March 13, 2010
I Missed (Paris)
11–13 March 2010
John Ashbery in Paris
Université Paris VII
(after On Kawara)
Michael Davidson
Lori Chamberlain
Bob Perelman
Francie Shaw
Donna Stonecipher
Hélène Aji
Sarah Riggs
Omar Berrada
Joshua Clover
Abigail Lang
Antoine Cazé
Olivier Brossard
Nicholas LoLordo
Paul Grimstad
Jennifer Dick
Françoise de Laroque
Gilles Weinzaepflen
Florence Manlik
March 12, 2010
from “Ashbery’s Historicism:
Nonsite Hypotaxis and Modernity Critique
in The Double Dream of Spring“
Presented at John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
12 March 2010, Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot
What makes The Double Dream of Spring both unique and exemplary for Ashbery’s work is its positive critique of social modernity, rather than a mere ironic reversal of modernism, at the intersection of critical theory, poststructuralism, and romanticism. In the figural space of his works, Ashbery inverts of the poetics of radical particularity—seen in terms of an aesthetic of the fragment and the condition of reification under capitalism—that relocates what Altieri terms its “aesthetic agency” in an interplay of “partial local coherence” that at once proposes and disposes of any horizon of totality. … More
March 3, 2010
Michael Waltuch’s Whale Cloth Press, the original publisher of Robert Grenier’s Sentences in the Chinese box version (with ivory clasps, manufactured in Hong Kong), has put up a mediated version of the poem.
http://www.whalecloth.org/grenier/sentences.htm
It is interesting to think about the tensions between the work in its print/index card/box format and its digital one—they are not identical. For one thing, even though the cards are displayed in a random order, different each time, they can never be displayed spatially—tacked up on a bulletin board, or placed on steps, or photographed in the crotch of a tree. The box was a three-dimensional boundary (like the skin surrounding the body of the work) that is quite a bit unlike a frame for a static two-dimensional image or an html page with flash animation. And yet the work is finding a new reception that reads the individual instances of the text in a kind of “free space” of interpretation:
http://steveroggenbuck.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-would-say-that-robert-grenier-makes.html
March 2, 2010
Ice house, Detroit, 2010.
A link to the Ice House Detroit project, courtesy Joe Paszek. In this project, Detroit artists sprayed an abandoned house with water in January, in a reversal of the usual method of getting rid of excess housing inventory by fire (a.k.a. Devil’s Night, a custom that seems to be on the wane). There is a description of a similar midwestern moment in Wyndham Lewis’s Self-Condemned (1954), where he describes a Toronto hotel encased in ice after a fire.
February 20, 2010
I Met (Louisville)
18–20 February 2009
The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture After 1900
University of Louisville
(after On Kawara)
Alan Golding
Andrew Engel
Chinmayi Kattemalavadi
Julianne Newmark
Kristine Danielson
Michael Fournier
Julius Lobo
Dee Morris
Lynn Keller
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Mark Scroggins
Norman Finkelstein
Mary Jo Bang
Marthe Reed
… More
February 12, 2010
“Berlin Exhibitions: Between Destruction and Community
(Tod—Kein Tod, Palast der Republik, 2005)”
Panel C-2, “Exhibition/s” (organized by Barrett Watten)
Friday, 9:00–10:30 AM, Room: 207
with renée c. hoogland, ”Imploding Communion: Actualized Alienation
in Rineke Dijkstra’s ‘Family of Man’”
and Sarah Ruddy, ”Documenting Disappearance: Exhibiting Community
in the Work of Nan Goldin”
The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture After 1900
18-20 March 2010, University of Louisville
For the complete program, see:
http://thelouisvilleconference.com/program_2010.pdf
February 11, 2010
“Ashbery’s Historicism: Regions of Modernity
in The Double Dream of Spring“
Workshop Session III, 14:30–17:00
Friday, 12 March 2010
John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
11–13 March 2010
Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot
For the complete program, see:
http://johnashberyinparis.blogspot.com/2010/02/conference-programme.html
February 10, 2010
Tonight at MOCAD, San Francisco archive activist Rick Prelinger showed an hour’s worth of material from his vast collection of film images of Detroit from the first three quarters of the 20th century (earliest 1917; latest in the 70s). I attended, along with several hundred other people—the space was full to overflowing. The screening was open to audience participation, and Prelinger, after his opening statement, encouraged vocal responses.
This dynamic made for a unique occasion. To begin with, the range of Prelinger’s material was limited—indeed, its limitations made for a kind of interpretive framework in themselves. We saw clips of downtown and water transport (modernity); the auto industry (mode of production); suburbs (community) and family (reproduction); police work (power); and local landmarks that no longer exist (history). We did not see sufficient images of labor or the black community, as Prelinger noted, likely due to the distribution and use of home movies.
February 9, 2010
From Drew Daniel’s “pretheoretical” account of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats:
By replacing the swing and feel of live instruments with the rigidity of sequencers, TG ensured that their stab at funk would feel mechanical, deliberately inhuman, lacking in interplay. By replacing tight riffs and thoughtful, carefully sculpted solos with murky cornet groans and detuned modular synth squiggles, TG ensured that their take on jazz would feel alien, impoverished, the musical equivalent of milk that’s gone slightly but noticeably “off.” The song feels like a setup and induces a kind of creeping self-consciousness on the part of the listener it is ostensibly designed to relax and seduce. [45]
February 8, 2010
I want to cite the opening lines of Bob Dylan’s “Beyond the Horizon” for my private, noncommercial use:
from Beyond the Horizon
Beyond the horizon, behind the sun
At the end of the rainbow life has only begun
In the long hours of twilight ‘neath the stardust above
Beyond the horizon it is easy to love [. . .]
Copyright Bob Dylan © 2006
http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/beyond-the-horizon-0
Now I have done so. As poet and critic, my purpose is to comment critically on the “locationality” of lyric address here, and in the larger work from which it is taken. There is something I see about the “place” of poetry that is crucially being thought through here. This is something common to the lyric in general. … More
