Bøger udgivet af Exact Change,U.S.

Morton Feldman wrote as he composed music, carefully placing one element after another, producing some of the avant-garde's most lucid considerations of what it means to make music Morton Feldman (1926-87) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th century, a man whose music is known for its extreme quiet and delicate beauty (while Feldman himself was famously large and loud). Karlheinz Stockhausen once asked the composer what his "secret" was: "I don't push the sounds around," Feldman replied. His writings resemble his music in their quiet steadiness, their oscillations between assertion and doubt. They are also funny and illuminating, not only about his own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including Feldman's friends Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara and John Cage. Give My Regards to Eighth Street is an authoritative collection of Feldman's writings, culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures, interviews and unpublished writings. It is one of those rare books from which anyone can draw inspiration, no matter what the vocation or discipline.

Protean, erotic, scatological and experimental, Picasso's poetry is finally compiled in this essential anthologyPablo Picasso is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the 20th century. What few in the English-speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that André Breton praised as "an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before." Similarly struck by the poems' originality, Michel Leiris wrote, "If we must compare him, despite his fierce singularity, in order to try and situate him on the literary map, I see only James Joyce." Near the end of his life, Picasso himself was quoted as having "told a friend that long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: 'Picasso, Pablo Ruiz--Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.'" For the past five years, poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso's original Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, "Picasso's entry into our own time." This is indeed a new Picasso for most of us, or rather, a renewed Picasso: the poems are as protean, erotic, scatological and experimental in form as his visual art has always been described. But amid the ubiquitous posters, t-shirts and tchotchkes, how many of us have truly felt the impact of Picasso's visual work as powerfully as it was perceived in the first half of the 20th century? The poems give us a 21st-century Picasso, free of cliché. Perhaps they will even spark a revival of interest in his "dabblings."

The discovery in the 1990s of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is reminiscent of the discovery of Kafka in the 1950s. Much of Pessoa's mystique comes from his unique practice of writing under different "heteronyms", each of which generated radically different texts. In THE BOOK OF DISQUIET, Pessoa came as close as he would to autobiography. Here is a 20th-century masterpiece in its best English translation and most affordable edition.

Frequently quoted but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own constructionThe French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) was modernism's great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: perhaps his most famous pronouncement is "everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book." A colossal influence on literature from Huysmans to Ashbery, art from Manet to Broodthaers, music from Debussy to Boulez and philosophy from Blanchot to Rancière, Mallarmé spent more than 30 years on a project he called Le Livre. This legendary, unfinished project is now translated into English for the first time. The Book was Mallarmé's total artwork, a book to encompass all books. His collected drafts and notes toward it, published only posthumously in French in 1957, are alternately mystical, lyrical and gloriously banal; for example, many concern the dimensions, page count and cost of printing this ideal book. Resembling sheet music, the lines are laid out like a musical score, with abundant expanses of blank space between them. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to reveal "all existing relations between everything."

This 1922 novel is one of the most entertaining works of Surrealist fiction. Aragon parodied a seventeenth-century epic which recounts the adventures of Telemachus, Ulysses's son, removing its moralistic underpinnings and replacing it with a Surrealist's dedication to the strange and beautiful.

Nonfiction. THE DEATH AND LETTERS OF ALICE JAMES. "A mesmerizing account of Alice James's career in invalidism; the letters themselves are savagely funny, relentlessly observant, and wholly without self-pity...A book everyone interested in women's history and literature will want"-Elaine Showalter.

Padgett's translation of the long title story appeared in a large, formal edition in 1968 (with illustration by Jim Dine); now the rest of the shorter tales included in Apollinaire's 1916 collection also arrive in Padgett's strong translations. The book as a whole is neither the choicest of Apollinaire's short fiction (L'heresiarque et Cie is far superior) nor absolutely representative of the astounding leaps his prose could make (such as in the pornographic novels). Still, every paragraph here does at least suggest the vigorous Apollinarian mix of soft metaphors and outrageous cultural exaggeration. Moreover, like the title story, the shorter pieces are frequently grounded in autobiography. "Giovanni Moroni" recalls a Roman boyhood and a close maternal bond, both based on Apollinaire's own. "The Moon King," with its then-fantastic glimpses of inflatable furniture and love-making machines, presents Apollinaire in a ragged quest for a grid involving myth, progress, cosmopolitanism, and eroticism. And elsewhere there is vivid evidence of Apollinaire's linkage of the "miraculous" to personal optimism: in "The Deified Invalid," he sees himself as a one-eyed, one-legged, one-armed man who only knows eternity, having no perspective or balance with which to judge the temporal. Though almost everything here is slight and toy-like, any translation of Apollinaire's remarkable prose - especially considering its literary-historical influence - is welcome. (Kirkus Reviews)

Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), next-door neighbor of Marcel Proust, can be described without exaggeration as the most eccentric writer of the 20th century. His unearthly style based on elaborate linguistic riddles and puns fascinated the Surrealists and famously influenced the composition of Marcel Duchamp's "Large Glass," but also affected writers as diverse as Gide, Robbe-Grillet and Foucault (author of a book-length study of Roussel). The title essay of this collection is the key to Roussel's method, and it is accompanied by selections from all his major works of fiction, drama and poetry, translated by his New York School admirers John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Harry Mathews, and the painter and author Trevor Winkfield. Ashbery writes that Roussel's work is "like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace ... we can still admire its inhuman beauty, and be stirred by a language that seems always on the point of revealing its secret."

This is the first new English language anthology of Artaud's writing m nearly twenty years, and reflects an increased interest in his late work (a show of Artaud's visual art from this period was on view at MOMA throughout 19961). Clayton Eshleman's translations have won widespread acclaim, including a National Book Award. Now in its second printing.

A selection of dream epiphanies and reveries from Joseph Cornell's voluminous diariesJoseph Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of his boxes--toy-like constructions whose playfulness and humor are anchored in a profound melancholy and loneliness. "Slot machines of visions," said Octavio Paz. Cornell himself is said to have enjoyed children's responses to his work; perhaps because nothing prepares one better for viewing a Cornell box than having an unbiased mind. Catherine Corman has combed through the voluminous diaries that Cornell kept throughout his life, now in the care of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, in search of the artist's own dreams. What she found are brief flashes of images, and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination--the verbal equivalent of Cornell boxes. In 1993, Mary Ann Caws edited a large portion of Cornell's diaries for publication by Thames & Hudson, an invaluable sourcebook for Cornell studies. This new, shorter volume is a poetic addition to that literature, equally indispensible to those interested in Cornell as it contains previously unpublished writings, but also because it is as intriguing and mysterious to the uninitiated as the magical boxes themselves.

The founding text of pataphysics ("the science of imaginary solutions"), and one of the most quietly influential novels of the 20th centuryAlfred Jarry is best known as the author of the proto-Dada play Ubu Roi, but this anarchic novel of absurdist philosophy is widely regarded as the central work to his oeuvre. Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll recounts the adventures of the inventor of "Pataphysics ... the science of imaginary solutions."

By Philippe Soupault. Translated by William Carlos Williams.

John Cage's poetical statement on indeterminacy, Duchamp, art, life and more Written in his characteristic "mesostics" (lines of prose poetry linked by a central vertical acrostic), Composition in Retrospect is a statement of methodology in which composer John Cage examines the central issues of his work: indeterminacy, imitation, variable structure and contingency. Finished only shortly before his death in 1992, Composition in Retrospect completes the documentation of Cage's thought that began with his classic book Silence (1961), but it is an introduction and invitation to his work as much as a summary or conclusion. Also included in this volume (at Cage's request) is "Themes and Variations," a piece written in 1982 about friends and heroes such as Jasper Johns, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp and Erik Satie. Together these pieces form a book that is both a testament to the artists Cage admired and a clear statement of his own ars poetica.

The artist Dali's earliest writing, from the period in which he was most closely allied with the Surrealists, has never before been translated into English. This is both an entertaining and important work. Dali's well-known humor is in full evidence, but so is his serious attempt at forging a "paranoid-critical revolution".

Fiction. "I have never felt any rest in sleep. For a few seconds I am numbed, then a new life begins, freed from the conditions of time and space, and doubtless similar to that state which awaits us after death. Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to unite them now?" -Gerard de Nerval