Adam Phillips (the English psychoanalyst)
says this in a review of a biography
of Dylan Thomas in the London Review of Books
*Dylan Thomas: A New Life*
by Andrew Lycett, Wedefield, October 2003
"Every distinctive poet notices something new about
the language: Thomas's notion was that if you looked
after the sound it didn't matter whether the sense
took care of itself; that it was possiblle to write great poems
without worrying too much about what they meant. The
pleasure one gets from a Thomas poem has nothing
to do with the pleasure of working it out or even the sense
that one day one will be able to work it out; and because it
isn't just a matter of time before you get it- as is the case, say with
John Ashbery- you can't get much literary criticism out of a Thomas
poem....
The poet is a comic figure now because his poetry is not funny.
He didn't have a theory about this because he didn't have theories-
or not that kind- but he had noticed something. It was becoming
increasingly difficult for poets to take themselves and what they
did at all seriously. Poetry might matter to people who liked
poetry but it wasn't important."
But this is the strange thing: I've yet to read a single piece
by Adam Philips that is the least bit memorable. But I've thought
about Dylan Thomas' poem *And Death Shall Have No Dominion*
hundreds of times:
And death shall have no dominion
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
And death have shall no dominion..."
(there are 6 more verses).
What is Phillips talking about? Though I have read this
poem and thought about it so much I have memorized
parts of it, I have yet to be impressed by a single
thing Adam Phillips has written; including his biography
of Winnicott. Adam Phillips is a bore; Dylan Thomas
is an interesting, memorable poet.
Distribution Automatique
Thursday, March 11
Notebook: 7/22/89
The world is the exciting and dangerous sea I embark on
to make my voyage as a poet- but the sea and
the world as it is given are not the
objects of my investigation as a poet. I know that
the powers I summon up from the deep can have immense
political consequences for myself and those around me-
but I cannot take reponsibiity for the outcome because
it is partly an accidental byproduct of my search.
Like the scientist, while I may be drawn to support one
or another tremendously significant political strategy or
cause- I am far too concerned about the
"individual case"- far too fascinated with the
particularity and the exotic connections between
things- to provide much impetus for those
concerned with immedite political action.
As a poet, I am a phenomenologist of the
inner socious- I must leave it to others to discover
what benefit might derive from the strangely shaped
fossils I discover there. They may have significance
for the politician, the political activist, the political
scientist or the political theorist- but as a poet,
I may be the least able to see this in my own work.
When I look at the work of others, I am most likely
toi frantically search through every word for the esoteric
information I am strongly driven to try to find.
I view as essentially political the readiness
to take action- and though political action
is completely conditioned and informed by writing at every turn (and
writing as such is profoundly influenced by every political
reality) - I think to be realistic about
relationship between the two- you're looking at a
stormy marriage- where both parties often want freedom
from each other more than they want a committment.
Politics and poetry cannot avoid each other because
they are both great talkers. You could never miss
with one at a party, for instance; the politician
will say many things meant to test your
reactions- the poet will say things leaving
you very unsure of all your reactions.
The world is the exciting and dangerous sea I embark on
to make my voyage as a poet- but the sea and
the world as it is given are not the
objects of my investigation as a poet. I know that
the powers I summon up from the deep can have immense
political consequences for myself and those around me-
but I cannot take reponsibiity for the outcome because
it is partly an accidental byproduct of my search.
Like the scientist, while I may be drawn to support one
or another tremendously significant political strategy or
cause- I am far too concerned about the
"individual case"- far too fascinated with the
particularity and the exotic connections between
things- to provide much impetus for those
concerned with immedite political action.
As a poet, I am a phenomenologist of the
inner socious- I must leave it to others to discover
what benefit might derive from the strangely shaped
fossils I discover there. They may have significance
for the politician, the political activist, the political
scientist or the political theorist- but as a poet,
I may be the least able to see this in my own work.
When I look at the work of others, I am most likely
toi frantically search through every word for the esoteric
information I am strongly driven to try to find.
I view as essentially political the readiness
to take action- and though political action
is completely conditioned and informed by writing at every turn (and
writing as such is profoundly influenced by every political
reality) - I think to be realistic about
relationship between the two- you're looking at a
stormy marriage- where both parties often want freedom
from each other more than they want a committment.
Politics and poetry cannot avoid each other because
they are both great talkers. You could never miss
with one at a party, for instance; the politician
will say many things meant to test your
reactions- the poet will say things leaving
you very unsure of all your reactions.
Wednesday, March 10
Michaela Cooper (Mikarrhea) {click here}:
"Fashion is a continuation of politics by other means...So then, what is war?"
"Fashion is a continuation of politics by other means...So then, what is war?"
Charles Borkhuis' two terrific radio plays,
*The Sound of Fear Clapping* (produced
on WNYC in 1995) and *Foreign Bodies*
(produced on WBGO-Exit 3 productions, in
2001) are now available on a CD, produced
for National Public Radio by Sarah Montague
under the tltle *Black Light*.
*The Sound of Fear Clapping* is also
available as a chapbook, published by
*Obscure Publications* in 2003.
"FAT MAN: Yes, well as fate would have it,
we happen to be looking for a nobody
just like you. We've always got our eye out
for certain drifters and malcontents. People
who have erased their identities and backgrounds
somewhere along the line. Peoole who are on
their way to becoming...blank slates. So you see,
you're perfect for the part."
*The Sound of Fear Clapping* (produced
on WNYC in 1995) and *Foreign Bodies*
(produced on WBGO-Exit 3 productions, in
2001) are now available on a CD, produced
for National Public Radio by Sarah Montague
under the tltle *Black Light*.
*The Sound of Fear Clapping* is also
available as a chapbook, published by
*Obscure Publications* in 2003.
"FAT MAN: Yes, well as fate would have it,
we happen to be looking for a nobody
just like you. We've always got our eye out
for certain drifters and malcontents. People
who have erased their identities and backgrounds
somewhere along the line. Peoole who are on
their way to becoming...blank slates. So you see,
you're perfect for the part."
Once again- over at Ron Silliman's blog-
poets have been drawn into rating peers.
Why is judging, rating and comparison
the activity most poets are drawn to
most of all? It seems most people get
bored without making a competitive game
out of poetry. I don't deny my own competitive
feelings, however, the activity of poets rating
other poets is the one I like least in
this field. Sure I make comparisons like
everybody else, but making a public
spectacle out of it this is the American obsession
I like least. It is the essence of the Society
of the Spectacle, the poetic equivalent
of a beauty contest. Sure I'm jealous of
all the attention Ron's blog is getting, but Ron
is a very generous friend and I applaud his
success. But this "best of" and
classification drive makes
me sick. How did I ever fall for
joining in? I guess I was in a great mood
that day because a blogger friend had
highly complimented me. Well, I should
be more wary about what I say
when I get so excited and happy.
poets have been drawn into rating peers.
Why is judging, rating and comparison
the activity most poets are drawn to
most of all? It seems most people get
bored without making a competitive game
out of poetry. I don't deny my own competitive
feelings, however, the activity of poets rating
other poets is the one I like least in
this field. Sure I make comparisons like
everybody else, but making a public
spectacle out of it this is the American obsession
I like least. It is the essence of the Society
of the Spectacle, the poetic equivalent
of a beauty contest. Sure I'm jealous of
all the attention Ron's blog is getting, but Ron
is a very generous friend and I applaud his
success. But this "best of" and
classification drive makes
me sick. How did I ever fall for
joining in? I guess I was in a great mood
that day because a blogger friend had
highly complimented me. Well, I should
be more wary about what I say
when I get so excited and happy.
Untitled poem: circa 1987
Unmixed, colors hold their integrity.
Digression: I thought about single minded pursuit,
That change meant subdividing oneself
In combination with parts of the world, viz:
To interact with means to become part of.
As for the primary, it is the domain of the particular,
Specifically the visual sovereign., lord of the merely proximate,
Lady of the soft familiar. Of course, at first
I was not ready for such bright shadows,
I faltered at the thought of the continuous,
I trembled at the feeling of ownership.
Battle ships tall in number ordained my sentences,
And, like any other pawn in this game,
I numbered the drawers according to my luck-
And things got misplaced and forgotten.
Don't be quarrelsome, I understand that
And recognize the duplicity of a leisurely denial.
Meanwhile the sky grew dark and serious,
Terrible lightning split the mailbox in two,
(A number with a way of knowing everything already.)
Down at the beach they strolled away,
While we sunned ourselves with silence and newspapers.
Congruence: an adult plays as a child playing as an adult
Playing as a child. A thing is like any other thing,
Each widens out believing in and not believing
And never waiting. And *now* we know that the beginning of the game
Is interesting because we don't know the end,
But in the end it is always the same. But we
Don't know it then. There's the lighthouse like it always was,
The horizon, the boats, this solitude, a favorite poem.
Pedantically, pontifically I observe that
The romantics had children too, that innocence
Must always exercise its charm. To us to be surprised
Presumes an absence, for her to remember is a joy.
We are learning to smile in spite of what we know,
She is learning to know bereft of any spite.
Unmixed, colors hold their integrity.
Digression: I thought about single minded pursuit,
That change meant subdividing oneself
In combination with parts of the world, viz:
To interact with means to become part of.
As for the primary, it is the domain of the particular,
Specifically the visual sovereign., lord of the merely proximate,
Lady of the soft familiar. Of course, at first
I was not ready for such bright shadows,
I faltered at the thought of the continuous,
I trembled at the feeling of ownership.
Battle ships tall in number ordained my sentences,
And, like any other pawn in this game,
I numbered the drawers according to my luck-
And things got misplaced and forgotten.
Don't be quarrelsome, I understand that
And recognize the duplicity of a leisurely denial.
Meanwhile the sky grew dark and serious,
Terrible lightning split the mailbox in two,
(A number with a way of knowing everything already.)
Down at the beach they strolled away,
While we sunned ourselves with silence and newspapers.
Congruence: an adult plays as a child playing as an adult
Playing as a child. A thing is like any other thing,
Each widens out believing in and not believing
And never waiting. And *now* we know that the beginning of the game
Is interesting because we don't know the end,
But in the end it is always the same. But we
Don't know it then. There's the lighthouse like it always was,
The horizon, the boats, this solitude, a favorite poem.
Pedantically, pontifically I observe that
The romantics had children too, that innocence
Must always exercise its charm. To us to be surprised
Presumes an absence, for her to remember is a joy.
We are learning to smile in spite of what we know,
She is learning to know bereft of any spite.
Tuesday, March 9
Reality: quicksand, deceptions,
manipulations, illusions at every turn.
The conviction it takes to sustain
energy, persistence, focus,
and not to succumb to the
many complex and seductive traps
at moments of surprised
accomplishment or
discouragement; their
sly accompanying complacencies
or subtle forms of passivity requires
not so much a renewed state of
vigilance (I thought that once) but
more an odd and a potentially estranging
combination of forgiveness, determination,
improvisatory readiness to confront
false assumptions, and most of all,
the ability to laugh at all those solemn
earnest expectations (entitlements),
at nearly every slippery transition.
manipulations, illusions at every turn.
The conviction it takes to sustain
energy, persistence, focus,
and not to succumb to the
many complex and seductive traps
at moments of surprised
accomplishment or
discouragement; their
sly accompanying complacencies
or subtle forms of passivity requires
not so much a renewed state of
vigilance (I thought that once) but
more an odd and a potentially estranging
combination of forgiveness, determination,
improvisatory readiness to confront
false assumptions, and most of all,
the ability to laugh at all those solemn
earnest expectations (entitlements),
at nearly every slippery transition.
Heriberto Yepez {click here} has translated
an aphorism from yesterday's ::fait accompli:: into Spanish.
"El poema: cualquier forma, la que sea, donde cada parte es necesaria".
Muchas gracias, Heriberto.
***************
Steve Tills' responses to ::fait accompli::
time travel right now on
Black Spring {click here}.
Theenk of that!
an aphorism from yesterday's ::fait accompli:: into Spanish.
"El poema: cualquier forma, la que sea, donde cada parte es necesaria".
Muchas gracias, Heriberto.
***************
Steve Tills' responses to ::fait accompli::
time travel right now on
Black Spring {click here}.
Theenk of that!
*The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger*
Detailed Commodity (Alex Young) {click here} picks up the pace.
Detailed Commodity (Alex Young) {click here} picks up the pace.
Notebook: 8/9/87
Follow out all of your desires, only to come back to the same
place. But now that place is in more places.
Aesthetic sublimation of the fear of death into plumbing its desires.
The lightest of things- like insects, like birds, like joy- can be easily
crushed. The heaviest of things- stones, sorrows, these stay- and
tend to hold their shape.
Art teaches us how to bring the dead to life.
The poem may occur in a place which is greatly dissimilar from the world
made apparent to the senses. But wherever it is, one fine day there or nearby you
will meet its poet.
Satie on the radio. Girl rolling and rolling in the foamy sea- black hair and
red bathingsuit.
8/10/87
Learn to plan your thinking.
It took very long for me to learn to enjoy the first deep draft of an experience.
Experience only apparently repeats itself- and because this is the most comforting
illusion of all- we can forget so quickly how fortunate we were that things finally
took the pass they did. Not only fortune did this but no doubt it took a tremendous
effort of will- or so it seemed- even if this effort consisted mainly in determining
not to throw it all into the air in total frustration.
8/11/87
Dream in which I saw Ted Berrigan- only he was very thin. I see a woman who
may or may not be Alice Notley and she is naked.
Maybe a writer is an obsessive who wants to do more than think.
My first thought was about Ted.
As I child, I rarely suffered from feelings of being left out or lonely, once
I discovered books. In themselves, books constitute a world for me.
9/5/87
Art prepares us for a gradual dissolution into inorganicity. Those silent
sculptures, those immense spaces... we feel events by means of their
continuous collision in the current space of time...things and their effects
accumulate...so- called synchronicities are not synchronized...the opposite...
disjunctive "connections" are made...you see now, you see ahead...copying
this may be a way of hearing it now...resistance to hearing is another way
of listening...listen to *that too*, and this voice reminds me of Alan Davies...
equivalence of moments is a way to *keep going*...
9/7/87
Give me the unexpected, in small doses, I hasten to add...tumble into life, jolting
forwards...see this from valleys and high peaks...how can you not bump
into things sometimes...don't beat so hard on them...don't calm down, calm *into*...
what makes you think someone would track you there?....the stealthier you are, the
quieter they'll be...if you make a lot of noise, they will too, so you won't hear them
as loudly...Select a few words when the occasion suits you...Stop, roll it into a
ball, and fling it into the first patch of gray light you eke out of the dark...or into
the slight shadow you still see lingering on the horizon (forget the violins)...
9/8/87
The story of a man who never tires of the smell of books and the look of words,
for whom existence is read through books, for whom the "point of departure" is
books (I've not found a way to describe this yet).
The author's personality "pervades" the work. But what is this personality but
clusters of innumerable choices ("Three of Four Things I know about Him"- Charles
Bernstein).
9/15/87
Revolutionary thought is yet burning a hole through the pages of history. One
day it may claim more- and only then will the relations between people change.
There is no disputing freedom.
9/20/87
Poem: Anti-alphabet
Make things free by making them freely.
Traditional writng separates the analysis from the content- you can see but
you just can't touch.
The continuum between forms.
"Permitting" things to gather (Toni Simon's *Space Surrounded By Its Objects*)
Strategy and movement.
9/29/87
An image is all that cohered.
And it was nothing more than the passing of a gleam.
Take the objects out of any poem and hold the world as it is.
Follow out all of your desires, only to come back to the same
place. But now that place is in more places.
Aesthetic sublimation of the fear of death into plumbing its desires.
The lightest of things- like insects, like birds, like joy- can be easily
crushed. The heaviest of things- stones, sorrows, these stay- and
tend to hold their shape.
Art teaches us how to bring the dead to life.
The poem may occur in a place which is greatly dissimilar from the world
made apparent to the senses. But wherever it is, one fine day there or nearby you
will meet its poet.
Satie on the radio. Girl rolling and rolling in the foamy sea- black hair and
red bathingsuit.
8/10/87
Learn to plan your thinking.
It took very long for me to learn to enjoy the first deep draft of an experience.
Experience only apparently repeats itself- and because this is the most comforting
illusion of all- we can forget so quickly how fortunate we were that things finally
took the pass they did. Not only fortune did this but no doubt it took a tremendous
effort of will- or so it seemed- even if this effort consisted mainly in determining
not to throw it all into the air in total frustration.
8/11/87
Dream in which I saw Ted Berrigan- only he was very thin. I see a woman who
may or may not be Alice Notley and she is naked.
Maybe a writer is an obsessive who wants to do more than think.
My first thought was about Ted.
As I child, I rarely suffered from feelings of being left out or lonely, once
I discovered books. In themselves, books constitute a world for me.
9/5/87
Art prepares us for a gradual dissolution into inorganicity. Those silent
sculptures, those immense spaces... we feel events by means of their
continuous collision in the current space of time...things and their effects
accumulate...so- called synchronicities are not synchronized...the opposite...
disjunctive "connections" are made...you see now, you see ahead...copying
this may be a way of hearing it now...resistance to hearing is another way
of listening...listen to *that too*, and this voice reminds me of Alan Davies...
equivalence of moments is a way to *keep going*...
9/7/87
Give me the unexpected, in small doses, I hasten to add...tumble into life, jolting
forwards...see this from valleys and high peaks...how can you not bump
into things sometimes...don't beat so hard on them...don't calm down, calm *into*...
what makes you think someone would track you there?....the stealthier you are, the
quieter they'll be...if you make a lot of noise, they will too, so you won't hear them
as loudly...Select a few words when the occasion suits you...Stop, roll it into a
ball, and fling it into the first patch of gray light you eke out of the dark...or into
the slight shadow you still see lingering on the horizon (forget the violins)...
9/8/87
The story of a man who never tires of the smell of books and the look of words,
for whom existence is read through books, for whom the "point of departure" is
books (I've not found a way to describe this yet).
The author's personality "pervades" the work. But what is this personality but
clusters of innumerable choices ("Three of Four Things I know about Him"- Charles
Bernstein).
9/15/87
Revolutionary thought is yet burning a hole through the pages of history. One
day it may claim more- and only then will the relations between people change.
There is no disputing freedom.
9/20/87
Poem: Anti-alphabet
Make things free by making them freely.
Traditional writng separates the analysis from the content- you can see but
you just can't touch.
The continuum between forms.
"Permitting" things to gather (Toni Simon's *Space Surrounded By Its Objects*)
Strategy and movement.
9/29/87
An image is all that cohered.
And it was nothing more than the passing of a gleam.
Take the objects out of any poem and hold the world as it is.
Monday, March 8
notebook: 5/24/87
At the moment we discover a way to express something, that very action
propels us all lthe more firmly in the world that was being addressed. Then, when
we have given it, that world grasps itself around us and it. What could make
one feels more separate from oneself, than that? Advancing towards the horizon of
exchange: -laughter and anguish.
To listen is to learn the alchemy of the known.
The poem: any shape at all where every part is necessary.
"Such people are dangerous. They do not obey known hierarchies."
At the moment we discover a way to express something, that very action
propels us all lthe more firmly in the world that was being addressed. Then, when
we have given it, that world grasps itself around us and it. What could make
one feels more separate from oneself, than that? Advancing towards the horizon of
exchange: -laughter and anguish.
To listen is to learn the alchemy of the known.
The poem: any shape at all where every part is necessary.
"Such people are dangerous. They do not obey known hierarchies."
Note:11/1/80 (written on the final page
of my copy of *Interaction Ritual* by Erving Goffman)
The parallel between aliveness and
wakefulness. If we were not alive
we would be in a condition analogous
to sleeping as in the (finite or
infinite) amount of time we were not
yet born. Waking is seeking
to adjoin, sleeping to separate.
Separate wakefulness or adjoined
dormancy is painful because it
conflicts with the cycles of birth
and death.
of my copy of *Interaction Ritual* by Erving Goffman)
The parallel between aliveness and
wakefulness. If we were not alive
we would be in a condition analogous
to sleeping as in the (finite or
infinite) amount of time we were not
yet born. Waking is seeking
to adjoin, sleeping to separate.
Separate wakefulness or adjoined
dormancy is painful because it
conflicts with the cycles of birth
and death.
Sunday, March 7
Saturday, March 6
Went to work on the storage space today
to get ready to move. Call it synchronicity,
spirit or just plain luck but the first book I
saw in the first box I opened was
*Onion Leaves, Her Map Untended*, by
Elizabeth Was .The gorgeous xexoxial
book, with about 8 pages of text, with
mysterious xerox graphics, with the look
of woodblock prints between each
page of continuous prose texts with varied
fonts, was given to Toni and I when Miekel and
Liz came to visit at our West 87 Street apartment in
1986 or thereabout, around the
time the book was published.
"*Up out of & in touch*. Talk to break between
sentence, to bathe before noontide, she hesitates
stately the ideas like pajamas. Pollution worries this
'granite-nut tender. Laughter is homogenous reliance
out the back door in a flashy pants. (Type justifies
the wandering. The explorer stumbles over the trailmarks,
cursing the numbers irate nonstop cuticle. A breath *before*
penning, vibrant, inner-aural prowl minus the sun or a new
distraction. Unrecorded voume the atlas of her going. Silent.
A modal detail hollowed to nothings diminutive. AS IF STUCK
ON A GLEESTRING, SELF STANDING ABOVE, HER HANDS
HEADSHINE; TOO FAR, ONLY THE GLOBE."
Other books of Miekel and Liz
we have include: *formula for labor* (about an
inch wide),*euy:,
a zaumist biography of Alexei Kruchenykh*,
*the plagiarist codex*,*L=I=N=G=-L=A=G=E*
and *The Aperiodic Journal of -Pataphysical-
Succulentosophy*
to get ready to move. Call it synchronicity,
spirit or just plain luck but the first book I
saw in the first box I opened was
*Onion Leaves, Her Map Untended*, by
Elizabeth Was .The gorgeous xexoxial
book, with about 8 pages of text, with
mysterious xerox graphics, with the look
of woodblock prints between each
page of continuous prose texts with varied
fonts, was given to Toni and I when Miekel and
Liz came to visit at our West 87 Street apartment in
1986 or thereabout, around the
time the book was published.
"*Up out of & in touch*. Talk to break between
sentence, to bathe before noontide, she hesitates
stately the ideas like pajamas. Pollution worries this
'granite-nut tender. Laughter is homogenous reliance
out the back door in a flashy pants. (Type justifies
the wandering. The explorer stumbles over the trailmarks,
cursing the numbers irate nonstop cuticle. A breath *before*
penning, vibrant, inner-aural prowl minus the sun or a new
distraction. Unrecorded voume the atlas of her going. Silent.
A modal detail hollowed to nothings diminutive. AS IF STUCK
ON A GLEESTRING, SELF STANDING ABOVE, HER HANDS
HEADSHINE; TOO FAR, ONLY THE GLOBE."
Other books of Miekel and Liz
we have include: *formula for labor* (about an
inch wide),*euy:,
a zaumist biography of Alexei Kruchenykh*,
*the plagiarist codex*,*L=I=N=G=-L=A=G=E*
and *The Aperiodic Journal of -Pataphysical-
Succulentosophy*
Notebook: Circa, late 1986
To present the raw coal to
take in, burn , and finally bring
to a red- hot state, to
present the substance in its
various states of polish,
from unpolished mineral to the
finest faceted stone, these
are the essences of the results
of presented form. So my
choice is to present the coal, for
we are now all miners of the
unknown regions, and the time is less
one to bedrock ourselves in
finery, but to burn through to the core
within which lies the substance
of still greater forms of energy. To
bring together our combined
essences must be the goal of
poetics, for this project if
it is to have a goal, it must be re
readjust the lines of the mind itself.
Thus it is that poetics came to be the
center of poetry's white heat,
not because it
offered the greatest promise
of new and better products-
we've all listened to
Ron Sillman's views on this,
who has shown us the
futility of seeking paradise there-
the fact is, poetry, and therefore
the profession of poet has, like so
many others, been sent packing to
the back laboratories- and the majority
have selected this humble position,
indentifying with the potential for
authenticity in these quiet and unequivocal
surroundings- does not at all
detract from the fates of these who have
chosen to publicize their "findings"-
for the best of those who have
embraced that role have recognized
the provisional nature of their "results"
as well, knowing well that a billion
successful poems could not make up
for one minute of the lives of the billions
still *suppressed*, and all the rest
*repressed*, or the millions dead
in our own beloved century,
by the unaccountable
primitive tidal pull towards power
struggle and death- also
at the glowing core of
our deepest energies.
But we did not find such unalloyed
conditions of authenticity in our laboratories,
in our untested state of reflexivity
and exploration of the products of the thought
process because these products defy
ownership in the same way that we cannot
own ourselves when the divided nature
of our identities hold a sense of wholeness
ever out in front.
The poems cannot be ours as long
they must continue to be ransacked for the
buried treasure that loses currency
before its distributed. The shall game of
power is none other than the matching
shell game of selves. As fast as we
stitch them to keep up
with the shifting conditions of the games,
of recognition of the continuity of dailiness.
As quickly as we might
examine a poem's
existence by its objective value as a poem,
just as instantly do we search the entire context
of its existance, including the most private
aspect of its very atmosphere-
the self of the poet-
also as simultaneously consumed
for its promise of breaking down
the margins between the public fact
of the poem's existence, and the relative public
skepticism about the possibility of such a person
having any consistency of relavance
to him or her.
Under such conditions, it seems to me
one of the most attractive positions
must be to embrace this secrecy and to, more or less
permantently lock the gates between the front stage
until a better distribution is possible, until the relative
positions have changed, possible as one
result of a change in power conditions.
One would not be hoping for an accord
to be reached between poets in this way,
but a growing mutual recognition that what is
shared between poets is not truly
shareable between the reader and the poem.
The sutation is truly fragmented and
the conditions are severe.The poet's quest
for authenticity has actually become
more dangerous, however, the risk inherent
in marginality. On the other hand,
it is a little more subtle to see the direct
relationship between this emergence and
actual satisfaction.
To present the raw coal to
take in, burn , and finally bring
to a red- hot state, to
present the substance in its
various states of polish,
from unpolished mineral to the
finest faceted stone, these
are the essences of the results
of presented form. So my
choice is to present the coal, for
we are now all miners of the
unknown regions, and the time is less
one to bedrock ourselves in
finery, but to burn through to the core
within which lies the substance
of still greater forms of energy. To
bring together our combined
essences must be the goal of
poetics, for this project if
it is to have a goal, it must be re
readjust the lines of the mind itself.
Thus it is that poetics came to be the
center of poetry's white heat,
not because it
offered the greatest promise
of new and better products-
we've all listened to
Ron Sillman's views on this,
who has shown us the
futility of seeking paradise there-
the fact is, poetry, and therefore
the profession of poet has, like so
many others, been sent packing to
the back laboratories- and the majority
have selected this humble position,
indentifying with the potential for
authenticity in these quiet and unequivocal
surroundings- does not at all
detract from the fates of these who have
chosen to publicize their "findings"-
for the best of those who have
embraced that role have recognized
the provisional nature of their "results"
as well, knowing well that a billion
successful poems could not make up
for one minute of the lives of the billions
still *suppressed*, and all the rest
*repressed*, or the millions dead
in our own beloved century,
by the unaccountable
primitive tidal pull towards power
struggle and death- also
at the glowing core of
our deepest energies.
But we did not find such unalloyed
conditions of authenticity in our laboratories,
in our untested state of reflexivity
and exploration of the products of the thought
process because these products defy
ownership in the same way that we cannot
own ourselves when the divided nature
of our identities hold a sense of wholeness
ever out in front.
The poems cannot be ours as long
they must continue to be ransacked for the
buried treasure that loses currency
before its distributed. The shall game of
power is none other than the matching
shell game of selves. As fast as we
stitch them to keep up
with the shifting conditions of the games,
of recognition of the continuity of dailiness.
As quickly as we might
examine a poem's
existence by its objective value as a poem,
just as instantly do we search the entire context
of its existance, including the most private
aspect of its very atmosphere-
the self of the poet-
also as simultaneously consumed
for its promise of breaking down
the margins between the public fact
of the poem's existence, and the relative public
skepticism about the possibility of such a person
having any consistency of relavance
to him or her.
Under such conditions, it seems to me
one of the most attractive positions
must be to embrace this secrecy and to, more or less
permantently lock the gates between the front stage
until a better distribution is possible, until the relative
positions have changed, possible as one
result of a change in power conditions.
One would not be hoping for an accord
to be reached between poets in this way,
but a growing mutual recognition that what is
shared between poets is not truly
shareable between the reader and the poem.
The sutation is truly fragmented and
the conditions are severe.The poet's quest
for authenticity has actually become
more dangerous, however, the risk inherent
in marginality. On the other hand,
it is a little more subtle to see the direct
relationship between this emergence and
actual satisfaction.
Friday, March 5
Very sorry to miss Ron Silliman & Michael McClure
at the Poetry Project, as well at the Boog City
Carve reading. Engulfed in all the details and the difficulties
of moving. Damn!
I appreciate Drew's brief reviews at Overlap{click here}
Now I'm looking for one re: the Carve reading.
at the Poetry Project, as well at the Boog City
Carve reading. Engulfed in all the details and the difficulties
of moving. Damn!
I appreciate Drew's brief reviews at Overlap{click here}
Now I'm looking for one re: the Carve reading.
My Quizilla query vias Chris Murray's Tex Files {click here}.
*You are naturally born with a gift,
whether it be poetry, writing or song.
You love beauty and creativity,
and usually are highly intelligent.
Others view you as mysterious and dreamy,
yet also bold since you hold firm in your beliefs.*
All of this because I like gray and write in a journal and
like to make new friends?
Anyway, I'm a sucker for astrology too.
*You are naturally born with a gift,
whether it be poetry, writing or song.
You love beauty and creativity,
and usually are highly intelligent.
Others view you as mysterious and dreamy,
yet also bold since you hold firm in your beliefs.*
All of this because I like gray and write in a journal and
like to make new friends?
Anyway, I'm a sucker for astrology too.
"The real secret of the contemplator's success is in his refusal
to consider as an evil the encrochment on his personality by
things....."
"The precise contemplation of objects is also a form of rest,
but a privilaged rest of adult plants that bear fruits..."
Francis Ponge *Things*
translated by Cid Corman
***********************************************
"'One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik
banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world
is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and
obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other further, as yet
unglimpsed manifestations of decay. You see, world
deterioration of this regressive type is a normal experience
of many half-lifers, especially in the early stages when ties
to real reality are still very strong..."
*Ubik*, Phillip K. Dick, Doubleday, 1969, p. 118
************************************************
"As I mentioned, I had begun early to find evidence that she unconsciously
defended herself against the recognition of her own psychological instability,
through projecting this instability upon not only other persons, but upon
her nonhuman environment as well. That is, she indicated that she not
only experienced other *person* in her presence (including myself, in the
therapeutic session) as being replaced, repeatedly, by different persons;
she also experienced the hospital buildings, the contours of the landscape,
and the locations of the trees as changing more or less constantly. She could
only conclude that all of her surroundings were a giant movie set which was
changed continuously. This included even the neighboring village, and the adjacent
city of Washington; when she went into the village or the city, she was sure,
each time, that this was a different community from any that she had ever
visited before. She was certain that there were thousands of Chestnut Lodges,
thousands of Rockvilles, thousands of Washingtons. Changes in these physical
surroundings , as well as changes in the appearance of other persons, would occur
right before her eyes. She had had a similar perception of her environment, for years
before my first interview with her. She once confided to me that even before the
age of eight, "I used to feel as though I were walking on quicksand."
Harold Searles, *The Nonhuman Environment*, New York, 1960, p. 315-316 316,
**********************************************************************
"No urban planner, puzzling out the rational requirements of a new city
development, would ever have arrived at the Morroccan birdcage shop.
Yet, of all the businesses on the block this is the only one which is most
typical of the peculiar big-city flavour of the quarter. It is an example of pure,
bedsitter-entrepreneurism; you import a functional object from a distant
place or period, make it both useless and decorative with a lick of paint, then
sell it at a fancy price as a status-enhancer. If the bottom falls out of the
birdcage market, no doubt the shop can quickly adapt t selling cracked
78 rpm rock-and-roll records, 1940's Aztec-fretwork radio sets, or glass
liquid jars for growing miniature gardens in. The market in fashion is
omnivorous in this improvisatory, make-do-and mend way; it transforms
junk into antiques, rubbish into something rich, strange, expensive and
amusing. It is solely concerned with effecting arbitrary changes in value; its
raw material is the continuous stream of waste products which we leave
behind us in our crazes. It is cyclical and self-sufficient, replenishing itself
as demand dictates, from the reservoir of refuse f rom which we have
temporarily averted our eyes. One blink, and we are making out a cheque
to pay for some *object d'art* which we tossed into a garbage can only
last month. The Moroccan birdcage syndrome is a useful model for a certain
kinnd of urban industrial process- a process which both supplies a demand
for commodities whose sole feature is their expression of aste, and becomes,
by virtue of its laws of economic transformation, the ultimate arbiter of that taste."
Jonathan Raban, *Soft City*, New York, 1974, p 95.
*****************************************************************
"WOZZECK Well, Doctor- you see, sir- sometimes there's folk
with this or that kind of character, or structure so to say; but
you see, sir, with Nature, sir- (He *snaps his fingers*) it's like that
sir. How could I put it? Like-
DOCTOR Wozzeck, you're philsophizing again.
WOZZECK You see, Doctor, when Nature gjives way, sir-
DOCTOR Nature! What! Nature!
WOZZECK- gives out, sir, and the world turns all
dark, and you go round fumblin after things
with your 'ands. And then'tis as though it might
all break up, sir- like a spider's web. Oh, sir- and
then there's something there; but it's not there at
all. Oh, Marie! 'Tis all so dark, and nol more than
a glint of red to west, like out of a chimney, sir-
and what are you to hold to then? (HE *paces
the room*.)
DOCTOR Tch! Don't shift your feet like that.
You're not a spider.
WOZZECK Doctor, have you ever seen anything
of compound reason? When the sun burns down
at mid-day, and it's as though the world might go
up in one flame. Once I heard a fearful voice, sir-
speaking to me.
Georg Buchner, *WOZZECK*
translated by Geoffrey Dunlop, London, 1952
*************************************************************
"In the sequence one can say that first there is object-relating,
then in the end there is object-use; in between, however, is the
most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development; or the most
irksome of all the early failures that come for mending. This thing
that there is in between relating and use is the subject's placing
of the object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent control;
that is, the subject's perception of the object as an external phenomenon,
not as a projected entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own
right.
The change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys
the object. From here it could be argued by an armchair philosopher
that there is therefore no such thing in practice as the use of an object:
If the object is external, then the object is destroyed by the subject.
Should the philosopher come our of his chair and sit on the floor with
the patient, however, he will find that there is an intermediate positon.
In other words he will find that after 'subject relates to object' comes
*object survives* destruction by the subject'. But there may or may not
be survival."
"The Use of An Object" from *Playing and Reality*, D.W. Winnicott.
London, 1971, p. 89
*************************************************************
"Those things of which there is sight, hearing, knowledge: these are
what I honor most."
Hericleitus of Ehpesus
translated by Kathleen Feeman
**************************************************************
"Ideas are not my forte. I do not handle them with ease. They handle me
instead. Give me a queasy feeling, nausea. I don't like to find myself
thrown in their midst. Objects in the external world, on the other hand,
delight me. They sometimes surprise me, but they seem in no way concerned
about my approval: which they immediately acquire. I do not question them."
Francis Ponge, *Methods*
from * The Voice of Things*
translated by Beth Archer
****************************************************************
"But," said K., "Ive'seen the inside of an official sledge in which
there weren't any papers." Olga's sotry was opening for him
with such a great and almost incredible world that he could not help
trying to put his own small experiences in relation to it, as much to
convince himself of its reality as of his own existence.
"That's possible," said Olga, "but in that case it's even worse, for
that means that the official's business is so important that the papers
are too precious or too numerous to be taken with him, and those
officials go at a gallop. In any case, none of them can spare time for father.
And besides, there are several roads to the Castle. Now one of them
is in fashion, and most carriages go by that, now it's another and everything
drives pell-mell there. And what governs this change of fashion has never
been found out. At eight o'clock one morning they'll all be on on another
road, ten minutes later on a third, and half an hour after that on the first
road again, and then they may stick to that road all day, but every minute
there's a possibility of a change. Of course, all the roads join up near the
village, but by that time all the carriages are racing like mad, while nearer the
Castle the pace isn't quite so fast. And the amount of traffic varies just
as widely and incomprehensibly as the choice of raods. There are often days
when there's not a carriage to be seen, and others when they travel in
crowds. Now, just think of all of that in relation to father. In his best suit,
which soon becomes his only suit, off he goes every morning from the house
with our best wishes."
Franz Kafka, *The Castle*, New York, 1930, p. 238
translated by Edwin and Willa Muir
****************************************************************
"The Situationists even believed that they had discovered the vastest
and most irreducible subject possible: "life." Unfortunately, this approach
does not solve the problem of the subject, as is demonstrated by the
rigid dichotomous vision to which it leads. The relationship of society to the
spectacle comes to be pictured as one between life and non-life. to the
commodity, the economy, and the spectacle, defined as "a negation of life
that *has become visible* as "non-life," and as "the life, moving of
itself, of that which is dead"...is opposed life as flux."
*Guy Debord* Anselm Jappe, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith,
UC Press, 1993.
***************************************************************
"The events that happen in individual existence as it is organized,
the events that really concern us and require our participation are generally
precisely those that merit nothing more than our being distant, bored,
indiferent spectators. In contrast, the situation that is seen in some artistic
transposition is rather often attractive, something that would merit our
participating in it. This is a paradox to reverse, to put back on its feet. This
is what must be realized in acts. and this idiotic spectacle of the fragmented
and filtered past, full of sound and fury: it is not a question now of transmitting-
it- of 'rendering' it, as is said- in another neatly ordered spectacle that would
play the game of neatly ordered comprehension and participation. No. Any
coherent artistic expression already expresses the coherence of the past,
already expresses passivity. It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To
destroy the conventions of its communication. To demoralise its fans. What a task!
As in blurry, drunken vision, the memory and the language of the film fade out
simultaneously. At the extreme, the miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain
sort of objectivity: a documentary on the conditions of non-communication."
Guy Debord, *Society of The Spectacle and Other Films*
*Refutation of all judgements whether for or against,
which have been brought to date of the film 'Society of
The Spectacle" is based on the translation by Ken Sanborn,
New York, 1989. No copyright for non-profit editions.
*********************************************************************
"We do not see the human eye as a receiver, it appears not
to let anything in, but to send something out. The ear receives;
the eye looks. (It casts glances, it flashes, radiates, gleams.) One
can terrify with one's eyes, not with one's ear or nose. When
you see the eye you see something going out from it. You see
the look in the eye."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Zettel, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe
UC Press, 1967, p. 40e
to consider as an evil the encrochment on his personality by
things....."
"The precise contemplation of objects is also a form of rest,
but a privilaged rest of adult plants that bear fruits..."
Francis Ponge *Things*
translated by Cid Corman
***********************************************
"'One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik
banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world
is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and
obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other further, as yet
unglimpsed manifestations of decay. You see, world
deterioration of this regressive type is a normal experience
of many half-lifers, especially in the early stages when ties
to real reality are still very strong..."
*Ubik*, Phillip K. Dick, Doubleday, 1969, p. 118
************************************************
"As I mentioned, I had begun early to find evidence that she unconsciously
defended herself against the recognition of her own psychological instability,
through projecting this instability upon not only other persons, but upon
her nonhuman environment as well. That is, she indicated that she not
only experienced other *person* in her presence (including myself, in the
therapeutic session) as being replaced, repeatedly, by different persons;
she also experienced the hospital buildings, the contours of the landscape,
and the locations of the trees as changing more or less constantly. She could
only conclude that all of her surroundings were a giant movie set which was
changed continuously. This included even the neighboring village, and the adjacent
city of Washington; when she went into the village or the city, she was sure,
each time, that this was a different community from any that she had ever
visited before. She was certain that there were thousands of Chestnut Lodges,
thousands of Rockvilles, thousands of Washingtons. Changes in these physical
surroundings , as well as changes in the appearance of other persons, would occur
right before her eyes. She had had a similar perception of her environment, for years
before my first interview with her. She once confided to me that even before the
age of eight, "I used to feel as though I were walking on quicksand."
Harold Searles, *The Nonhuman Environment*, New York, 1960, p. 315-316 316,
**********************************************************************
"No urban planner, puzzling out the rational requirements of a new city
development, would ever have arrived at the Morroccan birdcage shop.
Yet, of all the businesses on the block this is the only one which is most
typical of the peculiar big-city flavour of the quarter. It is an example of pure,
bedsitter-entrepreneurism; you import a functional object from a distant
place or period, make it both useless and decorative with a lick of paint, then
sell it at a fancy price as a status-enhancer. If the bottom falls out of the
birdcage market, no doubt the shop can quickly adapt t selling cracked
78 rpm rock-and-roll records, 1940's Aztec-fretwork radio sets, or glass
liquid jars for growing miniature gardens in. The market in fashion is
omnivorous in this improvisatory, make-do-and mend way; it transforms
junk into antiques, rubbish into something rich, strange, expensive and
amusing. It is solely concerned with effecting arbitrary changes in value; its
raw material is the continuous stream of waste products which we leave
behind us in our crazes. It is cyclical and self-sufficient, replenishing itself
as demand dictates, from the reservoir of refuse f rom which we have
temporarily averted our eyes. One blink, and we are making out a cheque
to pay for some *object d'art* which we tossed into a garbage can only
last month. The Moroccan birdcage syndrome is a useful model for a certain
kinnd of urban industrial process- a process which both supplies a demand
for commodities whose sole feature is their expression of aste, and becomes,
by virtue of its laws of economic transformation, the ultimate arbiter of that taste."
Jonathan Raban, *Soft City*, New York, 1974, p 95.
*****************************************************************
"WOZZECK Well, Doctor- you see, sir- sometimes there's folk
with this or that kind of character, or structure so to say; but
you see, sir, with Nature, sir- (He *snaps his fingers*) it's like that
sir. How could I put it? Like-
DOCTOR Wozzeck, you're philsophizing again.
WOZZECK You see, Doctor, when Nature gjives way, sir-
DOCTOR Nature! What! Nature!
WOZZECK- gives out, sir, and the world turns all
dark, and you go round fumblin after things
with your 'ands. And then'tis as though it might
all break up, sir- like a spider's web. Oh, sir- and
then there's something there; but it's not there at
all. Oh, Marie! 'Tis all so dark, and nol more than
a glint of red to west, like out of a chimney, sir-
and what are you to hold to then? (HE *paces
the room*.)
DOCTOR Tch! Don't shift your feet like that.
You're not a spider.
WOZZECK Doctor, have you ever seen anything
of compound reason? When the sun burns down
at mid-day, and it's as though the world might go
up in one flame. Once I heard a fearful voice, sir-
speaking to me.
Georg Buchner, *WOZZECK*
translated by Geoffrey Dunlop, London, 1952
*************************************************************
"In the sequence one can say that first there is object-relating,
then in the end there is object-use; in between, however, is the
most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development; or the most
irksome of all the early failures that come for mending. This thing
that there is in between relating and use is the subject's placing
of the object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent control;
that is, the subject's perception of the object as an external phenomenon,
not as a projected entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own
right.
The change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys
the object. From here it could be argued by an armchair philosopher
that there is therefore no such thing in practice as the use of an object:
If the object is external, then the object is destroyed by the subject.
Should the philosopher come our of his chair and sit on the floor with
the patient, however, he will find that there is an intermediate positon.
In other words he will find that after 'subject relates to object' comes
*object survives* destruction by the subject'. But there may or may not
be survival."
"The Use of An Object" from *Playing and Reality*, D.W. Winnicott.
London, 1971, p. 89
*************************************************************
"Those things of which there is sight, hearing, knowledge: these are
what I honor most."
Hericleitus of Ehpesus
translated by Kathleen Feeman
**************************************************************
"Ideas are not my forte. I do not handle them with ease. They handle me
instead. Give me a queasy feeling, nausea. I don't like to find myself
thrown in their midst. Objects in the external world, on the other hand,
delight me. They sometimes surprise me, but they seem in no way concerned
about my approval: which they immediately acquire. I do not question them."
Francis Ponge, *Methods*
from * The Voice of Things*
translated by Beth Archer
****************************************************************
"But," said K., "Ive'seen the inside of an official sledge in which
there weren't any papers." Olga's sotry was opening for him
with such a great and almost incredible world that he could not help
trying to put his own small experiences in relation to it, as much to
convince himself of its reality as of his own existence.
"That's possible," said Olga, "but in that case it's even worse, for
that means that the official's business is so important that the papers
are too precious or too numerous to be taken with him, and those
officials go at a gallop. In any case, none of them can spare time for father.
And besides, there are several roads to the Castle. Now one of them
is in fashion, and most carriages go by that, now it's another and everything
drives pell-mell there. And what governs this change of fashion has never
been found out. At eight o'clock one morning they'll all be on on another
road, ten minutes later on a third, and half an hour after that on the first
road again, and then they may stick to that road all day, but every minute
there's a possibility of a change. Of course, all the roads join up near the
village, but by that time all the carriages are racing like mad, while nearer the
Castle the pace isn't quite so fast. And the amount of traffic varies just
as widely and incomprehensibly as the choice of raods. There are often days
when there's not a carriage to be seen, and others when they travel in
crowds. Now, just think of all of that in relation to father. In his best suit,
which soon becomes his only suit, off he goes every morning from the house
with our best wishes."
Franz Kafka, *The Castle*, New York, 1930, p. 238
translated by Edwin and Willa Muir
****************************************************************
"The Situationists even believed that they had discovered the vastest
and most irreducible subject possible: "life." Unfortunately, this approach
does not solve the problem of the subject, as is demonstrated by the
rigid dichotomous vision to which it leads. The relationship of society to the
spectacle comes to be pictured as one between life and non-life. to the
commodity, the economy, and the spectacle, defined as "a negation of life
that *has become visible* as "non-life," and as "the life, moving of
itself, of that which is dead"...is opposed life as flux."
*Guy Debord* Anselm Jappe, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith,
UC Press, 1993.
***************************************************************
"The events that happen in individual existence as it is organized,
the events that really concern us and require our participation are generally
precisely those that merit nothing more than our being distant, bored,
indiferent spectators. In contrast, the situation that is seen in some artistic
transposition is rather often attractive, something that would merit our
participating in it. This is a paradox to reverse, to put back on its feet. This
is what must be realized in acts. and this idiotic spectacle of the fragmented
and filtered past, full of sound and fury: it is not a question now of transmitting-
it- of 'rendering' it, as is said- in another neatly ordered spectacle that would
play the game of neatly ordered comprehension and participation. No. Any
coherent artistic expression already expresses the coherence of the past,
already expresses passivity. It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To
destroy the conventions of its communication. To demoralise its fans. What a task!
As in blurry, drunken vision, the memory and the language of the film fade out
simultaneously. At the extreme, the miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain
sort of objectivity: a documentary on the conditions of non-communication."
Guy Debord, *Society of The Spectacle and Other Films*
*Refutation of all judgements whether for or against,
which have been brought to date of the film 'Society of
The Spectacle" is based on the translation by Ken Sanborn,
New York, 1989. No copyright for non-profit editions.
*********************************************************************
"We do not see the human eye as a receiver, it appears not
to let anything in, but to send something out. The ear receives;
the eye looks. (It casts glances, it flashes, radiates, gleams.) One
can terrify with one's eyes, not with one's ear or nose. When
you see the eye you see something going out from it. You see
the look in the eye."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Zettel, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe
UC Press, 1967, p. 40e
Thursday, March 4
David Sifrey, whose Technorati website is one of the most
useful sites in the blogosphere, posted the following regarding
the sociology of linking. See paragraph 2,
February 16: "I've been giving a lot of thought
to Tim Oren's succinct comments that linking is a new kind of social gesture..."
Sifrey's Alerts {click here}
useful sites in the blogosphere, posted the following regarding
the sociology of linking. See paragraph 2,
February 16: "I've been giving a lot of thought
to Tim Oren's succinct comments that linking is a new kind of social gesture..."
Sifrey's Alerts {click here}
"Well, let's put it this way: I have ideas, ideas that can be
turned into profits, and I have a way with things, of making
an idea concrete and giving it cash value. After my first big-
payoff inventions or discoveries, I didn't even need a way
with things; I got myself a staff. One invention led to another.
The money kept pouring in; it still does. All I really ever
needed was ideas, and I have never had a lack of those.
What is my secret? I start with myself. That's my first
million dollar idea. What would I really like? What do I
need? What would make my life better, even a little bit
better? What would I pay good money for? What would make
my life more comfortable and pleasurable?
There's a lecture I give, and I've given it all over the
country and in Europe, too, that I call 'How To Invent
Your Way To Big Money.' What I've just said is exactly
how I begin it every time. Usually I make people pay big
bucks for these words: I only speak to 20 people at a time
and I charge them each $1000 at least. My time is valuable
to me. I have to say, though, that most people just don't
get the message no matter how much they pay to hear
me speak. Most people are lumps. So you can quote me
for free. I figure that poor people might do better with my
secret to success than the rich ones."
"The Big Cheese" from *Hotel Death and other tales*
by John Perrault
Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1989
**************************************************
"Sometimes, you just have to bow down in awe. A person
comes up with an idea that no one has ever thought of, an
idea so simple and perfect that you wonder how the world ever
managed to survive without it. The suitcase with wheels, for
example. How could it have taken so long? For thirty thousand
years, we've been lugging our burdens around with us, sweating
and straining as we moved from one place to another, and the only
thing that's ever come of it is sore muscles, bad backs, exhaustion.
I mean, it's not as though we didn't have the wheel, is it? That's
what gets me. Why did we have to wait untiil the end of the
twentieth century for this gizmo to see the light of day?...I'm
telling your friend, things aren't so simple as they look. The human
spirit is a dull instrument, and often we're no better at figuring
out how to take care of ourselves than the lowest worm on the ground."
Paul Auster, *Timbuktu*, faber and faber, 1999
**********************************************************
"Reports of air attacks are seldom without the names of the firms
which produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, Heinkel, Lancaster
feature where once the talk of of cuirrassiers, lancers and hussars.
The mechanism for reproducing life, for dominating and destroying
it, is exactly the same, and accordingly, industry, state, and
advertising are amalgamated. The old exaggeration of sceptical
Liberals, that war was a business, has come true: state power
has shred even the appearance of independence from particular
interests in profit; always in their service really, it now also places
itself there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of the chief
contractor in the destruction of cities, helps to earn it the
good name that will secure it the best commissions in their
rebuilding."
"Out of The Firing Line," f rom *Minima Moralia* Thodore Adorno,
Verso,1978, translation by E.F.N. Jephcott
******************************************************
"As a focus of regression, mass culture assiduously concerns
itself with the production of those archetypes in whose survival
fascistic psychology perceives the most reliable means of perpetuating
the modern conditions of domination. Primeval symbols are constructed
on the production line. The dream industry does not so much fabricate
the drama of the customers as to introduce the dreams of the suppliers
among the people. This is the thousand-year empire of an industrial
caste system governed by a stream of never-ending dynasties. In the
dreams of those in charge of mummifying the world mass culture
represents a priestly hieroglyphic script which addresses its images to
those who have been subjugaged not in order that they might be
enjoyed but only that they be read...But the secret doctrine which is
communicated here is the message of capital. It must be secret because
total domination likes to keep itself invisible."
Theodore Adorno, *The Culture Industry*
Routledge, 1991
***********************************************************
"The spectacular organisation of modern class society brings with it
two consequences recognisable everywhere: on the one hand, the
generalised falsification of products as well as of reasoning; on the
other, the obligation, for those who pretend to find their happiness
therein, of always maintaining themselves at a great distance from that
which they affect to love, for they never possess the means, whether
intellectual or otherwise, by which to accede to direct and profound
knowledge, a complete praxis and authentic taste.
What is already so apparent when it is a question of living conditions,
of wine, of cultural consumption or of the liberation of morals, should
be naturally only the more marked when it is a matter of revolutionary
theory, and of the redoubtable language which they attach to a
condemned world. this naive falsification and this incompetent approbation,
which are like the specific odour of the spectacle, have hardly failed to
illustrate the commentaries, variously imcomprehensible, which have
responded to the film entitled *The Society of the Spectacle*.
Incomprehension, in this case, imposes itself, for still a bit longer. The
spectacle is a poverty, even more than it is a conspiracy. And those who
write in the newspapers of our epoch have dissimulated nothing of their
intelligence from us. What could they say of pertinence concerning a film
which attacks them at the moment when they themselves begin to feel
themselves caving in in every detail. The debility of their reactions accompanies
the decadence of their world...One who looks at the poverty of their life
understands well the poverty of their discourse. It is enough to see
their set decorations and their occupations, their commodities and their
ceremonies; and that is spread out everywhere. It's enough to hear these
imbecilic voices which tell you that you have become alienated, as they inform
you of it with contempt, at every hour that passes.
Spectators do not find what they desire: they desire what they find."
Guy Debord *Society of the Spectacle and Other Films*
Rebel Press, London, 1992
*************************************************************
"WILLY: Charley, I'm strapped. I'm strapped. I don't know
what to do. I was just fired.
CHARLEY: Howard fired you?
WILLY: That snotnose. Imagine that? I named him. I named
him Howard.
CHARLEY: Willy, when you gonna realize that them things
don't mean anything? You named him Howard, but you can't
sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can
sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you
don't know that.
WILLY: I've always tried to think otherwise, I guess. I always
felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked, that nothing-
CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? Who liked J.P. Morgan?
Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he'd look like a butcher.
But with his pockets on he was very well liked. Now listen, Willy,
I know you don't like me, and nobody can say I'm in love with you,
but I'll give you a job because- just for the hell of it, put it that way.
Now what do you say?
WILLY: I- I just can't work for you, Charley.
CHARLEY: What're you, jealous of me?
WILLY: I can't work for you, that's all, don't ask me why.
CHARLEY, *angered, takes out more bills*:You've been
jealous of me all your life, you damned fool. Here, pay
your insurance. *He puts the money in Willy's hand*
WILLY: I'm keeping strict accounts.
CHARLEY: I've got some work to do. Take care of
yourself. And pay your insurance.
WILLY, *moving to the right: Funny, y'know? After
all the highways and the trains, and the appointments,
and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."
from *Death of A Salesman*
Arthur Miller
Viking, NY 1949
turned into profits, and I have a way with things, of making
an idea concrete and giving it cash value. After my first big-
payoff inventions or discoveries, I didn't even need a way
with things; I got myself a staff. One invention led to another.
The money kept pouring in; it still does. All I really ever
needed was ideas, and I have never had a lack of those.
What is my secret? I start with myself. That's my first
million dollar idea. What would I really like? What do I
need? What would make my life better, even a little bit
better? What would I pay good money for? What would make
my life more comfortable and pleasurable?
There's a lecture I give, and I've given it all over the
country and in Europe, too, that I call 'How To Invent
Your Way To Big Money.' What I've just said is exactly
how I begin it every time. Usually I make people pay big
bucks for these words: I only speak to 20 people at a time
and I charge them each $1000 at least. My time is valuable
to me. I have to say, though, that most people just don't
get the message no matter how much they pay to hear
me speak. Most people are lumps. So you can quote me
for free. I figure that poor people might do better with my
secret to success than the rich ones."
"The Big Cheese" from *Hotel Death and other tales*
by John Perrault
Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1989
**************************************************
"Sometimes, you just have to bow down in awe. A person
comes up with an idea that no one has ever thought of, an
idea so simple and perfect that you wonder how the world ever
managed to survive without it. The suitcase with wheels, for
example. How could it have taken so long? For thirty thousand
years, we've been lugging our burdens around with us, sweating
and straining as we moved from one place to another, and the only
thing that's ever come of it is sore muscles, bad backs, exhaustion.
I mean, it's not as though we didn't have the wheel, is it? That's
what gets me. Why did we have to wait untiil the end of the
twentieth century for this gizmo to see the light of day?...I'm
telling your friend, things aren't so simple as they look. The human
spirit is a dull instrument, and often we're no better at figuring
out how to take care of ourselves than the lowest worm on the ground."
Paul Auster, *Timbuktu*, faber and faber, 1999
**********************************************************
"Reports of air attacks are seldom without the names of the firms
which produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, Heinkel, Lancaster
feature where once the talk of of cuirrassiers, lancers and hussars.
The mechanism for reproducing life, for dominating and destroying
it, is exactly the same, and accordingly, industry, state, and
advertising are amalgamated. The old exaggeration of sceptical
Liberals, that war was a business, has come true: state power
has shred even the appearance of independence from particular
interests in profit; always in their service really, it now also places
itself there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of the chief
contractor in the destruction of cities, helps to earn it the
good name that will secure it the best commissions in their
rebuilding."
"Out of The Firing Line," f rom *Minima Moralia* Thodore Adorno,
Verso,1978, translation by E.F.N. Jephcott
******************************************************
"As a focus of regression, mass culture assiduously concerns
itself with the production of those archetypes in whose survival
fascistic psychology perceives the most reliable means of perpetuating
the modern conditions of domination. Primeval symbols are constructed
on the production line. The dream industry does not so much fabricate
the drama of the customers as to introduce the dreams of the suppliers
among the people. This is the thousand-year empire of an industrial
caste system governed by a stream of never-ending dynasties. In the
dreams of those in charge of mummifying the world mass culture
represents a priestly hieroglyphic script which addresses its images to
those who have been subjugaged not in order that they might be
enjoyed but only that they be read...But the secret doctrine which is
communicated here is the message of capital. It must be secret because
total domination likes to keep itself invisible."
Theodore Adorno, *The Culture Industry*
Routledge, 1991
***********************************************************
"The spectacular organisation of modern class society brings with it
two consequences recognisable everywhere: on the one hand, the
generalised falsification of products as well as of reasoning; on the
other, the obligation, for those who pretend to find their happiness
therein, of always maintaining themselves at a great distance from that
which they affect to love, for they never possess the means, whether
intellectual or otherwise, by which to accede to direct and profound
knowledge, a complete praxis and authentic taste.
What is already so apparent when it is a question of living conditions,
of wine, of cultural consumption or of the liberation of morals, should
be naturally only the more marked when it is a matter of revolutionary
theory, and of the redoubtable language which they attach to a
condemned world. this naive falsification and this incompetent approbation,
which are like the specific odour of the spectacle, have hardly failed to
illustrate the commentaries, variously imcomprehensible, which have
responded to the film entitled *The Society of the Spectacle*.
Incomprehension, in this case, imposes itself, for still a bit longer. The
spectacle is a poverty, even more than it is a conspiracy. And those who
write in the newspapers of our epoch have dissimulated nothing of their
intelligence from us. What could they say of pertinence concerning a film
which attacks them at the moment when they themselves begin to feel
themselves caving in in every detail. The debility of their reactions accompanies
the decadence of their world...One who looks at the poverty of their life
understands well the poverty of their discourse. It is enough to see
their set decorations and their occupations, their commodities and their
ceremonies; and that is spread out everywhere. It's enough to hear these
imbecilic voices which tell you that you have become alienated, as they inform
you of it with contempt, at every hour that passes.
Spectators do not find what they desire: they desire what they find."
Guy Debord *Society of the Spectacle and Other Films*
Rebel Press, London, 1992
*************************************************************
"WILLY: Charley, I'm strapped. I'm strapped. I don't know
what to do. I was just fired.
CHARLEY: Howard fired you?
WILLY: That snotnose. Imagine that? I named him. I named
him Howard.
CHARLEY: Willy, when you gonna realize that them things
don't mean anything? You named him Howard, but you can't
sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can
sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you
don't know that.
WILLY: I've always tried to think otherwise, I guess. I always
felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked, that nothing-
CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? Who liked J.P. Morgan?
Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he'd look like a butcher.
But with his pockets on he was very well liked. Now listen, Willy,
I know you don't like me, and nobody can say I'm in love with you,
but I'll give you a job because- just for the hell of it, put it that way.
Now what do you say?
WILLY: I- I just can't work for you, Charley.
CHARLEY: What're you, jealous of me?
WILLY: I can't work for you, that's all, don't ask me why.
CHARLEY, *angered, takes out more bills*:You've been
jealous of me all your life, you damned fool. Here, pay
your insurance. *He puts the money in Willy's hand*
WILLY: I'm keeping strict accounts.
CHARLEY: I've got some work to do. Take care of
yourself. And pay your insurance.
WILLY, *moving to the right: Funny, y'know? After
all the highways and the trains, and the appointments,
and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."
from *Death of A Salesman*
Arthur Miller
Viking, NY 1949
Wednesday, March 3
This Just In From Aaron Tieger
(just in because my email server's been
down since last night)
If you're in or near NYC on Thursday,
March 4, please come celebrate issue 2
(and others) of CARVE with poetry readings by
Michael Carr
Gregory Ford
Brenda Iijima
Mark Lamoureux
Dorothea Lasky
Jess Mynes
Christina Strong
Aaron Tieger
Matvei Yankelevich
With music by The Millerite Redeemers!
Curated & with introduction by David Kirschenbaum.
Free wine, cheese, food, etc.
6 pm.
ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr. (Chelsea)
NYC
Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues
FREE AND OPEN TO THE
PUBLIC. BRING FRIENDS, DATES, ETC.
(just in because my email server's been
down since last night)
If you're in or near NYC on Thursday,
March 4, please come celebrate issue 2
(and others) of CARVE with poetry readings by
Michael Carr
Gregory Ford
Brenda Iijima
Mark Lamoureux
Dorothea Lasky
Jess Mynes
Christina Strong
Aaron Tieger
Matvei Yankelevich
With music by The Millerite Redeemers!
Curated & with introduction by David Kirschenbaum.
Free wine, cheese, food, etc.
6 pm.
ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr. (Chelsea)
NYC
Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues
FREE AND OPEN TO THE
PUBLIC. BRING FRIENDS, DATES, ETC.
"Every given commodity fights for itself,
cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts
to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only
one. The spectacle then, is the epic poem of this struggle,
an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any
Troy. The spectacle does not sing the praises of
men and their weapons, but of commodities and
their passions. In this blind struggle, every commodity
pursuing its passion unconsciously realizes something
higher: the becoming-world of the commodity,
which is also the becoming-commodity of the
world. So, by a TRICK OF COMMODITY LOGIC,
what is SPECIFIC in the commodity wears itself
out in the fight while the commodity-form moves
towards its absolute realization.
In the image of the society happily unified by
consumption, real division is only SUSPENDED
until the next non-accomplishment in the
consumable. Each specific product which represents
hope for a dazzling short-cut to the promised land
of total consumption, is ceremoniously presented
in its turn as the decisive entity. But as in the
case of the simultaneous diffusion of seemingly
aristocratic first-names carried by almost all
individuals of the same age, the objects from which
one expects a unique power could not have been proposed
for the devotion of the masses unless it had been
produced in large enough numbers to be consumed
massively. A product acquires prestiige only when
it is placed at the center of social life as the revealed
mystery of the ultimate goal of production.
The object which was prestigious in the spectacle becomes
vulgar as soon as it enters the home of the consumer, and
at the same time enters the homes of all the others. Too late,
it reveals its essential poverty, which it naturally gets from the'
misery of its production. But, by then, another object already
carries the justification of the system and the demand to be
recognized.
The fraud of satisfaction must denounce itself by being
replaced, following the change of products and the
general conditions of production. That which asserted
its definitive excellence with perfect impudence nevertheless
changes, both in the diffuse and in the concentrated
spectacle, and it is the system alone which must continue.
Stalin, as well as the outmoded commodity are denounced
precisely by those who imposed them. Every NEW LIE of
advertising is also an AVOWAL of the previous lie. The
fall of every figure of totalitarian power reveals the ILLUSORY
COMMUNITY which approved him unanimously, and was no
more than an agglomoration of solitudes without illusions.
What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change, and
must change with its base. The spectacle is abolutely
dogmatic and at the same time cannot really arrive with any
solid dogma. Nothing stops for it; this condition is natural to
it yet most contrary to its inclination.
The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class
division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of
production rests. What obliges the producers to participate
in the construction of the world is also what separates them
from it. What brings together men liberated from their local
and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What requires
a more profound rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality
of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What creates
the abstract power of society creates its concrete UNFREEDOM."
Guy Debord
*Society of the Spectacle
and Other Films*
cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts
to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only
one. The spectacle then, is the epic poem of this struggle,
an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any
Troy. The spectacle does not sing the praises of
men and their weapons, but of commodities and
their passions. In this blind struggle, every commodity
pursuing its passion unconsciously realizes something
higher: the becoming-world of the commodity,
which is also the becoming-commodity of the
world. So, by a TRICK OF COMMODITY LOGIC,
what is SPECIFIC in the commodity wears itself
out in the fight while the commodity-form moves
towards its absolute realization.
In the image of the society happily unified by
consumption, real division is only SUSPENDED
until the next non-accomplishment in the
consumable. Each specific product which represents
hope for a dazzling short-cut to the promised land
of total consumption, is ceremoniously presented
in its turn as the decisive entity. But as in the
case of the simultaneous diffusion of seemingly
aristocratic first-names carried by almost all
individuals of the same age, the objects from which
one expects a unique power could not have been proposed
for the devotion of the masses unless it had been
produced in large enough numbers to be consumed
massively. A product acquires prestiige only when
it is placed at the center of social life as the revealed
mystery of the ultimate goal of production.
The object which was prestigious in the spectacle becomes
vulgar as soon as it enters the home of the consumer, and
at the same time enters the homes of all the others. Too late,
it reveals its essential poverty, which it naturally gets from the'
misery of its production. But, by then, another object already
carries the justification of the system and the demand to be
recognized.
The fraud of satisfaction must denounce itself by being
replaced, following the change of products and the
general conditions of production. That which asserted
its definitive excellence with perfect impudence nevertheless
changes, both in the diffuse and in the concentrated
spectacle, and it is the system alone which must continue.
Stalin, as well as the outmoded commodity are denounced
precisely by those who imposed them. Every NEW LIE of
advertising is also an AVOWAL of the previous lie. The
fall of every figure of totalitarian power reveals the ILLUSORY
COMMUNITY which approved him unanimously, and was no
more than an agglomoration of solitudes without illusions.
What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change, and
must change with its base. The spectacle is abolutely
dogmatic and at the same time cannot really arrive with any
solid dogma. Nothing stops for it; this condition is natural to
it yet most contrary to its inclination.
The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class
division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of
production rests. What obliges the producers to participate
in the construction of the world is also what separates them
from it. What brings together men liberated from their local
and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What requires
a more profound rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality
of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What creates
the abstract power of society creates its concrete UNFREEDOM."
Guy Debord
*Society of the Spectacle
and Other Films*
Tuesday, March 2
Thanks to Mike Snider's Formal
Blog and Sonnetarium {click here} ,
and to Tim Peterson's Mappemunde {click here}
for the kind words and vote of confidence for this blog.
Blog and Sonnetarium {click here} ,
and to Tim Peterson's Mappemunde {click here}
for the kind words and vote of confidence for this blog.
"The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production
prevail, heralds itself as an immense accumulation of SPECTACLES.
Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation.
The images that detach themselves from every aspect of life fuse
in a common stream where the unity of life can no longer be
re-established. Reality considered PARTIALLY unfolds itself in its
own general unity as a pseudo-world APART, an object of mere
contemplation.
The specialisation of images of the world finds itself
accomplished in the world of the automatised image where the
liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete
inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as
a part of society, and as INSTRUMENT OF UNIFICATION. As a part
of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all
looking and consciousness. Due to the very fact this sector is
SEPARATE, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of
false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing
but an official language of generalised separation.
The spectacle is not an aggregate of images but a social relation
amongst people, mediated by language. The spectacle, grasped
in its totality, is both the result and project of the existing mode
of production. It is not a supplement of the real world, its added
decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In
all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, advertisement
or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present
MODEL of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation
of the choice ALREADY MADE in production and its corollary
consumption.
Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global
social praxis split into image and reality. The social practice
before which the autonomous spectacle installs itself is also
the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the gash within
this totality mutilates it the point of making the spectacle appear
to be the goal. In a world which is REALLY UPSIDE DOWN, the
true is a moment of the false.
Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is AFFIRMATION of
appearance and affirmation of all human life, that is of social
life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth
of the spectacle uncovers it as the visible NEGATION of life; as a
negation of life which HAS BECOME VISIBLE.
The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive,
indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than "whatever
appears is good, and whatever is good appears". The attitude
it requires in principle is this passive acceptance, which in fact
it has already obtained by its method of appearing without reply,
by its monopoly of appearance.
The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that
the economy has subjugated them. It is no more than the economy
developing itself for itself. It is the faithful reflection of the production
of things, and the false objectification of the producers.
Where the real world changes into simple images the simple
images become real beings and efficient motivation of hypnotic
behavior.
At the rate that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream
becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of
enchained modern society which ultimately only expresses its
desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian angel
of this sleep."
Guy Debord
*Society of the Spectacle
And Other Films*
prevail, heralds itself as an immense accumulation of SPECTACLES.
Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation.
The images that detach themselves from every aspect of life fuse
in a common stream where the unity of life can no longer be
re-established. Reality considered PARTIALLY unfolds itself in its
own general unity as a pseudo-world APART, an object of mere
contemplation.
The specialisation of images of the world finds itself
accomplished in the world of the automatised image where the
liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete
inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as
a part of society, and as INSTRUMENT OF UNIFICATION. As a part
of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all
looking and consciousness. Due to the very fact this sector is
SEPARATE, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of
false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing
but an official language of generalised separation.
The spectacle is not an aggregate of images but a social relation
amongst people, mediated by language. The spectacle, grasped
in its totality, is both the result and project of the existing mode
of production. It is not a supplement of the real world, its added
decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In
all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, advertisement
or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present
MODEL of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation
of the choice ALREADY MADE in production and its corollary
consumption.
Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global
social praxis split into image and reality. The social practice
before which the autonomous spectacle installs itself is also
the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the gash within
this totality mutilates it the point of making the spectacle appear
to be the goal. In a world which is REALLY UPSIDE DOWN, the
true is a moment of the false.
Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is AFFIRMATION of
appearance and affirmation of all human life, that is of social
life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth
of the spectacle uncovers it as the visible NEGATION of life; as a
negation of life which HAS BECOME VISIBLE.
The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive,
indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than "whatever
appears is good, and whatever is good appears". The attitude
it requires in principle is this passive acceptance, which in fact
it has already obtained by its method of appearing without reply,
by its monopoly of appearance.
The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that
the economy has subjugated them. It is no more than the economy
developing itself for itself. It is the faithful reflection of the production
of things, and the false objectification of the producers.
Where the real world changes into simple images the simple
images become real beings and efficient motivation of hypnotic
behavior.
At the rate that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream
becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of
enchained modern society which ultimately only expresses its
desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian angel
of this sleep."
Guy Debord
*Society of the Spectacle
And Other Films*
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger
At the same moment that Jack Kimball, who both captains
Pantaloons:Tykes on Poetry (Jack Kimball) {click here},
a sure and steady blogship, and sails a sharp and
swift publishing racing craft he calls *Faux Books* is
publishing an excellent series of book reviews on his blog
(he complimented Cori Copp's recent chapbook with
a comment very mildly disparaging blogging in favor of books
of poetry), on the Buffalo Poetics list the old theme of blogging being
a drag on the energies of the vivacious and glittering poetics list has once
again emerged. Unfortunately, we rose to the occasion with a
post to the poetics list, but fortunately so did Tim Yu and Chris Murray.
Tim's much clearer and more insightful post is available right now
on Tympan (Tim Yu) {click here}.
tex files (Chris Murray) {click here}
has not republished the comments she made on the poetics list,
but she does have a thoughtful comment to make on
last night's poetics brouhaha.
The subject line was: "Start an Argument on the Poetics List."
I may have been mistaken, but I thought Alan Sondheim
had called for more argumentative discussions on the
poetics list as in days of yore.
Here's my rather grouchy and pious ourburst:
*****************************
Blaming the blogosphere for what is lacking on
the poetics list is an old tradition,(old in internet-time)
and sounds to these old poet's ears like a cry of pain. This
is not unusual from Mr. Sondheim, whose precision
of perception is not the least bit
lost on a great number of poets, despite
its many fascinating, complex camouflages.
What a poet needs, especially a long distance marathon
poetry runner, is response. Some say
there is never enough response for an artist, and that
might be true, especially for those who crave the energizing,
potentially infinitely expanding cycle of signal and response
between artist and audience.
It may sadden, alarm and confuse some to hear,
given its tawdry, tinny surfaces,
that this is exactly what is delighting and challenging
many writers in Blogland. But the cycle (of signal land response),
that is occurring in this situation is unlike any
that has ever existed before, in the world of
letters, it seems to me, and is not at all
subsumed under the model shaped by the
cycle of argument and debate, the taste for
which is no doubt being stimulated (for some)
by the pathetically tired old clichéd debates now
going on in the mostly false and fraudulent
US election process: another kind of
Academy Award ceremony that is not even funny anymore.
Though many realize all of this movie
academy and election academy sturm
and drang is almost completely devoid of
meaning (not significance, of course),
does not prevent the emergence of the
mentally stimulating, imagination- appetizing
aspects of the spectacle of debate, an ancient
mode of provoking the discovery and identification
of greatness. But this election process is the
clearest proof of Guy Debord's theories
anybody could ever want to see.
The Society of the Spectacle is beyond crisis; it is moribund.
Can I wonder aloud if this argument and debate method of exchanging
knowledge and inducing change, discovering truth,
and uncovering greatness is totally bankrupt?
What might replace it? What could replace it?
Something is happening in Blogland and you don't know what
it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
affectionate regards to my list friends and literary comrades,
Nick Piombino
At the same moment that Jack Kimball, who both captains
Pantaloons:Tykes on Poetry (Jack Kimball) {click here},
a sure and steady blogship, and sails a sharp and
swift publishing racing craft he calls *Faux Books* is
publishing an excellent series of book reviews on his blog
(he complimented Cori Copp's recent chapbook with
a comment very mildly disparaging blogging in favor of books
of poetry), on the Buffalo Poetics list the old theme of blogging being
a drag on the energies of the vivacious and glittering poetics list has once
again emerged. Unfortunately, we rose to the occasion with a
post to the poetics list, but fortunately so did Tim Yu and Chris Murray.
Tim's much clearer and more insightful post is available right now
on Tympan (Tim Yu) {click here}.
tex files (Chris Murray) {click here}
has not republished the comments she made on the poetics list,
but she does have a thoughtful comment to make on
last night's poetics brouhaha.
The subject line was: "Start an Argument on the Poetics List."
I may have been mistaken, but I thought Alan Sondheim
had called for more argumentative discussions on the
poetics list as in days of yore.
Here's my rather grouchy and pious ourburst:
*****************************
Blaming the blogosphere for what is lacking on
the poetics list is an old tradition,(old in internet-time)
and sounds to these old poet's ears like a cry of pain. This
is not unusual from Mr. Sondheim, whose precision
of perception is not the least bit
lost on a great number of poets, despite
its many fascinating, complex camouflages.
What a poet needs, especially a long distance marathon
poetry runner, is response. Some say
there is never enough response for an artist, and that
might be true, especially for those who crave the energizing,
potentially infinitely expanding cycle of signal and response
between artist and audience.
It may sadden, alarm and confuse some to hear,
given its tawdry, tinny surfaces,
that this is exactly what is delighting and challenging
many writers in Blogland. But the cycle (of signal land response),
that is occurring in this situation is unlike any
that has ever existed before, in the world of
letters, it seems to me, and is not at all
subsumed under the model shaped by the
cycle of argument and debate, the taste for
which is no doubt being stimulated (for some)
by the pathetically tired old clichéd debates now
going on in the mostly false and fraudulent
US election process: another kind of
Academy Award ceremony that is not even funny anymore.
Though many realize all of this movie
academy and election academy sturm
and drang is almost completely devoid of
meaning (not significance, of course),
does not prevent the emergence of the
mentally stimulating, imagination- appetizing
aspects of the spectacle of debate, an ancient
mode of provoking the discovery and identification
of greatness. But this election process is the
clearest proof of Guy Debord's theories
anybody could ever want to see.
The Society of the Spectacle is beyond crisis; it is moribund.
Can I wonder aloud if this argument and debate method of exchanging
knowledge and inducing change, discovering truth,
and uncovering greatness is totally bankrupt?
What might replace it? What could replace it?
Something is happening in Blogland and you don't know what
it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
affectionate regards to my list friends and literary comrades,
Nick Piombino
Lanny Quarles, creator of the
endlessly inventive blog
(solipsis)//:phaneroemikon {click here}
sent us this poem
and gave us permission to publish it. Dig this:
S Qua Mater
by Lanny Quarles
the rose alloyed
of spectral S
tongues
within a hollow laddering
[pulse of pale-small digit-streams, system of microwave energies]
pale savage bitterness
of password (the hummingruel and shimmingrowl)
the moment as it seems
to history
[shave any multiplier or discriptor, they dream in separation]
that plain 'S'
whose surface as construction
opens conduits
undulating topologies
of holes
and of nights
[forever can be understood like a painting at best]
the fields of speaking hair
the rose alloyed
of spectral
vivid and optical bloodcakes
by extraction
in a woven yellow bowl
[the place of the hissing den]
placed over a round abundance
of emptiness
[the peoples of an inner wilderness]
and the lapis tongue
ceremoniously robed
as some zeus or zagreus of blackinsected corn
in curls of inky steam-stone
platyrhignostic, the kitschyschitzy image of divinity
[SCOP=structural classification of proteins]
and a field of lush green rolling
valley
hidden
a gigantic white sphere
where a rusted volvo is just exploding
and one lone red horned toad
peeks out from its make-believe hole
with a lone white ant
perched between its eyes
like a hood ornament
antennae
endlessly inventive blog
(solipsis)//:phaneroemikon {click here}
sent us this poem
and gave us permission to publish it. Dig this:
S Qua Mater
by Lanny Quarles
the rose alloyed
of spectral S
tongues
within a hollow laddering
[pulse of pale-small digit-streams, system of microwave energies]
pale savage bitterness
of password (the hummingruel and shimmingrowl)
the moment as it seems
to history
[shave any multiplier or discriptor, they dream in separation]
that plain 'S'
whose surface as construction
opens conduits
undulating topologies
of holes
and of nights
[forever can be understood like a painting at best]
the fields of speaking hair
the rose alloyed
of spectral
vivid and optical bloodcakes
by extraction
in a woven yellow bowl
[the place of the hissing den]
placed over a round abundance
of emptiness
[the peoples of an inner wilderness]
and the lapis tongue
ceremoniously robed
as some zeus or zagreus of blackinsected corn
in curls of inky steam-stone
platyrhignostic, the kitschyschitzy image of divinity
[SCOP=structural classification of proteins]
and a field of lush green rolling
valley
hidden
a gigantic white sphere
where a rusted volvo is just exploding
and one lone red horned toad
peeks out from its make-believe hole
with a lone white ant
perched between its eyes
like a hood ornament
antennae
Monday, March 1
dpqp: Visualizing Poetics {click here}
reported the death of Lyx Ish, aka Elizabeth Was, this past weekend.
Our condolences to Miekel And.
reported the death of Lyx Ish, aka Elizabeth Was, this past weekend.
Our condolences to Miekel And.
::fait accompli::
(((((BLOGLINK)))))(((((CRUSH)))))((((((LIST))))) (New Links)
(((((THESE)))))(((((BLOGS)))))(((((ARE)))))(((((HOT)))))
Notes From The Dovecote (click here}
Mappemunde {click here}
DagZine {click here}
the postmodern romantic {click here}
Anita Rust {click here}
A Parsnip {click here}
Dumbfoundry {click here}
Crony. {click here}
Twists and Turns {click here}
hanging like a ragdoll {click here}
Nice Guy Syndrome {click here}
dolebludger {click here}
"if.." {click here}
the trigger {click here}
3rd House Party {click here}
fuse {click here}
Anita Rust {click here}
DaDooDoFlow {click here}
The Shuniverse Dialogues {click here}
Malibu's Blues {click here}
Poetic Inhalation {click here}
pseudopodium {click here}
Black Spring {click here}
Almost Successfully {click here}
Fictions of Deleuze and Guittari {click here}
savoradin's photoblog {click here}
In Place of Chairs {click here}
A New Broom {click here}
gunther's block {click here}
**********************************************************************************
***********************************************************************************
::fait accompli::
(((((BLOGLINK)))))(((((CRUSH)))))((((((LIST)))))
(((((TIME)))))(((((TRAVEL))))
January 25, 2004
Almost Successfully (Michael Bogue)
Blaugustine (Natalie D'Arbeloff)
The Chatelaine's Poetics (Eileen Tabios)
Crag Hill's Poetry Scorecard
Heaven (Mairead Byrne)
Luminations (Ben Basan)
Muladar, Movedizo, Muladar (Heriberto Yepez) (Spanish/English)
Nemski.com
New Pages (Guide to Blogs)
Nobody Here (Jogchem Niemendverdriet (English/Dutch/Japanese)
random items (German/English)
Rob McLennan's Blog
Twists and Turns (Michael Gates)
Under Mind (Brennen Lukas}
Visions of Johanna (Johanna Rauhala)
Eratio (Gregory St. Thomasino)
Sifry's Alerts (David Sifry)
Scriptorium (Carlos Arribas)
Drunken Slugs (Nicole Cordrey)
dbqp: visualizing poetics (Geof Huth)
Vanishing Points of Resemblance (Tom Beckett)
Hoarded Ordinaries (Lorianne Schaub)
Ought (Ron Henry)
Paula's House of Toast
sodaddictionary part II
...something slant
God of The Machine
and
Froth (Marianne Shaneen) {click here} is back!!!
*************************************************************************************
This just in from Johanna Rauhala (Visions of Johanna)
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Yep, I've come out from underground turnips and rutabagas, and plan to post occasionally on this blog. (Sorry about the confusion with the name "Suze" . I have a work-related blog and I was using that as a pseudonym. But it's really me, Johanna!) And it's true- I'm pregnant! Almost four months. Scary/excited/scary/excited/scary/excited.
More links coming.
# posted by J : 5:54 PM
(((((BLOGLINK)))))(((((CRUSH)))))((((((LIST))))) (New Links)
(((((THESE)))))(((((BLOGS)))))(((((ARE)))))(((((HOT)))))
Notes From The Dovecote (click here}
Mappemunde {click here}
DagZine {click here}
the postmodern romantic {click here}
Anita Rust {click here}
A Parsnip {click here}
Dumbfoundry {click here}
Crony. {click here}
Twists and Turns {click here}
hanging like a ragdoll {click here}
Nice Guy Syndrome {click here}
dolebludger {click here}
"if.." {click here}
the trigger {click here}
3rd House Party {click here}
fuse {click here}
Anita Rust {click here}
DaDooDoFlow {click here}
The Shuniverse Dialogues {click here}
Malibu's Blues {click here}
Poetic Inhalation {click here}
pseudopodium {click here}
Black Spring {click here}
Almost Successfully {click here}
Fictions of Deleuze and Guittari {click here}
savoradin's photoblog {click here}
In Place of Chairs {click here}
A New Broom {click here}
gunther's block {click here}
**********************************************************************************
***********************************************************************************
::fait accompli::
(((((BLOGLINK)))))(((((CRUSH)))))((((((LIST)))))
(((((TIME)))))(((((TRAVEL))))
January 25, 2004
Almost Successfully (Michael Bogue)
Blaugustine (Natalie D'Arbeloff)
The Chatelaine's Poetics (Eileen Tabios)
Crag Hill's Poetry Scorecard
Heaven (Mairead Byrne)
Luminations (Ben Basan)
Muladar, Movedizo, Muladar (Heriberto Yepez) (Spanish/English)
Nemski.com
New Pages (Guide to Blogs)
Nobody Here (Jogchem Niemendverdriet (English/Dutch/Japanese)
random items (German/English)
Rob McLennan's Blog
Twists and Turns (Michael Gates)
Under Mind (Brennen Lukas}
Visions of Johanna (Johanna Rauhala)
Eratio (Gregory St. Thomasino)
Sifry's Alerts (David Sifry)
Scriptorium (Carlos Arribas)
Drunken Slugs (Nicole Cordrey)
dbqp: visualizing poetics (Geof Huth)
Vanishing Points of Resemblance (Tom Beckett)
Hoarded Ordinaries (Lorianne Schaub)
Ought (Ron Henry)
Paula's House of Toast
sodaddictionary part II
...something slant
God of The Machine
and
Froth (Marianne Shaneen) {click here} is back!!!
*************************************************************************************
This just in from Johanna Rauhala (Visions of Johanna)
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Yep, I've come out from underground turnips and rutabagas, and plan to post occasionally on this blog. (Sorry about the confusion with the name "Suze" . I have a work-related blog and I was using that as a pseudonym. But it's really me, Johanna!) And it's true- I'm pregnant! Almost four months. Scary/excited/scary/excited/scary/excited.
More links coming.
# posted by J : 5:54 PM
Sunday, February 29
Bored with the Academy Award show?
Check out:Errata and Contradiction: A visual poetry show online {click here}
Check out:Errata and Contradiction: A visual poetry show online {click here}
Meet the new Poetic Inhalation {click here}
blog and dig the lovely photo of bloggers, Andrew and Star.
blog and dig the lovely photo of bloggers, Andrew and Star.
Met Museum adding space to show
works now in storage
Met Museum new space {click here}
via Mysterium (Carlos Arribas) {click here}
works now in storage
Met Museum new space {click here}
via Mysterium (Carlos Arribas) {click here}
First Heathens in Heat ...David Hess {click here},
is back, and now Semioanalysis Discotheque (Karl Merleau-Marcuse) {click here}.
Let the brilliant fun begin!
is back, and now Semioanalysis Discotheque (Karl Merleau-Marcuse) {click here}.
Let the brilliant fun begin!
During the time I was writing some of the poems
for my collection
Light Street {click here},
I was experimenting with the idea of writing
poems along the lines of those I wrote as a child and
as an adolescent. For awhile I continued this practice,
and on 3/19/90 wrote the following poem:
Shakespeare's Shadow On Lined Paper
I was captured rather early in the game
By the sounds of cars going by and the sounds of rain
By the pigeons' aimless squawking across the street
By the look of a face or an eye in someone I'll never meet
And at times it's distracting to get through a day
When thoughts and feelings stream through in their own chaotic way
When perhaps I'm dismayed at life's contradictory play
And at last even come to lament death's final say
The warm rays of the sun are disappearing
The clattering sounds of the afternoon are clearing
The dissonant desires of night and dreams are nearing
And only the thought of sleep's soft arms is cheering
In one dream time itself has a place
Like every other object in trackless space
To go there happiness itself is but a lure
To be there is to partake of what is sure
In another the dark itself is bright
Color, hands, events are a kind of light
Where even the helpless fate of life is light
Where the closed eye of nothingness has sight
for my collection
Light Street {click here},
I was experimenting with the idea of writing
poems along the lines of those I wrote as a child and
as an adolescent. For awhile I continued this practice,
and on 3/19/90 wrote the following poem:
Shakespeare's Shadow On Lined Paper
I was captured rather early in the game
By the sounds of cars going by and the sounds of rain
By the pigeons' aimless squawking across the street
By the look of a face or an eye in someone I'll never meet
And at times it's distracting to get through a day
When thoughts and feelings stream through in their own chaotic way
When perhaps I'm dismayed at life's contradictory play
And at last even come to lament death's final say
The warm rays of the sun are disappearing
The clattering sounds of the afternoon are clearing
The dissonant desires of night and dreams are nearing
And only the thought of sleep's soft arms is cheering
In one dream time itself has a place
Like every other object in trackless space
To go there happiness itself is but a lure
To be there is to partake of what is sure
In another the dark itself is bright
Color, hands, events are a kind of light
Where even the helpless fate of life is light
Where the closed eye of nothingness has sight
Saturday, February 28
Brilliant review by
Ron Silliman {click here}
on Bertolucci's fascinating, controversial new film
*Dreamers*
Silliman is reading with
Michael McClure at the Poetry Project
on Wednesday, March 3rd (see the
sidebar to your left)
Ron Silliman {click here}
on Bertolucci's fascinating, controversial new film
*Dreamers*
Silliman is reading with
Michael McClure at the Poetry Project
on Wednesday, March 3rd (see the
sidebar to your left)
Wood s Lot {click here}
has opened some links to info on
the great composer and musician, the late
John Fahey.
has opened some links to info on
the great composer and musician, the late
John Fahey.
Noted on the Crony {click here}
comments section:
UMBRISM, n. Pure psychic automatism,
by which it is intended to express, verbally,
in writing, or by other means, the real process
of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence
of all control exercised by the reason and
outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
And the list of people and what they're
Umbrists of was great. But I must confess
that words like "manifesto" "proletariat"
and "revolution" make me sleepy.
I am a poet.
Gunther | Email | Homepage | 02.28.04 - 3:07 am | #
comments section:
UMBRISM, n. Pure psychic automatism,
by which it is intended to express, verbally,
in writing, or by other means, the real process
of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence
of all control exercised by the reason and
outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
And the list of people and what they're
Umbrists of was great. But I must confess
that words like "manifesto" "proletariat"
and "revolution" make me sleepy.
I am a poet.
Gunther | Email | Homepage | 02.28.04 - 3:07 am | #
*fait accompli* is pleased to be
honored by some discussion of our work
by the Umbrists at Crony {click here}
The link to our "Marriage of Language and Being" post
on Thursday, February 26th
has led to further parodies
and a discussion of parody.
Thanks, *Crony*!
honored by some discussion of our work
by the Umbrists at Crony {click here}
The link to our "Marriage of Language and Being" post
on Thursday, February 26th
has led to further parodies
and a discussion of parody.
Thanks, *Crony*!
Tim Peterson, who I am told
is a close associate of Karl Merleau-Marcuse,
author of the inimitable
Semioanalysis Discotheque {click here},
has opened a blog called
Mappemunde {click here}
****************************************************************
via Limetree {click here}
New Edge Books from Sand and Wallace
Rod Smith has issued the following notice:
Edge Books is pleased to announce two new titles:
Interval by Kaia Sand and Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose by Mark Wallace.
Special Offer: Order both books before April 1 for $15 postpaid.
or get Interval for $8 (regularly $10).
or get Haze for $10 (regularly $12.50).
Select Edge titles also available during this special offer at discounted rates:
The Sense Record, Jennifer Moxley, $10 (regularly $12.50)
Zero Star Hotel, Anselm Berrigan, $11 (regularly $14)
Integrity & Dramatic Life, Anselm Berrigan, $7 (regularly $10)
Ace, Tom Raworth, $7 (regularly $10)
Aerial 9: Bruce Andrews, $11 (regularly $15)
Dovecote, Heather Fuller, $7 (regularly $10)
Perhaps This Is a Rescue Fantasy, Heather Fuller, $7 (regularly $10)
Comp., Kevin Davies, $10 (regularly $12.50)
Sight, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino, $10 (regularly $12)
Marijuana Softdrink, Buck Downs, $8 (regularly $11)
Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There, Mark Wallace, $7 (regularly $9.50)
Checks payable to:
Aerial/Edge, PO Box 25642, Georgetown Station, Washington, DC 20007
Thanks for your support!
Interval
Kaia Sand
ISBN: 1-890311-14-6
2004, 80 pages, $10
Kaia Sand’s Interval establishes the “hunger throated sound” of a language in the act of interrogating its moment. Hers is an unflinching and thrillingly political practice…. Sand is a necessary poet, and bracingly new.
—Carolyn Forché
Read this book for its evocation of the sublime in the face of the populace’s raw complacency telescoped and interpreted, and do follow the ample instructions: “holler away our do-not-disturb quietude.”
—Heather Fuller
Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose
Mark Wallace
ISBN: 1-890311-15-4
2004, 104 pages, $12.50
This new collection of poems, essays, and divagations might be the essential Mark Wallace to date. Always the supreme contra-stoic, Wallace gets us to somehow bear it all the better. The strange world of literature is not only astutely observed, but transfigured, page by page.
—Rodrigo Toscano
Marvelous! A book that thinks! and that speaks out plainly and politically. Mark Wallace takes poetry seriously—and often in the most tongue-in-cheek way, but below the quick wit is a belief in and love of language and the art that it can make. “If poetry is, as I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity…” he writes, and goes on from there to show what can happen in a world where this is true.
—Cole Swensen
Forthcoming from Aerial/Edge:
American Whatever, Tim Davis, Summer 2004
Metropolis 30: The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Rob Fitterman, Summer 2004
Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian, ed. Rod Smith & Jen Hofer, Winter 2004
Visit our web site www.aerialedge.com for a complete catalogue.
Aerial/Edge, PO Box 25642, Georgetown Station, Washington, DC 20007
is a close associate of Karl Merleau-Marcuse,
author of the inimitable
Semioanalysis Discotheque {click here},
has opened a blog called
Mappemunde {click here}
****************************************************************
via Limetree {click here}
New Edge Books from Sand and Wallace
Rod Smith has issued the following notice:
Edge Books is pleased to announce two new titles:
Interval by Kaia Sand and Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose by Mark Wallace.
Special Offer: Order both books before April 1 for $15 postpaid.
or get Interval for $8 (regularly $10).
or get Haze for $10 (regularly $12.50).
Select Edge titles also available during this special offer at discounted rates:
The Sense Record, Jennifer Moxley, $10 (regularly $12.50)
Zero Star Hotel, Anselm Berrigan, $11 (regularly $14)
Integrity & Dramatic Life, Anselm Berrigan, $7 (regularly $10)
Ace, Tom Raworth, $7 (regularly $10)
Aerial 9: Bruce Andrews, $11 (regularly $15)
Dovecote, Heather Fuller, $7 (regularly $10)
Perhaps This Is a Rescue Fantasy, Heather Fuller, $7 (regularly $10)
Comp., Kevin Davies, $10 (regularly $12.50)
Sight, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino, $10 (regularly $12)
Marijuana Softdrink, Buck Downs, $8 (regularly $11)
Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There, Mark Wallace, $7 (regularly $9.50)
Checks payable to:
Aerial/Edge, PO Box 25642, Georgetown Station, Washington, DC 20007
Thanks for your support!
Interval
Kaia Sand
ISBN: 1-890311-14-6
2004, 80 pages, $10
Kaia Sand’s Interval establishes the “hunger throated sound” of a language in the act of interrogating its moment. Hers is an unflinching and thrillingly political practice…. Sand is a necessary poet, and bracingly new.
—Carolyn Forché
Read this book for its evocation of the sublime in the face of the populace’s raw complacency telescoped and interpreted, and do follow the ample instructions: “holler away our do-not-disturb quietude.”
—Heather Fuller
Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose
Mark Wallace
ISBN: 1-890311-15-4
2004, 104 pages, $12.50
This new collection of poems, essays, and divagations might be the essential Mark Wallace to date. Always the supreme contra-stoic, Wallace gets us to somehow bear it all the better. The strange world of literature is not only astutely observed, but transfigured, page by page.
—Rodrigo Toscano
Marvelous! A book that thinks! and that speaks out plainly and politically. Mark Wallace takes poetry seriously—and often in the most tongue-in-cheek way, but below the quick wit is a belief in and love of language and the art that it can make. “If poetry is, as I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity…” he writes, and goes on from there to show what can happen in a world where this is true.
—Cole Swensen
Forthcoming from Aerial/Edge:
American Whatever, Tim Davis, Summer 2004
Metropolis 30: The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Rob Fitterman, Summer 2004
Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian, ed. Rod Smith & Jen Hofer, Winter 2004
Visit our web site www.aerialedge.com for a complete catalogue.
Aerial/Edge, PO Box 25642, Georgetown Station, Washington, DC 20007
Friday, February 27
12/27/72
Dear Bernadette I was leaving the church with Paul after the
workshop last night and he suggested I send the poems to you
to give to Ann Waldman I picked out five and typed them here
at my office during the lunch hour so they are really lunch
poems! On the way home last night I read Basil Bunting several
times and couldn't sleep later so I kept reading, while my
girl was sleeping and I was awake so it had the feeling of
happening right then it is a difficult work to read the kind
that makes you work the only kind I really like I was writing
this letter last night in my head happy to have an excuse to write
a few words to you & gossip the reason I wrote Phase as 0-9
your Story and those magazines really stimulatetd me I had only
read a few issues by April 1969 when I left for Europe and when I
got there & tried to write long poems theycame out differently,
lyrical again so I ended by doing some collages instead
which were also lyrical it was only about two months before
the workshop started that I could do some "automatic" writing
using source material, etc By the way you know that letter
by Frank O'Hra was interesting because I was in Zagreb in the
summer of 1969 and the people (especially the young men) are
really crazy one guy picked us up (we hitched from Rapallo to
Banja Luka, Yugoslavia) and spent all night in the train station
with us drinking cognac at 20 cents a shot the next morning
at 6 Am he took us to the zoo there it is tiny & beautiful
and the animals there are very lively, clean and active one bird
cage was full of birds of different shapes and colors & when we
found the flamingoes one immmediately went into a dance so gentle and
graceful that I literally fell down on the walkway from dizziness
(I was also whacked out from no sleep and the strangeness of being
with somebody I really liked a lot and couldnt speak one word
with) later during that same time, going back to Zagreb we me
a guy who was just as friendly and wierd all he could say
in English was "I love you Bob Dylan" also, the guy who took us
to the zoo could say "I like Dean Martin" "He is from Yugoslavia"
Well, I have to leave now thank you for trying to help me get
into the world o yes the Alan Grossman bet was written for
was my shrink
rhetorically yours,
Nick Piombino
Dear Bernadette I was leaving the church with Paul after the
workshop last night and he suggested I send the poems to you
to give to Ann Waldman I picked out five and typed them here
at my office during the lunch hour so they are really lunch
poems! On the way home last night I read Basil Bunting several
times and couldn't sleep later so I kept reading, while my
girl was sleeping and I was awake so it had the feeling of
happening right then it is a difficult work to read the kind
that makes you work the only kind I really like I was writing
this letter last night in my head happy to have an excuse to write
a few words to you & gossip the reason I wrote Phase as 0-9
your Story and those magazines really stimulatetd me I had only
read a few issues by April 1969 when I left for Europe and when I
got there & tried to write long poems theycame out differently,
lyrical again so I ended by doing some collages instead
which were also lyrical it was only about two months before
the workshop started that I could do some "automatic" writing
using source material, etc By the way you know that letter
by Frank O'Hra was interesting because I was in Zagreb in the
summer of 1969 and the people (especially the young men) are
really crazy one guy picked us up (we hitched from Rapallo to
Banja Luka, Yugoslavia) and spent all night in the train station
with us drinking cognac at 20 cents a shot the next morning
at 6 Am he took us to the zoo there it is tiny & beautiful
and the animals there are very lively, clean and active one bird
cage was full of birds of different shapes and colors & when we
found the flamingoes one immmediately went into a dance so gentle and
graceful that I literally fell down on the walkway from dizziness
(I was also whacked out from no sleep and the strangeness of being
with somebody I really liked a lot and couldnt speak one word
with) later during that same time, going back to Zagreb we me
a guy who was just as friendly and wierd all he could say
in English was "I love you Bob Dylan" also, the guy who took us
to the zoo could say "I like Dean Martin" "He is from Yugoslavia"
Well, I have to leave now thank you for trying to help me get
into the world o yes the Alan Grossman bet was written for
was my shrink
rhetorically yours,
Nick Piombino
Thursday, February 26
Notebook: 7/10/86
The Marriage of Language and Being
[based on Blake's *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*]
Feeling roars & shakes his fires in the burdened mind:
Radioactive clouds sway on the deep.
Meek, expression follows a perilous path.
The so-called fair woman keeps tracks along
The vale of control.
Words are planted where memories stay.
And on the barren slate of meaning
Sing the commercial poets.
Then, some poets incorporate this stance.
And a stream of thought and a quick utterance
On every ad and show.
And on the emptied mind
They managed to get control of the media.
Till the investor stops reading trash
Is to continue the parboil any original thought and drive
The so-called sensible woman into writing dry hymns to money.
Here comes a hot agent, cool & quite hip
And our poet is tearing her hair out, walking around on Columbus Avenue
Where literary lions roam.
Feeling screams and blows off some steam-
What could this do against billions of units of radioactive vapors?
As a new literary movement is begun, and it is now about 10 years
since its advent, popular opinion roars its ugly attitudes. And lo!
Hilton Kramer, and occasionally Tom Clark put our vicious literary slander
attempting to court public opinion; their statements try to wrap some rebellious
poets in nast publicity. Now is the dominion of Reagan, Ray-gun as he is
affectionately called- just read nearly any issue of your local newspaper.
Without a lot of sharp disagreement, the public won't notice anything is
going on, so intrinsically this is not a bad thing. Attraction and repulsion,
thinking and feeling, love and hate, are all typical of human experience.
From this kind of total trashing springs more clearly defined philosophical
differences, formerly labelled Good and Evil. Now that we don't have authentic language,
attitudes have taken on infinitely increading inflationary conviction.
Good is Public Awareness; Evil ot Total Marginality.
THE VOICE OF THE OUTCAST
All books, poems and theories have caused continuing distortion:
1. That humankind has two responsibilities: acceptable attitudes and rent money.
2. That language, called marginal, emanates from a lot of bullshit;
and that Feelings, called Public, are the only authentic expression.
3. That Administrators will torment humans in Eternity for giving expression
to anything unique.
But the following contraries to these are True:
1. Humans have no language distinct from experience, for that which is called
language is a portion of Thought discerned by the five senses, the
chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Words are the only proof of expression, and are from experience, and
Feelings are bound to a socially determined set of attitudes.
**
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Argument
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.
Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb:
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.
Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility.
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
And now a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its
advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel
sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now
is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see
Isaiah xxxiv & xxxv Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
from Energy.
Good is Heaven . Evil is Hell.
THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL
All bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following
Errors:
1. That Man has two existing principles: Viz: a Body & a
Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason,
call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a
portion of the Sould discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul
in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the
bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be
restrained; and the restrainer of Reason usurps its place & governs
the unwilling.
And being restrain'd, by degrees becomes passive, till it is only
the shadow of desire.
The Marriage of Language and Being
[based on Blake's *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*]
Feeling roars & shakes his fires in the burdened mind:
Radioactive clouds sway on the deep.
Meek, expression follows a perilous path.
The so-called fair woman keeps tracks along
The vale of control.
Words are planted where memories stay.
And on the barren slate of meaning
Sing the commercial poets.
Then, some poets incorporate this stance.
And a stream of thought and a quick utterance
On every ad and show.
And on the emptied mind
They managed to get control of the media.
Till the investor stops reading trash
Is to continue the parboil any original thought and drive
The so-called sensible woman into writing dry hymns to money.
Here comes a hot agent, cool & quite hip
And our poet is tearing her hair out, walking around on Columbus Avenue
Where literary lions roam.
Feeling screams and blows off some steam-
What could this do against billions of units of radioactive vapors?
As a new literary movement is begun, and it is now about 10 years
since its advent, popular opinion roars its ugly attitudes. And lo!
Hilton Kramer, and occasionally Tom Clark put our vicious literary slander
attempting to court public opinion; their statements try to wrap some rebellious
poets in nast publicity. Now is the dominion of Reagan, Ray-gun as he is
affectionately called- just read nearly any issue of your local newspaper.
Without a lot of sharp disagreement, the public won't notice anything is
going on, so intrinsically this is not a bad thing. Attraction and repulsion,
thinking and feeling, love and hate, are all typical of human experience.
From this kind of total trashing springs more clearly defined philosophical
differences, formerly labelled Good and Evil. Now that we don't have authentic language,
attitudes have taken on infinitely increading inflationary conviction.
Good is Public Awareness; Evil ot Total Marginality.
THE VOICE OF THE OUTCAST
All books, poems and theories have caused continuing distortion:
1. That humankind has two responsibilities: acceptable attitudes and rent money.
2. That language, called marginal, emanates from a lot of bullshit;
and that Feelings, called Public, are the only authentic expression.
3. That Administrators will torment humans in Eternity for giving expression
to anything unique.
But the following contraries to these are True:
1. Humans have no language distinct from experience, for that which is called
language is a portion of Thought discerned by the five senses, the
chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Words are the only proof of expression, and are from experience, and
Feelings are bound to a socially determined set of attitudes.
**
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Argument
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.
Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb:
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.
Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility.
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
And now a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its
advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel
sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now
is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see
Isaiah xxxiv & xxxv Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
from Energy.
Good is Heaven . Evil is Hell.
THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL
All bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following
Errors:
1. That Man has two existing principles: Viz: a Body & a
Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason,
call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a
portion of the Sould discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul
in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the
bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be
restrained; and the restrainer of Reason usurps its place & governs
the unwilling.
And being restrain'd, by degrees becomes passive, till it is only
the shadow of desire.
Wednesday, February 25
I keep coming back to this post, and the Terry Teachout points about blogging, so...
from A Fool In The Forest {click here}
February 18, 2004 from {A Fool In The Forest} ( originally published by
George Wallace in Arts and Culture At Large, Poetry, Weblogs)
"Belittled"
"Garrick Davis, editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, offers up a thumbnail history of "the little magazine" in his own online journal's freshly scrubbed Mission Statement:
The history of 20th century poetry is inextricably linked with the genre of the little magazine, and much of that genre’s history has been forgotten. We must remember that the little magazine was an outgrowth—and the necessary vehicle—of Modernism. When the Modernists attempted to publish their works in the general-circulation newspapers and magazines of their day and were rebuffed, they were forced to organize their own magazines in order to break into print. Ezra Pound was the very type and role model of this era; he was the midwife of 20th century literature by helping to found, edit, and fund dozens of literary magazines.
Many of them foundered, of course, though there are a few honorable exceptions still among us. . . .
The real problem with the present world of literary publications is, of course, cost and distribution. . . . Possessing a tiny readership, the little magazine cannot attract advertisers. Lacking advertisers, it cannot offset the costs of production. With no profit margin to encourage its sale and distribution, every issue of the little magazine begins its life stillborn as a commercial enterprise. . . . The result of this marketplace Darwinism is that the little magazine is almost a couture object in our society—both difficult to obtain and expensive to purchase.
Since there are literally thousands of little magazines, the cost of “keeping up” with the important literary periodicals of the day to the individual reader is prohibitive, and the cost to libraries is staggering. . . . The genre of little magazines, which was originally conceived to publish the difficult art of the Modernists, has ended up making literature itself inaccessible.
Terry Teachout, in the notes I linked to below, suggests that weblogs "will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century," but he may have gotten the mechanism wrong. Because the hurdles that must be negotiated to create -- and, more importantly, to access -- a weblog are so modest, instead of having "influence . . . disproportionate to their circulation," the best weblogs may finally accomplish the feat of finding an audience large enough to match the caliber of their content.
Davis in his Mission Statement reminds us that T.S. Eliot's Criterion magazine had a peak circulation of 700; Pound and the Vorticists' Blast was presumably even smaller. Those journals' influence in the long term was out of all proportion to their circulation. Without the practical and financial impediments that Davis identifies, the potential influence of the right weblog at the right time could -- he said, thinking wishfully -- be even greater.
A random example, picked largely because he has actually voiced his goal in terms of audience size: Neocalvinist cultural observer Gideon Strauss is content to "dream[] of achieving my own little micro-readership of 250", a humble and seemingly achievable objective for many sites. If some significant percentage of even so small a core of readers have weblogs of their own, as is probable, a writer's best material will likely be linked and relinked, those links serving as levers with which the right post might move the world.
Then again, maybe this guy is right. [Link via American Digest.]"
Posted by George Wallace at 12:48 PM in Arts and Culture At Large, Poetry, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
from A Fool In The Forest {click here}
February 18, 2004 from {A Fool In The Forest} ( originally published by
George Wallace in Arts and Culture At Large, Poetry, Weblogs)
"Belittled"
"Garrick Davis, editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, offers up a thumbnail history of "the little magazine" in his own online journal's freshly scrubbed Mission Statement:
The history of 20th century poetry is inextricably linked with the genre of the little magazine, and much of that genre’s history has been forgotten. We must remember that the little magazine was an outgrowth—and the necessary vehicle—of Modernism. When the Modernists attempted to publish their works in the general-circulation newspapers and magazines of their day and were rebuffed, they were forced to organize their own magazines in order to break into print. Ezra Pound was the very type and role model of this era; he was the midwife of 20th century literature by helping to found, edit, and fund dozens of literary magazines.
Many of them foundered, of course, though there are a few honorable exceptions still among us. . . .
The real problem with the present world of literary publications is, of course, cost and distribution. . . . Possessing a tiny readership, the little magazine cannot attract advertisers. Lacking advertisers, it cannot offset the costs of production. With no profit margin to encourage its sale and distribution, every issue of the little magazine begins its life stillborn as a commercial enterprise. . . . The result of this marketplace Darwinism is that the little magazine is almost a couture object in our society—both difficult to obtain and expensive to purchase.
Since there are literally thousands of little magazines, the cost of “keeping up” with the important literary periodicals of the day to the individual reader is prohibitive, and the cost to libraries is staggering. . . . The genre of little magazines, which was originally conceived to publish the difficult art of the Modernists, has ended up making literature itself inaccessible.
Terry Teachout, in the notes I linked to below, suggests that weblogs "will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century," but he may have gotten the mechanism wrong. Because the hurdles that must be negotiated to create -- and, more importantly, to access -- a weblog are so modest, instead of having "influence . . . disproportionate to their circulation," the best weblogs may finally accomplish the feat of finding an audience large enough to match the caliber of their content.
Davis in his Mission Statement reminds us that T.S. Eliot's Criterion magazine had a peak circulation of 700; Pound and the Vorticists' Blast was presumably even smaller. Those journals' influence in the long term was out of all proportion to their circulation. Without the practical and financial impediments that Davis identifies, the potential influence of the right weblog at the right time could -- he said, thinking wishfully -- be even greater.
A random example, picked largely because he has actually voiced his goal in terms of audience size: Neocalvinist cultural observer Gideon Strauss is content to "dream[] of achieving my own little micro-readership of 250", a humble and seemingly achievable objective for many sites. If some significant percentage of even so small a core of readers have weblogs of their own, as is probable, a writer's best material will likely be linked and relinked, those links serving as levers with which the right post might move the world.
Then again, maybe this guy is right. [Link via American Digest.]"
Posted by George Wallace at 12:48 PM in Arts and Culture At Large, Poetry, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
Class Struggle
Student and teacher disagree about me!
Read it for free
right now on:
Bemsha Swing (Jonathan Mayhew) {click here}
Student and teacher disagree about me!
Read it for free
right now on:
Bemsha Swing (Jonathan Mayhew) {click here}
Tuesday, February 24
notebook: 1987
K (*Reading As Revery*) in celebration of *North of Intention* by Steve McCaffery
1. It would be embarassing at the beginning to put my words in the mouths
of your characters, even if they are available to anyone, necessary but
not sufficient. History itself is just as fixed in the eye of a storm, in
the words themselves, that the characters beginning with A would not be
complete. But would it be possible to exceed "A" in another register, if
at least the integers compared to themselves were not abused by our own presence,
and the vault that enclosed such vocabularies, as arbitrary and unrecorded as
the (this) exact movement of tides: such are the boundaries of reading- ever
tidal and undeferred- and time itself accords with such vast rhythms. Imagine
the contrary: imbecilic gestures from the minds of tyrants- visual figurations
of their own power-lines. Like all insignificant and dried branches- leaving
all the more exposed the "north of intensions."
2. Is it by chance that I return to you by the same route that I came into
my own revery? A landscape that still bears a trace (*passed on*, not remaining)
of another epoch (not in the past perhaps, in another clime) which surrounds
some unspoken utterances in the full chorus of the senses. They came by here
by another route, i.e.: the cooling breeze on the chest and arms, waves crashing
between thick silences, gulls cries *and* the enveloping silence; engraved *and*
erased- that static. Dawns never confuse the issue, so exact, nor do the steady
afternoons, nights, shadows of gulls overhead. Into these serene particulars
comes one displaced opening, and then another, moves a corner of comprehension,
a welcome meaning freed of its image, a memory of speech to replace the holding
continuity of a particular place:- (imaginary small color photograph of Alan
Davies, Toni Simon and me sitting close to the waves edge at Jones Beach on a
hazy day in mid- June, 1987).
3. Any weakening of the will will be evinced by our action (its double in the
proximate actuality).The king of this terrain (Kafka-Khlebnikov) is its
experience in the slow dissolution of one meaning, and then another. But
time (and this includes this time in an album still gathering its forms,
always did, even as many immense particulars, these waves co-exist under
another measure- aspect of the so-called Now moment. Imaginary figures
rush by and are forgotten (never were) as they rush into an avalanche of one
duration (Smithson, "sandtorm of pauses".) The smell is still there, the sound,
the breeze's touch, and the remembered meaning (exactly zero) is still nascent.
That is to say, I almost forgot the sun and the gulls standing in a circle of wet
sand. Could the real itself have exploded from the tendency of all things to give,
or eventually give in (i.e., give way?)
4. "Nothing more. The image is exhausted in the multiplicity of meanings...One
might say that psychoanalysis gave the dream no status beyond that of speech,
and failed to see it in its reality as language." Dream, Imagination and Existence,
Michele Foucault (1954)
Giving, giving way, "making room." Now the gulls are standing closer. Had I
not given the day, in part, to you (as to them) such space would still exist.
And it may yet, since this gesture (this space) would not exist. And it may yet,
since it is, by now, already prefigured in its passing, antithesis to what I wanted,
or expected was in my reach, but beyond this choice. Noting the proximity of
this trebling I announce a tendency, meeting yours on a separate day, a widening,
not a focus, in order to engender space from space. This wrenching, simply said,
apocalyptic but minute, to hurl the discus of withered principles into an infinitely
distance place, intuited complicity.
K (*Reading As Revery*) in celebration of *North of Intention* by Steve McCaffery
1. It would be embarassing at the beginning to put my words in the mouths
of your characters, even if they are available to anyone, necessary but
not sufficient. History itself is just as fixed in the eye of a storm, in
the words themselves, that the characters beginning with A would not be
complete. But would it be possible to exceed "A" in another register, if
at least the integers compared to themselves were not abused by our own presence,
and the vault that enclosed such vocabularies, as arbitrary and unrecorded as
the (this) exact movement of tides: such are the boundaries of reading- ever
tidal and undeferred- and time itself accords with such vast rhythms. Imagine
the contrary: imbecilic gestures from the minds of tyrants- visual figurations
of their own power-lines. Like all insignificant and dried branches- leaving
all the more exposed the "north of intensions."
2. Is it by chance that I return to you by the same route that I came into
my own revery? A landscape that still bears a trace (*passed on*, not remaining)
of another epoch (not in the past perhaps, in another clime) which surrounds
some unspoken utterances in the full chorus of the senses. They came by here
by another route, i.e.: the cooling breeze on the chest and arms, waves crashing
between thick silences, gulls cries *and* the enveloping silence; engraved *and*
erased- that static. Dawns never confuse the issue, so exact, nor do the steady
afternoons, nights, shadows of gulls overhead. Into these serene particulars
comes one displaced opening, and then another, moves a corner of comprehension,
a welcome meaning freed of its image, a memory of speech to replace the holding
continuity of a particular place:- (imaginary small color photograph of Alan
Davies, Toni Simon and me sitting close to the waves edge at Jones Beach on a
hazy day in mid- June, 1987).
3. Any weakening of the will will be evinced by our action (its double in the
proximate actuality).The king of this terrain (Kafka-Khlebnikov) is its
experience in the slow dissolution of one meaning, and then another. But
time (and this includes this time in an album still gathering its forms,
always did, even as many immense particulars, these waves co-exist under
another measure- aspect of the so-called Now moment. Imaginary figures
rush by and are forgotten (never were) as they rush into an avalanche of one
duration (Smithson, "sandtorm of pauses".) The smell is still there, the sound,
the breeze's touch, and the remembered meaning (exactly zero) is still nascent.
That is to say, I almost forgot the sun and the gulls standing in a circle of wet
sand. Could the real itself have exploded from the tendency of all things to give,
or eventually give in (i.e., give way?)
4. "Nothing more. The image is exhausted in the multiplicity of meanings...One
might say that psychoanalysis gave the dream no status beyond that of speech,
and failed to see it in its reality as language." Dream, Imagination and Existence,
Michele Foucault (1954)
Giving, giving way, "making room." Now the gulls are standing closer. Had I
not given the day, in part, to you (as to them) such space would still exist.
And it may yet, since this gesture (this space) would not exist. And it may yet,
since it is, by now, already prefigured in its passing, antithesis to what I wanted,
or expected was in my reach, but beyond this choice. Noting the proximity of
this trebling I announce a tendency, meeting yours on a separate day, a widening,
not a focus, in order to engender space from space. This wrenching, simply said,
apocalyptic but minute, to hurl the discus of withered principles into an infinitely
distance place, intuited complicity.
Monday, February 23
"The project of a hybridization or con-fusion of genres which
Ponge's texts share with Bloch's *Spuren*, the paradigmatic
texts of the modern prose poem tradition we have previously
examined, and Schlegel's notion of a *Universalpoesie* suggests
two directions running counter to each other: on the one hand,
a utopian aspiration toward oneness: on the other,a perhaps
equally utopian drive toward the greatest possible difference and
diversity, a breakdown of rigid categorical distinctions. A total
homogenization of the "universal" threatens the one: a total
fragmentation threatens the other. Ponge's texts are themselves,
as he himself has acknowledged, "very diverse, contradictory,
varied as to form...in *Le Parti pris des choses* there is a little
of everything: there are closed texts, there are open texts; each
one proposes as well an *ars poetica*" (CC. 411-12). Although
Ponge displays at times a nostalgia for the Book, he has himself
said that for the most part he is concerned with *texts* (CC, 426).
In other words, although Ponge sometimes entertains thoughts of
a singular coherence of separate texts on some formal or other unity,
more often he focuses his attention on particular phenomena, on the
individual rather than the collective. What the prose poem leads Ponge
to is less Schlegel's goal of a universal poetry than the nominalist
fragmentation suggested by Schlegel's polemical contention that
"every poem is a genre in itself" (*Jedes Gedich eine Gattung fur sich*)...
In order to contruct a new unity allowing for the greatest possible diversity
and difference, the poverty of received forms and the speciousness of any
notion of an already given, preexistent unity must first be exposed. The
possibility of a universal poetry must pass, in other words, *through* the
fragmented world of prose, not around it..."
Jonathan Monroe, *A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem
and The Politics of Genre*
Cornell UP, 1987
(from Chapter 8, *Fragments of a World
Restored: Francis Ponge's "Rhetoric of
Objects", pp 245-246)
Ponge's texts share with Bloch's *Spuren*, the paradigmatic
texts of the modern prose poem tradition we have previously
examined, and Schlegel's notion of a *Universalpoesie* suggests
two directions running counter to each other: on the one hand,
a utopian aspiration toward oneness: on the other,a perhaps
equally utopian drive toward the greatest possible difference and
diversity, a breakdown of rigid categorical distinctions. A total
homogenization of the "universal" threatens the one: a total
fragmentation threatens the other. Ponge's texts are themselves,
as he himself has acknowledged, "very diverse, contradictory,
varied as to form...in *Le Parti pris des choses* there is a little
of everything: there are closed texts, there are open texts; each
one proposes as well an *ars poetica*" (CC. 411-12). Although
Ponge displays at times a nostalgia for the Book, he has himself
said that for the most part he is concerned with *texts* (CC, 426).
In other words, although Ponge sometimes entertains thoughts of
a singular coherence of separate texts on some formal or other unity,
more often he focuses his attention on particular phenomena, on the
individual rather than the collective. What the prose poem leads Ponge
to is less Schlegel's goal of a universal poetry than the nominalist
fragmentation suggested by Schlegel's polemical contention that
"every poem is a genre in itself" (*Jedes Gedich eine Gattung fur sich*)...
In order to contruct a new unity allowing for the greatest possible diversity
and difference, the poverty of received forms and the speciousness of any
notion of an already given, preexistent unity must first be exposed. The
possibility of a universal poetry must pass, in other words, *through* the
fragmented world of prose, not around it..."
Jonathan Monroe, *A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem
and The Politics of Genre*
Cornell UP, 1987
(from Chapter 8, *Fragments of a World
Restored: Francis Ponge's "Rhetoric of
Objects", pp 245-246)
Sunday, February 22
"Like the fragment, the prose poem presents an analogon of a
complete work gesturing toward the utopian nonplace of a collective
labor that would constitute a reconstruction of the individual subject
and of the subject of humanity as a whole (AL, 373). It is both the
promise of what Francis Ponge will call the *Grand Oeuvre* and the sign
of its continued absence. In shifting the site from verse to prose of
the critique of the idealist subject of poetry and the dominant class
which is necessary to give *form* to such an *oeuvre*, Schlegel's
fragments and Baudelaire's prose poetry provide not so much
a "poetry of poetry"-the subject's critique of itself "from within"-
as a concretization of the *inter*subjective
nature of the *intra*subjectve. They thus offer not so much an
illumination of the self *by itself* (alone and self-sufficient)
as an illumination of the discourses that surround, traverse
and overdetermine it and from which it cannot finally retreat-as
Baudelaire's "A une heure du matin" trenchantly suggests- into
sublime isolation....If what constitutes the subject per se is
nothing other than the self-engendering power of its own discourse
(AL, 392), both the fragment and the prose poem call attention to
the fact that the discourse of any given subject is never really
self-engendering or absolutely autonomous but is instead inextricably
bound up with the discourses of others. Both the fragment and the
prose poem offer a critique of the world of prose with a view to making
poetry possible again through a rejection of the uncritical reproduction
of either poetry or prose in isolation. Their critique constitutes nothing
less, in other words, than an attempted reconstruction of a unity
that is missing in the chaotic fragmentation of the modern world,
a reparation of the world..."
Jonathan Monroe, *A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and
The Politics of Genre*
Cornell UP, 1987 (pps 69-70)
(from Chapter 1
*Universalpoesie* as Fragment:
Friedrich Schlegel and the Prose
Poem")
complete work gesturing toward the utopian nonplace of a collective
labor that would constitute a reconstruction of the individual subject
and of the subject of humanity as a whole (AL, 373). It is both the
promise of what Francis Ponge will call the *Grand Oeuvre* and the sign
of its continued absence. In shifting the site from verse to prose of
the critique of the idealist subject of poetry and the dominant class
which is necessary to give *form* to such an *oeuvre*, Schlegel's
fragments and Baudelaire's prose poetry provide not so much
a "poetry of poetry"-the subject's critique of itself "from within"-
as a concretization of the *inter*subjective
nature of the *intra*subjectve. They thus offer not so much an
illumination of the self *by itself* (alone and self-sufficient)
as an illumination of the discourses that surround, traverse
and overdetermine it and from which it cannot finally retreat-as
Baudelaire's "A une heure du matin" trenchantly suggests- into
sublime isolation....If what constitutes the subject per se is
nothing other than the self-engendering power of its own discourse
(AL, 392), both the fragment and the prose poem call attention to
the fact that the discourse of any given subject is never really
self-engendering or absolutely autonomous but is instead inextricably
bound up with the discourses of others. Both the fragment and the
prose poem offer a critique of the world of prose with a view to making
poetry possible again through a rejection of the uncritical reproduction
of either poetry or prose in isolation. Their critique constitutes nothing
less, in other words, than an attempted reconstruction of a unity
that is missing in the chaotic fragmentation of the modern world,
a reparation of the world..."
Jonathan Monroe, *A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and
The Politics of Genre*
Cornell UP, 1987 (pps 69-70)
(from Chapter 1
*Universalpoesie* as Fragment:
Friedrich Schlegel and the Prose
Poem")
"We hoped that in the peace after such a war, a great
expansion would follow in the mind of the Country; grand
views in every direction,- true freedom in politics, in
religion, in social science, in thought. But the energy of
the nation seems to have expanded itself in the war, and
every interest is found as sectional and as timorous as
before..."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
November 5, 1865
Journals
expansion would follow in the mind of the Country; grand
views in every direction,- true freedom in politics, in
religion, in social science, in thought. But the energy of
the nation seems to have expanded itself in the war, and
every interest is found as sectional and as timorous as
before..."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
November 5, 1865
Journals
from *Amiel's Journal*
10th January 1881
"To let oneself be
troubled by the ill-will, the ingratitude, the
indifference of others, is a weakness to
which I am very much inclined. It is
painful to me to be misunderstood, ill judged.
I am wanting in manly hardihood, and the
heart to me is more vulnerable than it
ought to be. It seems to me, however,
that I have grown tougher in this respect
than I used to be. The malignity of the
world troubles me less than it did. Is it
the result of philosophy, or an effect of age,
or simply caused by the many proofs of
respect and attachment that I have received?
These proofs were just what were wanting
to inspire me with some self-respect.
Otherwise I should have so easily believed
in my own nullity and in the insignificance
of all my efforts. Success is necessary
for the timid, praise is a moral stimulus
and admiration a strengthening elixir. We
think we know ourselves, but as long as we
are ignorant of our comparative value, our
place in the social assessment, we do not
know ourselves well enough. If we are to
act with effect we must count for something
with our fellow men; we must feel
ourselves possessed of some weight and
credit with them, so that our effort may be
rightly proportioned to the resistance which
has to be overcome. As long as we despise
opinion we are without a standard by which
to measure ourselves; we do not know our
relative power. I have despised opinion
too much, while yet I have been too sensitive
to injustice. These two faults have
cost me dear. I longed for kindness, sympathy,
and equity, but my pride forbade me to
ask for them, or to employ any address
or calculation to obtain them....I
do not think I have been wrong altogether,
for all through I have been in harmony
with my best self, but my want of adaptability
has worn me out, to no purpose. Now indeed,
I am at peace within, but my
career is over, my strength is running out,
and my life is near its end.
"Il n'est pas plus temps pour rien excepte
pour mourir."
This is why I can look at it all historically."
10th January 1881
"To let oneself be
troubled by the ill-will, the ingratitude, the
indifference of others, is a weakness to
which I am very much inclined. It is
painful to me to be misunderstood, ill judged.
I am wanting in manly hardihood, and the
heart to me is more vulnerable than it
ought to be. It seems to me, however,
that I have grown tougher in this respect
than I used to be. The malignity of the
world troubles me less than it did. Is it
the result of philosophy, or an effect of age,
or simply caused by the many proofs of
respect and attachment that I have received?
These proofs were just what were wanting
to inspire me with some self-respect.
Otherwise I should have so easily believed
in my own nullity and in the insignificance
of all my efforts. Success is necessary
for the timid, praise is a moral stimulus
and admiration a strengthening elixir. We
think we know ourselves, but as long as we
are ignorant of our comparative value, our
place in the social assessment, we do not
know ourselves well enough. If we are to
act with effect we must count for something
with our fellow men; we must feel
ourselves possessed of some weight and
credit with them, so that our effort may be
rightly proportioned to the resistance which
has to be overcome. As long as we despise
opinion we are without a standard by which
to measure ourselves; we do not know our
relative power. I have despised opinion
too much, while yet I have been too sensitive
to injustice. These two faults have
cost me dear. I longed for kindness, sympathy,
and equity, but my pride forbade me to
ask for them, or to employ any address
or calculation to obtain them....I
do not think I have been wrong altogether,
for all through I have been in harmony
with my best self, but my want of adaptability
has worn me out, to no purpose. Now indeed,
I am at peace within, but my
career is over, my strength is running out,
and my life is near its end.
"Il n'est pas plus temps pour rien excepte
pour mourir."
This is why I can look at it all historically."
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