Author Archives: Oscar Bermeo

TED2008–Jay Walker
Originally uploaded by TED Conference

From Wired.com:

Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library

Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker’s library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer … is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy.

Rest of article (with ultra-cool geek pics of the dream library) here.

Alfred Perez’s State of Our Union
Originally uploaded by geminipoet

Pegasus Books and Wave Books present
State of the Union: a Poetry Reading
in the spirit of this season of heightened political awareness and engagement

Tuesday, October 7th, 7:30 p.m.
Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA

featuring readings by Garrett Caples, Meg Hamill, Brenda Hillman, Joseph Lease, Michael Palmer, Barbara Jane Reyes and Joe Wenderoth.

The reading is free. Call Pegasus Books at 510-649-1320 for directions and information.

diag0607.jpg
Originally uploaded by emilymcmc

The VP debate is done and my initial prediction (cue the scene from your childhood playground where you witness an older sibling grabbing a younger sibling’s hands and makes them hit themselves in the face, all the while taunting “Stop smacking yourself!”) doesn’t seem to have come to pass. Palin seems to have held her own and showed up as prepared as can be (cue a very Matrix-like scene where Palin gets strapped to a chair, a socket injected into her skull, and all Vice-Presidential knowledge is uploaded directly to her brain).

As for the “nucular” pronunciation, I’ma side with Tony Brown on this one and just call that a pass.

Bringin’ it back to poetics for a sec, looking back at Palin’s conversation with Charles Gibson and asking “Woman, what were you thinkin’?!” I will offer the possibility that Palin was filtering her response with the aesthetics of flarf and her answer was an exploration of “the inappropriate” in all of its guises and that she tried to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing (inter)nationally syndicated public displays of political k(no)w-how. As an example, here is a retextualized Palin response.

A Matter of Doctrine

I know that John McCain
will do that and
                    I
, as his vice president,
families              we are blessed
with that vote
of the American       people
and are                 elected
          to serve
and are sworn      in
on January 20
, that will be
                    our top priority
is to defend
the (American) people.

Then again, she could just be a bad grammarian who has no idea what sentence structure is, at least according to this hysterical word nerd breakdown from Slate: The sentences of Sarah Palin, diagrammed.

Department of Ethnic Studies & University Press Books invite you to join Craig Santos Perez in a reading from his new book of poetry: from Unincorporated Territory

TUESDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2008, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

In the preface to his first book, a lyrical epic on the violent convergences of colonialisms on Guam (Japanese and American), history, family, and language (Chamorro and English), Perez writes: “On some maps, Guam doesn’t exist; I point to an empty space in the Pacific and say, ‘I’m from here.’ On some maps, Guam is a small, unnamed island; I say, ‘I’m from this unnamed place.’ On some maps, Guam is named ‘Guam, U.S.A.’ I say, ‘I’m from a territory of the United States.” On some maps, Guam is named, simply, ‘Guam’; I say, ‘I am from Guam.’” Written in the spirit of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Barbara Jane Reyes’s Poeta en San Francisco, Perez’s book promises to add significantly to a growing canon of Pacific poetries.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He received his MFA in Poetry from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several chapbooks.

UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS
2430 BANCROFT WAY (between Telegraph & Dana), BERKELEY
www.universitypressbooks.com