October 21, 2023

Entry 53: With Etel Adnan at Erquy

In July 2018 I traveled with Carla Harryman to visit Etel Adnan in Erquy, the beach town in Brittany where she kept an apartment with direct access to the beach, weather, and sunset. Simone Fattal was not present, while Etel was staying with a younger companion and gifted painter, Eugenie Paultre. I cannot locate photos from the period but Eugenie’s painting titled Mer, recalling the view from Etel’s balcony, suggests the drama and strangeness of this coast—while Erquy continues as a mid-tier vacation retreat, with small hotels, flea markets, parking, normative uses of the beach, hang gliding in the distance, strong tides.

In 2020 Etel published Shifting the Silence with Nightboat Books; the bio notes state that she continues to live in Paris though the work anticipates her death the next year. In terms of genre, the writing is a hybrid poetic meditation, a sentence-level nonnarrative that records states of being and mind, with the turn to language always present and exact. Time is marked at the level of the sentence, with only the sparest narrative motivation: “My thoughts drip, not unlike the faucet. They don’t let me know what they’re about. Other ones follow, strangers equally. / The daylight is getting dim. We’re not in winter, no, we’re somewhere in early July. The sunset will happen soon. Then it will disappear too” (5–6) Temporality emerges from the writing as a form of roughing out, coloring in, and smoothing over—and along with it rhetoric, perception, memory, affect, comprehension: … More

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September 16, 2023

Entry 52: Magnetic North (V)

Tuesday, June 20

Donna Stonecipher

Martin Eder, Elysium
Galerie EIGEN + ART

Pro QM Buchhandlung

I.S. Kalter/Yana Tsegay
Mountains Gallery

On this day we determined to meet poet Donna Stonecipher and spend some unstructured time with her. We would begin with Galerie EIGEN + ART, last hold-out of the gallery wave that defined Auguststraße as emergent art district twenty years ago and representative of the Leipzig School, notably Neo Rauch. Most of the galleries that traversed the merger from East to West have left—most recently the conceptual gallery Barbara Wien—but EIGEN + ART kept its original location while branching out. (A search to find out what happened to the former Waschmachine gallery yields no trace but ads for the Whiteware brand of washing machine and “Hot German girl fucks dildo on Waschmachine,” on Xhamster). Such references intersect, in their vulgarity, with the work on view: a theatrical series of hyper-post-consumer-utopian-quasi-religious-fantasy tableaux by Martin Eder titled Elysium. As the gallery handout reads: “Since there are no blemishes, no disease, no suffering, and thus also no death in Elysium, the fresh moisture on the figures’ skin must come from the dew on Paradise’s meadows. ‘Dewy,’ as the beauty tutorials in the Internet call it.” The stretch from the conceptual rigor and ideology critique the gallery brought to Berlin, to the cynical avowal of kitsch grandstanding as having somewhat the same effect, defines the times we are in. Not much comment to make, so we proceed to a late lunch and walk a mile across Linienstraße to Pro QM Buchhandlung, nearby the always-beating heart of Left Berlin of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the Volksbühne, Babylon Mitte, and the headquarters of Die Linke. After the surrealists’ calling as “specialists in revolt,” Pro QM sells books for “specialists in transformative urbanism,” from the psycho-geographical dérives of the situationists to current architectural studies and city guides, such as the one I brought back on Eisenhüttenstadt. It is home-in-exile on an intellectual plane that shows why we came here in the first place: to map the excitement of Berlin’s evolution as a city onto critical and creative projects. It is a source of thinking the city as one is within it.

… More

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September 2, 2023

Entry 51: Magnetic North (IV)

Friday, June 16
DB ICE 1040 Bergen auf Rügen > Berlin Hbf

54 Ebertystraße, Friedrichshain, Berlin

Carla Harryman
Ragna Berg
Florian Werner

Ellen Allien
Hamburger Bahnhof

Just about to get there; we have been away. Time crosses space, beginning in Rügen Island and ending in Berlin. Then we were advised to come and we would arrive. The party crowd is aware of its having a location in time and space, had been there for awhile—before we came. The party crowd at the Hamburger Bahnhof, celebrating the new director, a new orientation for art. As we come from a distance, the music invites us in, not yet there. On arrival it is there, an insistent pulse, meditative, cruising on horizontal, an endless plane of immanence, synced in time. He is coming soon, wrote Wittgenstein; he will be coming, he will have come. That must be the new director. Then he will have arrived. Gertrude Stein repeated the phrase, only with modulation. Ellen Allien is the legitimate appointee of the new director, hired to entertain and inspire the crowd, to be a work of art in herself. The party crowd is a work of art in itself, an instance of Gertrude Stein advancing in time. As the director himself had written, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world“—that is the principle of new art at the Hamburger Bahnhof. It is raining, the crowd is moving slightly then more openly, Ellen Allien gestures to the sky, arms raised, rain is coming down. A steady pulse of the language of limits becomes an episode in time and space. We are not afraid of speaking.

A man coming.
Yes there is a great deal of use in a man coming but will he come at all if he does come will he come here.
How to you like it if he comes and look like that. Not at all later. Well anyway he does come and if he likes it he will come again.
Later when another man comes
He does not come.
Girls coming. There is no use in girls coming.
Well anyway he does come and if he likes it he will coming gain.

Ellen Allien is the legitimate heir of Gertrude Stein. Nonsense, she pushes a button and there is a new orientation to the beat. Nonsense. Pulse, difference. Slight movements under an umbrella, the umbrellas are folded. We learn the new meaning to experience time and space, under the auspices of the new director, as an example of the new art. The art is coming all over with newness, like Gertrude Stein coming to Radcliffe, GIs arriving in the Bavarian Alps. The movement begins with a slight dancing, becomes more pronounced, is shared by many in the crowd. Finding a position in the middle, unable to really get a look at Ellen Allien, stepping back, her arms are raised with the beat. And a gigantic pause makes ensuing pulse more danceable, this is the basic grammar of techno. Nonsense. Now take a position a bit farther back, focus and click. On the pause that makes the pulse happen. Let us say what Ellen Allien teaches: electronic dance music teaches. She is the instructor of the moment, hired by the director, as an example of the new art. Her whole life is oriented toward this moment of instruction, in the form of a work of art, a way of being historical. This is the mandate of the Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart: to preserve the present as ethical obligation in the form of Ellen Allien and the crowd, moving under rain, skies now clearing, continuing as may be, a work of art.

… More

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September 1, 2023

Event 103: Poetry, Translation, Crisis

SESSION PROPOSAL WITHDRAWN

Poetry, Translation, and Crisis:
From the Post-Soviet Moment
to War and Emigration

American Comparative Literature Association
Montréal, 14–17 March 2024

Due to the difficult circumstances of the global present,
the organizers have canceled this session proposal.
Stay tuned for plans for a virtual colloquy in 2024.  

In 1989 and 1990, eight American avant-garde poets traveled to then-Leningrad to meet with Soviet counterparts, experimental poets working under quasi-nonofficial conditions during late Perestroika. These meetings followed extensive travel and translation activities in the 1980s. Among then-Soviets, the poetic schools of “metarealism” and “conceptualism” were well represented—by poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, Nadezhda Kondakova, Ivan Zhdanov, Ilya Kutik, Nina Iskrenko, Dmitrii Prigov, and Lev Rubinshtein. These events and developing contacts led to the publication of the collectively authored Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union and a flurry of translations. Three decades later, the dialogue between American poets and poets of the former Soviet territory, including both Russia and Ukraine, has continued. A comprehensive anthology of American experimental poetry, Ot “Chiornoi gori” do “Yazikovo picmo” (From Black Mountain to Language Writing), appeared from NLO in late 2022, with a publication event in Moscow and subsequent online reading. Other translations are imminent or postponed under the present circumstances, while interest in and translation of two generations of poets, now disrupted by war and emigration, continues. This session solicits contributions on past and on-going translinguistic, transcultural projects from both periods: the post-Soviet moment and now. What “cultural work” is being undertaken and advanced in these works of translation and affiliation, crossing over global spaces of conflict and establishing global poetic networks? The session language will be mainly in English, but contributions in Slavic languages are encouraged, and hopefully English translations can be arranged.

… More

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August 20, 2023

Entry 50: Magnetic North (III)

Friday, June 9
SAS 347 TRD > OSL

Heimdalsgata 35, Gamle, Oslo

Carla Harryman

According to my source, there are three kinds of space: absolute, relative, and relational. Looking for the proper airport code for Trondheim, I became enmeshed in the military and aviation history of its location in Værnes (not, evidently, the Værnes where the village church is located; the place name is repeated at two locations on the coast). Reading the entry, I stop at the exact description of the runway, its length, manner of construction, and what kind of air traffic it serves. “The main runway is 2,999 metres (9,839 ft) long, and runs east–west at 09/27. It is 45 metres (148 ft) wide, plus shoulders of 7.5 metres (25 ft) on each side. The runway is equipped with instrument landing system category 1. . . . ” In absolute terms, the runway thus materially exists. Should an airplane positioned at one end of the runway develop sufficient thrust, given the mass of the airplane and the lift of its wings, it will take off. Pilots know this and rest assured at the controls while passengers suffer through the mysterious event time and again. “Værnes has a theoretical capacity of 40 air movements per hour, but this is reduced during bad weather, so the airport has a registered capacity of 25.” In a given year, three to four hundred military aircraft are served by the facility, the entry goes on to state. What follows is a history of the transition from its use in the German Occupation to an important outpost for NATO, with continuing American military presence, likely being increased as I write.

… More

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August 13, 2023

Entry 49: Magnetic North (II)

Monday, June 5
Icelandair KEF > OSL

Sjøgata 4, Oslo

Carla Harryman

Travel consists in the denial of any goal for travel. Often one travels from point A to point B, but the experience of travel is otherwise than reaching the destination. This is why, for agéd traveler William S. Burroughs, “It is not necessary to live; it is only necessary to travel.” An interstitial space, the Interzone, the in between points of origin or destination, with the sensation of and material means for movement. One can become addicted to travel. Moving from a point of origin, it is often impossible to discern where that is—the “mooring of starting out” John Ashbery recalled as a condition of his availability at the outset, wherever that may be. We certainly did not begin our travels in Rochester, N.Y., though we passed by there recently on return from celebrating Ashbery with his tribe. One can adapt the field of aesthetic experience to the road map of travel and its discontents. Thus the rental car outside our hotel in Reykjavík must be returned directly to the scrappy terminal at Keflavík, site of former American airbase built on bare lava fields, roughly an hours drive south. The difficulty of locating the final gas station turned into a near catastrophe, but was masterfully overcome. Our transition continued through ticketing kiosks, baggage drops, crowded spaces, and passport checks where a border official tried to personalize each succeeding applicant before giving them a stamp. Once in the air it was normal, or anxious, or asleep. Then out the window the clouds parted and we saw the Farœ Islands, now the destination of a lifetime, soon to be passed by. After an intermission of blank time the massive coastal ranges of Norway loomed, with substantial snow cover, frightening in their immensity and lack of any habitation. The dramatic muscularity of glaciated ranges and valleys resolved into a flat plane of arrival and modern transit to an overpriced and inconvenient city and its arranged destination for one night. Whose amenities were mainly its proximity to the renovated harbor zone where one could find something to eat at a substantial price.

 

… More

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July 29, 2023

Entry 48: Magnetic North (I)

Thursday, June 1
Icelandair DTW > KEF

Carla Harryman

The lonely imperative of travel, as if one is uniquely hailed. That is ideological, covered in pin feathers (illustration by Icelandic expatriate artist Eero above). It was an idea of mine to go north, to seek out the (scratch that). Over the long duration of our disease, the two survivors had lived on only home cooking and streaming Nordic crime series on Netflix. In the event, something was missing or being covered up—that is what is meant by “the body,” which kept us glued to our seats. The disused warehouse of narrative effects is where all bodies are kept, we would find, each waiting to be worked into the upcoming narrative. Not really—for years there had been a blank place in the narrative, now determined to be “magnetic north.” At some point in early winter it was decided, she suggested. Putting in place a plan, all would unfold but not necessarily the way it was predicted. I believe there is no drama here, only the outer shell of a fate that would be enacted, to be revealed. The crime genre is never really surprising, as we are gripped in our seats. The seats were booked on a newly refinanced Icelandair Boeing 737 Max, now returned to service, on a stopover in Iceland. The real thrill was seeming to go nowhere and ending up in a place we had imagined. Blank fields of lava unfold under the belly of the plane with special webcams for passengers. It will be early morning the next day when we arrive at our destination.

… More

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April 21, 2023

Event 102: Can We Still Teach the Beats?

 

Can We Still Teach the Beats?:
Holism, Antagonism, Poetics,
and Pedagogy

A talk by Barrett Watten

Wednesday, April 26
WSU Humanities Center
12:30–1:30 PM, 2339 F/AB
In person/Zoom (here)

This talk will be drawn from a theoretical and historical reading of Beat poets Michael McClure (famous for transgressing species barriers and writing in “beast” language; now seen as a pioneer ecopoet as well as a poet writing at the intersection of language and the body) and Lenore Kandel (famous for her 1960s sex-positive collection The Love Book and other erotically charged writing; she is now seen a proto-feminist representative of the 60s sexual revolution). Both poets were subject to censorship in the 60s—McClure for his play The Beard, featuring a dialogue between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow; and Kandel for The Love Book; both would be vindicated in the long run. Encompassing this moment are the poetics of “open form” promulgated by Charles Olson and others, as the pedagogical framework for Black Mountain College through the 1950s, and at later experimental programs. In adapting my research to the present talk, the question on the table is how to teach the work of the Beat poets today, with their expressive/embodied excesses and absolute refusal to comply to with normative decorum. This is not a hypothetical question. The recent decision at Cornell University not to require trigger warnings for difficult material was a significant pushback against content restrictions in the classroom, and supported the discretion of faculty to present course material. But this issue is not simply a matter of Right or legal guidelines; how does one present and interpret the transgressive work of an earlier period, both as a research topic and a teaching occasion? How did the Beats themselves imagine their work as “teaching, and being taught,” as we see in the publicity photo of Allen Ginsberg from 1965? How do we contextualize their historical present from the perspective of ours? The stakes for our pedagogy in the increasingly corporatized university are high. … More

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March 25, 2023

Event 101: Academy of Scholars Lecture

The Inaugural Academy of Scholars Lecture in the Arts
and Humanities, in Honor of Guy Stern

Prof. Claudia Koonz, History, Duke University
author of The Nazi Conscience (Harvard UP):

“Harnessing Virtue in the Service of Cruelty:
Belief, Delusion, and Race in Nazi Germany”

Friday, April 7, 3:00–4:30 / hybrid format
Shaver Music Recital Hall, Old Main, WSU
480 West Hancock, Detroit (enter West Hancock)

Open to WSU faculty, students, and general public

… More

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March 14, 2023

Event 100: Black Avant-Gardes @ ACLA

Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir: Blackness, Innovation, Futurity
American Comparative Literature Association
Sheraton Hotel, Chicago, 17–19 March 2023
Register for Zoom link: http://bit.ly/3YW8A4w

Session 1 Friday, March 17, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Lauri Scheyer, “Jitterbugging the World: Calvin C. Hernton’s Diasporic
Avant-Garde and Anti-Movement Communitarianism”
Matthew Johnston, “N.H. Pritchard’s Avant-Pastoral”
Tyrone Williams, “Autobiography of a Middle Name”
Christopher Winks, “Downward Path, Inward Path: The Hermetic Poetics
of Magloire-Saint-Aude”

Session 2 Saturday, March 18, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Andrew Haas, “Black Power’s Free Improvisation and Its Afterimage
in Tongo Eisen-Martin”
Barrett Watten, “Horizons of Complexity: The Ends of Form in Anthony
Braxton and Language Writing”
Bryant Brown, Jr., “Architectural Non Sequiturs: Renee Gladman’s
Plans for Sentences”
Joseph Shafer, “Stanley Whitney: Opposition, Dramatic Struggle &
Literary Rhythm”

Session 3 Sunday, March 19, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Noah Hansen, “The Poetics of Garveyism: Situating Garveyite Poetry
in Space and Time”
Anthony Joseph, “Performance: Sonnets for Albert and the Frequency
of Magic”
Duriel E. Harris, “Re/Sounding Serious Play: Notes on Black Listening
with/through avery r young’s ‘groun(d)’”
avery young, “rock | paper | skittles: groun(d) as soun(d) monument
fo(r) trayvon martin”
Tracie Morris, “Black Hypertonality and the Performative Utterance”

C0-Organizers

Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center,
Hunan Normal University
Duriel E. Harris, English, Illinois State University
Tracie Morris, Writers Workshop, University of Iowa
Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University

Notes

Image: AACM circa 1968: group photo in Wadsworth Jarrell’s back yard, Chicago. [Musicians t/k[ From George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2008).

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