same identical sun

Christian Bok's Eunoia is the biggest selling Canadian poetry book of all time. If that doesn't whet your appetite then I don't know what will. It's an Oulipo job, the most bafflingly successful I've ever seen. Basically it's a collection of texts, each of which contains only one vowel. Follow the link, you'll see what I mean. It's kind of like the opposite of Georges Perec's La Disparition, which is the famous book with no letter 'e'. Now, I'll be the first to admit that a little oulipo goes a long way. Trying to live on it would be like only eating food that rhymed (my friend Kerry once suggested this as a diet - ham and jam, parrot in claret, etc.). You wouldn't get your nutrients. Didn't Satie once live off of only white food? Or was that Strindberg? Anyway, oulipo. It's something I know only a little about. Bookartbookshop has a nice shelf-full of the stuff which I'll score sometime soon I expect. From a distance it looks very clever-clever and dry; the sort of thing people laugh short mirthless laughs at in salons. My suspicion is that it's a lot more than that. Christian Bok is a bit oulipo-lite I think, but it's a nice way to get warmed up for the hard stuff.


I ordered a couple of interesting looking things from Salt: D S Marriot's first collection, and a rather unusual project from John Seed. Look out for ill-informed attitudinising posts about them in the next month or so.


Mairead Byrne is a pleasure to read. Read a short musing on cellphones. 'Stungun of the inbetween' eh? If I'd come up with that I'd take the rest of the day off.

Martin Stannard has gone to China. I've not got much of a clue who he is, but his blog looks like it was great - there's loads of interesting stuff in there. I'm extremely jealous. Except he's stopped now.

(That photo's of Georges Perec by the way - Bok's quite boring looking)