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Bob Perelman Bob Perelman gave a reading in Cambridge last night which was incredibly thought-provoking, fast and funny, including the new poem 'Womb of Avant-Garde Reason' and some 'Fake Dreams'. If you are in London, do go along to his reading on the 5th December (maybe Miles or Tim could post the details again) even if you don't intend to join the discussion on his book "The Marginalisation of Poetry", because it's very enjoyable stuff. Tracy Ryan Tracy Ryan also read last night from her new pamphlet called "Slant" which was launched that evening. It is published by Rempress (6 Grasmere Gardens Cambridge CB4 3DR, at £4) and as one of the publishers I don't know whether it is form to praise when that could just sound like bad advertising. "Slant" seems, like 'Womb of Avant-Garde Reason' to critique aesthetics though on different grounds. One of the poems from it is published in the internet journal 'Jacket', so easily accesible. Cambridge School To get back to John Wilkinson's point: yes, Andrew Duncan has written an interesting sociological perspective on the 'Cambridge School' which can be found in Angel Exhaust nr 8 and I think that issue is on the www also. Andrew Duncan sets up a dialectical model between the Cambridge School and the 'London School' presuming that the latter is centred around the (teaching) practice of Mottram/Cobbing. In short, these are the prejudices, according to Andrew Duncan, about the two schools: "The prejudices about Cambridge: elitist, supercilious, cliquey, neo-pastoral, torpid, referential, too attached to traditional linguistic structures, incomprehensible, literary." "Prejudices about London: a deeply invested tendency to think "oh it's not evenly printed on white paper and it makes a terrible racket and lacks gravitas and it's not written in proper sentences and anyway it's by no-one we've ever heard of"." But these are aesthetic value judgements, rather than strict sociological ones. I'd like to know what Ken Edwards has identified as shared prosody of the Cambridge School. I think Andrew Duncan's aim was to dispel the prejudices about the Cambridge School and he does not succeed at all well with dispelling the prejudices about the so-called London School. Which gets me to Ira... Yes, Johanna Drucker is interesting. Apart from the books John Cayley mentioned, have you seen her book "The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Avant-Garde Art, 1909-1923" (U of Chicago P, 1994)? Karlien %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%