Ron Padgett, "Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo" & "The Austrian Maiden"
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Al Filreis brought together James Berger and Richard Deming (who traveled together from Yale) and Sophia DuRose to talk about two poems by Ron Padgett. The poems are “The Austrian Maiden” and “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo.” Our recording of “The Austrian Maiden” comes from a February 26, 2003, reading Padgett gave at the Kelly Writers House; the poem had just recently been published in Padgett’s book You Never Know (2002). The recording of “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo” — a poem published in Great Balls of Fire (1969) — was performed at a November 20, 1979, reading given at a location that is now (sadly) unknown. That reading in its entirety is available at Padgett’s PennSound page; the recording comes to us courtesy of the Maureen Owen Collection of Greenwich Village Poetry, now housed at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
April 17, 2024
Åke Hodell, Orderbuch and CA36715(J), with a commentary by Martin Glaz Serup
EPC Digital Library
Åke Hodell, Orderbuch (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1965): pdf
Åke Hodell, CA36715(J) (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1966).: pdf
Published by EPC Digital Library.
In 1965 the Swedish writer and former fighter pilot Åke Hodell (1919-2000) published the unsettling pseudo-documentary Orderbuch and the year after the complementary CA 36715 (J). Both books relate to the Nazi death camps. The "order book" consists of long rows of numbers, prisoner numbers, followed by a J in parenthesis, a J as in Jude - Jew. Under the prisoner number is a single word that describe what the prisoner can be used for – Seife, Lampenschirm, Grundausfüllung, Unbrauchbar[1] etc. Some of the numbers, and still more the further we get into the book, are crossed out. The last number in Orderbuch that is not crossed out is CA 36715 (J). In the book of the same title from the following year the angle has changed – from reading the registrant of a KZ [konzentrationslager]-bureaucrat we now follow the diary of a KZ-prisoner; for every page we read we get closer to extinction. Or read or read – the book is written by hand and the handwriting is unreadable. “It is the handwriting itself that tells the story,” the Danish literary critic Hans-Jørgen Nielsen writes in an essay on Hodell, “A diary like that of Anne Frank, but perhaps even more chilling. The slow disintegration of a human being."[2] The handwriting is changing from page to page, getting more confused, dissolving into lakes of ink. As were it a metaphor for something. Here is more on Hodell's use of pseudo-documentary.