R-Hu

All the books of the Atelos series are commissioned, and the press specifically encourages genre-bending; Scalapino's latest, following the prose of The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence and the poetry of New Time, is no exception. Moving frenetically from memoir to essay to manifesto, Scalapino comes up with not so much a series of discrete pieces, but an aggressively episodic, vocally coherent book of contemporaneous fragments, each abetting the others. Building on the works of a diverse group of thinkers (Gertrude Stein, Giorgio Agamben and John Cage, among others) and a broad range of cultural references (MTV, travels in the Gobi Desert, her college experiences at Reed), Scalapino continues her long-standing inquiry into the nature of thought and its relation to hierarchy and dominance: ""what's the relation between `wonderful obsessive imagination' and thought--one thinks more than once?""; ""Thought is not only referencing of others' statements or ideas. Comparisons are arbitrary as after.""; ""Trajectory is hell."" Though often highly idiosyncratic, her seeming non sequiturs and digressions eventually lead the reader into an accreted form of logic, defined as much by sensory description as by abstract analysis, the same sort of logic that makes her book way a masterwork of Language writing. Though the prose is insistently disjunctive, the overall effect is seductively melodic. In later pieces, Scalapino discusses works by her contemporaries, among them Bernadette Mayer, Charles Bernstein and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. These ""reviews"" enlarge the book's predominantly interior focus--even when critiquing the well-known critic Marjorie Perloff in the ""Seamless Anti-landscape"" section, Scalapino's language is more adulatory than academic. Though this collection is for neither the faint-hearted nor the formalist, the aficionado of cutting-edge interdisciplinary literature will find much that is admirable, inimitable and provocative--the ideal function of the avant-garde. (Nov.)