Do not wonder how you will do a job, but do it and then wonder how you have done it I am always thinking about time. In many ways, we live in terrible times. Also, it is said that if you travel far enough into the future you will actually go back in time.
eohippus labs is a short-form literary micropress based in Los Angeles. I co-edit the press with Harold Abramowitz, who is also someone with whom I write collaboratively, and he is also one of my best friends.
From the moment that an explanation is offered, there’s no longer any danger for the reader. — Alain Robbe-Grillet, to Mario Bellatin, for molossus 1
Definition(s):
a) In prosody, a molossus is a metrical foot of three long syllables. English language prosody, mapped in stressed and unstressed syllables, is not very accommodating. Attempted examples include Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break,” which properly scanned makes three separate feet, the end of the second line of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ “The Caged Skylark,” (“Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—“), which seems a stretch but works if scanned as four feet and its final word does not take on extra stress, and “wild-goose chase,” which works in isolation but seldom in context, as in Thomas Hardy’s “Erotophuseos.”
The Evenings of Various Wonder occur as an entirely homemade, occasional, and joyful labor of love. I organize them when friends from afar whose work I am excited to share with the local literary and arts communities are coming to Los Angeles at a time when I have the space and wherewithal to host an event. Performers have been from many places in the U.S., from India, from Mexico, from all across Los Angeles, and from right around the corner in Cypress Park. Audience sizes have ranged from around 40 to around 120.
Red Shout! was a month long, four-part reading series held each Friday night as part of the LA Liberation School. But Red Shout! was, properly speaking, also just a part of the day, the conclusion of the Liberation school week, so to speak. Red Shout! took shape, then, in the context of a set of practices that diverged from those of the bookstore, gallery, and house reading series.
The LA Liberation School was/is a free university project that ran formally for the month of July 2013 in a live/work warehouse on the border of East and South Los Angeles. It has since transformed into a loose network of reading groups and organizing meetings held in various locations (I have since been away from Los Angeles and so have not been able to participate). Those who facilitated the School's operations tried to create a space that would escape the segregation that characterizes other public education projects and to create material practices to hold better space for thinking.
Since 1999, Andrew Maxwell, Joseph Mosconi and Ara Shirinyan have curated various reading series, journals and publications in Los Angeles, often under the banner of the Poetic Research Bureau. For the last few years, the PRB has shared an artist-run storefront with the Public School at 951 Chung King Rd. in Chinatown. Self-styled “Directors,” like canvas-backed Hal Roach rascals in an industry shantytown, they plant a flag in the Northeast of the city, and think back to the precedents.
A Primer