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February 8, 2010

Document 11: Beyond the Horizon

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

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February 7, 2010

Link 09: Content Concept

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:

http://waterwars.wikidot.com

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.

… More

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February 6, 2010

Entry 09: Frequency of Posts

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

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February 4, 2010

Document 10: Girl Scout Nation

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         

… More

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February 3, 2010

Link 08: Reznikoff Reads Holocaust

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

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February 2, 2010

Entry 08: Homage to Lee Crabtree

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

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February 1, 2010

Document 09: A Propos Frame

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

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January 31, 2010

Link 07: Displaced Agency in Social Space

In a FaceBook post today, Bay Area artist Scott MacLeod began a thread that concerns me directly and which I will paste here, along with an explanation and answer to his query:

Scott MacLeod: Complete the following: “Displaced agency in social space becomes nearly filmic in its sutured continuity—and the meaning of this temporal autonomy of signification is _____________.” [Barrett Watten]

Miekel And: screen burn

Jakub Calouseque: sequestering of dour libido

Barrett Watten: the Dream Cruise.

… More

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January 28, 2010

Image 06: Portrait of the Artist as Engineer

Life magazine commissioned a series of photodocumentary essays for the “Life Science Library” in the mid 60s. I discovered this image quite by accident, several years after it was published and I had left MIT for Berkeley. That is the 17-year-old present author at far right.

From The Engineer, Life Science Library (New York, 1966), 89.

(In memory of Jeanne Alderton Watten Agnew, 19 April 1926–28 January 1990.)

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January 27, 2010

Link 06: 4′ 33″ for Large Orchestra

The details are all in this performance of John Cage’s 4′ 33″ for large orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Foster, the Barbican Center, London, 2004. Thanks to Joseph Coates for the link.

 John Cage, 4′ 33″

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