The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger
Certain sites of reading project a promise of intimacy- the reader knowing full well that some degree of suspension of disbelief will be expected; but so what, nearly any intriguing read asks for some of that. Such intimacy, intuited from the first moments- at first sight, so to speak- immediately invites thoughts about possible time and frequency factors- where and and how often to hang out, for example.
More words are there and you come back to read again. A factor of possible interaction now imposes itself or is suggested. This time, as it happens, no stickiness or embarrassment, it's comfortable in fact, you don't even think that much yet about the content, though it's intriguing, especially from the standpoint of some early ambience of fitting in. It's a room you can hang out in for a bit - while that other place comes across more like a workout space, for example, ithe way a gym is intimate but the object being so much on self-improvement or strengthening and alert presence- you go but you don't necessarily linger.
With intimacy, connection, warmth, familiarity almost invariably trump revelation- true, both are present, but the revelations themselves seem to some degree to want to provoke chat not mere "response", and ultimately, some sort of involvement- after all you yourself do these things as well, and with a similar sense of pleasure and satisfaction: you too go to openings, you eat, you identify passages in poems you return to, you recognize, greet, mention artists. A book like this recently made me feel so welcome it actually got me past a whole day, maybe even a longer period of doldrums and whining.
I picked up Michael Coffey's *cmyk* at St Mark's when I first got back from a longish vacation in Provincetown. Immediately I was more enmeshed in thinking about New York than I expected to be reading a book of poetry, in particular its references to the lives and deaths of literary figures, many known personally to me, opening the book as I did just now to the line:"Half-lamenting the passing of Pessoa and Armand Schwerner." Armand was a close friend, a deeply influential poet for me and many others, so I personally appreciated this, that is, Coffey's projection of the simultaneous (literary) reference/ greeting and (personal/literary) grieving. By now I realized i'd been immersed in an intimate space and though I put the book down for some reason and wandered a bit around the bookstore, I soon picked it up and came back. This time I read it through completely, hungrily looking for references (Coffey once remarked to me he had noticed he himself had appeared as a sort of cameo in a book of mine, titled -Theoretical Objects- where he shows up as "the guy with the moustache" (the face hair is gone now) that I recognized at events and kept noticing and got curious about. Coffey mentions poets in the book including Ted Berrigan, Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Andrews, focusing on his affection for sonnets. Artists too, like Tim Hawkinson and Vito Acconci- so the book space intimately enters the art space, and eventually gets around to the restaurant space- a diary of menus and meals and social moments. But these intimacies, redolant as they are in some way with a nostalgia for the old New York School fondness for immediacy of experience, are not presented here exactly as such. In -cmyk-, casualness is less offhand, though still not all that earnest, or "cloying", but perhaps neighborly (maybe slightly like the way John Godfrey can be neighborly in some of his books- evoking the street and chararacter of the Lower East Side) - factually, meticulously detailed, while remaining emotionally substantial. Somewhat similar to a social visit, the way bloggers at first thought of people coming over to their blog as being like a social visit. He quotes Warhol:
"There is hardlly a better way of describing the situation of the late twentieth century artist who has everything at his disposal but for whom nothing is really present as he can no longer grasp the depth, all that has survived of The Last Supper's spiritual wealth, its spiritual substance are carbohydrates and that which, apart from pizza qualifies worldwide as Italian fastfood cuisine."
-Carla Schlulz-Hoffman, p 11 Warhols Last Supper
"Where do Italian art and culture intersect in your mind?
Andy: "Spaghetti?"
For its voyage through the abundant and various humidities, admixtures and intertwinings of writing the reading experience as an exploration of various doors-including doors, archways and entranceways constructed of intricate and intriguing typographical designs crafted by a master of such entwinings- Guy Bennett. -cmyk- proposes the seeming possiblity of a book as a temporary domicile: an enticing place to hang out and wander about within, with clues and/as memories popping up around to make you wonder if it might yet offer itself to you as a frequent stay. Early on, though, Coffey does drop a suggestion given such an open invitation, a certain requirement: you'd at least have to know how to hang out with a group of friends and have a relaxed beer.
O Books 2005
typesetting by Guy Bennet
cover by Rebecca Smith
Distribution Automatique
Wednesday, September 21
Dreams and Nightmares
The important work of Ligorano/Reese, now on view at Cooper Union and elsewhere (see below), is critical, probing, sharply satiric of American politics today. We checked out a show based on a book by Joel Sternfeld, -Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America-, on view September 16- October 22
at Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, NYC 10011 (212) 206-9100. Thankfully, for those of
you who can't get to the show, you can purchase or look at the book, which is well worth seeing and having. The show concerns experimental utopian communities across the United States, focusing both on their use of space and housing and on the essence of their communal ideals, structures and activities. This show comes at a crucial moment in US history, when it can be best described, perhaps, as a dystopia. There are at least 40 huge photographs on view, each accompanied by an excellently written, lengthy description of the history of the community. Some are well known, others obscure. The link to the New York Times review of 9/18 is: Mostly Lost [click here]
Another hightly recommended show now at Caren Golden Fine Art, 539 West 23rd Street, NY, NY 10011, tel: (212)727-8304 is Tom Burkhardt's *Full Stop* Here Tom Burhardt has wittly reconstructed an entire 50's style artist's studio, replete with pot-bellied stove, book and record shelves, numerous details all nearly full scale and constructed out of cardboard! It is dedicated to his father, Rudy Burkhardt, among others. See it on Tuesdays- Saturdays 11-6 pm. Some of Tom Burkhardt's excellent small paintings are on view in the show also.
If you're in Chelsea, make sure to check out this excellent gallery devoted completely to collage: Jeremy Lawson, 525 West 24th Street (212) 627-6000. On view until October15 are the fascinating collages of Rita Ackerman.
The important work of Ligorano/Reese, now on view at Cooper Union and elsewhere (see below), is critical, probing, sharply satiric of American politics today. We checked out a show based on a book by Joel Sternfeld, -Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America-, on view September 16- October 22
at Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, NYC 10011 (212) 206-9100. Thankfully, for those of
you who can't get to the show, you can purchase or look at the book, which is well worth seeing and having. The show concerns experimental utopian communities across the United States, focusing both on their use of space and housing and on the essence of their communal ideals, structures and activities. This show comes at a crucial moment in US history, when it can be best described, perhaps, as a dystopia. There are at least 40 huge photographs on view, each accompanied by an excellently written, lengthy description of the history of the community. Some are well known, others obscure. The link to the New York Times review of 9/18 is: Mostly Lost [click here]
Another hightly recommended show now at Caren Golden Fine Art, 539 West 23rd Street, NY, NY 10011, tel: (212)727-8304 is Tom Burkhardt's *Full Stop* Here Tom Burhardt has wittly reconstructed an entire 50's style artist's studio, replete with pot-bellied stove, book and record shelves, numerous details all nearly full scale and constructed out of cardboard! It is dedicated to his father, Rudy Burkhardt, among others. See it on Tuesdays- Saturdays 11-6 pm. Some of Tom Burkhardt's excellent small paintings are on view in the show also.
If you're in Chelsea, make sure to check out this excellent gallery devoted completely to collage: Jeremy Lawson, 525 West 24th Street (212) 627-6000. On view until October15 are the fascinating collages of Rita Ackerman.
Sunday, September 18
A Knock on The Door
The collaborative art team Marshall Reese and Nora Ligorano have a recent work
Ligorano/Reese
Pure Products USA [click here]
up at a literally dynamite
art show called *A Knock at The Door* at
Cooper Union
A Knock on The Door [click here]
The show-and the Ligorano/Reese mug shots
were featured both on a recent
cover of the New York Post (reviling
it, of course, as dishonoring the losses
of 9/11) and a surprisingly respectful
review in a recent issue of the Art section
of the New York Times. The Ligorano/Reese
work was the lead-off photo in the Times
review!
This is a must-see show!
The collaborative art team Marshall Reese and Nora Ligorano have a recent work
Ligorano/Reese
Pure Products USA [click here]
up at a literally dynamite
art show called *A Knock at The Door* at
Cooper Union
A Knock on The Door [click here]
The show-and the Ligorano/Reese mug shots
were featured both on a recent
cover of the New York Post (reviling
it, of course, as dishonoring the losses
of 9/11) and a surprisingly respectful
review in a recent issue of the Art section
of the New York Times. The Ligorano/Reese
work was the lead-off photo in the Times
review!
This is a must-see show!
Sunday, August 7
Blankness
'Bear with me. I know that I sometimes stray from the point, but unless I write down things as they occur to me, I feel I wil lose them for good. My mind is not quite what it used to be. It is slower now, sluggish and less nimble, and to follow even the simplest thought very far exhausts me. This is how it begins, then, in spite of my efforts. The words come only when I think I won't be able to find them out again. Each day brings the same struggle, the same blankness, the same desire to forget of ever bringing them out again....Memory is the great trap, you see, and I did my best to hold myself back, to make sure my thoughts did not sneak off to the old days. But lately I have been slipping, a little more each day it seems, and now there are times when I will not let go..."
Paul Auster
*In The Country of Last Things*
Viking, 1987
***************************************************
Oblivion
"No Oblivion
Someone, I tell you,
will remember us."
Sappho
translated by Willis Barnstone
Green Integer 26
1999
***************************************************
Pain
"Our hearts were filled with so much pain but this past week or so, the pain
seems to be capitulating to the point where she can pronounce..."
Nada Gordon
*V. Imp.*
Faux Press,
Cambridge, Mass 2003
*****************************************************
Ecstacy
"Now experiencing mounting feeling of ecstacy and anticipation; this is all
*leading somewhere*"
Gary Sullivan
*How To Proceed in the Arts*
Faux Press,, 2001
*****************************************************
Astonishment
There are things about reality
that continue to astonish almost everyone.
Notebook
2/24/85
'Bear with me. I know that I sometimes stray from the point, but unless I write down things as they occur to me, I feel I wil lose them for good. My mind is not quite what it used to be. It is slower now, sluggish and less nimble, and to follow even the simplest thought very far exhausts me. This is how it begins, then, in spite of my efforts. The words come only when I think I won't be able to find them out again. Each day brings the same struggle, the same blankness, the same desire to forget of ever bringing them out again....Memory is the great trap, you see, and I did my best to hold myself back, to make sure my thoughts did not sneak off to the old days. But lately I have been slipping, a little more each day it seems, and now there are times when I will not let go..."
Paul Auster
*In The Country of Last Things*
Viking, 1987
***************************************************
Oblivion
"No Oblivion
Someone, I tell you,
will remember us."
Sappho
translated by Willis Barnstone
Green Integer 26
1999
***************************************************
Pain
"Our hearts were filled with so much pain but this past week or so, the pain
seems to be capitulating to the point where she can pronounce..."
Nada Gordon
*V. Imp.*
Faux Press,
Cambridge, Mass 2003
*****************************************************
Ecstacy
"Now experiencing mounting feeling of ecstacy and anticipation; this is all
*leading somewhere*"
Gary Sullivan
*How To Proceed in the Arts*
Faux Press,, 2001
*****************************************************
Astonishment
There are things about reality
that continue to astonish almost everyone.
Notebook
2/24/85
Friday, August 5
War and Treachery
"This war has produced perhaps the richest crop of treacheries that has every been known; which indicates a revolutionary climate- a climate, that is, where the initial state of things is gradually changing and the general standard of discernment is beginning to differ from the views of this or that group."
10th July, 1940
Destiny and Peace
"Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our destiny and we find peace."
8th August, 1940
Completion and Transcendence
"A man completes a work only when his qualities transcend that work."
14th August, 1940
Cesare Pavese
*The Burning Brand:
Diaries 1935-1950*
Walker and Company
New York, 1961
"This war has produced perhaps the richest crop of treacheries that has every been known; which indicates a revolutionary climate- a climate, that is, where the initial state of things is gradually changing and the general standard of discernment is beginning to differ from the views of this or that group."
10th July, 1940
Destiny and Peace
"Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our destiny and we find peace."
8th August, 1940
Completion and Transcendence
"A man completes a work only when his qualities transcend that work."
14th August, 1940
Cesare Pavese
*The Burning Brand:
Diaries 1935-1950*
Walker and Company
New York, 1961
Tuesday, August 2
Henry Hills' Experimental Films {click here}
This rich site has a lot to offer, not only links to and discussions about the fascinating and richly conceived films of this important avant-garde filmaker, but it also features tons of links to information about many other filmakers and terrifically detailed essays concerning contemporary filmaking.
Also included are links to ::fait accompli's:: and Nada Gordon's blogged commentaries on Henry Hills' latest offering, the ongoing series *Emma's Dilemma* featuring Emma Bernstein's interviews with artists and writers including Carolee Schneeman, Ken Jacobs, Fiona Templeton, Richard Foreman, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jackson Mac Low and Tony Oursler.
This rich site has a lot to offer, not only links to and discussions about the fascinating and richly conceived films of this important avant-garde filmaker, but it also features tons of links to information about many other filmakers and terrifically detailed essays concerning contemporary filmaking.
Also included are links to ::fait accompli's:: and Nada Gordon's blogged commentaries on Henry Hills' latest offering, the ongoing series *Emma's Dilemma* featuring Emma Bernstein's interviews with artists and writers including Carolee Schneeman, Ken Jacobs, Fiona Templeton, Richard Foreman, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jackson Mac Low and Tony Oursler.
Saturday, July 30
Thursday, July 28
Beautiful New Books
Vernon Frazer, *Improvisations*
Beneath The Underground, 2005
"Surface denial breeds lost ampersands.
Who understands the colon's fitful wedge?
Pursuant to undreamed rhetorics the flay.
Sidestep rhythm commands. Cease and."
Ernesto Priego *The Body Aches*
ExPress Doble, 2005
"One day our names
will be read at the entrance of buildings
unrecognizable shadows
of a somewhat somewhere"
Burt Kimmelman *Somehow*
Marsh Hawk Press, 2005
"I suppose letters to the dead are common.
We need to speak, even when there's no one there.
I think of the crazy juxtapositions, the people
and things you loved. Life's a mute grieving."
Kyle Schlesinger Thom Donovan *Mantle*
Atticus, 2005
"Last-back in time
Lash-of the "future past"
Held things rung-this ring
(Too familiar) of the present's/
Seminal knell"
Thom Donovan *Tears are These Veils*
images by Abby Walton
Wild Horses of Fire Press
"I mean bark, thick meaning of bark
The actual act of cutting bark
Shot and printed"
Stan Apps *Soft Hands*
Ugly Duckling Press, 2005
"Because they want a future/
Where there's room for everyone, to enjoy themselves
Among the graves. It's a rich white racism thing."
Recent and Stunning
Charles Bernstein *Shadowtime*
Green Integer, 2005
"You can do nothing worthwhile
until you discover your own imperatives
the commands that will make
the supreme demands on your life"
Jerome Sala *Look Slimmer Instantly!*
Soft Skull, 2005
"problem is:
since we rule the world
the only culture we have
is the air we breathe
you human fuckers"
Standard Schaefer *'Water and Power*
Agincourt, 2005
"who blames the excessive heat on this damn thirst
the word property evaporates from the dossier
the word slavery not even noted"
All Warren *Hounds*
Spring 2005
"Louise is alright, but so delicious
and mechanical are my offspring
I need not worry even a poet
could name it by name"
Paul Celan *Lightduress*
Green Integer, 2005
translated by Pierre Joris
"Webbing beween the words,/
their time-halo-"
Clayton Couch *Artificial Lure*
effing press, 2005
"poems cast and collapsed into one life's misgivings/
does anyone live long enough to forget the whole song?"
Brother Tom Murphy, *finish . your phrase.
first line index. 03*
cat press, 2005
"some neil young in the morning...
versions of life's worth"
Mike Kelleher, *To Be Sung*
Blaze Vox, 2005
"I'll fuck anything
that moves.
But everything
is still"
edited by Vincent Katz
*Vanitas 1: The State*
"Comes to an end. Disestablished path. *maybe baby*/
token analytic muse in the glove compartment"- Ann Lauterbach
edited by Douglas Messerli
*the PiP Anthology of World Poetry
Volume 5: Intersections: Innovative Poetry
of Southern California*
Green Integer, 2005
"fried brains and all, dumbfounded
in Los Angeles, where mosquitoes drowse
in noonday heat, bloodlust drained from
tropical eyes"- Wanda Coleman
Gary Sullivan *Japanese Notebook*
Elsewhere #1, 2005
"There are so many people, so many dreams"
edited by Jordan Davis
The Hat #6, 2005
"Not something you have. Not something you are. Not even a/
medium in which you swim. Then what"- Jonathan Mayhew
edited by Kyle Schlesinger, Sasha Steenson, Gordon Hatfield
Kiosk #4, 2005
"I must be anachronistic to be so silent
in the face of these empty signs"- Michael Davidson
Ann Lauterbach *Hum*
Penguin, 2005
"*Ladies and gentlemen, rock 'n roll.*"
Kimberly Lyons, *Saline*
Instance, 2005
"At night, with a fever, the smell is of my own tongue,
swollen and of a washrag."
[for Steve Evans]
*************************************************************
Thought for The Day: The Good News
ecritures bleues (Laura Carter) {click here}
Vernon Frazer, *Improvisations*
Beneath The Underground, 2005
"Surface denial breeds lost ampersands.
Who understands the colon's fitful wedge?
Pursuant to undreamed rhetorics the flay.
Sidestep rhythm commands. Cease and."
Ernesto Priego *The Body Aches*
ExPress Doble, 2005
"One day our names
will be read at the entrance of buildings
unrecognizable shadows
of a somewhat somewhere"
Burt Kimmelman *Somehow*
Marsh Hawk Press, 2005
"I suppose letters to the dead are common.
We need to speak, even when there's no one there.
I think of the crazy juxtapositions, the people
and things you loved. Life's a mute grieving."
Kyle Schlesinger Thom Donovan *Mantle*
Atticus, 2005
"Last-back in time
Lash-of the "future past"
Held things rung-this ring
(Too familiar) of the present's/
Seminal knell"
Thom Donovan *Tears are These Veils*
images by Abby Walton
Wild Horses of Fire Press
"I mean bark, thick meaning of bark
The actual act of cutting bark
Shot and printed"
Stan Apps *Soft Hands*
Ugly Duckling Press, 2005
"Because they want a future/
Where there's room for everyone, to enjoy themselves
Among the graves. It's a rich white racism thing."
Recent and Stunning
Charles Bernstein *Shadowtime*
Green Integer, 2005
"You can do nothing worthwhile
until you discover your own imperatives
the commands that will make
the supreme demands on your life"
Jerome Sala *Look Slimmer Instantly!*
Soft Skull, 2005
"problem is:
since we rule the world
the only culture we have
is the air we breathe
you human fuckers"
Standard Schaefer *'Water and Power*
Agincourt, 2005
"who blames the excessive heat on this damn thirst
the word property evaporates from the dossier
the word slavery not even noted"
All Warren *Hounds*
Spring 2005
"Louise is alright, but so delicious
and mechanical are my offspring
I need not worry even a poet
could name it by name"
Paul Celan *Lightduress*
Green Integer, 2005
translated by Pierre Joris
"Webbing beween the words,/
their time-halo-"
Clayton Couch *Artificial Lure*
effing press, 2005
"poems cast and collapsed into one life's misgivings/
does anyone live long enough to forget the whole song?"
Brother Tom Murphy, *finish . your phrase.
first line index. 03*
cat press, 2005
"some neil young in the morning...
versions of life's worth"
Mike Kelleher, *To Be Sung*
Blaze Vox, 2005
"I'll fuck anything
that moves.
But everything
is still"
edited by Vincent Katz
*Vanitas 1: The State*
"Comes to an end. Disestablished path. *maybe baby*/
token analytic muse in the glove compartment"- Ann Lauterbach
edited by Douglas Messerli
*the PiP Anthology of World Poetry
Volume 5: Intersections: Innovative Poetry
of Southern California*
Green Integer, 2005
"fried brains and all, dumbfounded
in Los Angeles, where mosquitoes drowse
in noonday heat, bloodlust drained from
tropical eyes"- Wanda Coleman
Gary Sullivan *Japanese Notebook*
Elsewhere #1, 2005
"There are so many people, so many dreams"
edited by Jordan Davis
The Hat #6, 2005
"Not something you have. Not something you are. Not even a/
medium in which you swim. Then what"- Jonathan Mayhew
edited by Kyle Schlesinger, Sasha Steenson, Gordon Hatfield
Kiosk #4, 2005
"I must be anachronistic to be so silent
in the face of these empty signs"- Michael Davidson
Ann Lauterbach *Hum*
Penguin, 2005
"*Ladies and gentlemen, rock 'n roll.*"
Kimberly Lyons, *Saline*
Instance, 2005
"At night, with a fever, the smell is of my own tongue,
swollen and of a washrag."
[for Steve Evans]
*************************************************************
Thought for The Day: The Good News
ecritures bleues (Laura Carter) {click here}
Wednesday, July 27
Ideas
"70. Ideas too are a life and a world."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
translated by R.J. Hollingdale
Penguin, 1990
"Intense but imprecise memory? Try a poem"
"Dreams as aesthetic achievement: why couldn't one
take pride in a dream as a work of art?"
"Literature: disover localities that have not yet been
claimed by meaning."
"Disgruntled-because I was unable to think."
"Linguistic euphoria is needed for a poem
(even a desolate one)."
"I will not write another poem until I have a new view
of life."
"Writing- safe again."
October/November 1976
*The Weight of the World*
Peter Handke
translated by Ralph Manheim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1984
Pantomimes
" 69.The pantomimes of the ancients no longer
exist. But in compensation all modern poetry
resembles pantomimes."
Friedrich Schlegel
translated by Peter Firchow
Univ of Minnesota, 1991
"I speak of the Messiah whom the poet
Senses without naming, the painter
Feels without seeing, the composer
Hears without noting, the philosopher
Supposes without knowing."
Charles Bernstein- *Shadowtime*
1. Level 5.
p.51
published by Green Integer Press, 2005
To Paul Valery, May 5, 1891
"In order to give life and meaning to literature, we must reach that "great symphony." Perhaps no one ever will. Nevertheless, the ideal has obsessed even the most unconscious writers, and its main lines- however gross or fine- are to be found in every written work. The perfect poem we dream of can be suggested by Music itself; and if our own written melody seems imperfect when it has ceased, we must lay siege to the other and plagiarize."
Stephane Mallarme
translated by Bradford Cook
Johns Hopkins, 1956
"How far civilization is from assuring us the pleasures that are supposed to be its attributes! For instance, one might well be amazed that there is no league of dreamers in every great city, existing to support some newspaper that would record events in the light of dream. *Reality* is a contrivance, serving to situate the average mind among the mirages of an event....All ears, one had to be all eyes. From the mimic's stance, one hand straining upwards with fingers wide, I saw that, clever fellow! he had captured the audience's feelings with the movement of catching something on the wing, emblem (and no more) of the ease with which anyone seizes an idea; and that, stirrred by the breeze of this movement, the bear swayingly and gently erect, was querying the exploit, with one paw on the ribboned human shoulder....A lucid pantomime, vaster than the boards and with the gift proper to art of durability...."
Stephane Mallarme
*A Break in the Act*
translated by David Paul
*Poison and Vision*
Vintage Books, 1974
"70. Ideas too are a life and a world."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
translated by R.J. Hollingdale
Penguin, 1990
"Intense but imprecise memory? Try a poem"
"Dreams as aesthetic achievement: why couldn't one
take pride in a dream as a work of art?"
"Literature: disover localities that have not yet been
claimed by meaning."
"Disgruntled-because I was unable to think."
"Linguistic euphoria is needed for a poem
(even a desolate one)."
"I will not write another poem until I have a new view
of life."
"Writing- safe again."
October/November 1976
*The Weight of the World*
Peter Handke
translated by Ralph Manheim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1984
Pantomimes
" 69.The pantomimes of the ancients no longer
exist. But in compensation all modern poetry
resembles pantomimes."
Friedrich Schlegel
translated by Peter Firchow
Univ of Minnesota, 1991
"I speak of the Messiah whom the poet
Senses without naming, the painter
Feels without seeing, the composer
Hears without noting, the philosopher
Supposes without knowing."
Charles Bernstein- *Shadowtime*
1. Level 5.
p.51
published by Green Integer Press, 2005
To Paul Valery, May 5, 1891
"In order to give life and meaning to literature, we must reach that "great symphony." Perhaps no one ever will. Nevertheless, the ideal has obsessed even the most unconscious writers, and its main lines- however gross or fine- are to be found in every written work. The perfect poem we dream of can be suggested by Music itself; and if our own written melody seems imperfect when it has ceased, we must lay siege to the other and plagiarize."
Stephane Mallarme
translated by Bradford Cook
Johns Hopkins, 1956
"How far civilization is from assuring us the pleasures that are supposed to be its attributes! For instance, one might well be amazed that there is no league of dreamers in every great city, existing to support some newspaper that would record events in the light of dream. *Reality* is a contrivance, serving to situate the average mind among the mirages of an event....All ears, one had to be all eyes. From the mimic's stance, one hand straining upwards with fingers wide, I saw that, clever fellow! he had captured the audience's feelings with the movement of catching something on the wing, emblem (and no more) of the ease with which anyone seizes an idea; and that, stirrred by the breeze of this movement, the bear swayingly and gently erect, was querying the exploit, with one paw on the ribboned human shoulder....A lucid pantomime, vaster than the boards and with the gift proper to art of durability...."
Stephane Mallarme
*A Break in the Act*
translated by David Paul
*Poison and Vision*
Vintage Books, 1974
Saturday, July 23
Containing Multitudes, One Shadow at a Time:
on Ferneyhough and Bernstein's *Shadowtime*
“The past and present wilt- I have filled them and emptied them,/
and proceed to fill my next fold of the future/
Listener up there! What have you to confide in me?
/Talk honestly, or no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.
/Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself
/I am large/I contain multitudes”
*Song of Myself*
Whitman
Imagine if, when Debussy was looking for a libretto for his opera *Pelleas et Melisande* he had chosen Mallarme instead of Maurice Maeterlink. Well, maybe if he had written the work at age 61, as is Ferneyhough, he would have, but he happened to have been in his 40’s. Anyway, Debussy didn’t and wound up having to fire Maeterlink’s wife who had been offered the leading role, but far from Debussy’s ideal for the part. I spoke briefly to Brian Ferneyhough after tonight’s performance (which elicited quite a few curtain calls, allowing composer and librettest an opportunity both to take separate bows and to embrace.) He emphasized how pleased he was for his music to connect more with contemporary literary life.
Let’s put it this way. The Mallarme/Debussy comparison is apt because if there is one point that no one will disagree with: this writer and composer have produced a work that is anything, if not nuanced. Nuance is incorporated literally into the title of this complex, many faceted work, Shadowtime. In a typical slapstick
moment after the performance Bernstein pointed out his tie, subtly painted in shades of gray: “My Shadowtime tie” he told me, with a smile.
I liked the sonic shivers in all the instrumentation in this music, and the way this composer uses sound reminds me of both Debussy and Webern. Not that he overindulges in it, but there is not a small amount of very sophisticated humor in this music, that dances nicely with Charles B’s not infrequent joshing around. This is real amiability but it is a very intelligent amiability, and, sorry, that Debussy connection pops up again; Charles’ poetic horseplay, sometimes of a mildly self-deprecating Woody Allen type, which always includes joking about joking, corresponds nicely to Ferneyhough’s music which is freely at ease and comfortably conversant with all his influences, to a point where he can echo his idols to the edge of flattery- Charles, I think, has to compensate for an awful lot of affections for very many voices with a considerable dose of irony and not a small amount of lightly laced Manhattanite sarcasm.
The piece stretches out for a leisurely 2 and one half-hours, but not a second is wasted. Like Bernstein, Ferneyhough has quite a lot to say about his literary, philosophical and musical references and he is not going to leave out a single utterance or voice. I like to see artists take their time; set the slate, allow the music to double back on itself and rediscover its shadows.
Bernstein’s focus on time is Benjamin’s focus. Bernstein is showing clearly how Benjamin’s idea about time had to do with layering, with, as Benjamin states in the passage I quoted yesterday, the way things pile up at our feet in contemporary life. They confront us, these shattering contemporary events, Benjamin said; so there is no choice but to search for their harmonic and dissonant corresponding patterns in the past. Listening to this music I never felt impatient for it to end, I continually felt the moments were constantly varied and reconfigured.Sometimes the orchestral layer was foregrounded, sometimes the words, from time to time projected on the small screen above the curtain, rang out clearly in the mind and inner ear. As Charles has occasion to elucidate in the subtitle: this is a “thought opera.” Whatever the physical objects put in front of us, sound, image, voice, instrument, human body, we are constantly drawn to their counterparts in thought and time. For once, relationships are not the main story, the human ones anyway. Each presence, from memory, to association, to light (there were several lovely LED light bars added onto the stage and curtain towards the end, for example) sound, object, thought, word, phrase, interpretation, in the past, present, or future all have equivalent significance ("And the new angels pass away/ like sparks on coals/ Just as we/ no sooner than/ we had seen each other for the first time/ journeyed back together/ from where we came.").
This libretto substantially demonstrates one of Bernstein’s, and now Bernstein and Ferneyhough’s common political values; the democratic tenet of acknowledging, and trying to identify and comprehend as many connections conceivable between each and every character and moment in the world’s imagination, as they present, and have presented themselves: photographs of books, a man getting undressed and getting dressed again; the same scene projected or animated on the screen; or a figure leaning back over a chair as in a trance or a dance; cutouts of Einstein, Hitler, the Marx Brothers, Karl Marx;all appear as actors for cameos. There are references to philosophy, but there are also references to Benjamin’s essay on Hashish in Marseilles.
We are made out of everything we have experienced, that is sure: we hunt out words for the components of the experiences and the resulting present is a weave that is complete in every subsection but these are not necessarily, anyway, as yet named. This is true in Ferneyhough’s music as well. Not pastiche as the critics
will no doubt say, but collage, collage in the best sense meaning complexly multifaceted but not necessarily intentionally so, just as in life and democratic in being open to the next episodic insistence patiently. This is all we have, as Creeley might have put it. I’m thinking of some quote from the libretto now,but more on these soon. It’s past 3: 30 am!
note added 7/24
Although I had not read it (promise) before this morning, Brian Ferneyhough adds this note about his music in Shadowtime in the playbill:
"The second aspect of this music, that makes it perhaps a little bit dynamic, is that I do a quick run through of the entire history of Western music, from about the year 1000 up to about 1825, which is where, I think, the history of the genre comes to a stop and then the individual style takes over. Each one of these little scenes runs through some emblematic classical form with nonclassical means, no stylistic imitation at all."
on Ferneyhough and Bernstein's *Shadowtime*
“The past and present wilt- I have filled them and emptied them,/
and proceed to fill my next fold of the future/
Listener up there! What have you to confide in me?
/Talk honestly, or no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.
/Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself
/I am large/I contain multitudes”
*Song of Myself*
Whitman
Imagine if, when Debussy was looking for a libretto for his opera *Pelleas et Melisande* he had chosen Mallarme instead of Maurice Maeterlink. Well, maybe if he had written the work at age 61, as is Ferneyhough, he would have, but he happened to have been in his 40’s. Anyway, Debussy didn’t and wound up having to fire Maeterlink’s wife who had been offered the leading role, but far from Debussy’s ideal for the part. I spoke briefly to Brian Ferneyhough after tonight’s performance (which elicited quite a few curtain calls, allowing composer and librettest an opportunity both to take separate bows and to embrace.) He emphasized how pleased he was for his music to connect more with contemporary literary life.
Let’s put it this way. The Mallarme/Debussy comparison is apt because if there is one point that no one will disagree with: this writer and composer have produced a work that is anything, if not nuanced. Nuance is incorporated literally into the title of this complex, many faceted work, Shadowtime. In a typical slapstick
moment after the performance Bernstein pointed out his tie, subtly painted in shades of gray: “My Shadowtime tie” he told me, with a smile.
I liked the sonic shivers in all the instrumentation in this music, and the way this composer uses sound reminds me of both Debussy and Webern. Not that he overindulges in it, but there is not a small amount of very sophisticated humor in this music, that dances nicely with Charles B’s not infrequent joshing around. This is real amiability but it is a very intelligent amiability, and, sorry, that Debussy connection pops up again; Charles’ poetic horseplay, sometimes of a mildly self-deprecating Woody Allen type, which always includes joking about joking, corresponds nicely to Ferneyhough’s music which is freely at ease and comfortably conversant with all his influences, to a point where he can echo his idols to the edge of flattery- Charles, I think, has to compensate for an awful lot of affections for very many voices with a considerable dose of irony and not a small amount of lightly laced Manhattanite sarcasm.
The piece stretches out for a leisurely 2 and one half-hours, but not a second is wasted. Like Bernstein, Ferneyhough has quite a lot to say about his literary, philosophical and musical references and he is not going to leave out a single utterance or voice. I like to see artists take their time; set the slate, allow the music to double back on itself and rediscover its shadows.
Bernstein’s focus on time is Benjamin’s focus. Bernstein is showing clearly how Benjamin’s idea about time had to do with layering, with, as Benjamin states in the passage I quoted yesterday, the way things pile up at our feet in contemporary life. They confront us, these shattering contemporary events, Benjamin said; so there is no choice but to search for their harmonic and dissonant corresponding patterns in the past. Listening to this music I never felt impatient for it to end, I continually felt the moments were constantly varied and reconfigured.Sometimes the orchestral layer was foregrounded, sometimes the words, from time to time projected on the small screen above the curtain, rang out clearly in the mind and inner ear. As Charles has occasion to elucidate in the subtitle: this is a “thought opera.” Whatever the physical objects put in front of us, sound, image, voice, instrument, human body, we are constantly drawn to their counterparts in thought and time. For once, relationships are not the main story, the human ones anyway. Each presence, from memory, to association, to light (there were several lovely LED light bars added onto the stage and curtain towards the end, for example) sound, object, thought, word, phrase, interpretation, in the past, present, or future all have equivalent significance ("And the new angels pass away/ like sparks on coals/ Just as we/ no sooner than/ we had seen each other for the first time/ journeyed back together/ from where we came.").
This libretto substantially demonstrates one of Bernstein’s, and now Bernstein and Ferneyhough’s common political values; the democratic tenet of acknowledging, and trying to identify and comprehend as many connections conceivable between each and every character and moment in the world’s imagination, as they present, and have presented themselves: photographs of books, a man getting undressed and getting dressed again; the same scene projected or animated on the screen; or a figure leaning back over a chair as in a trance or a dance; cutouts of Einstein, Hitler, the Marx Brothers, Karl Marx;all appear as actors for cameos. There are references to philosophy, but there are also references to Benjamin’s essay on Hashish in Marseilles.
We are made out of everything we have experienced, that is sure: we hunt out words for the components of the experiences and the resulting present is a weave that is complete in every subsection but these are not necessarily, anyway, as yet named. This is true in Ferneyhough’s music as well. Not pastiche as the critics
will no doubt say, but collage, collage in the best sense meaning complexly multifaceted but not necessarily intentionally so, just as in life and democratic in being open to the next episodic insistence patiently. This is all we have, as Creeley might have put it. I’m thinking of some quote from the libretto now,but more on these soon. It’s past 3: 30 am!
note added 7/24
Although I had not read it (promise) before this morning, Brian Ferneyhough adds this note about his music in Shadowtime in the playbill:
"The second aspect of this music, that makes it perhaps a little bit dynamic, is that I do a quick run through of the entire history of Western music, from about the year 1000 up to about 1825, which is where, I think, the history of the genre comes to a stop and then the individual style takes over. Each one of these little scenes runs through some emblematic classical form with nonclassical means, no stylistic imitation at all."
Thursday, July 21
Shadows of *Shadowtime*: Bernstein's Benjamin
Charles Bernstein had occasion to remind me recently of the interest we share in the concept of art as object. Now, I see why he might have been thinking so much about this topic of late. In his libretto for Brian Ferneyhough's opera which premiered in Munich in May 24, 2004, and will be peformed at Lincoln Center on July 21st and 22cd, Bernstein mentions Walter Benjamin's famous discussion of the Paul Klee
painting Benjamin owned -Angelus Novus- which serves as an insignia for Benjamin's voyage into time,
also functioning as a kind of abacus for decoding -Shadowtime-:
"There is a picture by Klee called *Angelus Novus*. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before *us*, *he* seems one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong the angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly towardsthe future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is *this* storm ("from *On The Concept of History*)
Another essay Bernstein points to in the libretto is Benjamin’s *On the Doctrine of The Similar*.This essay is about the human proclivity for mimesis, a significant topic in itself, but Benjamin rides this horse a bit further than might be expected, discovering in the outreaches of this territory a basis for a theory concerning the underlying equivalence of languages. No surprise that Bernstein would find this intriguing, given his fascination with homolinguistic translation, I happen to have participated in such a writing experiment at the invitation of David Nemeth. It is an uncanny experience working this way; there is an excitement in having the experience of creating a new language with a group of writers- each one translating the poem before, into an new arrangement of words by mimicking the sounds of the previous poem, which in turn had evolved from the one previous, etc.
Benjamin states:
“If, at the dawn of humanity, this reading from stars, entrails, and coincidences was reading per se, and if it provided mediating links to a newer kind of reading, as represented by runes, then one might well assume that this mimetic gift, which was earlier the basis for clairvoyance, very gradually found its way into writing in the course of a development over thousand of years, thus creating for itself in language and writing the most perfect archive of nonsensuous similarity….So tempo, that swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from the process, would then become, as it were, the effort, or gift, or mind to participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to sink down once more.” *Doctrine of the Similar.*
It is of interest to note, speaking of similarities, that following this essay in the new Selected Writings is a piece called *Short Shadows III*.
Bernstein’s Benjamin in *Shadowtime* is riddled with similarities and clues to further connections and solutions to the rhymes, rhythms and runes underlying both their works- and the innumerable tie-ins between them. Like Benjamin’s, Bernstein’s concept of literary time focuses on harmonics and dissonancesacross languages, cultures and periods. To get *Shadowtime*, you have to work the same way Benjamin worked, like an archeologist searching in the arcades and in the annals of literary history: trying to unlock puzzles, uncover clues, you listen to the similarities, you dig it.
Charles Bernstein had occasion to remind me recently of the interest we share in the concept of art as object. Now, I see why he might have been thinking so much about this topic of late. In his libretto for Brian Ferneyhough's opera which premiered in Munich in May 24, 2004, and will be peformed at Lincoln Center on July 21st and 22cd, Bernstein mentions Walter Benjamin's famous discussion of the Paul Klee
painting Benjamin owned -Angelus Novus- which serves as an insignia for Benjamin's voyage into time,
also functioning as a kind of abacus for decoding -Shadowtime-:
"There is a picture by Klee called *Angelus Novus*. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before *us*, *he* seems one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong the angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly towardsthe future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is *this* storm ("from *On The Concept of History*)
Another essay Bernstein points to in the libretto is Benjamin’s *On the Doctrine of The Similar*.This essay is about the human proclivity for mimesis, a significant topic in itself, but Benjamin rides this horse a bit further than might be expected, discovering in the outreaches of this territory a basis for a theory concerning the underlying equivalence of languages. No surprise that Bernstein would find this intriguing, given his fascination with homolinguistic translation, I happen to have participated in such a writing experiment at the invitation of David Nemeth. It is an uncanny experience working this way; there is an excitement in having the experience of creating a new language with a group of writers- each one translating the poem before, into an new arrangement of words by mimicking the sounds of the previous poem, which in turn had evolved from the one previous, etc.
Benjamin states:
“If, at the dawn of humanity, this reading from stars, entrails, and coincidences was reading per se, and if it provided mediating links to a newer kind of reading, as represented by runes, then one might well assume that this mimetic gift, which was earlier the basis for clairvoyance, very gradually found its way into writing in the course of a development over thousand of years, thus creating for itself in language and writing the most perfect archive of nonsensuous similarity….So tempo, that swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from the process, would then become, as it were, the effort, or gift, or mind to participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to sink down once more.” *Doctrine of the Similar.*
It is of interest to note, speaking of similarities, that following this essay in the new Selected Writings is a piece called *Short Shadows III*.
Bernstein’s Benjamin in *Shadowtime* is riddled with similarities and clues to further connections and solutions to the rhymes, rhythms and runes underlying both their works- and the innumerable tie-ins between them. Like Benjamin’s, Bernstein’s concept of literary time focuses on harmonics and dissonancesacross languages, cultures and periods. To get *Shadowtime*, you have to work the same way Benjamin worked, like an archeologist searching in the arcades and in the annals of literary history: trying to unlock puzzles, uncover clues, you listen to the similarities, you dig it.
Tuesday, July 19
Do Bloggers Dream of Electric Sheep?
Bemsha Swing {click here} remembers to forget.
******
Thought Police in Australia
Mark Young (Pelican Dreaming) {click here} on this Orwellian world.
Bemsha Swing {click here} remembers to forget.
******
Thought Police in Australia
Mark Young (Pelican Dreaming) {click here} on this Orwellian world.
Sunday, July 17
Ideas
1. Writing that is devoid of ideas.
2. Deluged with fact and description, we are left with a craving for writing that is rich in ideas. Ninety- nine percent of writing consists either of some frequently encountered discourse or refers to it.
3. Writing that evolves out of ideas has its own flavor.
4. A lot of poetry points to an idea about poetry and that is all it does. Even if it is lacking its own idea it can refer to an idea about poetry that we support- an innovative idea, for example. This is poetry as fast food.
5. Ideas invariably lead to other ideas- but fast food poetry doesn't completely satisfy the craving for a fresh idea; instead, endows the poems with energy derived from the ideas than engendered the spark of the poems.
6. I enjoy fast food sometimes- and certainly the fast food of poetry. But I know that in the long run it will not sufficiently nourish or meet my craving for writing that is more substantial.
7. An idea may be likened to a perception as compared with raw data or input. An idea frequently combines an interesting observation with a thought about an observation.
8. Since the genesis of perceptions and the ideas constructed out of them involves halting the rush of observations there is an accompanying sense of a slowing down of the rapidity of thought, the stream of consciousness. At such moments you are mounting the beach near the river or the ocean of consciousness.
9. A memory of the ocean may be refreshing and sufficient but is not enough- in itself- to be considered an idea.
10. Two young women friends of similar stature in bathing suits standing side by side on the beach each with a small camera identically placed at their eyes, taking a photo at exactly the same time is itself a theme for an imaginary photo. Ideas, in themselves, have no abode. A photo, in and of itself, projects an idea but of itself does not necessarily encompass an idea. Something that incorporates an idea may not
of itself generate a fresh idea.
11. Like everything else ideas have a life span. Ideas are patient and will wait- this is the secret of
their longevity. Ideas inspire devotion. This places them in realms that offer sustenance. There is no doubt that there are destructive as well as constructive ideas.
12. Tracking the contours of an idea can stimulate a fresh idea. Take measure of feelings that accompany the emergence of ideas, a process with a beat, a rhythm. The beat anticipates the emergence of subsequent ideas echoing and building upon the pattern of the given ones.
*********************************
Complexity and the Failure to Further Understand: Benjamin, Blankness, Bernstein and *Shadowtime*
Today's article in the New York Times Arts Section about Charles Bernstein and Brian Ferneyhough's
Shadowtime (click here), in true Benjaminian spirit, concludes with Charles B. posing a powerful political critique stated in the form of a an aesthetic paradox. [From an interviewconducted with Charles B. by the New YorkTimes.]
The opera will be performed at Lincoln Center on July 21st and 22cd.
From the New York Times arts section, Sunday July 17.
"'Shadowtime' had its premiere last year at the Munich Biennale, and critical reaction ranged widely. The Süddeutsche Zeitung hailed it as "an apex of modern operatic artistry," but The Sunday Times of London described it as overly cerebral, "an abstract idea of an opera rather than the thing itself." The truth may well depend on one's definition of modern opera.
Mr. Bernstein, for his part, readily concedes the many difficulties of "Shadowtime," and argues that they arise not only by design but by necessity. "Clarity is valuable in many situations, but not necessarily in art," he said in a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment. "Many will no doubt be befuddled, just as a work that seeks to be clear risks boring people. These are the risks you have to take."
Yet more seems to be at stake than simply keeping an audience challenged. When pressed, Mr. Bernstein echoes Benjamin's friend and colleague Theodor Adorno, who defended difficult music as having its own social value precisely because it teaches us how to withhold understanding and therefore helps us resist the allure of false clarity in the world beyond the concert hall. Complexity, in other words, is a worthy ideal in art because reality is even more complex and dissonant than the thorniest work of modernism, even if politicians and the commercial culture reassure us that everything is simple, clear and harmonious.
Listeners will be able to judge for themselves the effectiveness of the difficulty of "Shadowtime." Mr. Bernstein insists that its ambiguity and often impenetrable surfaces are all the more crucial because of its subject matter. At the opera's center is what he describes as "the blank space of what happened to Europe between 1940 and 1945." Attempting clarity would be futile, or simply false.
'There have been a lot of very clear books written on the subject of this catastrophe," he said. 'But can anyone say that they truly understand what happened?'"
1. Writing that is devoid of ideas.
2. Deluged with fact and description, we are left with a craving for writing that is rich in ideas. Ninety- nine percent of writing consists either of some frequently encountered discourse or refers to it.
3. Writing that evolves out of ideas has its own flavor.
4. A lot of poetry points to an idea about poetry and that is all it does. Even if it is lacking its own idea it can refer to an idea about poetry that we support- an innovative idea, for example. This is poetry as fast food.
5. Ideas invariably lead to other ideas- but fast food poetry doesn't completely satisfy the craving for a fresh idea; instead, endows the poems with energy derived from the ideas than engendered the spark of the poems.
6. I enjoy fast food sometimes- and certainly the fast food of poetry. But I know that in the long run it will not sufficiently nourish or meet my craving for writing that is more substantial.
7. An idea may be likened to a perception as compared with raw data or input. An idea frequently combines an interesting observation with a thought about an observation.
8. Since the genesis of perceptions and the ideas constructed out of them involves halting the rush of observations there is an accompanying sense of a slowing down of the rapidity of thought, the stream of consciousness. At such moments you are mounting the beach near the river or the ocean of consciousness.
9. A memory of the ocean may be refreshing and sufficient but is not enough- in itself- to be considered an idea.
10. Two young women friends of similar stature in bathing suits standing side by side on the beach each with a small camera identically placed at their eyes, taking a photo at exactly the same time is itself a theme for an imaginary photo. Ideas, in themselves, have no abode. A photo, in and of itself, projects an idea but of itself does not necessarily encompass an idea. Something that incorporates an idea may not
of itself generate a fresh idea.
11. Like everything else ideas have a life span. Ideas are patient and will wait- this is the secret of
their longevity. Ideas inspire devotion. This places them in realms that offer sustenance. There is no doubt that there are destructive as well as constructive ideas.
12. Tracking the contours of an idea can stimulate a fresh idea. Take measure of feelings that accompany the emergence of ideas, a process with a beat, a rhythm. The beat anticipates the emergence of subsequent ideas echoing and building upon the pattern of the given ones.
*********************************
Complexity and the Failure to Further Understand: Benjamin, Blankness, Bernstein and *Shadowtime*
Today's article in the New York Times Arts Section about Charles Bernstein and Brian Ferneyhough's
Shadowtime (click here), in true Benjaminian spirit, concludes with Charles B. posing a powerful political critique stated in the form of a an aesthetic paradox. [From an interviewconducted with Charles B. by the New YorkTimes.]
The opera will be performed at Lincoln Center on July 21st and 22cd.
From the New York Times arts section, Sunday July 17.
"'Shadowtime' had its premiere last year at the Munich Biennale, and critical reaction ranged widely. The Süddeutsche Zeitung hailed it as "an apex of modern operatic artistry," but The Sunday Times of London described it as overly cerebral, "an abstract idea of an opera rather than the thing itself." The truth may well depend on one's definition of modern opera.
Mr. Bernstein, for his part, readily concedes the many difficulties of "Shadowtime," and argues that they arise not only by design but by necessity. "Clarity is valuable in many situations, but not necessarily in art," he said in a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment. "Many will no doubt be befuddled, just as a work that seeks to be clear risks boring people. These are the risks you have to take."
Yet more seems to be at stake than simply keeping an audience challenged. When pressed, Mr. Bernstein echoes Benjamin's friend and colleague Theodor Adorno, who defended difficult music as having its own social value precisely because it teaches us how to withhold understanding and therefore helps us resist the allure of false clarity in the world beyond the concert hall. Complexity, in other words, is a worthy ideal in art because reality is even more complex and dissonant than the thorniest work of modernism, even if politicians and the commercial culture reassure us that everything is simple, clear and harmonious.
Listeners will be able to judge for themselves the effectiveness of the difficulty of "Shadowtime." Mr. Bernstein insists that its ambiguity and often impenetrable surfaces are all the more crucial because of its subject matter. At the opera's center is what he describes as "the blank space of what happened to Europe between 1940 and 1945." Attempting clarity would be futile, or simply false.
'There have been a lot of very clear books written on the subject of this catastrophe," he said. 'But can anyone say that they truly understand what happened?'"
Friday, July 15
[scroll down to Wednesday,
July 13 for *A Midsummer
Night's Masque* (A time-travel
conversation between Emily
Dickenson, Franz Kafka, Sappho,
Laura Riding, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Walter Benjamin, Anne Sexton
and others)]
At The Mouth of a River:
a preview of Vernon Frazer's
*Improvisations*
Geof Huth, in his recent interview by Ron Silliman
and Crag Hill on e-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s {click here}-, states:
"Visual poetry is a borderland. I often use the adjective “brackish”
to describe visual poetry; it exists at the mouths of rivers,
at the point where a plume of fresh water folds into a large
open body of salt water. Some visual poems are heavily
verbal and modestly visual; others are almost completely
visual, merely implying language..."
Visual poetry, hovering in the background
of both poetry and art for decades, is at last
coming in to its own. As with so
many other media phenomena
of late, the web, of course , has
much to do with this. Until now,
distribution of visual poetry, like film,
has remained in the more expensive
range among contemporary trends
in poetry forms.
Crag Hill's blog {click here} and his magazine
*Score* as well as
Geof Huth's blog {click here},
and bloggers such as
Jukka Pekka Kervinen {click here}
Lanny Quarles {click here} and
harry k. stammer {click here}
frequently on the collaborative
blog As-Is {click here}
have greatly
helped to bring current trends in
visual poetry dramatically and
quickly into the limelight.
These efforts, as well as
Ron Silliman's {click here} sudden interest in thisrich phenomenon are clear signals
of a dramatic shift in emphasis
in the world of poetry.
With this backdrop, the arrival of
Vernon Frazer's
monumental *Improvisations* strikes
with the sudden rumble and
clap of a thunderbolt, what Edmund
Wilson called
*the shock of recognition.*
At 8 and 3/4 inches wide,
and 10 and 3/4 inches tall,
the sprawling page layout
comfortably accomodates this
enormous 700 page tome, making
this book one of the longest
and largest work yet of visual poetry-
combining nearly every
imaginable mesh of
print layout and font styles.
One would have to go to a number
of books by Johanna Drucker to find work
of comparable typographical complexity.
The constant alternation of formats makes
-Improvisations- the most pleasurable book
to browse I've seen since Drucker's
work and my favoriate classic of
the form, Frank Kuenstler's
haunting, hard-to-find masterpiece,
*Lens*. Reading the texts themselves
is also consistently engaging,
absorbing and amusing-
Vernon Frazer is a performance
poet working with jazz groups and
has published several CD's.
As Geof Huth says in his recent
interview, there is a fascinating
overlap between the aural and
the visual in much vispo work, a
synaesthetic quality I find fascinating.
My only regret is, having to carry
some groceries home to Brooklyn
from my Manhattan office,
along with Frazer's
book (I received it very recently
and wanted to write about it
immediately) the
book is so heavy I pulled
my back out. But it was worth it!
The book is available from
*Beneath the Underground*
568 Brittany L, Delray Beach, FL, 33446
{scroll down to
Tuesday, July 12 for
*No Exit: Meaning
and Masks in
Contemporary
Poetry*
Monday, July 11,
for Process and Object [in
Wittgenstein's *Zettel*:
Literary Currents
in W and Freud];
Saturday, July 9
for:* Poetry and Thinking:
Thinking for Oneself*
in *Zettel*;}
::see archives for:
Friday, July 8,
*Love is Not A Feeling*:
love put to the test in
*Zettel*; Thursday,
July 7: *The Most
Astounding Things are
Possible*: Thought and
The Infinite in *Zettel*{{
July 13 for *A Midsummer
Night's Masque* (A time-travel
conversation between Emily
Dickenson, Franz Kafka, Sappho,
Laura Riding, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Walter Benjamin, Anne Sexton
and others)]
At The Mouth of a River:
a preview of Vernon Frazer's
*Improvisations*
Geof Huth, in his recent interview by Ron Silliman
and Crag Hill on e-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s {click here}-, states:
"Visual poetry is a borderland. I often use the adjective “brackish”
to describe visual poetry; it exists at the mouths of rivers,
at the point where a plume of fresh water folds into a large
open body of salt water. Some visual poems are heavily
verbal and modestly visual; others are almost completely
visual, merely implying language..."
Visual poetry, hovering in the background
of both poetry and art for decades, is at last
coming in to its own. As with so
many other media phenomena
of late, the web, of course , has
much to do with this. Until now,
distribution of visual poetry, like film,
has remained in the more expensive
range among contemporary trends
in poetry forms.
Crag Hill's blog {click here} and his magazine
*Score* as well as
Geof Huth's blog {click here},
and bloggers such as
Jukka Pekka Kervinen {click here}
Lanny Quarles {click here} and
harry k. stammer {click here}
frequently on the collaborative
blog As-Is {click here}
have greatly
helped to bring current trends in
visual poetry dramatically and
quickly into the limelight.
These efforts, as well as
Ron Silliman's {click here} sudden interest in thisrich phenomenon are clear signals
of a dramatic shift in emphasis
in the world of poetry.
With this backdrop, the arrival of
Vernon Frazer's
monumental *Improvisations* strikes
with the sudden rumble and
clap of a thunderbolt, what Edmund
Wilson called
*the shock of recognition.*
At 8 and 3/4 inches wide,
and 10 and 3/4 inches tall,
the sprawling page layout
comfortably accomodates this
enormous 700 page tome, making
this book one of the longest
and largest work yet of visual poetry-
combining nearly every
imaginable mesh of
print layout and font styles.
One would have to go to a number
of books by Johanna Drucker to find work
of comparable typographical complexity.
The constant alternation of formats makes
-Improvisations- the most pleasurable book
to browse I've seen since Drucker's
work and my favoriate classic of
the form, Frank Kuenstler's
haunting, hard-to-find masterpiece,
*Lens*. Reading the texts themselves
is also consistently engaging,
absorbing and amusing-
Vernon Frazer is a performance
poet working with jazz groups and
has published several CD's.
As Geof Huth says in his recent
interview, there is a fascinating
overlap between the aural and
the visual in much vispo work, a
synaesthetic quality I find fascinating.
My only regret is, having to carry
some groceries home to Brooklyn
from my Manhattan office,
along with Frazer's
book (I received it very recently
and wanted to write about it
immediately) the
book is so heavy I pulled
my back out. But it was worth it!
The book is available from
*Beneath the Underground*
568 Brittany L, Delray Beach, FL, 33446
{scroll down to
Tuesday, July 12 for
*No Exit: Meaning
and Masks in
Contemporary
Poetry*
Monday, July 11,
for Process and Object [in
Wittgenstein's *Zettel*:
Literary Currents
in W and Freud];
Saturday, July 9
for:* Poetry and Thinking:
Thinking for Oneself*
in *Zettel*;}
::see archives for:
Friday, July 8,
*Love is Not A Feeling*:
love put to the test in
*Zettel*; Thursday,
July 7: *The Most
Astounding Things are
Possible*: Thought and
The Infinite in *Zettel*{{
Thursday, July 14
Spoiling The Game
"293. I give the rules of a game. The
other party makes a move, perfectly
in accord with the rules, whose
possibility I had not forerseen, and
which spoils the game, that is, as I
had wanted it to be. I now have to
say: 'i give bad rules; I must change
or add to my rules.'
So in this way have I a picture of the
game in advance? In a sense, Yes.
It was surely possible, for example, for me
not to have foreseen that a quadratic
equation need have no real root.
Thus the rule leads me to something
of which I say: 'I did not expect
this pattern: I expected a solution like
*this*...'"
Ludwig Wittgentstein
*Zettel*
**********************************
"I'd like to say how discouraged
and disappointed I feel, but
discreetly I don't; I'd like to say
how proud I am that nonetheless
I push on, but modestly I won't.
Then the two cancel each other
out."
from *The Boundary of Blur*
(Roof, 1993)
**********************************
"293. I give the rules of a game. The
other party makes a move, perfectly
in accord with the rules, whose
possibility I had not forerseen, and
which spoils the game, that is, as I
had wanted it to be. I now have to
say: 'i give bad rules; I must change
or add to my rules.'
So in this way have I a picture of the
game in advance? In a sense, Yes.
It was surely possible, for example, for me
not to have foreseen that a quadratic
equation need have no real root.
Thus the rule leads me to something
of which I say: 'I did not expect
this pattern: I expected a solution like
*this*...'"
Ludwig Wittgentstein
*Zettel*
**********************************
"I'd like to say how discouraged
and disappointed I feel, but
discreetly I don't; I'd like to say
how proud I am that nonetheless
I push on, but modestly I won't.
Then the two cancel each other
out."
from *The Boundary of Blur*
(Roof, 1993)
**********************************
Wednesday, July 13
The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging:
A Mid-Summer Night’s Masque
Emily Dickenson: “Publication/-is the Auction
Of the mind of Man-“
Anne Sexton: “Language has nothing to do with
rational thought. I think that’s why I get
so horribly furious and disturbed with rational
thought.
Language is the opposite of the way a machine works.
Language is poetry, maybe? But not all language is
poetry. Nor is all poetry language….Who, me? Sailing
around like crazy in LANGUAGE whatever it is and
then brought up short by reality (what is it, really?)…”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “359. Could a machine think?- Could
it be in pain?-Well, is the human body to be called
such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible
to being such a machine.
360. But a machine cannot think!- Is that an empirical
statement? No. We only say of a human being and what
is like one that it thinks. We also say it of dolls
and no doubt of spirits too.”
Laura Riding: “How we happen to be both human,
of the material of the machine…
The one original substance is one.
Two is two’s destruction.
But love is the single word wherein
The double murder of the machine
Is denied
In one suicide…”
Charlotte Salomon: “You’d do better to get
absorbed in the book you’re thinking
of writing.”
Walter Benjamin: “Because he is unable to
hold a vision he forces the machinist and
the decorative artist into his service.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The chair is thinking
to itself…WHERE? In one of its parts? Or
outside its body; in the air around it?
Phillip K. Dick: “’There are eleven paraworlds.’”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “Discard every memory. Of./
Even before they could. Surge themselves.
Forgotten so, easily,/not even as associations.”
Franz Kafka: “To avoid an error in the use of words:
What is to be deliberately destroyed must first have
been quite soundly conserved; what crumbles, crumbles,
but cannot be destroyed.”
Robert Smithson: “Cracked, broken, shattered; the
walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation,
corrosion, decomposition, disintegration, rock
creep, debris slides, mid flow, avalanche were everywhere
in evidence.”
Liubov Popova: “We are breaking with the past
because we do not believe it anymore, because
its hypotheses are unacceptable…”
Phillip K. Dick: “But something..has replaced it.
Perhaps an alternate paraworld…”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Might it not actually happen
that a dreamer, as it were emerging from the dream,
said in his sleep, ‘I am dreaming’?”
Sappho: “The moon and the Pleides/are set.
It is midnight/and time spins away. I lie in my bed alone.”
Emily Dickenson: “The words the happy say/
Are paltry melody/But those the silent feel/
Are beautiful-“
Sappho: “Someone honored me, giving me
the secret of their craft.”
Charlotte Salomon: “For a long time I was covered
by the earth. And I woke up among corpses. And when
I miraculously came home again, and when I then-
I had partially lost my memory.”
Walter Benjamin: "Warmth is ebbing from things.
The objects of daily use gently but insistently
repel us."
Anne Sexton: “Well, nevermind. I think language
is beautiful. I even think insanity is beautiful
(surely the root of language), except that it
is painful.”
Laura Riding: “Will beauty, can beauty
allay the deficiency?/(Never quite. Never quite).”
Franz Kafka: “You have harnessed yourself
ridiculously for this world.”
Theesa Hak Kyung Cha: “If words are to
be uttered, they would be from behind
the partition. Unaccountable is distance,
time to transport from this very minute.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “You learned the ‘concept’
“pain” when you learned language.”
Robert Smithson: “The deeper the artist
sinks into the time stream the more
it becomes “oblivion”…
Anne Sexton: “But then I found this girl
(very crazy of course) [like me I guess]
who talked language. What a relief!”
Emily Dickenson: “Her face was a bed of hair,
Like flowers in a plot-
Her hand was whiter than the sperm
That feeds the sacred light.”
Sappho: “Don’t try to bend a crazed heart.”
Walter Benjamin: "The work is a death
mask of its conception."
Franz Kafka: “Intercourse with human beings
seduces one to self contemplation.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “And what do I point to
by the inner activity of listening? To the sound
that comes to my ears, and to the silence when I
hear ‘nothing’?”
Emily Dickenson: “Whoever disenchants
A single human soul/By failure of irreverence/
Is guilty of the whole.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “Unlike birth, unlike
death, “this” redeemed through own memory
and presumes a separate conclusion.
Franz Kafka: “From a real antagonist, boundless
courage flows into you.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “We do not say that “possibly” a dog
talks to itself. Is that because we are so minutely
acquainted with its soul?”
Laura Riding: "The dogs still bark,
And something is not clear.
From ignorance dogs barked always.
How to enlighten them?
They do but bark...
Shall we seem to disappear
Until dogs stop barking?
There is no other way to explain."
Anne Sexton: “I feel, sometimes, sorry about
my poetry…not so far as the ‘literary world” is
concerned… but as far as the people in Wellesley
and the surrounding towns are concerned. It shocks
them and I can understand why…
You see, inside is the
place poems come from…”
Sappho : “The black sleep of night closes my eyes.”
A Mid-Summer Night’s Masque
Emily Dickenson: “Publication/-is the Auction
Of the mind of Man-“
Anne Sexton: “Language has nothing to do with
rational thought. I think that’s why I get
so horribly furious and disturbed with rational
thought.
Language is the opposite of the way a machine works.
Language is poetry, maybe? But not all language is
poetry. Nor is all poetry language….Who, me? Sailing
around like crazy in LANGUAGE whatever it is and
then brought up short by reality (what is it, really?)…”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “359. Could a machine think?- Could
it be in pain?-Well, is the human body to be called
such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible
to being such a machine.
360. But a machine cannot think!- Is that an empirical
statement? No. We only say of a human being and what
is like one that it thinks. We also say it of dolls
and no doubt of spirits too.”
Laura Riding: “How we happen to be both human,
of the material of the machine…
The one original substance is one.
Two is two’s destruction.
But love is the single word wherein
The double murder of the machine
Is denied
In one suicide…”
Charlotte Salomon: “You’d do better to get
absorbed in the book you’re thinking
of writing.”
Walter Benjamin: “Because he is unable to
hold a vision he forces the machinist and
the decorative artist into his service.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The chair is thinking
to itself…WHERE? In one of its parts? Or
outside its body; in the air around it?
Phillip K. Dick: “’There are eleven paraworlds.’”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “Discard every memory. Of./
Even before they could. Surge themselves.
Forgotten so, easily,/not even as associations.”
Franz Kafka: “To avoid an error in the use of words:
What is to be deliberately destroyed must first have
been quite soundly conserved; what crumbles, crumbles,
but cannot be destroyed.”
Robert Smithson: “Cracked, broken, shattered; the
walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation,
corrosion, decomposition, disintegration, rock
creep, debris slides, mid flow, avalanche were everywhere
in evidence.”
Liubov Popova: “We are breaking with the past
because we do not believe it anymore, because
its hypotheses are unacceptable…”
Phillip K. Dick: “But something..has replaced it.
Perhaps an alternate paraworld…”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Might it not actually happen
that a dreamer, as it were emerging from the dream,
said in his sleep, ‘I am dreaming’?”
Sappho: “The moon and the Pleides/are set.
It is midnight/and time spins away. I lie in my bed alone.”
Emily Dickenson: “The words the happy say/
Are paltry melody/But those the silent feel/
Are beautiful-“
Sappho: “Someone honored me, giving me
the secret of their craft.”
Charlotte Salomon: “For a long time I was covered
by the earth. And I woke up among corpses. And when
I miraculously came home again, and when I then-
I had partially lost my memory.”
Walter Benjamin: "Warmth is ebbing from things.
The objects of daily use gently but insistently
repel us."
Anne Sexton: “Well, nevermind. I think language
is beautiful. I even think insanity is beautiful
(surely the root of language), except that it
is painful.”
Laura Riding: “Will beauty, can beauty
allay the deficiency?/(Never quite. Never quite).”
Franz Kafka: “You have harnessed yourself
ridiculously for this world.”
Theesa Hak Kyung Cha: “If words are to
be uttered, they would be from behind
the partition. Unaccountable is distance,
time to transport from this very minute.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “You learned the ‘concept’
“pain” when you learned language.”
Robert Smithson: “The deeper the artist
sinks into the time stream the more
it becomes “oblivion”…
Anne Sexton: “But then I found this girl
(very crazy of course) [like me I guess]
who talked language. What a relief!”
Emily Dickenson: “Her face was a bed of hair,
Like flowers in a plot-
Her hand was whiter than the sperm
That feeds the sacred light.”
Sappho: “Don’t try to bend a crazed heart.”
Walter Benjamin: "The work is a death
mask of its conception."
Franz Kafka: “Intercourse with human beings
seduces one to self contemplation.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “And what do I point to
by the inner activity of listening? To the sound
that comes to my ears, and to the silence when I
hear ‘nothing’?”
Emily Dickenson: “Whoever disenchants
A single human soul/By failure of irreverence/
Is guilty of the whole.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “Unlike birth, unlike
death, “this” redeemed through own memory
and presumes a separate conclusion.
Franz Kafka: “From a real antagonist, boundless
courage flows into you.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “We do not say that “possibly” a dog
talks to itself. Is that because we are so minutely
acquainted with its soul?”
Laura Riding: "The dogs still bark,
And something is not clear.
From ignorance dogs barked always.
How to enlighten them?
They do but bark...
Shall we seem to disappear
Until dogs stop barking?
There is no other way to explain."
Anne Sexton: “I feel, sometimes, sorry about
my poetry…not so far as the ‘literary world” is
concerned… but as far as the people in Wellesley
and the surrounding towns are concerned. It shocks
them and I can understand why…
You see, inside is the
place poems come from…”
Sappho : “The black sleep of night closes my eyes.”
Tuesday, July 12
Today: No Exit: Meanings
and Masks in Contemporary
Poetry and in Wittgenstein's
*Philosophical Investigations*
scroll down to Monday, July 11,
for Process and Object [in
Wittgenstein's *Zettel*:
Literary Currents
in W and Freud];
Saturday, July 9
for:* Poetry and Thinking:
Thinking for Oneself*
in *Zettel*; also
Limetree, Bemsha Swing
and :fait accompli: in the
Bemsha Swing comments
section; Friday, July 8,
*Love is Not A Feeling*:
love put to the test in
*Zettel*; Thursday,
July 7: *The Most
Astounding Things are
Possible*: Thought and
The Infinite in *Zettel*]
No Exit
We live in a world in which we are
deluged daily by words, ideas,
facts, accounts, images. Still,
we frequently feel utterly isolated,
why? Kafka's *Metamorphosis*
provided us with one of the best
explanations as to why. The contemporary
world is intrusive, and the final result
of this constant intrusiveness is the
squashing of any possible feeling of
significance.
Although we are drowned in meanings
every moment of our lives, our sense
of there being much significance to our
meanings or our experiences is
constantly eroding. Like Gregor
Samsa reduced to insect dimensions,
we are utterly dwarfed by forces infinitely
larger than ourselves.There are, of course,
innumerable causes for this, among
them the fact that technology has made
it possible for groups, large and small,
to eliminate our very existence quite
easily. But there are other reasons.
The expropriation of the very process
of extracting a sense of
significance from our experiences as individuals
by the marketplace of meaning-making
results in a internal feeling of powerlessness
and insignificance. We hang on every report
as to the facts and numbers supporting this;
information-gathering offers our only sense of
control- a form of control
obviously extremely ephemeral,
elusive and mostly upsetting and confusing.
One development in contemporary poetry
offers a direction out of this dilemma by
suggesting that one can play, not only
with meanings, but with the very process of
meaning-making. Poets seize on the
pleasures and powers of this process
and find a way to breathe in the open
air of poetic expression. Yet
there is no excaping the *weltenshaung*
of one's era. The poetry, once introduced
into the public arena, invites poets
back into the very social dynamics
they sought to excape in writing it.
The poet never wrote the work to
increase the sense of isolation, on
the contrary. Yet the social dynamics
that squeeze the sense of significance
out of even the most committed efforts on part of individuals
to influence such dynamics are inexorable.
Hence, the contemporary direction in poetry towards
private languages. Such languages offer
poets an entry into a circle of readers who
seek an exit from the larger social
dynamic through work which disgusts people
who enthusiastically avow the powerful, public,
"civic" forces which resemble the actions of
a game, even a "language game," but a
language game that has more resemblance a football
game, than a game of questioning and interpreting
aesthetic paradoxes.. The craving for what is no longer
possible in conventional life- a feeling of
personal significance, however, paradoxically returns
the circle of makers of private language
right back to the game-as-usual
social dynamics of team
sports. As Phillip K. Dick believed, we've
never actually exited the era of the Roman Circus.
Wittgenstein's ideas offer much to think
about in this realm. While ostensibly
he supports the parameters of conventional
reality -creation through supporting traditional
behavioristic modes of language iinterpretation,
he weaves into his work an underlying series of
paradoxes, underlining the ambiguities,
ambivalences, debates
and paradoxes that
pervade the very fabric of the social reality
of language.
......
"243. A human being can encourage himself,
give himself orders and obey, blame and punish
himself; he can ask himself a question and answer
it. We could even imagine human beings who
spoke only in monologue; who accompanied
their activities by talking to themselves.- An
explorer who watched them and listened to
their talk might succeed in translating their
language into ours. (This would enable him to
predict these people's actions correctly, for
he also hears them making resolutions and
decisions.)
But could we also imagine a language in which
a person could write down or give social
expression to his inner experiences- his feelings,
moods, and the rest- for his private use?- Well,
can't we do so in our ordinary language?-
But that is not what I mean. The individual
words of this language are to refer to what can only
be known to the person speaking; to his
immediate private sensations. So another
person cannot understand the language."
(*Philosophical Investigations*-
Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Wittgenstein plays with the concept of private
language only to finally try to overrule it.
But the perpetual flirting with the notion, finally,
makes it even more attractive. This is often when
he turns to his fascination with music.
Like Kafka, Wittgenstein's
obsessions become our
own because of his scrupulous
loyalty to discovering
the truth through self and
social confrontations. This is
the other side of the
contemporary poet's dedication
to authenticity by uncovering and revealing
experience through a paradoxial
dedication to seeking
modes of camoflage.
A Queer Process
"196. In our failure to understand the use
of a word we take it as the expression
of a queer "process." (As we think of time
as a queer medium, of the mnd as a queer
kind of being.)
"197. 'It's as if we could grasp the whole use
of a word in a flash.'- And that is just
what we say we do. That is to say: we
sometimes describe what we do in these
words. But there is nothing astonishing,
nothing queer, about what happens. It becomes
queer when we are led to think that the
future development must in some way already
be present in the act of grasping the use and
yet isn't present....."
*****************************
As discussed below, Wittgenstein here
elucidates his discomfort with some of the concepts
employed in developmental psychology.
*************
Understanding a Poem
"531. We speak of understanding a sentence
in the sense in which it can be replaced by
another which says the same; but also in the
sense in which it cannot be replaced by any
other. (Any more than one musical theme
can be replaced by another).
In the one case the thought in the sentence is
something common to different sentences;
in the other, something that is expressed only
by these words in these positions. (Understanding
a poem)."
"532. Then has 'understanding' two different meanings here?-
I would rather say that these kinds of use of 'understanding'
make up its meaning, make up my *concept* of understanding.
For I want to apply the word 'understanding' to all this."
"533. But in the second case, how can one explain the
expression, transmit one's comprehension? Ask yourself:
How does one *lead* anyone to comprehension of a poem
or of a theme? The answer to this tells us how
meaning is explained here."
*******************
Wittgenstein makes it clear in the above aphorisms that he
has a firm grasp about what how poetry wants to be and should be understood.
But in many of the following sections he comes back to a behavioristic,
descriptive approach.
Wittgenstein is scrupulous- that is a good part of the fascination.
He has his approach- but he recognizes and confronts all the
the other approaches he can learn and find out about, having to do
with his themes, continually
applying his rigorous rules of logical thinking. He is a logician,
but one with a keen sense of and interest in how people think and feel
and explain how they think and feel to themselves and each other.
And now and then, in the midst of a logical exposition,
there are sudden moments of intense lyric
compression: These are all the more moving because of the
rigorous, dry, logical approach he generally employs.
******************
"543. Can I not say: a cry, a laugh are full of meaning?
And that means, roughly: much can be gathered from them."
****************
Wittgenstein's intense earnestness, concern and
trust in his pursuit of truth contribute to a powerful, inexorable
poetic undercurrent throughout much of his writing.
quotations are from:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, *Philosophical
Investigations*
translated by G.E,M. Anscombe
Blackwell Publishing
2001, first edition 1953
************************************
More strumming by Kasey to *Zettel* under the
Limetree {click here}
************************************
3 "Drop Dead Beautiful" Aphorisms About Love
from David Hess (Orpheus in Boxers) {click here}
and Masks in Contemporary
Poetry and in Wittgenstein's
*Philosophical Investigations*
scroll down to Monday, July 11,
for Process and Object [in
Wittgenstein's *Zettel*:
Literary Currents
in W and Freud];
Saturday, July 9
for:* Poetry and Thinking:
Thinking for Oneself*
in *Zettel*; also
Limetree, Bemsha Swing
and :fait accompli: in the
Bemsha Swing comments
section; Friday, July 8,
*Love is Not A Feeling*:
love put to the test in
*Zettel*; Thursday,
July 7: *The Most
Astounding Things are
Possible*: Thought and
The Infinite in *Zettel*]
No Exit
We live in a world in which we are
deluged daily by words, ideas,
facts, accounts, images. Still,
we frequently feel utterly isolated,
why? Kafka's *Metamorphosis*
provided us with one of the best
explanations as to why. The contemporary
world is intrusive, and the final result
of this constant intrusiveness is the
squashing of any possible feeling of
significance.
Although we are drowned in meanings
every moment of our lives, our sense
of there being much significance to our
meanings or our experiences is
constantly eroding. Like Gregor
Samsa reduced to insect dimensions,
we are utterly dwarfed by forces infinitely
larger than ourselves.There are, of course,
innumerable causes for this, among
them the fact that technology has made
it possible for groups, large and small,
to eliminate our very existence quite
easily. But there are other reasons.
The expropriation of the very process
of extracting a sense of
significance from our experiences as individuals
by the marketplace of meaning-making
results in a internal feeling of powerlessness
and insignificance. We hang on every report
as to the facts and numbers supporting this;
information-gathering offers our only sense of
control- a form of control
obviously extremely ephemeral,
elusive and mostly upsetting and confusing.
One development in contemporary poetry
offers a direction out of this dilemma by
suggesting that one can play, not only
with meanings, but with the very process of
meaning-making. Poets seize on the
pleasures and powers of this process
and find a way to breathe in the open
air of poetic expression. Yet
there is no excaping the *weltenshaung*
of one's era. The poetry, once introduced
into the public arena, invites poets
back into the very social dynamics
they sought to excape in writing it.
The poet never wrote the work to
increase the sense of isolation, on
the contrary. Yet the social dynamics
that squeeze the sense of significance
out of even the most committed efforts on part of individuals
to influence such dynamics are inexorable.
Hence, the contemporary direction in poetry towards
private languages. Such languages offer
poets an entry into a circle of readers who
seek an exit from the larger social
dynamic through work which disgusts people
who enthusiastically avow the powerful, public,
"civic" forces which resemble the actions of
a game, even a "language game," but a
language game that has more resemblance a football
game, than a game of questioning and interpreting
aesthetic paradoxes.. The craving for what is no longer
possible in conventional life- a feeling of
personal significance, however, paradoxically returns
the circle of makers of private language
right back to the game-as-usual
social dynamics of team
sports. As Phillip K. Dick believed, we've
never actually exited the era of the Roman Circus.
Wittgenstein's ideas offer much to think
about in this realm. While ostensibly
he supports the parameters of conventional
reality -creation through supporting traditional
behavioristic modes of language iinterpretation,
he weaves into his work an underlying series of
paradoxes, underlining the ambiguities,
ambivalences, debates
and paradoxes that
pervade the very fabric of the social reality
of language.
......
"243. A human being can encourage himself,
give himself orders and obey, blame and punish
himself; he can ask himself a question and answer
it. We could even imagine human beings who
spoke only in monologue; who accompanied
their activities by talking to themselves.- An
explorer who watched them and listened to
their talk might succeed in translating their
language into ours. (This would enable him to
predict these people's actions correctly, for
he also hears them making resolutions and
decisions.)
But could we also imagine a language in which
a person could write down or give social
expression to his inner experiences- his feelings,
moods, and the rest- for his private use?- Well,
can't we do so in our ordinary language?-
But that is not what I mean. The individual
words of this language are to refer to what can only
be known to the person speaking; to his
immediate private sensations. So another
person cannot understand the language."
(*Philosophical Investigations*-
Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Wittgenstein plays with the concept of private
language only to finally try to overrule it.
But the perpetual flirting with the notion, finally,
makes it even more attractive. This is often when
he turns to his fascination with music.
Like Kafka, Wittgenstein's
obsessions become our
own because of his scrupulous
loyalty to discovering
the truth through self and
social confrontations. This is
the other side of the
contemporary poet's dedication
to authenticity by uncovering and revealing
experience through a paradoxial
dedication to seeking
modes of camoflage.
A Queer Process
"196. In our failure to understand the use
of a word we take it as the expression
of a queer "process." (As we think of time
as a queer medium, of the mnd as a queer
kind of being.)
"197. 'It's as if we could grasp the whole use
of a word in a flash.'- And that is just
what we say we do. That is to say: we
sometimes describe what we do in these
words. But there is nothing astonishing,
nothing queer, about what happens. It becomes
queer when we are led to think that the
future development must in some way already
be present in the act of grasping the use and
yet isn't present....."
*****************************
As discussed below, Wittgenstein here
elucidates his discomfort with some of the concepts
employed in developmental psychology.
*************
Understanding a Poem
"531. We speak of understanding a sentence
in the sense in which it can be replaced by
another which says the same; but also in the
sense in which it cannot be replaced by any
other. (Any more than one musical theme
can be replaced by another).
In the one case the thought in the sentence is
something common to different sentences;
in the other, something that is expressed only
by these words in these positions. (Understanding
a poem)."
"532. Then has 'understanding' two different meanings here?-
I would rather say that these kinds of use of 'understanding'
make up its meaning, make up my *concept* of understanding.
For I want to apply the word 'understanding' to all this."
"533. But in the second case, how can one explain the
expression, transmit one's comprehension? Ask yourself:
How does one *lead* anyone to comprehension of a poem
or of a theme? The answer to this tells us how
meaning is explained here."
*******************
Wittgenstein makes it clear in the above aphorisms that he
has a firm grasp about what how poetry wants to be and should be understood.
But in many of the following sections he comes back to a behavioristic,
descriptive approach.
Wittgenstein is scrupulous- that is a good part of the fascination.
He has his approach- but he recognizes and confronts all the
the other approaches he can learn and find out about, having to do
with his themes, continually
applying his rigorous rules of logical thinking. He is a logician,
but one with a keen sense of and interest in how people think and feel
and explain how they think and feel to themselves and each other.
And now and then, in the midst of a logical exposition,
there are sudden moments of intense lyric
compression: These are all the more moving because of the
rigorous, dry, logical approach he generally employs.
******************
"543. Can I not say: a cry, a laugh are full of meaning?
And that means, roughly: much can be gathered from them."
****************
Wittgenstein's intense earnestness, concern and
trust in his pursuit of truth contribute to a powerful, inexorable
poetic undercurrent throughout much of his writing.
quotations are from:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, *Philosophical
Investigations*
translated by G.E,M. Anscombe
Blackwell Publishing
2001, first edition 1953
************************************
More strumming by Kasey to *Zettel* under the
Limetree {click here}
************************************
3 "Drop Dead Beautiful" Aphorisms About Love
from David Hess (Orpheus in Boxers) {click here}
Monday, July 11
Process and Object
"It somehow worries us that the thought
in a sentence is not wholly present
at any one moment. We regard it as an
object which we are making and have
never got all there, for no sooner does
one part appear than another vanishes."
from *Zettel* by Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of California Press, 1967
Wittgenstein was fascinated by Freud
and much has been written about the
differences between the two theorists.
Again and again, W seems to be on the
verge of embracing the developmental
aspect of psychoanalytic thinking; then
he ever more staunchly
returns to the behavioristic model.
As W acknowledges above, anyone
fascinated with the process
aspect of thinking
and experience comes to
question the behavioristic
approach with chooses to focus on
object over subject. But the two are
inevitably intertwined.
There is a longing in Wittgenstein for
a clear-cut distinction between what
is correct and what is incorrect, a
mathematician's understandable
yearning for answers.
Pyschoanalysis shows that
the rational element in experience is
never permanently distinguishable
from the irrational element, though
mental health depends on a
continual effort to distinguish them,
especially in times of conflict.
Both Wittgenstein and Freud
were drawn to literary insights
and examples. Both recognized
the irrational element in poetry
and art, but each in their own
way were driven to discover methods
enabling their work to counter
their, you might say, literary
tendencies, with logic and science.
But an argument could be made
that their most durable contributions
remain essentially literary.
It appears now that one of Freud's
enduring contributions was to
transpose literary methods, processes
and insights into a form of psychological
therapy he called psychoanalysis.
Although he acknowledged that the poets
preceded him, he grounded his psychoanalystic
system and organization on scientific models.
Wittgenstein also likened his philosophical work
to a kind of therapy, applicable, he said, to
"philosophical cramps."
Again and again attempts on the
part of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein
and Freud to incorporate
and submerge the successes
of literary processes and
contributions to culture
into an overarching system
of cultural intervention
have faded in time.
What does appear to happen is that
the literary domain grows ever
larger and more complex. Freud
helped to bring literary thinking into the
psychiatric domain; Wittgenstein,
like Derrida, helped to return its
energies and powers into the
philosophical/scientific
sphere.
Repeatedly, and cyclically,
the literary strain in culture
turns around and absorbs
and encompasses such lasting,
powerful contributions
helping to insure their permanency.
Nietzche is certainly another
striking example of such an effort;
Derrida another. In other words,
philosophy and psychology's
cultural territory expands; only
to be absorbed, historically,
into the annals of literature.
Might this be partly because the
literary river continually gains
in momentum over time due
to its essentially individualistic
international, and time-
defying character?
Of course, during fascist eras
like ours, this ultimate cultural
supremacy appears eclipsed
by the warlike character of
the ruling classes.Yet everyone
suspects the pen is mightier
than the sword- and systems-
but sadly, it appears,
only in the long run.
*******************************
The Emperor of Ice Cream: What Does It All Mean?
the Limetree (KSM) {click here}
riffs a long, cool, soulful solo on themes
developed on Bemsha Swing
and here of late, including some of our
own wistful whistling of melodies out
of Ludwig W's *Zettel*; Kasey's the
second blogger to jam on
Jonathan Mayhew's theme on
poetic thinking {click here}
until exhaustion. Whose next?
"It somehow worries us that the thought
in a sentence is not wholly present
at any one moment. We regard it as an
object which we are making and have
never got all there, for no sooner does
one part appear than another vanishes."
from *Zettel* by Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of California Press, 1967
Wittgenstein was fascinated by Freud
and much has been written about the
differences between the two theorists.
Again and again, W seems to be on the
verge of embracing the developmental
aspect of psychoanalytic thinking; then
he ever more staunchly
returns to the behavioristic model.
As W acknowledges above, anyone
fascinated with the process
aspect of thinking
and experience comes to
question the behavioristic
approach with chooses to focus on
object over subject. But the two are
inevitably intertwined.
There is a longing in Wittgenstein for
a clear-cut distinction between what
is correct and what is incorrect, a
mathematician's understandable
yearning for answers.
Pyschoanalysis shows that
the rational element in experience is
never permanently distinguishable
from the irrational element, though
mental health depends on a
continual effort to distinguish them,
especially in times of conflict.
Both Wittgenstein and Freud
were drawn to literary insights
and examples. Both recognized
the irrational element in poetry
and art, but each in their own
way were driven to discover methods
enabling their work to counter
their, you might say, literary
tendencies, with logic and science.
But an argument could be made
that their most durable contributions
remain essentially literary.
It appears now that one of Freud's
enduring contributions was to
transpose literary methods, processes
and insights into a form of psychological
therapy he called psychoanalysis.
Although he acknowledged that the poets
preceded him, he grounded his psychoanalystic
system and organization on scientific models.
Wittgenstein also likened his philosophical work
to a kind of therapy, applicable, he said, to
"philosophical cramps."
Again and again attempts on the
part of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein
and Freud to incorporate
and submerge the successes
of literary processes and
contributions to culture
into an overarching system
of cultural intervention
have faded in time.
What does appear to happen is that
the literary domain grows ever
larger and more complex. Freud
helped to bring literary thinking into the
psychiatric domain; Wittgenstein,
like Derrida, helped to return its
energies and powers into the
philosophical/scientific
sphere.
Repeatedly, and cyclically,
the literary strain in culture
turns around and absorbs
and encompasses such lasting,
powerful contributions
helping to insure their permanency.
Nietzche is certainly another
striking example of such an effort;
Derrida another. In other words,
philosophy and psychology's
cultural territory expands; only
to be absorbed, historically,
into the annals of literature.
Might this be partly because the
literary river continually gains
in momentum over time due
to its essentially individualistic
international, and time-
defying character?
Of course, during fascist eras
like ours, this ultimate cultural
supremacy appears eclipsed
by the warlike character of
the ruling classes.Yet everyone
suspects the pen is mightier
than the sword- and systems-
but sadly, it appears,
only in the long run.
*******************************
The Emperor of Ice Cream: What Does It All Mean?
the Limetree (KSM) {click here}
riffs a long, cool, soulful solo on themes
developed on Bemsha Swing
and here of late, including some of our
own wistful whistling of melodies out
of Ludwig W's *Zettel*; Kasey's the
second blogger to jam on
Jonathan Mayhew's theme on
poetic thinking {click here}
until exhaustion. Whose next?
Sunday, July 10
Virtual Flaneurs in the Cyber-Arcades
Jonathan Mayhew (Bemsha Swing} and ::fait accompli:: chat about:
poetry publishing, poetry careers, and more.
Jonathan Mayhew (Bemsha Swing} and ::fait accompli:: chat about:
poetry publishing, poetry careers, and more.
Saturday, July 9
Poetry as Thinking
Interesting discussion right now on
Bemsha Swing {click here}.
What Kasey seems to be suggesting is that
Jonathan is preaching to the
choir-and that, in some ways, all contemporary
poetry readers are basically in that choir already.
Whether or not poetry is a kind of thinking
(what happened to feeling-or imagining- or pretending- or
listening?) for the readers Jonathan is talking about-
poetry must- like any kind of verbal construct- be
understandable- or better yet, be completely decipherable;
the poet is creating- or miming- or evoking- a system,
hopefully a unique one, but one that in the best cases is
reducible to that which is always already present in the
world's knowledge base. In other words, these readers would
completely agree that poetry is a form of thinking- but thinking
that is eminently decipherable or decodable as must be any
form of *rational* thinking. Otherwise it is nonsense-
or worse yet, irrational nonsense.
For Wittgenstein, I see that poetry and
music create a kind of language.
He says [in *Zettel*]: "A poet's words can pierce us. And
that is of course *causally* connected with the
use that they have in our life. And it is also connected
with the way in which, comfortably to this use, we let
our thoughts roam up and down in
the familiar surroundings of the words."
For me, the key word here is *familiar.*
Without doubt, I would side with the group that
considers poetry a form of thinking-
But I want more.
I enjoy it most when poetry strives to
create a context in which readers-
in attending to the process of connecting with the poems-
also feel emboldened to construct their own modes of thinking, that
is - to further develop the ability- and the desire: *to think for oneself.*
For me, poetry is one crucial jumping off point in that pursuit- but
not the only one- or even necessarily the most effective one
sometimes. Although I've participated in a couple of schools
of poetry myself- including for awhile- the latter day New York School-
i am apparently not quite as interested as Jonathan might be- at the present
time anyway-
in school construction and maintenance
or poetry career construction and maintenance, for
that matter. This hierarchy-building and
team-building stuff sometimes gets on my nerves,
quite frankly. Poets
need schools because "no one listens to poetry."
But poetry school membership can exact
a painful price-especially in the
thinking for oneself department.
Thinking for oneself is not as easy as it sounds.
Some might picture this idea
as a kind of pragmatism, or rationality.
What I am getting at is efficacy in an attempt to encompass
all of one's experience-the world's experience-as it unfurls-
by extending the parameters of the limits of one's
understanding- which invariably comes around to
including self-transformation- the willingness to
accept change-particularly difficult change-
the essence of learning. I wish I could state
this a little less pretentiously- but sheez, it's
2:45 am!
***********************************************
Gustaf Sobin dead at 70
Some work was published in
Facture 1 {click here}
Boston Review {click here}
Shearsman 53 {click here}
I remember
very much enjoying the gentle,
self-reflexive work published by this fine poet in
*Temblor* in the 80's.
**********************************
War is the Health of the State {click here}. Critique
of patriotic hysteria by Randolph Bourne (1918).
via wood s lot
wood s lot {click here}
**********************************
Eileen Tabios has an author page at
Ahadada Books {click here}.
With characteristic modesty,
she discloses the author
photo is 7 years old!
Interesting discussion right now on
Bemsha Swing {click here}.
What Kasey seems to be suggesting is that
Jonathan is preaching to the
choir-and that, in some ways, all contemporary
poetry readers are basically in that choir already.
Whether or not poetry is a kind of thinking
(what happened to feeling-or imagining- or pretending- or
listening?) for the readers Jonathan is talking about-
poetry must- like any kind of verbal construct- be
understandable- or better yet, be completely decipherable;
the poet is creating- or miming- or evoking- a system,
hopefully a unique one, but one that in the best cases is
reducible to that which is always already present in the
world's knowledge base. In other words, these readers would
completely agree that poetry is a form of thinking- but thinking
that is eminently decipherable or decodable as must be any
form of *rational* thinking. Otherwise it is nonsense-
or worse yet, irrational nonsense.
For Wittgenstein, I see that poetry and
music create a kind of language.
He says [in *Zettel*]: "A poet's words can pierce us. And
that is of course *causally* connected with the
use that they have in our life. And it is also connected
with the way in which, comfortably to this use, we let
our thoughts roam up and down in
the familiar surroundings of the words."
For me, the key word here is *familiar.*
Without doubt, I would side with the group that
considers poetry a form of thinking-
But I want more.
I enjoy it most when poetry strives to
create a context in which readers-
in attending to the process of connecting with the poems-
also feel emboldened to construct their own modes of thinking, that
is - to further develop the ability- and the desire: *to think for oneself.*
For me, poetry is one crucial jumping off point in that pursuit- but
not the only one- or even necessarily the most effective one
sometimes. Although I've participated in a couple of schools
of poetry myself- including for awhile- the latter day New York School-
i am apparently not quite as interested as Jonathan might be- at the present
time anyway-
in school construction and maintenance
or poetry career construction and maintenance, for
that matter. This hierarchy-building and
team-building stuff sometimes gets on my nerves,
quite frankly. Poets
need schools because "no one listens to poetry."
But poetry school membership can exact
a painful price-especially in the
thinking for oneself department.
Thinking for oneself is not as easy as it sounds.
Some might picture this idea
as a kind of pragmatism, or rationality.
What I am getting at is efficacy in an attempt to encompass
all of one's experience-the world's experience-as it unfurls-
by extending the parameters of the limits of one's
understanding- which invariably comes around to
including self-transformation- the willingness to
accept change-particularly difficult change-
the essence of learning. I wish I could state
this a little less pretentiously- but sheez, it's
2:45 am!
***********************************************
Gustaf Sobin dead at 70
Some work was published in
Facture 1 {click here}
Boston Review {click here}
Shearsman 53 {click here}
I remember
very much enjoying the gentle,
self-reflexive work published by this fine poet in
*Temblor* in the 80's.
**********************************
War is the Health of the State {click here}. Critique
of patriotic hysteria by Randolph Bourne (1918).
via wood s lot
wood s lot {click here}
**********************************
Eileen Tabios has an author page at
Ahadada Books {click here}.
With characteristic modesty,
she discloses the author
photo is 7 years old!
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