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for the home audience
I don't blog stuff about the War in Iraq or War on Terror here too often: there are enough people out there doing a good, reliable job of it that mostly I leave it alone.
But still, when I start off my morning by seeing Al-Zarqawi on the front page of USA Today, it might be worth remembering the article that the Washington Post ran just barely two weeks ago, "Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi," in which "internal military documents ... explicitly list the 'U.S. Home Audience' as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign."
OK. Back to grading. |
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
8:36 AM
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self-promotional II
Some more things I've been involved with debuting on the Web:
One is Strike Online, a web-journal associated with the Chicago Socialist Party. I haven't contributed any content, but I did the design for the thing, so check it out and admire my mad HTML skillz. God bless tables!
Also, a new Flickr set: Cemetery Textures. Currently eighteen photos; although I might hit another cemetery on Monday, so stay tuned.
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Saturday, April 22, 2006
9:48 PM
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self-promotional
Some things I'm involved with are debuting on the Web this week:
One is Lead Into Gold, a 2-CD set from Rebis.
Lead Into Gold collects long-form works from a number of artists based on the theme of alchemical transmutation—ie. pieces that start in one place and end somewhere radically different, or that substantially alter their source material. Some pretty bright stars of the drone-noise-folk constellation are represented on this disc: Bruce Russell, Bird Show and Lichens, The Opera Glove Sinks in the Sea, Of...Ohv, Keenan Lawler, The Zoo Wheel, White/Light, The Gray Field Recordings, Son of Earth, and Birds of Delay. I'm not on there, but I did do the artwork. $18 bucks for those of you who are into this type of thing; we take credit cards and PayPal.
In other news, two poems of mine appeared this week in the new issue of Shampoo; you can check them out here if you want the direct route. |
Friday, April 21, 2006
9:23 PM
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macrosyntax
I just recently finished reading Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, which collects the writings of the Toronto Research Group, a group founded by the great experimental poets bpNichol and Steve McCaffery.
Although most of the "research reports" collected in this book date back to the Seventies, there have been few people in the intervening three decades who have rivaled Nichol and McCaffery's committment to interrogating the form of the book, the form of the poem, the form of the word, etc.
Part of their project hinges on developing more ways of thinking about syntax. If syntax is defined as "sentence construction or its rules," then it follows that rules governing units smaller than the sentence could be thought of as a microsyntax. Once this idea is established, it follows that, just as poets can choose to formally investigate / play with / reject the "rules" of syntax at the sentence level, they can similarly investigate / play with / reject the rules of microsyntax. McCaffery and Nichol also identify a macrosyntax governing "elements and combinations that occur in a context greater than the sentence."
Particularly inspired, to my mind, is this description of the largest possible macrosyntactic unit:
"As a macrosyntactic unit all literature is seen as one huge, spherical sentence, continuously expanding, whose grammar and arrangement is continuously permutated and modified... This macrosyntax is the given context of reading: it is the huge block of unread letter sequences that make up textuality."
More:
"Obviously, from the point of view of readership, the paths through the macrosyntax (which is itself constantly growing and changing) are infinite. The sequence of things read can be as significant as the actual things read. Any path creates valid reader experiences. The notion of any absolute reading is ridiculous. Intertextual travels that cover Husserl, Reader's Digest, Robert Filliou and Maurice Sendak ae as valid as those covering Max Brand, Stan Lee, Jacques Lacan, T.S. Eliot and Robert Crumb. The writer can never know the entire macrosyntactic context from which her readers draw. The only certainty is that they will all be different."
From this, McCaffery and Nichol conclude that "[b]oth reading and writing are activities of foregrounding from a ground of potentiality, and the history of a person's reading can be seen to constitute that person's own writing through the macrosyntax."
Of course, if that is true, it raises the question of "why write at all when one could just be reading?" but that's really a question for another day.
bPNichol died in 1988, but McCaffery is still around, most recently spotted writing about "parapoetics" for the North American Center for Interdiscipliary Poetics. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing |
Monday, April 17, 2006
2:50 PM
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artists with cosmologies
CJO and I are thinking about going to see Drawing Restraint No. 9, the Matthew Barney / Bjork collaboration, this Sunday, as a sort of Easter treat.
I've been thinking about Barney a lot lately, as well as Matthew Ritchie, another artist who undergirds his work with an ultra-complex personal cosmology. There's more artists working in this vein, too: in Proposition Player, Matthew Ritchie ticks off a whole series of artists who use "cosmologies and mythologies" as tools, including Liam Gillick, Gregor Schneider, Manfred Pernice, Andrea Zittel, Kara Walker, Katy Schimert, Michael Grey, and Michael Rees.
Ritchie talks about how these artists end up using "complex titling and installation strategies" as decoders or partial decoders of these cosmologies; a tradition that I'd argue begins with Marcel Duchamp's "Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even" (1915-1923) (and its corresponding decoder The Green Box). I think the Drawing Restraint website serves as a kind of extension of this idea, in that it provides a kind of quasi-theoretical underpinning for both the film and the drawings generated using restraints #1-8 (inclusive).
I wonder if these "cosmological" artworks aren't making a bid, a possibly conscious one, to "trump" two of the major art movements of the last fifty years, namely Abstract Expressionism and Conceptual Art. The emphasis on backstory / underlying concept adds a sort of intellectual or conceptual value to an artwork like a Matthew Ritchie painting, which might otherwise appear to be a garden-variety "contentless" Abstract Expressionist piece; yet the emphasis on physical-objectness and its related aesthetic traditons (such as "craft") adds material value to an artwork like a Matthew Barney vitrine, reversing the Conceptual-Art-ish emphasis on works that "lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence" (as this blurb for Martha Buskirk's Contingent Object of Contemporary Art puts it).
A perhaps more cogent way of thinking about this is to see it as a manifestation of the larger pattern of (material) "property" everywhere being overwritten with a layer of (immaterial) "intellectual property." Barney, Ritchie, etc. create works that function on both levels—the material and the immaterial—simultaneously, which makes them both appealing and interesting as artworks, but also invests them with twice as much capitalist value. Somewhere in here is the reason why Barney won't release the Cremaster films on DVD... Labels: art, media commentary |
Friday, April 14, 2006
12:42 PM
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blogrolls, tags, and meta-data
Spent a good amount of time last night tweaking the sidebar of this blog, culling blogs that have disappeared or that no longer update, and trying (less successfully) to develop a taxonomical scheme under which the sidebar could be organized.
The failure of this attempt helps to cement my appreciation of more flexible "tag"-based systems—in which one item can be tagged with multiple keywords—over more inflexible hierarchy-based taxonomies (like what we've got over in the sidebar right now).
A more pithy way of phrasing this problem: "folders suck." (That's how Ari Paparo puts it in his frank, insightful post on why bookmark-sharing utility Blink.com (circa 1999) failed, while later bookmark-sharing utility del.icio.us appears to be succeeding.)
Ari: "[P]eople are very bad and inconsistent at organizing things. One day etrade.com will go into the 'finance' folder and another day it will go into the 'favorite links' folder."
Well, exactly. And blogs, with their often eclectic focus, are even more damnably stubborn about slotting neatly into a single category. Derik Badman's great Mad Ink Beard is mostly about comics (as it makes obvious through the tag cloud on its front page) but my interest in it is at least as much because it's about literary constraints and their effect on narrative: shouldn't it go under a "constraints" category or a "narrative" category? Wait a second, aren't all comics basically narrative? Couldn't they all go into a "narrative" category? Sounds fine, until you consider a blog like Comics Should Be Good, which seems to have only a nominal interest in comics as narrative per se, and more of an interest in, well, which comics are good. And then there's something like the great blog Pruned, which claims to be about landscaping, but in reality is about so much more.
I find that what I most want is a little applet that would allow me to assign multiple tags to blog-links (like del.icio.us) but would also store various meta-data about the links (when it was added, when it was last clicked, how many times it's been clicked in total) and allow me to reconfigure them instantly using any of these meta-variables as the organizing axis (like what iTunes does with songs). And then ideally the whole thing would publish to HTML and could sit there in the sidebar (and maybe be re-configurable by readers of this blog). Does anybody know of anything that even approaches this? Labels: taxonomies |
Thursday, April 13, 2006
8:05 AM
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geraldine kim | povel
I'm pretty sure the claim that Geraldine Kim's book Povel represents a new form that successfully merges confessional verse poetry and the novel should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, appearing, as it does, in an introduction that claims to be written by Lyn Hejinian and claims to have originally been published in An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII, only to turn around to tell us, in a footnote at the very end, that "Lyn Hejinian never wrote this and An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII is not an existing text."
This fake introduction, with its sense of pomo gamesmanship and its willingness to cleverly tweak elements of "the book as form" (the author photo, bio, and epigraph are all played for gag effect, too) initially seems to place the book in a tradition staked out by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and later parlayed into a literary career by Dave Eggers, particularly in McSweeney's and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But perhaps Povel's claim to hybridity is not all red herring, as the book does ring akin to Lyn Hejinian's My Life, at least in the way that it makes a sort of biographical narrative by aggregating a set of tenuously-related details.
The main difference is that Kim renounces just about all claim to "poetic"-sounding language. A Hejinian line might say something like "The waves rolled over our stomachs, like spring rain over an orchard slope," a sentence that might contain the somewhat ungainly noun "stomachs" but which also is built around a "nature-y" simile that should sit pretty comfortably with readers of traditional lyric poetry. Contrast this against Kim's "Sarcastic Starbucks Guy runs like a frantic penguin to get tea for the lady in front of me." Still based on a nature-themed simile, but the difference feels pretty stark, even if what exactly distinguishes it is hard to articulate. Is it just the presence of the corporation name? Is it the fact that this image feels, to me, familiar, whereas the "orchard rain" image feels, frankly, exotic?
Whatever the reason, Hejinian's book feels like a poem, whereas Kim's book feels not exactly like a poem or like a novel but a bit like reading straight through the archives of a breezy, funny blog. "It would suck to be a unicorn" (p. 40). "A woman walks in front of me as we climb the stairs and I notice that her ass resembles a pair of tympanis" (p. 86). The whole book is like this, ten thousand bits of random observation, accumulating in various ways, some of which take on some of the features of narrative (the book does have, for instance, characters, some of whom have back-stories, although how much "character development" is happening here is questionable).
The fact that the book piles on these observations and leaves them in free suspension qualifies it as an "Everything Device," although one that's fragmented and trivia-focused in comparison, to, say, Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs. One could almost think of Kim as the anti-Spahr: where Spahr's book keeps focusing consciousness outward, broadening it, attempting to see each detail as part of the Big Big Picture, Kim's book seems more focused inward, the sheer massive weight of detail-to-be-collected cramming out any sense of wider connectedness as it overtaxes the very consciousness responsible for collecting it: "Trying to constantly remind myself to write it down before my short-term memory takes it away." I'm not saying that Spahr's book is better—in fact, if you asked me which one works as a better representation of everyday consciousness, I'd say that while we all might wish we had minds like Juliana Spahr's—concentrated on making sense of world atrocity and issues of personal agency—I, for one, feel the shock of recognition much more when confronted with the mind of Geraldine Kim, fixated on TV shows, celebrity trivia, momentary impulses, vaguely narcissitic anxieties, and things said to me by an ex, years ago. This may or may not be lamentable.
This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books Labels: book_commentary |
Thursday, April 06, 2006
12:47 PM
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juliana spahr | this connection of everyone with lungs
OK, so for a while now I've been wanting to talk about Juliana Spahr's new book, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, as an example of what I've been calling an "Everything Device," a structure, framework, or system which positions disparate information into a meaningful relationship.
We can get a sense that the book is going to do this from its title alone, a phrase drawn from the opening poem: "Poem Written After September 11, 2001." This poem's central task is to articulate the model of radical interconnectedness upon which the rest of the book depends. Over its eight pages it performs this task through what essentially amounts to a slow zoom-out, from the microscopic level ("cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells") all the way out to global scope ("the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands"). To call oneself a "global citizen" is slightly pollyanna-ish, but this poem still functions as a lovely vision: the way it is made elegiac by its positioning as a "post-9/11" poem feels slightly predictable, but that makes the elegy no less real. One of the more "important" poems in recent memory (let's set aside, for now, the question of whether poetry should aspire to importance).
More interesting and important still is the book's remainder, a single long poem (broken into discrete chunks), entitled "Poem Written From November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003." (The first bit of it lives over at Shampoo, you can go check it out if you're so inclined.) I think this poem is more interesting because it's doing the thornier work of dealing with the consequences of the first poem: if "everyone with lungs" is connected in a "lovely [and] doomed" global matrix, then what does this mean? If we can successfully expand our consciousness to the point where it encompasses the whole earth as a system, then what does it mean when part of that system (including but not limited to "our part") is attempting to kill another part of that system (including but not limited to "their part")? Is it possible to love humanity all-encompassingly when some of the humans that we're connected to behave so, well, shittily? Is a person killed in the Burij refugee camps important? What about someone killed in the Monoko-Zohi civil war? What about Justin Timberlake? How important is the weather? If you can make your own bed a place of "connected loving" and "pleasure" and "agency," what relevance does this have to the rest of the world, if any? How can you consider these questions seriously in a world at war without going insane or succumbing to crippling grief?
I don't think that the book answers these questions, but I think they're the right ones to be asking, and any book that represents a sustained attempt to address them (lyrically no less!) gets my recommendation.
PS: When I first wrote about Spahr's project I said that the high lyrical voice and the sometimes "newsy" details made it seem like "Walt Whitman doing NPR's Morning Edition," and it still seems possible to say that Spahr's project is to represent the newspaper in the form of a poem. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, and it has its own storied tradition: the avant-garde has been attempting to beat the newspaper as a model for radically discontinuous juxtaposition at least since Mallarme.
This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books Labels: book_commentary |
Monday, April 03, 2006
11:45 AM
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unread, unheard
I've been playing around at de.licio.us a lot over the past couple of weeks, and I've now tagged over twenty different pieces of writing online with my "to_read" tag. Sooner or later I should switch gears and actually read some of them instead of just collecting more.
Anyway, here's the full list: if anyone feels especially inclined to write me a series of incisive one-page summaries, e-mail me at the usual address.
The drive that makes me put all of the unread Web stuff in one easy-to-find place seems a little akin to the drive behind having made an "Unheard" playlist on my iPod (a playlist that currently clocks in at a scary 1,605 songs).
It's a little overwhelming, but if I'm to be honest I have to admit that I like having a huge backlog of interesting stuff waiting in the wings: it sure beats the ennui that comes with feeling like the world is tapped-out and dead. Labels: indexing |
Sunday, April 02, 2006
11:47 PM
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