Christian Bok at University of York

May 19, 2011

Bok at Weld

(1:06:30) MP3

photo by © Cecilia Gronberg, Weld Gallery OEI reading, Stockholm, May 10, 2011

Organized by Bill Sherman, who writes: Bök started the evening with a performance of Hugo Ball's 'Seahorses and Flying Fish' from 1916. He then read excerpts from each of the chapters of his best-selling book Eunoia (in which each chapter uses only one of the five vowels), 'Flarf, Arf, Arf, Arf!' (his hilarious defence of conceptual writing), 'Ten Maps of Sardonic Wit' (from his book made of Lego), and 'Busted Sirens' (a cybernetic response to Ron Silliman's 'Sunset Debris') before singing a hymn in the artificial language he created for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict. He finished with several texts related to his infamous new project, The Xenotext, in which he is encoding a poem into the DNA of a bacterium that will outlive humanity. Bök's concluding manifesto, 'The Extremophile,' paid tribute both to Deinococcus radiodurans (the virtually indestructible host for his ultimate poem) and to his enduring trust in the resiliency of language itself

Bök@PennSound