poetry beat : chris glomski and vincent katz

A Danny's Reading Series event

Wednesday, Jan 25 at Danny's Tavern

Chris began with a set of poems from his newly-published book, Transparencies Lifted From Noon

Of "Vela (the Amaneuensis)," he remarks that it began as an attempt to write 'a poem within a poem' but that he instead 'switched around the framing device and made it sort of a mystery.' The 'poem within a poem' is now represented as verses 'left behind in [a] Selectric on the desk' by the mysterious 'Vela,' recently disappeared

'Vela''s poem is pretty sensual stuff, with lines referencing 'fragrant ham and melon' and 'wriggling perfumes,' but then the poem is interrupted as 'something electric tore out the text and sucked it into the weather.' I like the way that the melodrama (ghost story? noir?) here fixes Vela's more lyric passages into something more narrative, but still cryptic.

Chris follows this with 'Currency Exchange,' one of my favorite poems of his. It's essentially a long inventory, short lines that are mostly nouns or noun clauses:

"Exclamations. The price of life. Peas and carrots."

There are some verbs thrown in, too, from time to time:

"Sun shines. Cobras spit."

Somehow the addition of the verbs makes the piece feel more "filmic"-- more a montage of short clips of non-narrative action than a montage of still shots of objects. To further mix things up, there are things in there that aren't objects or actions but abstractions:

"Illusions of speed and dexterity. Step 2 and Step 3."

and some bits of dialogue (with no identified speaker):

"How long will you have that look on your face?"

Some phrases seem chosen for their rhythmic qualities ("duct tape", for instance, follows "bake sale"), but this doesn't happen often enough to become a pattern. In fact, one of the things I like about this poem is that it's kind of a pattern-disruptor: every time you think you can articulate the formal principle undergirding the inventory, a new item comes in to disrupt that principle. This gives the poem a distinct life and energy.

The poem is funny, too, with lines like "Attention-seeking noise originates in cat"

He reads a few prose poems (also funny) from a sequence about 'brushes with fame,' including being visited at school by local weatherman / cult figure Harry Volkman, and a set of triolets inspired, apparently, by having made his students write triolets

He closes out with a piece based on Joe Brainard's I Remember, which he said he attempted to re-write in a "surrealist mode" before deciding it was "stupid." Instead he's given it an abecedarian scheme, wherein each stanza focuses on a different letter of the alphabet. This poem is entertaining, but to my mind it suffers from sounding too much like a standard abecedarian primer. Language tends towards clunkiness when you fit, say, "aardvarks" and "abacus" into the same line, and it's hard to transcend that awkwardness (although it can be done: see, for example, Christian Bok's Eunoia, which reads pretty smoothly while being driven by an extremely rigorous alphabetical constraint)

There were a couple of funny lines, and the poem worked well enough as a good-natured homage to Brainard, but was a trifle compared to most of the other work Chris read.

Vincent Katz began with a set of poems written in Brazil that were pretty narrative, driven by a stable lyrical subject, which frankly didn't do that much for me. I'm not all that interested in white-male observations on Brazilian street musicians and transitory female beauty to begin with, although I'll occasionally overlook that, but not for lines like "In a couple of years, his girl will look weathered ... Her breasts will be sad." I did like the first poem in this series, "Some Kinds of Love." Composed mostly of exclamations ("I can take no more! Tie me to a tree!"), Katz delivered this poem with real aplomb.

Katz has spent a lot of time translating the writings of Sextus Propertius, a Latin poet from around 50 BC, and these poems were possibly the high point of his reading. Katz describes Propertius as 'decadent and immoral,' and if you've ever whiled away an afternoon reading translated Pompeiian graffiti you know that hearing bawdy old-schoolers is often entertaining. And Katz delivers lines like "fortune granted that I always have affairs ... never will I be blind to the babes" with obvious relish. But afterwards it's back to poems like "Pearl," from Understanding Objects, which is, again, a straightforward narrative (about a man named Jimmy who bought the young Vincent Katz some Janis Joplin albums as well as the Kinks' Arthur). This one ends with some bald-faced sentimentality:

"Now, at 2 am, it rains. The kind of rain Jimmy would have noticed."

I hate to say it, but that kind of thing (along with the later assertion, in a different poem, that James Merrill "composed his poems as seer for an age") is exactly the kind of thing that turns me markedly off.

[Cross-posted to Kerri Sonnenberg's Chicago Poetry group-blog]

Labels: poetry_commentary

Friday, January 27, 2006
1:39 PM
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linkfarm XXXIII

1. Interesting litjournal Chain is looking for guest editors to work on a book series

2. Blossomy, a lovely font of plant wingdings

3. Free fonts from German desingers Typografski

4. Channel Null, conspiracy-related weblog

5. Be on the lookout for hyperdimensional mantid intelligences

6. The Buddha Machine, a low-fi Chinese loop-playing device

7. Antwerp art-damage label Ultra Eczema

8. Bibliography of books on menstruation

9. Urban legend: Goatman

10. Super-psychedelic artwork from Reed Anderson

Labels: linkfarms

Wednesday, January 25, 2006
10:23 AM
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rebis news

It is looking increasingly likely that Number None will be doing a micro-tour of a few (3-4) US cities this March, joining up with drone minimalists Son of Earth and UK noise lads Birds of Delay (on their first US tour). Will we be coming to your town? Stay tuned.

Here's a somewhat dubious photo of yours truly with the Birds chaps, from this summer, when we were over in the UK and touring briefly with them:

You can tell what kind of time I'm having, I think. (Hint: drunk)

The forthcoming Rebis comp, Lead Into Gold, features tracks from both the Birds and Son of Earth, hopefully we'll get it out to the plant soon so we can have copies for sale on the tour.

Also: a very kind review of the Damp and Damned tape-collaboration (of which we are now sold out).

Labels: number_none, personal

Monday, January 23, 2006
10:10 PM
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making luck

Inspired by a recent issue of Cabinet, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately on chance, risk, luck, and related concepts. Doing random Google searches on the word "luck" led me to this Fast Company article about the relationship between an individual's luckiness and his or her degree of optimism.

Researcher Richard Wiseman, interviewed in the article, suggests not only that optimists perceive more "luckiness" when reviewing any particular event (although they do), but also that this outlook is, in fact, self-fulfilling, that to believe you are lucky attunes you to the presence of opportunity.

Now, the power of positive thinking may not exactly help you beat Vegas, and the whole power-of-positive-thinking spin here seems very, uh, Fast Company to me, but I was intrigued by Wiseman's description of the experiment his research department used to test this theory:

"We asked subjects to flip through a newspaper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS.

"For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, 'There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?' We'd say, 'Yeah, carry on.' They'd flip some more and say, 'Do I get my 150 pounds?' Most of the unlucky people didn't notice."

Even longtime readers of this blog may not know that a decade ago I wrote a novel about Las Vegas.

Labels: perception

Thursday, January 19, 2006
1:52 PM
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linkfarm XXXII

1. Cute / psychedelic animals vomiting up hearts (drawn by Katy Horan)

2. Gentle rants about Narnia by Christian blogger Andrew Rilstone

3. 25 books from 2005, courtesy of the Village Voice

4. Some poems from the latest issue of Dana Ward's Magazine Cypress

5. Fascinating stories about working as a porn video clerk

6. Archive of digitized wax cylinder recordings (thanks Eric)

7. My favorite results from last week's "Draw Batgirl" meme: one, two, three, four, five, six

8. The memoir on which Syriana was based

9. Index of Folly, 2000-present

10. Collaborative "improvisational fiction" project seeks participants

Labels: linkfarms

Wednesday, January 18, 2006
11:19 AM
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contains spoilers (sort of)

I'm talking to my students this week about summary, and the related skills of selection and compression. As an in-class exercise, we watched the first ten minutes of Raising Arizona today (everything up to the opening credits) and I asked them to summarize those ten minutes as a series of 8-10 plot points. Afterwards, I asked them to condense those plot points to four sentences or less.

One student, mishearing, said "four words or less?"

I corrected him, but then thought about it for a second and said "couple decides to kidnap?"

After class, on the phone, CJO and I realized that many films can be aptly summarized in four words. For instance (spoilers follow):

Star Wars Episode Three: "Anakin becomes Darth Vader"

The Village: "Luddite myth-management prevails"

Babe: "Laudable pig herds sheep"

The Usual Suspects: "Criminal outwits cop, partners" (CJO's suggestion: "Playing dumb pays off")

Feel free to post your own four-word summaries in the comments area...

Tuesday, January 17, 2006
12:44 PM
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attraction and repulsion in the classroom

New semester started last week. A bunch of the students I had last semester for English 160 are with me again for English 161, which I take as a sign that they liked me (although it could just as easily be a sign that they think of me as "the devil they know").

I like it when students like me, it makes it easier for me to slip in some actual education here and there. Although then there's this thing that philosopher Simon Critchley says:

"Students should both admire you and then be repulsed by you. The art of teaching is managing that play of attraction and repulsion; in psychoanalytic terms. of making the transference and breaking it and not letting teaching turn into the crass discipleship one sees too much of in the United States."

I think I'm pretty good at managing that play: attraction yet repulsion is I think very close to being an accurate description of how I imagine my students see me.

(The Critchley quote, by the way, comes from Issue #17 of Cabinet Magazine, themed around "Laughter." I've been reading Issue #19 ("Chance") recently, which is quite good, and it's been making me think about luck, and risk, and things of that nature, about which I may write more later.)

Monday, January 16, 2006
10:35 PM
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war in the age of intelligent machines, by manuel delanda

Manuel DeLanda's preeminent virtue as a scholar is the way in which he applies the ideas of complexity theory (emergence, feedback, etc.) to the historical record, and War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) follows this template, looking at moments where technological developments (the conoidal bullet, wireless technology) spur military systems to evolve (a process which, in turn, triggers other armies to evolve in response).

If you accept this premise (fail to at your peril), it naturally suggests that the militaries of today will one day evolve even further. So in addition to sketching out historical instances of this sort of thing, DeLanda spends a lot of time drawing attention to contemporary developments in technology or military theory that might be putting us on the road to future phase shifts that might spell Bad News for soldiers and civilians alike. Artificial intelligence, RAND-style war game simulators, and predatory machines (of the sort outlined in DARPA's "Strategic Computing Initiative") all come in for an extended critique, although DeLanda seems more optimistic about technological systems that don't take human beings "out of the loop" (the book ends with an appreciation of humanist interface designer Doug Engelbart).

All in all, this book is pretty essential reading for anyone interested in the "machine" part of the war machine, although it could definitely benefit from a little revision and expansion edition: some of the Cold War anxiety undergirding the book has lost some of its edge in the intervening years, and I could stand to lose some of it in favor of having DeLanda as a guide through past two wars (although War was published in 1991, Desert Storm hardly ranks a mention, a little odd, given the use of Israeli-built Pioneer UAVs in that conflict).

This review will eventually be crossposted to Raccoon Books.

Thursday, January 12, 2006
12:29 PM
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index-card-based organizational technologies

With the advent of the new year, I'm attempting a new organizational system utilizing the six-pocket Moleskine Accordion File Folder. This system replaces the PDA I was using for a little while (January-May 2005) and makes a cautious attempt to replace the spiral-bound index cards that I've been using for much longer (August 1997-present).

The new system uses the Moleskine's six pockets as follows:

1. blank index cards

2. "active" to-do cards (basically David Seah's Task Progress Tracker condensed (by me) into a 3x5 format that can be printed on Oxford Printable Index Cards)

3. "inactive" to-do cards (each card is dedicated to a different project, and if a project doesn't have any currently "active" task it gets considered dormant until I figure out what the next task is)

4. 3 "calendar cards" (current week, current month, and 12-month), also designed to be printed on those printable index cards

5. three cards for shopping lists (basically grocery store, drug store, and department store)

6. index cards filled out with notes and awaiting archiving

So far, I like using Seah's system for the to-do cards. The big advantage of his system is that the longer you work on a task, the more boxes you get to check. Ostensibly this is to track your progress, but I find that it works as a suitable incentive to take on the longer, more difficult tasks (as well as an incentive to keep working—just another fifteen minutes and you get to check off another box!).

The biggest drawback of this system is that the Moleskine Memo Pockets thingum doesn't have a place to hold a pen (like the spiral-bound index cards do).

I'll let you know how it works out as time skitters on.

Labels: indexing

Tuesday, January 10, 2006
12:54 PM
0 comments

top ten albums of 2005

1. Ming, Hands Red With the Blood of Her Enemies

Campbell Kneale has been bringing stellar reams of noise-damage back from the mountain pretty reliably lately, and in his Birchville Cat Motel incarnation he provided another one of the year's great releases (Chi Vampires). But this two-disc release is really the one that hits my sweet spot, taking menacing drones, cryptic bits of found sound, decontextualized ritual music and random clatter and making them into totemic pileups, radiating a burnt, blackening magic. On Celebrate Psi Phenomena.

2. M.I.A., Arular

M.I.A. is the artist this year who came closest to being all things to all people. Some were won over by her hard-edged activist-militaristic pose, others won over by her doe-eyed softness. Her persona is so striking (and polarizing) that the album itself was treated by many as almost an afterthought. More's the shame, because the album is as fine a piece of dance-pop wonder as any available, blazing with the energy and fire of a small star. On XL.

3. LCD Soundsystem, LCD Soundsystem

The second great dance-pop album of the year. A great counterbalance, too, for James Murphy is perhaps the anti-M.I.A., completely eschewing the Big Global Issues that Arular takes on, instead offering silly trifles on record-collector cultural cachet and Daft Punk. But, really, who cares? This album brought the beats and the grooves to make me dance, and when I'm dancing, I don't really need any lyrics that go beyond the ones found on "Yeah": "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah." On DFA.

4. White Rock, Tar Pit

This collaboration between psychedelic agents Double Leopards and Mouthus may be better than anything either group has done individually. A slow trawl through a subterranean wonder-world, covered in luminescent fungal slime. I wrote a longer review of this back in May, which you can read here. On Troubleman.

5. Fursaxa, Lepidoptera

For years now, Fursaxa's Tara Burke has been producing albums of hypnotic, hazy chant and slightly icy song that are available either in obscure formats (the vinyl-only Mandrake) or in small, poorly-distributed CD-R runs (Amulet, The Cult at Moon Mountain). It's nice, therefore, to see the All Tomorrow's Parties label release a CD that might bring Fursaxa's work to a larger audience, especially nice given that Lepidoptera is her strongest work to date, providing the dream-addled listener with twelve tracks of opiated goodness. On All Tomorrow's Parties.

6. Various Artists, Invisible Pyramid : Elegy Box

A lot of nice experimental comps came out this year, from PseudoArcana's very fine 2-disc The Tone of the Universe = (The Tone of the Earth) to Foxy Digitalis' 3-disc overview of the psychedelic folk sub-underground, Gold Leaf Branches. But the real prize goes to Invisible Pyramid, a mammoth six-disc set described by Jewelled Antler's Glenn Donaldson as "the SUV of drone-psych compilations." This set showcases some of the most interesting musicians from all across the globe, from Italy's My Cat is an Alien to New Zealand's Birchville Cat Motel, and although not every track is great (this disc determines once and for all that just because something was recorded in Finland doesn't automatically make it gold) the hit-rate is incredibly high, making this the most indispensible "scene report" since 2001's Improvised Music From Japan. On Last Visible Dog.

7. Jazzfinger, The Well of Used Dreams

Even after spending a week in a van with the guys from Jazzfinger this summer, seeing them on stage a half-dozen times, and performing with them once, I still don't really know how they're making the sounds on this record. The slamming door and typewriter clacks are obvious enough, and there's some piano, and something that sounds like a violin, but then there are also these grainy sounds that are maybe tape-noise, and some scary electronic textures that sound like a disemboweled children's toy... This album continues to strike me as hermetic, oblique, and intriguing, a musty curio-cabinet of a release. On Classic English Womb.

8. Architecture in Helsinki, In Case We Die

The only indie-pop album to crack my top ten this year, In Case We Die sounds like the cool kids in high school with the ska records got together with the weirdest of the marching band geeks to form a house band for Rushmore's Max Fischer Players. Reeking of youthful charm, charisma, and heartfelt longing, Architecture in Helsinki write small-scale pop gems that strive to be big-scale, and end up sounding like the Polyphonic Spree, only without the bloated, syrupy quality. On Bar/None.

9. Brian McBride, When the Detail Lost Its Freedom

If In Case We Die was my go-to record for summertime fun music, this record, by Stars of the Lid alum Brian McBride, has been the one that's been playing again and again as the Chicago winter locks everything into bleak, icy gloom. This is a solemn collection of quasi-symphonic chamber minimalism, full of somber melodies containing just enough receding warmth to make your your heart break. Everyone I've played this album for has come away from it moved. On Kranky (which had a good year, releasing other fine records by Ben Vida's Bird Show and Rob Lowe's Lichens project...)

10. Of, The Buried Stream

With this album, Loren Chasse, of the Jewelled Antler collective, continues his investigations into sonic pantheism, stronger here than ever before. Back in January I said this collection of organic hum, instrumental sketches, and field recordings sounds "like the work of a man trying to bear witness to a vision of personal holiness": you can read the full review here. Self-released on Jewelled Antler.

Labels: music_commentary

Thursday, January 05, 2006
3:52 PM
0 comments

Casino Skating Palace, Asbury Park, NJ
Originally uploaded by jbushnell.

welcome to the pleasuredome II

The best photos from my Asbury Park photo-trawl are now up as a set of 21 photos.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006
1:46 PM
0 comments

the year in reading

Once again: a new year, time to crunch the numbers on the reading log. General trend?: reading fewer books but enjoying the ones I read more. There are a good half-dozen books on this year's list that I spent a long, intimate time with, filling dozens of index cards with crabbed handwriting and generally hastening my decline into obsessive-compulsive insanity.

Anyway, the numbers:

Total number of books I read last year: 35 (down 23 [!] from 2004)

Novels / novellas: 5 (down four)

Collections of poetry: 6 (down sixteen [!])

Collections of short stories: 1 (+1)

Books on science / technology: 2 (same as last year)

Books on religion: 8 (+8)

Graphic novels / comics anthologies: 9 (+4)

Books of literary or cultural criticism: 1 (-5)

Books on art / architecture / music: 2 (-1)

Essays / memoir: 0 (-4)

History: 0 (-2)

Authors I read in 2005 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2005: 10 (Karen Armstrong, Christine Hume, Rae Armantrout, Craig Thompson, David Toop, Alan Moore, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Charles Bernstein, and Ryan McGinness)

Books I read in 2005 that I read at least once prior to 2005: 3 ( Valis, by Philip K. Dick, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons)

High points: looking at the numbers above reveals a real increase in my interest in books on religion, and these are indeed the books that I spent the most time with and made my most careful notations on. (This interest traces definitively back to a single distinct experience which some of you have heard me talk about.) Unsurprisingly, then, many of my favorite books that I read this year come from that field. I enjoyed Elaine Pagels' Gnostic Gospels and Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, both rightfully considered definitive texts on their respective topics, but I probably got more out of Stephen Katz's deeply fascinating Mysticism and Language anthology and Philip K. Dick's provocative, loopy In Pursuit of Valis : Selections from the Exegesis.

Outside of the world of religion? The essays in Johanna Drucker's great collection Figuring the Word : Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics changed the path of the writing I produced this year more than anything else I read, and the "image/text" Vas: An Opera in Flatland, produced collaboratively by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, convinced me that there maybe is still life in the novel after all. Finally, reading the first two manga that comprise Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira saga revealed to me just how deeply the story is compromised by the abridged, compressed version found in the movie.

What did you read this year that you enjoyed?

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, January 02, 2006
12:36 PM
0 comments