Blindly co-opted, complicit Barthesian, or too lazy (impatient) to explain why so?

"Nobody will deny that there is such a thing, for instance, as a writing typical of Esprit or of Les Temps Modernes. What these intellectual modes of writing have in common, is that in them language, instead of being a privileged area, tends to become the sufficient sign of commitment. To come to adopt a closed sphere of language under the pressure of all those who do not speak it, is to proclaim one's act of choosing, if not necessarily one's agreement with that choice. Writing here resembles the signature one affixes at the foot of a collective proclamation one has not written oneself. So that to adopt a mode of writing—or, even better, to make it one's own—means to save oneself all the preliminaries of a choice, and to make it quite clear that one takes for granted the reasons for such a choice. Any intellectual writing is therefore the first of the 'leaps of the intellect'. Whereas an ideally free language never could function as a sign of my own person and would give no information whatsoever about my history and my freedom, the writing to which I entrust myself already exists entirely as an institution; it reveals my past and my choice, it gives me a history, it blazons forth my situation, it commits me without my having to declare the fact." -Roland Barthes, "Writing Degree Zero"

(The real excuse is that Roland Garros devours more of my attention at the moment)

Art/Book as [material, perishing, self-defacing] object

disappearing book no. 1 from disappearing books on Vimeo.

© Stacy Blint 2010, http://disappearingbooks.com/

(snatched from Silliman)

Finally!

Spotted this at my local BAM, and couldn't help laughing. In 2010, a compositional method that more/less has served experimental writers at least since the inception of flarf (probably prior) gets lauded (unto commercial poet-stardom), as if found-object's influence/subversion of the will of the author is a radical new concept, and Kenneth Goldsmith's completely (authorially) unobtrusive Day (a word-for-word transcription of a day's copy of the Times) never happened. Take experimental poetics or leave them, but what I really hope for there to be in the future is a type of poetry freed from formal constraints, composed according to musical phrase, perhaps (but certainly sans metronome), which renders the world as it appears to the author in all its varying intensities of shape, color, and feeling, yet still mimetically just.. we can call it vers libre! Call your agent.

Don Wimble: What-for art thou?

Even my most cursory scan of the news couldn't miss this. Will it be jaunty? Will he (rest assured, it will be a he) wear a frock coat? We'll have to see if two of my favorite things somehow complement or contaminate one another (though you've got me as to how poetry would besiege tourney). My gut says don't kid yourself. This could be ugly.

At Wimbledon: Tennis Poetry

Look twice, save a life

An implied caution against the codified monolithization (put pedantically novel) of well-intended ethical systems. Predictably, the viability of a thing exists in its application (an application with variously succeeding outcomes), not that anyone guarantees it universally absolute in the first place. Still, issues like this feed my obsession with academe self-programming lexica and buzz words/perspectives in general. Anyway, I thought it interesting enough to share.

Debate: incarcerated higher ed. aspirants vs. "theory-happy academics"

"The rational man is a wilder invention than the unicorn, er, the seven-headed tiger. No one ever saw one." -Robert Duncan (from his Olson Memorial lecture, March 1979)

Sea of birds

An outrageously unfair although not surprising co-opt of public ingenuity by the higher-ups: a new era in the battle for intellectual property rights or a rerun of capital "I"mperialism, only now labor is exploited in the setting of swivel chairs and Starbucks rather than tobacco fields? Neither, I'm afraid, if only that tech-savvy developers should know better (cf. Microsoft) than to be taken in by gestures of populism and openness facilitating innovation. The metaphor also fails because (a) developers for a time reaped the fruit of their labors, and (b) can, in most cases probably, negotiate a selling price; even if they feel a maternal bond with their app and consider it a mulatto baby—this deferred extrapolation needs to die, but frankly, I don't feel sorry for them. If you can capitalize on it, somebody else can and very possibly will.

A diggable collection, makes a diggable playlist

Recordings from Allen Ginsberg's class(es) on poetics from the early 80s. Dig.

"Dithyrambs have gotta connect to bricks." -from Class #33

[And I haven't seen Howl yet, but despite its juristic intent I already feel David Cross would've captured Ginsberg better than Franco, in irony as much as likeness; cheers for the glossy, poseur over-dramatization of lives of artists. Coming next year, the heartrending story of Lyn Hejinian's struggle against the construct of genius in My Life.]

Sonny, 1919-2010

"But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right—God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you."

Of moment

A figure popularly protruded no doubt because his rhetorically agreeable frame of reference (Socrates, Christ, Lincoln) easily overshadows the subversive nature of his utterance (as well that of the populace itself); nevertheless, his diligent organizing & reminding never mistook the where & how of his context, of the moment ". Time has him relegated to a day of remembrance, to a function of social complacency, therefore dis-armed or -engaging. One can upon a touching photograph & be comfortably moved, then continue disjoined from an injustice "somewhere" else, remote as 1963 Birmingham. And so, compelled by whatever to be reminded of a contextually distant, momently determined struggle, I quote from Dr. King's polemic without intentional conflation of time or place, & yet admittedly with a classic whitey appeal to authority, because in a genuine way I mean to not overlook nationally sanctioned holidays any less or more than the minute intricacies of every other type of human utterance. Also, because I can cite Amiri Baraka's still affronting contributions to civil protest any other day of the year.

"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."-Letter From Birmingham Jail

"It's all right to talk about 'long white robes over yonder,' in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about 'streets flowing with milk and honey,' but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preachers must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do." -"I've Been to the Mountaintop"

The iconography of iconoclasts

Sans the self-diagnostic, ego coddling apology, let me share without apparent jealousy the pellucid [goddamnit] work of those [bastards] more avidly concerned than my[childishly neurotic!]self about this matter. I haven't located the last article cited (Wheeler's "Poetry, Mattering?"), but reading Golding's terrifically balanced exposition feels like showing up to your fifth grade science fair only to find another project strikingly familiar in content but surpassing in rhetorical execution, and a more expensive posterboard. Of course, that never did happen because, as the comic reality exists, even today, "80 percent of success is showing up." The problem in question involves a lot of upset people doing a lot of things to upset the complicitly normative way of writing by deriding the "easy" way and fostering new ways to mean, inevitably causing an upset for those used to art-as-usual, used for commodity and complicitly absorptive audiences, then those new ways getting understood, getting trendy, upsetting those who expected the anti-authoritarian, anti-academic icon-clasters not to seize the moment of institutional sponsorship and affluence, because it's upsetting to think of once radical figures and works assimilating into the unpreventable canon, inadvertently setting (authoritatively) preferred standards of taste and teaching objectives, ultimately requiring a new tide of upset detractors to upsettedly upset the upsetting consecration of purposely desecratively upset upsetters and their upsetting works. Is it wrong for intentionally obscure poets to explain? to be made accessible? Should we write them off as fraudulent anti -capitalists and begin the counter-revolutionary revolution? or haven't we learned that opposites are imaginary, and no serious "should" belongs in any radical invective.. wait, is this absolute? what do I mean? Do you see my reason for tentativeness? Am I being clear? you understand? Oh, I sure hope not.

"Charles Bernstein and Professional Avant-Gardism" by Alan Golding

[snatched from Bernstein's Web Log]

Involited artifice

Katharsis-express or just another aura'd (commercialized) incident?

Epilepsy as art

Snatched from Silliman, this perhaps intended to spur more blogging on my part (cf. emptiness) than to compel your reading.