I've sort of given up formally reviewing zines over in the Invisible City Zines District, but since I still get review copies of things in the mail every once in a while, I figure here's as good a place as any to talk about ones that strike me.

I really like An Inside Job, a tiny zine of dream comics by Eli "Hob" Bishop (who also does the weblog Weather Head). It adheres to the standard of dream comic excellence set by Rick Veitch's Rare Bit Fiends or Jesse Reklaw's Slow Wave.

The other really remarkable zine that's come in the mail lately has been Here, a magazine archiving "the stories behind where you are." They sent me Issue 6, which features a heartbreaking article about the "Lord God bird," an interesting roundtable on gentrification, and little autobiographical sketches submitted by readers about the places where they live (in a style reminiscent of the reader-written section of The Sun).

Labels: comics, dreams, magazines

Wednesday, February 26, 2003
5:28 PM
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I'm currently finishing up reading David Means' book Assorted Fire Events, which is quite good, although to get started on it I had to force myself to look past the fact that the book appears to rip off its title from Ed Ruscha's Various Small Fires.

I had the same problem with Aimee Bender's Girl In The Flammable Skirt, a book which may have many merits but which always appeared to have gotten its title by running a very simple substitution cipher on Frank Zappa's "Girl In The Magnesium Dress."

Learn more about the flammable properties of magnesium at this magnesium fire FAQ, part of the Burning Art website.

Tuesday, February 25, 2003
10:09 AM
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I want to re-enable the comments for this website, but I'm having a hard time figuring out / remembering how to do it. I am awful at using telnet for anything and even worse at using UNIX for anything. They may be back soon. They may never be back.

Monday, February 24, 2003
12:10 PM
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Several years back, when I was a participant on FLUXLIST, I came up with an art project which was simply to send one person a postcard every day for a month. I pitched it for February, since that would be the easiest month in which to successfully complete the project.

The challenge was taken up by FLUXLIST participant Melissa McCarthy, who once gained notoriety by spending 24 consecutive hours in a Denny's Restaurant in Nashua, New Hampshire, and indeed she managed to sent me 28 postcards that February. Since then, we've exchanged daily postcards almost every February (last year was a gap for some reason I can't recall).

This year we both independently decided to do a series. Each card that Melissa sends me has featured a representation of a bowl:

...and I'm doing a series of "landscapes" made from photocopier abstractions:

Friday, February 21, 2003
5:40 PM
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There's been a really interesting discussion on spirituality, poetry, and the unconscious happening over at Ron Silliman's weblog. A few days ago, the discussion turned to apophasis, also described as "negative theology." Curious about what that might be, I headed to the library to pick up Michael Sells' Mystical Languages of Unsaying, a book-length study on apophasis.

As I understand it so far, apophasis seems to be a mode of religious discourse which confronts the problem of language's inability to express the inexpressible event at the heart of the mystical experience. In some ways apophatic figures (Meister Eckhart, Plotinus, and Marguerite Porete, among others) embrace this inability by speaking in ways that are self-canceling or paradoxical.

"[Negative theology] is negative in the sense that it denies that the transcendent can be named. [But] to say that 'X is beyond names,' if true, entails that it cannot then be called by the name 'X.' In turn, the statement 'it cannot then be called X' becomes suspect, since the 'it,' as a pronoun, substitutes for a name, but the transcendent is beyond all names. As I attempt to state the aporia of transcendence, I am caught in a linguistic recess. Each statement I make—positive or 'negative'—reveals itself as in need of correction. The correcting statement must then itself be corrected, ad infinitum. The authentic subject of discourse slips continually back beyond each effort to name it or even to deny its nameability. This regress is harnessed and becomes the guiding semantic force, the dynamis, of a new kind of language."

Thursday, February 20, 2003
10:51 AM
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Enteract is now RCN.

This weblog, therefore, no longer lives on an Enteract server. The replacement address offered to me on RCN's server was so ghastly and unwieldy that I just decided to move everything over here.

The commenting system is currently broken, and comments on old posts are probably lost forever, so if you were storing some great idea in some secret pocket of the old site, time to write it on a napkin before you forget it.

On the up side, I've been listening a lot to the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs—how come no one told me it was so great? Oh, wait, everyone did. Special thanks to Lorraine for finally putting a copy in my lazy hands.

And Mister Chris Miller recommends Stylus Magazine as a good online resource for new music reviews. I haven't had much of a chance to check it out, but I bet some of you might enjoy it.

12:15 AM
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For the past few days, I've been listening non-stop to the delicious Mirah record, You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This.

Like many K Records releases, it was recorded at Olympia's Dub Narcotic studio. In a recent issue of Tape Op, Calvin Johnson speaks about his studio:

"You gotta walk in right away and know this is not a normal studio, because, first of all, we got rid of concepts like isolation. There's not going to be many recordings that come out of here that don't have seagulls on them, trucks backing up, the guy sawing downstairs or someone making copies."

I like that; I think it helps to convey a sense of place, which can help to make a recording seem more intimate. These ideas are much in my mind as Chris and I begin to select pieces for our second CD-R, recorded over the past year in my apartment.

Thursday, February 13, 2003
1:47 PM
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Some time ago, when I was discussing the forerunners of hypertext, I mentioned Robert Grenier's Sentences, a work that consisted of 500 index cards, stacked inside an ingenious box, designed to be read in any order.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Whale Cloth Press letting me know that a random-access electronic version of the complete work is available online. Fun little knots of language to mull over.

Today, browsing the archives of Ron Silliman's poetry weblog, brought to my attention last week by Geegaw, I stumbled upon a number of rather lengthy entries on Grenier, from which I learned about his recent scrawl poems, mysteriously simple line art pieces which strike me as both naive and holy.

Labels: hypertext

Monday, February 10, 2003
4:20 PM
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Ben Marcus' fiction-writing exercises, linked to a long time ago by Geegaw, no longer exist on the Brown University site, but they can still be found courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Unfortunately, they are not helping me come up with ideas for tomorrow's class.

Still. They're fun to read:

"The notion here is that we can seize authorship of anything, that texts are waiting to be hijacked, that nothing is finished, and as artists we can impose our language onto fixed systems at will, bending them to our desire. We can cultivate the idea that everything is a story and everything can be revised."

Labels: writing

Thursday, February 06, 2003
10:17 PM
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Opened the Rilke to a random page this evening and read this:

"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind in this sense has been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions,' the whole so-called 'spirit world,' death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed and set down on a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforseeable experience with which one does not think onesself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will draw himself exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of the existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set around us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accomodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

Wednesday, February 05, 2003
10:55 PM
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A few nights ago I went out to see Toshimaru Nakamura, a musician who has pioneered the use of feedback as an instrument: he creates a closed loop by connecting the mixing board's output to its input, and he controls and manipulates the resultant tone through the use of pedals and graphic equalizers. Accompanying him was no less a figure than AMM's Keith Rowe, who improv followers will know as the person who essentially single-handedly invented the basic techniques of prepared tabletop guitar.

Together, they played a truly lovely set, the closest thing that I've had to a religious experience in quite some time. Both of them brought a musician's talent, patience and timing to the performance, proving that even "unmusical" sounds can be played with startling virtuosity. (I'm now thinking strongly about picking up Weather Sky, the album they recorded together.)

The performance was aided immeasurably by the fact that Rowe and Nakamura were listening so closely, so attentively to one another. I have long thought that musical improvisation is a form of intimacy, and I believe that it is indeed intimacy that was on display at this performance.

Today I've been thinking a lot about intimacy, and I wrote this, which I think sums up my best thinking on the matter:

"Intimacy can take various forms. Sex can be intimate. Conversations can be intimate. Humor can be intimate. Musical or other creative collaboration can be intimate. Just spending time running an errand with someone can be intimate. Intimacy does not reside naturally within any of these things; it is a quality of how you come at another person. I can best understand it as a process of making yourself vulnerable to another person in some fashion, trusting that they will not harm you, and the experience that results when the other person honors that trust and responds in kind."

4:30 PM
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Books I completed in January:

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
Game On : The History and Culture of Videogames, edited by Lucien King (thanks Cathy)
True Names by Vernor Vinge
Emergence by Steven Johnson (2x)
Undercurrents : The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young (thanks Chris)
The Duino Elegies by Ranier Maria Rilke

Monday, February 03, 2003
4:38 PM
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