I run my own publishing house called Ssemblage Publishing. I’ve published the first book (Sleep and Ecstasy by Tomas Boudreau and Mike Thorn) and it’s selling successfully. Follow the blog if you’re interested in collaborating or if you just want to check out the collection.

•  21 May 2012  •  9 notes

thecoldestmonths:

Sleep and Ecstasy—a collection of poetry/prose by Tomas Boudreau and Mike Thorn—is now available through Ssemblage publishing.

Look for more details on New Pagan or get more information from Tomas or Mike.

•  7 May 2012  •  12 notes

ssemblagebooks:

First publication:
Sleep and Ecstasy, a collection of poetry and prose by Tomas Boudreau and Mike Thorn.

Check back for details on how to purchase a copy.

•  4 May 2012  •  9 notes

L’avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)
julien donkey-boy (1999, Harmony Korine)
Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noe)
On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan)
Last Tango in Paris (1972, Bernardo Bertolucci)
The Dreamers (2003, Bernardo Bertolucci)
The 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut)
The Brown Bunny (2003, Vincent Gallo)
Naked (1993, Mike Leigh)
Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick)
The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Stanley Kubrick)
Shivers (1975, David Cronenberg)
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
Vivre sa vie (1962, Jean-Luc Godard)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
M (1931, Fritz Lang)
Melancholia (2011, Lars Von Trier)
A Serious Man (2009, Coen brothers)

Thanks to Mike for the recommendations.
Feel free to suggest other films.

•  2 May 2012  •  3 notes

1. Animosity fills the screen. Images flicker and flash. You are in the bath, head submerged, elegantly nude. The tip of your penis is breaking the water. You don’t know that you’re being watched. Know that my intentions are pure. I am bewitched by the image of an open circle.
2. He’s only six footsteps away from representation; the footprints are already there. All he has to do is walk—but walking is enough, or too much, when your condominium is burning down somewhere in the city and your father is in a hospital bed confessing all his missteps, holding hands with a national athlete while his organs rot to nothing. Walking is too much when you know you’ve taken the experiment too far and there’s a chemical reaction gone awry in some laboratory you left behind.
3. You’re a giant who has woken up as a monstrous bug and the townspeople are hunting you into the hills. You are trembling. The forest is dark. The pre-pagan animals scurrying around you are more curious than afraid, perhaps out of worship or awe, biting your scales, gnawing at your exoskeleton. Can you dream your way out of this machine, this labyrinth, this devil’s pact?
4. He sits in the confessional and stares blindly into the dark. Silence is building, setting in on him and the priest like chimeras on the mount who descend on the little mountain villages to pry out all the little hearts of all the little mountain children who sleep a profound sleep and dream profound dreams in little mountain nests—nests like coffins or sardine cans. The silence setting in. A confession oncoming.
5. The priest is the hidden thing in the basement. The one that makes you run for the light before it can get your leg. The screen holds it back but it’s still present in the blankness. In the unknown. Every sin finds a way to escape your memory. You leave the booth more laden with guilt than you were before you entered.
6. He writes numbers on the page frantically as the digital camera flashes in sequence, freeze-framing each moment, and the rain is pouring down, or maybe it isn’t raining at all but he swears it is and in the morning he examines the images on the dim-lit screen like an archaeologist turning over the alien junkyards on Mars … where was I? Yes, when he examines the images the morning after, each scene appears as if underwater.
 7. He’s been underwater in some sense since he first put the manuscripts away. Since he first took a real job. There’s a new language encoded in the aquarium. There’s focus to be found. Patriarchy in the deep; cosmic guilt in the abyss.   It’s too dark down here to look elsewhere. This is the maiden voyage, but he’ll never be coming back. Neither will you, turning your Roman bath poetry into a realized act of protest. An act of rebellion. More realistically, an act of impenetrable boredom.

•  1 May 2012

1. Stumbling in punctuated oblivion while queering the Gambit from divine mandate to carpark circlejerks with an ambidextrous shemale who calls you daddy and fiddles your fly while sitting through the matinee at the Blue Theatre, and you’re chewing your memories, holding out for the promise of tomorrow for the third consecutive tomorrow—mapping the curse like some lowlife Quixote who’s chasing the demon around the meaning of its death, pissing phantasmagoric, entering imperceptibility, enfolding the cloak, cutting line breaks and break lines, screaming scatological at the bearded maw hanging iron-limp from the cellar door: basement music emanating ambient, and you say to yourself, you say, get loaded, never give a shit, and you say to your baby—the ambidextrous circle jerk tranny queen who calls you daddy while cupping your balls—you say 2. ____________ 3. Topaz kernel kicked beneath the bloody revolution, beneath a warpath of vans skateshoes and unwashed hair 4. K’s describing concentric circles in the sand; you notice a few of her teeth have fallen in the pit and one spaghetti strap has slipped off—she looks at you with a defeated hello, I am yours 5. So you travel in your head, slip up on punctuated totalities, get loaded, never give a shit 6. A glance, a signal, the hardline of evil

•  18 April 2012  •  3 notes

Required Reading
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkeness
Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions
Thomas Hardy: Tess of The D’urbervilles
Anne Keenleyside: A Human Voyage

Theory
Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer
                        State of Exception
                        The Coming Community
Jean Baudrillard: The Agony of Power
Judith Butler: Precarious Life
Jacques Derrida: Glas
                       Right of Inspection
                       The Gift of Death
                       The Politics of Friendship
                       Writing and Difference
Sigmund Freud: Civilizaiton and Its Discontents
Martin Heidegger: Being and Time
Fredric Jameson: Valences of the Dialectic
Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
Chantal Mouffe: The Democratic Paradox

Literature:
Cesar Aira: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
               Ghosts
               Varamo
Benjamin Black: The Lemur
Roberto Bolaño: Between Parentheses
                      The Secret of Evil
                      Tres
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Leonard Cohen: Beautiful Losers
Philip K Dick: Counter-Clock World
Franz Kafka: The Castle
Davide Foster Wallace: Inifinite Jest
Gombrowicz Witold: Pornografia

Check back as I will be frequently updating this list throughout the spring/summer.

For a complete list, add me on goodreads. I’ve added many more books there.

•  14 April 2012  •  7 notes

1. crosses translated on the hill____________________________________________________ 2. the Vedic alien slashing at the wind 3. “I don’t have an answer” 4. transcendental scumbags emptied in the gutter 5. no more angelheaded hipsters kicking in their beds/no more value data/no more youth/no more my generation 6. only short trips to the liquor store/only four day growth, closing out the mirror/only sleep and booze and sleep/only a preservation of the nightmare 7. it’s learning over knowing/it’s a denied subtlety, or the capability we have to make marked predictions 8. see flaming faggots smoking out the episteme—ass fucking in the institution 9. watch the Vedic alien sucking at the sky

•  20 March 2012  •  2 notes

He brought a camera everywhere.
He brought a camera everywhere and sometimes he even had film and sometimes he even filmed ‘everywhere’.
Sometimes he filmed the night, while he slept, the camera posed on its tripod.
He filmed the night and watched the ghosts play at play: opening and closing doors/breaking the dishes/stealing objects and replacing them with previously lost objects.
Once he encased a camera in a waterproof cage and dropped it in a well. It’s at the bottom, recording indefinitely.
Some days he sets his camera up in a vacant lot and fires bullets at it with his dad’s Buckmark.
Other days he leaves the cap on the lens and records the sound of his breathing as he runs endless laps up the street and back.
Once he broke into his neighbor’s house and left the camera in the bedroom closet.
He used to break into cars and leave a camera recording in the back seat.
He used to have an obsession with emerging the cameras in water until he nearly electrocuted himself to death.  He now pisses on the camera from a safe distance.

He never watches his films. He sets up projectors at the end of country roads or under freeways or in the middle of dog parks and leaves them to play until someone steals the set or the battery runs out.

•  14 March 2012  •  4 notes

I dreamt of frozen detectives, Latin American detectives
who were trying to keep their eyes open
in the middle of the dream[1].
I dreamt of hideous crimes: our models of Fear[2][3][4][5][6].

•  28 February 2012  •  3 notes