At the end of the AM dial, at 3 am on PBS in 1989. Pyramid News Scheme is a back-broadcast run through multiple near-parallel (quasi-asymptotic) possibility circuits and difference engines. You get out here, in Shanghai, in 2019, say, and get in there, in St. Louis in, say, 1969. Or Berlin in 1990, or New York in 2002. The point isn’t digital yet, still analog, and so continues to arrive as more than the sum of its switches.
Pyramid News Scheme is produced in Shanghai by David Perry.
It is, among other things, a staging ground for writing projects of various sorts, currently including but not limited to:
- Liner Notes: Poems as essay & review, reviews as poems & essay, essays as poems & review, written in the listening to tracks of immediate currency
- Working Titles: Poems improvised to titles pulled from the proverbial hat (the world is the hat, the pull strange attraction)
- N Lines/Changing Lines: Writing the Shanghai Metro
- Notes on Water/In the Himalayas: Text derived from and expanding upon a collaboration with the artist 张建军 (Zhang Jianjun) and guqin performer Liang Huijun (performed at Himalayas Art Museum, 12 June 2013).
- Surfactant: WWWriting [any preposition] the Web (includes TOWERS)
- Your Other Left
- Foreign Body/Reaction Formations (science fiction, politics, expatriation, critical theory, etc., includes thinking through and researching Shanghai by way of sci-fi)
- Block: Texts & images & sounds from the immediate vicinity & around
When I began this blog, I was really interested in paranoia, both my own and that of others. Why paranoia? Well, just because… someone’s not following you? I’m interested in what living in China and being an American are doing to me. Now, I’m more concerned with the question of (for lack of a better term at the moment) the Anthropocene/End-Holocene and ecological crisis. It’s swallowing my attention, as is only natural and fit.
I’ll be writing and posting photos here, along with links to my work elsewhere and links to things others have done that ring my bell. Just like a blog.
Some things that ring my bell: Contemporary poetry and fiction (tending toward the “experimental” in both cases); urban studies; music of many genres so long as it’s rough around the edges, with a general preference for noisy (punk) rock; contemporary art and art criticism; literary translation in practice and theory; bicycling; Dada; globalization and its discontents; intellectual history; anti-intellectual anti-history; anthropocene chic; anarchism; furrowed-brow culture.
I teach writing at NYU Shanghai where I founded and co-curate the literary reading series.
I’m the author of two slender volumes of poetry, Range Finder (AiP/Zephyr 2003) and Expat Taxes, (Seaweed Salad/French [Concession] Press 2016) and two long poems published as chapbooks, Knowledge Follows (Insurance Editions 2005) and New Years (Braincase Books 2004). My translation of Shanghai-based Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway (Seaweed Salad Editions) is appearing in the spring of 2019, produced in collaboration with Monika Lin.