Page2RRS

• 01 Sep 2010 08:55

  "Where Do You Choose"Lucy AzubuikeImages Of DakarInvisible Borders-The Trans-African Photography Project

  September 01, 2010 MemoriesEstan Cabigas Paradigm of the TincturesPoems Steve McCaffery Images Alan Halseyfree ebook via Argotist Ebooks. the figure: viewed from the back It’s the other side of Summer in a blown-up world behind it there’s Caspar David Friedrich copying the paintings of Old Masters, sturm und drang with a pair of scissors for comfort. What a splendid air of security! The writing that knows the lovers of strange landscape is hardly visible,           shivers to the shape of a disappearing allegorical vocabulary. Let’s go there and be read in a morning fog ask a tree to dance with us in the sentence “I have to stay alone.” Alan Halsey by Gregory Vincent St. ThomasinoE·ratio Has poetics become too philosophical? Too political? How do you deal with this in your poetry, or are you indifferent (immune?) to it all. . . ? I can’t remember when I last read a book on poetics. In the 70s and 80s I did read Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and related work, and I’m sure you could trace the use I made of that and perhaps still do as a kind of background. But the philosophy which I consciously dwell on is what I learnt as an undergraduate a decade before, the Presocratics, Hume, Philosophical Investigations. The Presocratics for the impacted fragment, Hume for sceptical good nature, Wittgenstein for his attention to language as it goes about its business. That’s what I was trying to acknowledge when I wrote ‘Wittgenstein’s Devil’ although that poem is also a response to Steve McCaffery’s writing. Steve has much more enthusiasm for critical theory and contemporary philosophy than I have, at the same time as we share a number of preoccupations—that poem of mine is driven by the similarities and differences. Does poetry still matter? Is it still worth the investment? One is liable to devote a whole lifetime to poetry, a whole lifetime to the study of it, we become, some of us, and in our various ways, scholars of our tradition . . . is it worth it any more? We’re talking about poetry because it still matters to us and maybe a few hundred people of our acquaintance. I admit I’m less convinced now than I used to be that it can be made to matter or even be much noticed in the big wide world. Perhaps it will, we can’t know that, must just do what we do and want to do. ‘Literature’ in current parlance practically always means the novel, and usually novels of largely narrative interest not striving for any intensity of language—the very thing for which we read poetry is somehow regarded as off the scale of common appeal. I’m depressed by that, and even more when I find the same low intensity in poetry itself. CarnivalSteve McCaffery typewriter concrete poetry Steve McCaffery at Sound Poetry - A Survey Steve McCafferyFrom Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978 Canadian Alternative Poetry Online ditchPoetries of Canada The East Village Poetry Web Volume Four Canadian Strangea folio of contemporary Canadian arts & lettersDrunken Boat 2006 Do Not Bring a Tree into the House Dennis DiClaudioExquisite Corpse Yes, Hypatia was dragged from her carriage and pulled into the Caesareum. She was stripped naked. She was flayed with sharpened tiles and beaten and killed. Yes. Her body was carved into pieces and then burnt on a pyre in the Cinaron. It was a painful and cruel death, yes, but do not bring a tree into the house. Trees belong outside, where their roots can grow downward into the earth, where their limbs can reach upward toward the sky, where birds can make their nests in their branches and wearied travelers can rest beneath the shade of their leaves. And though it was a party of Nitrian monks, good Christians, who sharpened their ostrakois against rocks and waited for Hypatia's carriage to pass, we cannot help but view this event with some concern. (I want those eggs)FlorentinaIllustrations by Hana StepanovaA Journey Round My Skull Reconstructing the Story of the Storm: Hurricane Katrina at FiveRebecca Solnit Truth may be the first casualty of war; it's certainly the most important equipment to have on hand in a disaster. There's the practical truth about what's going on: Is the city on fire? Is there an evacuation effort on the other side of town? And then there's the larger truth: What goes on in disasters? Who falls apart and who behaves well? Whom should you trust? Most ordinary people behave remarkably well when their city is ripped apart by disaster. They did in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; in New Orleans during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake; in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11; and in most disasters in most times and places. Those in power, on the other hand, often run amok. They did in San Francisco in 1906, when an obsessive fear that private property would be misappropriated led to the mayor's shoot-to-kill proclamation; a massive military and national guard on the streets; and the death of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilians. Much like New Orleans ninety-nine years later, those who claimed to be protecting society were themselves the ones who were terrorizing and shooting. Earlier this year, Haitians were subjected to a similar rampage of what the disaster sociologists Lee Clarke and Caron Chess call "elite panic." For example, 15-year-old Fabienne Cherisma was shot to death in late January in Port-au-Prince for taking some small paintings from a shop in ruins, one of many casualties of the institutional obsession with protecting property instead of rescuing the trapped, the suffering and the needy. Surviving the new era, in which climate change is already causing more, and more intense, disasters, means being prepared—with the truth. The truth is that in a disaster, ordinary people behave well overall; your chances of surviving a major disaster depend in part on the health and strength of your society going into it. Even so, countless individuals under corrupt governments, in New Orleans, in Mexico City, in Port-au-Prince, often rise to the occasion with deeply altruistic, creative and brave responses. These are the norm. The savagery of elite panic is the exception, but one that costs lives.(....) The very subject of recovery is a complicated one for New Orleans. After 9/11 New York pretty much wanted to get back to where it had been—a thriving, functioning city (albeit one with plenty of poverty and injustice). No one thought New Orleans should get back to what it had been, and the disaster became an opportunity for the city to reinvent itself in various ways. That process continues, and where it goes is anyone's guess. It still depends on the dedication of volunteers and citizens, some of whom are returning, putting their lives back together in what may be, by some intangible measures of joy and belonging, America's richest city, even if it's the poorest by others. A disaster unfolds a little like a revolution. No one is in charge, and anything is possible. The efforts of elites, often portrayed as rescue or protection, are often geared more toward preserving the status quo or seizing power. Sometimes they win; sometimes they don't. Katrina brought many kinds of destruction and a little rebirth, including the spread of green construction projects, new community organizations and perhaps soon, thanks to the work of Thompson and others, some long overdue justice for police crimes. It's too soon to tell what it will all mean in a hundred years, but it's high time to start telling the real story of what happened in those terrible first days and weeks. Jim Johnson Imaginary BrideHannah Höch 1926Hannah Höch - Brushflurlets and Beer Bellies WeimarArt and Modernity in Central Europe Tan Lin Electronic Poetry Center lingo 6 Tan LinThe Imitation of the Imitation of History It means an envelope of conversation appears on a map, and is stationary like the whim between. In a cartoon, a hat expands When it is a pasture,2 1/2 2 5/7 2 11/16 memory pries open the usual, melodious vials of instruction, semi-acoustical vowels, the anti-romanticism3 accustomed to linger on porches. Ecouter et parler,4 blowing doe-eyed lavender shoes in wind weighed like macaroni.5 thus, you are my lips glued to the ocean.6 Like a coupon facing a mirror, the computer enters the moon's tendencies, Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource),[Pdf] Notes Towards The Definition Of Culture, Untilted Heath Ledger Project, A History Of The Search Engine, Disco Os, The New CathedralsEstan CabigasJoerg Colberg Spurious quotes from from Cioran, All Gall is Divided, translated by Richard Howard In other times, the philosopher who did not write but thought incurred no scorn thereby; ever since we began prostrating ourselves before the effective, the work has become the absolute of vulgarity; those who produce none are regarded as failures. But such failures would have been the sages of another age; they will redeem ours by having left no traces. Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred. Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth ... Awareness of time: assault on time ... Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it. Our disgusts? - Detours of the disgust with ourselves. August 31, 2010 Fishing Boats1909Georges Braqued. August 31, 1963 Dusie 10: the Canadian issue June, 2010 Beautiful bonesMonica Kidd (for Graeme Patterson) “… a man in himself is a city…”  -  William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1946) An imaginary map of an unimaginary place. Of motionless afternoons. Of cats melting into asphalt. Of boarded-over windows and old hockey injuries. I know this place. It is caught under my nails and between my toes. It is the wind that bothers the curtains before sound, before time, before the dog has stretched and yawned into her paws and forgotten, for the moment, about breakfast. It is the country I travel alone, Stegner’s exclamation beneath the prairie sky. Pat(t)erson: the city is a man. Perhaps, but what is a city that never took? A pothole swallowing all we’d rather forget. A plastic rat I thought was a flower blooming in the wreckage. A dead grandfather half a country removed. Beautiful bones.We peer through broken windows into the eyes of strangers. Standing Figure with Blue Plane1933Willi Baumeisterd. August 31, 1955 Galįxias Haroldo de Campos translated from Portuguese by a.s. bessaubu 'rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give sounding like a shamisen made of a tensed wire a stick and an old tin can at the end of the partyfair at highnoonhigh but for many that music did not exist it could not because it could not popplay if not sung that music is not popular if not in tune it does not atone nor tarantina and yet struck in the gut of misery in the tensed gut of the meagerest physical misery aching aching like a nail in the handpalm a rusty blind nail in the palm clasping palm of the handheart exposed as a tensed nerve retensed a renigrated blind nail everlasting in the palmpulp of the hand in the sun while selling for meager cruzeiros gourds in which the good form is fine meagerness of matter morphing famineform of halfbaked clay in the rottenroot of distress until others vomit their plastic plates of embroidered borders empirestyle for mistress misery for this is popular for the patrons of the people but people create and people engender and people wonder people are the languageinventor in the malice of the mastery in the smartness of marveling in the vein to improvise stuttertrying to traverse oiling the sun's axis for people know no servitude pure or quasi metaphor people are il miglior fabro in the hammering gait aiming the impossible in view of the nonviable in the crux of the incredible oiled hammergait and the sunaxis but the wire that wire bladewire painpained like a demented plangent wire hammering its widowed dischord in blazing brasses of howling hunger 'rounded by flowers 'rounded by flowers 'rounded by flooowers for I myself cant guide check this book this object of consumption this undergodunderthedevilsmercybook which I arrange and disarrange which I unite and disunite voyages of a vagamonde in the vagaries of vague moons god shall guide the devil shall guide you then for I can't don't dare or care don't trick nor touch or trade but only for my change my pennies my pains my rings my fingers my minuses my nadas in the antennas in the galenas in these nests in these rests as we'll verify in the verbenas in the sugary aēucenas or minor circumstances I know all this don't count all this disappoints I'm not sure but listen how it sings value how it tells savor how it dances and don’t propose that I guide don’t pose dispose that I guide unguided that I pray for promise that I trust you leave me forget me let me go untie me so that at the end I stand erect at the end I revert at the end I concert and for the end I reserve myself as it will be seen that I am correct it will be seen that there is a way it will be seen that it's been done and that through wrongs I made it right that from a scent I made a cent and if I do not guide I do not lament for the master who taught me does not teach any longer baggage of mirrormoon in the mirage of the second that through inversion I was dexterous being inverted by the sinistrous I do not guide because I do not guide because I can not guide and don't ask me for mementos just dwell on this moment and demand my commandment and do not fly just defy do not confide defile for between yes and no I for one prefer the no in the knowing of yes place the no in the ee of me place the no the no will be yours to know Haroldo de Campos August 19, 1929 - August 16, 2003 "Conscious of our failures, we are obliged, as poets of the space in which we live, to construct what not yet exists."  -  Haroldo de Campos Charles Bernstein on Haroldo de Campos"Concrete Prose": Haroldo de Camposs Galįxias and AfterMarjorie Perloff From Dante to the Post-Concrete: An Interview With Augusto de Campos Roland Greene ... all signs are that the next few years will be a combination of economic stagnation and political witch-hunt. This is going to be almost inconceivably ugly.Paul Krugman In New Orleans, Kindness Trumped Chaos Lessons of dedication, solidarity, love, and recovery, five years after Katrina. Rebecca Solnit ... we are entering an era where disaster will be common and intense. Survival will be grounded in understanding our own capacity for power and resilience, creativity, and solidarity. People who complain about "big government", but vote for Military Keynesians and Corporate Millenarians aren't interested in any kind of democratic control of capital. That's the last thing they want. Look at what they do. They're sending bagmen to the federal government and those bagmen do their jobs, with a vengeance. The rank and file is hanging on to its status in capitalism's race to the bottom. Without extravagant corporate entitlements and federal contracts, they're sunk and they know it. When the Left talks about material security and economic justice, they're adding "relative to whom and not at my expense", not relative to what they have in an absolute sense. They despise and mistrust their petty nobility and its plans, and rightly so, but they have no problem with the concept of petty nobility itself. A true left wing program would mean complete upheaval in their world.  -  Al Schuman (Stop Me Before I Vote Again) Sarah Mangold The book made an emotion of the lost territory          (for and after Bhanu Kapil, Dorothy Richardson) There he stood a comfort and a reproach the event of the border. How powerfully the future flows into the present. How to translate migration into the work of the line. And how on entering on experience one is already beyond it so that most occasions are imperfect save before and afterwards. The border is unintelligible and only at the price of solitude. Rewriting in neomuscular terms as gesture. Perhaps everyone has a definite thought rhythm and speech. If we breathe long enough ashes in some kind of motion. Rhythm which cannot be violated without producing self-consciousness and discomfort. Continual migration molecular. The whole process is strange strange and secret. I want to rock your gypsy soul Just like way back in the days of old Happy Birthday Van Morrison31 August 1945 Turn up your radio and let me hear the song Switch on your electric light Then we can get down to what is really wrong I long to hold you tight so I can feel you Sweet lady of the night I shall reveal you Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher radio Turn it up, turn it up, so you know, radio La, la, la, la... August 29, 2010 Parc de Sceaux. MorningEugčne Atget 1925 "The quotation in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction."(...) Benjamin, who for his entire life pursued the idea of writing a work made up entirely of quotations, had understood that the authority involved by the quotation is founded precisely on the destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by its situation in the history of culture.(...) This particular way of entering into a relation with the past also constitutes the foundation of the activity of a figure with which Benjamin felt an instictive affinity: that of the collector. The collector also "quotes" the object outside its context and in this way destroys the order inside which it finds its value and meaning.(...) The interruption of tradition, which is for us now a fait accompli, opens an era in which no link is possible between old and new, if not the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort of monstrous archive or the alientation effected by the very means that is supposed to help with the transmissin of the old. Like the castle in Kafka's novel, which burdens the village with the obscurity of its decrees and the multiplicity of its offices, the accumulated culture has lost its living meaning and hangs over man like a threat in which he can in no way recognize himself. Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into somethin alien that incessantly elludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it. - Giorgio Agamben, The Man Wiithout Content, translated by Georgi Albert Rodin—The Thinker Edward Steichen1902The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Todaymoma Homage to Translation: Benjamin in Japan Forrest GanderA Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence If translation were the apparatus allowing us to approach-- If translation were always taking place as part of a politics concerned with the flow of power-- If Billie Holiday's late signature song “Strange Fruit” had been written by Able Meeropol, aka Lewis Allan, a Jewish poet from the Bronx-- If repetition were a form of translation-- If symmetry were understood as translation plus reflection-- Walter Benjamin famously wrote that a translation should have an awkwardness about it that shows off “the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language.” He argued that translations should not attempt to ameliorate syntactical variance between two languages, but instead should celebrate the host language's instructive difference. Curiously, Benjamin's radical claim about translation did not markedly influence his own translations of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisian. When I read a poem, I hear it in my thorax. Basho praised a poetics of connotative associations, what the Japanese call “scent links” as opposed to merely thematic or linguistic links. I often think of tone as the auditory equivalent of touch. Tom Clark - readings in Tristram Shandy45 Reception:texts, readers, audiences, history Vol. 2 (Summer, 2010) Designed by a Berlin-based team of Canadian artist-designer Rodney LaTourelle and landscape architect Thilo Folkerts, the Jardin de la Conaissance (Garden of Knowledge) seeks to introduce the book as not only a structural garden element of wall, bench and bed, but also as a growing medium. Sandwiched within and between the reclaimed and decomposing books are several edible species of mushrooms like oyster and winecap, an intervention that highlights the living, ephemeral and cyclic character of these artefacts.   -  Mushrooms + 40,000 Discarded Books = 1 Garden of Knowledge Jardins De Métis / Reford Gardensmosses from an old manse What is happening with books? University libraries now have sculptures made out of them in their opulent foyers. These sculptures are meant to signal that reading is an adventure, or fun, or something, but what they really announce is that reading, as it has been known for the past 500 years, is dead. Private citizens have rallied to photograph their own books and to post pictures of them on the internet. Some have suggested that this is a new sort of intellectual 'pornography'. I suspect the anxiety is dawning that if the books are not documented in this way, if they are not registered in the single great repository of all that exists, then their status will be merely antiquarian, home-decorative, or, for the more creative, perhaps, sculptural.   -  Books, Justin E. H. Smith Institute for the Future of the Book and their blog if:book Recepta bibofilska Kraków, 1934 (Society of Book Lovers)Warsaw WarbleIllustration and design in Poland, 1917 to 1938A Journey Round My Skull The WindowsGuillaume Apollinaire August 26, 1880 - November 9, 1918 translated by Donald Revell All the yellow dies from red to green Where parakeets sing in the first woods Pihi giblets There is a poem to make about the bird with just one wing We'll phone it in Gigantic trauma Brings tears to my eyes Behold a young pretty girl amidst the youth of Turin The poor boy sneezed in his white cravat I'll raise the curtain And voila the opening window Spiders when my hands wove the light Beauty pallor fathomless flowers We'll fail at shuteye We'll start over at midnight If you've got the time you've got the freedom Winkles codfish polysuns and sundown urchins A yellow pair of old boots in front of the window Towers Towers are the streets Wells Wells are plazas Wells Hollow trees harbor vagabond half-breeds Mulattoes sing mournfully To noisy mulattoes And the wa-wa goose trumpets northward Where raccoon hunters Scrape pelts Vancouver Glittery diamond Where snow-white trains and nightlife fly from winter O Paris The yellow dies from red to green Paris Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the Antilles The window opens like an orange Handsome sunshine food The self-dismembered man: selected later poems of Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume Apollinaire translated by Donald Revell

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• 26 Aug 2010 08:08

  Collecting ShellfishJacob Henricus Maris b. August 25, 1837

  August 25, 2010 The Octopus from The Bestiary or the Procession of Orpheus1978-9 1978-9Graham Sutherlandb. August 24, 1903 Climate Change: Concocting the “Consensus” Andrew Gavin MarshallGlobal Research The debate is over! There is a consensus! The time for discussion has ended and the need for action is paramount! We have all heard this before. Yet it is important to keep in mind that these types of statements are inherently inimical to scientific inquiry; the debate and discussion should never be over. As new information surfaces, it should be taken into consideration, analyzed, discussed, debated and ultimately it will aid in the advancement of knowledge and scientific understanding. To declare the debate as over is to declare information and knowledge as irrelevant. Progress has never come from holding onto antiquated ideas. The attainment of knowledge does not come from the refusal to reflect. Climate change is no exception. In light of events of the past year, it has become clear that there was a concerted effort on the part of a small clique of elite scientists at the UN and in supporting institutions, governments and universities to concoct the climate change “consensus” to pressure governments and public opinion into supporting the political, economic and social agenda of elites. This article is a brief examination of the transformation of a political consensus into a scientific consensus, and thus we see that the scientific realm of inquiry and pursuit of knowledge and truth is not, itself, outside the influence of political, economic and social power structures. Indeed, science being a comparatively new concept in the human experience (roughly 350 years old) has historically been co-opted by entrenched elites to further their own interests and to strengthen their own power. The scientific technique becomes the elite technique; discovery becomes domination; knowledge becomes power; and truth becomes trite. Miner Probing a Drill HoleGraham Sutherland 1942 Oiling the War MachineCrude: The Story of Oil by Sonia Shah. Seven Stories Press, 2004. “The U.S. military consumes about 85 million barrels of oil a year, making it the biggest single consumer of fuel in the country and perhaps the world. Accordng to an interdisciplinary panel convened by the Defense Science Board (DSB ), cheap oil has distorted the American military into a handful of super-killing steel monsters, with the majority of the forces devoted to the logistics of simply feeding and fueling them. “The Army employed sixty thousand soldiers solely for the purpose of providing petroleum, oil, and lubricants to its war machines, which have themselves become increasingly fuel-heavy. The sixty-eight-ton Abrams tank, for instance, burns through a gallon of fuel for every half mile. With its inefficient, 1960s-era engine, the Abrams tank burns twelve gallons of fuel an hour just idling. “So much time and money is spent fueling the American fighting machines that, according to the head of the Army Materiel Command, a gallon of fuel delivered to the U.S. military in action can ultimately cost up to $400 a gallon. Indeed, 70 percent of the weight of all the soldiers, vehicles, and weapons of the entire U.S. Army is pure fuel.” Climate and CapitalismFeral Scholar Form in an EstuaryGraham Sutherland The Art of Disappearing Naomi Shihab Nye When they say Don't I know you? say no. When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply. If they say we should get together. say why? It's not that you don't love them any more. You're trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store nod briefly and become a cabbage. When someone you haven't seen in ten years appears at the door, don't start singing him all your new songs. You will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time. Naomi Shihab Nye: A Bill Moyers Interview Naomi Shihab Nye at The Poetry Foundation Red suitcase: poems Naomi Shihab Nyegoogle booksFuel: poems Naomi Shihab Nyegoogle booksNever in a hurry: essays on people and places Naomi Shihab Nyegoogle booksThis Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World edited by Naomi Shihab Nyegoogle booksThe flag of childhood: poems from the Middle East edited by Naomi Shihab Nyegoogle books Andrée’s Arctic balloon expedition 1897Grenna Museumvia Mrs. Deane Strike Me, LightningBruce Andrews A. 1. Vibora! Show-off! catechetical [cathechismal] gold placebo star milk, Milky Way practice modesty of the eyes dreamy idolatry Ocean of Colors outside of time none of my loving vida encaressed divertida magic lantern captivity Please destroy this letter A. 2. Let the night have its way with you vicarious in blind circling white incendiary adoration disguise & cast a spell the common mantle of night following me around like a pair of scissors property of dispossessed daughters of Eve inanimate unloved to memorize albino shadows curfew bells lunar eclipse the bitter pill back to the straight & narrow Bruce Andrews at PennSoundEPC trained listener (PoemTalk #35)Tan Lin, Chris Funkhouser, Sarah Dowling and Al Filreis on Bruce Andrews Moebius Eruption on Mt. Vesuvius 1767 October 20Pietro FabrisCampi PhlegraeiObservations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies1776Claremont Colleges Digital Libraryvia bibliodyssey Negotiations with a VolcanoNaomi Shihab Nye We will call you "Agua" like the rivers and cool jugs. We will persuade the clouds to nestle around your neck so you may sleep late. We would be happy if you slept forever. We will tend the slopes we plant, singing the songs our grandfathers taught us before we inherited their fear. We will try not to argue among ourselves. When the widow demands extra flour, we will provide it, remembering the smell of incense on the day of our Lord. Please think of us as we are, tiny, with skins that burn easily. Please notice how we have watered the shrubs around our houses and transplanted the peppers into neat tin cans. Forgive any anger we feel toward the earth, when the rains do not come, or they come too much, and swallow our corn. It is not easy to be this small and live in your shadow. Often while we are eating our evening meal you cross our rooms like a thief, touching first the radio and then the loom. Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash. How can we live like this? We need to wake and find our shelves intact, our children slumbering in their quilts. We need dreams the shape of lakes, with mornings in them thick as fish. Shade us while we cast and hook— but nothing else, nothing else. Marya at African Alchemy Crater of Mt. Vesuvius Pietro Fabris Campi Phlegraei Confronting ImagesQuestioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art Georges Didi-HubermanTranslated by John Goodmanmediafire pdf - via aaaaarg Often, when we pose our gaze to an art image,* we have a forthright sensation of paradox. What reaches us immediately and straightaway is marked with trouble, like a self-evidence that is somehow obscure.† Whereas what initially seemed clear and distinct is, we soon realize, the result of a long detour—a mediation, a usage of words. Perfectly banal, in the end, this paradox. We can embrace it, let ourselves be carried away by it; we can even experience a kind of jouissance upon feeling ourselves alternately enslaved and liberated by this braid of knowledge and not-knowledge, of universality and singularity, of things that elicit naming and things that leave us gaping. . . . All this on one and the same surface of a picture or sculpture, where nothing has been hidden, where everything before us has been, simply, presented We can, conversely, feel dissatisfied with such a paradox. Want not to let things lie, want to know more, want to represent to ourselves in a more intelligible way what the image before us still seemed to hide within it. We might then turn toward the discourse that proclaims itself a knowledge about art, an archeology of things forgotten or unnoticed in works of art since their creation, however old or however recent they might be. This discipline, whose status thus can be summed up as offering specific knowledge of the art object, this discipline is as we know called the history of art. Its invention was quite recent, by comparison with the invention of its object: we might say, taking Lascaux as our reference point, that it postdates art itself by roughly one hundred sixty-five centuries, of which ten or so were filled with intense artistic activity solely within the framework of the western Christian world. But the history of art gives the impression that it has made up for all this lost time. It has examined, catalogued, and interpreted countless objects. It has accumulated stupefying amounts of information and has taken over management of an exhaustive knowledge of what we like to call our patrimony. The history of art presents itself, in fact, as an enterprise ever more victorious. It answers needs, it becomes indispensable. As an academic discipline, it never stops refining itself and producing new information: thanks to which there is of course a gain in knowledge. As an authority for the organization of museums and art exhibitions, it likewise never stops expanding its horizons: it stages gigantic gatherings of objects: thanks to which there is a gain in spectacle. Finally, this history has become the cogwheel and guarantor of an art market that never stops outbidding itself: thanks to which people make money. It seems as though the three charms or three ‘‘gains’’ in question have become as precious to the contemporary bourgeoisie as health. Should we be surprised, then, to see the art historian take on the features of a medical specialist who addresses his patients with the statutory authority of a subject supposed to know everything in the matter of art? Yes, we should be surprised. ... The Mouse from The Bestiary or the Procession of Orpheus 1978-9 Graham Sutherland August 21, 2010 Simple Present Beijing Bert Danckaert Lyric, the Novel, ExcessJosh CoreyMiramare Because the novel insists on worlding but is primarily an event in language. An event that wants to mask itself. The overwhelming insistence of the mimetic: I’m not strong enough to keep it at bay without some formal constraint. And I don’t want to exclude the mimetic: there are real people and events I’m trying to translate into a communicable register, most of all my mother and the seductions of an imaginary assimilated past. But I want to roughen its grain, to make the labor of mimesis palpable, to enlist the reader in image- / memory-making. It’s a question of excess, finally. Elizabeth Willis says that the aim of the lyric poem “is to point outside any accountable meaning, to provoke the reception of an excess of meaning” (in her essay “The Arena in the Garden: Thoughts on Late Lyric” in Wallace and Marks, eds., Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s). Excess of meaning is the mark of authenticity for me in literature, or rather the mark of the Real. That sense of overflowing the bounds of mimesis and of ordinary speech, accessible in fiction through the hyperproliferation of signifiers (Joyce) or radical poverty of the same (Beckett). There are parallels here to Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as heteroglossia, competing discourses, so that no master monoglossic narrative can emerge (Bola?o’s 2666 stunned me into recognizing how this can be performed on a structural level and not merely a characterological one). Josh Corey is blogging his novel in progress - Miramare Ship Inn Mousehole 1930 Christopher Wood d. August 21, 1930 The Hexagon of the ConquestDagoberto GilbThe Barcelona Review ... I looked, and I read with him, until suddenly I was initiated: I forgot where I was once I found a book on my own. We probably looked at it together, maybe or maybe not, because I only remember the book, which was about the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. Just think of them, or better said, the drawings of them in a children's book. The Pyramid at Giza, that obvious one of power, already as famous as the country of Egypt where there was the Sphinx too. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was so much more to me because we heard in school so much about the "fertile crescent," the rich dark land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where these walls and terraces held and nourished fruit and flowers that grew on them like ivy. There was Zeus in Olympus. a godman made of gold, so big his head bumped the ceiling when he took this indoor throne. There was the Colossus of Rhodes on the Mediterranean, his feet planted on two land masses so that boats would have to go under him like a bridge. There were two in Turkey—the Temple of Artemis, who was the mother goddess of the wilderness, guarding the wild animals and nature, and the Tomb of Halicarnassus, which maybe was only another version of a pyramid, but to me was more a monument to death, the Big Grave. That counts six. It's that I remembered number seven wrong. The correct number seven was the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Even now, to me, this one seems off. It wasn't as tall as Giza or the Colossus, it wasn't golden, it wasn't an attraction to all or most or certain beautiful birds of the Western world—not one extra detail that would cause the imagination to dwell on its image or meaning. Bright as its light might be, important as I am sure it was for navigation, it was only practical. And so it was nothing like what I remembered, wrongly, as number seven, which was the Library of Alexandria. Could have been that these were so close, both with an "L of." I was so sure too, I couldn't believe it when I looked it up. But I say—still say—it has to be like number eight, no less than in the top 10! Doesn't it have to be? It was the library that collected all the knowledge combined of both the Greeks and the Egyptians, it held the library of Aristotle himself. That is, it was the symbol of knowledge, of its collection, of what a library is and does. And it was lost. Lost by Julius Caesar, the Roman conqueror, when he chased his rival Pompey and, in pursuing him, burned the Library of Alexandria down (accidentally, the story has it), and with it, or so it would seem, the oldest papyrus scrolls that were there, estimated to be somewhere between 400,000 to 700,000. That's as though ancient history, knowledge, and wisdom itself were burned and it all had to start over. Bad Behaviour in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Skepsi Volume III, Issue 1, Summer 2010 School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent The Role of Ecclesiastical Stairs, Galleries and Upper Spaces in Medieval ‘Bad Behaviour’Toby J. Huitson The Caption Poet and Inquiries into Resizable Monuments Ariel Goldberg jacket 40 It is our historic responsibility not only to produce photos, but to make them speak.   -  Ariella Azoullay, The Civil Contract of Photography ... To define the news is an insatiable practice: the industry churns inescapably; the banality nudges against tales of atrocity; the public space gets mangled in its private receptions. I am fixated on the still photograph in the news, meaning someone was sent to take it or already there to take it. Like finding the part in a thick head of hair, I am separating this photograph from the advertisement, which bombards the majority of the spreads, blinks around borders to tease visibility in overlapping windows. Looking at photographs in the news carries with it the weight of questions that become (en)listed even after looking at just one photograph. Looking at photographs in the news, for me, is a barrage of questions about origin stories built on murky and cacophonous uncertainties. These questions articulate themselves against a backdrop of rushing through a dark path and not knowing where you are going and how long it will take to get there. These questions are how photographs speak on their own, and they do powerfully, as interlocutors trapped in another time/space than their viewer/reader. Our attempts to make photographs speak vacillate between subordinate and intrusive. Carrying these questions of photographs around is as heavy as carrying camera equipment. Ariel Goldberg school children in 1899 viewing the first bison at the National Zoological ParkFrances Benjamin Johnston1864-1952Smithsonian Archives MiPOesias (September 2010) two²Blue Print Review - 25 edited by Dorothee Lang via tasting rhubarb Capetown Bert Danckaert Mod?le Fran?ais

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• 20 Aug 2010 12:39

  Stig Åsberg

  August 20, 2010 Winter Stories Paolo Ventura 12 The Invented Worlds of Paolo Ventura Paolo Ventura interviewed at The F STOP _______________________ The Poet and the Politician Salvatore Quasimodo Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1959 (....) The poet's language must be given its proper emphasis. It is neither the language of the Parnassians, nor that of the linguistic revolutionaries, particularly in countries where contamination by dialects only produces additional doubts and literary hieroglyphs. Indeed, philologists will never revive a written language. This is a right which belongs exclusively to the poet. His language is difficult not because of philological reasons or spiritual obscurity, but because of its content. Poets can be translated; men of letters cannot, because they use intellectual skills to copy other poets' techniques and support Symbolism or Decadence for their very lack of content, for their derivative thought, for the truths on which they have been theoretically nourished when they are found to resemble Goethe or the great nineteenth-century French poets. A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism. Men of letters think of Europe or even of the whole world in the light of a poetics that isolates itself, as if poetry were an identical "object" all over the world. Then, with this understanding of poetics, formalistic men of letters may prefer certain kinds of content and violently reject others. But the problem on either side of the barricade is always content. Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world. According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze. The politician takes advantage of the men of letters who do not assume a contemporary spiritual position, but rather one that has been outdated by at least two generations. Out of cultural unity he makes a game of sophisticated, turbulent decomposition wherein the religious forces can still press for the enslavement of man's intelligence. Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid. It is a mistake to believe that a spiritual conquest, a particular emotional situation (a religious state) of the individual, can become "society" by extension. Pious abnegation, the renunciation of man by man, is nothing but a formula for death. The truly creative spirit always falls into the claws of wolves. The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth. He terrifies his interlocutor (his shadow, an object to be disciplined) with images of physical decomposition, with complacent analyses of the horrid. The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue. In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life....(more) ..................................................... Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it is evening.   -  Salvatore Quasimodo - Salvatore Quasimodo b. August 20, 1901 Salvatore Quasimodo —in translation by Anny Ballardini eratio ..................................................... To My Father Salvatore Quasimodo translated by ? Where Messina lay violet upon the waters, among the mangled wires and rubble, you walk along the rails and switches in your islanders' cock-of-the-walk beret. For three days now, the earthquake boils, it's hurricane December and a poisoned sea. Our nights fall into the freight cars; we, young livestock, count our dusty dreams with the dead crushed by iron, munching almonds and apples dried in garlands. The science of pain put truth and blades into our games on the lowlands of yellow malaria and tertian fever swollen with mud. Your patience, sand and delicate, robbed us of fear, a lesson of days linked to the death we had betrayed, to the scorn of the thieves seized among the debris, and executed in the dark by the firing squads of the landing parties, a tally of low numbers adding up exact concentric, a scale of future life. Back and forth your sun cap moved in the little space they always left you. For me, too, everything was measured and I have borne your name a little beyond the hatred and the envy. That red on your cap was a mitre; a crown with eagle's wings. and now in the eagle of your ninety years I wanted to speak to you -- your parting signals coloured by the night-time lantern -- to speak to you from this imperfect wheel of a world, within a flood of crowded walls, far from the Arabian jasmine where you are still, to tell you what once I could not -- difficult affinity of thoughts -- to tell you (not only the marshland locust, the mstic tree can hear) as the watchman of the fields tells his master: 'I kiss your hands.' This, nothing else. Life is darkly strong. _______________________ Stig Åsberg (1909-1968) _______________________ Three new Ekelöf translations Steven Fowler The silence of the yawning night is vast It is not concerned by the scrabbling of human beings who eat each other upon the shoreline And I can hear the glorious watersound from ships who sail upon the sea out there These ships, are they truly so naive? Sometimes I hear from out there the drawn howls as though... as though...   - from Strountes (Nonsense) 1955 A miracle working icon: the poetry of Gunnar Ekelöf Steven Fowler nthposition Introduction to 10 Posthumous Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf 1907 - 1968 Robin Fulton Gunnar Ekelöf and Stig Åsberg in Pålsundet Mörkö in the 1930s _______________________ 101.(2) Each fragment of memory that I'll extirpate from time...(at) once will evaporate... Once set down on paper, each fragment of memory (that is, a sequence of recollections put together like a textbook excercise or an elucidation for my book (a moralized prose recollection) becomes, in fact, inaccessible to me. This probably doesn't mean that the record of memory, located under my skull, in the neurons, has disappeared, but everything happens as is a transference had occurred, something in the nature of a translation, with the result that ever since, the words composing the black lines of my transcriptions interpose themselves between the record of memory and myself, and in the long run completely supplant it.   - Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, translated by Dominic Di Bernardi _______________________ Paolo Ventura permanent link

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• 19 Aug 2010 02:50

  OrbsJack Spencer

  August 19, 2010 Hands of the puppeteerTina Modotti 1929 Voluptuous Viractualism Hermaphroditic Codes, Robotic Art and Immersive Excess Joseph Nechvatal ctheory Concerning this viractual span of liminality, I am reminded of two very different, yet complementary, concepts: entrainment and égréore. Entrainment, in electro-physics, is the coupling of two or more oscillators as they lock into a commonly sensed interacting frequency. In alchemical terms an égréore (an old form of the word agréger) is a third concept or phenomenon which is established from conjoining two different elements together. I suggest that the term (concept) viractual (and viractuality) may be a concordant entrainment/égréore conception helpful in defining our now third-fused inter-spatiality which is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the actual-a concept close to what the military call augmented reality that is the use of transparent displays worn as see-through glasses on which computer data is projected and layered. A lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged and established a seemingly unrestricted area of abundance which I call the viractual. Retinal Art Revisited: Story of the EyeJoseph Nechvatal September 4 - 29th, 2010 Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard Paris Introduction to:Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms Joseph Nechvatal's Ph.D. dissertation Three Poems Nancy Kuhlconjunctions Network, ConstellationNancy Kuhl screenlit and glowing word by slippery word the toothy demands tiresome flicker and all this simulation this lexicon falling flat pleading won’t you without a trace of cheekbone or ribcageplease and please and please and no memory of a body’s creased heat metallic shiver marching the spine every consequence rendered blank and blinking or bound and scripted almost routine steady to the end out of sight sayingI want and I want more of everything illuminated page tedious marks the sender is echo echo and our distant secrets constellate radiant like cold-night far-flung stars white and always heatless Nancy Kuhl, The Wife Of The Left Handand Suspendspdbooks Beyond Perfect-Bound Is it time to expand our idea of the poetry book? Jen Bervin and Nancy Kuhl Interviewed by Andrew Mauzey and Michael Dinsmoor Modèle Français Jean-Marc BodsonSoyons.net If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens(das schwerste Gewicht). If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim    ifile pdf - via aaaaarg Jean-Marc Bodson Notation And The Art Of Reading Karl Young The idea of notation implies, if not demands, performance. Virtually any form of writing is a kind of notation and any form of reading is a type of performance. Poetry is an intensely physical art, one that activates several senses at once. In aural societies poetry has traditionally been accompanied by facial movement, gesture, manipulation of symbolic objects, the drawing and painting of figures, the wearing of costumes, etc. -- all of which, in a tribal context, are read. Poetry still is a physical art using multiple senses: the body as a whole equals or sometimes replaces the voice in performance art, and even silent readers turn pages, move their heads, their eyes, the roots of their tongues if not their tongues and lips, and so forth. The kinesthetic link between sight, sound, and speech is mirrored by an inner speech, inner sight, and inner sound. Our thoughts are a combination of inner sight and inner speech. With this inner kinesthesia, we name things as we see them and form images of things about which we hear. Poetry, whether it is heard or seen, stimulates these inner sensations. An Anglo-Saxon warrior listening to a performance of Beowulf in the near darkness of a meadhall would not only be able to see dragons in the flickering coals of the fire, his mind would be filled with images generated by the words he heard. In like manner, a contemporary reader reading silently (provided she or he hasn't been hampered by speedreading practices) will hear an inner voice, which may call up inner sight. A great deal has been written about the "image" in poetry throughout this century. When that term is used it seldom refers to anything that can be seen on the page, but rather the inner vision of the reader. In the mainstream culture of the western world in the twentieth century, reading becomes an ever more ephemeral, dephysicalized act. At the same time contemporary poets work against this tendency, rediscovering reading methods from other cultures and discovering new ones on their own. Though for most people reading becomes more and more a system of simple data transference, poets attempt to find alternative notations and to expand the range of their performance. In this essay I will give examples of how poetry was read in three cultural contexts removed from ours in culture and time, and then describe some forms of notation in contemporary poetry and how they can be read. Jean-Marc Bodson towards a foreign likeness bent: translation duration press contributors: Ammiel Alcalay, Charles Bernstein, Norma Cole, Marcella Durand, Forrest Gander, Bill Marsh, Sawako Nakayasu, Kristin Prevallet, Ryoko Sekiguchi, Jonathan Skinner, Rick Snyder, Jalal Toufic, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Chet Wiener Nines and tens : a talk on translation Norma Cole The translation never takes place since the texts have nothing in common. The words are all different. Leap of faith. Transcendence or encounter. A record of the encounter. What is hidden and common to both. Nine nights. Ten nights. Nine, nones, the prayer offered at the ninth hour, the Latin nona hora; origin of noon. Nonariae (in ancient Rome, prostitutes were called nonariae because their doors opened at nine). Ten, a tithe, based on the ancient Jewish form adopted by both Christians and Romans, a tenth part of the harvest, decimus, what was due. Decimate meant exacting punishment from every tenth man in the legion. In Bugali, New Guinea, the “number word” is the word for a specific body part. The body part becomes conventionalized as the number’s name: nine, ngama, left breast. Ten, dala, right breast. For Torres Strait Islanders, nine is sternum, ten left shoulder. In Papua, New Guinea, nine is right ear, ten right eye. Paraguay: nine, arrived at the other hand, two sides alike. Ten, finished, the hands. In the Zuni language, nine is ten-ali- k’ya, all but one held up with the rest. Ten is äs-tem-‘thla, all of the fingers. The nine is imprisoned in the ten. The ten is implied by the nine. There is red in the pink and they are distinct. What, if anything, is the poem assuming? Supposing? Besides the words themselves, what could there be? In a received world, the sign itself is nothing. Retrieve a morsel and build a mean around it. You mean steal, but steal what, Prometheus? This then is the crime. It has its suspense. To some extent, or in a certain way, we are all one-trick ponies. We do what we can. We did what we could. We did that which we have could. (Fr.) We have done what we could done. (Ger.) It casts back difference, the shadow you are walking in. You attempt to draw a dotted line around that shadow, an outline. An outside. An aside. There is a local painter who appropriates shapes from popular culture, from, say, magazine ads. The shapes are often of women, “heavily coded.” The artist then has friends, other artists, perhaps, assume these positions. The artist will then use these new images, these translations. What could these translations say about the originals? If the viewer a) is, b) is not, fluent in the original language. “translate to keep the damage.” Present what it is in the way of presenting what is not. Make a shape around that by what is. Mirror to it its worst nightmare. Jack Spencer3

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• 17 Aug 2010 19:08

  Fernand Léger

  August 17, 2010 Deer Apples Summer 2003 Raymond Meeks more via Tim Atherton _______________________ Because of my tiredness, the thousands of unconnected happenings all about me arranged themselves into an order that was more than form; each one entered into me as the precisely fitting part of a finely attuned, light-textured story; and its events told themselves without the mediation of words. Thanks to my tiredness, the world cast off its names and became great. I have rough picture of four possible attitudes of my linguistic self to the world: in the first, I am mute, cruelly excluded from events; in the second, the confusion of voices, of talk, passes from outside into my inner self, though I am still as mute as before, capable at the most of screaming; in the third, finally, life enters into me by beginning spontaneously, sentence for sentence, to tell stories, usually to a definite person, a child, a friend; and finally, in the fourth, which I experienced most lastingly in that day's clear-sighted tiredness, the world tells its own story without words, in utter silence, to me as well as to that gray-haired onlooker over there and to that magnificent woman who is striding by; all peaceable happening was itself a story, and unlike wars and battles, which need a poet or a chronicler before they can take shape, these stories shaped themselves in my tired eyes into an epic and, moreover, as then became apparent to me, an ideal epic. The images of the fugitive world meshed one with another, and took form.   - Peter Handke, Essay on Tiredness quoted by Stephen Mitchelmore in A vast horizon of tirednessThis Space _______________________ Too wired to concentrateMark Fisher k-punk The "twitchy, agitated interpassivity" I describe - from which I'm far from being exempt myself - it is what Linda Stone calls "continuous partial attention" It's not a simple matter of opposing pleasure to duty. As digital addicts we are much like Matt Dillon's junkie in Drugstore Cowboy, "working harder than a construction worker on overtime". The constant craving to be connected, or to click through to the next link, or to check to see if mail has arrived, is intensely demanding: cyberspace is a hard taskmaster, and one that is never satisfied (and which, similarly, leaves us feeling dissatisfied any drained). Increasingly, I find reading books to be a refuge from digital twitch, and, in that way, more enjoyable - than ever. (That's one reason that I greet the rise of ebooks with something of a shudder.) (....) I know that I would be more productive (and less twitchily dissatisfied) if I could partially withdraw from cyberspace , where much of my activitity - or rather interpassivity - involves opening up multiple windows and pathetically cycling through twitter and email for updates, like a lab rat waiting for another hit. (The rat analogy is not idle: there's an argument that rats become more quickly addicted when they are given stimuli randomly; email is similarly random, sometimes providing massive satisfaction, often thin pickings.) The same goes for politics - a politics entirely contained within cyberspace would be locked into its interpassive circuits; but a politics that cannot make cyberspace one of its crucial terrains would be useless. ..................................................... Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial Attention Linda Stone _______________________ The Face and Technology Transformations Issue No. 18 2010 Faces, Interfaces, Screens: Relational Ontologies of Framing, Attention and Distraction Ingrid Richardson _______________________ The City 1919 Fernand Léger d. August 17, 1955 _______________________ Metropoles 7 | 2010 La nouvelle critique urbaine En hommage à Bernard Jouve Community, cooperation and metropolitan democracy Philip Booth _______________________ Axess: When the City has Triumphed No. 4 2010 City and country hand in hand Stig-Björn Ljunggren Axess Sweden is regionalising. Central power is caving in; we are developing from a monocentric into a multicentric state. Second, we have the city-country dimension. We are in the midst of a leap in urbanisation. The question is what will remain of the country when the city finally wins out. And whether the Swedish town can really be that amalgamation we associate with words like “city” or “metropolis”, and which we increasingly associate with “globalisation” because development is characterised primarily by growing gigantic clusters and development corridors, not by people no longer having to show their passport at borders. Instead, demands to show identification at border crossings have increased with even fingerprint and electronic body searches being introduced, in addition to the large number of routine requests for ID. “Urbanisation” is a better word than “globalisation” for how the world is developing. Third, we have the centre-periphery dimension. The centre stands for power and authority, for control and the setting of norms, while the periphery stands for object and subordination, for controlled and disciplined. Power relations can involve either our own subjective sense or an objective, observable relation. Some people think they are at the centre of power, like the undecided voter who watches a debate between party leaders shortly before election day, whereas we are really just electing which people will carry out the basics of politics. Or the opposite – others feel marginalised, based on the theme “politicians squabble and no one ever listens”, although they actually belong to the group of voters that can affect an election by a simple act of voting, where perhaps 100,000 votes are enough to change the bloc of parties in government. So centre and periphery are obviously not geographic relations, but instead involve inherent social structures – rather like demons in people’s minds....(more) _______________________ Carolyn Drake _______________________ To the Harbormaster Frank O'Hara I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will. The terrible channels where the wind drives me against the brown lips of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet I trust the sanity of my vessel; and if it sinks, it may well be in answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you. _______________________ from Stones Larry Rivers b. August 17, 1923 Frank O'Hara 1923-2002 In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art Russell Ferguson jacket _______________________ Promenade by the Sea 1896 Georges d'Espagnat 1870-1950 _______________________ In Memory of My Feelings Frank O'Hara (....) So many of my transparencies could not resist the race! Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth, the imperceptible moan of covered breathing, love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight, whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth! My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa. ...(more) permanent link

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• 16 Aug 2010 00:43

  Telegraph Wires Tina Modotti ca. 1925-1928The Dawn of Modernism Early Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography Throckmorton Fine Art

  August 16, 2010 Thermopylae 480BC The Death of LeonidasThe Course of HistoryBart Michiels The Madness of the Day Maurice Blanchot trans. Lydia Davisscribd I am not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying. I have wandered: I have gone from place to place. I have stayed in one place, lived in a single room. I have been poor, then richer, then poorer than many people. As a child I had great passions, and everything I wanted was given to me. My childhood has disappeared, my youth his behind me. It doesn't matter. I am happy about what has been. I am pleased by what is, and what is to come suits me well enough. Is my life better than other peoples lives? Perhaps. I have a roof over my head and many do not. I do not have leprosy, I am not blind, I see the world—what extraordinary happiness! I see this day, and outside it there is nothing. Who could take that away from me? And when this day fades, I will fade along with it—a thought, a certainty, that enraptures me. I have loved people. I have lost them. I went mad when that blow struck me, because it is hell. But there was no witness to my madness, my frenzy was not evident: only my innermost being was mad. Sometimes I became enraged. People would say to me, Why are you so calm? But I was scorched from head to foot; at night I would run through the streets and howl; during the day I would work calmly. Maurice Blanchot [pdf]Ullrich Haase and William LargeRoutledge Critical Thinkers Higher Intellect server hosting a searchable database of over 250,000 text files on a variety of subjects. Poemas del río Wanga review / tribute by Giovanni TisoBat, Bean, Beam - A Weblog on Memory and Technology ...engaging with Río Wang requires the full array of reading skills that the Web at once fosters and demands.(....) What Río Wang is in no small part about ... is the very possibility of translation, which is not a given at all latitudes, and most especially in the Anglo sphere, where theoretical misgivings often give way to a discomfiting monoculturalism. Mirror Studiolum responds ...if in the comments several readers say thanks to Giovanni for having presented Río Wang to them, we also have to say thanks for the same. For his precise review helps also to us to see our own blog from outside, from an aspect and in a context as we have never seen it. Its validity is proved by the fact that when we set about to write some thankful words to the author, the thoughts proposed in his review almost automatically continued to develop themselves further, outgrowing the frames of a comment and assuming the form of a new post. Here below we do not want to resume the whole review, only those few aspects that inspired us to carry them further.(....) ... we have always been stimulated by the various possibilities of reconstructing that non-linear, parallel and cross-referring way of reading as the texts encircled by commentaries, glossas, interlinear texts, notes, interpretations and variations used to live on the pages of medieval treatises, Renaissance editions of ancient works or even of the Dictionary of Bayle: by the alchemy of transforming the text into a texture. Seeded Grasses and DaisiesJoan Eardleyd. August 16, 1963 Is the Sky Falling on the Content Industries? Mark A. Lemley Social Science Research Network Abstract: Content owners claim they are doomed, because in the digital environment, they can't compete with free. But they've made such claims before. This short essay traces the history of content owner claims that new technologies will destroy their business over the last two centuries. None have come to pass. It is likely the sky isn't falling this time either. I suggest some ways content may continue to thrive in the digital environment. Building an Audience (and a Case) for TranslationsChad PostBuilding a Case for Translations, Part 2: “It’s Not The Elegance of the Hedgehog“ Chad PostPublishing Perspectives New Knowledge Environments Vol 1, No 1 Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age Stalk Laura Elrickblip tv Part dystopian urban cartography, part spatial-poetic intervention, this video/poem tracks a solitary figure (dressed iconically in the manner of a Guantanamo detainee) as it shuffles through work-a-day Manhattan at lunchtime. Appropriated text is from the Secret Orcon Interrogation Log, US Department of Defense. FYI: the first minute or so contains no images, only a black screen w/audio voiceover. Concept, Video Editing and Text: Laura Elrick; Camera: Kai Beverly-Whittemore & Kristin Prevallet; Field Support: Kythe Heller The Ideal Glass On Laura Elrick’s "Stalk" and the Poetics of Spatial Practice David Wolachjacket The work is recursive: a rehearsal of crisis as crisis, metaphor within metaphor as metaphor, and this produces an urgent and complicating picture of picture (narrative) making. Yet, like the glass window of a city, one can easily pass by Stalk without seeing one’s reflection in it. And like the proprioceptive being, the sensing subject, one can manipulate it at least this much: turn it on, off, rewind, fast forward, skip or let go — Interrogate. As poem, the digital artifact becomes fleshy and vulnerable in “the premise of… place.” This is also a work which demands more than one viewing in order to see or sense on a micro level, those moments, planned and unplanned, that occur just at the edge of the frame, and in the between aural spaces — between spoken lyric and cinematic (de)tour, between overt signification and fractured, sublating voice(s) underneath, including the sublingual voice of the music (composed entirely of MRI machine sounds) by Rizzia, member of the Chain Tape Collective. (....) There has been a resurgence in contiguity between poetics and political intervention in the past several years, particularly a re up and rethinking of Ranciere’s “redistribution of the sensible.” Though still unusual in today’s contemporary poetic landscape, such a re-imagining of poetic terrorism a la Hakim Bey, or of a more directed, politicized recalibration of the happening, have served as points of departure for increasing numbers of socially concerned poets, and this archival/spatial practice is every bit as conditioned by our eternal present’s situation of deepening crisis as it is a response to a long (in art time) period of underwhelming aesthetic-political production — both in poetry and in experimental visual art, a period that poet and critic Thom Donovan has aptly summarized as the decade of the reenactment. The re-thinking of a kind of guerilla poetry for today’s aesthetic and political realities, on the tactical level, has often meant a refocusing of one’s commitments: from the ephemeral/expropriative of past practices to the archival and site-specific. A poetics of the archive is broadened through an intermingling of Foucault and Derrida’s pivotal work on archival practice, the archive re-theorized, as Werner and Voss have put it, to be an ideological space insofar as how one maps and generates systems that order the textual materials of that space amounts to controlling a narrative. Laura Elrick at PennSound FloorDo-Ho SuhJim Johnson Ideas of the century: Scepticism (16/50) Frank Fureditpm Precisely because society is continually confronted with the ossification of its insights and the power of taken-for-granted truths it needs sceptics to encourage intellectual life to question its assumptions and yield to new experience. Contemporary society is no less drawn towards constructing dogma than previous ones. Indeed the tendency to morally condemn scepticism inadvertently signals the importance this philosophical view for the present era. Yet we have no choice but to live with our doubts. The antidote to our obsessive addiction to certainty is a regular dose of scepticism. Charles Bukowski b. August 16, 1920

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• 13 Aug 2010 15:15

  Joe Hill Linocut, 1979 Carlos Cortez Aug. 13, 1923 – Jan. 19, 2005 80 Years of Rebel Art youtube

  August 13, 2010 The Screen Cafe de Versailles, Paris George Luks b. August 13, 1867 _______________________ from A Kind of Testament Witold Gombrowicz Translated by Alastair Hamilton (....) These pre-war years were possibly more damaging than the war itself. Suffocating under this pressure I leapt as energetically as I could towards a new understanding of man—this was the only hope. Where was I? I was in the darkest of nights, together with the whole of humanity. The old God was dying. The laws, the principles, the customs which had constituted the patrimony of humanity were suspended in space, despoiled of their authority. Man bereft of God, liberated and solitary, began to forge himself through other men . . . It was Form and nothing else which was at the basis of these convulsions. Modern man was characterized by a new attitude towards Form. How much more easily he created himself, created as he was by it! I imagined the men of the future forming each other deliberately: a shy man will find people who make him bold; by skillfully manoeuvring others and himself, a roué will obtain a good dose of asceticism. I added my private experience to this general view of humanity and I derived a measure of tranquility from it. I was not the only chameleon. Everybody was a chameleon. It was the new human condition, and one would have to face up to it. I became ‘the poet of form.’ I amputated myself from myself. I discovered man’s reality in this unreality to which he is condemned. And Ferdydurke, instead of serving me, became a fantastic poem describing, as Schulz said, the tortures of man on a Procrustean bed, the bed of Form....(more) Context N°20 With Shushan Avagyan, Louis Paul Boon, Céline Bourhis, Roger Boylan, Przemyslaw Czaplinski, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Joos Florquin, Witold Gombrowicz, Aidan Higgins, Jim Knipfel, Henry Miller, Evgeny Pavlov, Robert Pinget, Michael Pinker, Ros Schwartz, Goce Smilevski, John Taylor, Dumitru Tsepeneag, Lindsay Waters _______________________ A Star Shell Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson _______________________ Agnomia Róbert Gál transl. from the Slovak by Michaela Freeman exquisite corpse This is a tautology of every moment, as if every moment was necessarily a tautology. “It seems undignified,” says Jan, “to accept congratulations for the past, as if that from the past, which is not subject to a time shortcut, was totally irrelevant. This is not a criticism of heroism, but a criticism of the need to place heroism out for adulation, as if every heroism was necessarily admirable – and not some other one. Isn’t this the conventional exchange of the act of socially defined heroism for an act of heroism which is highly individual, and thus socially undefinable? Where is the boundary between the need of a heroic act of a socially defined hero and the need of a heroic act of a hero, who is defined by this act itself into the position of a partaker of a heroic deed, who doesn’t feel the need of a social proclamation of this fact?” Jan asks. Jan is the hero of an invisible terror. Every opportunity for uprising is punished. And because each uprising gets already punished in the state of opportunity, it never runs into the acute state in any other way but wounded. A circle is always one-sided and this, always according to its direction of spinning. Multiplying its spins means, in practice, that the vision of its end naturally blends with the vision of its beginning. To push oneself off from any point of a circle is possible, however, it’s not entirely random. All we have to do is understand the rules of these banalities and by how much they help us to move forward! Because only a cynic can claim that it doesn’t matter at all which leg we get off the bed with first. To swallow the acidity of a smile with the awareness of the acidity and the smile. And so on. ...(more) _______________________ Cent mille milliards de poèmes Raymond Queneau randomly generated sonnets Beverley Charles Rowe via languagehat _______________________ Phenomenology of a Photograph, or: How to use an Eidetic Phenomenology L. Sebastian Purcell Abstract The present article aims to make good on Roland Barthe’s unfulfilled promise to provide an eidetic phenomenology for the photograph. Though the matter deserves consideration simply because no relevant account has yet been provided, the consequences of adumbrating eight eidetic features, we hope to show, bear directly on the phenomenology of time, the possibility of technological events, and the status of truth as what Heidegger called ale-theia. Finally, and most importantly for the enterprise of phenomenological reflection, if we are successful in this endeavor, we shall have established a new way to use eidetic phenomenologies: not for Husserl’s original aim of executing a rigorous science, but in a more Derridian spirit as a way to destabilize consensus. PhaenEx journal of existential and phenomenological theory and culture _______________________ Magazines and newspapers are no longer putting any money into photojournalism. They will commission a portrait or two. They might send a photographer off with a writer to illustrate the writer’s story, but they no longer fund photojournalism. They no longer fund photo-reportage. They only fund photo illustration. We should stop talking about photojournalists altogether. Apart from a few old dinosaurs whose contracts are so long and retirement so close that it’s cheaper to keep them on, there is no journalism organisation funding photographers to act as reporters. A few are kept on to help provide ‘illustration’ and decorative visual work, but there is simply no visual journalism or reportage being supported by so called news organisations.   -  Neil Burgess via Tim Atherton _______________________ The Arrival circa 1913 Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson b. August 13, 1889 _______________________ Konturen Volume 2 Between Nature and Culture: After the Continental-Analytic Divide an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the analysis of borders, framing determinations, and related figures of delimitation of all kinds: theoretical and historical, practical and speculative, aesthetic, political, methodological, and other. via Matt Christie _______________________ Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory Vol. 10, no. 3 Spooky Noises: Ghosts In The Music Machine of Paul D. Miller [pdf] (Aka Dj Spooky) Joshua Delpech-Ramey’s interview with DJ Spooky Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning. Today, music heralds—regardless of what the property mode of capital will be—the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore. But at the same time, it heralds the emergence of a formidable subversion, one leading to a radically new organization never yet theorized, of which selfmanagement is but a distant echo. In the years since the dot-com crash, analyses of cyberculture and digital media have begun to reveal—beyond the initially hyperbolic utopianism and apocalyptic portents—both a more profound set of social potentials and a deeper set of political economic, and even spiritual ambiguities. Digital music in particular has become a flashpoint for both despair and hope: despair over the stranglehold that monopolistic capital continues to maintain over content, copyright, and royalties; hope that in music a “radically new organization” of exchange and creativity (through file sharing and collective composition) may yet be breaking through. The above quotation, which describes our current situation so well, was penned in 1977. It is from Jacques Attali’s Bruits: essai sur l’économie politique de la musique (translated in 1985 as Noise: The Political Economy of Music), a text as provocative today as it was when it first appeared. Attali’s thesis was that music has an essential and dynamic relationship to noise, such that what can only be heard as noise in one historical moment is the harbinger of what will be heard as music in the moment forthcoming. But what Attali means by noise is at once musical and political....(more) [pdf] _______________________ Too Poor For Measure: [pdf] Working With Negri On Poverty And Fabulation Daniel Colucciello Barber and Anthony Paul Smith Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory The classic question of the Left has been, ‘Why did the revolution not take place?’ This pessimism is lacking in the work of Antonio Negri, for whom the question is why does constituent power, the power behind every revolution in history, stagnate into the constituted power of the State, the power that reacts against further revolution? Negri’s work can be read as an attempt to answer that question, focusing on a critique of the State-form of politics, and to name a way out of stagnation and towards a productive vitality. One such name is poverty and the poor that embody it. In the course of this essay we work with the material of Negri’s conception of poverty, because it is radical in its valorization of what, from the perspective of capital, is the embodiment of weakness and lacking in potential. _______________________ Roundhouse at High Bridge 1909-1910 George Luks _______________________ Doom Cusp David Meltzer Argotist Online E-Book In Memory of Wallace Berman 30:ix:05 Munir Bashir’s ‘ud alone in his Baghdad studio l987 ‘Music is one We’re all human beings The same family Music is for everybody’ The past that won’t catch up to the present History makes itself up until others make it up ‘acute homesickness’ Greek: nostos ‘return home’ algos ‘pain’ Nostalgia The retrospectives the catalogs of old photos of young lovelies ME: ‘harm, oppress’ Old French, grever ‘to burden, encumber’ ME:‘hardship, hurt, sorrow’ grief/grieve Burden of past Weight breaks Down early grace of Supple unknowing Grow to know Death’s musk On the cusp ...(more) via Nick Piombino permanent link

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• 12 Aug 2010 11:16

  silver lake photo - mw

  August 12, 2010 Bookplates by Michel Fingesten (1884 - 1943) for Gianni Mantero From the collection of Richard Sica. A Journey Round My Skull The Unkown Michel Fingesten _______________________ Losing One's Place Jacob Russell the pedestal It's always the end of the world for someone every moment even now as I draw this pen across the page the last hour has come for you, too, reading these words your eyes follow to the end of the line as you were taught long ago under your teacher's eye, that circle of children clutching copies of the same book taking turns fingers following on the page as you listen together shaping the words with your lips knowing soon it will be yours waiting for your name to be called knowing yes it will come it will happen no wonder your mind chose rather to drift to gaze at the clock at the door at the window to think of the garden behind the house where your grandfather is planting beans ...(more) Jacob Russell's Barking Dog _______________________ Pedestal 58 June 21-August 21 (2010) _______________________ Reflections on Chongqing - City of Ambition Ferit Kuyas Visura Magazine 10 _______________________ A happy day Joel Lehtonen (1881-1934) Translated by David Barrett Books from Finland ‘Quite the country gentleman, eh, what, hey?’ says Aapeli Muttinen the bookseller. ‘Like the poet Horace – if I may humbly make the comparison, eh, dash it? With his villa at Tusculum, or whatever the place was called, given to him by Maecenas, in the Sabine hills, wasn’t it? – dashed if I remember. Anyway, he served Maecenas, and I serve – the public, don’t I? Selling them books at fifty pence a copy.’ Muttinen’s Tusculum is his little plot of land in the country. A delightful place, comforting to contemplate when the first signs of summer are beginning to appear, after a winter spent in town in the busy pursuit of Mammon, under skies so grey that the wrinkles on Muttinen’s forehead must have doubled in number. A summer paradise of idleness… It lies a fair distance from the town, in the region where he was born: a villa set on a hill, where the shores of Lake Saimaa break up into a labyrinth of capes and inlets. Through the leafy birches his balcony peeps out over the water. There Aapeli is happy, especially during those first days of summer when he is still so weary and worn after his exertions in town, and once again the idea of idling in the country has all the charm of something fresh and inexhaustible. So tiring has he found it, perched up there behind his counter, raking in his beloved money, that by springtime his poor brain is no longer capable of thoughts, or even of memories. He longs only to escape into the bosom of Mother Nature, to laze, to do no more than exist. Not as Muttinen, not as anything at all: not as a philosopher, not even as a fat pig. To be nothing, to be no kind of creature at all. Happiness for him, as summer begins, is an absence of all thoughts and memories, an existence in the present, an indefinable peace. The most beautiful days, the ones with the fewest thoughts and memories, are those very first days of summer: and the nights of clear golden light, enfolding him in a warm and wordless happiness....(more) _______________________ Bookplates by Michel Fingesten _______________________ No one read the film poster. Listen, said Underground. No one listened. The chill rose up from the black tunnels. Are you there? said Underground. Will you answer? No one answered. Are you Orpheus? said Underground. No answer.   - Russell Hoban, Kleinzeit An und für sich is hosting a discussion of Hoban's 1974 novel. The Head Of Orpheus A Russell Hoban Reference Page _______________________ Personal Account: Being Rational Erin Stefanidis Each time, I would be able to evaluate things from two perspectives: my scientific logic and the explanation from the Deep Meaning. As the doctors would say, these corresponded to rationality and irrationality, respectively. But, given the input I had from the Voices (auditory hallucinations, the doctors say) and the immense feelings of truth from the Deep Meaning, I was in fact fighting to preserve my rationality in the face of the irrational. I valued my logical mind so dearly that when it began to be challenged by schizophrenic hallucinations, delusions, and disorders of the ability to ascribe meaningfulness, I used everything available to me to try and figure out what were the most rational explanations. I craved rationality, and rationality to me was taking all evidence and making conclusions. Even if they didn't conform to everyone else's ideas of what was rational, I was fighting to maintain, at the very least, the integrity of my own rationality. Antipsychotic medication has helped to distance me from the Voices and the Deep Meaning. While I never quite give up these as irrational, I am aware that they influence my ideas of, and my actions in response to, rationality. I have come to believe that in order to truly understand others, be they schizophrenic or otherwise, we must not only discover their thoughts, feelings, and actions, but we must look to understand how they connect these into a coherent structure and to recognize that no matter what this structure looks like, it is the product of a rational mind....(more) via Mind Hacks_______________________ "far away and high on the mesa's crest" Burroughs The Movie (1985) Featuring - Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Francis Bacon, Jackie Curtis, John Giorno, Lauren Hutton, Patti Smith, Terry Southern, William S. Burroughs Directed By - Howard Brookner UbuWeb: Film & Video via The Allen Ginsberg Project permanent link

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• 11 Aug 2010 13:36

  Tonoucí koráb Toyen 1927

  August 11, 2010 Wasted Expressions photographs and text by Charlie Ferguson lens culture _______________________ The Alchemist I burned my life, that I might find A passion wholly of the mind, Thought divorced from eye and bone, Ecstasy come to breath alone. I broke my life, to seek relief From the flawed light of love and grief. With mounting beat the utter fire Charred existence and desire. It died low, ceased its sudden thresh. I had found unmysterious flesh -- Not the mind's avid substance -- still Passionate beyond the will. Louise Bogan b. August 11, 1897 photo - Curt Alexander Louise Bogan at The Poetry Foundation more poems 12 Louise Bogan and the Pleasures of Formal Poetry Dena L. Moore The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet Elizabeth Caroline Dodd on H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Gluck google books ..................................................... Zone Louise Bogan We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef. The wind breaks over us, And against high sharp angles almost splits into words, And these are of fear or grief. Like a ship, we have struck expected latitudes Of the universe, in March. Through one short segment’s arch Of the zodiac’s round We pass, Thinking: Now we hear What we heard last year, And bear the wind’s rude touch And its ugly sound Equally with so much We have learned how to bear. _______________________ Horror 1937 Toyen Maria Cerminova 1902 - 1980 Weimar Art and Modernity in Central Europe 12 _______________________ from A Farewell to English Michael Hartnett for Brendan Kennelly 1 Her eyes were coins of porter and her West Limerick voice talked velvet in the house: her hair was black as the glossy fireplace wearing with grace her Sunday-night-dance best. She cut the froth from glasses with knife and hammered golden whiskies on the bar and her mountainy body tripped the gentle mechanism of verse: the minute interlock of word and word began, the rhythm formed. I sunk my hands into tradition sifting the centuries for words. This quiet excitement was not new: emotion challenged me to make it sayable. This cliché came at first, like matchsticks snapping from the world of work: mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin: they came like grey slabs of slate breaking from an ancient quarry, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin, slowly vaulting down the dark unused escarpments, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin, crashing on the cogs, splinters like axeheads damaging the wheels, clogging the intricate machine, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin. Then Pegasus pulled up, the girth broke and I was flung back on the gravel of Anglo-Saxon. What was I doing with these foreign words? I, the polisher of the complex clause, wizard of grasses and warlock of birds, midnight-oiled in the metric laws? Michael Hartnett Michael Hartnett at Poetry International Web Michael Hartnett in Contemporary Irish poetry: an anthology edited by Anthony Bradley 'He'll to the Moors', Michael Hartnett Paul Durcan Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies, Autumn-Winter, 2009 You're Not the Outlaw You Think You Are Remembering Michael Hartnett Conor O'Callaghan _______________________ From Mozart Variations Göran Sonnevi Translated from the Swedish by John Matthias (Surviving Lines of an Unfinished Translation Made with Göran Printz-Påhlson, 1984-1986) * Mozart and the whiteness of morning * a face which has cut off, white as a physical pain close to the unendurable— * Inscrutable humankind, violent listen to the sounds the silence grows inside me, a huge cone a funnel sucking me up into space so it was when I had the entire world growing in my belly, the globe just grew and grew, and I rose and rose a tiny shape on the infinite surface shouted, cried from there, to you, out of my mouth came letter-sculpted blocks of silence ...(more) Ars Interpres Issue: 8-9 From the Labyrinth (September 2007) thanks to the page edited by John McAuliffe and Vincenz Serrano _______________________ Rose Ghost Toyen 1934 calypsospots flickr _______________________ Evening in the Sanitarium Louise Bogan The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with decorative iron grilles. The lamps are lighted; the shades drawn; the nurses are watching a little. It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles; of the games of anagrams and bridge; The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask. The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over. The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well. Some of them will stay almost well always: the blunt-faced woman whose thinking dissolved Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl Now leveling off; one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy. Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been possible. O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after childbirth! O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted! To the suburban railway station you will return, return, To meet forever Jim home on the 5:35. You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless as anybody else. There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile. The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide to be. Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not drink habitually. The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia. _______________________ Thinking About Louise Bogan Kathleen Norris agni Sitting here alone with Orion— a lesson, the woman said, in drawing a straight line— I’m home. This is what I fought for, to draw from the darkness as from a well. I endured, she said, without the gift of faith and made what I needed out of work and love and stolen time. I kept at the writing, refusing the sacred bowl of broth they held out for me: the dressed-up Sundays, china never used kept under glass and dusted each week. ...(more) permanent link

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• 10 Aug 2010 05:39

  James Wilson Morriceb. August 10, 1865Montreal

  August 10, 2010 The Horse from the SeaNight HallucinationsIllustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny A Journey Round My Skull Journals - July 1959 John Wieners What can I write about to set my heart afire as the wood cut and burning in the stone place on my left. Here are no demons, only friends. Does the poem proceed out of pain does the heart have to beat at a super and unnatural speed for the word to be produced, like the gold of alchemy, transmuted. There are no dreams I have not lived except for Out the window West and the set sun. In the window a kerosene lamp whose light I write by. To my left the fire in the stone place and 4 people before it, the woman, her daughter and 2 men, sit on the stone floor, talking of sun worship and fire worship, the cricket in the roof where the bats live, Still shows a lighter blue than the black corners of this room, stone house with wooden doors on the side of a ridge that rises behind the house to a hill John Wieners1934 - 2002a new page at EPC The Hipster of Joy Street An introduction to the life and work of John WienersPamela Petro Harbour, BerwickshireSea ChangeMichael Marten the terrible community of financial capitalismtobias c. van Veen The financial community crossed over into illegality. Hell, it bought and sold the legal system. It understands full well every ounce of Tiqqun’s phrase that “all sado-masochistic exchanges outside of commodity relations are devoted in the end to illegality.” Indeed, the financial community long exceeded the mere trading of goods, or even that commodity relations – whether it be that of the signifier itself, of money, or of bodies, or of resources, products, processes or objects in general – should determine the basis of trade negotiations, future assessments, currencies, stock prices or debt obligations. The financial community reified, beyond the paradigm of legality, the profiteering of sado-masochistic force itself. When buying and selling against the probable failure of toxic assets, in such a way that utterly erases all ties to any kind of commodity relation, then the financial community trades in nothing but sado-masochistic violence wrought through the power of mystic numerosity. Credit and debit are concepts applied through the distribution of financial “justice” – the simple equation where debt is judgement, bankruptcy, death. The financial community disregards with sheer contempt the consequences of capitalizing the very human relations outside of commodity relations – where thousands of Blooms would be forced to foreclose and enter into bankruptcy – and their sacrifice is to workship the most pure, abstract illegality, the unleashed violence of abstract Moloch. Or so it thinks. Theses On The Terrible CommunityTiqqun Robert Kellyphoto by Charlotte Mandell “A word comes to mind. I write it down and see what happens. When you do this every day for 50 years, you learn how to wait.”Robert Kelly The Logic of the World: An Interview with Robert Kelly Sudden fiction. In my first answer I spoke of the immateriality of size, and the immense size of effect.So sudden fiction happens quickly, and swings a very long tail. Sudden fiction meant for me something that uses the conventions of prose fiction with the mindset of poetry. Not prose poem, as the French invented it and we have done so much with. But fiction, story, turned with the rapt condensation of a poem. Sudden fiction has been there—rare moments of it—for a long time. Those abrupt and awe-struck chapters in Melville’s Billy Budd, that amazing story by Georg Heym from a hundred years ago, “The Autopsy,” the dozens of parables and “fragments” by Kafka—those are some of the jewel-like ancestors of what we try to do. The Logic of the World and Other FictionsRobert Kellyamazon link Casilino 900Alessandro ImbriacoJoerg Colberg Hanging A Hammock Between Death And The Abyss: A Götterdämmerung Of KitschPhil RockstrohEbullient Skepticism (....) For many years now, we have been witness to cultural fantasies(both of the religious and secular variety) of decline, decay, of even the end of civilization itself … that are, perhaps, a collective wish for the taut bindings that modernity places on the psyche to be loosened. The modernist towers must fall; then our insular, nature-denuded mode of mind will be pulled down from its lofty precincts into the élan vital of primal dirt … There, the sterility of the collective, corporatized mind will meet its end, and reborn passion and vital imaginings will bloom like wild flowers in a post-apocalyptic strip mall parking lot … This is what, I suspect, lies beneath our fascination with apocalyptic scenarios. In these contemporary deluge myths, the hyper-commercialized and commodified psyche, befogged by its own convoluted libido, once destroyed, is now free to start life anew. Concurrently, in the fundamentalist Christian imagination, narratives of consumerism and End Time Mythology interweave and meld, becoming a gospel of instant gratification and imminent destruction … This is a religious cosmology resonating from a junk food paradigm: The Gospels of The Drive Thru Jesus; when The Rapture comes, our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers. But be warned, by eating of all that high caloric food, all of you Jesus-hungry Lard Asses of The Lord: If your clothes were to fall from you (as your prophecies claim) as you rise skyward, the sight of all your fat, sagging bodies, floating in air, will resemble anything but the dawning of eternal paradise — instead the event will more likely resemble an endless tape loop of a porno video for fat fetishists shot in a zero gravity chamber. The narrative of fundamentalist Christianity has become so encumbered with kitsch imagery that its followers hope for the destruction of the planet itself so that they can escape the soul-defying imprisonment of its creepy dogma. Hence, the modernist conundrum is: how does one retain the depth and resonance of myth, without concretizing it into a pernicious, fundamentalist death cult? Judaism, Christianity, Islam — the myths of the jealous, desert god — present a problem, because they place the answer in heaven i.e., far away in a sterile paradise … The gods of the earth have been cast-out as sinful. Hence, those religions become so obsessed with a fantasy of purity that earth-dwelling and subterranean drives and desires — that were symbolized, for example, by the Greeks as the gods Hermes, Pan, and Hades — appear to Christian believers as Satanic. In other words, Christians, Jews and Muslims, with their gaze fixed on heaven, view their earthly, human half as demonic. Moreover, by becoming split-off from their human half, followers of monotheistic belief systems are prone to suffer all the ills they attribute to the devil. Satan does have a “wide stance” after all. Jones Falls locks Rideau CanalJessica Auer Lucky’s Monologue from Waiting for Godot Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast heaven to hell so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labours of men that as a result of the labours unfinished of Testew and Cunard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labours of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation is seen to waste and pine waste and pine and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicilline and succedanea in a word I resume and concurrently simultaneously for reasons unknown to shrink and dwindle in spite of the tennis I resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham namely concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown but time will tell to shrink and dwindle I resume Fulham Clapham in a word the dead loss per head since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per head approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much more grave that in the light of the labours lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labours lost of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by the seas by the rivers running water running fire the air is the same and than the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas in the year of their Lord six hundred and something the air the earth the sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps the great cold on sea on land and in the air I resume for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull to shrink and waste and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labours abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard (mêlée, final vociferations) tennis... the stones... so calm... Cunard... unfinished... thanks to Follow Me Here Is Lucky’s Monologue Poetry? The Prose Poem: An International Journal

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