Currently reading David Hadbawnik's SF Spleen. David will be here in Dallas in late March reading for WordSpace at Standard & Pours. SF Spleen is put out by Skanky Possum with w/ a cover design by Scott Pierce of Effing Press. The collection is a sort of daybook/journal that covers July 1997 to March 1999, years in which Hadbawnik lived in San Francisco. The transparent eyeball of the speaker documents eavesdropped conversations, movie shoots, public transportation, the homeless and the multicultural peoples of SF. Not quite prose poems, the book is composed of short descriptive fragments to longer passages of a paragraph or two. At one point, the speaker is accused by a ponytailed Indian of being cop, to be regarded suspiciously for the way in which he looks to hard. And while there is a lot of looking and listening that goes on in this collection, there seems to be a strong detachment of speaker from action, the speaker serving principally as documentarian.
Simultaneous to reading David's book, I pulled Baudelaire's Paris Spleen off of my shelf, curious if I'd find resonances and connections.
