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March 3, 2010

Link 12: Sentences Mediated

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

… More

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March 2, 2010

Link 11: Ice House Detroit

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.

http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com/

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February 11, 2010

Event 07: John Ashbery in Paris

“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

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February 10, 2010

Entry 10: Lost Landscapes of Detroit

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.

… More

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February 9, 2010

Link 10: Pretheoretical Example

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]

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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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