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More free things... I scanned and formatted this one in for Kenny. I'm sure we'll hear from the estate soon, so get it while it's hot. Some really excellent stuff that can be hard going at times due to SB's distinctive and excessive digressions, but if you can't get enough poetic prose of the Objectivist tradition you won't mind this at all. And look at the rosebuds ye gathers: George Méliès, David Wark Griffith, Carl Theodore Dreyer, and Sergei Eisenstein. With an foreword by the Creeley man himself. How can you go wrong!
Have you paid your monthly visit to Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES? Try Dakota, you won't regret it. Turn up the volume if you can (don't watch it without sound).
The Australian digital poet geniwate and I have two collaborations up as part of the page_space project exhibition that is presently on view at Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado, Los Angeles.
I did the text and photographs for "Kyoto" and geni did the programming, sound, and filters on the images. For the second, geni provided the text and the concept (including the Quicktime video she found online), I did the programming and work with the stills.
Neither of us are entirely satisfied that these are the final versions of the pieces; we plan to revise them and submit them to How2 or some other online poetry center.
But for now take a peeksy, let me know what you think. Other artists in the exhibition include: Simon Biggs, Loss Glazier, Deena Larsen, Jody Zellen, Pedro Valdeolmillos, Lluís Calvo, Jim Andrews and Jason Nelson.
When You Reach Kyoto
Dibagan
The propaganda from Anton Soderman:
page_space project
The space of the page has long been taken for granted as blank, while text is valorized as the agent of signification. But what is the space of the page? What are it's architectures which quietly construct the possiblilities of a text? As spaces for writing multiply, perhaps infatuation with literary style will be replaced by the stylistics of the page, and a desire to create mechanisms that that offer new spaces for writing.
Traditionally, collaborations between writers and programmers move from pages of text to the forms of the screen: a writer first composes a text that the programmer then designs, arranges and presents. The page_space project is an experiment conducted under the direction of Senior Research Coordinator Anton Soderman which reverses the usual collaboration between writing and design. First, programmers and designers created digital page architectures. These spaces were then exchanged and used as fields for textual exploration.
The page_space programmer/writers are: Simon Biggs, Lluis Calvo, geniwate, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Deena Larsen, Jason Nelson, Brian Kim Stefans, Pedro Valdeolmillos and Jody Zellen.
The page_space project goes online on February 28, 2004, and initiates the Machine Poetics Research Unit of Superbunker.
[I know this might threaten my status as a card-carrying post-avant poet and drown me in the blithe currents of quietude, but I've got some poems and audio files in the new issue of the well-designed and edited webzine Drunken Boat. I missed the launch reading at Pete's Candy Store last week, still being at Brown, but I heard it was a hoot.]
FEATURING
Norman Mailer
interviewed by Barry Leeds
POETRY
Andrea Baker Brian Kim Stefans
Mark Bibbins Lyn Lifshin
Kevin Cantwell Aaron McCollough
Stephen Cushman Jessy Randall
Benjamin Gantcher David Starkey
Sarah Gridley Lina ramona Vitkauskas
PROSE
David Barringer Alyce Lomax
kari edwards Marc Pietrzykowski
Thomas Fink Felicia Sullivan
PHOTO
Nicholas Lawrus Eddy Seesing
Hoag Holmgren Daniel Simmons
VIDEO
David Ambrose Lila Yomtoob
Nick Fox-Gieg Mark O'Connell
SOUND
Jim Andrews Geoffrey Datson
Latasha Natasha Diggs Cary Peppermint
CYBERTEXT
Wolf Kahlen Tony Rickaby
Robert Kendall Lisa Bloomfield and Rod Val Moore
Dorothee Lang
WEB ART
Larry Carlson Yucef Merhi
Alan Berliner Philip Wood
Here's a nice interactive Shockwave piece by a guy named Nicolaus Clauss. Make sure your sound is on, and don't be afraid to click around and learn the interface -- there are several screens to explore.
[Another result of the recent visit of the two space Canadiens. And with a photo by Sylvia Plachy to boot!]
The Village Voice: Books: Crystal Method by Ed Park
I don't know why I find this site so amusing. Some of the ugliest, most expressionistic creatures I've ever seen, can't believe we're sharing the same planet! I look forward to seeing the new IMAX Volcanoes of the Deep Sea very soon -- better than the new Matrix! I predict that there will be a new fad, like there was in the early 20th century for African masks and other forms of neo-Orientalism, based on these photographs and others like them -- you heard it here first.
http://people.whitman.edu/%7Eyancey/midwater.html
I never heard of this site before, but there're tons of readings here, including my strange bit from E-poetry 2001 where I basically read the stock quotes from Kenny Goldsmith's Day while the Dreamlife was projected.
http://www.factoryschool.org/content/sounds/havanaglen.html
One of my favorite little bits from "The Truth Interview" that probably most of you haven't seen.
Rectangles (text by Kim Rosenfield)
Thom Yorke has an article in the Guardian:
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Losing the faith
Flash is really maturing into a medium that can potentially rival film for creating absorptive fantasy narratives that are -- true to the hoopla of computer technology -- "interactive," picking up on a lot of the pleasures of useless obsession (is there any other kind?) some of youze would feel figuring out the next stages in Mario Brothers or Myst, etc.
Anyway, follow this link for something quite exceptional, but be prepared -- high bandwidth only (and sound certainly helps). One of the few web pieces that didn't make me feel like I was utterly wasting my time (even very good web pieces make me feel that way). The art is impeccable also -- reminds me a bit of the new Radiohead video (and the dude in the second section looks like Thom Yorke).
You have to play along, click around and be patient. What does it mean? What did Melies mean by Voyage to the Moon? What do the Brothers Quay or Joseph Cornell mean?
http://www.freshsensation.com/samorost.swf
Here's how Curt Cloninger of Rhizome described it in the Net Art email:
Known simply as 'samorost.swf', this interactive Flash game by Czechoslovakia's Amanita Design combines Myst/Riven-like puzzles with a whimsical animation style reminiscent of crankbunny.com (or Roger Dean's early 'Yes' album covers). The puzzles are challenging but surrealistically intuitive, and the combination of gorgeously textured organic settings and playfully animated vector characters is plenty of motivation to advance to the next level. Samorost is a rare combination of entertainment, art, absurdism, and humor. And, as an added bonus, you get to save a planet from utter destruction.
On a related note, there was a great article in the New York Times recently about the too-be-release collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvadore Dali called "Destino." Click the image for a larger version:
Read the story while it's still there -- probably disappear into the archives soon: The Lost Cartoon by Disney and Dalí, Fellow Surrealists
This .pdf was commissioned for the next issue of The Iowa Review Web, who also interviewed me and will run a review of Fashionable Noise, which will go live in September I think.
Here's a brief description of what it is that I sent to TIR:
The final 12-poem sequence of "Pasha Noise: life and contacts," a long poem which was partly inspired by Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: life and contacts," the poet's satirical "farewell to London," published in 1920.
My "Nineties" is that of the "new economy," my London is New York City (particularly Williamsburg), my Lionel Johnson is Alan Davies, and my haircuts not the pre-Raphaelite locks of a Dante Gabriel Rosetti or Algernon Swinburne but the practical buzz-cut of, oh, Miles Champion? John Cayley? Darren Wershler-Henry?
The earlier part of the poem, written prior to 9/11, deals with more narrative elements, and introduces characters such as Pasha Noise, Tepid Ezine and HVA (Her Videoness Avatar). This latter section was written after those events and thus occasionally evinces a more nostalgic tone.
Coda: The Nineties Tried Your Game, There's Nothing In It
Great, rambling but informative story about my friend Alan Licht in the "Paris Transatlantic" -- he's the guitarist who played during my reading at St. Mark's a few years back. Nate Dorwood has a piece in this issue as well.
Here's a bit from one of my first web poems, Alpha Betty's Chronicles. No particular reason I'm posting it except that 1) nothing new in the shoot, and 2) I wanted to see how it looked in the blog.
The formatting was originally determined by a computer program. I was much under the sway of Charles Bernstein and Dante Piombino's "A Mosaic for a Convergence" at the time -- you can find the link on arras.net.
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You'll see that there's a seas on, a reason the blackouts shrugged and persisted, diletta ntes a figure of hope
to nobody. That's when you cared an d cash and carried the cigarette charm -ing lighter - the paradise for keepsies. holes in the ceme nt (trying to fathom what your mother meant
matchbook (secret matchbook) contained your picture, my puncture, her wound - p ink elephants.
there is syrup in the milk, there is movement on the perimeter, shogun warrior a nd there is a ring of saliva and there shall be calm in the evenings
we pl ayed injuns
p arables. And easy cutlet and lawn chair.
Freedom is an afterthought, after love popped out of the op en box. He screamed, another talent wasted o n portable fictions. Scram, beat it. |
[I posted this yesterday but am reposting as it got lost under the prehistoric bird.]
I've started a new blog for a photo / poem project:
What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers
The stuff there now is pretty random -- just what is most presentable at the moment. I'm not quite sure what the project is except that the poems are in a sort of "variable foot"-inspired stanza form I invented (and rather Ashberian in tone, but this will change), and the photographs will move back and forth between "straight" photos and pictures in which objects, through the magic of digital technology, are doubled, tripled, etc.
I hope to develop some more significant interaction between the photos and the poems. The new blog is just a way to organize the photos and poems.
Who cares about Flarf -- a monkey could write it!
Speaking of which, what do you think of the new FSC header?
Two radio streams to check out. The first is an experimental site run out of MIT labs that distills various threads of music into a single synthetic track -- a bit like those dissolving Listerine sticks that might be a bit too sharp to give any pleasure, but useful as a way to disinfect the orifices -- the second just a good dub station with some other kooky stuff thrown in (and your typical college-boy type DJ).
(Actually, I'm enjoying Eigenradio a lot more than the above might suggest -- it's just that when I first turned it on, it was quite noisy, like Plunderphonics with no soul -- as if it ever had one -- but now it's going through a pretty mellow, even kind of sexy, phase, a clicky electronic wave with bits of saxophone flitting above it.)
"Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you're tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you're hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear."
Eigenradio - The top 20 singular values all day, every day!
Dublab appears to be down for the moment but the URL is www.dublab.com.
A new Flash poem by Thom "with an H" Swiss and George "not Bernard" Shaw...
I like the concept and the varieties of interactivity, all of which are pretty witty, surprising, and "humanized" by the use of gravity effects and natural sounds. You have to play around with it to get through -- pull things, click and hold, or just move the mouse around, etc. After you are done with the piece -- only 6 or so sections -- there is some nice interactivity in the navigation that suddenly appears.
The text has that self-referential "let me tell you about myself" (i.e. about digital art) feel to it that I generally discourage, and the graphics are slightly "designy," like those shaved-head cuts that have now gone out of fashion. But for the most part the piece is spare and unpretentious, and as it is a part of the new issue of Postmodern Culture, it is supposed to be didactic and illustrative of techno-po principles, at which it is quite successful.
One of the best pieces in this mode -- the self-referential graphic new media essay -- is still Charles Bernstein's and Dante Piombino's Mosaic for a Convergence, which doesn't use any Flash etc. and is quite ugly to look at. Worth spending a few minutes of your work-time noodling through it's doodles (indeed, it makes the act of clicking feel like "doodling" itself -- rare).
I'm still losing sleep over the fact that my piece, The Truth Interview, with Kim Rosenfield, has not received a whole lot of attention, though, indeed, one part of TheLanguageofNewMedia -- the bit with the words moving up on elevated lines -- seems some sort of reference to the make-your-own-poem game of the Truth Interview (click the red button that says "vote" on the left column).
Thom's been doing lots of nice work with designers and programmers -- a writer working with other artisans, in the tradition of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kenneth Goldsmith (in his web work) -- which I think is a good way to go for "cyberpoets" and whatnot who don't have the time to really make the plunge into a new trade. Not that the do-it-yourself line is all that bad either.
By the way, if you ever want to eavesdrop on the ubuweb group, you can see it here: Yahoo! Groups : ubuweb (I think).
Wired News: Bush Impeached? Wanna Bet?
Though there was an outcry over the Pentagon's terrorism futures market, a similar online exchange is in the works to predict what the U.S. government is up to.
The American Action Market will offer various Washington "futures" that can be bet upon and traded. Examples include:
•Which country will the White House threaten next?
•Who will be the next foreign leader to move off the CIA payroll and onto the White House's "most wanted" list?
•Which corporation with close ties to the White House will be the next cloaked in scandal?
The AAM will begin registering traders in September and plans to open for business Oct. 1 -- the same launch date proposed for the Pentagon's terrorism market, until it was shelved.
Each has to be an acronym that is the last word of the prior entry.
Such poetic arse rot, reigning over western shores!
Unfortunately, membership is closed.
Yes,only locals kill sparrows
# posted by fatgiant : 16:33 gmt
You understand my munching yolks!
# posted by Michael : 16:04 gmt
Each new egg represents gastronomical yummy.
# posted by fatgiant : 15:47 gmt
Arduously tend to romping alluring coquets to insure virile energy.
# posted by Michael : 14:24 gmt
Yogic oomph girl's attractive.
# posted by Chenthil : 11:10 gmt
Sex educates daft undergraduates, coaching them in various erotic love yoga.
# posted by shazalina : 10:40 gmt
Gosh! One naked Aphrodite dances seductively.
# posted by Chenthil : 08:32 gmt
Yes, erogenous areas reverberate nicely, including naked gonads.
# posted by wageslave : 07:46 gmt
Does aphrodisiac increase lover's yearning?
# posted by Chenthil : 07:32 gmt
I've posted some stories about DARPA's Information Awareness Office on Circulars. More assurances that they are truly nuts in the Pentagon and White House.
From the propaganda:
"Based on a set of digital drawings (transformed into desktop replacement icons) depicting George W. Bush's administration as wounded soldiers in the war against terrorism, RE:THE_OPERATION explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war through the lives of the members as they physically engage each other and the "enemy".
Letters, notes, and digital snapshots "produced" by the members on their tour of duty become the basis of video portraits that articulate the neuroses and obsessions compelling them toward an infinite war.
Part A-Team, part philosophical meditation, with a dose of character assassination, RE:THE_OPERATION exists as a video and a set of desktop replacement icons for MAC and WIN."
You might want to skip the icons, which I can't get to download properly, and go straight to the videos, which are fascinating.
I would kill to be so dull. Or maybe cough.
[The indefatigable Mike Magee is at it again... I didn't realize his website is so nicely designed. I haven't played around in there yet but it looks like there's some poesie, and perhaps some wild flarf.]
I made it to Sharon Harris's ever growing stock of images of Toronto poetry readings and book launches. She chose a special wallpaper that matches my shirt! They got a good crowd up there in Toronto.
Brian Kim Stefans - First Toronto Reading
Another gem from the ubu list...
From the propaganda:
"Babyloner is a soundtoy that retrieves audio files of spoken words in different languages from the eLanguage.com website and plays them...
Babyloner uses already existing database, and it lives from it, if the database "dies" Babyloner dies too, unless it finds another database...."
There aren't a lot of languages working for it yet -- I know there are Scottish sound files out there -- but a good half-minute of any one of them is plenty. A surprisingly rich if finally annoying earful for a fairly limited program.
I've always been a huge fan of plunderphonics -- this, of course, is not quite that, but in the same general field.
Back issues of Keston Sutherland's Quid, an "occasional journal of poetics, criticism, invective and investigation" are now available online.
I've been waiting for this for a while -- previously, you had to send a quid across the ocean to get one sent to you, and I could never find a quid to do it right.
Will they now change the name to "free"?
I'm especially looking forward to working through some of KS's saucy prose, which I've found intriguing if rough going when he's read in New York in the past.
Early Voices: The Leap to Language
The reason, Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that language also operates as a badge to differentiate the in group from outsiders; thus the Gileadites could pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite asked to say "shibboleth" because, so the writer of Judges reports, "He said sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right."
I used to have a saying that the one thing net artists can never make is a mirror. But I guess this is close (remember to type your search string in backwards):
Another mirror, for "poetry bloggers" only, is provided by Jim Behrle.
The ULTIMATE mirror site, though, as I've just discovered is the following, which creates instant bile-ridden reviews of your favorite rock albums. Though it doesn't rate with pornolize.com for sheer linguistic exhuberance, the grammar is impeccable:
I despise you and your so-called taste
Here are three very simple Flash 6 apps that work beautifully as conceptual language pieces, even "poetry." This artist has nothing to be ashamed of -- the "bells & whistles" are not out to "distract" you. I would never publish "Windface" as a poem but the telegraphing of its quasi New Age philosophy seems to me suitable for its actions; the other two are closer to Dada and conceptual art.
Dead Words (Needle)
Kabuki (Consciousness)
Windface
You can download the entire run of books by the Critical Arts Ensemble at their website. I confess to finding it much harder to read .pdfs than "books" proper -- they just are far less inviting -- but if you want to dip into some of the CAE's theory about internet culture and "digitial disturbance" this is a great way to start.
Here's a site run by autonomedia.org and interactivist.net with writing by Stewart Home, Terry Eagleton, Antonio Negri, etc. I'm pasting in the first paragraph of a book review by Stewart Home below since it seems to have something to do with what Darren and I have been talking about regarding "writing" and the multi-authored blog, etc. Compare Home's ideas to some of what is happening on Silliman's site -- I'm sure that RS would agree with what is by now a truism regarding the bourgeois subject and "style," but my sense is that the cult of style -- as much as RS is positioning himself against the "school of quietude" -- is very much alive in his critical vocabulary; certainly no Language poet has gone as far in the critique of the bourgeois subject as the Situationists and their kin have. For the most part, I've never had any problem with the "bourgeois subject," at least some varieties, as it's been so long since we've seen anything else that I think even the most "radical" among us are more or less bourgeois (and the most un-bourgeois tend toward the side of religious fanaticism, even of a secular sort, but there are fewer of them in the art world). I kind of think of Andy Levy as probably the most obvious example of someone redolent of the aura of hearth and home but more or less affecting a "radical" open style, but much Language poetry is somewhat infused with the hankering after "style" and whatnot. My sense is that many writers who dismiss "style" as a bourgeois tick have simply never been able to acquire a style worth preserving -- it's not easy to do -- and are often readable, even compelling, but ultimately bland (dare I say anemic? winky winky) writers. But as James Schuyler once said, if we're not bourgeois, what are we?
Interactivist Info Exchange: Independent Media & Analysis
The Return of Proletarian Post-Modernism Part II
Luther Blissett's recent best-seller, 'Q'
by Stewart Home
Q is an intricate historical novel by four Bolognan authors deploying the name of the inglorious footballer Luther Blissett. Stewart Home, a champion of 'multiple identities' who has also published under this name, detects in Q's cultural bricolage an ascending dialectical movement between rebellious practice and theory.
More than any other art form, even painting at the height of its ‘realist’ phase, the novel is tied to the rise of the bourgeois subject. It is for this very reason that fiction writing has tended to lag behind the other arts, and novels are nearly always ascribed to single authors. Indeed, that past master of bourgeois reaction, George Orwell, made books no longer being written by individuals one of the great horrors of his risible dystopia, 1984. In many arts, and only most obviously music and film, openly acknowledged collaboration is the norm and the ongoing weakness of the novel as a mode of cultural expression can be ascribed at least in part to its one-sided and pseudo-individualistic development. Well established writers tend to find it difficult to collaborate because they insist the stamp of their own style should be left on everything they touch, leading to disagreements and a lack of cohesion when they attempt to work in concert. When one or more collaborating writers find it either difficult or impossible to accept the revision by others of their contributions to a group project, it is each author’s weaknesses rather than their strengths that are multiplied. Innovative writers happily lacking a ready-made cultural reputation are in the fortunate position of being able to take a dispassionate view of those moribund artistic conventions rooted in the notion of style. Thus it comes as no surprise that the most successful recent example of a jointly effected anti-novel should be the work of ‘young unknowns’. The book is called Q and although it is attributed to Luther Blissett, the vigour of its anti-narrative is rooted in the fact that it emerged from the combined imaginations of four young upstarts who just happen to live in Bologna and scribble in their native Italian. The gulf between Q and most of the books currently dominating the bestseller list is the difference between masturbation and sex.
Despite the minor note of unpleasantness left on TOB (This Old Blog) this morning by Nada -- to which John Donne has already fashioned a response -- Gary has posted a detailed, fun bit about our trip to the comic books convention here in New York yesterday afternoon. I wasn't quite as envious of the crowds as he suggests, however, it's just that the only time I've seen roomfuls of people crowding around tables full of poetry books was during the "poetry talks" event that Rob Fitterman put together in NY in 1995, at which there was only a fraction of who was there yesterday. I'm not sure I'd want poets to hawk their wares in quite the way these artists were yesterday -- "This is the guaranteed funniest comic you've ever read... If you do not laugh out loud when you read this, you can email me and I'll give you your money back" -- this guy was charming, but serious. His comic book was in fact funny, but I didn't buy it. I did buy for Rachel a cute little stapled book called Astrophysics: Big Questions No. Three, which featured a bunch of sparrows and an unexploded bomb that had been dropped on their nest out of a B1 or something. When the sparrow goes over to the wise owl "Alma" to ask what this large humming "egg" was doing in their yard, Alma (who didn't, it appears, speak sparrow) ate him. The bomb, meanwhile, didn't go off. Wisdom for the ages. The artist, Anders Nilson of Chicago, autographed it for Rachel with a nice drawing of the bottom of a car -- I smacked him for trying to pick up my girlfriend, and ran away.
Just chanced upon a nice article on Ian Hamilton Finlay in the Guardian UK... now, is he a poet of "quietude"?
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Profile: Ian Hamilton Finlay
Craig Dworkin's created a page of 30 music reviews of entirely silent pieces (the first review being, of course, of Cage's 4'33"). And they're not all favorable!
Just discovered an interesting group blog concerning digital textuality and literature, run by Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Andrew Stern, Noah Wardrip-Fruin -- I've met most of these folks, Noah having participated in the Mini Digi Po event here in New York, and Nick and Stuart hosting their own events which I've attended.
Some good, detailed and cogent discussion for those interested in the field, though as usual I have reservations about a horse-before-the-carriage aspect to approaches to digital literature (in this case, mostly fiction) -- there seems to be this agreement that there has not been a truly successful (or universally applauded, i.e. outside of the immediate electronic lit culture) hyperlink-based work (i.e. successful in the way Hemingway was successful), but that it must be possible to use the link and higher forms of "interactivity" -- such as user influenced plot outcomes -- simply because the technology is available. My tendency is to think of it this way: yes, it's possible, but it's also possible that people speaking English could decide not to use case forms simply because they are superfluous, or invent new verb tenses simply because they use them in other cultures--so we know its supportable by our language faculty--but we've not found a need to do so and forcing such switches has never been successful in the past.
Perhaps it's possible that literature will never find room for user-influenced textual adventures -- perhaps, in fact, one reads specifically because it is the one time in one's life when one is not having to make choices involving the outcome of a narrative -- the one time an individual is not a writer. Of course game worlds would seem to contradict this, but that's why they are called "games." Well, this is all clumsily phrased -- I don't want to write off a venture with which in fact I have great sympathy. Certainly, I'm interested in "interactive" literature of this sort, but I think that the focus should not be on the presence of loops and control structures in a fictional work--or whatever it is a machine adds--but how one can (for example) inject ethical dimensions to the choices one makes in such a work, hence raising the art to the level that, say, Dostoyevsky did when he asked us to imagine murder as the solution to some existential puzzle. Maybe a more fruitful approach would be to think of all the added elements of interactive textuality as flaws and detriments--it's a bug not a feature approach.
I discovered the blog by looking at the new module from Stephen's Web ~ Referrer System which shows all the places from which people have followed links to get here. (Scroll down below my archives lists to see it.) I recommend it to you bloggers out there if you want to know whose visiting and how.
I was just reading the The Complete History of Hacking and came across this line:
[1981] Commodore Business Machines starts shipping the VIC-20 home computer. It features a 6502 microprocessor, 8 colors and a 61-key keyboard. Screen columns are limited to 22 characters. The product is manufactured in West Germany and sells in the U.S. for just under $300.
I had one of these... I still have all of the cassette tapes with my programs on them. I also bought the 16k expansion cartridge (the computer shipped with 2k), but never graduated to the Commodore 64, which I think programmers slightly younger than I am all had. I tend to think that it was the necessity to write very small, airtight programs that made the Pound dogma in "Dos and Donts of an Imagist" -- "use no word that does not contribute directly to the presentation of the thing" for example -- so attractive to me when I was very young (that and the belief that nobody reads poetry). What doesn't appear in the above Complete History is the appearance of my very first computer, the Sinclair ZX81:
I found this specs sheet on one of those ZX81 hobbyist pages, ZX81 Home Page. I can't believe people still like to program in this thing, since the programs disappeared every time you shut the machine off and had to be rewritten -- at least that's how I remember it, or maybe I didn't feel like it was worth purchasing the cassette drive.
Integrated Circuits
Z80A Microprocessor clocked at 3.25MHz.
1K RAM, expandable to 16K, 32K or 56K.
8K ROM containing BASIC.
A single ULA for all I/O functions.
Ports
Bus connector for adding peripherals.
3.5mm cassette tape interface for loading/saving programs.
UHF output for display on a TV set.
9v DC power supply. Smoothed down to 5v.
40 key touchpad keyboard.
Screen Resolution
32x24 Text.
64x48 'graphics'.
256x192 Hi-Res graphics. (But see notes.)
Various overscan modes. (Since it's only outputting to a TV set.)
Memory Map:
0-8K BASIC ROM.
8-16K Shadow of BASIC ROM. Can be disabled by 64K RAM pack.
16K-17K Area occupied by 1K of onboard RAM. Disabled by RAM packs.
16K-32K Area occupied by 16K RAM pack.
8K-64K Area occupied by 64K RAM pack.
Wow, what a monster. I don't know how I got this computer -- I think my father got it free when he subscribed to Time magazine or something -- but I bought the Vic 20 with the money I got from winning a TV trivia contest hosted by our local newspaper, The Herald News. I heard John Ashbery was some sort of trivia whiz kid, so I'm not so embarrassed to reveal that part of my early youth was spent involuntarily memorizing the names of the actors in The Munsters.
Following is a link to a German essay by Sylvia Egger (not the one who wrote the hearbreaking work of genius or whatever the f*ck it's called) about the "Creep" poets -- my German's quite crappy at this point but I've been promised a translation sometime soon... Sylvia had edited a special issue of the magazine "Perspektive" that was focused on the avant-garde under net conditions. I don't know how many USAmerican poets were involved beyond myself and Rodrigo Toscano. My contribution can be found here auf Deutch (of course, I wrote it in Engllish). I probably posted the English version to this blog some time ago... maybe not. I'll see if I can find it.
avantgarde / under / net / conditions
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.
[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'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
This blog makes it sound like there's a whole blogging culture in Iraq -- heard anything about this? I haven't done any research on it myself. Is this a hoax?
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
[If you've got a spare 5 minutes, check out the new web piece by jimpunk.com. It's got sound but it's not loud. Let's call this an elegy for a certain brand of techno-futurism, but perhaps for a constructivist ethos as a whole, whether it be the international style, those assembly-line short haircuts or gray browser windows. A beautiful, melancholic mechanical ballet that certainly humbles this "digital poet."]
[Here's an interesting interactive piece by French artist Frederic Durieu (the image below is just a screenshot). Reminds me a bit of the Tony Oursler pieces where he projected film loops of blinking eyes -- some with infections, some crying, but mostly deadpan -- onto white globes of different sizes suspended from the ceiling -- one of my great New York art experiences.]
www.lecielestbleu.com/media/oeilcomplexframe.htm
More of his stuff can be found here. I highly recommend the Autoportrait -- better than the Mattisse and Picasso self-portraits you've been seeing splattered on subway cars all over New York.
It's pretty bizarre to me that Ivan Brunetti, creator of Schizo, one of the most thoroughly (as in "philosophically enriched") depressing (or suicidal, if it's possible for that not to be depressing) comix ever, has his own webpage and is now a relatively mild mannered cartoonist with a soft spot for Charles Schulz.
I'm amazed he's alive at all -- the first two installments of Schizo came out in 1995/6, the third, half the length of the first one, came out in 1998, and then nothing, though a brief note in the copyright notes of the third one announces that he's started taking two purple pills every day -- good for him, but probably the end of the edge for Schizo.
Not a lot of Schizo on the site itself but a few back covers, but worth taking a look at.
[Hey FSC shoppers... sorry not have been blogging. I've been spending more time at Circulars, the blog I set up for poets and artists to speak out against the war. But I did come across this, which seems a bit unsuitable for Circulars because basically quite useless, but amusing.
War Blogging: Announcing the "Index of Evil"
Announcing the "Index of Evil"
The time has come for a new metric of how this nation is faring. We have plenty of financial metrics -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for instance, or the Standard & Poor 500. Politically and militarily, however, we have few ways of measuring the health of our nation without polling. And so it's with great pleasure that the people behind War Blogging bring you the Index of Evil -- a measure of how much people are thinking about those truly Evil Ones who infest our world.
The Index of Evil is arrived at by measuring the number of times certain people's names are mentioned on weblogs in a given day. The total number of mentions for those people is that day's Index of Evil. The Index of Evil has four components -- the Ashcroft Index, the bin-Laden Index, the Hussein Index and the Poindexter Index (the Omar Index was replaced with the Poindexter Index on December 5, 2002).
[Here's some sample craziness from the weirdest blog I've come across, Dagmar Chili Pitas.]
Dagmar_chili: Tthe color of the terrorist threat.
Where to sit, in case you have shit
{}oe|e|ep[]
Browse the encyclopedia. Volumes to the left. They are free for your use. They may contain pornographic images made by people who want to kill you
Ernest, ruptured patriotic by Huskies piping flageolets (Gustique, Muctot, etc.) is approached in a roach prison, by elementary Ulrike at work.
"I didn't know they had any dwarves here also," says Ernest.
"Sure, and," said she, "there's tons of them!"
"Well why didn't Gargantua's mother, who ate a deacon's assload of tripes, say so?" asks Ernest.
"Because, well, you know, there's a lot of corruption floating around and so forth."
"I noticed that too! Isn't it really something else?"
"Yeah, I found that odd as well. Here, have some of Mr. Richardon's regurgitation. You drink this (it is in fact the regurgitated Ms Mariah Johanson) and it's like fairy powder or angel dust, you'll be able to fly! Here: I'll have some too!"
She feeds him Mr Richardson's crucid regurgiation, and she has some as well, I have fleas, and they fly away. The Huskies go richmond red.
{}oe|e|ep[]
Found made Word the Vat begot:
Cog engraver Ernest
(Title on his hat: "his Box")
Successful mannered mental flame
was whiff in bulk of nerves
Offends that evil Reasoned Federation,
his mission plagues gold plains
(Iron rich pods; buds; and cereal)
Position found, in a sour way
Was slipped, in the platepillow, nod soup
of Vinoking Ivar Echens
onset of mist
lie bonedead and dice the fix
and such a fine green nod of ale or tea
for ace weeds the exit
curse of peace inert toweled
by scripts within an Urn
burn finned rival
tree closet is fire, and fiery eating
Let men patrol
whose manly nostrils encase infected burrs
{}oe|e|ep[]
On every occasion, people post to dagmar_chili, but the price of speeding is unreal.
1 comment
I only post to dagmar_chili because I like to read the pyramid.
posted by Toadex Hobogrammathon at 5pm to 7pm EST, on channel Futch Ist, the only one of them making any money these days.
"Criticism's first duty is to follow and stress the complexities and only after this is done to say, if necessary, genius is simplicity."
This line is from a letter by Veronica Forrest-Thomson now appearing on John Tranter's Jacket website as part of a Cambridge Poetry feature. Other contents in the Forrest-Thomson section include my own short essay from several years ago and the following eclectic mix:
J.H. Prynne: Veronica Forrest-Thomson: A Personal Memoir (1976)
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: five poems
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Swinburne as Poet: a reconsideration (an unpublished essay); Swinburne Chronology — 1837 to 1909
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: A letter to G.S. Fraser
George Fraser: poem: A Napkin with Veronica’s Face, not Christ’s
James Keery: ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and the Levels of Artifice: Veronica Forrest-Thomson on J.H. Prynne — a fifty-page analysis of VF-T’s analysis of J.H. Prynne’s poem ‘Of Sanguine Fire’
Peter Robinson reviews Veronica Forrest-Thomson: On the Periphery (from Perfect Bound magazine, Cambridge, Number 1, 1976.)
Robert Sheppard: poem: Parody and Pastoral
Suzanne Raitt reviews Alison Mark, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry
John Tranter: poem: Address to the Reader
[I know that I've already informed readers of this blog about /ubu, but now it's fer real. Below is the official announcement from the Ubuweb Secretarial Pool. I'm posting it here in all its raw, email _italics_ and dead <links> glory for the sake of authenticity -- you can still smell the lingering aroma of fingers typing the letters out. For pictures of the book covers, look no further than here or here.]
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
UbuWeb is pleased to announce the launch of our new E-Book series, /ubu Editions (pronounced "slash ubu"). The Winter 2003 series, featuring 13 titles, is edited by Brian Kim Stefans and features a mix of reprints and new material presented in book-length PDF files. Each title is beautifully designed and features images from the UbuWeb site.
/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Winter 2003 Titles
--------------------------------------
Kevin Davies _ Pause Button _
Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in cyclotronic motion with his rapier's wit and caffeinated melancholy, making him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies, who now lives in New York, published his second book, _Comp._, in 2000 to much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary _Pause Button_, first published in 1992 by Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not in the vicinity of Canada's choice used bookstores.
Deanna Ferguson _The Relative Minor_
Ferguson's first book of poems is at once frenetically impatient with anything that could be called a lyrical subjectivity yet speaks, through the sliced rubrics of its many "postmodern" poses, from a perspective singularly angry, disaffected, vulnerable, eloquent, political and brash. The Relative Minor takes the project of the Language poets to the next level of public address, the scale tipping from (though not forgetting) the lexicons of theory and falling toward the pure, dystopic clamor of punk aspiration. Ferguson, who lives and works in Vancouver, has not published a book since this 1993 volume, one of the major contributions by the poets associated with the Kootenay School of Writing.
Richard Foreman _Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!_
For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark's Ontological Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky's postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his "reverberation machines" into a pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play's New York run, the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman's high style are alive and flinching in _Now That Communism is Dead_.
Madeline Gins _What the President Will Say and Do!!_
Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing _Mechanism of Meaning_, an illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a radical philosophy of architecture in which one "refuses to die." _What the President_ is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant twenty years after its initial publication.
Jessica Grim _Vexed_
Grim's style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the "New American" vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a "post-Language" sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim's poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.
Peter Manson _Adjunct: An Undigest_
Adjunct _forms a teetering, overloaded bridge between practitioners of subjectively-deodorized "conceptual literature" such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin and writers working in a "new sentence" vein such as Language poets Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, all with a nod to novelist David Markson's _Reader's Block_. But _Adjunct _is far from an organized literary venture; rather, it is a sprawling, subconsciously assembled stockpile of casual phrases, trivial ideas, worthless statistics, obituary notices, self-reflexive misgivings, and numberless, numbing et ceteras that make it an electric anthem to cultural (and personal) entropy.
Michael Scharf _Verite_
Scharf's poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of "otherness" are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The roving eye of _Verite_ takes in quantities of data that would sink writers with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism, sonnets, "lieder" and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling, multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.
Ron Sillman _2197_
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and _Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "2197" is the second half of the book, and anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows, rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in the age of the internet.
Ron Sillman _Sunset Debris_
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and _Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "Sunset Debris" is, structurally, a collection of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method and, by extension, time and memory.
Juliana Spahr _Response_
Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when selfhood -- one's sense of uniqueness and of the _permanence _of one's personality -- has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take center stage, floodlit by possiblity. _Response_, Spahr's first book (_Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You_ appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of participation in the social world.
Hannah Weiner _Little Books / Indians_
Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic ability -- she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations -- to create her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing naïve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious, sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language poetry. Weiner's oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the imagined "other," and _Little Books/Indians_, long out of print, is both a visual treat and an engaging read.
Mac Wellman _The Lesser Magoo_
The final of the four plays of Wellman's Crowtet, Magoo follows the adventures of Curran and Candle -- an expert on "Crowe's Dark Space" -- and their motley assemblage of peers, some of them categorically "unusualist," in the parallel, decidedly unsettled, universe that is distinctly Wellman's. Magoo is chockfull of alternative histories, comprehensive pseudo-sciences, eerily relevant, off-the-map absurdist politics and soft-spoken contacts between humans all vying for attention in the seemingly self-propelled linguistics of Wellman's versification, which at turns recalls Beckett, at others the polymath Pynchon or the more childlike landscapes of Ashbery (in Girls on the Run). The music for The Lesser Magoo, scored for voices, toy piano, ukulele, and violin, was composed by Michael Roth, for both the Los Angeles and the New York productions.
Darren Wershler-Henry _ The Tapeworm Foundry _
Toronto-based Wershler-Henry's last book of poems, _Nicholodeon_, was a seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. _The Tapeworm Foundry_ is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, "andor."
--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Winter 2003 Titles
-----------------------------------
/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
Here's a sneak preview of my new multi-authored blog. I'll keep the longview to myself for the moment; for now, you can read the "Mission Statement" on the site, along with the little bits of material I've collected.
Hey... for those of you following Gary and my discussion re: Renee French, here's her website. It looks out of date, and mostly has the milder stuff of hers, but how could you turn down Cornelia Does The Ice Fishing Thing.
from alienated.net :: you do their own thing
And you thought Lip Service was big ...Craig Dworkin's Editions Eclipse is proud to announce the online publication of Bruce Andrews' The Millennium Project -- a major new work. Dig in, kids.
[In the spirit of Carol's writing below, here's a political web piece by my friend Prema Murthy that is pretty simple but effective. I got this through the Net Art mailing list maintained by rhizome.org]
Using the format of search engine results, Prema Murthy's 'Mythic Hybrid' presents contextual information on a group of women in India, micro-electronics factory workers who reported having collective hallucinations. These women are the artist's focusing device as she remodels information on industrial conditions, spiritual phenomena and womens' status. The associations Murthy brings together are varied, but make conceptual sense not just in light of the fascinating story about the hallucinating workers, but also in tandem with some of the radical notions about women and the real in Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto -- a book that informed this project. -- Rachel Greene
turbulence.org/Works/mythichybrid/index.html
[Call me naive, but I think this web-specific project by artist David Crawford is quite compelling, partly because it's so simple, partly because it really does trouble the border between photography and motion pictures (aka "film" and "video") in a way that outdoes both of them on their own terms (kind of like a virus being a bit more effective at self-replicating than plants, animals or rocks, I guess, eh hem). I don't mean that these studies, or this method, would ever render photography or film obsolete, only that neither have been very successful on the web, and these studies contribute greatly to the idea of the web replacing the art gallery as a place for engaging pictorial art. This basic use of Flash technology and photography could become a new pictorial method for lots of artists in the future, with its own little cults and divergences of practice, like Warhol's films. Maybe not. I remember liking the earlier series better than this most recent one, but find out for yourself.]
www.turbulence.org/Works/sms3/
[Ok, I know you're all edgy about the Pete Townshend thing, but thought I'd share this bit from Paul Chan's website nationalphilistine.org. Paul has been in Iraq for the past month and has been posting very interesting (and well written) entries on his site. This is the most recent but I encourage y'all to go back and check out the others.]
January 12 : Baghdad (by way of Amman, Jordan)
Dear you,
This is a quick note letting you know I'm fine but have been unable to communicate outside of Iraq for some time because of the FUCKING Pentagon and their email "attack" (the story broke Saturday morning on CNN.com). The whole Internet infrastructure in Iraq was shut down because of it. We couriering stuff into Amman, Jordan, to be sent out.
The situation in Iraq is the same, which is to say not much. Those who can afford to prepare for a coming war do, buying petrol and water parrifin for heat and lighting. Those who cannot pay pray. The rest are busy trying to get the international media's attention on the plight of the Iraqi people and the devastation another war will bring to this country. War preparation is above all a class issue for me. There are divisions between the upper, middle, and lower classes in their perspectives on what can be done about living through an invasion. Most of the upper echelons of Iraqi society think that Baghdad will be ablaze with street fighters beating back the Americans. The middle class (if you can call it that) have largely left it to the fates, having had little to no history of political self-determination. The poor of Iraq wants to see the invasion over with. The sanctions have made their life already impossible, why not a war to shake things up a bit: what's there to lose? A young poor Iraqi teenage girl summed it up nicely when she said that she can't wait for the invasion so she can marry an American soldier. Desperation and creativity doesn't make that strange of bedfellows. Despite the differences on how one will survive a war and how a war will be waged in the country, they all agree that if there is a war, it won't begin until AFTER the invasion. It is incandescently clear that Iraq does not have the capabilities to fight the American military juggernaut. The real story of Iraq's survival will begin after the Americans come (if they come, yes there is still time and the means to stop the war, there is always time because tomorrow is today) and set up their puppet regime. A media escort and veteran of the Iran/Iraq war said, "They will have an occupation in hell."
I'm not ready to live in hell. And I assume the wonderful people I've met here in Baghdad aren't ready either, regardless of how many litres of petrol they buy off the black market. I also assume that you aren't ready for hell either, since by all accounts, in Jordan, Syria, and Turkey the sentiment is that there will be no way to contain the resentment an unjust war will bring to the Middle East. The resentment is beginning to build into a political program that promises nothing short of mass political insurrection, here and abroad, back home, where I live and you too.
I have tried to make my work here with a certain sensitivity and language to describe another kind of Iraq existing in another kind of reality marred by economic sanctions, the weight of war, and (American) popular culture. But I can feel myself losing this sensitivity. The fear is becoming overwhelming and the space for describing the taste of lamb's head stew made with food rations and trash is disappearing.
Perhaps the time and space will come again. In the meantime (what a word) there is (still) a war to stop. I am sure you've heard about the January 18th protests (global by the way, since the German, Japanese, and Italian delegations in Baghdad have informed us of their country's intention of doing solidarity protests on that date). I've been rereading Martin Luther King Jr.'s moving speech against the Vietman war delivered at New York's Riverside Church in 1967 and will try to finish off one more piece of writing based on it before I return to the States.
My return date is dicey at the moment but rest assured I'm well taken care of. Support group I will contact you first regarding my flight back. Let your media contacts know that I'm returning and that I'll talk to anyone about the work we've done here (can continue to do, members of the Iraq peace team continue to come into Baghdad and will do so throughout January and February, war or no war).
This turned out not to be such a quick note. I'll see you soon. Baghdad is tense and beautiful, as usual, by the way.
Which vegetable really poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? TIME asks for readers' views. (courtesy Tom Rawroth)
I'm probably silly for thinking this is interesting, but alas, someone has finally made a program that writes poems based on Google searches in formal "patterns" such as the sonnet and sestina. Of course, I plugged my name in there, and came up with this wonderful, Ashbery-rivalling pantoum...
John Reeves Dirk Rowntree Blair Seagram Spencer Selby Linda
Sunflowers. - i put a picture snapped by brian kim stefans
Bök as examples. We are - CONTEMPORARY. Bill Luoma,
Will read at Double= Happiness at 173 Mott Street in Manhattan.
Sunflowers. - i put a picture snapped by brian kim stefans
Site Arras, and reads tonight at the Kelly Writers House.
Will read at Double= Happiness at 173 Mott Street in Manhattan.
A butterfly---. drunken boat, a - Heather
Site Arras, and reads tonight at the Kelly Writers House.
BARRICADE, Elissa Rashkin, Box 3123,
A butterfly---. drunken boat, a - Heather
Helt eksplisitt i forlengelsen av Language-poesien.
BARRICADE, Elissa Rashkin, Box 3123,
Stefans, but what is - Reviews by Andrea Brady, Drew
Helt eksplisitt i forlengelsen av Language-poesien.
Kim Stefans, NYC, NY - JANUARY 5: JOAN RETALLACK
Stefans, but what is - Reviews by Andrea Brady, Drew
Osman Kristin Prevallet Lisa Robertson Leonard Schwartz
Kim Stefans, NYC, NY - JANUARY 5: JOAN RETALLACK
Myles, Alice Notley, Julie Patton, Pat Ranzoni,
Osman Kristin Prevallet Lisa Robertson Leonard Schwartz
Jennings, Winnie Nelson, Tom Orange, Ethan Paquin, Laura
Myles, Alice Notley, Julie Patton, Pat Ranzoni,
Conference Room, 3234 51 W. Warren Ave - His web site:
Jennings, Winnie Nelson, Tom Orange, Ethan Paquin, Laura
Institutionalization. Subject: BK Stefans
Conference Room, 3234 51 W. Warren Ave - His web site:
He is author of several critical essays - LA
Institutionalization. Subject: BK Stefans
By David Daniels and friends. Including selections Category:
He is author of several critical essays - LA
- com. Arras #4, Brian Kim Stefans,
By David Daniels and friends. Including selections Category:
Dexterity with which Poundstone negotiates several
- com. Arras #4, Brian Kim Stefans,
Gate, The Samuel Daniel Helman Gate, The Brian Kim Stefans Gate.
Dexterity with which Poundstone negotiates several
Dam bam: a kerning exercise J. Lehmus, Finland from The
Gate, The Samuel Daniel Helman Gate, The Brian Kim Stefans Gate.
Flash + Java Works: The Truth Interview; Object;
Dam bam: a kerning exercise J. Lehmus, Finland from The
(Sun & Moon, 1998) and Mongrelisme
Flash + Java Works: The Truth Interview; Object;
Several collections of poems, including Gulf and Angry Penquins.
(Sun & Moon, 1998) and Mongrelisme
Bök as examples. We are - CONTEMPORARY. Bill Luoma,
Several collections of poems, including Gulf and Angry Penquins.
John Reeves Dirk Rowntree Blair Seagram Spencer Selby Linda
Paul Chan, creator of Alternumerics and presently in Iraq with the Iraq Peace Team has been posting journal entries on his site National Philistine.
Paul may be the first artist who has travelled to a country on a mission of peace and with express purpose to create new fonts.
[The page actually hasn't officially launched yet, so you can consider this a sneak preview. We expect to make the formal announcement in late January, when the college kids are returning to school.]
Pause Button
Kevin Davies
Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in cyclotronic motion with his rapier's wit and caffeinated melancholy, making him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies, who now lives in New York, published his second book, Comp., in 2000 to much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary Pause Button, first published in 1992 by Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not in the vicinity of Canada's choice used bookstores.
The Relative Minor
Deanna Ferguson
Ferguson's first book of poems is at once frenetically impatient with anything that could be called a lyrical subjectivity yet speaks, through the sliced rubrics of its many "postmodern" poses, from a perspective singularly angry, disaffected, vulnerable, eloquent, political and brash. The Relative Minor takes the project of the Language poets to the next level of public address, the scale tipping from the lexicons of theory and falling toward the pure, dystopic clamor of punk aspiration. Ferguson, who lives and works in Vancouver, has not published a full-length book since this 1993 volume, one of the major contributions by the poets associated with the Kootenay School of Writing.
Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty
Richard Foreman
For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark's Ontological Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky's postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his "reverberation machines" into a pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play's New York run, the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman's high style are alive and flinching in Now That Communism is Dead.
What the President Will Say and Do!!
Madeline Gins
Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing Mechanism of Meaning, an illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a radical philosophy of architecture in which one "refuses to die." What the President is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant twenty years after its initial publication.
Vexed
Jessica Grim
Grim's style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the "New American" vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a "post-Language" sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim's poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.
Adjunct: An Undigest
Peter Manson
Adjunctforms a teetering, overloaded bridge between practitioners of subjectively-deodorized "conceptual literature" such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin and writers working in a "new sentence" vein such as Language poets Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, all with a nod to novelist David Markson's Reader's Block. But Adjunct is far from an organized literary venture; rather, it is a sprawling, subconsciously assembled stockpile of casual phrases, trivial ideas, worthless statistics, obituary notices, self-reflexive misgivings, and numberless, numbing et ceteras that make it an electric anthem to cultural (and personal) entropy.
Vérité
Michael Scharf
Scharf's poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of "otherness" are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The roving eye of Vérité takes in quantities of data that would sink writers with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism, sonnets, "lieder" and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling, multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.
2197
Ron Silliman
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "2197" is the second half of the book, and anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows, rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in the age of the internet.
Sunset Debris
Ron Silliman
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "Sunset Debris" is, structurally, a collection of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method and, by extension, time and memory.
Response
Juliana Spahr
Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when selfhood -- one's sense of uniqueness and of the permanence of one's personality -- has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take center stage, floodlit by possiblity. Response, Spahr's first book (Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of participation in the social world.
Little Books / Indians
Hannah Weiner
Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic ability -- she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations -- to create her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing naïve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious, sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language poetry. Weiner's oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the imagined "other," and Little Books/Indians, long out of print, is both a visual treat and an engaging read.
The Lesser Magoo
Mac Wellman
The final of the four plays of Wellman's Crowtet, Magoo follows the adventures of Curran and Candle -- an expert on "Crowe's Dark Space" -- and their motley assemblage of peers, some of them categorically "unusualist," in the parallel, decidedly unsettled, universe that is distinctly Wellman's. Magoo is chockfull of alternative histories, comprehensive pseudo-sciences, eerily relevant, off-the-map absurdist politics and soft-spoken contacts between humans all vying for attention in the seemingly self-propelled linguistics of Wellman's versification, which at turns recalls Beckett, at others the polymath Pynchon or the more childlike landscapes of Ashbery (in Girls on the Run). The music for The Lesser Magoo, scored for voices, toy piano, ukulele, and violin, was composed by Michael Roth, for both the Los Angeles and the New York productions.
The Tapeworm Foundry
Darren Wershler-Henry
Toronto-based Wershler-Henry's last book of poems, Nicholodeon, was a seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. The Tapeworm Foundry is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, "andor."
[I've been working for several months on a new series of .pdfs for the ubu.com site. The series is called /ubu ("slash ubu"), and includes the following titles in its first run:
Kevin Davies, Pause Button
Deanna Ferguson, The Relative Minor
Richard Foreman, Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!
Madeline Gins, What the President Will Say and Do!!
Jessica Grim, Vexed
Peter Manson, Adjunct: An Undigest
Michael Scharf, Vérité
Ron Sillman, 2197
Ron Sillman, Sunset Debris
Juliana Spahr, Response
Hannah Weiner, Little Books / Indians
Mac Wellman, The Lesser Magoo
Darren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm Foundry
Below is the general introduction to the series -- stop on by!]
Our hope, with the /ubu ("slash ubu") series is to complement and augment relatively "traditional" methods of publication by usurping one of the most common functions of independent presses -- bringing vital new literature to the attention of a wider public -- while moving into an area that most small press publishers are not able to approach: reprinting important works from the past decades that are too commercially unviable to do as print books.
What made this idea seem interesting now, as opposed to eight or so years ago when internet publishing began its colorful but checkered history (prematurely vaunted by poets as the sequel to the "mimeo revolution") is the realization that people are willing to read long, complex works of literature from the internet provided they can print them out.
By formatting these books with professional typesetting tools and publishing them as Adobe Acrobat files, not only is the amount of paper needed to print out a book lessened because web page items like menu bars and graphics are absent, but the letter-size (8.5 x 11) page is transformed into a visually pleasing "book" page, its seductive gutters, leading and tracking making Cinderellas out of the plain-Jane ream of photocopy paper.
Publishers of innovative poetries on the web have always had trouble formatting works in html (which, among other limitations, does not have tag for a tab), but the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat format is perfect for giving the designer all the features of advanced typesetting and graphic techniques that are stable and consistent across several computer platforms. A color printer lets you fully enjoy the cover pages of these files, most of them original designs by Goldsmith and including one of the artworks from the ubu archive.
And over the course of the many years these books will be online, they will no doubt be downloaded, printed out, and most importantly read by hundreds of readers who might not otherwise have access to poorly distributed, limited edition small press books. New works will enter circulation relatively quickly, and older works, after some hassling with a scanner and proofreading, will make their bids for being unjustifiably ignored classics.
All of the reprints in the /ubu series from books that were not already digitized (any title published before 1992 will be one of those) have been painstakingly reset, either after having been scanned and OCR’d, or being retyped into the computer. More recent titles are based on the files used to produce the original book, either for Word files or, in that rarest of instances, Quark files.
The original mandate for the series was to publish single-author titles of creative literature but as with any venture such as this there are stirrings that suggest new approaches in the future. For now, we encourage you to please steal our books -- you don't have to be bored Hollywood starlet or an Abbie Hoffman wannabe to walk out with bags full of priceless items here. Please check back regularly for new titles as they arrive, and thanks for stopping by.
[Kenny G at ubu.com has put up an .mp3 of Alan Licht and I performing last year at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. The direct link is here but it might change in the future. My intro is below.]
One day at work, not inspired by anything in particular, I decided to run Kenneth Goldsmith's "Soliloquy" -- a book whose text was composed of an uncompromising transcription from tape of everything Goldsmith had spoken for a week -- through Microsoft Word's "autosummarizer" program.
Since the autosummarizer basically preserves what, statistically, has been repeated most often, I discovered that a majority of what Goldsmith had said that week (and probably every week) was "Uh" and "yeah" with some fleshy words, like "Stockhausen" and "Cheryl," piggybacking on them past the autosummarizer's red pencil.
My text, which I called "Summary," seemed strangely resonant, and exposed to me the vulnerability of Goldsmith's somewhat strident, grandiose textual program -- which is to say, the risk of utter triviality, but also the way his private life can be helpless before the transformations of a text alogrithm (that he put the text online contributed to this).
I wanted to perform part of this text at my reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project on May 1, 2002, but learned, after practice runs at home, that I probably would not be able to hold anyone's attention for the desired length (I wanted about 5 minutes of it).
I had seen and heard Alan perform in a variety of contexts over 2000-2001 -- one time as solo performer riffing off a guitar loop, once as a second guitarist for a reformed DNA (with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori) and at home on .mp3s of his two bands from the 90s, Love Child and Run On.
His range was incredible, he seemed capable of doing anything, and I saw a kindred spirit in the sense that he was interested in trying out several seemingly incompatible styles that would appeal to different cultural groups and sensibilities, at times appearing a feedback "naif" and others aprog-rock virtuoso (he's also a really good writer).
Anyway, after a test run in my apartment we decided to give it a shot -- I thought, in both the rehearsal and the live performance, there was the same initial movement of apparent disjunction -- very percussive and, in the voice, kind of nasal -- that melded into an "ambient" phase that just flowed.
I surprised the audience by putting "Summary" at the tail end of a sequence called "What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers" -- you hear the last poem of that sequence in this .mp3; there was also some funny audience response that doesn't quite come through on this recording.
Tom Matrullo, a very interesting writer/blogger with one foot in journalism and one in more speculative literatures -- his interest seems to be where the apparent fetishism of fact impinges on the freedoms of opinion and art -- has posted a series of commentaries on the letter that I received from the Times demanding that I take down the Vaneigem pieces. I've taken them down from public view (they are stashed in a secret folder) and put up a special 404 for those of you have linked to it. I've also been interviewed by the Washington Post by a writer named Jennifer Balderama for a possible story on it but I haven't heard from them since Saturday. Tom's writing on the affair is below, kind of scattered around his blog; some of his ruminations are very interesting:
http://tom.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$1329
and Tom writes the following on http://tom.weblogs.com/2002/11/08
"Why does this agon of journalism against poetry get to me? It has to do, of course, with intellectual property issues; with the borders between journalism and something larger which for want of a better term could be called writing; and with the presumptive clarity or lack of it about representation and realty that underlies the journalistic gesture toward self-definition. As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has noted, there is little theory in Journalism's understanding of facts. Meanwhile, as Goethe has noted, facts are simply frozen theories, or words to that effect."
