I've spent a lot of this summer staking out The Cantos. The poem has proven to be relatively impermeable to forward assault, so I'm doing the kind of thing I don't normally do, namely, attempting to make the poem more intelligible by reading a bunch of contextual material, the writing about/around the poem.

This is more fun with Pound than it sometimes is with other poets, because The Cantos is a poem so Cinemascoped that it sometimes seems like almost everything ever written could be counted as part of "the context." The Odyssey? Check. Ovid's Metamorphoses? Check. The correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? Check. The Confucian Analects? Check.

I've been struggling through Pound's own (unorthodox?) translation of some of the Confucian writings, trying to see what he saw in them. The Analects in particular have been very difficult for me to appreciate: their repeated articulation of the actions and traits of the "superior man" makes them read, at times, like selections from the world's oldest self-help book.

Additionally, I struggle with the Confucian emphasis on tradition ("performing the rites") and the corresponding disdain for "twistiness" or deviance... this world-view is so congruent with contemporary U.S. conservativism that I have great difficulty feeling comfortable with it as a philosophy.

All the same, there's something in the Confucian works that I'm interested in, most notably the way the works approach pattern and change: the Analects can be seen, in part, as a way to ensure the continued iteration of certain patterns through time. How does one maintain a way of life or a body of knowledge through a universe in a state of eternal flux? This is a question that seems to have interested Confucius, and it's almost certainly a question that interested Pound, whose work can be understood as a kind of digest version of the history of literary knowledge, a kind of seed-book that might preserve information through a civilization's apocalyptic collapse (a collapse that Pound may have seen as imminent).

Pattern is also key to another text in this volume, The Great Learning, which is interested less in replicating patterns through time and more with replicating a specific pattern through scale: from the micro- to the macro-. If a man [sic] can establish self-discipline, or manifest the pattern of "orderliness" within himself, says Confucius, this pattern has the potential to radiate out, remanifesting in larger and larger spheres, all the way up to good (orderly) governance of the State.

"Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and beginnings. To know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet."

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Friday, August 27, 2004
3:45 PM
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US Department of Homeland Security renounces visa of scholar/writer Tariq Ramadan, under a section of the U.S. immigration law changed by the USA Patriot Act. (Chicago Tribune link; username: invisible-city, password: reader.) The new section "authorizes visa revocation because of someone's political activities if those efforts are seen as endorsing terrorism."

The Tribune describes Ramadan's work thusly: "Departing from traditional Islamic thinking, Ramadan has written that there are multiple interpretations of the Koran and that Muslims should engage in ijtihad, a perpetual process of interpreting the holy texts of Islam so that the faith evolves and is compatible with modern times."

...

The relevant passage here may be the final passage from Eric Michaels' Unbecoming : An Aids Diary. Writing on the Department of Immigration, after they denied him residency status in Queensland (despite his employment at a Queensland university) on the grounds that he presented "possible health risks for the general community," he writes:

"That people willing to do this exist staggers me. That they represent the official arms of the State depresses me more than I can say, or think."

Labels: war_on_terror

Wednesday, August 25, 2004
9:32 AM
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In today's Imaginary Year, Oliver suggests that all Kerry needs to do in order to win the election is win New Hampshire, which went Republican in the last election—even if all the other states go the same way as they did in 2000, New Hampshire will give Kerry four electoral votes, which will close the four-vote margin of the 2000 election (271-267).

Only what Oliver doesn't realize (or doesn't admit to), is that if this not-entirely-unlikely scenario plays out, the actual result will not be a win, but would instead be this:

So what exactly would happen next?

Jeff Harrell has the answer. Short answer: pray that today is the last time you ever see this map.

Monday, August 23, 2004
10:59 AM
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pistol opera

Last night I watched Pistol Opera, a new-ish film by director Seijun Suzuki, probably best known for his assassin thriller Branded to Kill (1967).

Branded to Kill is stylish and weird, but it's positively traditionalist in comparison to Pistol Opera, which does to the genre of the "assassin thriller" what Godard's Alphaville does to the genres of science fiction and noir. Both Suzuki's film and Godard's take systems of American filmic iconography and subject them to a radical cultural reworking; both films formalize and ritualize their "action" to the point where it begins to register as purely gestural, something more akin to dance or experimental theatre; both are disjunctive, beautifully shot, thrillingly strange.

Labels: media commentary

Sunday, August 22, 2004
8:35 PM
0 comments

Had a long, caffeinated discussion about databases this morning with CJO. What makes an effective database, what databases could be used for, etc.

This afternoon I find myself wondering: why is it that the database is not widely recognized as a form for artistic expression? There are certainly times when I feel like the index card file will end up being the best piece of creative output I will ever produce. And databases, in general, are oriented towards fragmentation, discontinuity, heterogeneity, montage, collage, and systematics—major governing principles of contemporary art.

Guy Davenport writes "A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible." The database is literally designed to be such a form. So where are the artists striving out in that direction? Milorad Pavic has produced at least one book that points the way...

I suspect there are hypertexts that qualify—almost all hypertexts have, as their back-end, arrays of lexia that could basically be thought of as existing in a sort of database form—although I'm hard-pressed to think of many hypertext works that actually function like databases. Where are the creative works that open within, say, Access, rather than running as independent programs with their own interfaces (such as those generated by a hypertext authoring tool like StorySpace)?

Labels: databases, hypertext, indexing

Saturday, August 21, 2004
2:29 PM
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Currently reading anthropologist/activist/theorist Eric Michaels' fascinating Bad Aboriginal Art. I've taken lots of notes from this book, but the observation that's sticking with me most particularly is one that isn't about Aboriginal art at all, but rather about contemporary Western art:

"[In contemporary art] the relationship between [figurative elements] may be masked, so we assume that the logic of these literal relationships is only accessible through the artist's idiolect. ... The viewer is tantalized by the conspicuous display of meaningfulness in a composition that itself fails to establish these meanings."

I like the anthropological clear-eyedness of this pair of statements, the way that in a few words they manage to explain a lot of the appeal of someone like Matthew Barney or Matthew Ritchie. (It's worth noting that I don't think Michaels intends this as a critique or as evidence that contemporary art is somehow a "scam": I imagine that he might agree that the process of being tantalized into investigating a curious new idiolect can be quite pleasurable.)

Thursday, August 19, 2004
1:46 PM
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This has been a terrible month for Raccoon updates. With only two updates in the past seventeen days, August 2004 looks like it's shaping up to be the most thinly-updated month in this blog's entire existence.

I'm not even exactly sure what's been keeping me so busy. I've taken no trips in August (except for a jaunt this weekend out to Madison/Baraboo to help various relocating friends) and I certainly haven't been working on my syllabus for the looming fall semester...

Let's see... I spent a bunch of nights attending Steve Krakow's brilliantly-conceived Million Tongues Festival, and a bunch of days hosting K's mom, brother, and half-sister who were in town... I've been continuing to enter index cards into the database... writing some poems... working on a few odd pieces of fiction...

Does that really account for half the month?

Labels: personal, writing

Tuesday, August 17, 2004
10:24 PM
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layered narrative environments

Last week I watched a DVD of Gus Van Sant's film Elephant. Steven Shaviro eloquently articulates what's working in this film:

"Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) is a beautiful film, so languidly quotidian, and yet so dreamily gorgeous, that its utter naturalism verges on the surreal ... The camera floats from student to student, with long tracking shots following one or another kid down the hallways or across the grass, looping backwards and forwards in time so that the same events are captured several times from several viewpoints."

The end result of this technique is that Van Sant creates a vivid evocation of a school as a rich narrative space: densely layered with multiple stories running in simultaneous sequence. Although the students are the film's focus we also glimpse the administrators, teachers, office staff, and cafeteria workers often enough (and vividly enough) to get a sense that they too have their own narratives directing them through the environment of the school. The film opts not to "follow" these particular branches but we're aware of their existence.

This design helps the Columbine-Littleton-style shootings of the film to carry more weight, to feel more palpable as tragedy: one of the reasons that violence feels shocking in lived experience is precisely because of its disruptive potential, its capacity to radically reroute (or terminate) the narrative "direction" of a life. Most filmic, televisual, or videogame violence, by contrast, fails to shock because the narrative context that we would need to feel that sense of disruption is not provided, or is only provided as a perfunctory sketch or a selection from the circulating set of readymade cliches. When the film's violence cuts through all the film's stories simultaneously, we feel the disruptive sense of that act in that space: this is the most (possibly the only) valuable contribution that Van Sant makes to the cultural discourse around these kinds of shootings.

Another nice Shaviro passage:

"The film is about teenage awkwardness and grace (which coexist in all the characters, in different proportions), and it is wonderfully attentive to the life of the body, to bodies in motion, with their microscopic habits and routines and glitches and disruptions, their momentary tropisms and encounters."

I almost wish that the film had not even had the shootings in it: by including them, the film inevitably becomes "about" the shootings, and I feel that Van Sant has considerably more to say on the life of teenagers in their "momentary tropisms" (what a film like My Own Private Idaho is really all about) than he does on the topic of school shootings. A full exploration of the former would render an exploration of the latter wholly unnecessary.

Labels: media commentary, narrative

Wednesday, August 11, 2004
12:54 PM
0 comments

Still in the process of digitizing the entire card file. I'm up to "AR" (Architecture)

Card #207:

"The earliest structure of any kind to which we find the word *labyrinth* applied was a huge building situated in the north of Egypt...probably constructed more than 2000 years before the commencement of the Christian Era." --W H Matthews, Mazes & Labyrinths : Their History and Development

according to Herodotus, this Labyrinth of Egypt has "12 covered courts, with opposite doors, six courts on the North Side and six on the south, all communicating with one another and one wall surrounding them all. There are two sorts of rooms, one sort above, the other sort below ground, fifteen hundred of each sort, or three thousand in all."

the lower rooms contained the tombs of the kings who had built the labyrinth and the tombs of sacred crocodiles

Card #208:

"1956--first fully enclosed mall: Southdal Center, Edina, MN"

Tuesday, August 10, 2004
6:57 PM
0 comments