>> Links <<
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
February 7, 2010
Midwestern Water Wars is an on-going wiki project to construct an evolving knowledge base of an apocryphal series of natural/human events in the mid-twentieth-century biosphere:
Its process of construction combines elements of indexicality and narrative, dada informatics and role-playing games. The authors add content and develop the site structure independently and in dialogue with each other. The evolving narrative structure produces, as its outer horizon, a lexicon of terms that become its conceptual framework—and vice versa. This is an example of site construction as an emerging digital genre.
February 6, 2010
Yesterday was the first day since beginning this project that I was unable to add daily content. My initial plan had been to add “something” on a daily basis, and to make the necessity of doing that at such a frequency part of determining what “something” is (see Entry 07, “Is This Anything”). I remain interested in the exterior, conceptual dynamics of such a frame—after On Kawara’s “I Got Up” project as a task of daily self-understanding, over the long run. Yet I also recognize, in refusing conceptual dogmatism, that there are other exigencies. … More
February 4, 2010
Sampling a fragment from Yedda Morrison’s Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Press, 2008); cf. trauma in the previous post. In Morrison’s work trauma is distributed, refunctioned, “naturalized.” Poet and ideal reader become identified the inviolable/violated figure of the Girl Scout who must see behind nature’s naturalization, where she finds:
in that stalker suit you’re hard to see
tracking prey against the wind
song of the bludgeoned Killdeer
oft empty twang
(we didn’t see it)
one looks for clues in the natural world
when girls go missing
for example the hair wad smells woodsy
February 3, 2010
from Research
A number of Jews had to drink seawater only
to find out how long they could stand it.
In their torment
they threw themselves on the mops and rags
used by the hospital attendants
and sucked the dirty water out of them
to quench the thirst
driving them man.
—Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust, 9–10
How might such a poem be read?
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Reznikoff-Holocaust.php
February 2, 2010
Fugs Second Album.
Recent threads on The Fugs have brought to mind my early encounter with their music, and the band itself, during my first visit to the St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, November 1965. When asked for a short statement on the Poetry Project for Anne Waldman’s anthology Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–91, I wrote:
Thinking back on the Poetry Project, I am reminded of an absurdist question posed by Gerard Malanga to Charles Olson in The Paris Review: “A school is place where one can learn something. Can a school lose by giving away its knowledge?” From my first involvement with it in about 1972, The Poetry Project seemed a place where a school of poetry—the New York School—was physically embodied in a group of writers who felt free to develop in the confidence of their mutual (and contending) assumptions, and I certainly learned something from that. … More
February 1, 2010
from Frame
Multicolored piles of gravel on black asphalt
behind rows of aluminum sheds.
We put frames around anything we wish.
In one version, wild dogs go for each other’s
throats (they assume the optimal to exist).
Unoccupied territory between opposing sides.
Matter of interest unfolds as a story.
Conflicts put on the table for debate.
—Frame: 1971–1990, 260
The parergon stands out [se détache] both from the ergon [the work] and from the milieu, it stands out first like a figure on a ground. But it does not stand out in the same way as the work. The latter also stands out against a ground. But the parergonal frame stands out against two grounds [fonds], but with respect to each of those two grounds, it merges [se fond] into the other. With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it merges into the wall [on which the painting is hung], and then, gradually, into the general text. … More
