[Mark Allinson]

[R. Nemo Hill]

This is a bit hard to read, I guess. For those with less than perfect eyes here's the more easily legible version.

Monday Oct 2
reading their own work,
Jane Ormerod, Jee Leong Koh, Paco, & Thomas Fucaloro

Monday Oct 9
texts by Gertrude Stein
PINK MELON JOY read by Jane Ormerod, Paco, & Michelle Slater
plus
the world premiere of a film by Lei Chou, IDENTITY A POEM
starring Bill Rice & Lavinia Co-op
(and Florentine Miguel Cabarubias as the Poodle)
text by Gerturde Stein, read by Ulla Dydo
live accordion accompaniment by Rachelle Garniez

Monday Oct 16
texts by St-John Perse
IMAGES A CRUSOE, Op 11 by Louis Durey
SCENES D'ANABASE by Paul Bowles
Beth Anne Hatton, voice
Ishmael Wallace, piano
Vita Wallace, violin
text read by Jee Leong Koh
plus
excerpts from EXILE
read by R. Nemo Hill

Monday Oct 23
sentences from THE UNNAMABLE by Samuel Beckett
read by R. Nemo Hill, Michelle Slater, Thomas Fucaloro, and Robert Vazquez

Monday Oct 30
THE STRANGE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN by R. Nemo Hill
(Hippocampus Press, 2005)
based upon a short story by H.P.Lovecraft
a complete reading by the author

All these "Active Ingredients" at THE STONE
corner of 2nd Street and Ave C
8 PM
$10 donation

Check out some of these recipes!
Come to the first gig for the added bonus of seeing Nemo emcee with severe jet lag!



[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited September 29, 2006).]

[Quincy Lehr]

Sorry I won't be able to make it. Excellent readers; excellent material. Should be really good.

[R. Nemo Hill]

R. Nemo Hill presents THIS MONDAY
Active Ingredients at The Stone
9 October, 2006

“I AM I BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME”
texts by
GERTRUDE STEIN

1.
PINK MELON JOY
text read by
Jane Ormerod
Paco
Michelle Slater

Pink melon joy! Don’t ask what that is or where or when! Let yourself fall into a huge welter of words words words. They climb, run and scatter all over, never argue, need no footnotes, no explanations. An abundance of words to swim in, dive in, play in and play with, exchange with yourself and others all at the same time. Words to make love with, words to tumble in bed with, even in England at the beginning of World War I. You must find out how to hear these words, how to speak them. You can try it in hundreds of ways. Run with them, throw them into the air and catch them if you can. He may run that reads,* Gertrude Stein said somewhere, quoting a biblical phrase she’d learned as a child and only understood much later.
And now that welter of words, word constructions, topics, vocabularies, sentences or not, spoken gestures, what on earth are you to do with it all (an exclamation, that, not a question)! Throw it in the air!
Pink Melon Joy! Eat pink melon joy, say it, kiss it, sing it in many voices. Invent the pink melons and see what they can do. Here are three readers who’ve tried it and thrown the words in the air. Let them surprise you and join them there.

[*Habakkuk 2, 2: Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables,
that he may run that readeth it.]


From the magnificent splendor of words in PINK MELON JOY with its many worlds, its multiple voices making love with words and in words, you will move to the film of IDENTITY A POEM. Here arise questions with no answers, moments of sad confusion, in shining, small words, often echoing monosyllables, barely sentences, short, simple, visual, memorable.

2.
IDENTITY A POEM
a film by Lei Chou
starring
Bill Rice
Lavinia Co-op
with Florentine Miguel Cabarubias & R. Nemo Hill as the poodle
text read by Ulla Dydo
live accordion music by Rachelle Garniez


You are about to see a film. But why is it called a poem, when it is in fact a play with three characters in it, sort of. Stein did not care about classifications. If a piece she wrote came up as a poem, she did not quarrel with its title.
A puppeteer name Donald Vestal had recognized her on a street in Chicago in 1935 and had asked whether she might be willing to write him a piece to perform. So she did. She sent it to him in 1936, and he responded,

‘ “I am I because my little dog knows me”
is a consummated story in nine words.’

You all know this sentence. You’ve heard it quoted almost as often as that other sentence, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” It is said with a smirk, with contempt, with an awkward laugh. But it has not disappeared. It keeps coming back. Come to think of it, is “I am I because my little dog knows me” a sentence or a question? It’s a matter of how I say it. “I am I because my little dog knows me.” Or “I am I because my little dog knows me?” We’re never quite sure whether the little dog is there or whether he isn’t. And Stein plays with the dog, and with writing this play about his identity and her own.
Never in all the years of working and writing had Stein worried about identity. She wanted readers and wanted to become famous, but for thirty years fame eluded her. Then, in 1933, appeared THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, a bestseller written in the name of another. She was invited to come to America for a lecture tour, and became a big success. But upon returning to France, she could not write. That’s when she became self-conscious and the worry about identity began. And the little dog—she’d had a little dog since 1929—allowed her to consider the problem. That little dog knows how to play. He never thinks about himself, doesn’t remember and simply lives. Stein learned that as long as she thought about herself and harbored ambitions, she wouldn’t be able to write, for writing was what kept her alive.

NOTES by ULLA DYDO



[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited October 08, 2006).]

[R. Nemo Hill]

R. Nemo Hill presents
ACTIVE INGREDIENTS at THE STONE / www.thestonenyc.com
16 October, 2006
corner of Ave C & 2nd Street, 8 PM, $10 “donation”

“...Like him who strips at sight of the sea,
like him who has risen to do honour to the first land-breeze
(how is his brow magnified under the helmet)...”

Texts by St-John Perse

~1~
“Images A Crusoe”/ Pictures for Crusoe
music by Louis Durey, Opus 11
Beth Anne Hatton, voice
Ishmael Wallace, piano

text read by Jee Leong Koh
translation, Louise Varese


intermission


~2~
“Exil”/ Exile
text read by R. Nemo Hill
translation, Denis Devlin

~3~
“Scenes D’Anabase”/ Anabasis
music by Paul Bowles
Beth Anne Hatton, voice
Ishmael Wallace, piano
Vita Wallace, violin

text read by Jee Leong Koh
translation, T.S. Eliot

“Out of the poetic obscurity he encouraged for himself comes Alexis Saint Leger-Leger, born in 1887 [in Guadeloupe, French Antilles), dying in 1975. French diplomat in China, general secretary of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1933 and 1940, forced into long exile in America, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1960. He wrote under the pseudonym of St-John Perse. Between his literary life and his life in the world there seemed a gap so wide that the two identities sometimes appeared as two different people...”
(biographical note, Letters, St-John Perse, Princeton University Press, 1979)


"I don’t think you ever took my obsession with the sea seriously; it struck you as a literary affectation when, in fact, because of my birth, childhood, and ancient insular atavism on a small Caribbean island, the sea is to me something absolutely basic, mingled with my very blood; and without my noticing, it has spread to every part of my being.
There is nothing metaphysical in all this. When I was still very young, I heard a grown-up peremptorily state that woman was the fifth element. I countered bluntly, saying that it was the sea, which, in my mind, was quite distinct from water and air.
Dear, great, friend, to me you will always be the most human man of letters I have ever met. Do you know what I admire most about you? Your abiding inability to pass judgment on those whom fate places in your path as friends.
Do you bring the same fatalism to your judgment of a whole period? The one in which I met you cast a lovely radiance on the earth. It was a golden age that still had about it, without our realizing it, much of the glorious leisure that once reigned over the empire of the Four Seas. The war has blighted all that and severed many a thread. But you are not one ever to be caught unawares by destiny; and the past disappears so suddenly into the depths of the sea that it forces us to confront our future masks with a sharper awareness. As long as there is still movement, there is no cause to despair of the morrow. The important thing is to live, with our strength intact, coiled close at hand like fine rope rolled upon the deck."
(Saint-Leger Leger, letter to Joseph Conrad, Peking, February 26, 1921)


"But tell me if this would be possible: that the outside cover bear only the word Eloges [Praises] devoid of any author’s name, which would only appear on the inner title page. If you thought this were really too contrary to publishing practices, I would immediately withdraw the directions I gave Verbecke. But it would be really nice if that were possible. Please don’t think I’m a crank. It’s just that it seems to me that poems should always preserve something of the sudden, anonymous way they come into being."
(A. Saint-Leger, letter to Andre Gide, Pau, August 1911)



[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited October 13, 2006).]

[R. Nemo Hill]

R. Nemo Hill presents
ACTIVE INGREDIENTS at THE STONE www.thestonenyc.com

23 October, 2006
corner of Ave C & 2nd Street, 8 PM, $10 “donation”

“the comma will come when I’ll drown for good,
then the silence,”


SENTENCED
sentences from THE UNNAMABLE
by
SAMUEL BECKETT

READERS
Thomas Fucaloro
Michelle Slater
R. Nemo Hill
Robert Vazquez

and featuring
as
“the silence”
a black bag not much larger than the human head




[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited October 20, 2006).]

[Quincy Lehr]

Bumping up tonight's NYC events.

[R. Nemo Hill]

LAST CHANCE!

R. Nemo Hill presents
ACTIVE INGREDIENTS at THE STONE
www.thestonenyc.com

The Fifth (and final) Monday
30 October, 2006
corner of Ave C & 2nd Street, 8 PM, $10 “donation”

THE STRANGE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN
a poem by
R. Nemo Hill

based upon a short story
by H. P. Lovecraft

music
Cello Suite No. 3 in C major—Prelude—by J. S. Bach
Anner Bylsma

~

book and audio CD available
from Hippocampus Press
www.hippocampuspress.com



[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited October 27, 2006).]