Sunday, November 30, 2008
... from Nada Gordon's Blog... The Nada Love Continues! ...
Leslie Holt is doing this stuff much better than I ever could. For one thing, she's not using Photoshop! Check out Hello
... from Joshua Clover's resonating skull ...
basic questions for marxist literary analysis
Is M-C-M' a narrative motion? The answer to this question is not at all as apparent as it may first appear.
One might answer in the affirmative by rehearsing Lukács' Theory of the Novel, in which the return of the individual to the social whole after his bildung narrativizes M-C-M' (though the book is written before his Marxist turn and does not frame things in this manner). The Lukácsian model narrative, however, is more properly analogous to an Althusserian reproduction of the relations of production. Thus at best one can argue that modern narrative shows the preconditions for capital's self-valorization.
Conversely, M-C-M' character as at once change and not-change might seem to defy the category of narrative. After all, it is not clear that change is itself narrative (as in the case where the same "change" is repeated ritualistically and reset so as to be repeated again). Certainly motion isn't intrinsically narrative. Is increase narrative? Or is such a belief itself entirely ideological? Moreover, Debord's account of "frozen history" (itself routed through Lukács) suggests that M-C-M' is fundamentally anti-narrative, much as Marx suggests that history begins when the M-C-M' cycle comes to an end.
It may be that the best one might propose is that narrative is an imperfectly-wrought mechanism for inspecting the lifeworld of M-C-M', as well as being in its contemporary form one of the formula's many effects.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
... recently acquired ...
1. The Gift of Death- Jacques Derrida
2. My Life in the Nineties- Lyn Hejinian
3. The Age of Huts (compleat)- Ron Silliman
4. Fear and Trembling & The Book on Adler- Soren Kierkegaard
5. The Collected Poems 1956-1974- Edward Dorn
6. Sonny- Mary Burger
7. Swoon Noir- Bruce Andrews
8. From the Book to the Book (The Edmond Jabes Reader)- Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
9. Guy Debord: Revolutionary-Len Bracken
10. The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems- Marjorie Welish
... my ron picks ...
The Chernoff-Hoover Hölderlin
Mark Scroggins discusses
Louis Zukofsky’s development as a poet
Jascha Kessler on Auden, Ashbery
and “the fix” of the Yale Younger Poets
(scroll down)
“Ashbery was wheezing and coughing”
(scroll to no. 18)
Bruce Andrews: “Dang Me”
Two posts on
Larry Eigner
Charles Bernstein:
”British poetry in the ‘90s”
C.D. Wright:
”Like Hearing Your Name
Called in a Language
You Don’t Understand”
Looking for Aphrodite
in Olson’s Maximus
Thursday, November 27, 2008
... I guess it could get better than Howlin Wolf, Edmond Jabes, and an Hasidic wedding dance but this is the best I've got ...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Drawn Curtains
"Dullness of words where God speaks. A dark which feels
good. Drawn curtains. On the dark page lines continue the
crease and the dream, the space between."
-Reb Rissel
1
"Hope: the following page. Do not close the book."
"I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope."
"Perhaps hope is the book."
2
"In my dialogues there are no answers. But sometimes a question
is the flash of an answer.
"My route riddled with crystals."
-Reb Librad
And Yukel said:
"If an answer were possible death would not travel alongside life,
life would not have a shadow. The universe would be light.
"Contradiction is the scream of a soul drawn and quartered by the
moment. Did not Reb Sedra write: 'Here is grain for your field: a
grain of life, a grain of death. The grain of life will nourish your death,
the grain of death feed your life.'"
("Death will get the better of me. God can only help
me in the void."
-Reb Zeilein)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
... you have to own it, you just do ... it is possible that this will be the most important collection of poetry published in my lifetime ...
from EPC:
Jack Spicer at PennSound
- Poems:
- A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance
- The Unvert Manifesto and Other Papers Found in the Rare Book Room of the Boston Public Library in the Handwriting of Oliver Charming. By S.
- Three Marxist Essays
- from After Lorca
Second letter to Federico Garcia Lorca
- from Admonitions
Letter #1
Letter #2 - from Language
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
SPORTING LIFE - from Book of Magazine Verse
Six Poems for Poetry Chicago, poems #1-4
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
... penn sound update! ...
A Celebration of Hannah Weiner's Open House
Posted 11/24/2008
Today, we're very happy to announce a new page containing audio and video recordings from last November's launch party for Hannah Weiner's Open House at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Edited by Patrick F. Durgin, the career-spanning collection of work by the late Hannah Weiner was one of last year's most celebrated reissues.
Filmed by James Kalm, the three-part video begins with introductions by Stacy Szymaszek and Durgin, who states that his inspirations for the project lay in "the conviction that the vitality of Hannah Weiner's work is at this time equal to the degree to which its historical importance has been under-appreciated." From there, the evening kicks into high gear with Rodrigo Toscano, Laura Elrich and Kaplan Harris' imaginative performance of the hilariously bawdy "Romeo and Juliet" from The Code Poems, complete with walkie-talkie interplay between the fated lovers.
The second segment begins with John Perrault's discussion of Weiner's early street works, sharing memories of the poet's hiring two Coast Guard flag semaphore officers to perform excerpts from The Code Poems outside her NYC apartment, which he follows with his own semaphore performance of a brief poem, using flags constructed from kitchen towels and mop handles. Carolee Schneeman is next, with a slideshow piece, "Looking for Hannah's Photo," which celebrates their friendship and the broader community of poets and artists to which they belonged. The final video, featuring the Bernstein family — Charles, Susan Bee and daughter Emma — performing an excerpt from Clairvoyant Journal, their contrapuntal voices undercutting and stacking upon one another in a worthy rendition of Weiner's complicated palimpsest.
You'll also want to visit PennSound's Hannah Weiner author page, a rich treasury of recordings from the late 70s (following Angel Hair Press' publication of Clairvoyant Journal) through to the end of her life, which includes a number of multivocal renditions of that signature text, featuring the likes of Rochelle Kraut, Sharon Mattlin, Peggy De Coursey, Regina Beck, James Sherry and Charles Bernstein. There's also a link to Weiner's EPC author page, where you'll find many full texts in electronic format
Stephen Ratcliffe: New Author Page
Posted 11/21/2008
We've just created a new author page for Stephen Ratcliffe, anchored by a twelve-hour document of his magnum opus, human/nature recorded at UC Davis this past June.
A thousand-page poem, written in one thousand consecutive days (from October 19, 2002 to July 14, 2005), human/nature seeks to "explore collaborative work in a variety of mediums." Moreover, when the written text is performed in an open art environment, the poem further "extends [Ratcliffe's] investigations into the integration/interaction of human beings and natural landscape," or, in the poet's own words, "the relation between things seen/observed in the natural world and how such things might be made (transcribed/transformed) as works of written (or visual) art." During its run at UC Davis, human/nature's cast — including Ratcliffe, Dylan Bolles, Keith Evans, Michael Meyers, Edward Schocker, Zachary Watkins, and others — was accompanied by sound, light, movement and sculpture, and the audience was encouraged to enter into dialogue with the performers. To accompany the four-part recording, we've included the flyer announcing the event, and a series of photographs by Michael Meyers, including the one you see above.
In addition to human/nature, you'll find three other readings spanning two decades of Ratcliffe's work, from a 1991 recording at the Central Park Grill in Buffalo, NY to a 1999 reading in San Diego. There's also Ratcliffe's reading at San Francisco's Canessa Gallery, recorded a little over a month ago, and a brief video of a reading at Point Éphémere in Paris. Clicking on the title above takes you directly there.
Louis Zukofsky: New Author Page
Posted 11/17/2008
Today, we're extremely proud to announce PennSound's newest addition: an extensive author page for the highly-influential American Objectivist, Louis Zukofsky. Nearly six months in the making, this page brings together nearly twenty full-length recordings by the poet, including important readings, conversations and lectures, along with supplementary materials responding to Zukofsky's work.
The earliest of the seventeen readings contained in our Zukofsky archives is a 1954 appearance on Berkeley's KPFA Radio, which includes a number of excerpts from 1946's Anew, as well as "A"-11 and the second half of "A"-9. Selections from Anew and 1941's 55 Poems comprise much of the setlist from his 1958 reading at the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University, as well as a historic 80-minute homemade tape for the Library of Congress, recorded in November 1960, which also features lengthy samplings from Some Time, Songs of Degrees, Catullus and Barely and Widely. Another homemade tape from the following year includes Catullus 1-46 (save 18 & 19).
Other historic recordings include a 1961 reading at Les Deux Megots (precursor to the St. Mark's Poetry Project), recorded by reading organizer Paul Blackburn and broadcast on WBAI-FM; a two-hour 1962 session at New York City's A&R Recording Company, which includes a broad survey of his work from "A," After I's, Catullus, Some Time, Barely and Widely, Anew and 55 Poems; a 1971 recording of Autobiography taken from Lincoln Center; 1972 readings at Temple University, Glassboro State College and Bard College; and a 1975 recording by Hugh Kenner of a reading at Johns Hopkins University featuring selections from "A" and 80 Flowers, plus "A Foin Lass Bodders," Zukofsky's Brooklynese rendering of Cavalcanti's "Donna Me Prega."
In addition to these recordings, you'll also find a 1961 conversation between Zukofsky and Robert Creeley, a 1971 lecture on Wallace Stevens at the University of Connecticut and a handful of broadcast appearances. These resources are augmented by a number of recordings of contemporary poets performing and interpreting Zukofsky's work, including Charles Bernstein's take on "A Foin Lass Bodders," Guy Davenport's comparisons of Zukofsky's Catullus poems and the original Latin texts, and a pair of marvelous performances of "A"-24, recorded in the Bay Area in 1978, which feature Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson and Bob Perelman (on piano). There are also links to videos from 2004's Zukofsky Centennial Conference at Columbia University & Barnard College, featuring Perelman, Creeley, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein and Mark Scroggins, among others. Those interested in further Objectivist listening will also want to check out PennSound's author pages for Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi.
PennSound is immeasurably grateful to Paul Zukofsky for his gracious permission to share these many recordings of his father's work with a worldwide audience. Archives such as this do not materialize overnight, and so we'd like to thank Danny Snelson, our Zukofsky page editor for his tireless efforts. Peter Quartermain, Mark Scroggins and Ron Silliman also deserve thanks for both editorial input and access to recordings from their collections. Richard Sieburth and Jeff Twitchell-Waas also provided helpful feedback on the collection, and Mollie Braverman, Kareem Estefan and Jenny Lesser spent countless hours digitizing and editing recordings. It's our sincere hope that this Zukofsky page will be an indispensable resource for fans and scholars of the poet, and an avenue for those not familiar with his work to begin their acquaintance. Click on the title above to start listening.
Monday, November 24, 2008
... Clover's resonating skull breaks through the nonsense... Speak on brother! ...
• as 2046 makes clear, hotels are the hookers of the housing market.
• war hawks, technocrats of neoliberalism, or both. Shocked — shocked — by Obama's stern move to the right post-election. Didn't see that coming at all.
• "At the level of intention sure speculators and hedgers are different but from the perspective of what they do I'm not so certain — the distinction between speculation and hedging might be specious — people just like to talk about speculators so they can have someone to blame — some story about causality — it's like Jews — I mean that's what the Jews are for right? as the secret causal principle of economy gone wrong — when people say speculators it's pretty much the same thing — they really mean to say Althusserian structural effectivity but can't bring themselves to say that out loud or even to themselves."
• there ought to be a law against history.
• wait, where is the money for the stimulus package coming from again?
... my Ron picks ...
Reading Katie Degentesh
John Timpane on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
William Gaddis & Roberto Bolaño
Marcela Valdes on 2666
Robert Creeley on poetry in motion
Talking with Toni Morrison
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Very Exciting!!!
Kool Keith - Spacious Thoughts (ft. Tom Waits)
The debut album from N.A.S.A. (North America/South America), "The Spirit of Apollo" features beats crafted by the duo of Squeak E. Clean (aka DJ/producer/composer Sam Spiegel, brother of director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (aka DJ/producer/professional skateboarder Ze Gonzales), plus contributions from the aforementioned artists as well as Kool Keith, CSS' Lovefoxxx, Spank Rock, John Frusciante, Fatlip and Slim Kid Tre from the Pharcyde, E-40, Gift of Gab, Chali 2na, KRS-One, George Clinton, Seu Jorge, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, Amanda Blank, Z-Trip, DJ Qbert, Kanye West, Chuck D, Ghostface Killah, the Cool Kids, Scarface, and Santogold.
... from Bernstein's blog ...
The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
ed. Hadley Haden Guest
introduction by Peter Gizzi
Wesleyan Univeristy Press
Barbara Guest has created a textually saturated poetry
that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, and the flickering
in translucent surfaces of contingent connections.
These poems unravel before us
so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves,
if we go unprepared,
the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit.
Guest at EPC
Guest at PennSound
& my
Barbara Guest: Composing Herself
(Bookforum, April 2006; Jacket 29)
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
... my picks of Ron's blog ...
Russian avant-garde books digitized
Erik Davis on the new Jack Spicer collected
Two dozen full-length readings,
talks & discussions by
John Ashbery
John Ashbery
Reading “The System,”
Ashbery’s most important poem
Reading Rae Armantrout
in Joe Brainard’s pyjamas
A report of Rae Armantrout at the Folger
by someone who wasn’t there
Michiko Kakutani on Burroghs & Kerouac
13 years before On the Road
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn & Edward Said
Wittgenstein & biography
Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Kafka on the day job
Camilla Paglia
on how she produced
Break, Blow, Burn
Monday, November 17, 2008
... just purchased ...
#32
The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.
us
You own a friendship bracelet and a roll of quarters.
You have a canvas bag that you carry with snacks.
You have two moles in the shape of running dogs and a door knob.
I miss talking to you about losing my virginity.
I told you a secret after class, and you smiled and held my hand.
I like it when you say something.
You drew me a picture of an ashtray.
You gave my sister a washcloth for her birthday.
I drove by your house and put my recycled trash in your container.
I love you, and you are my friend.
Your nights and your health are fixtures for your teeth which you pride.
I see you talk to older people in restaurants.
Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I cry for hours.
We have matching belts that we wear always.
You have a poster of a hummer limo in your garage,
And you can’t access your trust fund until after you marry.
You have the patience and tan of a springtime fisherman.
You think the word palpitate means masturbation.
I showed you my tattoo idea, and you said it was very nice.
We shaved our heads and crotches in college.
I love you because you are my friend.
You pay attention to time when you’re trusting and drunk.
You act like you know what people are saying, but you don’t.
You ate like a capitalist in your favorite pantsuit last year.
You live for the moment, and you get blood on your sweatband.
Your medication makes you feel like a dangerous widow.
I loaned you three hundred dollars for a magazine subscription.
I accept who you are in your terrified wonderland.
You have a feral cat in your heart like a smile.
I like to see you scream and curse at your relatives.
You’re my friend, and I love you.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
... penn sound ...
PoemTalk 12: Ezra Pound's "Cantico del Sole"
Posted 11/14/2008
Listeners eagerly awaiting the latest installment of the PoemTalk podcast series need wait no longer — host Al Filreis is back with a new episode, the twelfth in the series. Joining Filreis this time, for a discussion of Ezra Pound's "Cantico del Sole," are his PennSound co-director, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Levitsky (this year's CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice) and Joshua Schuster (a longtime member of the UPenn community and an architect of the Kelly Writers House).
Bernstein begins by citing the differences in tone between the two recordings presented in the program — while the 1939 version is introspective, the 1958 rendition plays up the poem's satirical edge — a distinction Levitsky elides to depict the speaker's ambivalence. Filreis recalls that Pound studied the classics at UPenn, and that the poet translated Francis of Assisi's "Hymn of the Sun," which gives Pound's poem its name, as part of his masters thesis. This fact, taken together with a contemporary legal decision that the classics should be exempted from obscenity laws, since (as Pound reprints in the essay originally accompanying the poem) they "usually appeal to a comparatively limited number of readers," forms the context for the poem as both a lament for America's disinterest in classical (or any serious) literature, and also a glimpse towards a society in which the opposite were true.
Schuster is quick to point out that it's not a staid pedagogy rooted solely in the past that Pound is aiming for, but rather the "24-hour experimental poet world that the classics kinda suggest were in existence back then." Indeed, a society as receptive to the classics would be equally receptive to the contemporary avant-garde, and Schuster notes that, in Pound's time, certain notions of the avant-garde were precisely tied to revisiting the classics (H.D., for example).
Bernstein makes another connection, to the Canticle of Simeon (a devout Jew who was promised he'd live to see the coming savior), which raises the issue of the poem's sacrilegious tone as well as Pound's later anti-Semitism, and how one navigates that facet of his history in light of his work overall. He also points out how incompletely the allusions to both Assisi and Simeon are integrated within the multi-vocal palimpsest, which adds to both the poem's tensions — including the contradictions between its anti-Phillistine and elitist voices.
Filreis brings the conversation to a close by introducing the writings of Peter Wilson, who discusses the differences between the avant-garde's relation to mainstream society in the contemporary era (in which poets can more easily find an audience) versus Pound's time (where the Modernist ideal trended towards isolation and exclusivity). Schuster expands this notion to consider implications of medium and availability, suggesting that in the present, the avant-garde is not rereading the classics, but rather fully embracing and exploiting technological means to develop and share new ideas, a rubric into which sites such as this one neatly fit (and be sure to listen through to the end, where Bernstein parodies Pound's parody, by sharing how "the thought of what America would be like if PennSound had a wide circulation" troubles his sleep).
PoemTalk's next episode will see the show go on the road, to New York City, where Filreis, along with Bernstein, Nada Gordon and Lawrence Joseph will discuss a late poem by Wallace Stevens. In the meantime, be sure to visit PoemTalk's homepage, where you can download the first dozen episodes and find more information about the poems and panelists, along with listener comments.
Also, stay tuned to PennSound Daily for the launch of a very exciting new author page on Monday — a monumental archive of recordings on par with some of our biggest additions to date, including PennSound's Pound, Williams, Duncan and Ashbery collections.
... ubu web ... Wakefield picks ...
Featured Resources:
November 2008
Selected by Neville Wakefield
1. Willoughby Sharp Interviews Vito Acconci (1973)
2. Bas Jan Ader - Selected Works (1970-71)
3. Pipilotti Rist - Video Works (1986-2003)
4. Chris Burden - Documentation of Selected Works 1971-74
5. Johan Grimonprez - Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997)
6. The Films of Jack Goldstein (1974-1978)
7. Gordon Matta-Clark - Splitting, Bingo/Ninths, Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1974-1976)
8. Lawrence Weiner - WATER IN MILK EXISTS (2008)
9. 
Psychic TV - "Unclean"
10. Robert Smithson - Bootleg of Hotel Palenque by Alex Hubbard (1969 / 2004)
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Matthew Shindell's IN ANOTHER CASTLE
Parable of the Boy inside the Deer
1.
They talked about Bonanza on the way.
The boy told his father, “Were I a woman,
I would like to live on the Ponderosa;
the boys there were good with the guns
and the muscle.” “Probably,” said the father,
“you would have to marry a Cartwright.”
“Yes,” said the boy, “probably.” “Little Joe
was the ladies man,” said the father.
“Yes,” said the little round boy, “but his
was the touch of death; his love interests
always died.” “Remember the girl
killed in the hayloft with the pitchfork?”
said the father, “That’s no fate for my son.”
“No,” said the boy, “and not Adam either.
I’d be looking for a man like Hoss.”
The father agreed, Hoss was a good choice:
“He held his family above any chance
of gold in Virginia City.” “And Carson City, too,”
said the boy, “I only hope he could love me
as much as the animals he tended.” “I know,”
said the father, tousling his son’s black hair,
“it’s hard to compete with a man’s work.”
2.
The kill – one shot by the father behind
the doe’s left front leg. It gave him an idea.
“Run to the truck and bring me the jumper
cables and battery. Hurry back!” The boy
returned for further instruction. “You see
how I’ve gutted this deer?,” said the father,
“It’s just large enough for you to climb inside.
You connect the alligator clips to the joints just so...”
“I see,” said the boy, “so then I am the deer.”
“It’s that easy,” said the father, “simple machines.
And haven’t you always wanted to be a deer?”
“Yes,” said the boy, “for quite a while now.”
Inside the doe, the boy made a circuit of body
and battery. He leapt. His father was amazed.
Certainly, he’d never seen anything
like this in all his life. It gave him another idea.
He began to shake, saying, “You know, your mother
would love this. We should bring you home like this
and show you to her.” “Yes,” said the boy,
“she’ll think I’m a real deer. I can jump out
and yell, ‘Surprise!’ like the woman in the cake!”
From:
NOW FOR SALE!
published by Three Candles Press.
Friday, November 14, 2008
The Universe©
The wood of this place is a sip of raki $...it's ribbons pinned to your muscular chest which is always bare...$.
It's a mini-dirt bike heading in opposite directions, colliding with the same idea:
A molecular turning point of explosions, a ravine of fichus trees and test-water, a wishful tinkering with everything plutonic, A girl, A machine, A game.
The gestation period of solid prose is brief like humiliation.
The wall of this place is redolent of its wood $... it's self-absorbed miracles of life which spark like trashcan lids doused in spirits...$.
It's incomplete recipes, for lack of a better word, plain in their order:
A containment unit for all things distant, a suicidal contemplation of relatives, a piece of froth and a pair of dove-skin socks, a blind contour drawing of temperatures.
All project cars are terrible birds which come out like mechaniclowns in the ring.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Butcher's Dance (It's a Racecar)
Busy weeping or will be shortly
(Please leave off the dining room light)
Tearful rugged contours serene in reflection of boats,
Machines, neckties, and some old PO's op-ed piece
Shutter immortal nakedness like water none should
View this bandaged face less its diaphanous veil
Reckless satin brassieres, transparent to eye
Reticent eau-de-cologne days, tassels santuri-fueled lignite
Sinew plebiscites' breakage
Bespattered with plaster and rapacious bodices
See the sea body cleaving vessels
Patterns of gaffers on the prow's lighterman
Oh, the dance... sing-song importunacy round in dieticianisms
Some Cinderella boundary house landscape of rustic satellite sessions
Autumnal organism spraying the waves till hell if I know.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
... L ...
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¨°º¤ø„¸ LANGUAGE!!¸„ø¤º°¨
¸„ø¤º°¨ LANGUAGE!!~ ....°º¤ø„¸
¸„ø¤º¨ ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø„¸¨°º¤ø
¨°º¤ø„¸ LANGUAGE!!¸„ø¤º°¨
¸„ø¤º°¨ LANGUAGE!!~ ....°º¤ø„¸
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Monday, November 10, 2008
I want my dyke president. Back like I want Windows NT. Matte vanilla monitors. Orange text running on 40 MB of RAM . I'd like my dyke president. In green tennis shorts. Arm wrestling coaches. I want her in an incubator. More than mice with rubber balls. Dykes have dial up modem connections. When they talk I want it like a back pack. The size of a printer. She's so natural to us. 1992 and a room full of wiring. The dyke president represents a place for us. To place ourselves upon a shelf. The dirtiest of projector. It isn't modest. Wiring will accommodate us. A round up like 60's blow up dolls. My dyke president worships. Souvenirs.
I often know what people are looking for when they’re not,
Work in a dumpy old love hotel and you’ll train laser dogs,
On hazy mornings be invited to judge NHK bands,
May wish (might) of this rock not struggling with color.
Aperture problems, which are not Nigerian hyena people,
present pageantries (fixed & saggy) to neighbor,
And a surgeon say, “I can’t. I can’t,
I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t."
Flying over America
will be like flying
over everything.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
From the new times by benjamin mullein
Karen, valet parker to the stars, had a double-troubled youth (widow at age nine, three time divorcee by fourteen). She acted fifteen better than she lived it.
Karen stole Emmys and Oscars from Hollywood elite pawning them for good times and joy ride. Found dead on Wednesday inside the Spelling mansion, Karen suffered three shots to her thieving body.
The murdered burglar's eyes still glared at where her assailant once stood pointing mother's finger and loaded pistol, fuming and panting, forgetfully firing blanks followed by live rounds at the female intruder.
After pronouncing Karen dead it was someone's dumb job (not mine) to assist in pulling lead slugs from her skull and collar bone, bummer.
She's now a brave, watery babe dumped in the river instead of being given the proper autopsy she obviously deserved.
Keeping in mind that last week's prime is this month's pi, bimbo:
Turning the complexion of her parking lot scour into pigments in a box for painting with or snorting down during bouts of depression
Was to coil up, like an apprentice or day urchin, inside her emotions.
Preparing to spring at the ready, to uncoil when antigratuity permeated, to seize those awards.
Karen (March 4, 1987 - October 31, 2008)
... first draft ...
I finished my first completed draft of Notplace. I have no idea what I think of it and I have no idea what I will do with it. But for now it will sit on my desk and I will try to bounce it off some brutal poets.
... oakland ... (link)
I saw Sole and the Skyrider Band last night.
Sole and I argued about Barack Obama and the Save the Peaks issue in Flagstaff, AZ.
He voted for Obama and thinks that Obama goes to sleep wanting to change this country so that no one suffers.
This is what has happened.
... slacker ...
I am slacking on my Julliard's Dustamans Project...
There are so many textual inserts to devise...
Saturday, November 8, 2008
... avant-garde ...
Ceptuetics Radio: Seven New Episodes
Posted 11/6/2008
Today, we've added seven new episodes of Ceptuetics Radio — Kareem Estefans' poetry program (broadcast weekly over WNYU and iTunes) which ably captures the pulse of contemporary poetry and poetics.
We begin with Episode #26, featuring Jen Bervin, who reads from and discusses the process guiding the composition of her latest collection, The Desert. Juliana Spahr shares a new poem, "The Incinerator," in Episode #27, and discusses the role of place and class in autobiographical writing. That conversation leads neatly into Tracie Morris' discussion (in Episode #28) of politics and language, specifically within the context of the US Presidential election — she also reads from collaborations with Charles Bernstein and Elliott Sharp.
Episode #29 showcases Tan Lin's Plagiarism/Outsource, a document of actor Heath Ledger's death rendered through SMS messages and RSS feeds, which leads into a consideration of the ways in which technology augments the potential for myriad subjectivities within his work. Brad Fils also explores the role of historical events within his work, and the pursuit of "ethically responsible" poetry in Episode #30. In Episode #31, Estefans interviews the team behind For Godot — Gregory Laynor, Stephen McLaughlin and Vladimir Zykov — and discusses their most recent project, ISSUE ONE, which featured poems generated by Jim Carpenter's Erika T. Carter program and attributed to more than three thousand contemporary poets. Finally, in Episode #32, Craig Dworkin reads from his latest, Parse, and explains some of the editorial choices behind two recent anthologies, Against Expression and The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing.
You'll also want to check out the show's first 25 episodes, which include readings and conversations with Chris Funkhouser, Caroline Bergvall, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anselm Berrigan and Rodrigo Toscano, among others. Click on the title above to start listening.
... my picks of Ron's blog ...
Essays & excursions for
Myung Mi Kim
Rae Armantrout:
”Prayers”
A profile of Ashbery
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Plurilingual Writing & Other Identities - Sophie Pucill
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
You Can't Wash Culture (Work in Process)
You may look it in the eye and curse it and hold it on the ground to hear what noises come out then corner it poke and prod at it until you’ve infected it and can experiment on it and play online poker to see if it wins or put a down payment on a car and take it home with hope and ask it to wash or wash as it watches but can’t wash it because it’s not dirty or clean only staring at you like a pet or a ceiling fan and like you can turn it on let it cool a room or take a nap in your bed while you look at pictures on the internet when it wakes take to a movie or if it doesn’t feel like movies because depressed talk to it about movies or its needs like yours they’re deep and secret needs to include or be included like a thing or time wants what you want but can’t talk like big men because it’s not and neither are you might hug or serve it food let it rest more give it time like it won’t care and talk while it sleeps again.
The next day is new you hold it down same noise comes out the same but different it pops a cd in your favorite you dance till it hurts see that movie smoke tobacco or look in its eyes acknowledge it like friends it might like them if it doesn’t push it under the couch like it’s gone maybe sleep yourself in and out of dreams awake it stares the meal is greater this time not the same it doesn’t remind you yet holds mugs and conversations like you see yourself in it taking painting classes paint a picture of it gasping like you near rabbits or fire sneezing gets colder wearing sweaters it’s the time of year to be like winter olympics which it loves you don’t see point to watching it holds you this time telling you of your abuses it holds you down seeing what comes out mostly fear for not this it’s confidence scaring you and it not lack of hope and you write most of this.
Titanium tang pin and kicker. Polycarbonate
bite handle with infused pivot
pins. Two silver handles tell attackers, "good fortune,
but cutting. Now run!" Dross
never touched this swedge.
Sweet in its entirety.
Absolute polished razor recoated
grinds in paper wheels sped at 30,000 rpm,
silicon carbide grit gives my bur wiry lubricated
balance like gut hooks.
Spit coil
makes for smooth whetting
twice as sharp as scissors!
Tormek jigs give my blade gouging capability.
In my hands it's swivel flipped
with latch spring ease.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
Dust.
Hinged heaven, a .void
Like attic open ing s
A vacuum
Covered in e g g a t o m s.
Pens or pin it up,
Backwards. Peppered chignon charts suggest
Celebrity neck tie fashion in and outs
Of next year next to
Last year next to this
Year. Soignée quotations show how eyes barble this
Petite house of
FLASH!
Wish bulbs light the set
Trickling babes
Hot whiteness in
Fonts of phlegm. Honesty
Dust or truthful dirtiness
Models walk with devilishness
Hurry past faster, smiles
Prove puzzling amazement in a sing u lar ity
Of perfect petard use from Russian spy novels
Finity, rigged, mellow, depositing,
Ground
In front of them, heels wArBLe
Pelvic motion, balanced
In its rightful place, 3rd
Maquillage garage medicine
For pills, they do it. Hikes up head to the skirt
For provocative crotch shots.
Adobe karate shop mutton
Chops. Bouncers box wax Walgreens run
Or for socks, their sensible hand
Spanking the wind and fans pike spines
And helpful toward sartorial pains of
(Applesauce
diet)
Leg planks
wind down
differently
Hearts and soldering
Gun chords. With masturbation regularity. Dim
Door mat wet naps which
Clean liquid ingestion, infused debris
Side advantages, eventual tarps for the mess.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
... UBU Web ...
Paul Chan - Three Videos (2002-2006) In 2002, Chan was a part of the American aid group Voices in the Wilderness that broke U.S. sanctions and federal law by working in Baghdad before the U.S. invasion and occupation. In 2004 he garnered police attention for The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention, a free map distributed throughout New York to help protesters to get in or out of the way of the RNC. Most recently Chan collaborated with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time to produce a site-specific outdoor presentation of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. Featured here are RE:THE_OPERATION (2002); Baghdad No Particular Order (2003); and Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law, and Poetry (2006)
My Love For You
I love the way your trail mix zigzags, and wasps in the cellar.
Your coolness is havalina's semen on paper mattress.
I want to disassemble your synapses like a car engine?
Do you know why I love your fucked up face?
You wear gloves like leather police cars under water.
You have a stubbly barbarous melancholy in your voice, deep fried.
You wear a bouncer's sideburn that will not forget my little mind.
You have a thirty five year old son whose face I'd like to smash with this love.
This love is like AstroTurf, like plumbing.
This relationship is thousand chocolate ant bits.
This love is tearing me apart by my limbs like monkeys.
This relationship is place for metal plates.
I'd sooner Russian kick your Margery with the contrarian bum needs of aluminum
Candles than allow any member of your committee entrance to my body hospital.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
... from Joshua Clover's resonating skull ...
real badiou
Surely much of Alain Badiou's essay "Of Which Real is this Crisis the Spectacle?" (generously translated into english by Infinite and Savonarola) is salutary, and its conclusion only moreso:
Total break with capitalist-parliamentarianism, the invention of a politics on a level with the popular real, sovereignty of the idea: it's all there, everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and to give ourselves over to the fusion between live thought and organised action.In trying to understand the crisis, and imagine our way toward such fearless demands, certain particulars of Badiou's essay bear noticing.
The main analytic involves in essence the collapsing of two Jamesonian formulations — that of "the real of history," and the epigrammatic "history is what hurts" — into a single, sharp point: the real is what hurts. Not the "real economy," not the spectacle of financial meltdown, but actual human misery which exists in contrast to fictitious capital and mendacious reportage. It would be tempting to describe the essay as "Jameson without political economy" (sometimes called "philosophy") — except for Badiou's gesture in that direction, so unfamiliar as to provoke Infinite's exclamation: "Badiou on mortgages! Who'd have thought it?" In short, one small measure of the crisis is this: it is spectacular enough to seduce even the set theorists into talking securitization, if only to dismiss it. And it must be remarked: Badiou treats the specifics well, choosing a select few and offering them up incisively without sacrificing his demands on the pyre of the technicians.
Let us start with what he gets right. Badiou notes that financialization is scarcely a new fact. And he adds, with even more justification, that there is no division between the speculative and "real" economy, and finally no such thing as "fictitious value" — a term which provides as much coverage to bankers as it does insult, since it proposes falsely that the financial processes are somehow isolated from exploitation in the production processes. And so he proposes, again compellingly, that "the return to the real cannot be a movement leading from bad "irrational" speculation back to healthy production." Instead, it must be "the return to the immediate and reflective life of all those who inhabit this world."
Now let us attend to what he gets wrong. He errs by ignoring the mutations of financial capital in the last 35 years, and their relation to the specific development of a world political dynamic. Which is to say that, while understanding the relation of the speculative and real economies, he fails to insist on the conjoining of finance space and political space. And this points up his classically Badiouvian horizon: even when gesturing toward economic facts, he cannot read the relation between political economy and the state.
Further, he can't read the relation between the political economy and the real. He treats the spectacle as an independent object projected to distract the audience from the real. This is more or less the antithesis of how Debord presents the spectacle, which is as anything but a diversion, a made object, a thing. "One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced." And, more specifically elsewhere: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." Perhaps Badiou had in mind Regis Debray's mediatisation, or Baudrillard's simulation. But the spectacle does not replace nor distract from the real; it is an expression of real conditions, produced by the developmental logic of capital and its forms of exchange. The social sphere may no more look away from the spectacle than I may look away from my own mind. There is no choice between spectacle and real; Badiou's title is nonsensical. Or, rather, it is non-dialectical. This may seem an abstract point: it had clear and absolute consequences for his analysis.
This non-dialectical thought conceives of things like state, political economy and the real as autonomous objects, only related — it would seem — by something like decisionism, as if we could simply turn away from one and toward another. This is evident in the inert presence within his argument of the autonomous concept, "immediate and reflective life" — an Archimedean position from which "one can observe capitalism without flinching, including the disaster movie that it is currently inflicting upon us." It is apparently arrived at via revelation.
One can't blame Badiou for such fantasies; they are a survival strategy. Less defensible is his root economic claim, to wit: "The real essence of the financial crisis is a housing crisis."
No it's not.
This is not to say that what has happened with housing has not been a source of actual homelessness, penury, and misery — and that this wants better attention than the hypnotic representational sway of the Dow Jones Index. And perhaps, as a generous friend argues, Badiou isn't referring to the specific housing crisis of foreclosures, but taking the opportunity to remind us of the ongoing global immiseration of the homeless — in which case his argument has nothing to do with this crisis in particular, and is reasonable to the very extent that it's entirely general. But if one wants to think economically or politically about the crisis — and as everyone with a handle on the dialectic knows, these constitute a single thinking — one ought to grasp that "the real essence of the financial crisis" is a doubled crisis of credit and of hegemony.
It is important to specify what "crisis of credit" means — and what it does not mean. It does not mean that the sudden credit freeze within the financial industry; it does not mean the unavailability of commercial paper in the money markets; it does not mean the phenomenon first called "flight to safety" and then shortly amended to "flight to quality." It does not even mean panicky deleveraging, or the failure of banks and hedge funds which cannot meet margin calls. And finally it does not mean the decreasing access to consumer credit, though that's a bit closer. The crisis of credit is found in the status of the relationship between the speculative and real economies.
The relationship is in essence contractual. The speculative economy expands based on the extension of credit. This extension of credit is in effect a contract, and it is not vague and mysterious (despite the mysterious financial instruments that wheel about withn it). It is a contract committing the real economy to increase the intensity, magnitude, and/or duration of its exploitation of labor so as to return that real value to the economy. That promised exploitation — on which every deal in the speculative economy eventually rests — is a guarantee of misery to human lives, and it doesn't get realer.
The meltdown is the upwelling of doubt that this contract to deliver real exploitation of value sufficient to the extension of credit can be honored. We can see that this macro-level reproduces the exact form of an individual mortgage disaster (say, e.g., an option ARM mortgage), wherein things fall apart as soon as home equity value ceases to increase within an endlessly expanding market. Having seen this, one sees that the crisis is isomorphic not simply with its individual cases but with geopolitics: the grand strategy for increasing intensity, breadth and duration of labor exploitation is exactly what we call neoliberalism. Thus the crisis of credit, wherein the promise to increase exploitation is no longer believed, is not just isomorphic to, but merely a different phrasing for, a crisis of hegemony. They are the same scheme to command and harvest a single space which is at once political and economic. Economics and the state are explicitly, absolutely and dialectically intertwined through the marriage of credit and hegemony in the modern era. This can be seen in the notion through which other nations and sovereign wealth funds purchase American paper to secure the protection of the U.S. military in our role as global cop, while the U.S. in turn funds its geopolitical force with such revenues.
But this is ending. That is the global truth of the crisis. The US-led interstate system, in conjunction with current transnational corporate forms, can no longer compel a belief in its own endless extensibility. Not even when Condoleeza Rice sneaks onto the television during the early peak of the meltdown to rattle sabers in Russia's direction — as if she could click together her famous heels while chanting hegemony hegemony hegemony and transport herself to the familiar comforts of home. Alas. Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Washington Consensus anymore.
We can now dispense entirely with Badiou; even accepting his definition of the real as the immiseration of the impoverished and exploited and displaced (and who but the most churlish of ideologists would refute that?) it's clear that the geoeconomic crisis is in no way exterior to such miseries. The crisis of credit/hegemony (or cregemony) is tied deeply and absolutely to the real and its fate, and to think these matters means to think political economy and geopolitics, and to think them together.
Without diverting attention from local effects (and I must say, the suddenly popular deployment of the term schadenfreude to indicate all feelings other than tender humanist concern is an impoverished account indeed of the affective lives engendered by capital), this systemic and historical crisis wants equivalent thought. I would argue that this is an occasion where revolutionary thought is not just possible but necessary, according to history itself.
Arrighi describes the successive cycles of world-system hegemony as each expanding on the previous in ways that are both quantitative and qualitative. One notes, at the same time, that pivotal revolutionary moments within the world-system have had three characteristics, which Yeats understood perfectly well when he wrote "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (funny how poetry was once empowered to confront these matters). One: they happen during moments of exchange between hegemonic centers: the American, French, Haitian et al revolutions taking place during the transition from the Dutch to British empires; the Russian Revolution during the overlap between British and United States world regimes. Two: they happen not within the hegemonic exchange, but off to the side. Three: they increase in aggregate scale and organizational complexity, just as the empires do. All of which is to say that such revolutionary moments have a tendency to appear in a time and place where the struggle is not successfully magnetized by a singular hegemonic force, with a magnitude related to the magnitude of the world-system itself.
Or to rephrase the matter slightly: South America. It is, after all, there that the fading of U.S. geoeconomic hegemony has been most visible, as the capacity to enforce neoliberal economic restructurings via the IMF/World Bank nexus becomes a memory. Of course the political and economic shifts on the continent have been very much along the lines of three steps forward, two steps back in the last forty years, as has been well-summarized here. In part this is endogenous to the continental situation, with its differences in history, language, resources. However, this should be understood not as an impossible horizon but as an inevitable consequence of the broadening field of action, per element three above: a tenuous, only half-coordinated continental revolution. Two more evident horizons present themselves.
One is that it is hard to conceive of what form this current transition will take. It is unlikely to appear as a "world war"; unlikelier still as some sort of direct handover, as in the current fantasia, in which everyone wakes up one day and says in unison, "All hail China!" That this hegemonic exchange will be slow and unfamiliar, a mutation that doesn't accord with the world-picture fostered by the Westphalian interstate system, does not mean that it isn't happening nonetheless.
In the shorter run, the economic crisis will surely manifest itself in horrifying ways in Latin America itself, in ways that inhibit any kind of Mercosur solidarity — structural debt remains, even if the Chicago/Bretton Woods mandate has lost its premillennial charisma. This will be a real site of struggle, both economic and perhaps military. The reformulation of credit/debt relations between Norte and Sur, which exists in inextricable concert with the real housing crisis, is also a condition of possibility for the real revolutionary moment we are already in.
Given that the movie industry has played a significant role in the era of U.S. hegemony, both as economic engine and ideological chassis, it should surprise no one that it turns now to speak of that era's end. Perhaps — no, certainly — that is the import of not one but two films being released in swift succession on the life of Che Guevara, the spectral embodiment of a unified revolutionary Latin America: films that are at once apparitions of the spectacle and expressions of the real.
... from Gary Sullivan's Blog ...
DOUBLE TROUBLE
Stan Apps reviews Sharon Mesmer's Annoying Diabetic Bitch and my own PPL in a Depot in the latest issue of Jacket.
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