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Just thought I'd mention that I traded for some amazing books yesterday at the mini book fare at James Cohan gallery in Chelsea. (I sold a whopping one copy of my book there, and that only because Chet Wiener cajoled his two French friends to pick one up.) The books are, in order of thickness:
Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, a complete resetting of one day's New York Times into plain text, read linearly across the page (like a scanner) -- it's a huge blue tome that makes his No. 111 look like a Poetical Histories chapbook. Of course we must be sceptical, of course we must be human, but it was actually lots of fun reading about Andre Agassi's 3rd round loss to Arnauld Clement in the 2000 French Open, just riding the wave of his big comeback, showing he's human and also not yet married to Steffi Graf (a little beyond human). There's some kind of weird generosity in this book; everybody from the Wall Street brokers (represented by the largest number of pages, pure numbers and business names), to children (in the ads for children's clothes) to, of course, those folks populating the news and entertainment stories (it was a Friday) are equally represented. I think it makes for a nice piece of anthropology (it certainly gives you a sense of how many WORDS are published a day on this planet -- it really would take a long time to even run your eye over this stuff); it's like putting a bug under a microscope, or flatting a pyramic out into a plain and making it live among the denizens of Flatland (to use a metaphor I've used before). Making a newspaper weigh 5 pounds also does something for ya. Useless, I mean priceless, I mean useless...
George Stanley's much-awaited collection A Tall, Serioues Girl -- the title is taken from the gorgeous final poem called "Veracruz" in which he wishes his father had married his mother's brother, whom he loved, and that his father were a woman, and that he (George) were a woman (the "tall, serious girl" herself) so that he could give birth to a son, the boy he's always loved... etc. (I'm making it sound farcical but it's really a one page poem in the "magical realist" vein, were that tradition to have been founded by John Wieners rather than, say, Milan Kundera or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) Well, this book is certainly a find -- it ranks with the collected John James (Salt Press) as a book showing on a lifetime of work that seems to perfect and relevant now but which I'd just not known about. Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin edited it; it reflects much of the precise wit, challenging but always elegant linebreaks and humor of the former, some of the lighter NY surreal, "daily" vein of the latter -- his taste for exquisite miniatures -- well, I'm not about the write literary criticism now, just wanted to provide a quick graph of my enthusiasm for the book, which I half expected to be dull simply because I think honest, meaningful poets are half the time rather dull (hence my general dishonesty in my own work) -- but, of course, so are the peacocks, usually.
Lastly, Rod Smith's new Music Or Honesty -- speaking of honesty -- which features a painting by Reubens on the cover (where did Roof get the cash to swing that?). I can say, on my first quick read, that I think it's his best full-length collection, his style has really developed to represent his channeling of both the absurd and the sublime (or absurd into the sublime, like Turner basing a painting of a tumultuous ocean on the smiley faces painted on the bouys and the angry sunbathers... maybe not) -- it's a style I associate with Ashbery's first books after The Tennis Court Oath, in which he's beginng to use a mellifluous line but still taking in some of that crazy, recalcitrant detail, tossed up like the drowned sailors in blue puke of Berrigan's sonnets (courtesy Rimbaud) -- now, the scale and the form of the poem are matching up more, he's really quite garrulous and words flow like water from a faucet, my hope only being that he doesn't even it out too much and become a "talker" -- a personality -- I don't think that will happen, it should have happened by now. What was I saying? The typesetting is certainly a lot better than In Memory of My Theories and the style more consistent, and the sequences seem more worked out, to me, than Protective Immediacy, though I miss the days when I would get a huge collection of Rod's work in the form of a stapled xerox chapbook from Rob Fitterman or someone like that. Well, I think Rod needs a good essay assessing his style, modes, influences -- not a longwinded academic one, mind you, but one trying to figure out how thematics work in his poems, how symmetry and chaos operate in his forms, etc.
Ok, enough, I'm not going to reread this, I'm tired...
John Wieners is featured in today's "The Next Big Thing" -- I'm listening to it now, haven't gotten to the Wieners part yet, but apparently (according to Ben Friedlander on the UK Poetry List) there are clips of him reading, interviews with his friends, etc. And, ok, this gives me an apportunity to put a photograph of Wieners on the site. I am, of course, quite jealous -- I never got to give a reading in a Burger King.
John Wilkinson sent on these two pictures he took at last night's launch for my and Rodrigo's new Atelos thangs at Spoonbill and Sugartown bookstore. We each read (or in my case, talked) for about 5 minutes each. I must tell you that I am not as greasy as I appear to be in this photograph! There was a pretty huge turn-out -- I'm imagining that it was at least 40 people, possibly more, since I sold 19 copies of the book, half the people who came already had a copy, and I'm sure that not everyone who didn't have one bought one (am I making sense here?) -- simple math, dear Watson. Anyway, it was a lot of fun -- we got good and drunk from 7-9:15 at the store, and then moved over to the terrible Mexican restaurant across the street for dinner, stayed there till about 11:30 (Stacy Doris and Chet Wieners made their appearance at about 10), then got a night cap at Planet Thailand, the party still about 12 strong until long after midnight.
[Check out this email I wrote to the people who run Radiohead's official website -- a group called "W.A.S.T.E." I have no idea what this group is -- the site itself is quite lo-tech, not your average music company hi-tech site. Anyway, I got an address back today, so I'll send them a copy of the book soon.]
Dear W.A.S.T.E. etc.,
Odd as this may sound, my new book of essays about poetry and digital media includes a piece that riffs off of Radiohead's song "Creep."
I've created a new literary tendency, called "Creep" poetry, that is composed of real poets but (in fact) they are mostly involuntary members - the "movement" is more a critical construct, though I think an accurate one.
To further the strangeness, the essay is written in a form of "synthetic Scots," really just a pseudo-Scottish dialect that I created with dictionaries and computer algorithms.
In any case, I'd love to send a copy on to the band - I'm a huge fan. I'm not sure if I can use the address you have on the site for the videos for this - is there a place I can send it?
Here's the blurb on the book:
http://www.atelos.org/fashionable.htm
My own webites are a political art one, www.arras.net/circulars (which is now in "archive" mode for the summer) and www.arras.net, my digital poetry site.
Cheers,
Brian
Here's the cover of the book that my book was not named after, but with which it has a peculiar resonance, not just in title but content. One essay in Fashionable Noise was inspired by Alan Sokal's infamous writing of a pseudo-scientific essay which he had published in a major journal sometime in the early nineties. Google it if you want to know more. This is a pretty good book, actually, if you are not too emotionally attached to Lacan or Kristeva. Ever since I coudn't convince my postcolonialism teacher that Chomsky thought more seriously about real world politics than Foucault (who I think looked pretty bad in that first interview in Power/Knowledge), and that, rather than being simply post-Marxists, it's worth discussing Muslim fundamentalism as a force for "resisting" the West and capitalism -- i.e. that the strength of the phenemonon needs accounting for even if we, as progressives, find the gender politics abhorrent -- I've tended to side with the less poetic, "rational" tradition of philosophers than those set on undercutting common sense at all turns for the sake of theory. Fashionable Nonsense might seem like a valiant effort by philistines to take the piss out of poststructuralism; in fact, since they start from their position as physicists and merely look at the use of metaphors and analogies in the works they are critiquing, it manages to preserve and highlight what is in fact useful and attractive about the works.
[I don't as usual have anything to put up today. My "conflicted" poem based on Marianne Moore's "Poetry," called "Blogs," was recently published in the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter. Also, as you've noticed, there's been a redesign. Also, Circulars is officially in "hibernation" mode. Well, to test out this new design I thought I'd throw up a little review I did some years ago, which now appears on my Little Reviews page at Arras.]
poetics@
Edited by Joel Kusai
publisher: Roof, 1999
isbn: 0-93780-479-7
price: $18.95
While it is probably true that internet listservs as vehicles for the dissemination of critical thinking is still going through its "experimental" stage, with contributors still unsure of the ontological status of their words, this edition of cullings from the early years of the "poetics list," run out of State University of New York at Buffalo, should prove at least one thing: that literary criticism among the "experimental" community has advanced past the stage of statements of "poetics" and moved into something more engaged, passionate, "real time," and direct.
As the Kusai notes in his introduction:
It was all here: the quick dismissals and the brilliant precis, the idle chat and the meticulous scholarship, the silly and the self-important, the smug arrogance and startling generosity, the noise and music.
[5]
As a quasi-academic volume that positioned itself against the academy -- that is, in response to the "frame lock" of much academic poetic discourse -- A Poetics of Criticism bore little relation to the poetics statements by New American poets collected by Donald Allen in the Poetics of the New American Poetry. Few of the writers really said why they wrote, what it is that they do when writing or what their social contexts were, but rather suggested their range of interests, and outside of a few -- Lew Daly, for example -- most writers didn't offer many upsetting, candid, charismatic, downright narrow-minded or convincingly visionary views of how poetry is or should be written today.
This isn't to say that Poetics was a bad volume -- it is a great record of its time, and several essays by writers such as Lisa Robertson and Tan Lin could be referenced as key texts in these writers' personal canons -- but it lacked the "whole field has been lifted" excitement that, for example, William Carlos Williams saw in "Projective Verse." Its unclear how the group of writers it recpresented interacted with each other, and one wonders if its community snapshot may have exposed more fissures than commonalities.
One can spectulate that a result of these strategies -- not just in Poetics but elsewhere -- was a decreased sense of what could be called "feedback" for works of poetry, as if poems were no longer to be understood as discrete statements executed into a living, palpable world that could be upset or enamoured by them, but were, rather, mere turns in some myriad proliferating strands of discourse concerning the "avant-garde," a text stream unresponsive to the poem's status as "outside." A pious attitude toward avant-garde writing and its traditions had settled in, and the naturally impious attitudes of the artist looking for singularity against the gray scales of the given could find no place in it.
The writing in poetics@, in contrast, is practically an explosion of the issues, anxieties, enthusiasms, intellectual rivalries, contentions and cross-cultural camaraderie -- all the barroom talk that can be, if taken seriously, the living critical culture of poetry -- that were rendered silent by an anxiety to perform in the field of "poetics."
While it is a mere chip off the iceberg of what had been written during that time (the first two years, from 93-94, running at 10,000 printed pages) and though it still leans toward the writing strategies of academics, poetics@ is nearly complete as an image of the nexus of issues that -- in our "globalized" and technologically connected world, in which the Cold War has been replaced by corporate monoculture -- have grown to characterize writing about poetry since, inside and outside the "experimental" communities.
"I think you boys must be getting a little saddle weary from all that wobbling," opens an email by Jennifer Moxley, already clearing the air of the technical stylistics of writing that is self-consciously non-academic, and she continues:
Those who muse around in definitions of community without self-referentiality obviously can 'step away' long enough to question: are we in one? do we want one? etc... Most people on earth are born into your vagary.
[tk]
The range of subjects run over in this volume is amazing, and little of it has appeared in any of the more standard academic texts, such as The Marginalization of Poetry or the books of Marjorie Perloff, concerning writing of the past twenty years: New Zealand poetry (N.Z. poets like Alan Loney and Wystan Curnow were active early participants), Diane Ward's book Imaginary Movie (and an ensuing debate on the relevance of the "pleasure of the text" in reading it), the meaning of "experiment" in "experimental" poetry, a debate over the journal Apex of the M which had appeared at the time (possibly the most controversial first issue of a journal to appear in the 80s and 90s), why "few women post" (i.e. write criticism from a sort of activist perspective despite the activist motivations of much feminist writing) and why the "boys" are always engaged in verbal sparring, what sort of role the academy plays in the continuation or nurturing of avant-garde activity and whether it can any longer be called "avant-garde" -- just a random selection of the topics crossed, which flow into each other with fluidity rather than being separated by chapter headings and lead sentences.
Poets from the "mainstream" mingle with "Melbournian Doctoral Students," African American poets with English cyberpoets, young upstarts with established Language poets, with both ease and masterfully expressionistic unease.
The "image" of this book, what it presents metonymically as a substitute for the whole, is that of a dialogic complexity in which the basic contract is to let the text of the "other" sound itself out prior to any knee-jerk engagement with the author or ideas.
In real life, of course, the Poetics list was, and continues to be, something quite different from this happy utopia of fleshy vectors engaged in an experiment of radical democracy. Because of the ontologic crisis about the place of these texts in the universe of time and space, writers on the list often engage in ad hominem attacks on individuals, usually with a brand of rhetorical strategies that want to be intellectual pyrotechnics, or seem born of a falsely self-convinced strategy of neo-romantic improvisational brilliance, but are unfortunately something like mental self-preening in front of the computer screen, a private, perhaps therapeutic activity gone public.
Whether this book, which finally places a lot of the digitized writing "in print" and on the poetry consumer market, could make an effect on this confusion (the list has not been nearly as central to people's concerns since then) remains to be seen, but as a break in the continuum of anthologies of poetry (in which the editor, with the exception of Ian Sinclair, seem timid in writing anything that suggests critical perspective) or about poetry by poets, poetics@ seems the place to go to get a quick bird's eye view of what poets were talking about in the nineties, in a language that is imperfect in such a way that is revealing rather than demeaning.
Please join Rodrigo and I in lifting a glass of... something to, uh... ourselves, Tuesday, May 27th, to celebrate the launch of his excellent book of poems, Platform, and my curious book of essays and poems, Fashionable
Noise: On Digital Poetics, both just out from Atelos Press.
Where: Spoonbill and Sugartown bookstore, in the charming, little celebrated gated community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on 218 Bedford Avenue. It's the L train, stupide! (as zee French might say) -- zee Bedford stop, head south a few blocks.
What time: 7-9 (hours of the "magic light").
There will be wine, cheese, olives and depending on our attitudes toward formalities a brief reading, but I doubt it. I'm planning on selling my book on at a slight discount -- $10 ($3 off) -- don't know what Rodrigo's plans are but he might do the same. Get it while it's cheap. Tell friends to get it while it's cheap. Tell everyone.
Please read (but don't believe) the promo info below to be further persuaded of the necessity of your presence at this event. And there's nothing better than a Tuesday night of loitering on the streets of Wburg!
Cheers,
Brian
***
Rodrigo Toscano's Platform is a political one; his writings are predicated on the political conditions of contemporary life. But his work is not (and will never be) predicted by those conditions; indeed, outwitting, unnerving, and outspeaking the forces and figures clinging to control is one of his signal artistic strategies. It would be correct to read Platform as a triumphant product of precise and complex labor (thus adding to the tradition set by of Louis Zukofsky). But where the spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach informed Zukofsky's work, we would suggest that it is the spirit of the Teatro Campesino that informs Toscano's — his poems carry out brilliantly creative interventions. The works is bitingly inventive and yet delicately meticulous; outrageous, funny, anti-hypocritical, and "unfuckingrightgaggable," Platform is victory for the political intelligence whose exercise is now, more than ever, a human necessity.
Rodrigo Toscano grew up in San Diego. After a few years in the San Francisco Bay Area working as a social worker and an activist within the labor movement, he moved to New York, where he continues this work. He is a nationally influential writer, whose work along the intersections of social and aesthetic activism is adding new dimensions to contemporary poetics.
Platform is Rodrigo Toscano's third book. His first book, The Disparities, was published jointly by Green Integer and O Books in 2002. His second book, Partisans (which, due to a variety of circumstances, came out before his first), was published in 1999 by O Books.
http://www.atelos.org/platform.htm
***
Brian Kim Stefans' Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics eludes any singular description — it is too various. At once, Fashionable Noise explodes with ingredients of essay, games, and poetry, and it is always engaging, always thought provoking. How does limitless replication and change affect a dialogue one might try to have with another poet's words? What's so interesting about the hidden code behind the link Walt Disney that misdirects you, takes you to the wrong site? Stefans confronts these questions, and the ease with which he simultaneously discusses, investigates, and incorporates those elements that might make up a digital poetics is astounding. Generating poetry with a computer program, synthesizing Scots by using an algorithm accompanied by dictionaries, employing an ICQ chat transcript as the conduit for delivering a significant discussion on digital poetics: these are just a few examples of what readers will find in this book. Although "the webwork, unlike the earthwork, can never be photographed from a satellite perspective," Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics is on the forefront of mapping out a rapidly emerging, constantly morphing, virtual terrain.
Brian Kim Stefans is the author of Free Space Comix (1998), Gulf (1998/2000), and Angry Penguins (2000). He has been an active presence on the internet for several years, editing arras.net — a ceaselessly original site devoted to new media poetry and poetics — and creating works such as the acclaimed Flash poem "The Dreamlife of Letters" and a setting of the "e" chapter of Christian Bök's Christian Bök's Eunoia. He is an active literary and cultural critic, publishing frequently in the Boston Review, Jacket, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.
http://www.atelos.org/fashionable.htm
[Here are test runs of a verse form I've been playing with for a few years. A few of these appeared in a David Bowie tribute that Kevin Killian (or someone else whose name I can't remember) edited last year. I'm working on a less mystifying version of poems in this stanza form (which I won't describe, but it has to do with the indents) called What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers.]
Smooth green world
permitting axis grinding
neath a star
bulbous and mirrored
truth ache, comedy
of replicants deferring
ovoid, efficacious
maxy sheen
the love lost between selves
in crackling plastic
what one observed
through the rain
is a runner chasing countdowns
sadly forgotten
but for the gorgeous
challenge of it all
invisible -- insidious
connecting for vagrancy
the jawbone isolate
amidst streaming quarks
Using dem types of woids
to muscle support
is history
gracelessly, the pedestrian surrenders
difficult brilliances
the instinctual sham-o-meter, that
any given night
gives reason to pay the rent, that
reason, lost
pump fist over the castrates
from behind the gleam of armor
defecated by choice
republic -— these thoughts fancy across the water
of talk
the vandal in career
blemishes the tubeways suspiciously, courage-
ously, morphs the museums
where the discourse fairly sucks, sucks
sucks discordant channels
from the popery that will not smell it
The infallible bloke
deft with a lime
or a meter
barrage, twice times the second
wind fixture, gravity
cultural mushrooms
corrects the materials
in it
video heirlooms, the inauspicious
slanting out sideways
one of the great english voices
cut
up, three stories
robert wyatt
hum, incredibly danceable
now, to the new knowledge
accrued with friendship
such self-referential grease
provokes the dim readership
blatantly, by twisting thumbs
This, finally, my book
of philosophy
recollections, discrougements, lex
often reading circus
for humid terms
suspended in the wild percentage, moving
like cloud spots, frictions
of leg against leg
the music
this frantically the look
of seemingly improper moments, for the
book
protects, and then there' s abundance
to elevate
the mundane, to its
synaesthetic upper station
where white funk makes its play, for
emotion, pleasure, pain, simple
it seems — to the roving challenger
bored, quite frankly, of this
My adolescent skin gives me a bad voice
in the office
among the lazy
in determined activity
rhyme after rhyme after rhyme, no
poetry
as the fans are flakes
and the texts, half-baked
corduroy -- what pill has gotten in here
to
clean?
carpets auspicious as a brainwash, lux
causing sneezes
perfumorama debilitating lapdogs increases, yeah
that’s right —- policy
damns the underarm
and the underrated
in the cubicles and mail jaws
branding the chaos of the menial’s pines
quite consequential
So Brian Eno
fuck-a dis, fuck—a dat, sometimes
thoughtful people are confined
to wheelchairs
in memory
for the seven reasons punk died
plastered to the freeway
again, anonymous
with a seventy gallon haircut
sometimes bras make sense
hippie pennies contract
amidst the big sur cataracts
dungareed dudes with digeridoos
values every other muscle
pure
snowflake -- and that’s where the pastoral begins
the satire
offends, in case this ambiance is protective
it ain’t —- such somonex
clues us in on the big arrears
You are so casual
in the fuzz box, of
autumn
slants of light curtains
over deli materials, knoblauch, the smokes
occurring
so humanly, persists
this stifling warmth
that, shading the eyes from this sun, the
family
is auspicious
rents in the stratosphere
it's so possible to elevate
one's mind beyond the conditions
one struggles in a wealth of wait
productively managing the interior, who
complains (this is worth forgetting) is
thrown in
the circle -- stones are projected
venemously at the jolly roger
How it's going to talk
one out of her covert
operation, tag-to-tag
survival
in the mesh of vicinities, bar code
of
beer bombs, a
ball room, such
across that heat is
africa, crust
of issues, she
asks
and performs the marxist plug, in
toto, samoleans
are god, and the windows
under it, show unto
deaths, fields of destructions, pax
cassandra
asks about the poem
too overrun with humor
If the smoker takes one step back and observes
the shape of paint on squares
barely able to perceive the emotional complex, for the
rigors of
this reticulous democracy, and the
nerve net is glowing
apprehensively at first but then continues
this growing
of the werk on the werk in the indelible cellars
of culture
that would be a chapter
one would want to review further, this
gridwork, pile-on, path through the
forest -- paved out by yellow flares,
pylons, incredibly undeterred
by fear, insecurity, love, loathing hate
a cartographer's wet dream, who has
just returned from europe
clutching, from the drama of organic life
the sense of civility, civic pride
[My book -- see below -- will also be available at this.]
ROOF, THE FIGURES, and GRANARY BOOKS
invite you to a party
Thursday, May 29th, 2003
at JAMES COHAN GALLERY
533 W. 26th Street, NYC
from 6-8
for the following new books:
SEEING OUT LOUD by Jerry Saltz
DAY by Kenneth Goldsmith
LIGHTS OUT by Geoffrey Young & James Siena
PAGE by Hannah Weiner
MUSIC OR HONESTY by Rod Smith
SNOWBALL'S CHANCE by John Reed
DURER IN THE WINDOW by Barbara Guest
THE DIK-DIK'S SOLITUDE: New & Selected Works by Anne Tardos
TURNING LEAVES OF MIND by Ligorano / Reese with Gerrit Lansing
YODELING INTO A KOTEX by Ron Padgett & George Schneeman
Refreshments Served
[Here's a site that lets you download "patriotic" cursors that run on Windows. Someone has to explain to me how some of these are expressions of "patriotism" -- you mean if you're have a flashing speech bubble coming out of your mouth you're not American? But the hard, silent stare makes you a patriot? I'm sure there's a Chomsky one out there with "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" in the bubble.]
[Ok, I promise that this is the last time I will mention this on my site... the link below takes you to an interactive version of the text below (written by the publisher).]
http://www.atelos.org/fashionable.htm
Brian Kim Stefans' Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics eludes any singular description — it is too various. At once, Fashionable Noise explodes with ingredients of essay, games, and poetry, and it is always engaging, always thought provoking. How does limitless replication and change affect a dialogue one might try to have with another poet's words? What's so interesting about the hidden code behind the link Walt Disney that misdirects you, takes you to the wrong site? Stefans confronts these questions, and the ease with which he simultaneously discusses, investigates, and incorporates those elements that might make up a digital poetics is astounding. Generating poetry with a computer program, synthesizing Scots by using an algorithm accompanied by dictionaries, employing an ICQ chat transcript as the conduit for delivering a significant discussion on digital poetics: these are just a few examples of what readers will find in this book. Although "the webwork, unlike the earthwork, can never be photographed from a satellite perspective," Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics is on the forefront of mapping out a rapidly emerging, constantly morphing, virtual terrain.
Brian Kim Stefans is the author of Free Space Comix (1998), Gulf (1998/2000), and Angry Penguins (2000). He has been an active presence on the internet for several years, editing arras.net — a ceaselessly original site devoted to new media poetry and poetics — and creating works such as the acclaimed Flash poem "The Dreamlife of Letters" and a setting of the "e" chapter of Christian Bök's Christian Bök's Eunoia. He is an active literary and cultural critic, publishing frequently in the Boston Review, Jacket, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.
I generally shy away from Google poems, but this one turned out pretty good (sure), with a little correction of punctuation and capitalization. The only thing I added were the curse symbols in the last line. It's based on the phrase "Fashionable Noise" -- I was hoping that my book and the book by Sokol called Fashionable Nonsense would somehow get mingled up in here. Well, back to the drawing board. The pantoum isn't so interesting. The Google machine I used is by Levi Leehto, and can be found here:
http://www.leevilehto.net/google/patterns.asp
AFTER NERVAL
Sombre future, writ large all over.
Penguins. His forthcoming book is called
Spirit Of Thoroughness Has Not Died:
Noise Rock Instead. Satisfaction that...
satisfaction that the spirit of...
that the spirit of thoroughness has not died
out in Germany. But has only been drowned.
Fashionique, fashionpolice,
recently angry penguins - 2000 forthcoming -
"Hey kids, which one of these - graphics and
noise - on digital poetics? Is due
goes to the police?" Donors for making
books are angry penguins (poems). And
- if you like - you can &$%# all sides.
HOTEL STE...?
They aren’t making any of the newly fashionable noise
despite the grisly realities, portending
fashionable noise rock. Instead - satisfaction,
Fashnek! Awek don’t seem to fit in their native
fashionable noise, despite the grisly realities portending.
("Not died out in Germany, but has only been drowned out,
Fashnek!!") Awek don’t seem to fit in their native
noise - fashionably late - fashioncore
not died out in Germany, but only drowned out.
Relevant results: we have omitted some entries very similar to the
noise. "Fashionably late." "Fashioncore."
You like? You can, all sides! Brian Kim Stefans’s
relevant results we have omitted, some entries very similar to those
by M. Mara-Ann (book, interior design):
"you-like." You can all, 'sides Brian Kim Stefans’s
noise rock. Instead? Satisfaction
by M. Mara-Ann (book). "Interior design,"
but has only been drowned out for a short while by the
noise rock. Instead? Satisfaction.
(Some entries very similar to the 25 already.)
Burt has only drowned? out for a short while by the
Tu Show - you? The most relevant results we have omitted -
some entries very similar to the 25 already:
"NOISE: see: Brian, Kim Stefans. Stops."
To show you the most relevant results, we have omitted
"Noise, rock." Instead: satisfaction !=
noise. See Brian Kim Stefans, Stops
- for Christophe Tarkos. Brian Kim Ste...?
Noise Rock instead? "'Satisfaction
Rock' instead." (Satisfaction
for Christophe Tarkos.) Brian, Kim, Ste...?
They aren’t making any of the newly fashionable noise.
I've just finished creating a new archives page for Circulars -- perhaps in the near future I'll do one for this weblog as well:
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives.html
Actually, here's what it would look like were I to just drop the Circulars template in there -- notice that the stylesheet tags don't match up:
http://www.arras.net/weblog/archives.html
[The following is from Steve Perry's Bushwarsblog concerning something he posted a few days ago, and to which I linked on my site Circulars. I think it's very pertinent as I've linked to other sites on my site -- "humor" sites -- that were criticized as being racist. My own response to Steve is below.]
I admit I had some misgivings over posting the Snoop Dogg translation of Bush's victory speech yesterday. And my friend Dave Marsh--the longtime rock critic and author whose new TCB blog goes live today--has the same reservations. Marsh is both hypersensitive and wise in matters of crypto-racism, and he wrote me as follows: "This isn't such a good idea. It reeks of coon show."
I know what he means, and the question comes down to this (I think): Is it prima facie racist to employ racially tinged stereotypes to make a point?
The point I wished to make between the lines was this: Gangsta culture is gangsta culture, and if you credit the reasoning of Bush's foreign policy, you have to respect the most hardcore gangsta rappers as well--and, needless to say, vice versa. Why? Because either it's all right to value getting paid over all else--sooner rather than later, and by any means available--or else it's not. Any which way, I see the Bush administration and the most grandiose of the hiphop gangstas in the same light.
But maybe this is all just so much rationalization, irrelevant even if it's correct in its own obscure way; maybe, for practical purposes, the most salient point is that employing racial stereotypes to any end is pernicious. Myself, I think we're past that point. But I'm not entirely sure. Tell me what you think: sperry@citypages.com
Dear Steve,
I run the website Circulars -- http://www.arras.net/circulars -- and reposted the Shizzolatin piece, though with some reservations:
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000608.html
I didn’t foreground the metaphor that you were making between gangsta culture and the Bush regime – I don’t think too many people would have gotten that, certainly not in the formulation that you made on your blog today.
(“The point I wished to make between the lines was this: Gangsta culture is gangsta culture, and if you credit the reasoning of Bush's foreign policy, you have to respect the most hardcore gangsta rappers as well--and, needless to say, vice versa. Why? Because either it's all right to value getting paid over all else--sooner rather than later, and by any means available--or else it's not. Any which way, I see the Bush administration and the most grandiose of the hiphop gangstas in the same light.”)
I put it up, though, because I see my site as a sort of clearing house for different ways of making political art, even if slightly tasteless. At times – like when I make links to the site whitehouse.org – racist stereotypes and language are involved. (Actually, it’s only that site that moves into racism – other more or less “tasteless” political art seems to have no problem stereotyping gays and women, not to mention those with mental health issues.)
Here are the two times that I linked to whitehouse.org and/or took some of their art: http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000583.html. (I actually agree with “Buford,” that the piece, which I hadn’t read entirely before posting, is pretty bad, though I think “he” is more full of “hatred” than I could ever be – I would never fantasize about doing harm to someone the way he does.)
Here’s the other one -- http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000480.html-- which seems to take shots at everybody, though the commenter didn’t obviously think so.
This is because I’m interested in the creative, non-discursive, “surprise attack” aspects of political art – excess, even if it moves beyond positive formulations of “what we should do,” since I feel pretty desperate to fill in the void of wilder forms of protest art that seem to have been more prevalent in the last century. Here is something rather extreme, again having to do mostly with celebrities: http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000582.html.
In addition, I write about “digital poetics” and cover topics concerning how a text can move from an ethically neutral zone to one that is ethically charged based on the work of a simple algorithm – the site pornolize.com is the example I use, but it seems the most recent crop tends to have to do with Black American English (there are tons of “Ebonics” translators out there).
I suppose, if this didn’t come from a site actually created by Snoop Dogg – I’m assuming it was, or by his company – then I wouldn’t have posted it, as there is a pretty tedious new streak of web art these days (I assume by whites) that tries to make a good point – that the internet, or at least most of the discourse around it, seems to be the domain mostly of whites and Asians – by “getting dirty,” trying to be on the good cop by pretending to be the bad cop, and doing obnoxious things like this site -- http://rent-a-negro.com/ -- whose URL speaks for itself.
I myself am Korean American (“half” Korean), and was not raised in a Korean neighborhood, so I’ve had my share of racial epithets tossed my way. I know that when I was in high school – I attended an urban high school in Jersey City rather than my mostly white high school in the suburbs – it was somewhat liberating for me and my friends there, who were mostly non-white, to play with racially-charged language – we took it over, in a sense, though not to pathological extremes – it still hurt when we heard it elsewhere.
I’ve never mentioned that I was Korean American on the site, though, as I didn’t think it mattered, in a way, and my hope was that the sensibility expressed on the site – to which there are over 15 contributors – would be general enough, beyond any need to psychoanalyze motives. But I confess that I was a bit afraid, also – would it be acceptable to people “out there” that a site that is so obviously critical of the Bush administration was created by a Korean American? I don’t want to know.
I guess I always hope that “we” can share a joke – that racist stereotypes are bad – by putting on the masks, switching identities, playing with the language, etc., but I’m not sure how that plays out in the long run, in either reaffirming what we would like to destroy, etc. I may have lost some readers by posting the links to whitehouse.org, or even your site – well, my readership has gone down anyway, since the “war” “ended” – which is unfortunate, but I’ve learned a lot by reading the comments section on my site in reaction to these pieces, even when they were flames.
There are certainly enough stereotypes about white people flying around in the political art of today, perhaps particularly Texans – is the fact that it white Americans create this art important? Are the perspectives translating well across a broad spectrum of culture?
Anyway, I have no answers to any of this. One can’t expect everyone to share one’s sense of the range of permissible forms of expression – something will always confuse or anger someone else – negativity, whether in the form of punk rock, gangsta rap, Dada, even these language algorithms, can have its liberating aspects, but to many it might just seem vicious noise.
Thanks,
Brian
[A second email soon after...]
Hi Steve,
One last point I wanted to make was this – that the ethnic make-up of the Bush cabinet seems to suggest that he is responding to a need for racial diversity in the government, and is in some ways “progressive.” Fine, but I think the issue is not just “diversity” but “difference” – that the various races that live in America also play by different rules when they are existing in their own neighborhoods, cultures, etc. – speak differently, also. Sometimes they don’t even hear each other, though the Bush cabinet, working in exquisite concord, apparently does.
I suppose, though I am not sure, that creating obnoxious cartoons about “difference” at least suggest the contradictions and potential conflicts in American culture that the Bush cabinet seems to want to gloss over, as they have glossed over differences with their peers around the world. I prefer this harsh highlighting of recalcitrant social detail over the evangelical “vision” that guides our foreign and domestic policy at the moment. Perhaps I am the wrong person to foreground this – I’m pretty middle class – but nonetheless it seems necessary.
Does this make sense?
Thanks
Brian
I should be receiving a package today with copies of my book -- it's 11:17 and it hasn't yet arrived, but any minute now. I've put up a file of "fashionable supplements" which includes some of the source files that contributed to the creation of the texts and poems in that book. The supplements include:
1. ICQ Chat Number
2. T.S. Eliot, Reflections on Vers Libre
3. Original poems from "When Lilacs Last in the Door"
4. Replacement algorithms for Scots translation of "Lilacs"
5. Thomas Gray, on the Death of Mr. Richard West
6. David Larsen, Dogma '01
None of this will be of any interest to you unless you have the book, which you can probably get soon at Small Press Distribution.
[I wrote my final column for the Poetry Project Newsletter recently only to discover that Gary and Nada decided to devote the whole issue to writings they got from blogs. So they are taking the column -- which reads like a blog entry anyway -- but also suggested I blog it to keep the concept clean. So here it is, several weeks ahead of time.]
Gary tells me I have all the space in the world this month to write whatever the f*ck I want but actually, I don’t have all that much to write.
Visitors to my blog have probably noticed that I’m basically p*ssed off about everything, including blogs. I’m also p*ssed at Herberto Yepez for stopping his English blog, but really, that’s ok, I wasn’t reading it anyway – I’ve been too p*ssed. (Everything Yepez wrote there was a manifesto of sorts, including his last bit: “This blog is dead” – a sort of blogging degree zero.) And I can’t read the Spanish one because I’m too f*cking stupid.
So Anselm’s the new Ed Friedman.
But the big question is: who will be the next Maureen?
I hope they don’t take the English guy.
ONLY KIDDING.
(See? I’m blogging…)
Nobody downloaded Arras 5, part II, though 1,249 downloaded part I – what the f*ck does that mean?
Bergvallmania over so soon? Nobody interested in what Alice Becker-Ho has to say these days? (She was Guy Debord’s lover – I lifted a great short article by her on criminal argots online.)
Dagmar Chili Pitas sound too Aryan-Mex for you?
(I will write that intro for the two issues soon, promise; this disparity will be corrected, or my name isn’t Mysterious Billy Smith – “the trigger.”)
Did nobody get to the bottom of the e-mail to see the Bruce Andrews stuff? (Confessions of a spammer…)
(Write to me if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
I don’t think anything very interesting has been happening in “digital poetry” for the last several months; if there has been, I’ve not been paying attention.
No reports from “E-poetry 2003,” live from West Virginia, though I’m sure, like the Freemasons, they are merely saving their discoveries for future Presidents and renegade Jesuits. (I wasn’t invited to that one, and anyway was in California.)
Will the “poetry” in “E-poetry” ever chance upon John Wieners?
It’s been a wild ride of detourned thises and that’s for those of you paying attention to Circulars (www.arras.net/circulars). Whitehouse.org might be the most radical and prolific of these sites -- their latest headline reads: “The War In Iraq Concluded, President Bush Proudly Honors The First-Ever Recipients Of The "Civilian Warmonger Medal Of Armchair Valor." I got this written to me after posting a link to one of its/their stories:
"Dear Brian,
While you're handing out awards you should give yourself one for "Jackass of the Year". First of all you accuse FOX News of "Obediently chastising anyone who dared voice opinions that were'nt in my f-cking script" and then like the true hypocrite that you are you go and chastise everyone and anyone who disagrees with you? You are oviously a very angry, bitter, hateful, racist, anti-semite, mysogynistic creep who is in desperate need of psychiatric counseling. Your attempts at being humorous do nothing but show your true hateful colors. The only thing that sucks more than the war itself is that you weren't on the receiving end of a cruise missle straight up your rear end." [Etc. etc.]
Of course, I didn’t write any of what was attributed to me – the whitehouse.org story I linked to had a lot of foul epithets in it, and perhaps I should have read it more carefully, but since it was a satire and supposed to be some insanely bigoted map of Dubya’s unconscious, I figured people would understand the perspective and just go elsewhere if they didn’t like it.
Tom Raworth’s poem “Listen Up” – which he tried to have published on the “Poets for the War” website -- is a classic satire in this very mode, though admittedly a thousand times more clever. That poem doesn’t have that juvenile South Park feel of whitehouse.org or The Onion – it’s more classic Archie Bunker (or whomever the English analogue was) meets Jonathan Swift:
Why should we listen to Hans Blix
and all those other foreign pricks:
the faggot French who swallow snails
and kiss the cheeks of other males:
the Germans with their Nazi past
and leather pants and cars that last
longer than ours: the ungrateful Chinks
we let make all our clothes; those finks
should back us in whatever task--
we shouldn't even have to ask:
and as for creepy munchkin Putin...
a slimy asshole -- no disputing!?
Ok, so there’s foul, racist language. But I wonder -- and I really do wonder – why I, who was raised hearing racist epithets tossed my way on every block find this poem hilarious and myself not personally implicated (as speaker or subject) whereas other readers of it might find it “hate mongering.” I read it and think that Tom’s on my side, and I even see whitehouse.org that way – I know I don’t use those words, or think that way, just as I don’t think like Ivan Brunetti in Schizo, but alas, it’s cathartic to witness these extremes.
(Perhaps it’s a form of high anxiety – a language that doesn’t permit violence just seems more frightening to me? Am I just blogging?)
Darren Wershler-Henry covered for me in late April while I was in Cali visiting my sister – haven’t heard from him since returning, but they just lifted the SARS ban on Toronto today, so perhaps I’ll get an email from him soon.
Internecine bloodbath? There was a little of that at Circulars – which may be R.I.P. by the time you read this. Luckily, we have a contract with Haliburton so everyone will look like poets again by the time of your next visit. The infrastructure is intact.
Speaking of whom: can someone tell me why Poets Against the War are so confident that they/it are/is “historic”? Whatever happened to leaving “blanks in the record, I mean for things we didn’t know” (Pound).
What’s historic is the Iraqi National Museum…
It’s a bad word – I never use it.
I’m also pretty down on the internet list poem these days (was I ever up on it?). OK Flarfers anony-mouse, this means you. I think they/we have to get past the list poem, take the “list” and make it “listen” and tweak the poem to work longer than 30 seconds without pooping out. One good image culled from a Google search is worth more than a life’s works (Pound) – but it’s got to be a good image. I thought that was the great challenge in poetry – dichtung = condensare (or: “looping = pooping”).
I guess I feel guilty because “riddled argots” is full of examples of the form… someday I’ll write that intro.
Elizabeth Fraser-Hemerding, the Administrative Assistant in my office, is out getting steel pipes put in her spine. She’s about 30 years older than me, but the fact that she’s getting these installed because of excessive computer work, well…
It was on Elizabeth’s tiny portable television that I first saw the Towers burning…
I’m blogging again…
Just makes me think…
Does the fact that Devendra Banhart looks a lot like Che Guevara (and drives a Diesel van) mean that history really does travel in circles (albeit very short, Latin American ones) and that, soon, the early books of Kit Robinson will look fresh again? (Some of them already do… they’re online at: www.whalecloth.org/.)
Another thing – is there a crisis for “political poetry” and/or “avant-garde poetry” when its response to the war is either the above-mentioned internecine fighting (all forms of debate are good, in my book, but some do get bogged down with rivalry over scholastic details), or when birdhouse-makers and poets are seen as analogous in terms of articulation of cultural values (as in “it could have been birdhouse-makers invited to the White House and the effect would have been the same”), or when those poets most involved in social issues still write in a obscure, however passionate, form of Language poetry that comes across as encrypted messages for cultured insiders than public enactments of truth or vision?
Am I being a booby and picking on my friends?
Vietnam happened already, but so did the Pisan Cantos, n’est pas?
I mean, I like this type of poetry, I wrote it at one time, but I’ve never believed in the inevitability of the descent of language from wholes to fragments – that’s just one trajectory.
I know that you know that I know that you know that I know who I’m talking about… and it’s not like I put out any Mayakovskian masterpieces during the time of this our last Great Slaughter – just that, well, it makes me think: we were all not afraid of a Dixie-Chicks like burning of the books but, nonetheless, what was there that was done that would have called for it?
(That last clause is a mixture of Lenin and early Ashbery, in case you were wondering…)
Just hope we get something together against the big one: RE-ELECTION. If George W. Bush isn’t utterly humiliated soon then we have little hope for saving face – in “history.” Even Tom Hanks c. 2035 can’t make a bunch of guys riding black Stealth fighters holding joysticks in their crotches dropping laser-guided bombs on scampering SUVs seem heroic. Can you see Vin Diesel (with hair) playing Tommy Franks in this one?
And we’re running out of deserts and pharmaceutical factories to bomb – a luxury of Middle East wars. If “we” got back to Korea, may have to burn the foliage again.
This is probably my last column for this mag – hasta la vista, thanks.
Brian