A: Before we begin today I wanted to add a little to my comments yesterday. Q: Sure. What did you want to say? A: One thing was that I didn’t want to argue the case that indigenous people are the only ones disenfranchised by bureaucracy and so on. Disenfranchisement is a complex issue and it’s really quite disingenuous to single out white middle-class men as the ones who benefit from bureaucracy. In fact, no one benefits. People can manipulate it though, pervert it. Discrepancies are obvious too. For example, when a US-born Filipino friend wanted to move back to the US with his Japanese wife, the application and process was more drawn out and made more complicated than is usual for whites. There was nothing illegal about the extra interviews he and his wife had to attend, and racism would be hard to prove, but at the same time one has to ask why his application was delayed (it took more than 6 months) while other white Americans’ applications take about half the time. I don’t know the history of bureaucracy for other groups. The indigenous people of the US, at any rate, is one in which bureaucracy was the next brutality after force. In my family, we experienced this in the form of the “blood registration” at the turn of the 20th century.. And then there is the risible Cherokee Nation, the Lilliput of Washington-style politics… Q: Well, I was actually going to follow up on this a little. I did some checking up on your name last night. “Basan” is either Turkish or Hebrew, I can’t work out which. A: I’m sticking by Milton on this and will assert that the name is from modern day Jordan. But the name is Hebrew, yes, my father was raised Jewish. Q: Milton? A: Yes, in Paradise Lost the town of Basan is one of those dominated by Moloch. It’s still on the map. Q: You’ve spoken a lot about indigenous Americans, but looking at you, you look much more, err, Jewish. A: Good point. If we start measuring blood like Nazi’s you’ll find me to be 1/2 Hebrew (Jewish relates to a religion) and just a miniscule 1/16 Cherokee, with the remaining bits being mostly Macedonian with a trace of Scotch. If you’re out for binging, I’d make a lousy drink! Q: So why.. A: Why all the talk about Cherokees? I don't know. I’ve always had a hard time identifying with the Jewish side of things. One reason is that the religion never featured in my life. My mother is a devoted Christian, I am an atheist. The whole Israel question further complicates things. Also, my sister and I were quite close to my grandfather on the Cherokee side.. Anyway, I’m bored with this topic. This is the last day, can we move on? Q: Sure. I wanted to ask about your current projects. What are you working on? What do you have planned? A: This’ll probably take up the rest of the interview! As you know, I’ve spent a good part of the year preparing my Ph.D. application, because of this I haven’t been able to do much in the way of real writing, aside from reams of notes made here and there in transit. That said, I did write quite a bit on Gins and Arakawa at the beginning of the year, culminating in a kind of crappy review of their book “The Architectural Body”. I’m going to go back to that as soon as I can. Madeline sent me a review copy so I really owe her one. I also started the year writing about 100 post-card instructions – poems to be constructed by someone else I another place. I want to do something with them, but soon after I finished the first batch, the Iraq war broke out and I felt the cards were somehow superfluous or fatuous. So I started writing a project I called “A Modest Proposal Revisited” in which I make Swiftian suggestions concerning the Middle East in the business presentation genre, with ppt. Slides and everything. Again, this is half done partly because I wanted to put it online and I don’t have the technical ability to do something like that. The other reason was that other obligations prevented me from finishing. Since then, I lost the ppt slides in the same computer crash that destroyed the sound script you found yesterday. At least I have most of the script in my notebook (mead notebook that is). Those are the two major projects I plan to finish around March next year. I still have some poems and bric-a-brac I need to polish up. I pretty much finished one called “Brancusi’s Car” the other day. I like experimenting with reducing and cutting away words as part of the process of the poem, as well as with patterning. “Brancusi’s Car” is like that. It’s inspired from a John Cage quote in which he says that the car alarms in NYC remind him of a Brancusi (I think he had the sinusoidal wave in mind there). Then there is the question of what to do with hours of taped noises. I had to do a lot of travel around Tokyo this summer doing interviews etc. so when I got the chance I’d take out my tape player and record anything really. I started putting those together, but I need to find some better software. I have a copy of Acid Pro, but I have no idea how good it is. Basically, I want to layer the sounds with music (especially a couple of Nono pieces) that features silence. Then there is the question of my sound scores. Either I need to get people together to read them or I’ll use the same software to do it all myself. Err. But first I have to find them all. Q: You aren’t the most organized of people, are you? A: No, although not usually this bad. It’s just that I work a lot and have the application to think about. That is my number one priority right now. I need community, poetry and arts community, and I see it in the US. Also, my studies feel like “unfinished business”. If I don’t go back, some abstract study mobster is going to put a severed horse head in my bed. I’ll know I made the wrong decision. Q: we need to finish.. A: Yes. Well, thanks for allowing me on the blog.

Ben got called out to do a few interviews about 10 mins after I arrived. After waiting 45 minutes for those to finish and then for him to go out and get an aloe drink, I’m a little tired. At least I had time to read Stephen Vincent’s excellent piece on Wounded Screams ant Walter Road. I also rummaged through his bag and found a sound score that he thought he had lost in a computer crash. He was looking pretty grumpy before I declared the find, but now he is decidedly confused. Apparently, he can’t remember which program he used to make the score, so at the moment, it’s a crumpled bit of paper Q: Glad I could have been of assistance. A: You shouldn’t have been in my bag, but I am grateful. Now how long is it going to take me to remember how I made this. I’m pretty sure I used photoshop… Q: We should really get back to the questions. A: OK Q: Yesterday we finished with you talking about identity. Today is Thanksgiving. Do you have any feelings about that? A: First, I guess I should say that one side of my family is Cherokee on my mothers side. Considering the mass murder (genocide is to accept o term) committed against American Indian, at one point in my life I found the holiday to be like having a Krystallnacht holiday in Germany. I’ve come to accept Thanksgiving and Christmas as simply necessary family holidays. I no longer worry about the history of them. People need holidays and rites of passage, it’s a time to release excess tension etc.{pause} I do worry about the history, but not in relation to the holidays. The history of the indigenous people in the Americas over the last 500 years has been particularly brutal. Bureaucracy is our new brutality - I recently saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which is an excellent depiction of this point – and the North American Indians still suffer from it… Q: You’re sermonizing. Judging from all the notes, notebooks, and scribbled-on things in your bag, you do a lot of writing, don't you? How to you come to poetry and writing? A: This is one of the few questions I like answering. I always enjoyed poetry and tended to make much more of an effort writing poetry than other creative activities at school. I remember writing a book of poems for my little sister once. I wish I could find them. I think they were in haiku. I only remember spending a lot of time writing them neatly because my handwriting was and is so hard to read. I developed a real interest in poetry at around the age of 13 when my father decided that I would like all his old Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Herman Hesse books. As I remember, I was reading quite a few horror novels at the time, like Steven King, and voiced my boredom with the genre, so my father just dropped these books on my bed. There was a book he gave me, The Revenge of the Lawn, I liked that a lot. You can’t deaden an interest in poetry. It’s worse than a wildfire. I’ve finished relationships over it, started relationships because of it, sadly less frequently than the former. I started writing about the same time that I started reading. Until I left university, I wrote pretty standard stuff. Sonnets, villanelles, sestina’s etc. all on pretty common topics. I was always pretty bored with the British poetry I had access to. It was after I discovered dada and then all the language poets and poets doing something interesting that really catalyzed my writing. Oh. We’re way over time. Tomorrow’s the last day, right? Q: Ok, yes that’s right.

Q: Right, where were we? A: {cough} Q: Yes, who are you? I mean, not a lot of people know who you are, wouldn’t you like to tell us a little about yourself? A: I don’t enjoy talking about myself, but I’ll try. I am quite strongly placeless. I mean many people have a hometown or a home region, or a home country, but I can’t say clearly that I have any of these. I was born in Oklahoma, spent most of my younger years in Texas, my adolescence in England (where I found closer friendships with Africans and Europeans), and now several adult years in Japan. My passport says I’m American, were is not for this piece of bureaucracy, I wouldn’t easily identify myself as American. Q: So you are American? A: I recently watched a Monty Python skit in which Picasso was doing a cross-country painting on his bicycle. As a mock sports event other painters on bicycles raced passed John Cleese, the man on the beat. Last coming through was Kurt Schwitters. Cleese calls him something like, “ the great British Kurt Schwitters”. A spectator (Eric Idol dressed in drag) points out that Schwitters is German. Cleese retorts “he died ‘ere! That makes ‘im Bri’ish enough”. The point is, I guess, that place isn't important. Space certainly is important and the function of place in space is important.. Sorry, I’ve got to finish today. A: OK. Thanks for the latte.

This Week: An Interview with Me

Exclusive to Luminations

Interviews are something like ego massages for the interviewees and voyeurism for the viewer. I need both an ego massage and to be viewed, returning from a housebound 3 day weekend. Q: Aside from flogging your name and wares around a bit, you are essentially unknown. Do you feel like an ass keeping a public blog when nobody knows who you are? A: hmm. Well, don’t waste time with pleasantries! {long pause} To answer your question, yes, I do feel like an ass. There are highly visible poets and writers out there keeping nicely written, reasonably well-considered blogs. Mine is completely the opposite. Since it’s written during my lunch break from a place where I like to keep my interests secret, careful consideration and attention to detail is virtually impossible. Still, the blog is a place for potential visibility and I do my best to put something up that might be of interest to someone somewhere. That said, I don’t usually try to communicate myself through the blog. Aside from the occasional lapse into criticism, I often use various ‘voices’ and guises. In part the voices and guises are an experiment, no doubt they also function as a type of escapism from the work environment. Q: Do you like work? A: You’ll notice my blog does not have my name on it.. that is because it is being written on company property and, although I appreciate visibility, I don’t want to be visible to my colleagues (in more ways than one, I assure you). As for work as an abstract condition (I think we’ve decided there is no such thing as real work anymore), no, I don’t like working. That said, everyone should try it, it’s good practice for the real world. Once one enters the world of poetry, I think the memory of work will remain an idle fantasy. Q: Hmm. If I can move on… A: Please.. Q: Who are you? {phone rings} A: Hello? {pause} no, I can’t, but did you know that {pause} ok. Look I’m in the middle of an interview and I think the interviewer is getting a little impatient. I mean how much time do you think he has? {pause} alright, thanks for calling, bye. {looks at me quizzically} Q: Who are you? A: Oh, that was my little boy. He loves Peter and the Wolf and was explaining that the wolf is represented by four French horns rather than the three claimed on the box. Can we finish this for today? I’ve got to get back to work. Q: OK. Are you in tomorrow? A: It’s in the contract..

I've just added Kasey Mohammad's Limetree to the sidebar. Kasey always has interesting things to say, even when they're boring. He was my favorite poster on the Poetics list for the longest time, but sadly he rarely contributes these days. He's recently been in 'a bit of bother' about some comments he made about a California poet... and indeed the comments were a little insensitive, though some of the attacks on Kasey's blunder were wholly disproportionate and injudicious. Kasey is very aware of pop culture as his post today attests (Britney Spears in Middle English). How I wish I could keep up as he does, were I not such an insufferable snob... Warm welcome to the sidebar, Lime Tree!

I’m going to be taking a bit of a blogbreak for the next few days, at least until Tuesday Japan time. Perhaps it’s obvious, but between working 12 hour days, getting together my Ph.D. application, and dealing with an overly emotional family life I haven’t got much time for, well, anything.

Finally read Jack Spicer last night… am humbled

Who is this Billy Collins? Quite happy this week that a colleague came back from San Fran with $70 worth of books including In the American Tree and the Robin Blaser Jack Spicer anthology AND some John Taggart AND some Carla Harryman AND FULCRUM I’ve been looking forward to Fulcrum since the issue was announced on the POETICS list some time back. Who is this newcomer? A Sulphur for the 21st century. Unfortunately not. There are some great articles and poems in there; I enjoyed the Bernstein/Perloff interview; but a lot of the poetry is just plain unmusical and awkward (Pat Herron is looking good though). But to top everything off is this one BAD poem from a guy called Billy Collins and an equally DULL interview. Billy Collins is new to me, really. I’ve heard his name, and wish it were only that. I understand that he is a bit of a celebrity in the US.. but then they have Fox news there too… The problem with the Collins poem in Fulcrum is that it has lines and verses that have no rhythm, no meter and visually the lines don’t even contribute to the poem. They just are in the way the gold shit sits atop the Asahi building (the difference being that the shit has become a landmark and one can’t even remember one line from the poem). Moreover, the last verse is just some quirky twist like the poems on those pastel colored poetry sites for teens. I read with bewilderment that Collins spends 7 or 8 hours a day writing. I wonder what he does with that time? And as for the interview itself, Collins and the interviewer come off as rather toffee-nosed. Aside from Collins’ odd comment about writing for such an amount of time, he also drops this peculiar off the cuff remark about Emily Dickenson. The interviewer compares Collins’ and Dickenson’s penchant for writing at home and Collins responds by saying something along the lines of, “ yeah, I’m like that, except I don’t wear the dress”. Que? This is a humor too sophisticated for me. Finally, I don’t understand Collins’ comment about there being too much serious poetry. The only serious poetry I’ve ever read was Celan, and even Celan’s writing has some humor.

I'm gradually adding links to the side bar of blogs I like for one reason or another. Today I put up Stephen Vincent's. I don't know much about him, but his prose is invariably mellifluous, even when he's cranky. Check out his blog!

BBC Radio four has a program called Desert Island Disks that involves inviting a celebrity or cultural vulture to talk about the music they would take with them on a desert island etc etc. It’s usually an extraordinarily droll affair with “best of” celebrities listing “best of” music. I think they once had Phillip Glass on, but that is hearsay. Anyhow, since I have something else to get on with today, here’s my list of desert island books in no particular order: Mechanism of Meaning – Gins & Arakawa I would have chosen Architectural Body, but it is not quite as practical as MoM. MoM is like a manual in consciousness. It’s a wonder to me how they could have actually produced something after this book… But they did, and it’s even better and many times larger. Cantos – Ezra Pound For me Pound’s Cantos are more than a book of poetry, they are a textbook in culture (or Kulchur). My breath still gets shallow when I read “And then went down to ship..” No one can write an “and” like Pound. Last Lunar Baedeker – Mina Loy I haven’t been able to part with this book since I bought it. ‘nuff said? Helen Keller or Arakawa – Madeline Gins O.k. two Gins books, so what? HK/A defies description, that’s why I call it poetry. A novel/non-fiction/philosophical tract etc etc. If one plans to write a book, reading Gins is essential because the immense complexity and planning etc that must go into her writing makes one blush armed only with these spontaneous word games. Eunoia – Christian Bok A Phenomenal Book! What can I say?.. The only problem is that I need a dictionary to read it. Collins Gem Dictionary See above… I love this dictionary because they use IPA symbols for the pronunciation key. I can’t get my head around those funny oo symbols in Websters.. From the other side of the Century – Douglas Messerli This is a great anthology (thank you Catherine!). My only difficulty with it has been that a lot of the authors I like in there are no longer in print! John Taggart to name one, ?? Godfrey to name another. Hence, this anthology is essential. Poems for the Millenium Vols. 1 & 2 Comments as “From the other side..” with the added benefit of having a truly international selection. Rothenberg and Joris really needed a 3 volume set though. The omissions are glaring, especially from more recent writers. I think in addition to this one needs to rip out the poetry from the Chicago Reviews German Writing… Two words: Ulrike Dresdner (in German is even better!). – I’m cheating, btw, there isn't a link between these books.

It's the weekend. What the hell am I doing here?? Just reading through the blog I noticed the word "laconic" (do a search with apple+f or ctrl+f) and realized that apparently I MISUSED it. And I have been misusing it for 10 years! As it was explained to me way back when in ardent discussions of the Peloponnesian war, 'lacon' referred to the idiotic simplicity of the Spartans (actually, it just means Spartan). Thus, I have always used the word to mean "moronically simple" (I distrust simple). Now I find that through some bizarre and unjust shift in use, laconic has come to mean 'terse or concise'. The Spartans must be getting a laugh out of that one... if they laugh.

Hey! Check out Sawako's The Ongoing Show to see her performance writing.

I wonder what S. is up to in Paris? We didn't really have a chance to speak before she left for a one or two month trip, so I actually had no idea where she was going. Paris, after a brief US tour. As I remember, she gets a lot of her inspiration there, so I hope it works out and she has loads of stuff to show for it. Never having made the short trip to Paris (from London), I have no idea the affect the place has on ones senses. Tokyo is certainly an overload and has given me more to write than London. In fact, London is like a huge enervating cesspit. Were I to live in the countryside anywhere on the planet I would probably take to quaffing huge amounts of beer (and growing huge amounts of marijuana), I love nature but need excessive inebriation to live in it... and would write very little between stupors. New York City makes me feel thoroughly Steve Reich and early Phillip Glass, which is a good thing.. really. 10 years ago, Athens was also a good place in which to write, though I was a classicist type at the time; Delphi, too, had some inspiring charm. The Greek islands had the same effect. (I'm very curious about the differing affects of place and space on poetic production. That is, I wonder if the ideas we bring to a place (like Delphi, the navel of the world) override or work with the space itself. It would seem most natural that they would work simultaneously.) Generally I like to write in overloaded environments, like Tokyo. Throngs of people pushing on and off of trains, Obasans darting at seats, the unplanned mass of mostly white, pink, and brick-colored concrete, flashing lights, Korean 'massage' parlors, orange-tanned men with lonsilverer hair in suits, etc etc. Speculatively, the love of such chaotic places has to do with imposing an order on the chaos, finding patterns and frequencies that are hidden under the noise. But then this doesn't really account for Rhodes, where the chaos is the transient migrations of those little red mopeds. Though frightening at times, not particularly chaotic. K?ln and Düsseldorf are wonderful places to write, if you can stay awake. I believe the Meistermenschen are real; they might write for you, if you can catch one. There's a parade ground in Die Altstadt near the river in Düsseldorf that's great for catching odd bits of continental life, like obese men with long, bushy moustaches in pastel-colored clothes, and American tourists looking for the 'right kind of mustard' to go with their hotdog. Yawn!

Speak speak. I’m totally fucking exhausted and ask myself to speak. I’m fucking hallucinating colorful trails follow anything (in)organic that moves. Fuck. Speech is markedly yours, don’t speak. Fucking identity. Don’t ask me. Certain paeans to negativity. I could be speaking or etching pinwheels in moon craters, who gives a fuck? Fuck interpenetration, we’re working on linearity right? I’m fucking tired. You’ve entered me innumerable times today, leave me the fuck alone. Choose anybody, motherfucker. Being inside you is like a Schopenhauerean porcupine. Cobwebs. Shit and the cooling fluid always sits outside you, on skin. That’s what you’re like. A pellucid gel on your thigh, a mistake.

I wonder if anyone did anything as crazy as Anal Magic between 3 and 6 New York time on the 5th of November 2003. Ahh.. I’m relieved

Remembering Bihari through assertion of homosexual friend

He said that if I were homosexual, he would score with me more frequently. Moreover, he averred, if all men were homosexual, men would all score more frequently. Considering this more closely, I realized that if all scores were homosexual, I would be more frequently. She said being warms the hearth of a woman’s pistons. Her nurse demurred at the premise; a woman’s pistons are not of the hearth. He said the hearth of pistons is not of woman, to which the homosexual warm… I said…

Selections from: Banalities from the Chinese Kurt Schwitters Flies have short legs Red currants are red The end is the beginning of every End Banality is the ornament of the Bourgeoisie The citizen is every bourgeoisie’s beginning The bourgeoisie have short flies … Every woman has an apron Every beginning has its end The world is full of clever people Clever is stupid Not all of what is called Expressionism is Impressive art …

My plan was to explain, at least a little, about the work you saw here last week. Unfortunately, some of the files I needed to upload are missing… and perhaps were never put into digital format. Let me explain. Day one was a list of quasi-aphorisms I dubbed “blaphorisms’. Since I’m writing from work etc etc. these are a personal filter on Kurt Schwitter’s “Banalities from the Chinese”. I have actually translated Schwitter’s aphorisms for my own amusement and don’t even know if they are available in English (never having read Schwitters in English). I was going to publish them here but I couldn’t find them on my HD this morning and suspect I never went beyond the pen on paper stage. If I remember, I’ll put them up tonight… The other jottings from day one were sheer madcap and I have no idea what I was doing. The rest of the week you saw my “non-events”. What is a “non-event”? (prepare for my circuitous answer) Sol Le Witt became well known for his instructional art that, as I understand, he also combined with the mail art form so that works could be created without him ever being present. Whether or not the recipients knew that he was going to send them a set of instructions is beside the point. A non-event concerns itself with the space between the instruction and the enactment of it. Simply explained, I write an instruction, which is a kind of event, but then there is the actual ‘implementation’ of the instruction: another event. Once on the screen or page, these are ‘non-events’. The non-events of last week were simple and deliberately laconic, following the theme of the week. They can become quite complex, and I think quite informative about the receptive environment of the reader. As the week progressed, I played around with these two ideas to write instructions that really weren't instructins at all. Sometimes I allowed them to veer more to the abstract, others I wanted to read like comic orders (e.g. Inhale / Expire). The major exception is Friday's fact finder about the president of the usa. In fact, I improperly called this a non-event, when it is really something else.

Fact Finder: Non-event # 7

George W. Bush declares an emergency George W. Bush is declared an emergency The emergency declares: George W. Bush

Proto-Surrealist Non-event # 6

Ingest one spoonful of medicine Medicate an ingested spoon.

Non-Event #5

Lane after lane. Cars stop for a red light. Breathe

Non-Event #4

Become aware (of your breath)

Non-Event #3

Inhale Expire

non-event #2

Imitate the frame of a hand-fan with your right hand. Close the fan with your left hand

Non-Event #1

Blink

overheard conversation

A: Can I buy you a drink? B: Yeah, black, hot, perfect. A: O.K. Sure. B: Thanks.

///////////////////////////////////// \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< <><><><><><><><><><> <+<=<_<)<(

“WOAH! Like I watch you watching me and..”

I thought about what to write next.

Blahphorisms The telephone rings. Another phone call. I slid the ‘in’ tray out… I forgot to push it back in. I don’t really care so much for cufflinks It got dark before S’s plane flew out last night. (This is conjecture) Children are like algebra. They multiply. This cake was sweeter yesterday. The dictionary was open for a short while. I realize boring is not so easy.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Next week is non-event week. Nothing will happen on this blog. We’re going boring. Watch or don't watch this space. Either way, you won't miss anything.

O.K. I realized yesterday that my archives are virtually empty! So you can’t link to the entry from a few months ago about Kent Johnson.. Argh, oh well. I did find the entry in a word doc on the computer but it is currently in web transit after I was asked to make a little space on my hard drive. I’ll put it up when I can… anyhow, good news about the archives. I have less to be embarrassed about.

I had intended to write more on the below, but ran out of time.. a disadvantage to blogging over a lunchbreak. I could continue today, but other things agitate my mind, namely: Kent Johnson’s interview over at VeRT magazine. I’m pretty sure I kept my comments on Kent Johnson in here somewhere. I’m an irregular blogger so you shouldn’t have trouble finding them should the desire take you. Anyhow, while I generally agree with him, I do wonder whether he has a low self-esteem. Why on earth does he keep going on about the Language poets and Yasusada? I can see both are tied to his idea that Lang Po didn’t go far enough and question actual Authorial authority.. Surely an important point to make, but in the same terms over and over again?? Kenny Goldsmith quoted the Brion Gyson about poetry being 50 years behind art in his short essay about being a post-language poet (can’t find the link, sorry). And perhaps on this issue poetry is even further behind? But we’re talking POETRY, not just language poets! -- Some people reason that LP is a fair target because it has become hegemonic. Oedipal episodes are understandable I guess... it would be nice to prove Freud wrong though-- As for Kent Johnson, I really hope he moves on. He has some interesting points that won't be made because he seems to be repeating himself. Even worse, he continuously names those close to the Yasusada affair. If I’m not mistaken, Eliot Weinberger, David Rosenberg, and Mikhail Epstein all supported Johnson during the height of controversy. I know for sure that Johnson quotes from Epstein in his correspondence with the Japanese scholar (I forget his name) interested in the Yasusada affair. Yasusada is not the only case of authorial challenge. Yes, there’s the Ern Malley case etc. but how about those smaller things like Duchamp blacking out the lines of a poem he had written – what was authorial becomes anonymous – Sol Le Witt sending instructions for art through the mail?? Nevertheless, it’s good to upset people and get called nasty things. On that account I am very jealous of Johnson because I doubt I could ever piss someone off quite so much and so publicly. I’d like to see him do it again. I do like a spectacle!

Can poetry challenge militarized language and propaganda? Are textual critique, parody, and satire adequate responses or do they reify these abuses? This question was over on Ron Silliman’s blog and interests me partly because it is a silly question and because it’s a question I often answer to myself (being inherently, biologically silly). Silliman, I guess, has given up or rescinded upon his communist past (well, I was lead to believe he was a communist) as he answers this with heavy commentary on American politics. Being a nominal American only, I just can’t understand the typical American response of outing the Republican Party in favor of the Democrats. Outside of America, it seems to make little difference in real terms (i.e. the number of bombs and big business dropping on foreign countries) who is in office. What I think is at stake is more of a cosmetic PR issue at best. George Bush is a moron and is an embarrassment to Americans who believe in America. Democrats are, on the whole, better spoken. Sadly, the greens, Ralf Nader, are not terrible well spoken either… But this isn’t what I intended to write about at all. Can poetry challenge…? Well, yes it can and it's not really a question of whether we should combine this with direct action - that's like asking can a car move? and getting the answer "yes, if we give it some gas". As far as I’m concerned this question is asking us more about the challenge itself. Since poetry can challenge, what type of challenge can it pose? Textual critique, going back to the car question, needs factual critique as well. A semiotic analysis of political speeches and jargon does have it’s place, but that is a fairly narrow following. … But parody and satire?? This must have been asked by a humorless group of people. Parody and satire are the lifeline of the ability to challenge “militarized language & propaganda”. Much of Swift’s writing, for example, or even some of Lee Ann Brown’s Oulipo National Anthems are testament to the effectiveness of parody and satire. Moreover, magazines like Private Eye in the UK keep this traditional alive.. Apparently, even Michael Moore is capable of satire. Certainly, a certain caliber of parody and ‘satire’ is counter-productive. The late night talk show variety (Jay Lenno, etc), from what I’ve seen (very little) is complicit in the comedian’s own celebrity and is almost always counter-productive. I’m out of time, but want to add that the only response capable of reifying these abuses is the militarized language itself. “Shock and Awe” reifies abuses. Any intelligent parody or satire of Shock and Awe exposes the shallowness and reification. …

I want to say a little more about herbs/spices and poetry. Before you even consider that I was on to something, I wasn’t. As I stated it – when? last week? – the poem pot is little more than you’d find in most British bookstores (now that Compendium is closed). Herbs/spices engage our olfactory, gustatory, and mnemonic senses in a very direct way. I’m curious about the senses poetry engages. The writing of it certainly involves a great deal of senses (ever been in the middle of a great – possibly stoned- thought and had the doorbell ring?) and this sensory material certainly channels into the poem itself. Thinking of Jackobson’s axis of selection, one must concede that selection is not a mental process but an environmental one. But all that goes into writing is seemingly stripped away the moment another reader opens the book and what enters is the environment of the reader. It’s on this level that herbs and spices meet poetry. Herbs and spices also have ‘environmental lives’ and in fact are more extreme – being earth-bound products – in that they are in constant need of verification (what better word is there? Who knows the smell of the cinnamon tree without a being around?) moreso than poems. At any rate, I like to wonder what the possibilities are that we poets give up on the method of making ‘reader oriented’ texts and think more about the fabric of the reader? That is, making the reader aware of the process of meaning making rather than thatshe is making meaning. Instructions?? I will be submitting my postcards to the mail art expo in Buenos Aires.

Before I go off and not make usual sense, I’ll admit to corporeal presence, but don’t tax me.

Preventative medicine is what, oranges and fresh fruit? We shouldn’t joke about medical conditions. Topics deemed acceptable would be fruit oranges vegetables and meat when the company admits to omnivorous consumption.

Ah, homemade Giyoza and rice. Fantabulous. Shiso giyoza, I should add. Aside from Baudelaire, I’m not aware of many poets who have written about food, although I’m sure there are some. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons does include the headings (such as roast beef) and in fact my father has a recipe book that may be Stein’s or Toklas’ (we used the hashish brownies recipes a few times), I can’t remember. Food and cooking, and in fact the whole gustatory “thing” is really important for me. However, I can’t say I’ve ever really written about food or eating… I’m not sure how to approach it. My interest is more in the raw materials: herbs, spices, bare ingredients. Being most interested in Indian cooking (there is a cute story behind my predilection for Indian food, but not now), the ingredients I tend to appreciate are primarily used in South East Asian Cuisine. The only exception is Jalapeños, which are terrible in Indian food. Were I to make a poem out of spices, a good balance of Cardamom, about one black to five green, would form the rhythmic base. Ginger would no doubt carry most of the melody. Garlic would certainly be the most complex to include. In poem such as this, the garlic must be barely perceptible but still present. In keeping with the general trend of omitting the ‘in additions’, ‘therefores’, and as many articles and prepositions possible – in short the novelistic spices – I would leave out most European garden herbs: basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary etc.

Ah, homemade Giyoza and rice. Fantabulous. Shiso giyoza, I should add. Aside from Baudelaire, I’m not aware of many poets who have written about food, although I’m sure there are some. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons does include the headings (such as roast beef) and in fact my father has a recipe book that may be Stein’s or Toklas’ (we used the hashish brownies recipes a few times), I can’t remember. Food and cooking, and in fact the whole gustatory “thing” is really important for me. However, I can’t say I’ve ever really written about food or eating… I’m not sure how to approach it. My interest is more in the raw materials: herbs, spices, bare ingredients. Being most interested in Indian cooking (there is a cute story behind my predilection for Indian food, but not now), the ingredients I tend to appreciate are primarily used in South East Asian Cuisine. The only exception is Jalapeños, which are terrible in Indian food. Were I to make a poem out of spices, a good balance of Cardamom, about one black to five green, would form the rhythmic base. Ginger would no doubt carry most of the melody. Garlic would certainly be the most complex to include. In poem such as this, the garlic must be barely perceptible but still present. In keeping with the general trend of omitting the ‘in additions’, ‘therefores’, and as many articles and prepositions possible – in short the novelistic spices – I would leave out most European garden herbs: basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary etc.

I’m hoping one day to be obnoxious. By the laws of probability, moving to America will increase my chances. Moving to America and watching the flickering TV through endless mindless episodes of pop culture gunk. Moving to America watching pop culture gunk and eating endless calories of weight watchers chips, weight watchers ice cream, weight watchers beer (as if the American isn’t light enough). There is something sinister about weight watchers, something tautological about being in America and being a weight watcher; I can’t put my finger on it. Moving to America: the obnoxious landscape of made in Taiwan vs, Made in the USA. What is not pop in the USA aspires to be. What is pop everywhere else, aspires not to be. Think chewing gum and roller skates. Think “Roller Girl”, think ‘Tank”. GOP smacks of SMACK, of gob and liberal; (put your right hand on your heart) the color white and blue, or white and red, or red and blue, or white and white, blue on blue is still two. Two will be enough for me and not much you. It’s all based on equations. Wind on a windy day blows me to the end of it somewhere near the beginning. By the end of it it’s war time. Miller the terrorists. What I say is true in a pretzely kind of way. I know I’m not obnoxious END OF LUNCH

Anal Magic Attempt 2 Yesterday I wrote a little spiel about Anal Magic but, dissatisfied with what I wrote, the entry is lost somewhere in the nether regions of my hard drive. Hurrah! Not being a radio aficionado, I don’t really know the precedents for Anal Magic. Kenny G(oldsmith) is not a shock-jock like Howard Stern, nor is he quite the comedian of Groucho Marx; his style is quite his own. Being a American who has been out of the States so long that I am really a foreigner, it’s refreshing to hear someone on the radio who has a real sense of humor and cruel irony. Kenny know that I loved his reading of a George Bush speech of the torture sounds of Tortura, but there is much more to the show than that. Anyone interested in Sound and the recording arts really ought to listen to ANAL MAGIC. Kenny does play sound poetry at times but he also links this in with new modes of audition. John Cage, of course, frequently features on the repertoire as does Erik Satie. Then there are all of the sound art practitioners themselves like Amikhanian, Hodell, etc. I’m sure he even played some of the music from the Cremaster as well. All of this is really, very very important because the significance of the change in auditory perception since Russolo and Satie is consistently ignored by most literatures. (I know that was a bad sentence but, hell, I’m on my lunch break). I obviously have a bias, I won’t conceal it. For me sound and audition is extremely important for bringing the body back into poetry.. or rather is the juncture at which words can leave themselves. Literary types tend to downplay audition as such because other critical approaches Mail; Jeremiad: word of the day.. Er. Critical approaches, such as Freudianism/ psychoanalysis etc. lend themselves to either justify meaning or even add meaning in the case of certain poets. Sound. What do you do with it? Charles Bernstein arrogantly, in my opinion, dismisses sound as meaningless in his Radio Radio interview! He makes a bunch of obnoxious sounds (ok here’s my jeremiad for the day) and says essentially that there’s nothing in it. Sound involves a context. Sound poetry is often closely related to music and highlights the musical aspects of language. I think Mr. Bernstein would agree to the extent that sound poetry does much the same thing to the musicality of language that language poetry does for the social use of language. Sound poetry has moved on for people like Jaap Blonk who create wonderful textures of this raw material itself, beyond the concern with language per se. But there is more. Sound is always implicated in our environment as is as much of the fabric of the social and cultural domain as language. Oops.. Would like to continue, but I’ma outtada time

I've decided to go a little more public with this blog so I'm going to tidy it up a little. I'm still here, anyhow.

With 30 mins to go.. Yeah, it could’ve been. At another time perhaps before it snowed or rained I forget which. Or if you consider a trajectory to future events, it may reside in a nutshell. I like telling stories, not porkies, just narratives in which if we jump from side to side with an easterly tilt we can find a beginning middle and end. You aren’t following this. This is a monologue composed in complete sentences; I challenge you to find a missing subject object or verb, in that order. The subject is of course me; my own self-indulgence outdoes me. Object, if you’re reading there is one. Verb? Did I mention that verb always reminds me of gardening? My basil is dying, the rocket is dead, the goldfish is dead, but the fruitless Jalepeno thrives. Out there. On my balcony. That fascinating place between the home and the public. I wear my underwear near the window. Not to be existential, you know. I guard my pee in the best way I know how. Japanese pissers. Check google. They’re all over. Cherry blossoms line the street my balcony overlooks. They don’t blossom much and I miss them. I walk under them and squash the petals under my steel capped boots. Sometimes I slip and laugh about it. Other times I don’t. Cicadia’s sing through them through the summer. I could come up with an epiphenomenon. You know I won’t. Preferring prostitution to nature, I walk through my little hamlet in Tokyo. Go-go girls squash cigarette butts and slip through semen. They always talk to men with long hair and suntans. I don’t like them. They wear white terry-cloth socks. Someone washes their hair. In the suburbs the architecture is inclusive. I often feel the overhead cables and wires slip around my neck and pick my teeth. My gut rumbled through a mildewed tatami room opened onto the street. I notice all the laundry is white. The housewife has nipples as large as silver dollars, dark as grapes. She washes them with white soap. She observes a dark purple cock and eventually paints it; she still believes in representation. The authorities accuse her of reproduction. The laundry is still white. END 14.00

Cyborgs etc

This is tangentially related to the poverty of poetry paper

Christian Bök has some very interesting, clued in, things to say about the future of literature viz-a-viz technology. He says that with the advent of programs like RACTOR (an almost communicative program) that know nothing of literary history or poetry, can ‘write’ poetry better than humans who don’t know poetry, and perhaps better than those who do, presents a problem in terms of authorship and well as the future production of poetry itself. The authorship issue is essentially that with a computer that does not even understand what it is saying can produce poetry of such quality, then there is no reason why a person who supposedly does know what he is saying has much bearing on the reception of the work.. That’s not clear. What I mean is that RICTOR’s poems generate interest even though there is no author, why should knowledge of the author, therefore generate any more interest? This is an interesting take, although I do wonder why North American writers still feel it necessary to invoke this authorship in this way. As I discussed before in terms of Kent Johnson’s Yasusada, there are more culturally provocative approaches to deal with issues of authorship. To simply say that computers abnegate the author is relevant but a little banal. As for the future production of poetry Bök makes 2 interrelated points: that future poets will be programmers who make code that generates poems so that it is the code and not the poem that interests people and 2. we should be writing poetry for androids as they will be our future audiences. There seem to be poets out there already programming poetry, Alan Sondheim and Lewis Lacook come immediately to mind but there are many many others. However, to say this is the future of poetry seems a little steep to me in relation to the second point, that we should write poetry for computers. He’s saying that code, designed for androids, will also stimulate our artificial audience. I find this problematic for a number of quite complex reasons. First of all, it is unlikely that computers will ‘think’ in the way humans do. When critics of the technological drive to replicate the human say that a computer will need whole life experiences to match the human, these are not just experiences of your second birthday or all that crap about implanted memory from Bladerunner, it is of all the experience that we never notice.. like the fax printer droning in the background and various voices, my experience of space etc etc. That is, embodied experience. It may indeed be possible to create a semi-thinking machine that can ‘process’ highly complex information and handle many of the rules based activities that the human does and may even be able to interact on a factual level with humans, but a machine won’t think.. Now what may be possible would be to biologically engineer machine-like people (as if there weren’t enough already!) say by altering DNA so that they won’t emotion pain. HOWEVER, machines are new tools with which the poet must come to terms with. Perhaps we will come to love a poet’s code, but the question is why would we love the code? Would we live it because of its ingenuity of design, like some people love cars? Because of what it enables us to do? Programs can give you a sense of achievement, like the many poem generators. I guess I can see this possibility, although it reduces the appreciation of the poem to the level of a video game. Bök’s points are very important to discuss because underlying them I see a fundamental conception of the human. The view of this school of thought, just like the view underlying popular culture of Matrix, Bladerunner, and even AI is that the human is programmable and that interaction works on the level of information transferal. However, there is a school of thought (to which I lean favorably) that posits complexity, that information doesn’t really exist as such and that our body in the environment does not operate on the mechanistic model posited by Descartes and, more importantly, Newton. Now, my question is, where does this take poetry????????

Very little time today since I ventured further than the local corner store to get a negi-toro ikura don (onion, tuna and tuna roe on rice) and even, gasp, a nectarine! Over the weekend I went to a contemporary Turkish art show in Saitama. Sadly, the pieces on display there were quite underdeveloped. Essentially there were many good ideas that were poorly realized. I apologize for not remembering the artist’s names; I will give some examples of what I mean. There was quite a big section dedicated to sound (visual and aural) and perhaps the most interesting was a huge sequined banner with the words RUMOUR HUMOUR HOOVER The surround was silver and the words themselves were, hmm, green, red and, possibly blue conveying the image of quite tawdry looking women’s (or feminine style) discotechque clothing. There was a fan positioned to move the banner and create at least a little noise. As I read it, this was a comment on rumor and femininity, rumor being a basic concepts within noise of woman.. That is, traditionally rumor is understood as woman and is frequently depicted as having a million eyes (hence the sequins) and with horrible ears and mouth (the noise from the shaking of the sequins).. if this is even remotely close to the artists point, then well, it’s a good idea that simply doesn’t work. (notwithstanding, the sighs we all have when we come to the big center piece in an exhibition. There is always one!) .....

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I was going to start serializing a piece called the Poverty of Poetry (well, when I say serialize I mean burden blogger with my lunchtime notes towards an essay of such a title). Somehow, it isn’t in me today. Watch this space, though, it will come. Because there are many Povery’s of .. I’m sure someone has already written something with the same title. The title does have an interesting history, actually. Marx wrote a paper (which I downloaded on Kazaa Lite!) entitled “The poverty of philosophy” in response to Proudhon’s “The philosophy of poverty” . I haven’t read either piece (though I instinctively side with “Property is theft” etc) so I can’t be much help on the contents. Nevertheless, Marx’s title is crafted in direct opposition to Proudhon, thus “The Poverty of..” carries an oppositional sense. The poverty of poetry is simply an argument against typical “colonizing” measures of poetry. By this I mean that poetry tends to appropriate vocabularies or even describe other disciplines but rarely attempts to enter the practice itself. Stein did manage this to an extent with her use of grammar as a poetic response to Cubism. An example I came across recently is a piece by Christina Kubisch in which she takes lines from 18th and 19th century poetry that highlight the effect of silence and prints them onto translucent glass. The glass was then placed in the desolate enclaves in a dilapidated castle and above it is a kind of ultra-violet light that makes the words visible – kind of like those watermark readers they use to prevent counterfeiting. The light also highlights the decaying walls around them. This to me is poetry occupying a vital space. It emphasizes not just silence, which is the theme of her piece, but also the context of reading and the space in which we occupy to read. There is also the comment about decay and sound etc. In short, this is a beautiful poetry that the page cannot do. Perhaps my aspirations for poetry are too architectural, that I want poems not just boxed in books and memory but in every movement around us. I want the failing car to sputter poems. For poems to act in the shaping of buildings and streets, the hum from which is also poetry. My phone rings poems.. I don’t have to dial them up, they are in the dialing.. I leave you today on that.

I encountered quite a big glitch in my Mina Loy paper last night so I spent my trip to work making even more notes and annotations to the Love Songs. The papers main contention is that the concepts of noise and audition inform the Love Songs and that to consider them in purely literary terms is only a half-seeing approach. So I’ve gone through and demonstrated how sound works in terms of content (that is, the images and events that take place in the poem), but now I’m looking at sound/ noise itself. I’ve limited myself somewhat by trying to see her noise in terms of Russoloian language noise – that is, the noise of consonants. I think consonantal noise is present, but there is more that is harder to quantify, such as the short /i/ sound. She certainly never goes the direction of Stein with an ever present sonority, but still what are those rattlings and shaking tin walls? Why are they there??? I’ll work it out, I’m sure. Otherwise… Office poetry is a beating keyboard and the monotonous hum of hard-drives etc. He’s taken good songs, that’s all Dub dubbing Eto What are you watching Laugh phone ring Noise Jyu ichi nin

This’ll have to be brief if anything is capitalized or punctuated it’s because my hands were working well or word did it for me I am super rushed but wanted to get some things down before I don't smile So ive been traveling with doug messerlis big fat anthology all week cuz I couldn't stand going without poetry any longer this is my fear of academia all over again you no longer read works but dissect them like frog in 9th grade science class poor things I don't think things will be that way once I get out of this miserable job and actually have time to do something when im not in a rush or half asleep Well, for the bfb big fat book ohh a comma thanks hands the bfb ive been reading mr charles olsen ive read him before but anyway what struck me is how much of a modernist he still was of course the localism of this place called glouchester not England I presume thanks for the caps word removes him a bit but not much what was on my mind this morning was his use of myth I was once a great myth-man my dog rip was called bucephalus after alexanders horse and even my son is amateras after Japanese myth is myth an exclusion western myths are themselves known to have been appropriated from the Indian and Persian but his references to man I can’t remember which myth,, whatever, I felt was rather exclusive limiting his poetry somewhat from the global not that one would write to be global necessarily but is it important??? Also sometimes olsen is compared to pound and these writers LOVE to discuss his visits to st. elizabeths etc etc but really I think there is one very crucial difference.. olsen is not musical I may be wrong since ive only read several selections of his but I have barely detected an ear he tells wonderfully embellished stories and has some great lines like:

it is not bad to be pissed off

Anyhow im outta time

I couldn’t take another day of it poemless and theoretical deluged by the theory of practice so this mornging I emptied my bag of Capra’s The Web of Life , Creeley’s Windows, and even the copy of Sawako’s Hockey Love Letters (That’s where I put it!) and put in the great tome Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century. I even went to the effort to take along an aging Nono tape and earphones to prevent myself from listening in on other people’s conversations and sounds. Once I got a seat on the unusually busy post-Obon Yamanote-line, there was no question, open to John Taggart. I ‘discovered’ Taggart a few months ago when in a similar mood I pulled out Poems for the Millennium 2 before bed. I was so enthralled – the poem in PotM 2 read like the poets rendition of In C – I even read it to my wife, who, as usual was uncaptivated but flattered that I thought she might like to hear it. Taggart is an extraordinary poet. One of the few modern poets who has really attempted to reach music but hasn’t shied away from actual feeling as well. In fact, he is able to use these generalisable abstract words, like “pain”, without bathos. Ah, great, some of his poetry is available on the web! Here is an excerpt from the Slow Song for Mark Rothko (the poem anthologized in PotM2):

To breathe and stretch one's arms again to breathe through the mouth to breathe to breathe through the mouth to utter in the most quiet way not to whisper not to whisper to breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way to breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe to sing the most quiet way. To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness radiantia radiantia singing light in darkness. To sing as the host sings in his house.

The repitition recalls Stein somewhat, though it is more deliberately musical. I read that Terry Riley was very much influenced by Stein, thus the connection is hardly surprising. Still, as I was saying, a poem in which the wonderfully sensitive line “to light the most quiet light in darkness” can become part of this musically minimalist framework bespeaks the strength of writing. Damn out of time..

Ok. I WILL do this today, finally, a Friday. It’s just been a very very busy week AGAIN. In the poetry world, it seems Mr Silliman has had yet another pointless spat with another poet. This time it involves some pseudo-movement called New Brutalism – is this the Bruitists? Seems like this fella got under Silliman’s wick for saying L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry favors theory over emotion. Woo! Am I alone in thinking that this debate is pointless? Since I’m not shy of crudity, who the fuck cares? It seems that the general characteristic separating poets and other artists is that the exhuming and constant revision – rather like Freudian mourning, going over a lost object – is the poor lot of these full-blooded literary types, whereas artists are generally happy to let the critics wrangle while they move on and develop new ideas, sometimes correcting the critics in their folly. I wonder if this is in any way related to a question posed several months ago asking why artists go through phases (like Picasso’s Blue Phase) while poets are generally considered more singularly. It is partly for this reason that I dread becoming involved in such a musty literary world. My other reasons being: • Dread of national poetry and stigmatization (I still get shudders hearing Charles Bernstein say “I prefer ‘Walter Benjamin’ [Anglicized pronunciation] the American way since he was so poorly treated by his own country” .. even when he says “American poet” blurrgh!). To be called an “American/Canadian/Finnish/ British etc” poet is the greatest insult. • Being in any way aligned with these so-called defenders of young poets like Jim Behrle, Jo Massey etc. Please Jim, don't defend me against Darth Silliman. I don’t know these guys, so I may be being unfair, but I’m not impressed by their public gestures. It seems to me like it may be time for another Futurism – at least the energy.

I can’t remember what it was that I wanted to add to the last blog. Perhaps why identity is an issue in the first place?? That seems highly uninteresting though.. hmm. It’s worth asking anyway. Basically, I’m not sure exactly why it became necessary to remove the artist from the production of the work. I assume some of it has to do with the popular conception of the artist somehow expressing his/ her woes through art. It is really highly offensive to suggest that a piece of art really ‘expresses’ anything. If it does then it is bound to be rather poor. One always needs some amount of distance to do any piece of art. Art is not necessarily representation (as Mr. Warhol taught us it is also reproduction), but does work with symbols. Now it would be rather absurd to say that the ‘symbols’ actually had a corollary in the ‘real world’ (absurd but not unheard of); symbols are, the world.. that is to say that they exist not in relation to things but in relation to themselves and context etc. Thus art is a manipulation of symbols, when art becomes expressive, that is when someone creates with the intention of expressing what is after all, symbolic, the result is almost always poor.. I realize this is a silly argument, I’m just entertaining ideas. In fact I understand the phenomenon differently. To create simply requires a psychological distance otherwise the piece becomes overcharges with mass generalizations. Such is the result of most teenage art and writing, as well as Harold Pinter’s poetry. (Sadly, even intelligent artists think of poetry as this odd empty vessel into which the excrement of their ‘emotions’ can be dumped.). Er. Yes, so, this may be one reason. The other may be partly psychological. Most people have come to understand that the self is a unity of convenience, that is, “I” is a multiplicity. “I” is another as Rimbaud said. Taking the “I” out a work presumably allows the other into it. I’m not sure to what extent the above psychological conditions link to sociological conditions -- i.e. these are post-modern, fragmented times, fragmented by capitalistic schizophrenic pluralism – for artists. This seems to me always a half-truth and an approach only beleaguered Marxists would take. Capitalism thrives, it is true, through the appearance of unity to cover its monstrous chaos, a chaos that could lead us to believe that the ‘I’ is even more fragmented. I think in this respect capitalism is not new. Every ‘order’ is the semblance of unity. The difference is that now the chaos is on a global scale.. Where writers especially, are falling short these days, incidentally, is the failure to recognize internationalism. Though not a writer, I was quite amused at a PhD. Student’s resume that stated something along the lines of :”Because my university is near to the Canadian border, I am also aware of Canadian poetries, such as Steve McCaffery and Christian Bok.” Whooo! I guess it’s thinking like this that earns a 4 GPA!

Hoax’s and authorship In a recent correspondence between Kent Johnson and Brian Kim Steffens (among others) about Conceptual Literature the issue of authorship viz-a-viz Yasusada came up, for me unexpectedly. I have always maintained support for Johnson, even though the implication could be that he is the author, and Yasusada (who doesn’t exist) because of the various challenges it presents to the areas of authenticity and the unified literary persona. I should unpack these ideas a bit before going on. It is assumed in literature that the art object is an expression of, or is in some way related to, the authenticity of feeling or intellection on the part of the artist. Of course, in the 20th Century people like Duchamps & MacLow attempted to remove themselves from the production of art objects, though certainly failed in removing themselves from the ‘signified’ piece. That is, Duchamp ‘made’ the Standard Stoppages without taking part in their making (though people debate this), but we still know the piece as his and not “No Man’s” (No Man is still a very powerful image and theme). With the cult of personality being all pervasive, even in these post-Pollack days, the Duchamp is A Duchamp. The authenticity of the piece is never doubted. If you see the Standard Stoppages at the Tate in London, the friendly placard will inform you of Duchamp’s intentions, so too in other exhibits will you learn about his alter-ego Rose Selavy. In the case of a hoax, if ‘hoax’ can be used even if authenticity is never uncovered, we have a different ‘take’ on the same idea. The artist has given up hope of removing him/herself from the production of the work since, as we know, it is impossible, and instead has taken his/herself out of the reception of the work. This is a very important move in my opinion. In the case of Yasusada, moreover, the whole façade goes further than former models in actually subverting culturally held beliefs in relation to authorship and also to the cultural “other”. (I might add at this point that this particular hoax has induced in me a certain amount of shadenfreude, a pleasure that for some is guilty, especially from Ron Silliman’s initial response to Yasusada. Now that Mr. Silliman has his own blog, presumably scared off the POETICS List since his early misguided Leninist war mongering after the World Trade Center fell, I can get regular doses of this less acceptable pleasure.) Well, the lunch break is over, so I’ll have to continue this Monday.. It’s back to Noise and Loy for the weekend.

I take most of it back. Creeley isn’t so bad. I’ve made my way to some of the later poems and have been more impressed. Poems like this one, Window, irked me somewhat: The window had /been half /opened and the /door also /opened, and the /world then/ invited, waited/ and we /entered One of my objections to the poem is simply that he is still harping on about that old poets malaise, the world and me, subject – object, as though they aren’t problematic. From my own point of view, these aren’t really problems at all they just don’t exist. This is a poetry that is still relying too much on the eye and as a friend mentioned just yesterday, to privilege a sense is anti-thetical to world making, it is an abstraction of the world which in no way tries to enter it.. Before I digress, I’d also like to include a poem I liked. Was it thunk suck of sound an insistent outside into the patient abstract waited was lost in such simple flesh ou sont les motherand father so tall the green hills echoed .. That’s as much as I’ll quote since I’m at work. Obviously, what I like about this is the sound. There’s also the suggestion here that sound can potentially “suck” one into “simple flesh”, though that may be a complete misreading. There is still that “insistent outside” that irked me about “Window”..The poem is actually dedicated to Jasper Johns, who I know little about. The poem probably functions on quite another level for someone who knows about Johns. In fact, I think I’ll print out a little about him before leaving the office today and see what all I can find out.

Ah! Back and with a new name; hope you like it. I’m kind of browsing through a number of books right now. My mood is so changeable, sticking to one or two just isn’t feasible. Rob Creeley’s Windows has got to be the biggest disappointment of them all though. I very much like the poem of his, Anger, anthologized in Poems for the Millennium 2, but I have read little else with a pulse. In fact, I started reading the book earlier this year and started actually ‘correcting’ whole stanzas. I’d never done this before (good exercise though) and eventually got frustrated.. So what’s the problem? His rhythms can be interesting at times, granted; it’s the content. Dedications, death, the small things in life, etc etc. He no longer has faith in other ways of seeing (as Anger most definitely did with anger compared to trucks smashing into a wall – this is from a faint memory), he just wants us to see as everybody assumes to see.. On the topic of Mr. Creeley, any idea why has received so much recognition from the experimental writers? Oppen wrote very similar, though less musical, poetry and even lived the ideal life of dropping out of poetry to exile himself in Mexico during the McCarthy years.. O.K. I’m not a big Objectivist fan, Oppen and to some extent Olsen are a little too frontiersman for me.. and WCW, who seems to be their predecessor, well, when I was at university, his step-shapes poems fascinated my eye but eluded my ear, but his verse always paled next to Pound’s, and froze next to Schwitters’ & Stein’s. Now, I was going to make the link with the above, but avoided it to prevent too much vitriol against Oppen, Creeley etc. One of the things that bugs me about many of the above is their trite Americanism; nationalism is a virus among poets even today. Hear Bernstein talk about American Poets, for example, college courses dedicated to American poetry. Goodness, you’d a thought that they’re still wearing Quaker hats! WCW wrote this stinker called “In the American Grain”, that arouses quite a lot of anger (there’s that truck crashing again) in me. It’s not that poetry isn’t local - it is always local and we can’t help composing in space (and time) – but such ideas are not just wrought in locality but in ideality (I only half intend these asinine assonances). Many of us would discount religion and God because it presupposes a force and resignation beyond the human and worldly, why make the exception for a country. Belief in a country is the same to me as belief in God… We’ll that’s the end of my vitriolic (sorry) lunch break. I promise something more positive tomorrow.

levity is a levitation leech.

I’m reading Doug Kahn’s Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts right now to get a better idea of how to approach my application paper. As I go along, it occurs to me how radically different new approaches to the body and cognition can actually change the way we think about sound in the arts. Kahn’s assumption is that the world is “out there” and we just happen to fall into it, thus sound is all pervasive. Autopoiesis (or perhaps I should call it the Santiago theory) teaches us that the world isn’t exactly out there, at least not in any ordinary sense, rather that we “bring it forth.” I understand this to mean that we create the world in response to what is actually there (the world is there) and as an organism with a nervous system and sense generally we are constantly ‘bringing forth’ – never brought forth. Sound then is always interpreted – perhaps the word “interpret” is incorrect, but anyway… So where does that get us? In theory it brings us back to selectivity, though selectivity not based on taste so much as biological structure.. In practice, we would have to consider that mimetic attempts at sound are never mimetic, so Marinetti’s “Rattatat Tat” machine guns could be a pervasively glottal “u=u=u=u=u=u,” point one. The interesting point is that, having similar structural similarities, we may all understand the different versions of machine gun fire as machine gun fire. I would say the other point is that because we can broadly assimilate onomatapoeic sounds, that there is a possibility for metaphor in sound. Suppose my, imagined, piece called “beer belly” started with a succession of flatulent sounds and continued to ASCII: “plezur plezur : ?? Well, ahem. Anyhow, sound artists actually already know this on one level. Kenny Goldsmith is doing it all the time, but as far as I know, people don’t get it.. Well, that’s all I’m doing for now. Hmm. I’m more than a little dissatisfied by this actually. If theory does nothing but explain what has already been done, then it is utterly useless. It has to always point to what has been done and what can be done. This is just explanatory. If you think otherwise, let me know