all over the grid

Und ich dachte immer

2012-02-16T02:11:00.000Z

Und ich dachte immer, die allereinfachsten Worte
Müssen genügen. Wenn ich sage, was ist
Muß jedem das Herz zerfleischt sein.
Daß du untergehst, wenn du dich nicht wehrst.
Das wirst du doch einsehn.

- Bertolt Brecht, c.1956

How to Sleep Faster 2

2012-01-23T00:48:00.002Z

A longer, revised version of the Statement for YBT was published in the new issue of How to Sleep Faster. Nick Bates totally drew all over it. Megaupload is dead. There is no spoon.

2012-01-22T15:09:00.001Z

"Like No Exit, except in space"

Neutral Facial Expression: Internets & Refusal, contra Riviere

2012-01-13T19:25:00.011Z

Q: So how much of an inspiration has the internet and the digital world been on FSV?

JF: The Internet is dispatching everything in our globalised mega-city. People are essentially wearing the Internet, eating it, hearing it, talking about it all the time, because everything is like a symptom of an Internet driven society. It's really obvious, though it's not the main attraction in FSV's story. FSV is a still life. Everybody's music sounds like the Internet right now, from Top 40 to underground. Fashion looks like the Internet. It's this weird impressionism that everything embodies. I think there will be more and more artwork resembling this. Digital clarity has given us another perspective on humanism.

Q: Do you think it's possible to avoid making art that doesn't reflect the intenseness of the internet's involvement in modern society?

JF: If by chance somebody does achieve this they are truly avant garde.

-- Extract from Quietus interview with James Ferraro, December 2011.

On the first page of my print-out of The Faber New Poet Sam Riviere’s recent article on Internet Poetry, midway between the title of the essay and the formless hyperlinks rendered in underlined bold type sitting top-left, there is a small, generic, embedded advert for the “skills-based social directory” website skillpages.com. Featuring the wide-eyed, expectant visage of a woman’s face holding an expression of some benevolent but incredulous admonition, the innocuous .jpeg claims, in tones so glaringly bludgeoned into content-savvy submission that it makes Jobseeker’s Allowance jargon sound like your own mother crooning you to sleep on a balmy summer evening, “Poets wanted in the UK. Join SkillPages Now. 100% Free.” The fact that this ad is equidistant from Riviere’s first example of what his essay celebrates and promotes as a form of “refusal” and “resistance” in online literature, sandwiching as they do the title of the essay itself, is a strange, beguiling and disturbing juxtaposition. The ostensible levels of time, skill and energy that go into making such extraordinary claims upon our online attention contribute, of course, to much wider developments in digital marketing techniques designed to reflect the mutable desires of the target audience demographic of any such encounter, determined not just by immediate web-content but increasingly by any individual browser’s cache of search terms used to locate content of any sort in the first place. “Poet?” the .jpeg innocently chimes as I click on the essay about Poetry on the Internet; “Lawyer?” it would presumably chirrup, if I happened to be browsing articles on Tort Law; “Social Historian?” if my subject was the suspension of Habeas Corpus after the French Revolution; “Despot?” it might potentially trill if I was trying to find information on where to purchase the arms and manpower to crush a small, but embarrassing, uprising - all innocently couched in the projected emotional blackmail of the rent-a-visage mock indignation of the face “staring” back at me and whose look of cheerful stupefaction would not change no matter what the interrogative utterance input by the random parameters determining its pixelated vision of contempt for human expression that looks, superficially, like a person’s face.

Riviere, of course, has no control over how the presentation of his essay on poetry like xTx’s From Your Eyes, the poem directly beneath his title and directly mirroring the advertisement just described, might affect his arguments (this itself should give us pause for thought, and not just vague and boring ones about authorial intention); but he does talk at length about this style of writing having “proved itself to be highly adaptable to an online environment,” that it “harnesses poetry’s own unpopularity against it[self]” in the form of “Tactics from branding and advertising [...] deployed to promote poetry zines and events” and that “these strategies of appropriation and internalisation of commercial culture orientate the poems both as antagonists of the dominant tradition (in poetry), and as self-aware artistic ‘brands’ within culture more generally, able to appeal to an online readership directly rather than just via a poetry audience and their disillusionment.” There is a lot I find useless, unnecessary, offensive and ugly about this argument, but I want in this post to pick up on just a few of the points raised in the article, points that for the most part are primarily guilty of reifying a new, fashionable and for the most part critically vacuous collection of writing by appealing to the most formally equivalent aspects of its style and production at the expense of any scrutiny whatsoever of its actual content. Internet Poetry, whatever that defines in toto, is in the first and final analysis, supposed to be a form of “refusal" and “resistance” not just to established forms of cultural dissemination (because the Internet is, as bad contemporary artists keep reminding us, the space in which we will find our happiness, one and all) but also to History and Materialism in general, at the same time as providing, by “avoiding compliance with what we expect from poems,” a formula for the complete re-definition of poetry as we (don’t yet) know it. These grandiose claims are supported by tautologous and self-serving arguments that do little to deepen our understanding of virtuality and digital poetics, that in fact might further mystify that understanding, and prove furthermore that what Riviere thinks “we expect from poems” is a straw man designed purely to be refuted in the most generic of terms whilst smuggling in forms of abstract equivalence and “interchangeability” disguised as a potential solution to the badly propositioned problem.

Contra Riviere’s (for the most part) uncritical enthusiasm for this work, but not his admirable effort to conceptually organize its determining principles, I dispute entirely the notion of “refusal” in the very ease of its attribution, not as applied to readings of individual poems (which are not present, close or otherwise, in the essay), but to the style of Internet Poetry per se (to which it is attached without reservation, and in general). This attribution stems, early on in the essay, from the wider, more universalist claim that “we realise instinctively it [Poetry] is by its nature a subversive practice, connected with a kind of ideal spirit of honest perception, resistance and dissent.” This assumption is a bad place to begin, and not only because it assumes a lot more than it asserts - that, for example, “our awareness” of what “we realise” as un-examined social formulae might provide the mental ground of bourgeois self-identity that is itself the formulation of the “ideal spirit” of an artform “we” recognize as being implicitly “our” own, and in this case “our” own form of relatively Whiggish “dissent” from whatever happens to be the prevailing, non-subversive practices themselves. Riviere’s next sentence confirms this closed-circle of hermeneutic back-slapping: “Probably this is partly why the people who are drawn to poetry are drawn to it in the first place”. The honest perception of the poet satiates the attraction to honest perception of the honest reader of poetry, who knows innately, probably from being taught in school that poetry is all about honest perception, that this is where they will find the gem of dissent in the otherwise mendacious “liberal establishment” comprised (ironically gosh) of rapacious publishers and bad capitalism. Granted, Riviere’s description of the elitist realms of publication and Arts Council funded bodies is intended to be a wake-up call to the fact that “aspiring poets not only learn to write in accordance with a broadly accepted style, but also share broadly accepted aims, in order to increase their chances of publication” and that such practices are “a very effective way of strangling an art form”; but his answer to this strangulation, in the process of which he does not acknowledge the formal circuitry of his assumptions about the social make-up of the “we” that realise things about “our” art, is simply to state that “The possibilities for reversing this situation afforded by the Internet are obvious and probably do not need re-stating.” On the contrary, I think they do need re-stating, and with greater clarity of exposition than they have yet received. But it also needs pointing out that the assumption of the figure of the poet who aspires to imitate a certain style in order to get published is a curiously market-driven speculative personality in itself. No doubt these people, like all speculative categories, really exist, but in that case I fail to see how the “the Internet” is going to “reverse” anything.

“If we can say that in poetry the genuine tradition is anti-tradition, and that continual overthrowing of entrenched styles is desirable, then it is worth looking at exactly what form of interruption this new strand of poetry proliferating on the internet takes, and how valid it is in it positing itself as alternative writing.” Nothing in this sentence strikes me as absurd; far from it, it strikes me as a necessary and useful line of enquiry. But the parameters of its potential discovery seem already set in motion by what has come before: publishing “gatekeepers” create the normative Poetry reader by their control of the means of production, but on the Internet Poetry can thrive because these fetters are thrown off in the freedom and multiplicity the net provides. There’s an error of analysis here that needs correcting: Internet Poetry, as Riviere conceives it, does, I believe, emphatically not need to “adapt to an online environment” because it was born there and could not exist without it, and being “used to the idea of making their work available for nothing” is not necessarily a determining feature of writers who publish all their poems on blogs or in the form of gmail chat conversations, because the cultural capital of becoming a successful Internet Poet is absolutely bound up in getting a chapbook out of the effort at the end of the day – the reciprocal teleology of creativity and commoditisation remains absolutely the same. The conformity of the poetry of writers who aspire stylistically to tickle the fancies of editors from the TLS to the CLR in order to get published is not going to change drastically once those writers begin to want to appeal to the editors of Hipster Runoff or Jacket. The appeal to “aspiring poets” of this ilk, which makes an implicit claim to represent the totality of “unpublished” writers in the UK (by which Riviere means unpublished by a mainstream press), is from the start predicated upon a section of the mainstream “positing itself as alternative writing” by eschewing its former hack opportunism in favour of a new-found model of self-perpetuation and self-promotion: the fact that Riviere thinks that “the Internet” can “reverse” the situation he describes is completely down to the paucity of his description of the situation itself, and the corresponding weakness of the solution he provides for it. In the former, no distinction is drawn between the mainstream big presses and the no less crucial histories of work (small-press, avant-garde, experimental) that has consistently repudiated the idea that Poetry exists, as Riviere maintains “it” has become used to doing, as “a somehow economically untainted art form”; the latter continues in a vein that, to my mind, deliberately valorises Internet Poetry as the natural successor to the natural status of dissent and refusal that Poetry has seemingly always autonomously embodied, because “The opportunity for creating and nourishing an audience for new poetry like this has never existed before,” regardless of what that new poetry says, or does, or contains.

I said above that what Riviere thinks “we expect from poems” is a straw man designed purely to be refuted, and I need now to qualify that statement. What I mean is that Riviere’s entire argument rests on a fairly conservative understanding of what the average reader of mainstream poetry expects when they read a poem in a book published by a real live publisher with Arts Council funding. The refutation of that experience, the refusal of its structural norms, is what Internet Poetry is supposed to provide (regardless of what else might rock that fragile little boat, including the entire history of twentieth-century modernist inheritance, hated and ignored by everyone from Larkin to Armitage), not least because it is predicated upon the sort of historical movement that Riviere identifies at the start of his essay as the condition for “any significant shift in poetry [: the] “shift ‘down’ – to the demotic, the current vernacular as experienced by readers.”

But being on the internet does nothing to make poetry more accessible.

Elucidation of the content of the type of poetry under discussion in the essay is informative and well-reasoned, but it is not a form of elucidation that allows for a scrutiny of the content of individual poems so much as a series of things these types of poems do that are supposedly pregnant with refutation or refusal. A taxonomy of samples follows, which I will address one by one:

1. “Tactics from branding and advertising are deployed to promote poetry zines and events, and inform the language and construction of the poem themselves. I would argue that these strategies of appropriation and internalisation of commercial culture orientate the poems both as antagonists of the dominant tradition (in poetry), and as self-aware artistic ‘brands’ within culture more generally.”

2. “Although these texts obsessively take note of the various signs, brand names and many other instances of commodified language that prompt us to incorporate their meanings into our lives (and contribute to theirs), we are confronted in these reductions with what is the least materialistic writing possible.”

3. “...the type of interruption that Internet poetry practice makes in its larger tradition [...involves the] deliberate turning away from history and memory, the territories that literature normally wishes to claim, [and] ensure it freedom from any obligation to that narrative; it owes nothing to that set of priorities. It insists instead on the authority of the personal, the immediate, intensely subjective experiences that are shared by millions.”

Firstly, such “appropriation” of advertising techniques (whatever this might be; it is left undefined in the essay), the very semblance between the SkillPages.com advert and its twin noted above, is set up antagonistically against the entire contemporary inheritance of literary practice. This seems fairly far-fetched. It is certainly not original; it is the praxis of détournement drained of its last radical breath, even as an elite cabal of contemporary semioticians recruits that same praxis into its latest assault on the social sensorium. Promotion of a poetry magazine or a poetry reading does not need to borrow the tactics of advertising, because it already is advertising, nor does being “self-aware” make any difference to this practice – it is the essential ground of the promulgation of an object or event to its potential audience, and it might be important here to distinguish between advertising in the form of sending out an e-mail to a selective ListServe community from advertising in the form of online banner ads for SingleMuslims.com. In order to make sense of this argument I take Riviere to be suggesting the latter rather than the former, the locus of the meme as viral product placement for the emotional exegesis of Steve Roggenbuck, to take a concrete example. But then, where does this get us? How can a “self-aware artistic ‘brand,’” framed in the deferrable matrix of the scare-quote, be anything other than the brand “artistic” vying for the same attention of the finite poetry market as its languishing, long-lost print-Other? It cannot – the distinction breaks down – and we are left with a situation in which the appeal to “advertising” does nothing other than provide a finer, more discrete and therefore saleable branding of the material at hand. Nothing is refused. A bigger nothing than ever before is refused, because an everything the size of the infinite pathos of Capitalism versus Children is the chronic excess from which “freedom of obligation to [any] narrative” [see “Thirdly”] is rapaciously devoured. But perhaps more to the point, “Using tactics” is not something that one can read in a poem; it is not a critical category; it is in fact a little brand name all of its own.

Secondly, the logic of “the least materialistic writing possible” comprises, if I understand it correctly, the paucity of “emotionally directive” sentiment that would tip the reader outside the circle of an infinitely potential “ambivalence” couched in a literally reductive form that promotes tiny sound-byte-style utterances ostensibly named “poem”, but not necessarily resembling one. I confess to some confusion here: surely the adoption of advertising tactics named (or rather, invoked) above as a primary characteristic of the work’s operative momentum would obviate any possibility of the poetry being anti-materialistic? “The intercepted commands from advertising and other media are the most significant intrusions into our experience of narrative, directing the paths we take through our cities and online” rings true enough, but does it not then follow that the writing would inevitably have to be materialistic in order to negotiate this labyrinth? The uncertainty here is not really conceptual, it is linguistic, because the statement is not so much a characteristic of the content of the poem by Linh Dinh quoted above it, but a category error that cannot adhere to or describe poetry or a poem in anything but the most airy of critical designations. Linh Dinh’s poem may announce, portray or ventriloquise an anti-materialist stance (incidentally, I don’t think the poem quoted has anything to do with materialism, or being materialistic, at all), but this is different to saying that it is some of the “least materialistic writing” around, which seemingly designates some meta-linguistic intentionality of a texte rather than a literal feature of a poem or some poetry.

We come, Thirdly, to the beating heart of Sam Riviere’s essay. This does not really attempt to posit itself as a formulation or understanding of the content of some poetry as have the previous two examples, but it does signify perhaps the most important element of the entire piece. “The deliberate turning away from history and memory” is the radical break with tradition and the individual talent that allows Internet Poetry to exist in the perfect equilibrium of ambivalence and disdain for emotional “manipulation,” a state of affairs also celebrated as a form of uncertainty that allows the work to be “both extremely personal and totally universal” (ever the mantra of a stuck dialectic), rejecting out of hand “any type of speech that rings false through its very assertiveness.” Refutation now embarks on the task of eliminating the social and replacing it with “the immediate subjective experiences that are shared by millions,” which is nothing less than the very form of ersatz equivalence the internet is so effortlessly capable of re-producing, and whose logic is the very logic of the endlessly mutable marketing strategies of which the advert I described above is so emblematic. Riviere’s move is to make the structure of personhood embodied in Internet Poetry completely isomorphic with this spectre of the [virtual] self-identical, ensuring it only the “freedom from any obligation” to itself or anyone else, owing nothing to History or Materialism because utterly unable to encounter them, sequestered and isolated by a “deliberate turning away from memory” that forfeits any capability to refuse or resist any aspect of the world because systematically removed from its social constitution. By these lights, the internet = the self on the internet = the internet, a dead-end incapable of comprehending “the territories that literature normally wishes to claim,” let alone resist them, and is furthermore likely to be the advance-guard for a colonization of the territories it claims to reject. The call to destroy history can never be revolutionary. Poetry that refuses the world can only ever ignore it.

The language of resistance and refusal is hereby adopted to demonstrate some ultra-generalised ethical/political Standpunkt at the expense of any rigorous working-out of what exactly the poems are meant to be refusing; or else the assessment of such refusal does not amount to much more than the evacuation of everything except the individual Internet Poem, not one of which is closely read. This is the sum total of Riviere’s conception of and arguments for Internet Poetry: by dint of the solicitation of its social-structural existence, net poetry becomes resistance and refusal because it is Internet Poetry. The move is a purely formal one on the most abstract of levels, and an assumption on the part of the means of dissemination that naturally assume the characteristic of “resistance,” which itself rests on the work as a whole being essentially ahistorical and “immediate.” This is not convincing. Or rather, it convinces me that Riviere has tapped into a peculiar vein of valorisation of internet culture, that of the tautologous celebration of the existence of art on the internet that is somehow magically capable of producing forms of social critique, in this case “refusal,” simply by, in the final assessment, being on the internet in the first place. But this cannot be true, because the latest Carol Ann Duffy abomination on the Guardian’s splash page cannot, by the same dint of the structural designations that nominate what is called Internet Poetry, apply for membership of that standpoint.

I don’t really blame Riviere’s analysis for missing out on the real content of the examples dotted about his essay, because for the most part there isn’t any. The gap is the whole. What I mean is that any serious consideration of what is called Internet Poetry must seriously consider its typically fatuous content-less alienation as its primary modus operandi, not as fodder for dismissal by being on the internet in the first place, but as ground for a critique of the symptomatic relations between this work and the conditions of its virtual promiscuity. It is not only over the top to claim for this poetry the benefits of resistance and refutation as Riviere does, it is actually completely useless and beside the point, because conferring upon it a kind of sardonic Futurist agenda, to regard it as emancipatory, as embodying forms of refusal or resistance to mainstream publishing practices, to see in it the unalloyed freedom of the individual subject filling the gap left by his over-active male laser-gaze, is not only gross and undesirable, it is so far beyond the factual and conceptual concerns of the work that it provides only an enormous interpretative parasol shielding it from practical criticism. A reading of the work that chose to concern itself with the beleaguered desperation of lyric individualism tracing its own death-throes through the narcissistic promulgation of ultra-ironised teenage angst might provide a more positive formulation for illumination. But that will have to wait.

One massively good thing on the internet has recently come to an end, but thankfully remains stuck to the lining of the contra-sphere like the best gob of virtual love-juice ever spat into the system, and that is, of course, Chris Goode's blog. Chris's blog has consistently provided some of the most passionate and believably truthful soliloquies, mix-tapes and pornography ever channeled through Blogger's succulent tubes, and the last post is a heady triumph; the "best of" may yet appear in non-virtual form, but whatever happens this is a loss to theatre, performance, improv, poetry and Muppets criticism everywhere.

Finally, Luke Roberts has a new collection of poems in the world. It is a book, and you should buy it.

2011-12-12T23:37:00.000Z

Jon Dorsen has a new album.

2011-12-07T21:42:00.001Z

Jonty Tiplady has a new blog.

2011-12-07T13:45:00.002Z

a short note on Wordsworth, Benjamin, Baudelaire, from a reply on the same to the question of identifying contemporary "meanest objects"

2011-12-03T12:45:00.009Z

I'm not sure I believe in poetical ways out anymore. I know I certainly used to - back in the days when every poem I could encounter might perform a newly specialized abstraction of catharsis or transcendental bliss. But I think I wanted to encounter poetry then as a means of by-passing poetry and landing somewhere else entirely, jumping into infinity via the linguistic catapult; I also think I am a much better reader of poetry than I used to be. That pivot object at the end of the Immortality Ode is complicated, for me, by the preceding two lines:

     Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
     Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
     To me the meanest flower that blows can give
     Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

So that the object is distinguished in its meanest particularity by, and only by dint of, the "human heart", or rather, the condition of being part of the human race that allows the utterance "To me" to gain a foothold amongst the innumerable joys and fears of everyone else who doesn't happen, at this point, to be me. The condition of this experience of ruling out despair is the assumed joy of absolute connection to the social body at its most abstracted level, the level of biological species; "Thanks" to the emblem of my absolute similarity I can appreciate this meanest object as the backwards reflection of the joy we started with, or if not exactly the same joy, then one which derives its depth of feeling from the same wellspring of universal song which give certain "Thoughts" their universal excellence - except that I can't, because that a priori bliss doesn't seem nearly as symbolically biological as it seemed to Wordsworth.

I think what we're no longer capable of is not distinguishing the identities of the most useful meanest objects, of which I can think of dozens - pornography, pop songs, cigarettes, the poor - but arriving at them replete with the knowledge of their power to reflect that which Wordsworth already felt deeply in the blood: that he was embedded in the universe he describes thanks to his very physiognomy as a poet. And that's a pretty bad mark in itself, or lack thereof, isn't it? I sometimes think that everything I write is a bad mark, another flagging up of the attempt to coral a diagnostic passion into a slightly less that parallel symptomology of experience (ha!), but then I also wish I didn't think so often along the binary of diagnosis in verse, versus the cultural symptoms of bad affect (I don't anymore, anyway). In Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire he distinguishes between the possible social and moral readings of his work, which I think map on to my (now abandoned) binary quite nicely; it's obviously extremely difficult to write from both perspectives at the same time, although maybe that's what's now absolutely necessary. In Baudelaire, for Benjamin, the two are fused in the speaking (not ventriloquising) empathy of the commodity. Perhaps I'm getting off-track, but since I'm at this point anyway:

"If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle".

Leaving aside the notion for the moment as to whether or not, or at least in what sense, Marx was joking, isn't this kind of universalism more the sort of stuff [good] poets are made of? Perhaps I feel that I approach my objects, however mean, not with the full knowledge of my human and super-human powers, but rather with this knowledge implicitly circumscribed by the far more easily delineated knowledge of the bad humans I feel bound to distinguish from myself, and further to render crap and pointless by assumption. In order for mean objects to have the power to banish despair, I need a vision of "humanity" to which, right now I do not have access; or rather, which is systematically screened off from me by my inability to experience it as anything other than the mendacious .jpeg of a thousand blended hands begging for me to want to nestle. Humanity is the logo of corporate idealism.

2011-12-01T12:58:00.002Z

Parker's Piece (with thanks to Crater Press)

2011-11-04T12:44:00.002Z

Google Song is out now. re:

* Centuries hence, despite faster-than-light travel, human interstellar exploration is stagnating.

* There’s not enough money in it for the vast controlling companies such as Zantiu-Braun, now reduced to extracting profits via “asset realisation” — plundering established colonies that can’t withstand Earth’s superior weapons tech.

* Now another Z-B squaddie, trained to use the feared, half-alive “Skin” combat biosuits, which offer super-muscles, armour and massive firepower, all queasily hooked into the wearer’s bloodstream and nervous system.

* Secret plans to make off with a rumoured alien treasure.

* Resistance is unexpectedly tough, thanks to locals such as Denise Ebourn who have mysterious access to neuro-electronic subversion gear far subtler and perhaps more dangerous than Skin.

* Meanwhile, how fictional are the stories about a fabled Empire that ruled our galaxy for a million years before becoming…something else?

* Genuine hopes to avoid bloodshed - while lofty idealism results in chilling atrocities, and even Z-B may be less cruel and monolithic than it seems.

* A breakneck interstellar chase leads to a satisfying finale and an unexpected romantic twist.

Toggle here.

At some point in the future I promise to utilize this blog for something less benignly parasitic, but much more fulsomely attractive, than advertising. Watch this underscore. Last night Timothy Thornton read the entirety of Jocund Day in the Sit Room, and it was real. I don't think there's anything quite like it currently in the world. Make it yours. Tim's giving another reading tonight in Cambridge with Tomas Weber and Simon Jarvis.

IN LOVE, THE CURRENCY IS VIRTUAL - Ayn Rand

2011-10-12T22:49:00.002+01:00

selecting an object with no predecessions

2011-09-14T17:36:00.001+01:00

2011-08-28T11:42:00.001+01:00

2011-08-11T11:29:00.002+01:00

Sarah Kelly, Jonny Liron, Francesca Lisette, Joe Luna, Nat Raha, Linus Slug, Josh Stanley, Timothy Thornton, Anna Ticehurst, Jonty Tiplady, Mike Wallace-Hadrill, Tomas Weber and Steve Willey are all represented in this new anthology from Chris Goode's Ganzfeld imprint; exchange paper for paper here. Huge thanks to Chris Goode, whose limitlessly exacting blog is here, next to list of his forthcoming appearances in meatspace. Hola Chris!

The Fine Old English Gentleman (New Version)

2011-08-11T11:04:00.002+01:00

I'll sing you a new ballad, and I'll warrant it first-rate,
Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate;
When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate
On ev'ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev'ry noble gate,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!

The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and chains,
With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains,
With rebel heads, and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins;
For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains
Of the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!

This brave old code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes,
And ev'ry English peasant had his good old English spies,
To tempt his starving discontent with fine old English lies,
Then call the good old Yeomanry to stop his peevish cries,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!

The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need,
The good old times for hunting men who held their fathers' creed,
The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed,
Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed....
Oh the fine old English Tory times;
When will they come again!

In those rare days, the press was seldom known to snarl or bark,
But sweetly sang of men in pow'r, like any tuneful lark;
Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark;
And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark.
Oh the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!

Those were the days for taxes, and for war's infernal din;
For scarcity of bread, that fine old dowagers might win;
For shutting men of letters up, through iron bars to grin,
Because they didn't think the Prince was altogether thin,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!

But Tolerance, though slow in flight, is strong-wing'd in the main;
That night must come on these fine days, in course of time was plain;
The pure old spirit struggled, but its struggles were in vain;
A nation's grip was on it, and it died in choking pain,
With the fine old English Tory days,
All of the olden time.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land,
In England there shall be dear bread — in Ireland, sword and brand;
And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand,
So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand,
Of the fine old English Tory days;
Hail to the coming time!

- Charles Dickens, 1841

from The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry 15th-20th Century (Penguin, 1965). Victorian Web has the following information: Dickens wrote this savagely satirical ballad for the Liberal journal The Examiner; it was published on Saturday, 7 August 1841, shortly after the Tories had taken over the government in a parliamentary election. The anachreontic song is a parody of a popular ditty about a Fine Old English Gentleman who, "while he feasted all the great, / He ne'er forgot the small."

2011-08-10T19:21:00.002+01:00

the all new sell, bathos vs. failure, etc.

2011-08-10T19:02:00.004+01:00

"There is a world by negation, then, and it presses on us. Bathos and failure are both crucial here, and their differences subtly but keenly felt: as bathos necessitates a bifurcation of value and its appropriate distribution, here and there, cross-hatched in the shadow of the cosmic faux pas, failure tends irredeemably towards a linear end-stop of utter cancellation; where bathos has the potential to act prosodically and diagnostically as the mark of an experience that derives its legitimacy from a latent truthfulness hardly yet disbanded, failure cannot be so easily or comfortably entrained into the services of measure-taking because so relentlessly immeasurable; we are the progenitors of bathos, it is performative and alive to the possibility of its success, but failure is the very opposite of success, and does not thus shed the light of understanding any more than it confers the historical weight of the tragi-comic; bathos must have its object, but failure is merely viral; failure is the pit that opens up beneath the limpid cloud of bathos."

- from the insert to Hi Zero 6, which is out now, featuring poems by Samuel Solomon, Adam Weg, Ian Heames, Amy De'Ath, Justin Katko, Eric Linsker, Tom Bamford, Tim Atkins, Luke Roberts, Emily Critchley, Jeff Nagy and Richard Owens.

Reply to Helen Bridwell

2011-08-06T23:22:00.001+01:00

Since Blogger seems to have disabled commenting on comments, this goes here for now, in reply to Helen Bridwell's comment on the original post, below. If anyone knows how to fix my internets, please let me know. Yours incapably, etc.

Yo!

That bit about net utopianism, that is the single most torturous sentence in the whole thing, Timothy Thornton picked me up on those objects too, and in fact suggested "phantom" as a means of distinguishing them as the most ghostly part of the whole set-up. By me, that is. They are the significant lack of the whole thing. What are the objects that net utopianism purports to critique? Tim was right to say that they are at least phantom, because the "critique" of some of this stuff is non-existent. Still, the sentence felt *right* to me, in a way that perhaps only scrolling down some of the comment sections on Art Fag City blog posts could ever attest to. For example, this from a year ago in response to Price's piece:

"Hi, Seth. It seems you are more interested in books than the Net. Many of your references to the Net are negative or written in a dry, anthropological tone. ("Self-consciously generous transparency," "an infantilizing rationality," "circumvent[ing] traditional ethical standards," and so on.) You sound at times like a threatened print writer criticizing bloggers. Your collection is also a disconnected hoard of images but the subject matter is books and magazines. Is having the fingers in each shot to distance yourself, as the antiquarian lover of one type of medium, from the complained-about effects of the medium in which you are communicating? The idea of showing books as a retro "hoard" page is great but could probably do without the accompanying talking down to Internet users. Books and magazines have their limitations and pathologies as well. (Maybe that's the point you're making--if so it could be clearer.)"

The same astonishing distinction between being, like, "negative" about the innernet, but having a "positive" outlook crops up everywhere, which is slightly alarming, a kind of binary code dialectics for schmucks. In "Kool-Aid Man in Second Life" Jon Rafman / Kool-Aid Man bats off this exact nonsense when his interviewer poses the question: "Yeah, a lot of this sounds very pessimistic, yet the work...seems very optimistic", to which Rafman / Kool-Aid Man responds: "Yeah that's a good question, how can we take so much pleasure in a movie in which all humankind is completely annihilated?".

It's a speculative piece, so in a sense I'm creating a version of "net utopianism" out of all the bad net art and half-baked London shows I've seen over the last year and a half or so and then lambasting it with an impossibly shit parody of itself. Those "objects of critique" are actually just what bad net art ignores, or rather, what feels to me is being deliberately and scathingly dispensed with when I'm enjoined to celebrate amorphous and nebulous concepts like "multiplicity" and "plurality". That's what got my goat about the Vierkant article. Consider his:

"The use of “We” is not to advocate solely for participatory structures of art but to insist on a participatory view of culture at large, and ultimately of taking iconoclasm itself as a quotidian activity. Whereas in previous times it was legitimate to conceive of culture as a greater system with impassible barriers to entry and a finitude of possibilities, culture after the Internet offers a radically different paradigm which our “They” idiom does not allow for. This is not to say that we have entered a fully utopian age of endless possibilities but simply to claim that culture and language are fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same image-creation tools used by mass-media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those images, and gain free access to the majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning."

So what, we haven't quite got to the "fully utopian age of endless possibilities" yet, but since regular folk can freely torrent a cracked version of the latest Photoshop and spam away we're at least on the right track? The necessary but unspoken corollary to this thinking is utopia as image management, the point at which the best of all possible worlds is not one without any advertisements but one in which we all make our own advertisements, and they're all equally as effective and equally as fucking massive. This is what Ciscso Systems is telling us, if only we could all listen at once. Net utopianism, insofar as I've constructed it, can't critique anything, let alone an object, because what it wants is for us all to imagine that a free online community is interesting to the world at large for anything other than selling discount Xanax. It's a necessarily gross speculative construct, because I wanted to argue against an extreme side of things that probably doesn't really take effect outside of a general tendency not to think too hard about what the work is doing.

Next I want to have a go at this:

"my best guess is that they/it are the real world of commodities, which is to say infinite plurality of virtual worlds, which is to say RL?"

Because I think what you've written there, and what you infer, and what happens when I read that, are all different and competing things, but first can I ask you to confirm what RL stands for?

love,

joe x

Joel Stern at Apiary Studios, London, 12/07/11

2011-08-02T20:54:00.002+01:00

P'Kard's gonna be there

2011-08-01T00:08:00.002+01:00

Coming soon: What I see in Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job!

Statement for YBT (Harry Sanderson, Riyo Nemeth, Dominik Dvorak)

2011-07-31T23:58:00.006+01:00

The following was written for the Your Body is a Temple collective of artists, whose work, amongst others, will be the subject of discussion at the South London Gallery in Peckham on Wednesday night.

The internet is a giant pun.

When Marx describes, in the first chapter of Das Kapital, the religious world as the reflex of the real world, he does not demand that we eradicate the former in order to better understand the latter. Rather, he suggests that only with recourse to the mist-enveloped world of religion might we find a suitable analogy with which to understand the fetish-character of commodities, in which a definite social relation between men assumes, in our eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. [Marx, K., Capital (London, Lawrence & Wishart,1967), pp.76-87, and see esp. p.77. The full text of Vol. 1 is also available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm] In the religious world, says Marx, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.” The infinite plurality of virtual worlds has arguably superseded the religious one in Marx’s formulation whilst maintaining a degree of mysticism necessary to their self-replicating evanescence; the internet is the utopian refuge of the fetish-character, wherein Marx’s satire of our propensity to equate as values the products of specific social labour by their exchange becomes a form of triumphant, perpetual dissolution of “character” itself. Fetish unbound and free from any hyphenated attachment to social state or being might instantiate itself at infinity speed across the length, breadth and scope of the living net, no longer merely prescribed in aspect; life endowed with independent being is grateful for your traffic, and wistfully imagines that your heart will beat forever in the silver lining of the chat-box panelling the screen. The internet is a giant pun, whose giddy shimmering between life and realism might at any point tip ruthlessly into either of those de-mystifying dead-ends, but whose imperial magnanimity is in any case the pre-condition for both. "What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain". [Bataille, G., Eroticism (London, Marion Boyars, 1962), p.19] But then again, we can always just create another world.

The viral strain of net utopianism -- that assumes, with lethal cupidity, that the instantiation of the screen as site and sound of a radical participatory mass-media culture of constant prosumer re-definition is the means by which the image is freed from its authenticity of presence in some backwater post-Benjaminian dungeon -- is as blithely and reductively universalist as the phantom objects it purports to critique. The internet has done more than any other invention in human history to instigate an ersatz universal equivalence of experience and subjectivity disguised as the harmonious interaction of endless and immutable particularity. Advertisement logic as profile stimulator. Meme extraction. This is why the internet is so profoundly at home in the New Age, or whichever cultus of abstract man is lashed to its latest masthead banner ad for freshly bottled emotive water. The internet is brilliant at producing the wholeness we desire to extract from it because it is built on the sale of a radically interactive egalitarianism which alleviates political and economic reality into its very own neo-sincere celebration of utopian avatar expressionism.

Someone has recently said:

In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author.

[Vierkant, A., The Image Object Post-Internet http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html]

So as the distance between us is forever annihilated into the barest intimation of formal intersubjective fantasy, the image accelerates farther away from us than ever before – the dialectical tendency of the limitless re-deployment of an image across multi-platform occurrences is that we may never finally approach anything except the knowledge that we have encountered an artwork, and the proliferation of pure image becomes the merest coded announcement of its own narcissistic predilections for display. Seth Price has referred to “the embarrassing and stupid demands of interactivity itself, which foists an infantilizing rationality on all “Internet art,” and possibly Internet use generally, by prioritizing the logic of the connection, thereby endorsing smooth functioning and well-greased transit” [Price, S., Teen Image www.distributedhistory.com/Teen_Image.pdf], although this assumes that what is at stake is the completion of the artwork, rather than any specifically diagnostic claim about what might happen to physicality in a network of remote, as opposed to tangible, experience - what about the logic of the dial-up, the logic of the bad connection, the logic of the YouTube faith-healing account? How does a participatory structure distinguish between credit card fraud and facial recognition? How can I look into your eyes on Skype and know that you see my eyes looking back at you? How can we enjoy intimacy with an infinitely deferred other? If your body is a temple, who (or what) is worshipping inside you?

“In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race”. At the crux of that interaction now is the formation of the “human race” itself as the magnanimous progenitor of its own global and technological refresh-rate. Together, you are told by Cisco Systems Incorporated, we are the human network, in the blissful rhetoric of implied corporate idealism that says, because it does not say it, that without Cisco Systems Incorporated we are the dismembered faceless backwards-looking monads in helpless disarray. What we need now is an art that is as far removed from the ersatz utopianism of the Cisco Corporation as it is deeply cognizant of the social conditions and structures through which that logic arises. If there is any chance of a critique of the limitless technological and cultural expansion that might also engender the hopefulness in particularity of the experience of virtuality as becoming more real than it yet remains possible to be, it will emerge here, in this world, right at the heart of my refusal not to accept the data that does flow through my bloodstream like desire.

Click here for the gallery site, and here for more YBT.

from finer branding

2011-07-28T15:25:00.004+01:00

Think of stupid people – what the fuck?
Some men there are love not a gaping pig
But stuck it; last night my friend was pissed

On. But blind are able to see anything in
The world, whenever they want to see it
In the future, a total bean to cup experience

Lifts me from the trauma at the station, –
A kiosk is a violent thing, hurling coffee
At the other one that simply shouts a

Thousand times at rush-hour. They are
Absolutely trying to kill us and I am
Wholly entrained into the gorgeous

And imperial magnanimity of the
Escalator entering my face, O speck
Of truth you everywhere, a kiosk of

Pure light, expanding in the world sung
Diegetically. Your destiny, if you choose
To flake it, is for your children

To be born inside bad jokes about the
Frappuccino and to be pissed on by the
Sea, whose steely resolve is < 1%

Of the total empire of harm that wants
To kill you, where you will drown in
The massive fight off Ship Street, you

Will drown as the cops pull out, slowly
You will raise your joke about the mocha
To the level of a social critique so damning

You will not even become punched, and
You will punch yourself in the eye to make
Clear that you are never going to die

In the latencied disservice of a latte shitstorm
Surrounded by your friends off Ship Street
Beaming with the thrill of live violence

Equal to the size of you ... #London’s home
Less invade our streets; I wish wholeheartedly
The homeless were an army and this were true.

2011-07-28T00:27:00.001+01:00

2011-06-18T13:27:00.002+01:00

Hi Zero 4

2011-05-17T12:16:00.000+01:00

jack my swag

2011-05-17T11:51:00.004+01:00

I mean, I have a long slow fear that starts with the pause button and coagulates to my best impression of a sinking pig. I've been re-tweeting you for months and all I get is this lousy shipping? And Dr. Freud said: "The very thing, then, that she only sought to hint at quietly because she was really supposed to conceal it from him completely, that she is actually all his before the choice is made, and that she loves him, all this the poet allows to emerge into the open with admirable psychological sensitivity in the slip of the tongue, and by so doing he is able to assuage the unbearable uncertainty of the lover as well as the similar excitement of the audience about the outcome of the choice." The thing here then is the proxy certainty of the jeans in question, worn by any number of admirable celebrities, but not yet mine; at least the manufacture of this particular slippage, or smear, is the overburdening of the debt to style that the ode to leg-wear itself omits thanks to its all-too-passionate declaration of true love's material reflex. Recovery.

If you listen to both of these at the same time, something incredible happens. Peter, if you think this is one of those banalities you mentioned, I beg to differ. This is a portal into the very heart of the world. Point it at the sun.

I just can't believe she wore those jeans like me. This is, of course, eminently believable; but in the dream economy of passionate consumer affect, where emphatic utterance is the non qua sine of the perfect object's post-aural effervescence, the emotion merely slides back round the globular surface of the song to impregnate itself with the desire for its own gleaming smudge tool. The fact that the jeans in question aren't named in the lyrics is even better - their archetypal phantom presence flags up the gaping lack at the heart of the tautology. What we end up with is a pop song so brutally naked in both love and barbarism that it was always already the rape of itself. ARK should run for the presidency of the IMF.

On girt co-ordinates

2011-05-09T17:29:00.001+01:00

2011-04-30T12:22:00.004+01:00

NEWNEWNEWNEWNEW

2011-04-11T12:23:00.000+01:00

SWAG

2011-03-08T23:24:00.000Z

Hi Zero ONE

2011-02-11T00:48:00.001Z

AKB-Henry Green

2011-01-16T16:41:00.012Z

The wreckage beneath standing beeches was lit at this place by a glare of sunlight concerted on flat, dying leaves which hung onto life by what was broken off, the small branches joining those larger that met the arms, which in their turn grew from the fallen column of the beech, all now an expiring gold of faded green. A world through which the young man and his girl had been meandering, in dreaming shade through which sticks of sunlight slanted to spill upon the ground, had at this point been struck to a blaze, and where their way had been dim, on a sea bed past grave trunks, was now this dying, brilliant mass which lay exposed, a hidden world of spiders working on its gold, the webs these made a field of wheels and spokes of wet silver. The sudden sunlight on Elizabeth and Sebastian as, arms about one another's waists, they halted to wonder and surmise, was a load, a great cloak to clothe them, like a depth of warm water that turned the man's brown city outfit to a drowned man's clothes, the sun was so heavy, so encompassing betimes.

A knee which, brilliantly polished over or beneath, shone in this sort of pool she had made for herself in the fallen world of birds, burned there like a piece of tusk burnished by shifting sands, or else a wheel revolving at such speed that it had no edges and was white, thus communicating life to ivory, a heart to the still, and the sensation of a crash to this girl who lay quiet, reposed.

In next to no time that bath was run, with Merode stretched out under electric light and water, like the roots of a gross water lily which had flowered to her floating head and hands. This green transparency was so just right, so matched the temperature of the hidden bliss, that she half closed her eyes in a satisfied contemplation of a chalk white body. She felt it seemed to sway as to light winds, as though she were bathing by floodlight in the night steaming lake, beech shadowed, mystically warmed.

She took a whole azalea right into her mouth.

Quadralectics

2011-01-07T22:01:00.003Z

Worshiping a Word God will destroy the USA, for life is composed of cubed opposites. Simple Cube Divinity is the most perfect and life-supporting form existing in the universe and on Earth - including Earth itself. Do you realize that a 4 corner square rotating 1/4 turn creates a full circle? A full rotated square will create 16 corners, 96 hours and 4 simultaneous 24 hour Day circles within only a single imaginary cubed Earth rotation. This amounts to a spiraling quad helix of Earth as it revolves around the Sun - rotating as it revolves around the Sun, to induce the value of the Sun revolving about the Earth. This act demonstrates that both Sun and Earth rotate around each other simultaneously - thus creating Opposites existing only as Opposites with a zero value existence between the binary and cancelling to nothing as One or God theism. All Creation occurs between Opposites, and exists only as Opposites - with a zero value existence. As One or as a Godism, all Opposite values cancel out to nothing. The Circle you see around Earth divides Earth into Opposite values equal to a zero existence. As One or God, both Earth and Human cancel to nothing. The whole of the Universe is composed of Opposites - with a zero value existence - that cancels to nothing as One or a God. Humans worship ONEness of DEATH, thus they are destroying the LIFE of all Opposites by which all Creation exists. I have found Evil lies in the Bible that will rock religious and academic values to their primitive origin. There is no Human or God who can match my Cube Wisdom as a Cube Phenomenologist - The Cube God Measurer. While the Circle of Earth rotation is a perpetual embodiment as it is void of the Corner Time notches that accumulate as aging Life for the 4 corner residents. Have you mentality to know 4 Days rotating simultaneously on Earth?

Ray has wagered $10,000 that his theories cannot be proven wrong. The site has been criticised for the "centered 30-point type" of its design and the "endless blather" of its content.

endless in both directions

2011-01-03T11:53:00.004Z

my villi caress your face, learning the soft curves of your cheeks, the bridge of the nose. i introduce my friends, a couple of belligerent stick figures. you seem bored and disengage from my hose station with a yawn, filling out the required forms as you rollercoaster stomach drop into the oblivious void of bliss at our feet, squawking like a wounded gull. the bridge is silent now, as mitochondria dance in the bellies of beasts below, the green, greasy stench rising to dance in my nostrils.

I need to feel endless in both directions. It's personal.

the co-ordinaters of the future

2010-12-18T16:58:00.000Z

2010-12-02T18:32:00.002Z

albumblatt

2010-10-23T21:34:00.002+01:00

Fucking Hell

2010-10-18T21:21:00.003+01:00

Forever outside unseeming misdirection parse
un-useable arid Ars. invalid O I exculpate so freely
chusing him by town light. Owning all of the prick
condom petals lite unstable helio, bullet nose dread
from error crank everybody holler seismic interlude
voiding the pops. Mum screws back liniments evilly

No totally no baby endofuck resolute : : he speaka
good Ingrish I love you so hardened quite
sublimely right, I still completely love you so my
febrile waif was ever so just love me please of shit
banana cake, Hippolytus trump the binary gouache.

Or before dawn when they blaze unbelievably bright
with vivid and slowly shifting iridescent colours. They
are filmy sheets slowly curling and uncurling, stretching
and contracting in the semi-dark sky. Compared with
dark scudding low altitude shitcanned tinnitus fire

ten past nine

2010-10-09T23:14:00.003+01:00

Is relentless and self-immolating honesty any useful barometer of the immediate, or does it merely slide back into the chasm of colonial lyric desire spreading out from my fingertips? I feel that at the moment, which is really at the very moment, that the only possible ethics of writing is to impale an immediacy into passion that is at least the truth of the next second of writing - is this the precision of mortality I think it is. I want to be utterly definitive this second, to trust the voracious temporal greed that is the only useful form of greed at my disposal. What is honesty in poetry, what is the call to arms, what is the invocation of poetry to do with itself, how can what I write do everything that I do *not* want it to do because *that* in itself would be the only possible realism? But then a poetry such as that would perhaps resemble the most risible chance-based nonchalance. When is a surfeit of passionate response USEFUL to anything other than a lyric demand for clarity of expression? Its vaunted uselessness is not enough, and in any case I am creating poems which are then sent to people to be read as objects of work, any uselessness is quickly inverted even in the moment of its conception. I twist. Is the point, why is love commendable in and of itself - why should it be? How fucked up is your love, see me pirouette and land in flames, can we allow ourselves that much trust? What do I risk by writing that is not just a failure of or in the writing? I want to feel actual movement feeling, real flesh, language conspires in the meaning flesh to alter its state, to elect it, simultaneously grounded in how is your body local to me, how do I keep my skin soft, how do I make my skin shine, how can you love me. That must be the question now, not how can I love you, that's all too easy, I can slam the brakes on whilst loving you to death, but how can you love me if I love you that much? And does it even matter? Do I finally care as long as I can get a poem out of the night? Is the immediacy of experience forever lost through its mediation by exchange and the virtual insistence on an ersatz immediacy of ease and profit? You can make $400 an hour from home! Click here now! It is not enough to hate that, although that must be loved, the hatred of exploitation. Poetry should match the New-Age insistence on the transformation of consciousness but make it work through attention to the particular, and what is more particular than the next second - there must be a social instance, poetry, of the responsibility of denying oneself "the ideological misuse of one's own existence". I will perform this for you now, a remote healing, watch my hands, the contradiction of me helping you the reader to overcome the ideological misuse of your own existence whilst appealing to an ideology of literary trust, how can you love me? From "On the morality of thinking" (MM 46): "Knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insistently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled. This admittedly presupposes a relation to the general, though not one of subsumption, but rather the reverse. Dialectical mediation is not a recourse to the more abstract, but a process of resolution of the concrete in itself." Do that. Now get out.

The Gnostic Cartography of Desire: aphorisms on Olson

2010-10-05T22:54:00.008+01:00

What I come down to is that Maximus is the poetics of temporality, laid bare. I think finally that’s how the poem ACTS, and I think only, or at least certainly by, insisting upon temporality as the primary figure of the poems in particular, can all the booming, phallocentric, thetic rhetoric of the essays be put to good use. But finally, because I always want to skip, to go straight for the jugular with Olson, can there truly be a poetics of temporality, or is such a thing only ever destined to merely describe the passage of time, as Ashbery ends up so pathetically, whimsically doing? But to go back to jumping the gun – I think it’s a real danger in reading Olson, and a fear which seems to have been born out in the whole style of the recent film Polis is This, that if you take any single one of Olson’s theoretical touchstones from Projective Verse, Human Universe, Against Wisdom as Such, or wherever, and you apply it wholeheartedly, and you look at Maximus through that one lens, you end up with just that, the end of the picture you wanted to start with, and that’s when the project segues, not without struggle, but segues relentlessly into a kind of corny mysticism. Olson is not mystic, not in the way, say, Duncan was. He got his theory of myth and muthos from Harrison, and he stuck with that actionable language, as was passed onto Ed Dorn, who has a whole other folk ontology going on. But what still bothers me is the way in. Perhaps this has come about simply because of the historical weight P.V. bears, and that Olson seems only ever to be read as living up to his constructs (which in any case are filled with wild humour, puns, the kinds of twists he practices in the verse). The essays and the poems seem to me to be both purely textual, that he was constantly practicing praxis, and that nothing else would ever do – his letters too, especially to Creeley and Bolderoff.

The hugeness of Olson – that the poetry does deal with the “primitive” (as he had it) condition, the prime conditioning, in the case of the “pejorocracy”, of man, philosophical, economic. But even these categories aren’t somehow sufficient. It’s not that they’re not wide enough, but that to describe the primary writing of Maximus as layered in philosophical, mythical (which is emphatically not mystic, because it obeys rules of perception and history), economic, personal, geographical, I mean, these things are there, but they’re not there for the sake of being aspects of the text. The text does these things, that we can call philosophical, or economic – or it should do, and it doesn’t, not all the time. There is the sense, whenever I approach Olson from anything more than a distanced, tuned imbibing (which in any case always flicks me onto a sharper rumination) of: where to start, how to get to grips with the enormity of these instances of cognitive, etc, perception that are laid out before us. And I think it important to recognize that to a large extent, the poetry itself enacts this same process of finding, exploring, receiving, is itself the taking stock of its own procedure, which is not to say it is purely auto-enacting – cf. Stephen Thompson’s excellent and articulate essay in the Ladkin/Purves Edinburgh Review 14 on American Poetry – and therefore un-usable, but precisely to pinpoint the actual condition of form AS content that so pre-occupied Olson.

The complex simplicity of the Maximus project is that this is process as pedagogy – that the alienation of man/being/breath/muthologos, that for Olson are all part of the same historical schema, the pejorocracy & logocentricism – must be rectified by a poetics of temporality that puts man squarely in the driving seat. Gloucester is not microcosm, but simultaneously micro & macro – “life spills out”, every instance in Maximus is an image of the whole, transcending (but grounding) the lyric condition. It is an instruction manual of how to get out of onself and one’s debilitating culture – by appropriating history as what one does & says – and it is precisely this removal of the pejorocracy, this insistence on distancing oneself from it, which we can probably assert is the point at which Prynne, around 1970, begins to believe that such a project is too top-heavy, that the important thing to do is it collide with the pejorocracy head-on, to no longer avoid it in favour of an appeal to the Polis, which was never quite as dialectical as Thompson almost reads it, in Letter 6.

“For Olson, reality is the missionary position.” – Tomas Weber

The gnostic cartography of desire is: LIFE – which wants to abstract itself out // AND // my LIFE – which wants the particular to stand in for the whole, but stays particular. This is the lyric thrust that Prynne talks about in that most beautiful piece of friendship disguised as pedagogy, his address to the folks at Simon Fraser University in 1971. That lecture is, I know, hugely important to many people writing excellent and worthwhile poetry today, and I think perhaps more so than Maximus IV, V, VI is, or will be. But the image of desire that Prynne traces in that essay is, I think, couched in the temporal hi-jinks of Maximus as text, not as abstractable conceit, or any discourse of historical seismic shift in the space of post-modern American poetry, which I’ve no doubt Olson would have dismissed with some sort of misogynistic disparagement of the progenitors of discourse in general.

“that we act somewhere / at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides, or / the latest finest tape-recorder, or any form or record on the spot / - live television or what – is a lie / as against what we know went on, the dream : the dream being / self-action with Whitehead’s important corollary: that no event / is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal / event

The poetics of such a situation / are yet to be found out”

Which is Maximus finding them out, not on the spot, but through the course of the epic. Now this passage throws up any number of concerns, not least the phallocentric cosmic boner of the reading of Whitehead, and of course mythic genealogical penetration is everywhere in Maximus, and also that “self-action” is dangerously un-coupled from Polis, so that here it is assumed that if everyone had the Polis in their eyes, then Polis is this, that segues uncomfortably into tautology, unless we keep reading, unless we keep wanting it, which is the poem’s real beauty. That it only makes sense in the actual act of reading it is both Maximus’ supreme achievement and also its galactic faceplant. It’s no good making language ACTUAL if it only appears actual when you’re reading it? (I get a similar feeling from some of The White Stones, another whole schooner of fish, right, but just the hell of it). But then how else might a poetics make sense, how else can life spill out of a poem? How else but by the spillage from percept to example, by how you take literature to act in the space of LIFE. That is, if you define them separately as such. Because if you stick with it, Maximus nearly actually becomes LIFE, it’s grandiose colonial projections unstick because the condition of colonialism is to subjugate and condense, to temper the environment and to make it micro, whereas Olson is continually opening it all up, including himself, especially including himself. It is the most generous un-auto-biographical use of biography, because, Letter 27 [withheld], he does propose a dialectical relationship between the lived experience of a personal history, the eternal event crossing him like a secant, and the instances of time that budge a life into itself continually to form the ever-present tense within which Maximus operates, nudging it forward, “than that which is, / call it a nest, around the head of, call it / the next second / than that which you / can do!”.

This is the sense in which, for me, Maximus is not like life, is too particular to be anything so grossly universalized as “like life” – “I am a ward / and precinct / man myself and hate / universalization, believe / it only feeds into a class of deteriorated / personal lives anyway, given them / what they can buy, a cheap / belief” – but rather, as the 3rd Letter on Georges has it, “makes it with me, and I want that sense / here, of this fellow going home”, but as I compare my feelings, or write my feelings on this poem by putting a line in my mouth from a unwritten poem, from the “sense” that Olson could not write himself, of this fisherman, “of this fellow going home” that he was not, I seem to trip across the whole metonymic twist of the poems and get lost. If the best I can do (which it isn’t, in any case, but let’s investigate this for now) is allow my appreciation of the poem to rest in a sentiment that Olson wanted to express himself but could not, is that the most personal commitment to home as the condition that any one of us has access to, on Earth, or is that too much like Battleship Earth? “I want that sense / here, of this fellow going home”. Desire and deitics headbutt as Olson demands that we make it with him – I want that sense too, but “here”, slammed across the enjambment’s wet deck, is already out of the picture, is already moving off out of our reach, and we have to keep running the course of the want itself to get there, as the cadence does not slow but similarly slams into the italicised square bracket, making us instanter stop still wanting. Not much more good may now come of this tonight, but hopefully this’ll run on further. This is still the best tattoo ever:

o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)

John Wilkinson on holiday

2010-09-29T16:03:00.000+01:00

Tourism

They improve with age.
The weathered images
are living saints
moved to a museum
from these niches; and
under this reformation
the pigeon stools instead.
A cine camera whirs
with ascending beats.

Don't be fooled. They
retain the spirit, and
coaches' disgorge
still gapes at the
empty vault of heaven.
Their vacancy
a kind of proof, and this
the buttress countenances.

Only children, these
at least, grip with
concentration. The white
regiment is unswaddled,
squalls in mufti clothes
under a chestnut tree,
stamps on prickly
armour. For it is soft

they know, and the silky
nut is released for play.

From Get Set in Oort's Cloud: Early Poems (Barque)

notes from the infinite source of all energy

2010-09-20T17:12:00.002+01:00

People dying for no strategic benefit

2010-09-17T06:31:00.004+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/16/jock-stirrup-iraq-evidence-failure

More great material from Jock. Seriously, everything this guy says is absolute gold. Remember when a few more civilians were blown up in Helmand some time ago? No? Me neither. But Jock comes out with this beauty:

"This operation … is not about battling the Taliban, it is about protecting the local population, and you don't protect them when you kill them"

Is Chris Morris secretly controlling his mouth from a tiny remote control lodged surreptitiously in the pituitary gland? He is called SIR JOCK STIRRUP. As the gasp of obsoletist irony falls way off the map of southern Iraq, what is left of this actual and blankly honest, utilitarian rhetoric that can be of any use? "You don't protect them when you kill them". It is the sufficiently self-admonishing and repulsively bureaucratically correct language of military PR, impacted to its absurdist zenith, that injects the notion of foreign death into the invading population to produce the desired level of middle-class frowning and sighing whilst simultaneously wiping out any question of the validity of the military presence in the first place, indeed, the validity of military presence itself .

Foreign death is our mediation of state-instructed murder that attempts to bear no resemblance to innocent death from terrorist attacks in the West, removing death even as a right of the invaded population and placing it squarely in the sights of the precision bombers which are the grisly chrome hallmarks of modern abstracted warfare.

on Nat's photos

2010-09-17T06:05:00.001+01:00

Mention country second point command help one swerve gallant into prosody, on second thoughts pursue this hetero-limb back to basics yeah thanks for that. X has said nothing like that. Where unskilled workers ratchet up to fire love so stupidly, it is a bit like

Sitting in the best internet cafe in the world.

That theme song from Dawson's Creek is ringing out over the bass-heavy speakers, eliciting just the right balance of lonesome proxy nostalgia and practical revulsion to keep me going through this letter. I mean, Solo is always Solo, and we just seem to collide in the nicest possible way, with the added paranoia over leaking rooms and typhoid-ridden towels. I'm staying in the same room I lived in for a year, and pretty much staying put in this town, and doing the things I used to do when I lived here - sleep a lot, eat a lot of rice, listen to and play gamelan, hang out with friends, buy my ticket out. It's a strange sort of dialectical relationship whereby I'm constantly glad of the fact that I will be leaving, which reflexively makes my time here even more precious. I'm reading Adorno in a mosquito net (I mean generally, not right now), going to the Mankunegaran Court Palace to practice gamelan whilst the rains smash the ground around us, hanging out with my neighbours' kids, watching Yojimbo round a friend's house whilst fending off the mosquitoes. It's a life I both crave and crave to dissect from afar, conceptually proximal but physically remote, I get here and I feel completely gluey on the inside, malleable, re-workable. That fluidity of purpose and self is massively important to cultivate, as I try to, but without any pride in doing so - I also seem to be exactly where I was with the language when I left, which has made re-unions all the more palatable. I'm not really saying what I want to say. Which is strange, because here that's all you have to do, and it works. I mean, there are codes, like anywhere, there are behavioral codes and dress codes and holding hands codes, but once you have these you know how to bend and break them, and getting on in the world is as easy as ordering a taxi in a foreign language in a city you don't yet know very well because you get taxis everywhere. Ease is not a component I trust - it emphatically isn't easy to live here, but the day-to-day transactions require a modicum of love and surface-feature interiority (which the dictionary wants to "correct" to inferiority, which isn't a bad pun) that bring certain selves to the surface almost without any actual volition. I find myself deep in conversation with one of my friends about the nature of what I can say in their language, and how that defines my capacity for truth.

It is also, in many ways, a very funny place. I have never laughed harder in my life than with David, here attending the same university I went to, but what we laugh about is couched in such particular experience the transfer of the joke is always at our expense - we effectively laugh at ourselves laughing, which I suppose could get dangerously solipsistic, but that I think is the necessary corollary to being so constantly outwardly exposed, at least superficially. I still find the music pathologically beautiful, and yet last night at the court palace practice, round the back, on the old gamelan, where it leaks and the foreigners and kids practice, I wasn't struck with the same magical charm I used to be - or maybe I was and I just took it for granted because I was concentrating on playing so much. Like the music, life here consists in expansion and contraction, tightening up and widening out, speeding in and rolling away. I found a dead wall-lizard in my toilet this morning.

The sound-world here is like nothing else - at any given point in the city the melange of characteristic sounds is remarkable. From my bed I get the panoramic call to prayer from 10 different mosques, some using ancient cassette tapes on maximum gain, the sound of the gamelan cassette from downstairs with Marseno singing along, doors slamming from the building behind my bed, and the occasional train horn from across town. Pop up to the roof of the outhouse and the sound of the mosques beaming out the Word is a totally different beast. I feel composed here as nowhere else. Passively, made-up, created, re-created, but also with dignity some way off the map, present but hardly that important.

But what better role for anyone to aspire to than hero? Hang on, hang on. Real life is like a photo but it moves, all 3% and climbing.

Tonight there's a latihan at Pak Panggah's house in Benawa. The old village dudes that practice there are some of the best people in the world, and I love them. My teachers from last year will also be there, see below for Pak Kamso and Pak Pardi, plus some londo. Budget capitalism is cuter / the image of the advertisement on the surface of the advert / capital as a diluted reflection of itself / disparity of the Jakarta-set soap operas where literally everyone lives in a huge clean house and is even whiter than me.

Ravel + nuclear war in yr head

2010-09-07T09:49:00.003+01:00

Last week Harry Sanderson asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a set for Primitive London's Saturday night exhibition // show // party - hell yes says I, and hell yes it was! I don't think any of it was recorded, of which I'm glad, I was rather thinking to enjoy the process of working with Harry after 2 years on respective bronze // beats, and there we go, the beats were lovingly submerged in a syrupy destructo-hedon-blitz, peaking tenderly at the roof of the railway arch, we got a fractured spleen / brain thing going on that I haven't heard this side of either Caboladies, Axolotl or BWH, not to mention the useful plugging in of the ephemeral to the necessary. Plus it's been a while since I've seen actual dancing. Everyone was there. Thanks Harry x

"Parcite dum propero, mergite cum redeo"

2010-08-23T00:41:00.004+01:00

...Child comments that “The conceit does not overwell suit a popular ballad”, presumably because the corrupted broadside influence, filtered down through the centuries from Martial’s epigrammatic eloquence, does not to his mind cohere with the oral-poetical tradition from which the ballads spring. But it is the transcription of Greek [epic] tragedy into the local and contingent ballad form through the lens of Jones’s strident, literary revivalist musicianship that secures this sentiment all too suitably in the song’s structural dialectic. William has got his mother’s malison and knows that he must drown in the Clyde – the impossibility of his love’s fulfillment is at once both his cursed fate and that which impels him to take to his horse and seek out Margaret’s bower in the first place. The very doubt that is the originary impetus for the ballad’s narrative and structural irony is also the impacted self-knowledge of failure that drives William to live as best he might, as within the laws of the ballad universe he must, before the night comes on. Jones’ treatment of this particular facet of Clyde Water’s historical patchwork of narrative influence is therefore couched in the same humane contradiction in which the song itself is drenched; his placement of the Make me a wreck couplet as the framing element and crux of the first stanzaic unit serves to both unite the structural elements clearly under a banner of a resolute pathos (over-burdened by an overwrought tragic sensibility which it cannot sustain) as well as obscure the subjective agency of the individual actors, leaving us thus emotionally localised but lacking the precise co-ordinates of blame, themselves abstracted out to the banks of the ballad’s historical mytho-functionalism. This is a lot like life.

...The song of the lover is at once the lover's other lover. The substitute is total and cannot be compromised, say, with the other lover. The other lover is not composed of the same desires as the lover, whose song, whether his or another's, is the other in rapid oscillation between presence in the mind of the lover and absence in the traditional sense. The song and the other lover are never coeval, but displace each other and cancel each other.

2010-08-18T20:54:00.002+01:00

got overspill wrecked upside
from the slip in gracious not
claim no rescission

plenary flat-footed gumbo solipsism easily
remembered, oh so babe for truthful sucker
punch to get our longing fixed in transit, star
to star -

to these this makes solar repugnance
inevitable, in which direction do I love, is
upbraided like the stupid shore.

No not fanciful begot Arthurian prophetic self
to come back here and sigh like roses
quickening by foreign exclamation no death
likened now to siphon all immortal dregs are not

life, by which I mean not allegory of the world

but its clear and prescient softness, only
to be bleached in sight of song
coursing final
seconds away.

tables * poets

2010-08-03T19:56:00.000+01:00

This Saturday 7th August in London - first this, and then this. Word.

awesome song

2010-07-27T22:39:00.024+01:00

Shoal Creek Labour Day, Alabama Sacred Harp, 2009

Gaelic psalms at Back Free Church, Isle Of Lewis, 2003

Georgian Polyphonic Choral Music

Bedhaya Dirada Meta, Jawa Tenggah

Bacchantae, Columbia/Barnard a cappella group

Boundary Situation / 8.7.10 / Hertford East

2010-07-09T11:11:00.011+01:00

I need more. Open site proves access non
obstreperous financial poon gross abject tang
re-living in a space provided, mono-sensual, graft
escalope of belly four-eyes parcelled up to Saigon
flapping wildly please don’t prick me with the
remote. Eventually we rest. Concoction filial
but pure, gastronomically entropic to a wilder suit
your main could be your starter if you eat faster
but the guilt is timeless, passing into humoral
abstraction like the Jimmy in a text goes fallow
on the surface plop shiny blow-holes into, after.
Do you like me like this? I can do better. Pink-eyed
Icarus storms the lock, a crass retaliation, no-one
needs that many apples let me tell you how I got
here so it clicks: First spot: child of pasteurization
champ of the lakes, grimy cumshot baked on between
the breaks to make objection better, more than I can
crossbow fake duality inflicted on themselves
behind a chocolate landslide tasty as the day breaks
fall guy. Court me lately. Call off your frogspawn.
Organic re-lives splice the danger in a fixed limb our
manageable distance long, smooch also by the tracks
an awesome wind farm co-op debarred from conversation
fool hardy Tom likes his uncrusted I like mine on top
on fractal fiction loophole going back into the Truth
like a steady gong too soon. I could show you that I
mean business if you like. Then fake is fine, pharaoh
magic fits the bill for anyway & anyone encounters
dead forever, no-one needs him in their lives at least
camomile beefsteak menagerie, upshot frugal down
loading progress will aptly name apply new skin
detects an extra blowjob or its post-Earth equivalent
bartered so in meatspace revealing not 1 not 2 but
.3 recurring, tonight’s injection sprayed into a fault
less blanket. Re-set. Moon is time regained, disport
new sizes grappling with the big fat robot of the future
which I’m driving now & lastly on the range, to test
the general limits of detection. Aft. Access on the sly.

TRANSPOSE THE VITAL SIGNS INTO A LEMON TWIST

AWAY ARC UP IN AIRBAG SPREE CONFLATED INTO BLISS

SEE THE CYNIC POSTURE BY THE BLADE OF HIS OWN KNIFE

IRONICALLY ENGENDERED BY A FIELD OF MEASURED SPIKES

Who’s yr daddy, caddy? After all we pass the buck on
to a silky rejection, if that, painstakingly reviewed, like,
Dude I’m having sex but better! Africa comes to life
in front of us, it’s great! Fuck Montaigne! I’m not
hang on, extravagance is a phantom wheelie bin
the blare of my laptop fan denies and I relinquish
all the fassy shit for one thing least of all – brick it

run the caramel midnight off in deep-space seclusion
tearing beta versions of the limbic stem grown thinner.

a version of the sublime

2010-07-07T22:11:00.002+01:00

"We might begin with the hypothesis that the encounter with literary greatness - the so-called rhetorical sublime - is structurally cognate with the transcendence, gentle or terrible, excited in the encounter with landscape, the "natural" sublime...our hypothesis commits us to a search for a structure beneath the vast epiphenomena of the sublime.

It is not, however, possible to write completely exoterically. Philology teaches, or used to teach, that the history of ideas is a history of metaphors made and remade; so, too, the history of criticism. It is difficult to be wholly clear about the logical status of the metaphorical moment we seek. The conflict subsumed in a major metaphor may only be inferred, but to take the metaphor for the lived reality is to neglect the presentness of the past, the fact that it too was once a moment of origin, an instant before the metaphor crystallized. Or was it? The image of thinker or poet standing as a third term in triangular opposition to discourse (language), on the one hand, and experience (sensation and its unconscious derivatives), on the other, has an impossibly abstract look. It may be that the original moment is always just next to us, but it cannot be definitively specified or pinned in a temporal sequence, except hypothetically. For the historian, the moment of macro- or micro-origin is usually a retrospective construction designed both to secure and to assuage a necessary alienation from the past. Throughout the analytical tradition the sublime moment tends to have a typical or fictional status. The dialectic of continuity and originality can only be resolved in a fiction of some kind, and it may be that the origin, like a screen memory, is a compromise between what we cannot fail to know and what we need to believe - the latter usually a mystery to ourselves. We write, in short, about modernism from within some version of it."

The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Thomas Weiskel (John Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 11-12)

Jonny Liron wants to be fucked, or, GOING OVER THE TOP OF THE FLESH: an introduction to the pornography of poetry

2010-07-06T17:40:00.001+01:00

Jonny Liron’s poetry is activated by desire. His writing strokes a queer trajectory that moves from Shakespeare’s walking wounds to Acker’s Rimbaud’s precocious, transcendental masochism, tenderly inverting the traits of private longing into the honest myths of localised, de-privatised bodies, advancing a zealous campaign for the dredge of all our nightly lust to be converted through the slipstream of convertible language into fecund methodologies for examining subjectivities. Here the vicariousness of the imagined sensual body is exploded in favour of a hurt directly responsible to desire, and desire that responds directly to the hyperbolic positioning of sexuality as radically un-assimilable by the predations of robotically functional capital; at least seemingly so, as the work deliberately manoeuvres itself into wranglings within both the body and the body politic, a self explored in all its flesh and letters. Hetero-throats vomit back the urgent constituting gaze in a queer cartography of gregarious delight & ethno-babes take the fervent soundscape of the succubus’ phallic intransigence and fuck with it in pertinent, esoteric song.

The activation that I nudged at formerly is part of Liron’s wider praxis of theatrical desire, or desirous theatre, one that stems from the usefulness of place demolished of its private assumptions and invigorated by desire in place of stultified communicative models of interaction, a responsive erotics of occurrence, where that desire “is always political” and trained to invert the voyeuristic mode of awkwardness and discomfort into fertile ground for performative modes of connection. Liron’s poetry seems to me part of both the elicitation of that response and the response itself, as in,

see the meaning fall off like so much gravy

down the sluice you testified my testicles drooped off

into the home alone hell hole of rhyme and

syntax you cannot leave me with this butcherdress

of un living in the cattle prod of disneylanded squash the ch

christ push my face further in the shit so I can't breathe

kill me or set me free, fuck me or fuck me up,

but here god damn it no knife for us now in the

60's self referencing bitterly ironing automobile

of my reading infested with the clot of cliche drizzling

out the stigma of my earnest urge, this form is barbed

wire to be left and caught in a wing of distaste

where the incessant, barely sadistic self-harm is the index by which the poetic voice can feel again for the first time, completely wounded, real and shivering, a post-modern arsehole sonnet of failed affection but secure desire. How seriously should we take this urgent, unsimulated rhetorical demand to “fuck me or fuck me up”, and where do the ethics of this eroticism stake their claim? In the guts of poetry’s designs on a passive other, forever loved in silent sequence, the exhortation to be not only the loved one instead of the lover, but the fucked instead of the fucker, is in the poem a superfluity of “earnest urge”, however painful, in the face of what is denigrated as the “self referencing bitterly ironing automobile / of my reading”, where I take “ironing” to be a facile piss-take of “ironizing” and the general mode to be one of hope rather than despair, despite the self-satire of “my reading”. The danger implicit in a violently sexual encounter makes the body realer than referencing the self’s own desires, and thus the body needs only to be desired upon or in in order to accumulate the subjectivity necessary to make fucking vital life. The desultory and denigrating “un living in the cattle prod of disneylanded squash” makes the only viable response a mass onslaught into the fleshy processes of real life which must be accessed from a state of wanting to be transformed, to see the meaning of our bodies re-applied, not through the identity politics of straight or gay, but by queering the lover’s gaze to make the constitutive act less important than the desire behind the desire to be so constituted, the bloody real-time catwalk sped to a hurricane of lust to pump more blood through the veins than they could possibly handle, a cry against the “ironing” out of desire to the mass entrainment of normative beauty and pre-packaged, glossy, textiled love that is the very place of the poetry’s ecstatic insurgence.

Undoubtedly there are problematic points in a poetry of this kind – radical subjectivity was and never is a generalized prerequisite for fucking, although I am certain that Liron’s pornographic tendencies are aimed at re-appropriating the body from its image and re-investing it with the truth of desire whilst jettisoning exploitation. Pornography is an industry that has hi-jacked sexual desire, both gay and straight, for its own billion-dollar profits, and language that can attempt a reversal of the balance of power into the hands of those real human peoples who love & fuck in equal measure serves only to wrest influence away from pornography as the teleological arbiter of discourse on modern sex. Nonetheless, a Bataille-shaped transcendental shag is hard to pull off without sliding into exactly that kind of bathos or cynicism – the word “fuck” itself is a violent sound of attack, loaded with discrimination: the language itself is complicit. “Degradation”, notes Bataille, “which turns eroticism into something foul and horrible, is better than the neutrality of reasonable and non-destructive sexual behaviour”, because that neutrality, where too little is at stake and too little risked, is too distanced from the original taboo on violence and death that for him effectively invests eroticism with its transcendental power to glimpse the continuity of death and to burst through the barriers of our bounded subjective lives. And yet this reasoning predicates suffering and hurt, even if only for the rhetorical self declaiming the violence of desire in such a fashion. Desire is constantly co-opted. How can the poetic voice regain from corporate co-option the ability to conceive of itself as a desiring subject without itself performing those same hollow acts of appropriation that turn real love into the fantasy parameters of plastic souls? How much of that hurt can be re-invested into the work of a poetic language swimming in the erotics of theatrical desire and how much ends up superfluous damage in a subjective body already all-too wounded by commodification and cashflow? When can love corrupt capital? These are questions undoubtedly being raised (and answered) by other voices in the current poetic climate, and I submit this perky stub in the spirit of friendship and excitement about Jonny’s (and others’) continued investigations into the praxis of desire.

Jonny Liron is reading & performing in Cork at the SoundEye festival next week. Read his poetry here.

An open letter to Nicholas Brendan, c/o SOBA Sober Living Community, 22669 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu

2010-06-19T01:45:00.008+01:00

Dear Nicky B,

It's just not fucking fair, is it? Like, one minute you're coming-to after being tasered twice in the butthole by some faggot LAPD ne'er-do-well, the next some crackpot's writing you illegitimate fan letters begging for nostalgia to be relinquished up to the youth who did begot them, those perky dreams of suicidal catch-ups, your comic / cosmic double. What was so great about the fans was that they knew they all existed. It's sickening that we end (or lose an eye, lol), but if the Prime Evil wanted you to be doing meet-and-greets at $75 a pop then fuck that, it's just not fair. What the hell is representation without trust? A fucking Hellmouth, that's what. Open mine and smile.

Come to think of it, they still have us running circles around those motherfuckers in space, how’s the line developed through first to Death and then Eternity, without whom our lives would mean as little as, say, that bucket of used pointy sticks. I mean, to prick the relative corners of our pubescent cosmographia is the medium incarnate, the acquisition of universe plugged into millions of wounded eyeballs whereby your indiscretion you both move and are the movèd; what impresses me is that you knew enough about Euripides to keep that shit in the can until such time as we could manage their despondent doom-rattle with the appropriate sardonic aplomb. When was the last time Joss called? He owes you more than this, we all do – there was no hope devoured to the last abstraction that we couldn’t squeeze into allegory, aye Xan man! Popping the fortunate foreskins of the adept! To rule without complicity the bastard lobbyists of distant galactic colonies! To lick too late the arc of desire stretching from my shuddering wrists to that barely permissible fake moustache you were sporting on YouTube last week! But I hear the people there are good, and you’re getting the attention and commitment to relinquishing reality that you need – & the point is, as you sagely put it, that you haven’t killed anybody yet, which is perhaps the most tortuous aside since that devilish honky asked the audience if they could tell when he was lying. Hetero-throats and death-breath. I for one always understood this to mean that I, specifically, but also generally and politically, was charged with planting all the seeds in the inter-personal underbelly I could manage before the curtain plunged us all into the deluge of perdition, and that my bit-part in this role of citizenry would give me unparalleled insight into the functioning of the aforementioned Prime Evil. Secure the perimeter, head straight for the jugular. Alas, the guest spots dried up, but you know what I mean, right? That little conniving cunt got his, our ambivalence diluted any sense of Furor Justitae we had thus far managed to wring out of such vampiric morality, and now we chill in orbit and play Spot the Spin-off just to get through the frontispiece.

Look, the idea that montage was in any sense a contribution to a poetics of radical economy as the merely opening credit sequence makes your best expressions promo for a horny fess-up, the facial muscles roll D12 to determine the shareholder’s delight. You needn’t feel threatened by day if your heart secretes the bliss of the undead, the immortal youth of language at a summer camp in Maryland. Our polis was defined in darkest shadow, through the scree of necessary love, the lone voice-over spiralling joylessly across the firmament, O resplendent chronicle! In both human life and inanimate Orbs of Thesulah the one presence of the Buffyverse felt & seen! It’s like that with us Nicky, it’s the terrible burden we bear as progenitors of lost innocence, the onward rush of teenage fatalism draining quicker than the blood from Giles’ ruptured scrotum in the Season 9 finale.

Bollocks to that. Although I suspect that’s exactly the kind of sentiment that’s gotten you stuck up in Alphaville over there. I know you don’t need me to be the raw, reviling demi-god you always looked up to on set, I know you’re past that, and tbh when I found out James was getting hitched to that Slayer from Ohio I realised how gravely I’d misled the lad, taking him out for week-long benders filled with knock-off Campari and House of the Dead IV, when what I should’ve been doing was teaching you how to love yourself. I’m sure those patronising cunts in Malibu are telling you the same thing, but listen to this, Nicky: it is the same thing, and precisely therein lies the fucking Queller Demon masquerading around campus channelling the shade of John "Planetary Pissflaps" Donne, OK? Block them out. Yes, we are the song of the stars, and I carry my feet with Adam’s errant backbone slung to my side, being entirely there for myself and my co-stars from the thin end of the vas deferens right through to our collective epididymis. I swear Nicky, the moment you kicked in your neighbour’s door to get your mutt back the whole constellation began to topple like a disco suffering troll-damage. Can you send me the name of your sponsor so I can make sure he’s not some wide-boy in it for the action figures? I’ve got your back, comrade, remember that.

Remember also that the traitor’s reticence is his final trump, despite the lovely recourse to a just and hopeful torture - the death of one is forelock to the life we dream would yet be parted. When you’re out we’ll get back on the coke and chilli sauce and stay the fuck away from anyone who doesn’t believe in cultivating dianetical consciousness. Enclosed are some aesthetic-resistant earplugs and a pint of my own recalcitrant sperm; use them wisely, child, and know that I’m thinking of you always, especially at night.

In friendship and i’faith,

Tony. x x

Underground

2010-06-19T00:59:00.002+01:00

O Fucker-Killer, Midnight Thriller,
Dictator in buffalo furs,
In your platinum room, with a platinum blonde,
With a pussy which whines when it purrs.

O Fucker-Upper, Double-D Cupper,
With snakes wrapped around all your necks,
With your morphine laugh, guillotine-and-a-half,
And your Amazon made out of sex.

O Spider in Drag in a brown paper bag,
In your limousine twenty miles low,
You spilled out your seed with your single good deed,
And her orgasm called out, Hello.

I'm a Killing Machine, if you know what I mean,
Please permit me to highlight your error:
Just get down on your knees while I speak in Chinese,
And I'll show you the new War on Terror.

By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
To light up a packet of crack,
As we sang to the Lord and we went overboard,
On our death-ship of Love to Iraq.

O Chief of Police, O the President's Niece,
Do you mind if I rig the election?
Go ahead but drop dead if you dip in the red,
I need cash to maintain my erection.

O American Night, O Hysterical Knight,
You chew ice while youre breaking a jaw
—But thats breaking the law—No, thats making the law,
In this town we sip lungs through a straw.

the coordinates are the reading

2010-06-03T09:14:00.014+01:00

Just to let y'all know I will be reading with the ESTEEMED Mr. Josh Stanley & others, w/(at least more than) performance from the EXCEPTIONAL Jonny Liron, all happening this Saturday 5th at the Sit Room in 7 Sisters (check link for directions and line-up up-up updates). This will be the first time I've read since the last time I read. There will be no free wine. The co-ordinates are as follows:

Title: Manifesting on a Sunny Wednesday Afternoon, or, Hey come back here with my monk!

Prologue: The subject is fundamentally jealous of the contemporary. That's the starting point from which the pivot kind of flows down into the range of the viable. Temporally speaking, natch. Nay, not for nothing the fluxus fluxeth.

[...] - some meat-space exhortations, followed by the back-up plan: I've got two swords in one scabbard / They cost me deep in my purse / And you shall have the bestest one / And I shall have the worst - [...]

Wrap-up: Some of us will make it; some will end up naming their first-born "Zephyr".

Unlove

2010-05-28T21:08:00.002+01:00

"The songs are sung outdoors. They are sung in daylight only. They do not exist in the dark. But it is darkness or absence or lostness or vacancy or deprivation that they are about...The constraints...are the most obvious: the guards, escape, sentence length, geographical places remembered or longed for or heard of, sickness, death, guns, the work itself. The songs concentrate on the devices and forms of control and the manifestations of impotence. The language is...highly concrete, but the themes are not; the themes are negatives: things like unlove and unfreedom and unimportance..."

-Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Work Songs from Texas Prisons, collected and edited by Bruce Jackson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. xvi. See Rounder Records 2013. As quoted in Rounder Records 1715 Prison Songs: Historical Records from Parchman Farm 1947-48.

2010-05-26T12:57:00.004+01:00

roboc irc universe
titan

not even wholly
part of that
which I might
not yet resemble
is my total point
today, a kinder
setting aside

O arc incessant

Entropy is a measure of disorder in the universe or of the availability of the energy in a system to do work

2010-05-25T21:32:00.004+01:00

Questioner: Now these entities incarnate into a third-density vibratory body. I am trying to understand how this transition takes place from third to fourth-density. I will take the example of one of these entities of which we are speaking who is now in a third-density body. He will grow older and then will it be necessary that he die from the third-density physical body and reincarnate in a fourth-density body for that transition?

Ra: I am Ra. These entities are those incarnating with what you may call a double body in activation. It will be noted that the entities birthing these fourth-density entities experience a great feeling of, shall we say, the connection and the use of spiritual energies during pregnancy. This is due to the necessity for manifesting the double body.

This transitional body is one which will be, shall we say, able to appreciate fourth-density vibratory complexes as the instreaming increases without the accompanying disruption of the third-density body. If a third-density entity were, shall we say, electrically aware of fourth-density in full, the third-density electrical fields would fail due to incompatibility.

To answer your query about death, these entities will die according to third-density necessities.

Questioner: You are saying, then, that for the transition from third to fourth-density for one of the entities with doubly activated bodies, in order to make the transition the third-density body will go through the process of what we call death. Is this correct?

Ra: I am Ra. The third and fourth, combination, density’s body will die according to the necessity of third-density mind/body/spirit complex distortions.

We may respond to the heart of your question by noting that the purpose of such combined activation of mind/body/spirit complexes is that such entities, to some extent, conscientiously are aware of those fourth-density understandings which third-density is unable to remember due to the forgetting. Thus fourth-density experience may be begun with the added attraction to an entity oriented toward service-to-others of dwelling in a troubled third-density environment and offering its love and compassion.

Questioner: Would the purpose in transitioning to Earth prior to the complete changeover then be for the experience to be gained here before the harvesting process?

Ra: I am Ra. This is correct. These entities are not Wanderers in the sense that this planetary sphere is their fourth-density home planet. However, the experience of this service is earned only by those harvested third-density entities which have demonstrated a great deal of orientation towards service-to-others. It is a privilege to be allowed this early an incarnation as there is much experiential catalyst in service to other-selves at this harvesting.

Field Report, CRS vol. 5, 21.5.10

2010-05-23T21:53:00.011+01:00

What might a reading do?

What is the scope of our insistence on the plurality of address in contemporary experimental poetry? What are the implications of articulating, either by direct or inverse means, a polis whose basis is the entrainment of a readership into a productive and necessary milieu through which to act, to respond, to engage? How does this process relate to poetry’s designs on the folk, the people of which a community of poets is always a slight but inevitable instance? What are the designs of the people upon the poets? What are the ramifications of the activation of space in a play called The Reading for, in the first instance, the people who were there and for whom that space becomes radically theirs, and in the second instance for everybody else? How much does everybody else even matter, or do they remain a they, a kind of vaguely intimidating, abstractly regressive and unproductively somnambulistic Das Man until entrained into the utopian projection of our superabundance of desire? What, in any given reading or performance, can possibly be said to be assumed?

There are two things, I think, to come to terms with before attempting to untangle this deafening masque. The first is that in order to bridge the void between subjectivities the social space which subtends, contains and often undermines those subjectivities must be addressed holistically as well as fractally, preferably at the same time, or at least in the same breath. The second is that the notion of “preaching to the converted” is nonsensical when applied to the Arts, and poetry in particular, first because it assumes that there are only two possible states of play at stake, those of pre- and post-conversion, after which the infinite variety and radical potential of language slides like dribbles of iced latté down the polyethylene meniscus of the initiate's perception; second because “preaching” re-enforces a performer/audience dichotomy that is far less interesting than the active listening which is the axis of social space and of which both speaking and remaining silent are variegated articulations. This is to say that the potential for “creating culture” as opposed to, or perhaps parallel with, “reproducing it”, in Marianne Morris’ terms, are not diminished or somehow reduced in power or scope because the same people go to the same readings all the time. This is not a memorandum to my friends in the business, and I am not advocating an insular and reductive micro-dystopia of writers and performers selected for their collective genome’s compatibility with the esoteric knowledge of experimental poetic technique. Rather, I mean that the very cognizance of friendship, our ability to know each other and to express that knowledge, to work and thrive in the sun of it, is what could be at stake at readings and performances that enact certain desires and put such forces into play. The important question is not how to get more people interested in experimental poetry, but what to do with the ones that already are. In any case, I don’t believe that the same people do go to the same readings all the time; but I do believe that it is a certain quality of poetic disclosure that enables access to that “we” I want to talk about, as well as to its constituting subjectivities, whoever comprises and constitutes “us”, all of whom “I” desire to know as far and as productively as possible.

This then, is a political activation, however we qualify the instance of polis. What we can do to activate the space we inhabit. “My true readers”, says Dorn in the foreword to his Collected Poems, “have known exactly what I have assumed”, and Morris makes a similar, collectively appropriate point:

“a poetry like ours – that’s mine and my poetic colleagues’ – in fact relies on shared experience, both in criticism and engagement with performance as well as in a tacit understanding that a way must be found in poetry of speaking with more than one voice. This is why you see the first person plural pronoun in so much of this poetry – my own included: the ‘we’ that creates community, even where there is none…”

Morris, writing in the face of a deeply cynical, throw-away attack on the Infinite Difference anthology in the TLS, is keenly aware that the views expressed in the “review” were not meant to engage in debate or productive discourse, but simply blank and irreproachable, a derisive snort in the direction of a casual public whose proxy nostrils are cleared by the chummy, hairless tone of arrogant condescension, and as such her comments on the work to be done are directed to her poetic colleagues – Know your enemy is less useful didactic knowledge here than Know your friends, and less important. What then, should we assume? I said just now that it is a certain quality of poetic disclosure that enables access to this “we”, and stopped short of defining poetry as a constitutive force of the reflexively defining first person plural as Morris does. This is because I believe that whilst poetry can give ourselves to each other more truthfully than the static notion of self could bear, the skin-line not a burr thrown up against the world but finally a series of valves or ultra-porous access points through which we contain, refute, are filled and desired by the world, the potential for affinity must surely be pre-requisite for a community to come together and to effect that constitutive “we” in the first place. Community cannot just be created “even where there is none”, but only where “we” desire it to come into being by knowing each other more profoundly than we could by merely having similar preferences for original modes of language use? First of all, we must desire it. We must desire the dialectics of difference to be put to the use of poetic knowledge in order for our capacity for love to be more fully realised. The point is perhaps pedantic and in any case may be elucidatory instead of contradictive. And the first person plural pronoun can of course be put to other uses than those of highlighting our particular historical and collective endeavour, not least to worry that conception and keep us wary of complacency, to indicate other, perhaps more subtly mendacious and illusory methods of collective identity that the widest “we”, the human race, are constantly compartmentalised into, whether productively (not to mention usefully, willingly, falsely or painfully) or not.

Posie Rider & Jow Lindsay’s reading on Friday night assumed much less than it would perhaps be safe to assume a Cambridge Reading Series night of experimental avant-garde poetry would assume, but by this very play was able to open up a space in which the performance of the reading constantly flirted with, insulted, disparaged, castigated, comforted and barely became a means of effecting a communitas based upon what was already there, what we already have, and what we might possibly become. Recent national political discourse was both appropriated and mocked, but also re-constituted into the political space of the reading, tracing a line of constant watchfulness over the machinations universally predicated upon and in the name of the folk whilst at the same time tragically powerless to prevent those machinations from organising/mobilising satirical negations & refutations of constructed collective identity. The creation of the radical experimental “we” through such a gathering was tempered with a dangerously isomorphic “we” of satirical invective and absurdist comedy, the laughter of the audience perhaps the most realistic effect produced by the Wagnerian, mythological, polysemous diatribes flitting between the two barely realistic personas of the poets. The potential for a delineation of a universal WE to be reductive and obscurantist is enormous, and these are the precise means by which corporate advertising and party political affiliation seek to homogenise humanity into demographics and target audiences destined only for differences in the vagaries of their consumption and tactical voting preferences. To say, as I believe I heard Posie Rider say, that “we are the poets laureate” in the midst of an exhausting and increasingly overwhelming dialogic code is a re-appropriation of a political right and the creation of, or at least the exciting image of, a fragile community existing, fleetingly, in the heart of the multi-national flux of assumed identity. What is “assumed”, that is, taken as given, a priori, implicit, hereby becomes inverted to be that which is passed over in haste, ignorance or ambivalence, and what must be attested in the act of the reading is the (newly) human capacity for engendering caucuses of radical community so that we may attain enough trust to assume in the positive sense once more. The figures of Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider are mythological tricksters, ever playing with our trust in assuming that we are assuming the same thing/s as the poets we heed. We are not simply given to assume that we can all trust each other and can therefore sing together the firmament of the new world, but rather the intimidation and awkwardness these trickster aspects produce in the audience (for example, naming specific people in the audience, something I’ve seen Lindsay do a number of times both in improvised performance and in published work) work to make the sense of place more malleable in order that we may mould new ways of listening to and being with each other. Those moments of joyous augmentation, (self-)plagiarisation and re-organisation result in a mixtape-like quality that presents not only a plurality of voice, but voices of real collective experience and instantaneous memory.

Only by carving difference into the universally reductive notion of humanity itself can we become truly human, and by dint of this, humane. That is the axiom at work on the macro-level of experimental poetry communities and the micro-level of the individual reading.

This is also how readings act theatrically without becoming theatre. The creation of such communitas is contingent upon its only lasting as long as the reading itself, its durational nature perhaps the key to the feeling of common endeavour, even if only articulated negatively. Lindsay’s exhaustive prose performances are, I think, a beautifully doomed attestation of the occasion of the reading as the productive mechanism by which communities are made, defining themselves against both an undifferentiated humanity-at-large replete with built-in sensors to detect love, companionship, truth & beauty as well as by more positivist means declaring a space for the activation of radical subjectivities inexpressible within the nexus of the everyday uses of language. The temporality of the reading as play is therefore the crux of the meaning of the performance in terms of its delineation of our time, our language, our wound, our response. It is the proper occasion of song which frames and therefore reveals the event itself as constitutive of a collective grand narrative forged from the desire of those for whom pre-packaged national, gender, ethnic or sexual identities have become useless and restrictive.

How might all this relate to wider conceptions of the people, the folk, the inhabitants of Universe City? I’m as yet unconvinced that it does, or even has to. I am convinced, however, that these trousers somehow contain the answers we all seek.

Dante & the music of the spheres

2010-05-17T22:59:00.002+01:00

"...when Dante insists on describing the quality of the musical performances of damned, penitent and blessed souls, he does not do so out of mere aesthetic interest. Music is an agent of divine grace and its use is consistent: Dante employs music in Paradiso as a rain to bless the souls and as a mystical means of expression in order to circumvent the engulfment of poetic language, while in Purgatorio plainchant provides a means for purging sins. By the same token, music in Inferno mocks the damned and reminds them of the salvation they will never reach, in a consistent parody of sacred music. Ironically, the same tool is therefore employed both to fulfill the desire of eternal happiness and to frustrate it.

Dante introduces into his poem the different styles of music of his time, showing an impressive knowledge, if not of the compositional techniques, at least of the repertory and its liturgical uses. He makes music the language of the spirit and incorporates this art into the monumental construction of his other world. References to polyphony are neither accidental nor decorative, but constitute a complex architecture, whose inherently musical meaning mirrors the reconciliation of multiplicity and unity. It is Dante's solution to the age-old problem, of reconciling the multiplicity of individuals with the unity of the Creator. The chants of the Commedia are therefore not a mere accompaniment to the pilgrim's voyage, but an essential component of it. Harmony, in a political, spiritual and musical sense, becomes the end of Dante's journey to polyphony.

The transition from monophony to polyphony accompanies a cathartic progress toward the spiritual union with the Creator. There is a specifically musical quality to this purification process: for the penitents, monophonic singing is the tool of purification as the individual struggles for harmony. The songs in Purgatorio therefore constitute a pharmakon, a remedy to heal the soul from sin, which seems to revive the Pythagorean notion of music as medicine. The change to polyphony in Paradiso reflects the harmony with the Supreme Being, realized, spiritually as well as musically, through the simultaneous resonance of the souls' melodies within the music of God."

- Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante's Journey to Polyphony, (University of Toronto Press, 2010)

I'll never get out of this world alive

2010-05-16T10:51:00.003+01:00

Now you're lookin' at a man that's gettin' kinda mad

I had lot's of luck but it's all been bad

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world a live.

My fishin' pole's broke the creek is full of sand

My woman run away with another man

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

A distant uncle passed away and left me quite a batch

And I was livin'g high until that fatal day

A lawyer proved I wasn't born

I was only hatched.

Ev'rything's agin' me and it's got me down

If I jumped in the river I would prob'ly drown

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

These shabby shoes I'm wearin' all the time

Are full of holes and nails

And brother if I stepped on a worn out dime

I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was heads or tails.

I'm not gonna worry wrinkles in my brow

'Cause nothin's ever gonna be alright nohow

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

I could buy a Sunday suit and it would leave me broke

If it had two pair of pants I would burn the coat

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

If it was rainin' gold I wouldn't stand a chance

I wouldn't have a pocket in my patched up pants

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

Hank Williams, 1952

Some letters in the meantime, to be sent

2010-05-15T17:13:00.019+01:00

Containing some scattered and some more delineated thoughts on failure, O'Hara, theatre, folk song & the faux-pas. The continuation of our grand narrative. On the way back from a Chinese traditional music concert in Oxford at the weekend I mentioned to my housemate that I could quite easily have sat through two hours of solo qin music without the modern recapitulations of sung poetry, to which he responded tetchily "not everyone's you, Joe"; a valid point, but doesn't my desire to expand my self into everything subtend and undermine that protest? I love harder than you, I will encompass your desire and you will see. Love as the great colonizer; the reflexive machinations of Wilkinson's Proud Flesh attempt to dislodge these anxieties but ultimately reinforce and re-inscribe them. Do I drown in this gross superfluity of desire or revel in it?

Letter to Luke Roberts, 14.5.10

Dear Luke,

Great to hear back from you, and glad to hear you're having a hectic, if not entirely healthy trip. I recently read your Terraform Lecture Notes (long overdue, I know) and was particularly struck by your:

"What fails but this, the failures I love, into the earthquake shortened day where for milliseconds we might have done something special"

Which at the moment of writing, shot-through with totally contingent personal lyric from where I sit in the computer room of the Taylorian library on a lunch break, sounds like the fallout from a rebuff, and then after the comma, the interrogation of the validity even of THAT as feeling or (responsible) response. I was looking at Yves Klein's Leap into the Void again for the first time in a long while, and reveling in the pathos and awfulness of the whole endeavour - Klein in some dirty Parisian back street wide-eyed and flapping around, it's all so utterly tragi-comic, leaping into the great Void whilst a disinterested lady cycles down the street with her groceries, completely oblivious, the sincerity of Klein's action just segues into ridiculousness. His imaginary "architecture of the air" becomes a vaguely phallic gesture of pre-failure into which he can throw himself but nothing else. Perhaps, finally, that's where his personal vision of transcendence fails, but fails beautifully. The world accepts and absorbs his passion but then immediately and imperceptibly becomes brittle and dry, leaving him hanging in photo-montaged air, a idiot grinning in the face of the love that he loves.

That's the discrepancy in perception when desire falls short, that the primary result is a feeling of being incommensurable with the world, discontinuous and dis-contemporaneous. This is true whether the subject is a particularly unobtainable Laura or Beatrice (longing - distending - stretching), or video footage of an American helicopter killing Iraqi civilians (impotence - weakness - horror). It's the time dilation involved in the inevitable alienation from the common ground of language, which is possible only thanks to love's greivious machinations. And through that alienation we desire all the more, we're then able to produce the necessary superfluity of desire that could subtend a poetics of the impossible made, if not possible, then at least (mostly) manifest.

Failing beautifully is something I know a few people in our ambit are interested in - Chris Goode is the primum mobile here, who got a lot out of a blog-piece that Matt Trueman wrote, and I've talked with both of them about notions of failure in performance, or perfomative failure, or performing failure, which I think for Chris always needs to orbit an axis of vulnerability and weakness (see his blog post on the matter, which you have probably already done). I wanted to ask you what ARE the failures that you love, and why? Is there something bigger going on here? I mean Keston's working through his tripartite thesis comprising the cardinal points of WRONGNESS, BATHOS and STUPIDITY, which seems to have some parallels with Chris' aesthetics of failure. I don't for a minute want to suggest that Failure and Wrongness are isomorphic, because they're patently not, and anyway Keston and Chris have massively different praxes. But I think there is a more general thrust here towards embracing these antitheses of literature and performance and re-appropriating them in order to re-infuse them with the passionate arguments needed to keep us all afloat.

I've come to think that the tragic is the only true, or perhaps the truest, measure of life. That we have to come at it from that angle. How the tragic opens up a wound in perception that is productive and powerful, both alienating and universal at the same time. I love how "tragic" in common parlance has become a byword for social or artistic failure or faux pas, marking the instances of our descent. On the other hand, how foreign death is immeasurably more powerful when couched in indignation, as opposed to tragedy - "a tragic loss of life" now sounds the hollow apolitical horn of cowardly complicity. Here the tragic is co-opted into the foul and evil-smelling mouth of Brigadier Major Sir Jock Stirrup as a means to dodge & obscure a measure of human life in fact brutally defined by SMART bombs and surgical strikes; this he has to do, because to admit of an adversary's humanity is the first step towards pacification and negotiation, obviously anathema not only to military operations in general but also to the language employed to present such operations as necessary and urgent.

Letter to Y.S., 5.5.10

Dear Y,

I hope you don't mind my writing to you - I'm sorry I had to rush off after the seminar & I would've liked to talk more about O'Hara and your paper, which I really enjoyed. It was rather depressing, in one sense, to encounter a rather regressive streak in the audience that still clung to the idea of art for Art's sake as some kind of tautological and self-referential institution that runs like a parallel line alongside life, culture and politics, as if such a discourse hadn't worn itself out over the course of the entire gamut of twentieth-century acts of embedded, contextual, engaged and active art & performance. Still, I don't want to get bogged down in refuting such a concept - we might just quote Oscar Wilde or Guy Debord and be done with it - but at the same time it mirrors an argument that still to some extent plagues any work, particularly poetry that is self-avowedly or even critically referred to as "political"...You were totally right to say that everything is political - at least any art that engages with human relationships, as all human experience is conducted & mediated in liminal zones whose boundaries and limits are themselves defined by the given cultural and political rules of engagement. Of course a poem is not a sit-in, or a march - and I wondered what exactly was the point of labouring this issue, especially given the fact that the questioner had already decided that art is to be referred to and thought about Artistically in light of the Canon. A manifesto is as inert as a poem on the page if it is not taken up and given a social role, and surely readerly practice has as much to do with how far a work can be "politically effective" as the agency, or lack thereof, of the (debased and outmoded idea of) "art in itself". What I find striking about O'Hara's work, and this is inevitably coloured by the kind of criticism I read around him, especially Malcolm Phillips', is the the fact that the interstices and rivulets of interaction and time that he works in create fragile and transient occasions for being together, moments of engagement that are not transcendental or escapist (the major difference for me between O'Hara and Ginsberg) but actually fully committed to working in the gaps and fissures of the urban consumerist absurdity that characterises New York in so many of his poems. Now, that kind of work is political on a more complex and deep level than the gapingly large definition I provided just now because it figures out the various spaces in which thought and love and motion can be processed in the glaring mass of the city - these moments of extreme and often all-too-tender intimacy are conditioned by the melee that goes on around them, the flux that is constantly tearing O'Hara from one party to the next. I think there's a reason that O'Hara and Berrigan talked about Coke and pills all the time, and I think it has a dark side to it, that it reflects negatively the positions these poets had to adopt to stay both committed to lived reality and create instances of new forms of engagement within that reality - to whit, they must have gotten pretty tired being so various. The tone of quiet resignation that pervades poems like Having a coke with you and Aus Einem April I think bears this out.

But to be more specific, I think a poem can be politically just as much, if not more than, it can mean politically; the latter category segues all too easily into a position of reflection and critique, which is not what O'Hara does to my mind - or if he does, it's constantly his self that is being critiqued for staying in the same place for too long, and thus missing out on something going on down the street. The denial of national identity in Grand Central is a wound almost protected by the breezy tone of the way "love" is bandied about immediately following this statement (even that I find slightly disturbing - as if he didn't quite trust love enough and felt more comfortable using it as a kind of human shield, using a part of himself to defend another, wayward part that won't play along), but finally left open to the machinations of the reader - the self from which the poetic voice is reconstructed is ALWAYS to some extent created by the readerly act, and that's a kind of political manoeuvre that bleeds out frequently from O'Hara's more naked poems. What is more political than manipulation at the hands of a distant other? This is what I mean by the poem acting, or being political more than meaning someTHING political, in that narrow sense that politics sets up for itself when being referenced in those terms. Is the faux pas in O'Hara a radical wound through which the poet allows the reader a glimpse into their own manipulative designs upon the body of the other?

Letter to Jonny Liron, 9.5.10

Dear Jonny,

So, the terms of engagement. After spending the last couple of days with some sort of letter sploshing around in my head, I'm not even sure any more of the points I was supposed to make, or even if they need to be made. What am I trying to do comparing Poetry and Theatre when what I should be doing is getting on with making poems? I remember reading about Yves Klein and his entourage, that Klein was approaching Art through his painting, one of his friends through poetry, another through music, etc, but the point seemed to be that they were all looking for the same essential fix, they just differed on their respective ways in. I don't think that sets up our terms very satisfactorily, because I wouldn't presume to want the same thing that you do, and I think to assume that is arrogant and stupid. There isn't just some great big Art that we're traveling towards through our different praxes, no point at which we can all say - we've arrived, Jonny get here through theatre, Joe through poetry, that's just too universalist and ultimately bland and reductive.

Nor do I want to "defend" poetry - it's failures and limitations are what interest me most. Have you seen the recent discussions on the List about sestina form and wrong poetry?

But I am interested in the form an event takes. The liveness of any art is contingent on the act of its occurrence - any given performance of a composed piece of music or a written poem is an instance of a singular thing that acts to transform that thing - it is no longer inert but performative. In some musical cultures the idea that there is no such thing as a piece of music outside of the act of its being played is more explicit than in others, and only relatively recently have Western musicologists questioned the superiority of the idea of the "Great Work" that exists before and after any of its articulations in performance, and subtends those individual instances within some grand structure of meaning. That's obviously not how we encounter art in our lives - meaning is totally contextual, delineated by the subjective and the communal, and tied up with culturally ingrained responses. Theatre brings these things to the forefront of the stage, as it were, as it is. The continuing and responsive present moment of being, distended indefinitely. The ultimate mode would of course be Chris's utopia of ever-on-going theatre that the public would and could encounter at any point - the never-ending present distended indefinitely in actual praxis. I don't know, maybe this stuff is just so totally intuitive it doesn't need pointing out, and the dialectic between a work and its articulations in lived experience is just something that hovers at varying radii from any practice. This is why I'm so fascinated by folk song - it is constantly dealing with this dialectic (or what in the essay on Dorn which I attach I call a trialectic, because you have to take the singer into account as well) at the forefront of its practice. That discrepancy between the artwork and its articulation in performance, whether what is being performed is the same essential THING or whether it becomes a new phenomenon each time, and the discrepancy between the artist and the historical context out of which she arises, are isomorphic. I'm building patterns of reality in the hope that they'll break down and split. An act of tuning. The history of temperament.

From a letter to Neil Pattison, 1.5.10

So, enough quotation. I want to address folk song in Olsonian terms, especially the sense of the phylogenetic in the ontogenetic, which is something I reference above when talking about Jonathan P. Stock's response to Victor Grauer's article on the evolution of musical forms in the journal World of Music, and then move onto talking about the use of song in modern poetry, specifically with reference to Ed Dorn's Geography. One of the key elements of folk song, as I mentioned at the very beginning, is the position of the singer within the song. When a folk singer sings, is she singing "the song", her "version" of the song, or something else entirely? Cecil Sharp tries to pin down the question of the authorship of folk songs in his English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, rejecting both the idea that the folk song has no author and simply arises out of an anonymous collective tradition, and the super-relativistic conception of there being no such thing as "a song" and that each interpretation of such a phenomena is a new song in itself. His compromise is to cite a constant development of the body of song in which the songs are transformed over the course of generations to mean the particular version that is sung at any given time - in other words, that each articulation of the body of song will occur in an environment in which that song's status is always already assumed. The divergences and discrepancies between "different" versions of the "same" song is a paradox that is contained within the legitimacy allowed to such "versions" within their communities. Nonetheless, always with folk song there is the looming sense of the singer coming out of and returning to a wider tradition that both authenticates and subtends her voice - that determines its variation and encompasses its scope. Always in folk song there seems to me that essential ontology of being one amongst many, how to determine the scope of one's voice. The dialectic can be disturbing - folk song, in any culture, is a closed system, or cosmology. It prescribes and determines the limits of one's capacity for love.

Photograph from the Brighton Poetry Festival by Marianne Morris

2010-05-01T20:18:00.001+01:00

Work Songs

2010-04-21T00:54:00.012+01:00

The BRight-On Poesie Festival still ringing in my beleaguered ears as I type, a full and proper redaction of the weekend's mountains and pitfalls will surely appear as soon as I don't have to sleep immediately. For now I'll post my 2 cents worth of World of Work, Chris Goode and Jonny Liron's rambunctious, fecund and SHLONGO!!!-centered menagerie - what I called a 'work song' for the purposes of the piece, and what has since developed into a kernel of an idea for a thought about such performance stimuli, and where and how they could possibly go. Again, the material is Feld via some Fluxus STUFF and maybe even some Mac Low, as he's certainly on the agenda. Meanwhile, a review I wrote of Andrea Brady's incendiary new Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity & Illumination has popped up in the new QUID (20) alongside poetry by JL the finer, an essay by Lowri Jenkins on Tim Atkins and a hole buncha other celebrity gossip and free moisturiser samples. Top tens, seaside prattle and everything else will turn up laterz. Ouch. x

Phil Tanner, for Peter

2010-04-06T16:40:00.037+01:00

Just left the house for the first time in 3 days and the air is primed and musky with a lurid stickiness that even drowned out the cat alarms, but what the fields must have smelled like down in the village of Llangennith on the Gower peninsula back in 1937 one can only strive to imagine. Ale, probably. Llangenny's Phil Tanner was recorded by the BBC in 1937 and 1949 singing a selection of traditional ballads, bawdy verses and "mouth music", the latter a vocal style imitating the whiddles and trumps of fiddle music and sounding gloriously like a kind of drunken rural glossolalia, interspersed with dance accompaniment instructions ["step"] and the odd joyous yelp. A victim of the grossly unjust late 19th century land laws in Wales that were investigated in 1893 by the Liberal government, Tanner married a 50 year-old widowed landlady at 25 and was a weaver and farm labourer for most of his life. The liner notes to Veteran's 2003 release The Gower Nightingale make a pretty good effort at re-inserting the socio-economic context of Tanner's life and times into the sickeningly halcyon nostalgia of Wynford Vaughan Thomas' caricature of the man as one of the "amiable eccentrics" peddled on his 1976 BBC radio programme of the same name. Thomas, whose commentary on Tanner appears on the CD in two parts, essentially presents the folk singer as a vehicle for his own brand of lamentable faded-youth Hardy-esque countryside quaintness who "wasn't concerned with protest in the slightest degree" (despite the fact that he was one of the very few farm labourers actually to give evidence of the working man's plight in the district to the Royal Commission on Land in Wales & Monmouth as part of the above mentioned investigation, and was consistently refused farm tenancy and thus social advancement by the machinations of the local landowner) and was always "happy and contented" (despite the cruel and ineluctable fates of the characters in the songs he sang). The liners, meanwhile, present a lovingly researched history not only of Tanner and his clan, but of wassailing, bidding weddings and mouth music, and Roy Palmer provides some interesting commentaries on the songs themselves.

I've put up a few of Tanner's more astonishing songs here, including an example of his mouth music, a style that prevails amongst those crazy "travelling folk" of most areas of the British Isles, and quite remarkably beautifully is called "tuning" by the Renals & Legg family of North Cornwall in particular (says Palmer). The Gower Wassail would've been sung as Tanner went wassailing with his own brew, and exchanged verses with those upon whom he'd called for a dance and a drink. Young Roger Esquire seems to be a particularly self-reflexive & satirical song, the last verse apparently deflating the entire episode with a cod-heroic statement from our greedy eponymous hero. Palmer dates the song to early 19th century, which fits. The Gower Reel mouth music is a joy and a hoot - three separate versions are presented on the CD, which can be found here. And is it just me, or perhaps my latent ageism and beardism, but does anyone else spot the uncanny resemblance between Tanner (above), and a certain late, famous British sound poet in full flow? Just a teenchy bit? And isn't the mouth music the icing on the cake of that potentially spurious comparison? How fruitful would it be to think about Cobbing's work less in terms of pure sound, and more in terms of song?

Lastly, I should point to a particularly stunning verse from Tanner's version of the Wassail that, according to Palmer, is found in no others:

We know by the moon that we are not too soon,
And we know by the sky that we are not too high;
We know by the stars that we are not too far,
And we know by the ground that we are within sound.

Which I suppose is pretty much about as Hölderlinian as you can get 70 years ago in rural South Wales, that measuring of song as breath and spirit, deeply alive (and probably just as deeply drunk), isomorphic with the measuring of oneself against the body of song from which the singer emerges, and into which he disappears.

Go To FileFactory.com

Teengirl Fantasy!!!!

2010-04-03T12:35:00.001+01:00

bird sound words

2010-03-31T23:37:00.009+01:00

There is much splashing
& the song
hardens
into many simultaneous
drops

*

1) place names very close together
2) place names very far apart

This follows
the general song axiom
to always be abstract
before being explicit

*

In effect
the instrument's sound flows
indexically to the body's flow

by the singer, whose song
demands confirmation
singling out
one, two
or a number of audience members
who may be provoked
to tears

*

These phrases beg for help
attention
and recognition

and result in a feeling
of sorrow

*

The song had proceeded, hardened
& climaxed; here, at the end,
you are what you call
"home"

-

Adapted from Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression, (2nd ed. 1990) University of Pennsylvania Press.

An open letter to Chris Goode

2010-03-17T13:43:00.009Z

Dear Chris,

I’ve been figuring out how best to arrange this, in the sense that it was originally reaction to your piece Who You Are, but now must necessarily take the position of reaction to the reactions to that performance from both yourself [of which, by the way, I'm very touched to be the dedicatee] and Lowri Jenkins on Repetitive Strain, then somewhere below the sternum coagulate into coherent arguments oriented towards an object of discussion to which I was a party. The whole thing seemed a little daunting, and I thought about just posting recorded conversations I’d had with Jonny and Matt at the bar, and these might crop up now and then as they seem to capture something fleeting and analogue that I wouldn’t know how to write down on my own if I tried.

There is a point at which desire segues into didacticism. There is also a point at which it comes back out the other side, and is, hopefully, greeted with some kind of confirmation or conversation. This loop, this glass, is what I’m interested in here, and what I saw in Who You Are was at least in part a negotiation of the desire to find new ways of being with, and closer together to, other people, and the risk of alienation that is ineffably built into that desire and which sends it ramming up against its own projections in a kind of beautifully tender dialectical frottage. The precariousness of those projections are perhaps more obviously consciously composed than some would believe, or like to believe, or care about, but the fragility of that ultra-reality in theatrical space demands at least some kind of cognitive leap on behalf of the audience (or perhaps a physical one in a different type of piece). Now this is what the piece did, and in that sense my reactions to Balka’s How It Is as an artwork or installation were inescapably wired into the performance that took place inside it. Immediately after the show, for example, I was thinking about that grumpy critic, and reflecting on my own grumpiness inside How It Is when I was first in there a couple of weeks ago. My grumpiness was predicated on the space of that works’ immediate occurrence, and irritation that what you saw as a momentary finding oneself, and celebrating that fact, I saw as an essentially touristy form of instant nostalgia, wiping out the very theatricality of the space by illuminating it, instead of perhaps trying to find oneself, or other people, in the dark. Of course, these two reactions are not mutually exclusive or incommensurate [edit: no, hang on, actually they are], and in fact given the increasing level of light inside How It Is, I imagine frustration of the sort I experienced will quickly become pointless in the extreme. My desire inside How It Is was frustrated because I wanted everyone else to be doing the same thing I was doing, so that we could all be together. Yours was not because you revelled in the conceptual and literal cracks in the walls that would permit the all-too massive artifice of the piece to be ruptured by an ecstatic refusal to do what everyone else was doing, and you found that through that process you could feel more together with those others than you would have done had you closed your eyes and fumbled about claiming purity of artifice. By a similar twist Who You Are could be transformative only if each individual audience member took it upon himself or herself to first realise the impossible speciousness of transcendence before desiring it anyway [any way]. That was a terrible way of putting it. By a similar twist Who You Are enacted the failure of the theatrical artifice (falling back into "performance") and wriggled around inside the gap it opened up. By a twist not un-similiar to whatever, Who You Are understood the imperialism behind the words "love this" and sought to love us instead.

Who You Are was not trying to be transcendental, or metaphysical, and nor was it – it was grounded, tenderly and quietly in the disruptions between the categories of selves and others, performers and audiences, theatre and…theatre. What are we doing with our privacy if not at all times attempting to give it away? I say “we” here meaning our gang, obviously. If you’re not, I really don’t want to know. Or perhaps I do and I don’t know it yet. There is a point at which it comes back out the other side. Say, I should try and get into the nitty-gritty. This is how, for example, I saw the “biographical” section of the piece, or even perhaps the way you described your elation at the kids taking photos of themselves in the dark. The immediate suggestion, the sound coming out is one of want – the utter, natural body, the voice in the body which is the body’s, is speaking to us, the audience, but more specifically, to me, Joe Luna, telling me utter truths that it could tell to no-one else, and yet is, because this is a public confessional, which becomes dangerous – why is he telling me these things? What does he want? The confessional becomes a kind of violence perpetrated upon the audience for daring to believe they could be listening to any kind of truth, the value of which is irrelevant in this situation anyway because we’re in a fucking box – the desire becomes a lecture, it becomes, in the audience’s mind, an attempt at wanting them to want, to encourage a reciprocal desire, the didacticism of desire, as it washes over us, what then, is the difference between this string of words, and the digitally randomly generated names we heard earlier? The search terms bundled into a body. As you said,

…the six minute duration was intended to be long enough to allow the audience to experience exactly the shift that I've been through and which I now experience as a kind of drone of ambivalence and tension. What seems like an act of making oneself vulnerable quickly becomes powerful, even aggressive -- just as Lowri notes, apparently supposing this to be a flaw in the work, rather than a question that it's trying to ventilate. The image I had in my mind as I wrote it was of someone kind of hurling their body against that invisible fourth wall, the edge of the huge vitrine that all gallery art and so much performance is trapped in, often not even knowing that that plane is there, is still there. The image of a wasp trapped behind a window, that keeps banging its head, unable to comprehend the unseen barrier between itself and the outside.

But the unseen barrier is also (in) me, and I felt it very calmly and clearly somewhere around my solar plexus during this part of the performance, and during the section in which we were asked, did we think about the performers like they think about us? Did we wonder what they were going to perform for us? Will they get it wrong? Will they get it right? Now through me, and only through me, can this possibility of empathy be given a wasp’s chance in hell of getting through. Empathy is erotic: What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain (Bataille). What I desire, in the context of such a piece of theatre as Who You Are, is not only sustaining but possible, and this is before “we” as an audience can get anywhere as a collective unit. It is the elective nature of the work that pushes it back out of didacticism and completes the feedback loop, that I want it, even as the fourth wall of every person in the audience becomes momentarily clear. Something that both you and Jonny have said is also becoming much clearer – that the theatrical has the potential to be more real than everything else that goes on around it, and I think this has something to do with the giddy patterns the superfluity of desire traces as it negotiates the risk, harm & warmth of every potential encounter.

I told you I was troubled after the show, and I still am, because it seemed to me to strike a chord which has been reverberating throughout a lot of performances and readings I’ve attended lately, and this is the failure of passion, or more precisely, passionate failure. I’m not even sure what else I want to say about that, and anyway, I think you know what I mean. Have you been listening to that JLS song too? No? Shit.

“It won’t be me”. Well, exactly. But it might be.

x

misc/fest

2010-03-14T23:02:00.007Z

It could be a breeding ground. I think this is pretty important, and the related stew, for vignettes as brilliant as:

"I believe that the future of the money shot will involve the impossibility of male ejaculation, which is still too human, too teleological. Impotent men will toss themselves off in vain while a pretty young girl gazes up at them as if at the cosmos itself. There will be no mediation."

amongst others. Having been in Cambridge a lot, I am stoked about Katko, Liron, Weber and Manson to such a degree that I'm having trouble sleeping; Katko reading the lyrics to JLS' One Shot as the song played through in its entirety was both funny and incredibly touching, the Epic/Sony production juggernaut being filtered through Katko playing Pinter/Wournos in the basement darkness of the Judith E. Wilson studio a premise the song could (probably) never have anticipated, its proxy, slick, crotch-grabbing emotion somehow hi-jacked into live & singular tenderness by its appropriation through Will Stuart's Transfigurations. The re-figuring of corporate passion as substitute, placebo, satiric enjambment or brutally relentless subjectivity, not to mention knife-wielding compassion, seems hard-wired into any useful reaction to what is commonly known as love & shopping - I'll get the lads out, Robbie's already downed a bottle of absinthe and is sicking up the alphabet. In any case, I loved Jordan Hunt's piece as well, and perhaps I wouldn't have done had I seen it in any other setting, but I didn't, and as far as I'm concerned it rammed its own futility up the backside of most of the derision it could've engendered, flailing helplessly & all-too-aware of its own impotence in the face of non- contemporaneousness both relational and chronological. Shit hurts. I'm not talking about boyfriends by the way :) O Tuborg dark, the liquid soundtrack washing me to gentler shores. Tate tomorrow. Hype Williams & the Hounds of Hate, all of that, etc. x

how we roll

2010-03-14T12:44:00.012Z

some material aspects of the preceding

2010-03-14T02:49:00.016Z

Icarus '05

2010-02-24T10:48:00.001Z

Valentine's Donk

2010-02-17T13:09:00.000Z

This poem was literally fashioned out of concrete.

Don't let Rawls get wind of this

2010-02-17T01:13:00.000Z

Daniels:

O but fathom my heart’s
beleaguered forfeit,
some merry hack-job
in blackest panties,
romance pro-rata

McNulty:

The best poem ever:
O Death Where is Thy Sting
or, tea-bagging a milf smoking
a photocopied cigarette

Daniels:

[ignoring him]
Nor is any loss
abstract-able.
Whose fearful pomp
delivers crucial salmon –

The day is goaded
’cross the tripwire of
her smile

McNulty:

[starts quoting Veronica Forrest-Thompson
then thinks better of it]
a.k.a. no slack resplendent,
your faded corpse-paint
edits only less frenetic
self-inflicted; the bookends
of our lives are sound &
song

Omar:

Indeed.

Daniels:

Put a Breendonk on it asshole –
Aeolian is all, and I the reed.
In ’76 I caught a glimpse
of everything, the darkness
spread thin as ink, her fingernails
cute as sugared almonds

McNulty:

Squinting at the legislature
foreshortens the money-shot.
Any mouth is theoretically
compromised if all you do
is rip & run

Greggs:

[balks, incredulous]
& fuck you very much –
the chapter headed
Scourge of the Dialectic
cross-fades all blissful-like unto
the setting sun

Daniels:

[increasingly agitated]
My rank protectorate
so discharged, night
terrors come in caravans
to mix my blood with olive oil
& tear me a new one.
This fear completes me.

McNulty:

This whole screwy cosmogony
chides us with spirit propaganda
[sings]
1, 2, buckle my shoe,
3, 4, murder a whore

Daniels:

Odi et amo…
But most of all, I love my job.

Prez:

What’s cosmogony?

McNulty:

It is finished in ignorance
and blessed with caustic irony.
How may any man
Not love and be deceived?

Daniels:

A little something called
Chain of command, shitbird.
Lord knows I’m tired of this
existentialist tourette’s, hetero-throats
& death breath…
[he begins to weep, gently]
I bury my head in her digital bosom –

McNulty:

– and show me yr tits on chat roulette.
I love you back
but it comes out pebble-dash;
fuck you
& fuck the bosses.
The poem is a plug.

Bunk:

[aside]
And the smoke hangs in the air
Like smoke.

2010-02-12T13:04:00.001Z

Bled Ink (Robbie Dawson)

2010-01-31T22:40:00.000Z

This is from Robbie Dawson's flickr account, the source of some joy, some exasperation and much clicking to-and-fro this otherwise utterly banal evening. There was talk at the back of my head about a post on poetic practice, some kind of extraction & distillation of recent work, but the juice of it keeps leaking in unpredictable ways and I'd feel more comfortable if we all just did it anyway. An emergency falling asleep, indeed. I hope the next one doesn't feel so amputated. Hej da x

Sublime Usurper

2010-01-23T22:10:00.000Z

I've been plugging the Edinburgh-based improvisers Usurper (above) to anyone who'll listen for a few years now, and continue to do so in a piece that should be up on Foxy Digitalis in the next few days. In it I propose, roughly, that Usurper are like, Adorno, but like, not. I can't believe The Wire haven't offered me a job yet. In other Foxy D news an interesting and pertinent review of a new Sublime Frequencies release has been posted by Jan-Arne Sohns, who argues that Bishop and Gergis's latest shows worrying signs of an extremely counter-productive fetishism and de-historicising of the material at hand, as a result of which what is on one level an undeniably noble program tends to segue, however unwittingly, into a culturally dubious proxy-nostalgia that offers archive Asian pop music a chance to escape its obscurity only by being streamlined through a bastardised commodity-fetish presentation of its own outlandish otherness. Now, this won't be news to a lot of people, and the debate over SF's ethical water-tightness has been bubbling away for years and usually surfaces in interviews in the form of a question about royalties and the suchlike, to which the answers are for the most part perfectly reasonable - when SF is able to pay a living artist it does, although as a great deal of their catalogue represents archive compilations this to me isn't the most pertinent question concerning their methodology. Alan Bishop is an intelligent man and will deliberately fly in the face of perceived criticism of the label on any kind of anthropological grounds, often deliberately imitating a kind of gaudy post-imperialist sarcasm and making sweeping statements about the "system" and the "industry" which leads only to an opaque and seemingly ill-conceived notion of how SF fits into the "industry" picture. But these kind of statements are a part of the structures which SF uses to reflect its position with regard to what Bishop has termed the "academically catalogued/corporately funded "we've done all the work so stay home and shutup" elitist ethno-agenda", and more to the point (because no-one's trying to defend Songlines or Tower Records) the design and manufacture of the records displays the hand of the compiler in such a way that, in the words of Marcus Boon:

more than being eclecticism for its own sake, these "foreign" intrusions mark the presence of the editors, their own tastes and idiosyncrasies, the subjective nature of their choices. They also mark "the foreign" or "the intrusive" as something that is already being negotiated and appropriated through montage as a source of power and pleasure in these places...

These "intrusions" also take the form of absence, in the often stark and limited manner in which SF packages its CDs, something that Sohns takes particular offence to in his review of the latest Thai Pop Spectacular. This, too, can be recovered into the socio-political remit of the label in terms of a refutation of the kind of "elitist ethno-agenda" Bishop mentions in the Foxy interview - by serving up little aperitifs of text in the accompanying packaging, you reduce the need of the listener to actually find out where this music is coming from, what it's doing, when and why. After all, what is "fifty words of wall text next to a sweet ceremonial mask or hitting Wikipedia to explain jihad" if not base and misleading scholarly nonsense that would be condescending to all involved? The point is that for all the SF team's excellent and productive discussion of travel as the means of furthering one's cultural horizons instead of constantly searching for the traces of one's own, and the obvious encouragement for people who buy their records to search the stuff out for themselves, visit cassette shops and junk markets and find the musicians, the material itself suffers from a dearth of historical and social contextual information because this would be at odds with the aesthetic aura that defines the label's output.

The world of social anthropology has come a long way since Malinowski, and I think it safe to say that appeasing the likes of Sohns in terms of a few more liners in the releases would not only be possible within the parameters of SF's political aesthetic but actually boost the credibility of their status as an outsider label operating as a cultural jammer, feeding the ignorant Western music industry music it was too lazy or too disinterested to appropriate for its own ends. It's also fair to assume, and Bishop has been explicit about this in at least one interview, that the places from which, say, the golden-age nuggets of South-East Asian pop culture come from aren't particularly interested in having them re-discovered, and that the image of nostalgia that is marketed in the CDs design and presentation is to a certain extent a substitute for researching the providence and cultural legacy of the music more rigorously. The attitude sometimes adopted seems to be very much in line with something Bishop says in a Believer interview from 2008, and which chimes with others I've read:

BLVR: Travelling as frequently as you do, I’m curious as to how many languages you speak.

AB: I don’t speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don’t even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places. If you’re somewhat resourceful and perceptive, you’re pretty much going to know what’s going on because human nature is human nature: they understand it, you understand it, and it works.

This strikes me as odd coming from someone who is obviously a champion and an advocate of the culturally mysterious, weird and wonderful as spanners to throw in the monocultural works - he also states that this willful ignorance is an active and positive force in the creation of the SF canon, as if, for example, Bishop is listening to a Thai pop song from "the 70s" and doesn't know what the lyrics mean,

I can read it into my own way of formulating what it means to me. For the same reason that the guy singing that Thai song may even listen to Western music, but he’s not going to know what’s going on with the Western music either. He doesn’t know the fine points. He doesn’t speak English. Let’s say that all the Thais are listening to all this Western pop music and they don’t understand what they’re saying either. But they love it because it’s doing the exact same thing to them as their songs do to me. That’s the similarity here. That’s what is much more interesting than knowing what the songs are about.

which is where I suppose we would fundamentally disagree about the nature of the universal experience Bishop espouses, even if it can even be posited with any validity that such experience is culturally exchangeable in the terms described. If the desire is to actually encounter otherness and embrace that encounter instead of appropriating and translating it then why prioritise "what it means to me" as the sole barometer of cultural legacy? Is this kind of ultra-subjectivity towards musical meaning the only valid and meaningful interpretation left of how musics themselves translate as experience or commodity? Or is Bishop's stance the appropriate response to the "ethno-elitism" that itself appropriates, designates meaning and then presents its findings to the world at large? Is it, indeed, a part of the guerrilla tactics which Bishop clearly sees as necessary for SF to use in order to remain differentiated from the industry and closer to the non-aesthetic of Thai or Indonesian bootleg CD stalls, at which discographical information is at best patchy and in most cases non-existent? If the latter is true, which is probably the case, then it remains a strange image of a non-existent aesthetic, propagating as style something that is, in a sense, poverty or loss. At any rate, it does not, to my mind, serve SF's wider agenda, especially in terms of realising something of the nature of the “exotic”, that its predilection for a dearth of historical-contextual information may serve to have its products consumed as blindly and as familiarly as any other product of the Western-oriented pop hegemony; and the fact that so much of the South-East Asian material in some way involves American or European influences as essential ingredients in order to concoct their original histories complicates instead of simplifying the picture.

It should not escape note that I own a number of SF releases, and believe the SF canon to be a brilliant, vibrant and important document of modern and archival sounds, and hope they continue releasing this stuff if only because you're not going to hear Blondie in Khmer Camouflage anywhere else. But I am wary, like Sohns, of consuming at face value what are often very historically and culturally complex documents from incredibly diverse cultural backgrounds whilst being told that we are all human and thus all musical meaning is somehow directly culturally symmetrical.

untitled

2010-01-19T01:14:00.000Z

so, song as not response
but inculcation on the variant
instance, what is hewn
at the point, of fraternity

utterly unimpeachable

2010-01-06T00:00:00.001Z