Hey Ahadadians!

I’d like to draw your attention to a project that Jesse and I have been developing for a long while now: The Small Press Exchange (www.smallpressexchange.com).

The Small Press Exchange is an augmented social Network formed with a number of questions in mind: Could writers and poets better strengthen their relationships through online communities by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities? Could they do this so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to redefine what it means to be a small press publisher today?

Thus, the Small Press Excange was built with the interest of the independent community in mind, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks—it was intended to be a tool to help extend creativity among individuals and enhance collaboration among those who share a common interest.

The Small Press Exchange has three main objectives:

1) To create a system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries;

2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commonalities and the values of the independent literary community; and,

3) To enhance the ability of poets and writers to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in order to better engage in the creative process.

So we ask for your participation in the creation of online ontologies and taxonomies that will help shape the stucture of this community! The Small Press Exchange we envisioned would be achieved in an incremental manner, started among a relatively small group of participants, and gradually adopted by larger online community systems as they see fit.

The Small Press Exchange will be built on open standards, an initiative that would coordinate the efforts of many for the benefit of all.

Check it out at www.smallpressexchange.com.

The Small Press Distribution catalogue is now available. We’ve seen an overwhelming response from the campaign we ran in this most recent catalog, with a few of our titles coming close to selling out. Small Press Distrinution is our American distributor — a fantastic place full of all sorts of gems. Check out their offerings.

As we continue work here at our new home, I’d like to outline upcoming additions and or changes that we will likely implement over the next week:

• Work continues on our new confirmed titles — more news on them when we send out our Spring 2006 mailing very shortly — please send an email if you’d like to get on this list — a small catalog of our past and present titles, along with presses affiliated with Ahadada Books — more information on that soon!
• Video of the Ahadada reading at Beyond Baroque, December 17, 2005! Jerome Rothenberg, Jesse Glass, Catherine Daly, Bruna Mori and myself.
• Finally! Material for Ahadada radio including performances by Mike Gubser, special guests, music, et al.
• Our gallery — including our installation of Swedonborg’s Airplane — along with some recently received additions.

And hopefully, we’ll move the archived blog posts from our old site to our new digs! Thanks in advance for your patience everyone! More soon!

Edit: Whoops! I just wanted to add to Jesse’s post — but I’ve copied over it. Sorry Jess!

I know you’ve all been waiting for the debut of Radio Ahadada with a brief ad for the new titles from the press….well…..wait a little longer, it’s coming and…Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?

If you’ve been looking for it, Dan has unpacked it and placed it under “other imprints” in the Titles section.

In the midst of grappling with the flu and moving from one website to another, Mr. Nuts & Bolts Ahadada turned 31! Congratulations! If you look straight ahead into the gloom you can see the tail lights of the ahadada-mobile on cruise-control to Poem City.

Needless to say, the rest is UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

So here we go again, learning a whole new dashboard, gear shifting sequence, and mode of driving, all without the benefit of fuzzy dice! Ah, but we’ll get it down, my friends, we surely will! Jesse

Repeat the words Eternal Youth.

Morph it to form different words.

End up back at eternal youth.

The H H H on the CD liner notes are collapsed together so that they look suspiciously like the stitches on an autopsied body’s chest and abdomen. The home-burnt CD itself sports a hand-drawn series of stitch marks: H H H H H. You get my drift? Already one has flashes of strange people hanging around the intake room of the local embalmer’s college, and the songs, screams, rants themselves do not–on the whole change the impression. For $5.00 or a trade one can hear some of the most imaginative musics out there in post-post-modern Baltimore, where John Waters looms Large and Divine and Eadie the Egg Lady are not mere names gliding past on the credits of a late-night cult film drive-in binge of a college weekend. The cuts that grabbed me most were: The Gush, Death is a Lonely Boy’s Voice, Here Come the Heat Makers, and the insane blues Armitage Shanks. Contact Ric Royer at www.RICROYER.com for more information. I mean, we’re absolutely not talking Garth Brooks here.

I remember taking my first spin in my brand-new, second-hand 1964 Plymouth stationwagon. It was a sleek machine with a special knife-switch automatic gearshift. Just right to cruise the cornfields in. Well, here’s my first spin in this pink cadillac of a new ahadada site, thanks to web mechanic Dan. Heck we even have a radio and some fuzzy dice and already we’re getting some good notes from fellow-travelers! Thanks for them!

Welcome, thanks, welcome!