CarloParcelli channeling the spirit of the apostle Simon Kananaios aka Simon the Zealot will be performing selected monologues from his Canaanite Gospel: A Meditation on Empire at the Boog Festival August 3^rd at the Sidewalk Café as well as a full one and one half hour performance at theBowery Poetry Club on August 4^th at 6:30 PM. Will he again cast his rod into a serpent as he did at Busboys and Poets in DC? Or will an indignant God smite the blasphemer and the Archbishop nix his celestial cabaret card? http://carloparcelli.com/ https://www.facebook.com/carlo.parcelli https://www.facebook.com/events/261559237366228/ https://www.facebook.com/events/1514470778783300/?context=create&source=49 http://carloparcelli.com/ 88 of the 93 monologues comprising the Gospel According to Simon Kananaios appear in scroll form and are available at Country Valley Press. Read what reviewers have to say: The book's primary literary inspiration may be David Jones, who after WWI wrote long poems like "Anathemata" implicitly comparing the Roman and British empires. Present also is the ghost of Ezra Pound, who made a comparable juxtaposition of eras in "Homage to Sextus Propertius." Maybe POUND is the more appropriate citation, for his "Propertius" showed poets the use of a persona to double the poetic voice--that is, make it speak more than one idiolect at a time. --- Wayne Pounds Pound Scholar and Professor Aoyama University <http://aoyama.academia.edu/>, English <http://aoyama.academia.edu/Departments/English>, Faculty Memberof Literature Tokyo The power of these monologue meditations comes from a bravura use of language reminiscent of JOYCE or Burgess. The 88 monologues are a calliope of argots, "profane, blasphemous, obscene and peppered with ethnic slurs." --- Wayne Pounds Pound Scholar and Aoyama University <http://aoyama.academia.edu/>, English <http://aoyama.academia.edu/Departments/English>, Faculty Member and Professor of Literature Tokyo Carlo Parcelli's Canaanite Gospel is a work of astonishing wit and temerity that infuses the Synoptic Gospels with vitality, relevance, and urgency by breaking open the complacent vanity which has enrobed the gospels in recent memory. --- Jennifer Johnston Ferocious, hilarious, deeply and richly imagined, The Canaanite Gospel projects a world as new and undiscovered as it is disturbingly recognizable. --- Jack Foley, novelist, playwright and editor "The Canaanite Gospel" -- an unapologetically revisionist (not to say irreverent: but I'll OK, I'll say it. . . ) telling of scenes around the gospel stories, with a "Passover Plot" premise. Most interesting were the voices inspired by David Jones's Roman poems -- Carlo performed part of "The Fatigue" in cockney voice, per David Jones's suggestion in the preface to In Parenthesis, to set up the voice of his own Roman captain, one Severenus. A terrific performance..." --- Kathleen Henderson Staudt teacher, poet and spiritual director at the University of Maryland, College Park, Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria and Wesley Seminary in Washington, DC I absolutely understand Parcelli's hints that the whole shebang wrote itself, as though 'dictated': the author the vessel through which the Rite makes itself manifest. Right and proper because that is the nature of religion (surely?) that it is revealed - and here that revelation is itself revealed in a new and this-minute - eighty-eight poems long! - vision. It has that belief in itself. 'Reverse engineering an empire!' he calls it. --- Alan Tucker antiquarian and poet The book's primary literary inspiration may be David Jones, who after WWI wrote long poems like "Anathemata" implicitly comparing the Roman and British empires. Present also is the ghost of Ezra Pound, who made a comparable juxtaposition of eras in "Homage to Sextus Propertius." Maybe Pound is the more appropriate citation, for his "Propertius" showed poets the use of a persona to double the poetic voice--that is, make it speak more than one idiolect at a time. --- Wayne Pounds Pound Scholar and Professor Aoyama University <http://aoyama.academia.edu/>, English <http://aoyama.academia.edu/Departments/English>, Faculty Member of Literature Tokyo