tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17379929448135848692024-03-12T23:33:51.873-07:00Conceptual Writing 101Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-3643664907946087312010-11-12T08:10:00.000-08:002010-11-12T08:10:51.196-08:00LEMON HOUND: Pulled off my Shelves #8: "All Work and No Play Ma...<a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/11/pulled-off-my-shelves-8-all-work-and-no.html?spref=bl">LEMON HOUND: Pulled off my Shelves #8: "All Work and No Play Ma...</a>: "In All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, Phil Buehler attempts to document, assemble and continue Jack Torrance’s manuscript from Stan..."Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-48820320931178014072010-11-09T07:33:00.000-08:002010-11-09T07:33:10.435-08:00In which Vanessa Place addressesA few of the questions people had about her <i><a href="http://living.scotsman.com/features/Interview-Vanessa-Place-lawyer-and.6617682.jp?articlepage=2">Statement Of Facts</a></i> piece which she read from recently in Montreal.Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-15699508814697693692010-10-26T19:41:00.001-07:002010-10-26T19:41:03.714-07:00Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/LFE2CCfAP1o?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/LFE2CCfAP1o?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-91450803580588079842010-10-25T11:32:00.000-07:002010-10-25T11:32:30.013-07:00Conceptual Writing, sure, but what is Flarf?<blockquote><span>Flarf plays Dionysus to Conceptual Writing’s Apollo. Flarf uses traditional poetic tropes (“taste” and “subjectivity”) and forms (stanza and verse) to turn these conventions inside out. Conceptual Writing rarely “looks” like poetry and uses its own subjectivity to construct a linguistic machine that words may be poured into; it cares little for the outcome. Flarf is hilarious. Conceptual Writing is dry. Flarf is the Land O’Lakes butter squaw; Conceptual Writing is the government’s nutritional label on the box. Flarf is Larry Rivers. Conceptual Writing is Andy Warhol. No matter. They’re two sides of the same coin. Choose your poison and embrace your guilty pleasure.</span><span class="uc">—</span><span class="uc"><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=237176">Kenny G </a>.</span></blockquote><span class="uc">Also, here's a flarf poem from Katie Degentesh. For a reading of Degentesh's poem see <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/11/ryan-fitzpatrick-reads-katie-degentesh.html">Ryan Fitzpatrick</a> here. </span><br />
<blockquote><span class="uc"><br />
</span><br />
NO ONE CARES MUCH WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU<br />
<br />
when Serbs get mad, they talk<br />
about a small town like Grace<br />
<br />
Stop laughing; I’m serious<br />
Grace is all I can afford on my nursing home wages<br />
<br />
I pity her for the thankless job of building<br />
A nation of Americans conceived in petri dishes.<br />
<br />
Whores are disposable.<br />
They get strangled, beaten, tortured, raped ...<br />
<br />
in old motels, diners, train stations, or whatever,<br />
and I think about Capri Sun bags when it happens.<br />
<br />
As he unzips his pants I realize that I’m<br />
what happens to us when the curtain goes down<br />
<br />
no one cares much for the body parts<br />
murderer creeping up behind her<br />
<br />
Look, poetry, painting, writing ...<br />
People don’t get it like they should.<br />
<br />
But it exists because it’s a link to what we can<br />
accomplish through our Academic Plan<br />
<br />
no mattter how public it all seems<br />
there’s a forced casualness to this conversation<br />
<br />
I’ve been out here shooting long snough<br />
I know even a public toilet will net you jail time<br />
<br />
Because when it comes to that word, “nigger,”<br />
- I know that this is illegal -<br />
<br />
it’s like the emergence of yet another guilty, white Southern male<br />
as the fat lady continues to sing<br />
<br />
“when they were first created the thing<br />
was to make them as white as possible”<br />
<br />
as long as we are laughing<br />
at Rush Limbaugh’s addiction<br />
<br />
remember that Mt. Rushmore was itself<br />
the creation of an ardent member of the Ku Klux Klan<br />
<br />
from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Anger Scale</span></blockquote>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-36525648373648879122010-10-22T09:00:00.001-07:002010-10-22T09:00:54.531-07:00derek beaulieu: Dadaist Poems & Morebeaulieu's post on <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/10/pulled-off-my-shelves-5-compose-holes.html">Lemon Hound</a> today.Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-51004783481816639402010-10-21T13:41:00.000-07:002010-10-21T13:41:23.198-07:00Not conceptual perhaps, but funAlso, can <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5669317/student-hides-rick-astleys-song-in-college-paper">anyone get enough of the Ginger Smoothie</a>?Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-32506247289399519472010-10-18T17:39:00.000-07:002010-10-18T17:40:39.111-07:00Kenneth Goldsmith: Always Almost Obsolete, Always Almost NewConceptual Writing is automatic. It operates most efficiently when machines perpetuate it subconsciously. Conceptual Writing is infinitely flexible. It is obvious yet discreet, insidious yet desirable, powerful yet pathetic. It is despised, yet sought after. It is ubiquitous yet specific. It is both centralized and dispersed. The medium for Conceptual Writing is information, which is a mere receptacle for quantification — a domain within which information is both extracted and deployed. It is the grid again — the return of the Cartesian, but with a vengeance. This time, roving crosshairs — not unlike those of missile guidance systems — have been included. Conceptual Writing doesn’t have the pretense to find poetry all that important; in subsuming literature to the statistical, it announces the obsolescence of expression.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Conceptual Writing is evaluated through an entirely modernized vocabulary; no longer is it a matter of versification or enjambment, but instead is now computed, calibrated, assessed, predicted, optimized. Conceptual Writing is mobile. Like a roaming searchlight, Conceptual Writing brings certain linguistic regions to visibility depending on particular informational categories while others are suppressed, invisible, or ignored. It is a literature in continuous flux, diligently recording the fulminating processes of the web: Borges’ map of infinite information, only set in motion.<br />
<br />
Conceptual Writing is the desire to make literature simultaneous with the irrationalities and vicissitudes of the literary establishment. It is the aspiration to a type of stability assured by mechanisms that enable immediate retaliation or response to sudden change, suited to the digital environment which grows increasingly flexible, increasingly ephemeral, increasingly mutable.<br />
<br />
The network forms the cognition of Conceptual Writing, determines its vision, seeps into its subconscious. It is so basic as to be literature’s assumed, uncritically deployed mode of operation, its instinctual reflex, its aspiration.<br />
<br />
Conceptual Writing is engineered and totally artificial, serving simultaneously as reassurance, therapy and panacea for literary paranoias. It is the solution to a desperation born of the constant threat of terminal decline.<br />
<br />
Conceptual Writing signifies the need to understand, quantify, record, regurgitate, manipulate, and coerce the process, circumstances, and flow that determine thinkership. It is a meticulously assembled apparatus. In order to make its processes intelligible and useful, it has canonized data. Conceptual Writing inaugurates the triumph of the statistical.<br />
<br />
Conceptual Writing deforms what used to be considered The Literary. Not only have the traditional distinctions between public / private, inside / outside, and near / far been eclipsed by this far more efficient, rapid, ubiquitous, and “invisible” literature of informational analysis, saturation, and regulation; in the wake of Conceptual Writing, poetry has been surreptitiously mutated, topologically reconfigured, systematically coerced, while still (innocently) believing in “Literature’s” former authority.<br />
<br />
Just as industrial production discharges effluent by-products, so does the Conceptual Writing generate its own type of residue. As language is increasingly treated as a resource to be exploited, processed, and manipulated, and as the forces of measurement become increasingly accelerated, non-expressive, and non-locale based, so must language be discarded, abandoned, expended. Much of the new writing is generated by default rather than intent, creating a new literary landscape, comprised of residual words. The most visible and obvious manifestation of this residuum is the generation of an unfamiliar literary landscape that, when viewed under more traditional criteria, appears dissolute, attenuated, entropic, and amorphous. As it operates through logistical networks, mechanized protocols, pre-ordained structures, Conceptual Writing becomes rapidly suffused by its own residue, resulting in a ubiquitous wasteland of boredom.<br />
<br />
How totalizing is Conceptual Writing? Its focus is inherently short lived, inherently desperate, inherently capricious. Conceptual Writing is constantly searching for the next realm of exploitation, the next window of opportunity. In exacerbating instabilities for its own benefit, in artificially accelerating the cycles of decline and obsolescence, and in constantly shifting its focus from one domain to another, Conceptual Writing inevitably produces gaps, contradictions, perhaps even moments of freedom situated not so much outside but alongside and within control.<br />
<br />
Conceptual Writing is still imperfect. Engineered as a type of life support system deployed with varying degrees of effectiveness, it represents the corporate desire for its own type of sustainability. Yet to what degree can this system be perfected? To what degree are the complexities and unpredictabilities of literature beyond its control?<br />
<br />
from <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/always-almost-obsolete-always-almost-new/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+HarrietTheBlog+(Harriet:+The+Blog)&utm_content=FaceBook">Poetry Foundation</a>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-91412492254853190002010-10-18T17:38:00.000-07:002010-10-18T17:38:03.489-07:00Vanessa Place: Notes on why Conceptualism is Better than Flarf<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">1. Conceptualism asks what is poetry?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">1. Flarf says sez you!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">2. Flarf is never about anything other than poetry itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">2. Conceptualism is allegorical. It is about things other than poetry itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">3. Flarf is the court jester. As such, it is still a member of the court.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">3. Conceptualism courts jest, but is not the king’s dog.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">4. Flarf is composition.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">4. Conceptualism is composed.</span></div><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">5. Conceptualism employs a variety of techniques that compromise and complicate the question of excess text, of unreadability, of extra-textual narrativity, of the need for and love of categories and the acategorical, of the false and adored divide between praxis and other praxis, addition and subtraction, theory and things with two types of teeth.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">5. Flarf is a one-trick pony that thinks a unicorn is another kind of horse. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">6. Flarf is sexual repression on a half-shell. It giggles at dildos.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">6. Conceptualism is sexy. The penis is a dildo.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">7. Flarf still loves poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">7. Conceptualism loves poetry enough to put it out of its misery.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">8. Flarf wants to be funny.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">8. Conceptualism wants. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">9. Flarf maintains a superior attitude towards the world-at-large. Random.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">9. Legit.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">10. Flarf has one answer to every problem. It involves the spin or schema of interpretation, that is to say, the social construction of a social phenomenon, such as is favored by advertisers and politicians. Thus, its philosophical underpinnings lie primarily in a Platonic premise of a unified ethical and aesthetic field, in the sense that the frame as represented must contain a more or less stable relationship to a larger belief-system, equally stable, preferably central, in order for the frame to function as both relevant to the empirical realities of its potential participants and to the narrative fidelity of the frame itself. Cognitively, the framing-effect involves the amygdala, and thus flarf hits an emotional pitch. The emotional pitch, it could be noted, of the hysteric.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">10. Conceptualism has no answers, but is, instead, interrogative. Through the deployment of multiple strategies that serve to destabilize text (extant or made) via reframed reiterations and multiple sites of rhetorical deployment, conceptualism is neo-Kantian, epistemologically concerned with the ongoing sobject and the instantiation of radical evil, in other words, the affirmative will to evil that manifests the fact of will itself. In other words, the instantiation of that which is consciously contra-textual in the sense of all that has made text make contextual sense, the rendering immaterial of every materiality of poetry. The contra-text being the new con-text, con-, as I have pointed out elsewhere, in the sense of being a cunt. Conceptualism is, as the term indicates, primarily a cortical engagement.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">11. Flarf is funhouse Freud: the id tweaking the superego.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">11. Conceptualism is Lacan in a mirror, the discourse of the slave.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">12. Flarf is Freudian in the sense of the drive by way of the virtual dérive. As such, it must be sans satisfaction. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Le donné</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">12. Conceptualism is Lacanian in the sense of desire by way of the Law by way of the petit objet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a</i>. As such. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La donne<o:p></o:p></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">13. Flarf plays Cuzin while playing it off, it speaks to people in people-voice okay, it’s the first to suggest titty beer bong hits and butterscotch Jell-O shots, it wants to stay up late and bitch bitch bitch, it might bleed out but nothing’s permanently stained, it surfs like point break without leaving a wake, it goes Louey-Louey and blows O.C. pretty, it would like you to like it, really?, it wants to be kinda Dada but it’s not that fucking desperate, wants to play it black but mostly lays trick pussy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">13. Flarf plays Cuzin while playing it off, it speaks to people in people-voice okay, it’s the first to suggest titty beer bong hits and butterscotch Jell-O shots, it wants to stay up late and bitch bitch bitch, it might bleed out but nothing’s permanently stained, it surfs like point break without leaving a wake, it goes Louey-Louey and blows O.C. pretty, it would like you to like it, really?, it wants to be kinda Dada but it’s not that fucking desperate, wants to play it black but mostly lays trick pussy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">14. Flarf is a style, a mode as à la as sliced cheese on pie. Those who write flarf write flarf, or, to use their terminology, they write “flarfy” poetry, to be distinguished from regular poetry. Flarfy poetry makes hay where the sun don’t shine. Like baboons copulating in cages at the zoo, flarf fucks inside the glass walls, a show-stopping show, playing to the embarrassed (maybe) or bemused (could be) or the temporarily entertained (probably), it’s kind of natural but nature’s not in it (who me?). In this sense, flarf is a whoopie cushion in the world of the new & old lyric poem.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">14. In this sense, conceptualism is a fart.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">15. Ron Silliman likes flarf.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">15. Ron Silliman does not like conceptualism.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">16. Flarf succeeds in doing what it sets its mind to, to upend and offend, to play the hand all the way through. The best flarf is virtuosic.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">16. The best conceptualism is failure.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">17. Flarf looks like poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">17. Poetry looks like conceptualism.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Vanessa Place, April 2010</span></div>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-43005287339965271002010-10-18T10:10:00.000-07:002010-10-17T21:18:32.197-07:00Mayer/ Bernstein Writing Experiments* Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or</div><div class="MsoNormal">take out all words beginning with 's' in Shakespeare's sonnets.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of</div><div class="MsoNormal">prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing</div><div class="MsoNormal">work. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form</div><div class="MsoNormal">these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let</div><div class="MsoNormal">them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Design words. <br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">* Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a</div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">a non- connotative word, like "so" etc.</div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal">* Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until</div><div class="MsoNormal">it is "ultimately" reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or</div><div class="MsoNormal">word by word. Read a novel backwards.</div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">* Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another,</div><div class="MsoNormal">pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science</div><div class="MsoNormal">terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few</div><div class="MsoNormal">days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that</div><div class="MsoNormal">idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that</div><div class="MsoNormal">happens is in relation.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be</div><div class="MsoNormal">handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to</div><div class="MsoNormal">paper and don't stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt tape recorder work, that is, recording without a text, perhaps at</div><div class="MsoNormal">specific times. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Make notes on what happens or occurs to you for a limited amount of time,</div><div class="MsoNormal">then make something of it in writing.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write in a strict form, or, transform prose into a poetic form.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Read or write a story or myth, then put it aside and, trying to remember</div><div class="MsoNormal">it, write it five or ten times at intervals from memory. Or, make a work out</div><div class="MsoNormal">of continuously saying, in a column or list, one sentence or line, over and</div><div class="MsoNormal">over in different ways, until you get it "right."</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Make a pattern of repetitions.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by</div><div class="MsoNormal">choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a</div><div class="MsoNormal">seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or</div><div class="MsoNormal">rewriting the "source."</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Experiment with writing in every person and tense every day.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries,</div><div class="MsoNormal">almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word "word"</div><div class="MsoNormal">include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story,</div><div class="MsoNormal">word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise,</div><div class="MsoNormal">vow, contract. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* The possibilities of synesthesia in relation to language and words: the</div><div class="MsoNormal">word and the letter as sensations, colors evoked by letters, sensations</div><div class="MsoNormal">caused by the sound of a word as apart from its meaning, etc. And the effect</div><div class="MsoNormal">of this phenomenon on you; for example, write in the water, on a moving</div><div class="MsoNormal">vehicle. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Consider word and letter as forms-the concretistic distortion of a text, a</div><div class="MsoNormal">mutiplicity of o's or ea's, or a pleasing visual arrangement: "the mill pond</div><div class="MsoNormal">of chill doubt." </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Do experiments with sensory memory: record all sense images that remain</div><div class="MsoNormal">from breakfast, study which senses engage you, escape you.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical,</div><div class="MsoNormal">without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Make writing experiments over a long period of time. For example, plan how</div><div class="MsoNormal">much you will write for a particular work each day, perhaps one word or one</div><div class="MsoNormal">page. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed or written.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing and vice</div><div class="MsoNormal">versa. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing</div><div class="MsoNormal">individually off of each other's work over a long period of time in the same</div><div class="MsoNormal">room; a group contributing to the same work, sentence by sentence or line by</div><div class="MsoNormal">line; one writer being fed information and ideas while the other writes;</div><div class="MsoNormal">writing, leaving instructions for another writer to fill in what you can't</div><div class="MsoNormal">describe; compiling a book or work structured by your own language around</div><div class="MsoNormal">the writings of others; or a group working and writing off of each other's</div><div class="MsoNormal">dream writing. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or</div><div class="MsoNormal">transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and</div><div class="MsoNormal">incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or</div><div class="MsoNormal">song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity</div><div class="MsoNormal">or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream</div><div class="MsoNormal">characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks,</div><div class="MsoNormal">drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block</div><div class="MsoNormal">to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make</div><div class="MsoNormal">notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of</div><div class="MsoNormal">writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a</div><div class="MsoNormal">long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* The uses of journals. Keep a journal that is restricted to one set of</div><div class="MsoNormal">ideas, for instance, a food or dream journal, a journal that is only written</div><div class="MsoNormal">in when it is raining, a journal of ideas about writing, a weather journal.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Remember that journals do not have to involve "good" writing-they are to be</div><div class="MsoNormal">made use of. Simple one-line entries like "No snow today" can be inspiring</div><div class="MsoNormal">later. Have 3 or 4 journals going at once, each with a different purpose.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Create a journal that is meant to be shared and commented on by another</div><div class="MsoNormal">writer--leave half of each page blank for the comments of the other.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Type out a Shakespeare sonnet or other poem you would like to learn</div><div class="MsoNormal">about/imitate double-spaced on a page. Rewrite it in between the lines.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your</div><div class="MsoNormal">own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Choose a subject you would like to write "about." Then attempt to write a</div><div class="MsoNormal">piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone</div><div class="MsoNormal">to grade you. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or</div><div class="MsoNormal">surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or,</div><div class="MsoNormal">write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place</div><div class="MsoNormal">where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or</div><div class="MsoNormal">apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if</div><div class="MsoNormal">possible. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a bestiary (a poem about real and mythical animals).</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write five short expressions of the most adamant anger; make a work out of</div><div class="MsoNormal">them. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* A shocking experiment: Rip pages out of books at random (I guess you could</div><div class="MsoNormal">xerox them) and study them as if they were a collection of poetic/literary</div><div class="MsoNormal">material. Use this method on your old high school or college notebooks, if</div><div class="MsoNormal">possible, then create an epistemological work based on the randomly chosen</div><div class="MsoNormal">notebook pages. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Meditate on a word, sound or list of ideas before beginning to write.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Take a book of poetry you love and make a list, going through it poem by</div><div class="MsoNormal">poem, of the experiments, innovations, methods, intentions, etc. involved in</div><div class="MsoNormal">the creation of the works in the book.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write what is secret. Then write what is shared. Experiment with writing</div><div class="MsoNormal">each in two different ways: veiled language, direct language.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a work that attempts to include the names of all the physical</div><div class="MsoNormal">contents of the terrestrial world that you know.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without</div><div class="MsoNormal">remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and</div><div class="MsoNormal">last words of each line to see what happens. For instance, the lines (from</div><div class="MsoNormal">Einstein) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* When at the reception</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Of sense-impressions, memory pictures</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Emerge this is not yet thinking</div><div class="MsoNormal">* And when. . . </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Would become: </div><div class="MsoNormal">* When reception </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Of pictures </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Emerge thinking </div><div class="MsoNormal">* And when </div><div class="MsoNormal">* And so on. Form the original prose, poetic lines, and first-and-last word</div><div class="MsoNormal">poem into three columns on a page. Study their relationships.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one</div><div class="MsoNormal">month, then turn them into a best-selling novella.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are</div><div class="MsoNormal">conversant with). </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt</div><div class="MsoNormal">to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write</div><div class="MsoNormal">without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is "called"</div><div class="MsoNormal">invisible writing).</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Choose a period of time, perhaps five or nine months. Every day, write a</div><div class="MsoNormal">letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to</div><div class="MsoNormal">a number of people who do or do not exist. Create a title for each letter</div><div class="MsoNormal">and don't send them. Pile them up as a book.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Etymological work. Experiment with investigating the etymologies of all</div><div class="MsoNormal">words that interest you, including your own name(s). Approaches to</div><div class="MsoNormal">etymologies: Take a work you've already written, preferably something short,</div><div class="MsoNormal">look up the etymological meanings of every word in that work including words</div><div class="MsoNormal">like "the" and "a". Study the histories of the words used, then rewrite the</div><div class="MsoNormal">work on the basis of the etymological information found out. Another</div><div class="MsoNormal">approach: Build poems and writings form the etymological families based on</div><div class="MsoNormal">the Indo-European language constructs, for instance, the BHEL family: bulge,</div><div class="MsoNormal">bowl, belly, boulder, billow, ball, balloon; or the OINO family: one, alone,</div><div class="MsoNormal">lonely, unique, unite, unison, union; not to speak of one of the GEN</div><div class="MsoNormal">families: kin, king, kindergarten, genteel, gender, generous, genius,</div><div class="MsoNormal">genital, gingerly, pregnant, cognate, renaissance, and innate!</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a brief bibliography of the science and philosophy texts that</div><div class="MsoNormal">interest you. Create a file of newspaper articles that seem to relate to the</div><div class="MsoNormal">chances of writing poetry.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don't know how, I'll</div><div class="MsoNormal">be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for</div><div class="MsoNormal">instance from Melville.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has</div><div class="MsoNormal">died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write the same poem over and over again, in different forms, until you are</div><div class="MsoNormal">weary. Another experiment: Set yourself the task of writing for four hours</div><div class="MsoNormal">at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don't stop until</div><div class="MsoNormal">hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a</div><div class="MsoNormal">four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and</div><div class="MsoNormal">will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we</div><div class="MsoNormal">begin to know something.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how</div><div class="MsoNormal">thought becomes language, or does not.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For</div><div class="MsoNormal">every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the</div><div class="MsoNormal">original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word "honesty" would be</div><div class="MsoNormal">replaced by "honey dew melon." Investigate what happens; different</div><div class="MsoNormal">dictionaries will produce different results.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt to write a poem or series of poems that will change the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Does everything written or dreamed of do this?</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other</div><div class="MsoNormal">poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of</div><div class="MsoNormal">loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing</div><div class="MsoNormal">for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work</div><div class="MsoNormal">in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Experiment with every traditional form, so as to know it.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write poems and proses in which you set yourself the task of using</div><div class="MsoNormal">particular words, chosen at random like the spelling exercises of children:</div><div class="MsoNormal">intelligence, amazing, weigh, weight, camel, camel's, foresight, through,</div><div class="MsoNormal">threw, never, now, snow, rein, rain. Make a story of that!</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Plan, structure, and write a long work. Consider what is the work now</div><div class="MsoNormal">needed by the culture to cure and exact even if by accident the great</div><div class="MsoNormal">exorcism of its 1998 sort-of- seeming-not-being. What do we need? What is</div><div class="MsoNormal">the poem of the future?</div><div class="MsoNormal">* What is communicable now? What more is communicable?</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your</div><div class="MsoNormal">mind for a long time--from songs, from poems, from conversation:</div><div class="MsoNormal">* What's in a name? That which we call a rose</div><div class="MsoNormal">* By any other name would smell as sweet</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Romeo and Juliet)</div><div class="MsoNormal">* A rose is a rose is a rose</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Gertrude Stein) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* A raisin in the sun</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Langston Hughes)</div><div class="MsoNormal">* The king was in the counting house</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Counting out his money. . .</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Nursery rhyme) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* I sing the body electric. . .</div><div class="MsoNormal">* These United States. . .</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Walt Whitman) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* A thing of beauty is a joy forever</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Keats) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* (I summon up) remembrance of things past</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (WS) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Ask not for whom the bell tolls</div><div class="MsoNormal">* It tolls for thee</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Donne) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Look homeward, Angel</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Milton) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* For fools rush in where angels fear to tread</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Pope) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* All's well that ends well</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (WS) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Allen Ginsberg) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* I think therefore I am</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Descartes) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,. . .</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Dickens) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* brave new world has such people in it</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Shakespeare, The Tempest, later Huxley)</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Odi et amo (I hate and I love)</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Catullus) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Water water everywhere</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Nor any drop to drink</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Coleridge) </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Curiouser and curiouser</div><div class="MsoNormal">* (Alice in Wonderland)</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Don't worry be happy. Here's a little song I wrote. . .</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a</div><div class="MsoNormal">whole page. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Set yourself the task of writing in a way you've never written before, no</div><div class="MsoNormal">matter who you are.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* What is the value of autobiography?</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt to write in a way that's never been written before.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Invent a new form.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a perfect poem.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* In a poem, list what you know.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Address the poem to the reader.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write household poems-about cooking, shopping, eating and sleeping.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write dream collabortations in the lune form.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write poems that only make use of the words included in Basic English.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Write while being read to from science texts, or, write while being read</div><div class="MsoNormal">to by one's lover from any text.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Trade poems with others and do not consider them your own.</div><div class="MsoNormal">* Exercises in style: Write twenty-five or more different versions of one</div><div class="MsoNormal">event. </div><div class="MsoNormal">* Review the statement: "What is happening to me, allowing for lies and</div><div class="MsoNormal">exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems."</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-10616790188003938602010-10-18T09:21:00.000-07:002010-10-18T09:23:21.619-07:00Restructuring well-known works of literature<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px; text-transform: none;"><b>Wind the with Gone</b></span><br />
<div class="entry" style="padding-bottom: 20px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Novelist and Conceptual poet Vanessa Place is in the middle of <a href="http://twitter.com/VanessaPlace" style="color: #184d49; font-weight: bold; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none;">tweeting</a> the entirety of Magaret Mitchell’s <em>Gone With the Wind</em>. Of course, because she enters the text in 140 character increments, and because Twitter places the most recent posts at the top of the page, the text is being reversed. For example, the two most recent posts have been:<br />
<blockquote>e of the Confederacy, for final victory was at hand. Stonewall Jackson’s triumphs in the Valley and the defeat of the Yankees in the Seven D<br />
need be, and bear their loss as proudly as the men bore their battle flags. It was high tide of devotion and pride in their hearts, high tid</blockquote> via <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/10/wind-the-with-gone/">Poetry Foundation</a><br />
<br />
follow<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/VanessaPlace"> Vanessa Place</a> on Twitter. </div>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-28120269314916434962010-10-17T10:01:00.000-07:002010-10-17T21:16:10.974-07:00Jen Bervin<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: silver; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 17px;">When <span style="color: black;"><strong>I have seen</strong></span><strong> </strong>by Time’s fell hand defaced<br />
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;<br />
When sometime lofty <span style="color: black;"><strong>towers</strong> </span>I see <span style="color: black;"><strong>down-razed</strong></span>,<br />
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;<br />
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain<br />
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,<br />
And the firm soil win of the watery main,<br />
Increasing store with <span style="color: black;"><strong>loss</strong></span> and <span style="color: black;"><strong>loss</strong></span> with store;<br />
When I have seen such interchange of state,<br />
Or state itself confounded to decay;<br />
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate<br />
That Time will come and take my love away.<br />
This thought is as a death which cannot choose<br />
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.</span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">An </span><a href="http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/bervin.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">excerpt of Bervin's <i>Nets</i></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> online. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Philip Metres has a </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1751198611"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">review of </span></a><i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1751198611"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Nets</span></a></i><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/25/metr-berv.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">on </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Jacket</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><a name='more'></a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This is an erasure piece in which Bervin notes she "</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the "nets" to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest."</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">How does this text operate? </span>What decisions has Bervin made in terms of how she would erase, and would she unearth, or make visible?<br />
<br />
How does Bervin deal with the historical and literary significance of the poems?<br />
<br />
How does she make use of the form? Does the fact of their sonnet form matter at all?<br />
<br />
What about the "I"? How is that operating here? How does Bervin turn the courtly love nature of the poems around?<br />
<br />
How does the reader then engage with these poems? Do they lend themselves, as Shakespeare's sonnets have for a few centuries, to readings and rereadings and interpretations?<br />
<br />
Or, can these poems be said to be allegorical? If so, then how are we to read them?<br />
<br />
<br />
What, or how does Bervin deal with language?<br />
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</span></div>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-54652096642976876242010-10-16T22:17:00.000-07:002010-10-18T17:35:38.508-07:00How To Do Silence: A conversation on Erasure with Vanessa Place<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpsFcFSp4DhQodlfpJ_EzPallDG8sxTNjTTrVjaH3YzX4ykBMlTg7FSbp7KZY_KESOX6fzxurHR5GoVpa6YZ6WJPWDTzT9Uj8UkY2hzninw8NTANvvLrZublmNTDEkovdEQ2nZ8l6bspSd/s1600/DSC_1503.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpsFcFSp4DhQodlfpJ_EzPallDG8sxTNjTTrVjaH3YzX4ykBMlTg7FSbp7KZY_KESOX6fzxurHR5GoVpa6YZ6WJPWDTzT9Uj8UkY2hzninw8NTANvvLrZublmNTDEkovdEQ2nZ8l6bspSd/s320/DSC_1503.JPG" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQxuX-LGQXsy1p6nRy5Dwmk-ByeFW7GD9gBKwKi-xFojw8cq_gEDB9CSeTd17edJxuxc-8W3P1IBolwZFDxA2Yyg6SVil-QCmlURT6Yl7PwIlsLSjsUmPnDh2oKkwBkzA6JupsjHaGO4AY/s1600/DSC_1502.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQxuX-LGQXsy1p6nRy5Dwmk-ByeFW7GD9gBKwKi-xFojw8cq_gEDB9CSeTd17edJxuxc-8W3P1IBolwZFDxA2Yyg6SVil-QCmlURT6Yl7PwIlsLSjsUmPnDh2oKkwBkzA6JupsjHaGO4AY/s320/DSC_1502.JPG" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What is she reading? More than two minutes of silence, well, near silence, filled up the auditorium as Vanessa Place scanned the page in front of her, one hand moving from page to body and back, occasionally looking up, making eye contact. I started our brief conversation about the performance she gave at the University of Greenwich earlier this month by asking what the title was--she didn't say prior.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP:"Gone with the Wind by Vanessa Place"</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: You offer no apparatus for the audience/reader to receive the work, which makes for a powerful, and somewhat uncomfortable experience. How would you describe the piece?</div><a name='more'></a><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: As a "white-out," though erasure would be the technical (techne) description. All but the last line is obliterated, not read. I don't contextualize it because I don't want to direct the thought/expectation. The content of the piece is retroactively supplied (like any historical event, or memory itself)-- ie., content/interpretation is injected only after you understand the signficence (do you mean this word or significance? I like this word, just checking. I like this word too sign+magnificence) of the moment. (this is triggered by the reading of the iconic last line--maybe. Some people miss history.) Iconic last line: "After all, tomorrow is another day."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: Actually, it isn’t only with this piece, you never say anything before you read do you?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: No.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: Can you imagine going longer, holding the silence longer, than you did in Greenwich?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: Yes. At the Denver Museum of Modern Art, the piece lasted 5 mins 22 secs. One could do the whole book, which would be lovely in a kind of Abramovic way. Though perhaps better.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: The discomfort of silence is well-known in the world of drama, and the world of conceptual art, but not so much in the world of poetry--at least in terms of the public offering of poetry as a commodity. Is the silence the fact of the matter, or the amplification of the triangulated relationship between author/text/audience. By that I mean, in a sense your silence, your “noisy” presence, makes the audience hyper aware of textuality even when there appears to be none… I’m asking this because I’m trying to come to terms with the lack of context, which in this particular instance, seems to be such a powerful gesture, even more so than when context is withheld in other pieces…</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: One wonders what one’s expectations are in this, or rather, where. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: In keeping with your excellent Factory Series, in which you are farming out your own ideas to other poets to do under your name, would you like to see this piece done, say simultaneously in several cities? Or would you prefer to have a bunch of poets approaching texts in a similar way?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: Yes, excellent. Either way, all ways. It would be grand to have poet-slaves doing simultaneous instantiations. Also grand to have freepoets whiting out other texts--see Yedda Morrison's excellent work on Heart of Darkness, in which all but the words related to “nature” are erased. Though I also hope to become even further estranged from the actual mode of production in the Factory.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I did do a simultaneous reading of my SCUM intervention in March: I read the piece at the Bowery Poetry Project while "Vanessa Place" (my friend Kathleen Chapman) read it at the same chronological time at a gallery here, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. She was introduced with my bio, etc., so that the author function was properly fulfilled by the usual apparatuses. Several people told me that I gave an exceptionally good reading.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: Yes, the Boycott series. I enjoyed your SCUM Manifesto intervention, though while I am familiar with the original I didn’t actually recognize Solinas’ text immediately. While I was listening (at Greenwich), it seemed a much more iconic and indeed older text. Has anyone else mentioned this? And has it been published anywhere?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: Not yet. I’m gathering a collection of Boycott interventions, which should run from first to third wave feminism (cum masculinism), and we will see what happens to these. Andrew Rippeon of P-Queue will be publishing a deBeauvoir intervention in the not-unduly-distant future, which promises to be of interest.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: Your reading caused quite a stir, as you often do. At least one woman was moved (or driven) to tears after Statement of Facts. Does this happen often?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: Yes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: I have heard you read from that text now on several occasions and find it extremely disturbing on multiple levels, as you know. In fact it feels like a feat when I can stay put through the reading. It must take some discipline to actually make it through the text yourself, even though, your role as a barrister and your specialization—working with indigent sex offenders—must offer some context for the work. The listener/reader on the other hand, has no context. He or she must simply confront the text. You talked about this, or around this, a little in the paper you gave at the conference where you suggest that interpretation, particularly in this instance, is up to the reader. The text is what the reader brings. “What will be already is,” in other words.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: True.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: And? Can’t we say that all text relies on interpretation, or presence from a reader/listener?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: Yes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: I’m wondering too about the crafting of the Statements. I have to take a look at the larger project more closely, but the one you read at Greenwich I also heard you read in New York and Santa Cruz and this time I could hear how the pieces were knitted together—the larger narrative of the perpetrator coming clearer. These statements then are actually not as they might be found in public record, but rather are melded by you which suggests a kind of collaging rather than benign presention.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: That depends on you. If there is a collage, it’s yours.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: But I mean the texts are crafted somehow. Can you comment on the decisions around which statements you might include in a given document and why?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: Some are very material—length, heft, breadth. Though this is only relevant to a reading; if I use a Statement, I use it in toto. If there are multiple Statements in a work (such as in the book Statement of Facts), I might include different pieces for the same reason as anyone might include different pieces—variation, boredom. It’s not what you see that is art, art is the gap.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: I was intrigued by several strands in your paper at Greenwich, particularly your statements about realism, something I have been thinking a lot about lately, both in poetry and fiction (as if it would matter the genre…). You questioned, as I do, the suggestion that there is “a realism” or a “real” in any case, and further, who represents the “real.” This has always seemed problematic to me, if for no other reason than a basic classist stance (what I see is real, my experience, my sense of the world is real, yours, well, yours is a wee bit flawed). But further you ask how reproduction is realism, which intrigues. Can you talk a bit about that…or perhaps offer a snippet from your essay? What is it we sometimes swallow?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: There is definitely a Real. It’s the representation that’s tricky. Luckily for me, as noted in my paper, I am a mouthpiece. Thus, my representation is strictly regurgitation. What is swallowed by us is the Real, more or less undigested. To put it stupidly, we make use of the imaginary, cater to the symbolic, but what we enjoy is the excreta. Put another way, I offer no sense of the world. This may be the noisy silence previously noted.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: What do you mean by radically evil poetry?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: Poetry that has no other poetic claims other than that it is poetry. Poetry that demonstrates that meter doesn’t matter, that form doesn’t matter, that authorship doesn’t matter, that content doesn’t matter, that neither aesthetic nor ethic matters, that all that matters is that it is not not poetry.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: So would you describe yourself as a “Not Poet”?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: No, not not a poet. An advocate of a poetics.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">LH: Do you see your work as a kind of conceptual endgame?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">VP: One can only hope.<br />
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This interview originally appeared on <i><a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-to-do-silence-conversation-with.html">Lemon Hound</a></i>, July 29, 2010</div>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-62729920774768480772010-10-16T19:51:00.000-07:002010-10-17T09:22:37.106-07:00The Allegory and the Archive/ Vanessa Place<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><div class="p1"><div style="line-height: 2.5 em;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>But I must constantly repeat that I say all this in connection with repetition. Kierkegaard Je ne suis point la justice</i>. Place<br />
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With luck, I ended yesterday on guilt and shame; now that you are in a proper frame of mind, we will consider—thankfully more briefly—allegory and the archive, which are, after all, ways of mediating and instantiating both. That is to say, how memorials are forgotten and made.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>A<i>llegory (from Greek: αλλος, allos, "other", and αγορεσειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal. Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as the facts of surface appearances.(Wikipedia)</i></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So Wikipedia defines the allegory historically, as ahistorically represented in Wikipedia. One of the confusions about conceptualism appears to be this issue of the allegorical. We know what allegory was originally, Dante‟s <i>Commedia</i>, Bunyan‟s <i>Progress</i>, Langland‟s Plowman, and my copy of T<i>he Marvelous Career of Theodore Roosevelt (and the story of his African Trip</i>). And we all remember that allegory is extended metaphor, wherein objects (signifiers) within a narrative equate with meanings (signifiers) outside the narrative. That there is always a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning, that synthesis between narratives lies with the reader, that personification within the literal is not determinative, and that the allusive is not necessarily the allegorical, but the allegorical is very often allusive. That the allegorical was<br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">further defined by Dante as polysemous in the sense of relating to past events (typological), present events (moral) and future event (anaological). That then Benjamin came with his ange of history, and, upon contemplating the state of German tragic drama, took the baroque too literally and found allegory confounded. So the neue allegory was the skull and the ruin, fractured renditions of imaginary castles.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Wikipedia is ahistorical because it remains paradigmatically unfixed. There is no “edition” or publish date by which to historicize any one entry or the archive as a whole.1<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Benjamin wrote extensively and cribbed copiously on Baudelaire, poet of the allegorical; in his P<i>assengenwerk (The Arcades Project)</i>, Benjamin writes of his desire to relate the figure of the modern and the figure of allegory, while quoting Baudelaire, who concluded that “almost all our originality comes from the stamp that time imprints upon our feelings.” Benjamin later quotes a 1933 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, which notes in turn that Baudelaire “always concentrates on the inner life, as Dante focused on dogma.” Thus, allegory, via Benjamin via Baudelaire via his 1933 editor is the psychic center that holds, or doesn‟t, as the allegorical internal/external (es-ternal) whole, represented by Dante, is crumbled. The modern allegory is one of despair, melancholy, the man on the move, motored by egoism, mystification, and purely private conversation.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Conceptualism similarly maintains there is no single allegory, and no potential allegorical loss. One of the legacies of post-modernism is that polysemousness is as promised; one of the differences with post-modernism is that there is no ache for, or cognition of, truth, not even in the absence or lack thereof. Rather, there is a recognition of the truth of the soup in which the</div><div style="text-align: justify;">2</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
individuated we and you stew. So that there is no divide between subject and object, hence the conceptual “sobject.” Defined by me in N<i>otes on Conceptualisms</i> as existing in an ongoing procedural loop, self-eclipsed by degrees. Thus the antique notion of dogma, or sacred text, or single allegory is as impossible as the modern conceit of sacred interiority. In this sense, all text is equally sacred in conceptualism. Sacred in the sense delineated by Giorgio Agamben as the man who murders, who can be killed for this murder, but who cannot be sacrificed—the murder of the murderer cannot be sanctified. His guilt makes him the exception to both the rule against murder and the rule favoring sacrifice, i.e., giving to the gods. In this way, Agamben‟s sacred man proves the rule that only the sovereign can determine who dies. In conceptualism, all text is sacred, but there is no sovereign, not even the sovereign that once was or was once. Moreover, all text is equally sacred, the living dead of the world, as text has overtaken text, subsumed text, overwritten text, but there‟s not time or space sense to this incessant juxtapose and jockeying, like amazon sales ratings, you may be #32 one day and 4,455,658 another. The blog hit or the Twitter-miss. On the other hand, you can also be issued in limited chapbook form, or spring, fully-formed via print-on- demand, i.e. fetishized or simply snapped into instantiation. No king or king of king determines who dies, for no one dies, just as no one decisively is. On the other hand, one man‟s garbage is another‟s madeleine. Our allegory is the abyss, but our abyss is a mountain, our mountain an archive.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Benjamin reported Baudelaire‟s condemnation, in 1852, of “the puerile Utopia of the school of <i>art for art’s sak</i>e” Let us consider, in our post-Duchampian, Wikipedian time, the puerile utopia of the school of anything for any other sake, or, in other words, of anything that is immune from becoming art. So that art that may be extracted or pressed, like oil, from<br />
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everything. Is this true? This changes the question from the utility of art to the art, that is to say, the excess or the residual, of utility.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Though I might aside here that my sense of ahistoricity is itself historical, and specifically American, as geography is always history. We are a people that like to be history-free, a people who pride themselves on assimilation of the melting variety, one in which it is good to fit and fit in and be as ordinary as your average, as uniquely fungible as any perfect snowflake or new masculinist lyric. So we URL our world, which is an historic gesture, historically bound, we‟re Whitmanesque sans Whitman, American without England, though English all the hypertrophic way.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Whereas conceptual art institutionalized the dematerialized, such as Lee Lozano‟s general strike piece (refusing to engage with the “art world”) and Yves Klein‟s proto-work Le Vide (The Void, an essentially empty gallery space, complete with opening party), conceptual poetry valorizes the immaterial. Immaterial meaning irrelevant, such as the yesterday‟s news of Kenneth Goldsmith‟s Day or the unimportant, such as the suburban banality of Rob Fitterman‟s <i>Sprawl</i>, or the neatly eviscerated, such as Craig Dworkin‟s grammatically-correct and contentless <i>Parse</i> or the scientifically and socially denuded, such as Kim Rosenfield‟s re:evolution, or my own vomitous—50k words = 1 sentence—baroque in <i>Dies</i> or the effectively impotent, such as my <i>Statement of Fact</i>s. Immateriality also having to do with unreadability. In this sense, “pure” conceptualism is a surface allegory about unreadability because something has already been read (such as the NYTimes) or cannot be “read” (such as grammatical structures), and impure or sampled conceptual work concerns unreadabilty as the gaps and chunks in the mashup (such as when high evolutionary theory meets advice on the lay science of living), and the baroque is unreadable because its de trop (such as war</div><div style="text-align: justify;">4<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">itself). If modern art is that which thoroughly exploits a medium‟s surface, and the remainder in Lacan (the psychologist of the post-modern), is that part of the Subject which cannot be thoroughly absorbed into the Other, or the lack in the Other that defines the Subject by way of excess, then conceptualism (heretofore unpsychoanalyized) is concerned with the way that the surface excess of text mirrors the excess of the remainder. That is to say, what cannot be read. What is immaterial because it is dull and contentless, dense and difficult, erased or rococco‟d. These are specific ideas about immateriality, evidenced in specific allegorical forms. By specific, I mean multiple.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Thus, just as ahistoricity is a point of perspective, not a statement of fact, allegory is currently the alienation of realism from the real, and the real from the Real. By allegorizing the real, conceptualism emphasizes its non-reality, its material fabrication, its ubiquitous status as matter of fact, its essential uncontainability, its Reality. Newspapers, dictionaries, shopping mall directories, appellate briefs—all are represented outside their natural habitats, i.e. those webs of ethical and aesthetic conditions and assumptions, including the condition and assumption of communication itself, i.e., readability itself. This is when thinkership takes over and overcomes readership, when readership supplants thinking in the sense of the supplementary. Though it should be noted that there‟s a fight to the photo-finish.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In an appellate brief, statements of facts are that portion of the brief which presents, in narrative form, evidence that was presented at trial. Evidence presented at trial typically consists of two stories, one articulated by the prosecution, one by the defense. A story of guilt and a story of innocence. All stories are told under oath, all sworn to be true. They are “statements of fact.” In my book, <i>Statement of Facts</i>, I take statements of facts from appellate briefs that I‟ve written and represent them as poetry. The allegory here includes an allegory<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;">about law as subsumed by the case, the case as rhetorical gesture, as linguistic “fact.” The Law is revealed a speech act, a speech act that is fundamentally about witnessing.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Law of the Father is Lacan‟s response to the Oedipal complex: the child perceives that the mother desires something, and tries to make itself into that something. When the child sees the father intervening in this aspiration, the child must submit to this intervention. If the child understands the intervening father as the representative of a larger social law, a law also followed by the mother, the child will be non-pathologically normalized. The Law of the Father is thus about witnessing and is thus always the allegory of language itself, of ordered interpolation. In <i>Statement of Facts</i>, the Law of the State is an allegory for the Law of the Father. So too with poetry and the Law of Poetry. All that poetry is is witness. On a case-by- case paradigmatic basis.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Agamben analogizes paradigm and allegory as the “singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.” In this regard, Agamben distinguishes between the exemplar—that which is to be imitated—and the exemplum, that which gathers together “a new intelligible ensemble and in a new problematic context.” The archive is exemplum as it is the fusion between paradigmatic structure and institution. The archive creates a gesture of equivalency between things archived (i.e. contained within an archive). To do so, the archive must be authored, that is to say, signed. In other words, it is the authority of the archivist that creates the archive, that says these things are gathered together, to be read as one thing. Let‟s think about signatures for a moment. According to my Black‟s Law Dictionary, signature is “the act of putting one‟s name at the end of an instrument to attest its validity,” to sign something is to “give it effect as one‟s act.” Thus, signatures<br />
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literally “effect what they figuratively express,” as noted by Thomas Aquinas, they efficiunt quod figurant, for, just as in the holy sacrament, the “effect depends on a signator.” In 17th century ontology, exemplified by the philosophy of Lord Edward Herbert of Chirbury, every being presents the signature of unity, unity of truth, truth of good: quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Roman law, the <i>dies fast</i>i were those days on which courts were open and justice could be administered, when the prætor could pronounce the three words—“do,” “dico,” and “addico.” “Do” is to grant or give, “dico” to speak, “addico” to award. These “triverbial days” were thus days of instantiation and articulation, of bringing into being by speaking. In Latin, the <i>index</i> is the sign, or an informer, that which shows by means of the word, just as the <i>iudex </i>is the one who says the law, and the <i>vindex</i> the one who takes the place of the accused and announces himself ready to suffer consequences of the proceedings. Thus raising the relationship between event and its evidence, evidence and its subject, and subject and its sobjective effect, which are the fundamental questions of the index.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>To be archives, materials must be preserved for reasons other than those for which they were created or accumulated.</i> (T.R. Schellenberg)<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Archival art tends to manifest in some form of uniform. Andy Warhol archived his documentary stuff—all his documentary stuff: invitations, letters, photos, souvenirs—by regularly filling a series of regularly shaped cardboard boxes. Once one was full, it was taped shut and shipped off to storage. At the time of his death, he had created the archival work, Andy Warhol’s <i>610 Time Capsules</i>, now neatly shelved in Pittsburgh. Similarly, Gerhard Richter‟s work <i>Atlas,</i> consists of a grid of same-sized framed photos of newspaper clippings,<br />
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photos, and sketches; project was begun in 1964, and is ongoing. Note the role of the signator, for Richter produced some of the original material, and some he simply collected. Too, a number of the photos are reproduced in two forms: blurred and un-, or focused and un- . Too, note how the un- follows and defines the originary intent, alternating, that is to say, what is the image and what does it represent. Benjamin Buchloch‟s essay on <i>Atla</i>s notes that trauma (the originating trauma of WWII) is the one link that binds image to referent in the work‟s archaic photo montage/barrage. Hanna Darboven‟s great installation piece <i>Kulturegeschichte 1880-1983</i> (Cultural History 1880-1983) was composed of 1,590 sheets and 19 sculptural objects: the work included postcards, pinups, documentary references, doorways, magazine covers, art catalogues, and kitsch. In her introductory essay for its Dia exhibition, Lynn Cooke describes the “libidinal exuberance” of Darboven‟s work, while at the same time, its pathos—there is no synthesis of referent or representation possible, no making it "readable‟—all that is is “the possibility, albeit qualified, of individual demurral.”<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Raising for us the important question: what is “it,” that is to say, what is it that is to be read? In other words, while much conceptual poetry is archival, or has the features of the archive, and we can use archival art to understand this kind of conceptualism. It is perhaps more useful to consider how the archive helps us understand the allegorical, given that all conceptualism is allegorical.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Art historian and curator Charles Merewether has questioned the relationship between testimony and record, document and archive. In his consideration of aprés-bomb Japanese poetry and photography, Merewether quotes Allan Sekula‟s definition of a document as that which “entails a notion of legal or official truth, as well as a notion of proximity to and verification of an original event.” In post-Hiroshima Japanese photography, according to</div><div style="text-align: justify;">8<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Merewether, truth is represented either as “a linear progression from past to present or by virtue of the fact that the camera as a mechanical form of reproduction provides a „source of factual knowledge‟ and „objective evidence. The document it produces therefore becomes the source and foundation of the archive and the archive itself authorizes the veracity of the document through its incorporation.‟” Merewether goes on to note that the post-bomb photographic archive became a comment on, not memory, but forgetting: “citation as representation” becoming the “<i>mise-en-abyme</i> of representation....” demonstrating “the impossibility of a <i>lieux de mémoire</i>.”2 The very fact of the very pictoral, i.e. representational, abundance creating a gap between seeing and having seen, a gap characterized by excess in refer-ent and representation, creating in turn, as Merewether puts it, “an archive of the unconscious, an archive of the avant-garde or an avant-garde archive.” Again invoking the remainder, the left-over of our own (arguably traumatic, though which trauma do you prefer, homecrown or soemthing with a more international flavour) present-tense existence, which poetry puts in the futur anterior—the what will have been.i\<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For it is the sense of what will have been that incites documentation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
Marjorie Perloff‟s forthcoming <i>Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by other means</i> discusses the role of citation in poetry, of “poetry by other means.” Poetry persists as taste, as selection. But taste must be framed.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some citations:</div><div style="text-align: justify;">9</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
The Raqs Media Collective/First Information Report (2003): “because a document‟s raw material is rhetoric, the practitioner has to constantly evolve a rhetoric of rhetoric to make documents yield.”<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Paul Ricoeur: “If history is a true narrative, documents constitute its ultimate means of proof. They nourish its claim to be based on facts.”<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Whether factual or no, proof of memory or of what I forget, archival art assumes there is no great difference between event and evidence. Or rather, it taps into a desire to synthesize event and evidence, which the archivist may satisfy or cock-tease. I assume there can be no real synthesis, for there is always a gap between event and testimony, even if the difference is that of the country fact of the witness. Agamben has described tradition as that in which the traumatic event is suppressed or preserved, which comports well with Merewether, and a number of other archive thinkers. I would like to introduce here another definition of archive, put forth by Foucault: archives as “systems of statements.” According to Foucault, “the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” That is to say, the archive defines statement‟s “system of its enunciability,” the “system of its functioning.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Taking up from Foucault, Agamben distinguishes between the archive as a system of relations between the said and unsaid and testimony as a system of relations “between the inside and outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable in every language.” The archive presupposes the subject as a function “founded on the disappearance into the anonymous murmur of statements. In testimony, by contrast, the empty place of the subject becomes the decisive question.” Renée Green writes that “to be a subject and to bear witness</div><div style="text-align: justify;">10<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">are the same and that same is a remnant.” But we do not have to decide whether it is an object or link that is missing, whether the subject is functionary or functional. Put another way, we must not decide.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For if what a subject is is a witness and what a witness is is a subject, then subject is again defined in relation to object, that is to say an event, even a linguistic event, then we are back to our porous sobject. The one who witnesses some thing it is witnessed by. What is critical to conceptualism is that the one who witnesses is the one who decides what the allegory really is, what is really archived. The encounter is all that is provided. And as I have said, these encounters engage in the discourse of the slave, a discourse in which the signified, suppressing the fact of its excess, addresses the signifier with the language of the signifier, repeating the language of the signifier, producing the split subject, the subject pre-divided by language itself. So the key is not what trauma or whether trauma or this utopia or that utopia but the repetition that comes post-trauma and sans utopia, the Sisyphean move of reiteration, the patterned joy of the same all over again.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Kierkegaard put forth two metaphysics of time: recollection and repetition. Without one or the other, Kierkegaard writes, “all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise.” Recollection is the category favored by the Greeks, repetition “the new category that will be discovered.” In what has been called less a philosophical doctrine and more a thought paradigm, Kierkegaard encourages the “courage to will repetition,” arguing that, as contrasted to the causal bonds of recollection (the new traced to the old) the moment of repetition is when there is no causal chain (the old becomes new).<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Why is the grid used in archival art? What is the allegory of the grid?</div><div style="text-align: justify;">11<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Are grids serial? Are they simultaneous?<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Is there a difference between the serial and the archival, and, if so, is the difference necessary? Eighteenth century police archives have been described by contemporary art historian Arlett Farge as having “un effet du réel,” an effect of the real, an effect of accident, of contingency; Duchamp referred to his <i>3 Standard Stoppages</i> (1913), 3 lengths of tailor‟s thread dropped from a height of 1 meter onto a piece of painted canvas, as “du hasard en conserve” (some chance in a can). Later archival art has leaned on chance, and then play, so that Andrea Fraser‟s <i>Information Room</i> (1998) involved her installing the library archive of the Bern Kunsthalle in a gallery, the spines of the boxes unidentified so that visitors, invited to search through the archive, didn‟t know what they were looking through or for until the boxes had been duly dug through, creating chaos out of order. While a nice riposte to the original impulse of the archive, this of course simply reaffirms the conceit that the archive is fundamentally order. What I am proposing is that the archive is no more ordered than any autobiography, that is to say, a real one, one that exists serially only temporally, but is an act of happenstance and repetition, recollection and accident. In my <i>Statement of Facts</i>, I narrativize criminal acts, sexual assaults, many of which are the result of winning the bad luck lottery: you happened to have an uncle who loved you too much, I happened to leave that window open. It was hot. So was he. Each of the thirty-three texts in <i>Statement of Facts</i> forces the question posed by Deleuze: What does it mean, therefore, to affirm the whole of chance, every time, in a single time?”<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Books are structurally serial, i.e., they occur sequentially. Books contain their own grid, i.e., the page. I question the relation between the grid and the archive, or rather wonder if there is</div><div style="text-align: justify;">12<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">something in the immaterial one that wants its material other. In his book on the document in art, Sven Spieker argues that nonarchival collections are tied to Lacan‟s Imaginary, the library of books to the Lacanian Symbolic, and that the 19thcentury version of the archive, a gesture against contingency and chaos, was the embodiment of the Real. (<i>The Big Archive 6</i>) Not to deluge you, but the Lacanian categories or orders may be roughly and mistakenly equated with their Freudian counterparts: the Imaginary is the realm of the ego, concerned with image, imagination, deception. It‟s illusions are wholeness, synthesis, similarity. The Symbolic may be linked to the superego in the sense that it is also a structuring field, a realm of law and order, essentially linguistic. (Lacan‟s most famous aphorism being “The unconscious is structured like a language.”)<b>3</b> The discourse of the Symbolic is the unconscious, the topical regulation of desire. The Symbolic is concerned with radical alterity, the big (A)Other, and thus is always a triadic structure. It is the realm of death. (The realm of the Soviet artist Aleksander Rodechenko‟s Productivist archive of Lenin photographs, for example, though Rodechenko wanted a commonplace mythos of the man, i.e., a monument of Lenin created from snapshots.) The Real is that which is neither symbolic nor imaginary. The leftover, the remainder, the excess. The abyss upon which we sit.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">To quote Lacan: “At issue, in an analogic or anamorphic form, is the effort to point once again to the fact that what we seek in the illusion is something in which the illusion as such in some way transcends itself, destroys itself, by demonstrating that it is only there as signifier.” According to Kierkegaard, it is only through repetition that there can be transcendence because consciousness itself is “a relation” that is the contradiction/collision between what is</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">13</div><div style="text-align: justify;">and what was which opens up into the third possibility. And it is this third possibility which caused Delueze to say that repetition “is against the law.”<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">To quote Stewie: “Again, again! I love repetition!” (“Bird is the Word” <i>Family Guy</i>)<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">And so we know that the “same” of repetition refers to the effect of repetition, which is a forced consideration of difference. And here I may have snuck in—finally—meaning. In theory, repetition is endless, the old turning new turning old turning new, the eternal return, the come again again. The Danish word for repetition is gentalgese, “re-taking,” “taking back.” If something is taken back, it can be given again. This makes repetition brutal, unrelenting. Nietzsche countered this horror by advocating amor fati, love of fate, “that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” The embrace of the same, which, again, leads to the new and different. In <i>Tender Buttons</i>, Stein wrote: “the difference is spreading.” Spreading as in spatial, spatial as in archival.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">When I wrote in <i>Notes on Conceptualism</i> that all conceptual writing is allegorical, the question became what is it allegorical of—note the preposition. I did not include this preposition. I refuse to assume the prepositional position. If you, reader, writer, audience member, lecturer, do, then you have assumed the position of the enunciation rather than its reiteration. I have quoted a great deal in this paper, saying again what has been said before, gathering these statements into my own archive—this paper, this grid, this series. This allegory. The work I am interested in engages with various registers and disciplines outside those registers and discipline, or at least ostensibly outside, work that resists the false dyad of chance versus premeditation, but understands the triad that meditation is always canned chance—that perception is categorical as well as cant. And categories are contagious. It is a</div><div style="text-align: justify;">14<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">serious question to answer to what are you witness? It is a serious answer to question what is poetry?<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Agamben writes, “Only he who perceives the indices and signatures of the archaic in the most modern and recent can be contemporary.” Put another way, and here I quote from the 1960 French film “Eyes Without A Face,” (Les yeux sans visage) “The future, Madam, is something we should have started a long time ago.” (“Le futur, Madame, est une chose que nous aurions dû commencer il y a bien longtemps.”)<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">To quote Walter Benjamin:<br />
<blockquote>“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Poetry is witness. Put another way, quoting here from the 1960 French film “Eyes Without A Face,” (<i>Les yeux sans visage</i>) “The future, Madam, is something we should have started a long time ago.” (“Le futur, Madame, est une chose que nous aurions dû commencer il y a bien longtemps.”) What do you want with it?<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Vanessa Place, Buffalo 3.2.10</i><br />
<u> ________________</u><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">1 When recent news of a Brad and Angelina split hit the Times UK online, one reader said that, being 19, she would not believe it until it appeared on Wikipedia. Thus the idea that truth is a matter of majority opinion, subject to popular rewriting, is now understood by everyone, up to and including sophmores.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">2 Baudrillard, “In the exact duplication of the Real, preferably by means of another reproductive medium— advertisement, photography, etc—and in the shift from medium to medium, the real vanishes and becomes an allegory of death. But even in its moment of destruction it exposes and affirms itself; it will become the quintessential real and it becomes the fetishism of the lost object.” (L’écharge symbolique et la mort</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">3 We could make a small discursive movement here to note how the Freudian notion of the unconscious is hermetic, archival—a mollusk (whose inside Benjamin analogized to the 19th century domestic interior), and the Lacanian is synchronic, temporally pulsating, opening & closing—a vagina (whose interior was not so analogized by Lacan, though he did note that the Other is always woman = A). And how many others unwittingly note this analogue via Clam, Bearded Clam, etc., mollusk-based synonyms for vagina. Is there something envaginated about repetition? As contrasted, for example, with the famous Aristotlian cathartic arc?</span></span><br />
Vanessa Place, 2010. This originally appeared as a chapbook, No Press, Calgary 2010. </div></div></div></span></span>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-40738762576672570552010-10-14T14:35:00.000-07:002010-10-18T17:37:29.338-07:00derek beaulieu: Nothing Odd Can Last<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Are the bawdy passages and double entendres important in this book?</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Could it have been omitted?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Does the author guide his pen or does his pen guide him?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Does she have redeeming qualities?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Does the novel demonstrate that there can be postmodern texts before post-modernism?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Do you think the author intended to end the novel with the ninth volume?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">How do we account for the author’s strikingly unsentimental treatment, at times, of such topics as love and death?</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><a name='more'></a></span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">How does the seventh volume, in which the narrator describes his travels through Europe, relate to the rest of the book?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">How ironical is their presentation?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">How much control do you think the writer has over the mixture of digression—both kinds mentioned above—and the narrator’s history?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">How sentimental and gushy is the writer of this book?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">If the latter is true, what justification can there be for that?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">If you were a reader like the Lady, who reads “straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge,” how would you feel about the novel?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In what way are such details important to the author’s method?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In what way is it possible to reconcile the statement that the book will “be kept a-going” for forty years with the contention that the novel is completed?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is it legitimate for an author to require—or even request—that the reader do things like “imagine to yourself,” replace misplaced chapters, and put up with omitted chapters?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is kindheartedness necessarily mawkishness?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is she as stupid as she seems?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is the author in control of his digressions (and merely affecting their spontaneity), or does the story actually run away from him and have to be reined back in?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is the writer unable to present a straightforward story, or does he deliberately frustrate the reader?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is there any importance to this, or is it just the author’s bawdiness?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is there sufficient justification for such passages in the book?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Or should the reader say to heck with it?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What are some of the qualities that the writer of the book has inherited from his forebears?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What does this indicate about the writer’s plan and his control of what he was doing?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What evidence is there that the narrator’s childhood traumas actually influence his adult personality?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What is the author’s attitude toward science?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What is the effect of the precise visual details given in the book?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What is the effect of the narrator’s frequent addresses to his audience?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What is the relationship between the “I” who narrates the story and the author?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What kinds of scenes receive this treatment?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Which predominates?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Why or why not?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Would it make sense to interpret the novel psychoanalytically?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Would you argue for or against his statement?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Would you rather that they were deleted from it?</span></span><span style="color: white; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">NOTHING ODD CAN LAST consists of 36 alphabetized questions from Coles Notes-style websites on Laurence Sterne’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. </span></i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">From </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">How to Write</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, this piece originally appeared online at </span><a href="http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/06fic/beaulieu/nothingodd.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">DrunkenBoat</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. The video contains a reading of both "Nothing Odd Can Last," and "Cross it over it".</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><object height="385" width="400"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kX4UW_pqpME?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kX4UW_pqpME?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="385"></embed></object></div>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-7850734520701752122010-10-04T18:12:00.000-07:002010-10-06T01:16:40.420-07:00Week 4Discussion on the <a href="http://conceptualwriting101.blogspot.com/2010/10/ethics-of-appropriation.html">Ethics of Appropriation</a>. Please take some time to read over that post and follow the <a href="http://conceptualwriting101.blogspot.com/2010/10/ethics-of-appropriation.html">links</a>.<br />
<br />
As promised, here is a link to Sianne Ngai's essay, <a href="http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/current/31n4ngai.html">The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde</a>.<br />
<br />
Please note that all texts are at the Coop Bookstore.<br />
<br />
Please read Jen Bervin's <i>Nets</i> for next week.Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-22326640612487019122010-10-04T13:20:00.000-07:002010-10-05T07:50:54.951-07:00Ethics of Appropriation<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19px;"></span><br />
for this discussion, please consider the following texts by Abe Louise Young, Ray McDaniel, Gregory Betts and Jonathan Lethem repsectively.<br />
<br />
Young's essay slams Ray McDaniel for using material found on an archive that she built, carefully and respectively, to allow victims of Hurricane Katrina. Already disenfranchised, Young suggests that by plundering them McDaniel does further injustice:<br />
<blockquote>I believe these people have a right to their narratives. In order to publish them, I believe that the speakers must be consulted and that they must be given the opportunity to sign off on copyright forms. By neglecting to inquire, much less make certain that his plans were acceptable to the narrators, McDaniel reenacted a familiar racist pattern, and a blind spot in American poetry publishing was revealed.<br />
<a name='more'></a></blockquote><blockquote>Hurricane Katrina did not happen in a vacuum, in America’s imagination, to everyone, or in general. It happened in a particular geography, a history, an economy, and a field of race and power built to render certain people powerless. When a white person takes the voices of people of color for his own uses, without permission, in the aftermath of a racially charged national disaster, it is vulture work—worse than ventriloquism.</blockquote>from <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239906">Abe Louise Young on Poetry Foundation</a><br />
<br />
It's important to actually encounter the poetry in question here, but in his essay, McDaniel speaks of his writing project, a bit about his history and relationship to New Orleans and to the text.<br />
<blockquote>I resist autobiographical writing. I don’t begrudge anyone the right to practice the art; I just don’t trust that it provides what it advertises. I don’t often try to write within its protocols, and thus I’m not very good at it. A reader won’t emerge from my poems with clear confidence in either backstory or the “thoughts” and “feelings” of the speaker who may or may not approximate me. My first and third books—Murder and the forthcoming Special Powers and Abilities—rigorously exclude any first-person speaker who acts as a stand-in for the poet. But for Saltwater Empire, at least, I’m in there, if in complicated ways, the explanation of which goes to what the book desires, and what I desired in making it.</blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19px;">from <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239904">Ray McDaniel on Poetry Foundation</a> </span><br />
<br />
Please see the original archive online, as well as McDaniel's poems online. Also read the comments on both streams and if you are still curious, see responses to these posts on <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/08/poetry-magazine-gets-up-in-your-face.html">Lemon Hound</a> with further commentary.<br />
<br />
Here is another take on the discussion:<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, mono; font-size: 12px;"></span><br />
<blockquote>Plunderverse makes use of the wealth and waste of language by exploiting the unattended information in a source text. It makes connections and variations of a previous author’s words to create a different poem from the original piece. But, whereas found poetry and the like celebrate the random connections discovered by abstract rules or unconventional readings of source texts, delighting in the dissolution of communication and the disjunctive semantic fragments that survive, plunderverse celebrates the possibilities of speaking through source texts.</blockquote><blockquote>Plunderverse limits its own expression to the source text, but attempts a genuine, divergent expression through the selection, deletion or contortion of it. Plunderverse makes poetry through other people’s words. The constraint is not random, but merely an accelerated variation of the basic fact of language: we already speak in each other’s words. Plunderverse exaggerates the constraints through which we realize and discover our own voice, re-enacting the struggle against influences and cultural histories. It does not try to obscure, bury or overcome influence, but, in fact, celebrates the process by which influences vary into and inform our own voices. It foregrounds the process of language acquisition, reveals the debt of influence and exploits the waste of language.</blockquote><div class="body" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, mono; font-size: 12px;">Gregory Betts <a href="http://wordsters.net/poetics/poetics05/05betts.html">from his essay, Plunderverse, on Poetics.ca</a></div><br />
Finally, to round out the points of view, here is an excerpt from <i>The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism</i> by Jonathan Lethem originally in Harper'<a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387">s. Read the entire piece here</a>.<br />
<blockquote>All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .</blockquote><blockquote>—John Donne</blockquote><blockquote>LOVE AND THEFT</blockquote><blockquote>Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of anamour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.</blockquote><blockquote>The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?</blockquote>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-22923347461060625042010-09-27T13:13:00.000-07:002010-09-29T11:09:27.090-07:00Week 3<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">Monday, September 27</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">Discuss the Silliman Ersasure exercise</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">In Class Writing: Write the history of the world as you know it, using a vowel/consonant restraint. </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">Discuss: Ubu Anthology, Jen Bervin <i>Nets, </i>Emma Kay, <a href="http://conceptualwriting101.blogspot.com/2010/09/emma-kay.html">Worldview</a></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">Follow up assignment: Write a story using a list. Here's <a href="http://www.fivefingersreview.org/5FR23/23hayes.htm">one possibility</a> from Jared Hayes. </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Event of the Week: </span><br />
<a href="http://popmontreal.com/en/venue/agora-hydro-qu%C3%A9bec-du-coeur-des-sciences-de-luq%C3%A0m">Kenneth Goldsmith will be here in Montreal on October 2</a>, lets meet at the venue.<br />
Saturday, October 2, 2010 - 12:30<br />
FREE<br />
Presented by Matrix Magazine:<br />
<br />
Shedding Light on the Obscure. A conversation with a charismatic visionary, looking at archiving the known and unknown arts, and the role that avant-garde culture plays in popular cultural creation.<br />
<br />
Venue: <a href="http://popmontreal.com/en/venue/agora-hydro-qu%C3%A9bec-du-coeur-des-sciences-de-luq%C3%A0m">Agora Hydro-Québec du coeur des sciences de l'UQÀM</a>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-11523757858277193752010-09-27T12:10:00.000-07:002010-09-27T12:10:37.284-07:00Emma Kayfrom Kenneth Goldsmith's "<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/01/journal-day-five-2/">Gallery of Conceptual Writing</a>" on Poetry Foundation <br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 17px;"></span><br />
Emma Kay<br />
<em>Worldview</em> (Book Works, 1999)<br />
<br />
Emma Kay is a British conceptual artist whose process requires that monumental works of art, geography and histories be reconstructed from unaided memory. Her books include <em>The Bible from Memory</em> (1997), <em>Shakespeare from Memory</em> (1998), and<em>Worldview</em> (1999).<br />
“Without any recourse to reference material, relying solely on memory, <em>Worldview</em>draws on a variety of sources—newspapers, books, films, television, computer games, memories of school lessons, music, advertising and travels.<br />
The neutral and authoritative style of Worldview admits no doubts, yet is fallible; the gaps, inaccuracies and the missing parts of history are as important to the work as the recollections themselves. It challenges you not just to correct and question, but to doubt your own account of history. How would you balance pre-history against the Black Death, the Bayeux Taperstry or Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative?” (Book Works)<br />
From page 12:<br />
<blockquote>After all the Ice Ages, and as the Sun continued to get hotter, the Earth became a nicer place to live again. Some of the mammals had begun to try to walk on two of their legs, to reach food that was growing on trees. They were the apes. Dinosaurs gathered food this way too, but their upper limbs were quite weak in comparison to the lower ones. Apes’ upper limbs were long and strong, and were known as arms. Their brains were much larger in relation to their upper body weight than the dinosaurs’ brains. About a million years ago apes were multiplying rapidly, they appeared all over the Earth in pockets. They lived in social groups, which were hierarchical. They were herbivores. Most lived in trees but some had begun to live on the ground. The apes had the biggest brain in relation to their body of all the creatures so far. Their brain continually evolved, and their social interaction grew more complex. They made very rudimentary tools to assist with food-gathering. They protected each other, not just their offspring. They spent a proportion of their time in play, since they were so good at gathering food that they did not need to do it all the time. Their predators were larger mammals such as lions and tigers, wolves and bears. As they became more intelligent, they learned how to avoid being eaten. They were a very successful species, and this fact enabled them to multiply and evolve at a quick rate.</blockquote>From page 53:<br />
<blockquote>China was a vast empire and people often lived in extreme and remote places. The majority were peasants. The climate was very severe in places. Unwanted babies were exposed and left to die and women were sometimes sold into slavery as concubines for the warlords. The concubines and wealthier women would have their feet bound as this was deemed sexually attractive. This practice made them into cripples as it broke all the bones in their feet, although it was very desirable to have the smallest feet possible in order to achieve the best marriage. The main garment was the kimono, a long-sleeved coat tied with a very wide sash worn by men and women. Wooden clogs were worn to elevate the person above the often muddy ground. The Chinese had a great knowledge of the medical properties of herbs and were extremely advanced in their treatment of the sick. They believed that the human body contained meridians and pressure points which corresponded to internal organs and moods. If pressure or needles were applied to these then a cure could be effected. This was called acupuncture. Chi, the life force, flowed around the body along the meridians and if it were disrupted then the person would feel unwell. Qi gong and Tai Chi were meditative exercises that were an aid to healing and wellbeing.</blockquote>The second to last entry in the book, p. 211:<br />
<blockquote>Many people planned their New Year’s Eve celebrations years in advance and booked up hotel and function rooms all over the world. Some opted for the point on the dateline, in the Far East, where the Sun would rise for the first time in the 21st century. But the vast majority did not and were content to stay at home and plan street parties. Fireworks factories increased their production. Governments laid plans for controlling law and order in the event of mayhem caused by computer system failure. Many bars had to offer to pay their staff four or five times the usual wages to get them to work on New Year’s Eve. But for a large part of the world’s population the millennium had no relevance, although it was difficult to ignore. Many religions followed a different calendar. The year 2000 AD simply marked 2000 years after the birth of Christ, which made it a Christian celebration.</blockquote>***<br />
See a description of Emma Kay's show at T<a href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/34">he Hammer</a>, 2001<br />
On Kay's <i><a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/practiceoffailure.php">Worldview</a></i> in CabinetLemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-69828606612073271232010-09-20T19:02:00.000-07:002010-09-20T19:08:25.767-07:00Week 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5hcbVBiclzEtoZKaLcCUOdWbRtlfddTxlnE-L5Nt-OIKHbgmFr-ZOthygILqY4M7d72CK-c9LvgHBFzlj7FN1V4MRGnxlSzmwiw2nhMah7fzS38dLiToRCdQpgdjZlrYNTyl2qQKiD-4/s1600/43-15042.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="381" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5hcbVBiclzEtoZKaLcCUOdWbRtlfddTxlnE-L5Nt-OIKHbgmFr-ZOthygILqY4M7d72CK-c9LvgHBFzlj7FN1V4MRGnxlSzmwiw2nhMah7fzS38dLiToRCdQpgdjZlrYNTyl2qQKiD-4/s400/43-15042.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">SEPTEMBER 20</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Art: Ellen Gallery (Library Building) see: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #383a34; font-family: Arial; font-size: 9.5pt;">NELSON HENRICKS. TIME WILL HAVE PASSED. LE TEMPS AURA PASSÉ @ </span></b><a href="http://ellengallery.concordia.ca/en/">http://ellengallery.concordia.ca/en/</a> (meet Wednesday, September 21st at 4pm)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Art: <a href="http://www.ubu.com/sound/duchamp.html">Marcel Duchamp</a>, <a href="http://conceptualwriting101.blogspot.com/2010/09/sol-lewitt.html">Sol Lewitt</a> also see Sol LeWitt's Autobiography, 1980</div><div class="MsoNormal">Inclass Writing: </div><div class="MsoNormal">1. Describe/list the contents of a room</div><div class="MsoNormal">2. Ekphrasis and Conceptual Art</div><div class="MsoNormal">Discuss: Ubu Anthology Intro & 1-12, Jen Bervin, <i>Nets </i>(not in stock yet...)<br />
Discuss: Retyping pieces<br />
Start Reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dies</i> (to be discussed November 1<sup>st</sup>)</div><div class="MsoNormal">ASSIGNMENT #2 Erasure (to be discussed next week)</div><br />
<br />
P.S. Why not contribute your own text to <a href="http://tickertext2.concordia.ca/">Concordia's Holzer inspired art project</a>?Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-4128994934518803112010-09-20T18:21:00.000-07:002010-09-20T18:21:12.205-07:00The Plagiarists' Code<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/37659386/Plagiarist-Codex">Steal Ethically</a>.Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-89115144371020705562010-09-20T11:58:00.000-07:002010-10-16T23:47:57.821-07:00Sol Lewitt sung by John Baldessari<object height="385" width="400"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Q6eSfKeJ_VM?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Q6eSfKeJ_VM?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="385"></embed></object><br />
<h1><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Sentences on Conceptual Art</span></i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></i></span></span></h1><ol><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Irrational judgements lead to new experience.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Formal art is essentially rational.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">One usually understands the art of the past by applying the convention of the present, thus misunderstanding the art of the past.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The conventions of art are altered by works of art.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Perception is subjective.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist's concept involved the material.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">It is difficult to bungle a good idea.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">These sentences comment on art, but are not art.</span></li>
</ol>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-5520351686929947322010-09-15T07:18:00.000-07:002010-09-18T07:45:47.588-07:00Jenny HolzerJenny Holzer is at <a href="http://www.dhc-art.org/fr/exhibitions/jenny-holzer">DHC</a> in Montreal. Know what text is? What it can do? Watch Holzer, in typical Holzer fashion, ignite, bend, tease out the layers embedded in bodies of text. Holzer's show responds directly to war, mostly to the Iraq war, but also to earlier conflicts in the Balkans. The text in Thorax and Ribs is taken from US Government Documents that have been made public. There is the usual LED scrolling texts, but there are also canvases that feature maps and texts that have been blacked out.<br />
<object height="385" width="400"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rR6GbMOU_1I?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rR6GbMOU_1I?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="385"></embed></object><br />
At about 2:30 you'll see the reverse word fountain.<br />
Another video, more fun than informative. Must See. MUST SEE.<br />
<object height="385" width="400"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/UIpNj7WvIrw?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/UIpNj7WvIrw?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="385"></embed></object><br />
You can follow Jenny Holzer on <a href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer">Twitter</a>.<br />
<table cellspacing="0" class="columns" style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 363px;"><tbody style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
<tr style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><td class="round-left column" id="content" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-left-radius: 5px 5px; border-top-left-radius: 5px 5px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: top; width: 564px; word-wrap: break-word;"><div class="wrapper" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 15px; padding-left: 15px; padding-right: 15px; padding-top: 15px;"><div class="profile-user" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 0px;"><div class="user following" data="{lists:[]}" id="user_6451032" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><h2 class="thumb clearfix" style="clear: both; color: black; float: none; font-size: 2.8em; font-weight: bold; font: normal normal normal 18px/normal Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 50px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 20px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 15px; padding-top: 10px; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://twitter.com/account/profile_image/jennyholzer?hreflang=en" style="color: #d73030; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" height="73" id="profile-image" src="http://a2.twimg.com/profile_images/25643062/jenny_holzer_bigger.jpg" style="border-bottom-color: transparent; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-color: transparent; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-color: transparent; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: transparent; border-top-width: 0px; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" valign="middle" width="73" /></a><br />
Jennyholzer</h2><div class="hentry" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"></div><div class="profile-controls round" style="background-color: #f6f6f6; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-left-radius: 5px 5px; border-bottom-right-radius: 5px 5px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-top-left-radius: 5px 5px; border-top-right-radius: 5px 5px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 7px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 7px; text-align: right;"><div class="is-relationship" style="float: left; font: normal normal normal 15px/normal Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="is-following" style="display: inline-block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><i style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -144px -16px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; display: inline-block; height: 13px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; top: 1px; width: 15px;"></i><strong style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Following</strong></span></div><ul class="user-settings" style="float: left; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><li class="setting sms-setting" style="display: inline-block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important; position: static; text-align: left;"><a class="off tease" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -160px -48px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 4px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; text-decoration: none; width: 16px;" title="Set up your mobile phone to receive tweets from this user by text message."></a></li>
<li class="setting shares-setting" style="display: inline-block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important; position: static; text-align: left;"><a class="on" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -96px -48px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 4px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; text-decoration: none; width: 16px;" title="Retweets from this user will appear in your timeline."></a></li>
</ul><ul class="user-actions" style="list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: right;"><li class="action-menu menu" style="display: inline-block; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important; position: static; text-align: left; vertical-align: top;"><button class="btn" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #dddddd; background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/buttons/bg-btn.gif); background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-left-radius: 4px 4px; border-bottom-right-radius: 4px 4px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-top-left-radius: 4px 4px; border-top-right-radius: 4px 4px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; color: #333333; cursor: pointer; font-size: x-small; font: normal normal normal 11px/14px 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; height: 25px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 5px; text-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 1px 1px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: 36px;"><i style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -32px -64px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; display: block; height: 13px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: -2px; margin-right: -2px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 22px;"></i></button></li>
</ul><div class="followed-by" style="font-size: 11px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 4px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><label style="color: #666666; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Also followed by</label> <a class="user" href="http://twitter.com/VanessaPlace" style="color: #d73030; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">@VanessaPlace</a>, <a class="user" href="http://twitter.com/sheilaheti" style="color: #d73030; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">@sheilaheti</a>, <a class="user" href="http://twitter.com/joshcorey" style="color: #d73030; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">@joshcorey</a>, and <a href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer/followed_by_my_follows" style="color: #d73030; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">10+ others</a></div></div></div></div><div class="section" style="clear: both; float: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;"><ol class="statuses" id="timeline" style="font-size: 14px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 6px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><li class="hentry u-jennyholzer status latest-status" id="status_23889830435" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.5em; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 1.5em; position: relative; zoom: 1;"><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="actions" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: absolute; right: 10px; top: 8px;"><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="fav-action non-fav" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" id="status_star_23889830435" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -32px 0px; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 15px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden; width: 15px;" title="favorite this tweet"></a></div></span></span></span><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="entry-content" style="font-size: 1.77em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE BY</span></span><span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 11px; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="entry-date" href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer/status/23889830435" rel="bookmark" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Wed Sep 08 05:58:45 +0000 2010'}" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">1:58 AM Sep 8th</span></a> <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">via <a href="http://twitter.com/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Tweetie for Mac</a></span></span> </span></li>
<li class="hentry u-jennyholzer status" id="status_22913259359" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; position: relative; zoom: 1;"><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="actions" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: absolute; right: 10px; top: 8px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="fav-action non-fav" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" id="status_star_22913259359" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -32px 0px; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 15px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden; width: 15px;" title="favorite this tweet"></a></div></span></span></span><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="entry-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">GOING WITH THE FLOW IS SOOTHING BUT RISKY</span></span><span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 11px; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="entry-date" href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer/status/22913259359" rel="bookmark" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Fri Sep 03 19:15:21 +0000 2010'}" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">3:15 PM Sep 3rd</span></a> <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">via <a href="http://twitter.com/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Tweetie for Mac</a></span></span></span></li>
<li class="hentry u-jennyholzer status" id="status_22294341905" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; position: relative; zoom: 1;"><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="actions" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: absolute; right: 10px; top: 8px;"><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="fav-action non-fav" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" id="status_star_22294341905" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -32px 0px; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 15px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden; width: 15px;" title="favorite this tweet"></a></div></span></span></span><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="entry-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE</span></span><span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 11px; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="entry-date" href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer/status/22294341905" rel="bookmark" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Fri Aug 27 20:02:32 +0000 2010'}" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">4:02 PM Aug 27th</span></a> <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">via web</span></span> </span></li>
<li class="hentry u-jennyholzer status" id="status_22227734573" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; position: relative; zoom: 1;"><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="actions" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: absolute; right: 10px; top: 8px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="fav-action non-fav" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" id="status_star_22227734573" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -32px 0px; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 15px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden; width: 15px;" title="favorite this tweet"></a></div></span></span></span><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="entry-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">HUMANISM IS OBSOLETE</span></span><span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 11px; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="entry-date" href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer/status/22227734573" rel="bookmark" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Fri Aug 27 01:39:47 +0000 2010'}" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">9:39 PM Aug 26th</span></a> <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">via web</span></span> </span></li>
<li class="hentry u-jennyholzer status" id="status_21948305179" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; position: relative; zoom: 1;"><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="actions" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: absolute; right: 10px; top: 8px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="fav-action non-fav" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" id="status_star_21948305179" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -32px 0px; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 15px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden; width: 15px;" title="favorite this tweet"></a></div></span></span></span><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="entry-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">SLIPPING INTO MADNESS IS GOOD FOR THE SAKE OF COMPARISON</span></span><span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 11px; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="entry-date" href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer/status/21948305179" rel="bookmark" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Mon Aug 23 22:26:41 +0000 2010'}" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">6:26 PM Aug 23rd</span></a> <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">via web</span></span></span></li>
<li class="hentry u-jennyholzer status" id="status_21681411902" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; position: relative; zoom: 1;"><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="actions" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: absolute; right: 10px; top: 8px;"><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="fav-action non-fav" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6101984&postID=4277022768145313004" id="status_star_21681411902" style="background-image: url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1284159889/images/sprite-icons.png); background-position: -32px 0px; color: #d73030; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 15px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden; width: 15px;" title="favorite this tweet"></a></div></span></span></span><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="entry-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU</span></span><span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 11px; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><a class="entry-date" href="http://twitter.com/jennyholzer/status/21681411902" rel="bookmark" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Fri Aug 20 17:24:26 +0000 2010'}" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">1:24 PM Aug 20th</span></a> <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">via <a href="http://twitter.com/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #999999; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Tweetie for Mac</a></span></span> </span></li>
<li class="hentry u-jennyholzer status" id="status_21602808304" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; position: relative; zoom: 1;"><span class="status-body" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 0px; overflow-x: visible; overflow-y: visible; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; width: 425px;"><span class="status-content" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="actions" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: absolute; right: 10px; top: 8px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"><br />
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<ol class="statuses" id="timeline" style="font-size: 14px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 6px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"></ol></ol></div></div></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Plus: Check out this site featuring a webcam where you can watch Holzer's Projections at her show at Mass MoCa. These projections use the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska.Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-36321964640719123782010-09-13T19:08:00.000-07:002010-09-20T19:15:02.359-07:00Week 1SEPTEMBER 13<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Art: <a href="http://www.dhc-art.org/">DHC </a>see: Jenny Holzer (check back for out appointment: tentatively Friday 17th</div><div class="MsoNormal">Discuss: Kenneth Goldsmith on <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/conceptual_paragraphs.html">Conceptual Writing</a>, <a href="http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2462">Uncreative Writing</a>, <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html">Boredom</a>, and <i><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=kKOefRuY954C&printsec=frontcover&dq=kenneth+goldsmith+day&source=bl&ots=6jzjmeqi8f&sig=3SNMiyNQAwxR-zrQTMXM__hkSCM&hl=en&ei=H2uOTI__FIL98AaZ9cz3CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">Day</a></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>See two excerpts from <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=237062">Day on Poetry Foundation</a>.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Read for next week: Craig Dworkin’s Introduction to the <a href="http://www.ubu.com/concept/">Ubu Anthology of Conceptual Writing</a> & begin reading first ten entries. Choose 2 to present on in the next few classes. Be prepared to discuss.</div><div class="MsoNormal">ASSIGNMENT #1 Retyping<br />
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Update: Meet up at <a href="http://www.dhc-art.org/">DHC Gallery</a> just before 2 this Friday, September 17th</div><object height="385" width="400"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rR6GbMOU_1I?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rR6GbMOU_1I?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="385"></embed></object>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-44869311595046362542010-09-13T11:16:00.000-07:002010-09-13T18:57:09.989-07:00Introduction to Conceptual WritingWhat is conceptual writing and who is doing it?<br />
<br />
A group of practitioners can be loosely drawn as they are on the side bar of this blog. The list will be added to over the coming months as we move through the readings. Some of those added will aguably be described as conceptual writers, others we'll have to make a case for. To figure out what is and isn't we'll have to come up with some definition of Conceptual Writing, which, if you look at the writing about Conceptual Writing, isn't necessarily so easy to do.<br />
<br />
Here's something to think about:<br />
<blockquote>constraint isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Aren’t we talking about disruption as a way of ordering disruption? Procedure as a mock-up of process? I guess I’m interested in what happens when avant garde practices are applied to more conventional strands of storytelling…Unreadablity as a feature of reading in extremis? I’m not sure what I’m looking for exists quite yet but I am sensing a kind of formally innovative, intelligent and emotive kind of fiction that is under some pressures, that uses found and sculpted language, that transforms in some new way, how we might look at our (excess) world…that helps us in fact, imagine it.</blockquote>From the <a href="http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/06fic/intro.html">Introduction to Conceptual Fiction folio on Drunken Boat</a> curated by Sina Queyras & Vanessa Place.<br />
<br />
Here's something else:<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote>It's clear that long-cherished notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does writing respond to this new environment? This workshop will rise to that challenge by employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering, as compositional methods. Along the way, we'll trace the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language. We'll see how the modernist notions of chance, procedure, repetition, and the aesthetics of boredom dovetail with popular culture to usurp conventional notions of time, place, and identity, all as expressed linguistically.</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote>--Kenneth Goldsmith</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #111111;">Riffing on Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing workshop we will, over the course of the semester, immerse ourselves in conceptual writing practices. We will explore the relationship between art and language on the page, on walls, inside and outside spaces. We will attend galleries and engage in projects of description, transcription and détournement. We will take our practice to the street and to the archive. We will access the Internet but we will also access the surfaces of the city. We will read conceptual writing, and writing about writing, and we will ourselves, engage in short and long term writing projects that are responding to the readings, as well as proposing our own projects. Weekly art outings are not mandatory, but will enhance the discussion of conceptual work over the course of the semester.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: #111111;">Primary Texts </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Inkblot Record</i>, Dan Farrell, Coach House</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Notes on Conceptualisms, </i>Fitterman & Place<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nets</i>, Ugly Duckling Presse, Jen Bervin</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rob The Plagairist</i>, Robert Fitterman</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dies: A Sentence</i>, Vanessa Place, Les Figues</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Revolution</i>, Kim Rosenfeld, Les Figues</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: #111111;"><a href="http://www.ubu.com/concept/">Ubu Anthology of Conceptual Writin</a>g ed. Craig Dworkin <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: #111111;">All additional readings not handed out in class will be available or linked to on this blog: the syllabus will certainly shift. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Grading & Assignments</div><div class="MsoNormal">Participation & Discussion 40%</div><div class="MsoNormal">Must attend. These discussions cannot be replicated and we will likely do in-class writing as well. You will lose 5% for each undocumented absence. Please keep a writing journal and respond to each reading in detail. This will ensure you have something to contribute each class. All students are expected to contribute to discussions. It would be good to come with a written reading response. Students are also asked to keep a writing/reading journal in which they respond in an ongoing way to the readings we are engaging with, as well as track their own writing projects. This will help develop your final statement. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Assignments 40%</div><div class="MsoNormal">You will have 5 writing assignments over the course of the semester as well as 3 opportunities to lead a discussion. You will hand these in and workshop. Each of these is worth 5%. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Final Portfolio & Statement 20%</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">You final portfolio will consist of your writing assignments, plus a short written statement outlining your engagement with conceptual writing. </span>Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737992944813584869.post-8559070129062124752010-09-12T14:37:00.001-07:002010-12-08T12:58:59.262-08:00Derek Beaulieu<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzP80GIBzz_loho8w3eoQis-Wb4i2ZSkGL6bg73X2wCI_69Cy4rMdicClGYyw5FuCr9Gryv_INH-T1I49PPPQ' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br />Video via Helen. See her reading report on derek's <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-write-reading-by-derek-beaulieu.html">Montreal reading</a>.<br />Check out <a href="http://derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com/">derek beaulieu'</a>s blog.<br />Read Greg Betts on <i><a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/09/gregory-betts-reads-derek-beaulieus.html">Flatland</a>.</i><br /><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Find out more about </span><a href="http://www.informationasmaterial.com/Work/Beaulieu.htm">flatland</a></i>, Information as Material, UK<br /><div style="margin: 0px;">Read excerpts <a href="http://www.littleredleaves.com/LRL1/beaulieu.html">here</a>:</div><div style="margin: 0px;">PDF of the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/authors/beaulieu/Beaulieu-Derek_Flatland.pdf">whole book here:</a></div><br /><a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/06/talking-with-derek-beaulieu-no-press.html">Lemon Hound in Conversation</a> with beaulieu<br />Lemon Hound <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2006/10/reading-newspaper-beaulieu.html">On Reading the Newspaper </a><br />Lemon Hound on <i><a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-to-edit-chains-flatland.html">Flatland, Chains and How to Edit</a></i><br />Interview re: How To Write with derek and Helen Hajnoczky on <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/09/derek-beaulieu-on-how-to-write.html">Lemon Hound</a><br />Derek's artist statement & from Drunken Boat:<br /><a class="workname" href="http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/06fic/beaulieu/statement.html" style="border-style: none; color: rgb(204, 204, 255); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Artist’s Statement</a><br /><a class="workname" href="http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/06fic/beaulieu/thentherewerenone.html" style="border-style: none; color: rgb(204, 204, 255); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">And Then There Were None</a><br /><a class="workname" href="http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/06fic/beaulieu/nothingodd.html" style="border-style: none; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:black;">Nothing Odd Can Last</span></a><br /><br /><table style="width: 480px;" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td bordercolor="#666666" valign="top"><img src="http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/headshots/beaulieu.jpg" width="60" height="75" /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></td><td valign="top"><span class="artistname-big" style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:16px;" >derek beaulieu </span><span class="text" style="text-decoration: none;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;" >’s five books of poetry all engage with textual production and the way that composition informs comprehension. His first book, <em>with wax</em>, was published by Coach House Books in 2003, and was followed-up by<em> frogments from the frag pool: haiku after basho</em> (Mercury Press, 2005) co-written with Gary Barwin and <em>fractal economies</em> (talonbooks, 2006). His most recent book is<em> Silence</em>(red fox press, 2009) a suite of non-semantic concrete poems.<br /><br />beaulieu is also the <a class="links" href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/beaulieu/" style="border-style: none; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:black;">author</span></a> of three books of conceptual fiction; <em>flatland</em> (information as material, 2007 online <a class="links" href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/authors/beaulieu/Beaulieu-Derek_Flatland.pdf" style="border-style: none; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:black;">here</span></a>) and <em>Local Colour</em> (ntamo, 2008, online <a class="links" href="http://ntamo.blogspot.com/2008/10/derek-beaulieu-local-colour.html" style="border-style: none; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:black;">here</span></a>). His collection of conceptual short fiction, <em>How to Write</em>, was published by talonbooks in 2010.<br /><br />beaulieu is co-editor of the best-selling anthology <em>Shift & Switch: new Canadian poetry</em>. He has been editor of filling Station (1998-2001, 2004-2007), dANDelion (2001-2004) and endNote (2000-2002) magazines. His small press housepress (1997-2004) published over 250 publications and is now archived, in its entirely, at Simon Fraser University. He has lectured about small press, community and poetics in Canada, Scandinavia, the US and the UK. His artwork–which engages with text and readability–has been shown in group and solo exhibits internationally.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />how to write: http://talonbooks.com/books/how-to-write<br />excerpts here:<br />http://www.brokenpencil.com/view.php?id=5386<br />**<br /><br />local colour: http://ntamo.blogspot.com/2008/10/derek-beaulieu-local-colour.html<br />excerpts here:<br />http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2010/03/derek-beaulieu-local-colour.html<br />http://necessetics.com/derek.html<br />http://www.trickhouse.org/trapdoor/trapdoor/pages/derekbeaulieu.html<br />**<br /><br />and there's more links and such up here:Lemon Houndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02339211884645310602noreply@blogger.com0