philly and books

thanks to the philly gang for their support and friendship this weekend!

for locals, get to second story books in bethesda before april 15 because everything in the store is half price until then. here's my haul from last week, shd give some sense of where i'm at these days:

• lao tze, tao te ching (penguin edition, $0.50) - wd like to do a serial poem in 81 sections (one for each section of the dao) and dedicated to steve lacy
  
  
• henry and sidney cowell, charles ives and his music ($3) - a renegade american composer writes about another
  
  
• janheinz jahn, muntu: the new african culture ($1.50) - late 1950s cultural anthropology attempting to identify common elements among african cultures that have resisted europeanization and were at the heart of the renewed interest in african culture as european colonialization was being overthrown, with chapters on voodoo, dance, philosophy, art and literature (NB: and amazon.com reviewer states that this was the textbook for a jazz philosophy course she took at antioch college in 1972 taught by cecil taylor)
  
  
• georg lukács, marxism and human liberation ($0.75) - a nice selection of essays covering his whole career
  
  
• maurice blanchot, writing the disaster ($3.75) - my fascination with blanchot is long over but it's the only of his major texts i do not own and have not read
  
  
• michel foucault, this is not a pipe ($3.00) - i'm still quite interested in foucault and his essay on magritte is again one of the few from that period i do not own and have not read
  
  
• antonio gramsci, selections from political writings 1910-1920 ($3) - i've yet to find a way into gramsci's thought and given that this is early stuff of a highly topical and journalistic nature i don't imagine this will be the way in i'm looking for but what the hell
  
  
• hans richter, dada art and anti-art ($2.50) - a great historical survey by one who was there first-hand
  
  
• noam chomsky, profit over people ($4) - presumably essential and yet i do not like when he does not give sources
  
  
• hugh witemeyer, the poetry of ezra pound, forms and renewal, 1908-1920 ($1.75) - a good overall survey of ep's poetry pre-cantos (collectors note: this copy bears the inscription of its previous owner, modern lit scholar a. walton litz)
  
  
• cid corman, sun rock man ($1) - new directions book of poems from the 1960s, looks like good stuff and i think ol cid's a decent poet
  
  
• robert kelly, kill the messenger who brings bad news ($3) - incredibly prolific poet whom i could never begin to cover thoroughly but i do like his work from the 1970s, a good open field poundian/olsonian/duncanite
  
  
• david meltzer, luna - ($3.75) likewise an incredibly prolific writer and the youngest to be included in the don allen anthology, this is an early 1970s collection that has some great stuff in it (check out his new penguin selected, gives a real good survey near as i cd tell from a quick runthru)
  
  
• carolyn forche, the country between us ($1.75) - her second book, the one that brought anti yankee imperialism to her confessional-type poetics and not without controversy
  
  
• marjorie welish, the windows flew open ($2) - burning deck book from 1991, her contributions to the paul hoover norton postmodern american poetry really brought her to my attention, she's quiet accomplished and belongs, following barbara guest, with ann lauterbach and mei-mei berssenbrugge among others as a painterly poet or poet whose work has a clear engagement with painting
  
  
• big deal #5 maureen owen issue ($3.75) - the final issue of barbara baracks' great mag, this stands as an important volume in owen's body of work, an interesting writer perhaps in a joanne kyger line of open-field, personal/meditative buddhist-inflected work
  
  
• ray dipalma, raik ($5) - an astounding work given how typeface is used as a formal constrain, i.e. each poem has a line-length constraint based on the number of characters (letters and spaces) in the courier font (attention grad students: there's a dissertation to be had surveying dipalma's oeuvre)
  
  
• david c.d. gansz, millenial scriptions ($5) - i know his name cuz he wrote an omnibus review of clark coolidge bruce andrews and two others whom i can't remember, this is a curious book, apparently a hardbound collected, with numerous epigraphs from various apocyphal sources of wisdom (gnostic gospels and whatnot) and using sound and neologisms in a very interesting zukofskyan kind of way
  
  
• kenneth rexroth, bird in the bush: obvious essay ($1.75) - a 1959 collection of journalistic pieces on everything from jazz to ferdinand leger and martin buber, rexroth is a fantastic polemicist whose style was honed by decades of work writing for anarchist rags (NB: thanks to dan b who points out that rexroth was writing for the san francisco examiner and the nation in the 1950s but was never a regualr contributor to any anarchist pubs. where did i get that idea?)
  
  
• nelly sachs, o the chimneys ($6) - clothbound first edition of her pulitzer-winning first english selected, she was a mentor to paul celan and it shows, this is really lovely stuff, dense and elemental and sonically lush (i don't know what the state of english translations of her work is like but it's certainly worth investigating. NB 4/9: green integer is supposedly bringing out a two-volume collected.)
  
  
• alan golding, from outlaw to classic: canons in american poetry ($5) - major study by our man in louisville