Procedural Notes

The basic move is to pick it up
and look at it. To close your eyes,
form its image, and put it down.

Another way is to look at it
and pick it up. Then open your hand,
form its image, and look away.

If you feel sleepy, get up, walk
around, shake your arms,
roll your head, talk to yourself.

There is the method of pushing
and of glancing. In reaching for it,
there is an application of longing.

Peel it off the appearance, stick
it onto the surface. After
the fact, before the act. The image.

Your blonde guitar, my plaster Buddha

When Wittgenstein described himself as "someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do,"* he probably meant that he couldn't write like Kate Greenstreet.

The first issue of Absent is here.


-------
*In Culture and Value, p. 24. It's the same remark in which he says "philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition."

The Flowers of Emergency

for Asmund and Søren

Horse Holistics, i.e., Bush Flowers, are to be
taken during an emergency or crisis. They
help with trauma, anxiety, injury and/or
any emotional crisis or individual
responsibility. This is Emergency Essence.
I.e., Angelsword, Crowea, Fringed Violet,
and Dog Rose of the Wild Forces.
Negative condition: panic, distress; yes,
but you must really fear a positive outcome:
ability to cope, navigation, documentation.
Then there are, of course, the Flowers of
Emergency Childcare Services. This is a short-
term, recreational emergency and needs are met
by gift baskets, Godiva chocolate,
fruit baskets, Teddy bears and pad rations
packaged neatly and completely with a snack mix.
Essences for dogs and cats only: a natural
herbal remedy for accidents, stressful
situations, trauma, fear. Gift emergency:
a blissful bouquet of white and blue flowers
will tell your loved one they make you $79.99
(as shown). Emergency Sandbag: rainbow, crystal,
clay, expanded, and technically sandless.
Facial mask: blue healin' love monkey.
Emergency Music: Hoping Flowers Bleed Horace
Horse Tranquilizer. This emergency plan has
been designed for Charles and will be updated.

These Purely Formal Questions of Arrangement

For some reason Nicholas Manning's comment to my last post has been hidden from view. Here it is in full:

What's so interesting about this model for me is that it makes me think of a probably important distinction between two different types of collage that up until this point we haven't really explictly made.

For on the one hand there is this type of collage, which is purely about choice and formal arrangement, (though interestingly Lynch does not at all consider here the role of choice: the bits of paper are considered "random" and the choice of the material apparently "unimportant"), and on the other hand, collage which includes the introduction of "original gestures" on the part of the artist: that is, the cubist painter or Rauschenberg painting over collaged surfaces with marks which are recognisably his or her own, marks which must have, I think, a different statute to that of the found and arranged material.

For it seems to me that these marks, though still governed by such rules of arrangement as Lynch outlines, are still to an extent different, and make the confrontation and interaction between more-found and less-found materials (in order not to say "found" and "original") infinitely more complex than these purely formal questions of arrangement imply.

For it is almost like the confrontation of two entirely divergent theories of art and artistic creation (inspiration and techne perhaps, or Plato and Aristotle), and it is this, I feel, over any formal devices, which leads to the often stunning complexity of collages' aesthetic statements.

I wonder if the most important distinction here is one between pure collage and hybrids of various kinds. This also goes for Flarf, where there is no rule against "writing over" the collaged the materials with "original gestures". The point, for me, however, is that collage focuses the writer on "purely formal questions" precisely by setting the problem as one of arrangement ...

... and selection, I should add. Nicholas is right to point out that Lynch's exercise does not include this aspect. But I did leave out Fig. 51d: the finished product called Cliff with Cloud in which he adds a piece of paper obviously either made or selected to that end.

In any case, my questions are largely formal. What I like about collage/flarf is that it approaches form as the selection and arrangement of materials, instead of something that is violently imposed on content. This strikes me as a more sane approach to both the origin and the terminus of the art work.

How to Make Collages

[This post is excerpted from John Lynch's How to Make Collages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), pp. 68-71]

Fig. 51a


Fig. 51b


Fig. 51c

In figure 51a four simple white shapes have been torn from a sheet of heavy paper and dropped at random onto a sheet of gray cardboard. The shapes are not complicated or particularly interesting in themselves. Their relationship to one another in this accidental arrangement is dull. Why? Because the indispendable elements of tension and interaction are lacking.

In figure 51b a more interesting contrast has been created between the two left-hand pieces in relation to one another. The straight edge of the thinnest piece is in opposition to the jagged edge of the piece above it, and a certain amount of tension is felt in the resulting space between the two pieces.

In figure 51c the arrangement has been amplified. These four variations on a rectangle are aligned in such a way that the contrast has an abstract interest. Two opposing factors are involved--the shapes themselves and the spaces between them. They begin to suggest something--a cliff, perhaps. Their placement makes the gray cardboard part of the composition rather than a neutral background, which it was in figure 51a.

Men of Anger and Light

"Vivid," wrote Borges, "is the contrast in styles" between Cervantes' Don Quixote and Menard's (which are of course identical in their letter). I think I have found a contemporary example of this contrast in styles between identical expressions written at different times.

In 1946, Henry Miller published a pamphlet called Patchen, Man of Anger and Light. In 2006, I might write a pamphlet called Tost, Man of Anger and Light. Here, too, the stylistic differences are vivid.

A less perfect example can be constructed by asking whether Kenneth Patchen or Ben Lerner wrote "Perhaps It Is Time":

Does anyone think it's easy
To be a creature in this world?
To ask for reasons
When all reasons serve only
To make the darkness darker,
And to break the heart?
-- Not only of a man,
But of all breathing things?
Perhaps, friends, it is time
To take a stand
Against all this senseless hurt.

Angle of Yaw arrived the other day. These are good days for my grammar. Vivid.

Hiatus and the New Metaphysics

I will be taking a break from this blog for a while. Instead, I think I'll hang out in Nicholas Manning's comments box.

And then this comes up

Jacket 31 brings us two serious pieces on Flarf. Gottlieb's piece sets some things straight about the influence of Google. (A brilliant analogy: the suggestion that Google makes Flarf a conduit of corporate ideology is like the suggestion that flipping a coin is a genuflection to filthy lucre.) While Rick Snyder offers some interesting readings of the actual poetry, I think his interpretation of "Chicks Dig War", for example, could avoid some speculative conclusions by looking directly at the influence Google (or, in this case, the source page itself) seems to have have on the poem.

Required Reading

When selecting the works that students are to read and be examined on, the important thing is not just that the books be worth reading and rereading but that this reading may safely be interferred with by teaching. Imagine students who are predisposed by interest and talent to enjoy Hamlet, Don Quixote, Ulysses, A la recherche du temps perdu, Sein und Zeit, and Philosophische Untersuchungen. Imagine, next, that these students are given sufficient time to read them; that is, imagine that they are not pestered by an overwrought curriculum to also read a bunch of other perfectly good books. We will pester them only about those six books, which are of course inexhaustible. If their sense of literature (their mastery of grammar) is improved by reading something else, I want to suggest, it will show in their reading of these core six works. We may suggest they go and read Woolf or Augustine or Confucius but we are not to ask them directly to prove that they have done so. Instead we may ask them what they now think of "the relationship between sensation and memories" (Proust) or "Dasein's own temporality as ecstatically stretched along" (Heidegger). Likewise, we may want them to understand Hegel's philosophy of history but we are only to lecture them about the connections between, say, the fair maidens of the Quixote and the sad masons of the Investigations. This approach may appeal mainly to a certain kind of mind; but are such minds really to have no place to improve themselves?

Grammar School

[Note: I originally framed this post with some critical remarks on the current state of higher education. Rereading them today, I've decided against putting it exactly that way for now. There is of course an implicit critique of the status quo in this proposal, but I'm not sure that that particular way of making it explicit really captured it.]

I want to spend a few post on a utopia that I have written about before. I think all university education (at least in the humanities) should be centred on the reading and rereading of a handful of books. Six books, to be precise. The list of books can of course be discussed, and schools could differentiate themselves by their choices. The key is to make sure that, whatever material is selected, students are encouraged and expected to return to the same, shared set of works again and again in the course of their (typically) four years of undergraduate study.

While I sometimes call it the Department of Western Thought or the Department of Modern Language (not quite sure what the MLA would think, though), it might also simply be called the Grammar School. Back in classical times, the teaching of grammar included the study of literature. I think that is the spirit of what I'm driving at.

Ethics is Not a Branch of Philosophy

That's probably one of the more controversial consequences of the pangrammatical homologies. It goes nicely with the idea that neither psychology nor sociology are proper sciences: they are crypto-politics. The only relevant psychological "experiment" is a democratic election. The only relevant sociological "observation" emerges from negotiation. I'm not fully committed to these consequences right now, but I thought I would just note them down to keep track.

If this is right, a just society will not emerge from philosohy and science, but from poetry and politics. (Whitman would back me up on this. Pound would too. Kung, also, I think.) This of course explains much contemporary injustice.

Available Materials

Can you mask a tree? That walk we took made me wonder, even as you invented yourself a bike with a sort of stick. Even then it occured to me that all this may be a mask. It imposed itself on the clouds and lunged at the winds. It bore itself no thankless labours of contempt. It spilled its fruits into the brook, and the brook carried your shirt into the public square. I hung cantarelles on the fences as a sort of garland, as a funeral oration ... that is, for kicks. And all the laughing you did from behind your wooden face. I made several brief sketches and discarded those that gave me pleasure. It was a cloud of penance for all they had done to my country. It was a cloud of grace for the efforts of my family to establish an acre of civility in the provinces. You and the many plants can visit my cavernous garrison full of drupes. I will put on this tree mask, this trunk of feathers, this quadrangle of sex appeal, and stalk myself til the musculature of my own sad hatred collapses to a slow quiver.

Towards an Index of Invisible Bride

Agnes, 8, 21, 28, 30, 47, 49
Arkansas, 19
assassin, 21, 22

Dylan, Bob, 49

eternity, 17, 23, 45

fire, 1, 33, 53

identity, 3, 33, 48

knife, 1, 31

pain, 1, 37

shoulder, 21, 31

Texas, 57

war, 2
weeping, (of animals) 13, (of mothers) 35
winter, 13-15

Of Another Tostian Item

The way these faces look in the crowd:
Leaves on a wet, black branch.

"Of another Tostian item" is an anagram of "in a station of the metro". Riding the Copenhagen Metro today I found the faces as striking as I imagine Pound did in 1913 in Paris. I found his little poem very useful too. I spent a long time thinking about whether there really is a missing "like" between the first and second line, or whether there needs to be. I.e., whether or not it is an implicit simile. I found it most useful simply to imagine the experience of the faces followed by the experience with the petals.

To hold the bough up to those faces, as it were.

The apparition of those faces is not just a thing of beauty (though it is that too). There is something disturbing about it. And Pound's poem helps us to deal with it. So do the poems in books like Invisible Bride, The Lichtenberg Figures, The Hounds of No, and Petroleum Hat.

These are (often little) poems that help us to manage what Tony once called "pivots", a Poundian notion in its own right. Pound puts it this way: "I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."

Tony puts it this way: "I find myself wanting to recreate or find pivot-points in my own poems: a pivot from image to aphorism, from emotion to trivia."

The Department of Philosophy and Poetry

Googling the phrase "department of poetry" does not come up completely empty, but it doesn't give us anything like the institutional support for "department of philosophy". This is an interesting grammatical asymmetry between "poetry" and "philosophy" (i.e., a difference in the way we use these words). Studies of poetry are normally hidden in departments that deal with particular languages or groups of languages. Philosophy departments, of course, have their various regional biases, but they don't generally explicate them in terms of national literatures.

I'm not sure what the right way to go is. (I don't think anything very substantial will be achieved by carving up academic fields of study differently.) Sometimes I think we should see works of philosophy simply as contributions to broader (and even national) literary traditions. Sometimes I think the study of literature would benefit greatly from being dissociated from its often less than implicit nationalism and even patriotism.

I think a Department of Philosophy and Poetry would be an excellent idea. Like many much needed excellent ideas it has zero hits.

The Radical Silence Model

A woman's silence is a prelude to another more radical model: zero infinity.

The relationship between van Lamsweerde and Matadin and Kate Moss is one of such radical silence, for example.

For fifteen of these women, language does not mirror an unbearable appeal.

Like Saussure, they work with the strongest and most therapeutic of Puškin’s Boris Godunovs in dialogue.

Experiences and actions are now thought of as objects that are accessible only through posture.

This requires the invention of new idioms, but the upshot is to set the "social" over against the "verbal", and

the refusal of all activities of art, i.e., the standardizing of all opinions about women.

Fixing the country's failed social integration, the motherfucker has chosen to stand.

Close Reading Assignment

Hang a Cosimo Tura beside a Carlo Dolci. Compare and contrast my recent flarf effort "Blowjob" with Leonard Cohen's "Celebration" (see below). Compare your comparison with a comparison of Drew Gardner's "Money" (see below) and Dana Gioia's. Then compare your comparison with a comparison of Tony Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot" and David Jason Blocker's "The Poet".


CELEBRATION
(Leonard Cohen)

When you kneel below me
and in both your hands
hold my manhood like a sceptre,

When you wrap your tongue
about the amber jewel
and urge my blessing.

I understand those Roman girls
who danced around a shaft of stone
and kissed it till the stone was warm.

Kneel, love, a thousand feet below me,
so far I can barely see your mouth and hands
perform the ceremony,

Kneel till I topple to your back
with a groan, like those gods on the roof
that Samson pulled down.

MONEY
(Drew Gardner)

Money is a kind of lettucy Stegner Fellow.
-Wallace Stevens

Money, the long pink scorpion semaphores,
cash, stash, Charman Mao, extra sharp cheddar
getting hard just listening to Terry Gross.
I just killed the Pillsbury dough boy.

Chock it up, fluff it all over yr own self,
Shelly Duvall it out. Watch it
burn holes through the argon gophers.

To be made of it! To have it
to slumber on in the frightening alien metal disk-things!
Greenbacks, Mike Schmidts,
twelve point bucks arguing with Minnie Driver.

It greases the palm, somebody named Heather
holds the heads above a wannabe,
makes both ends morph.

Money breeds with leather instructional manuals.
Gathering questionable options, pounding on Dan Rather
Always in circulation.

Money. You don't know why it's floating in front of you,
but you put it where your mouth put it.
And it talks to itself.

Blowjob

Mit einem Gedicht von Leonard Cohen.
Ja, ein Gedicht, kein Song!

When you kneel on the bench
in both cities, I have heard suburbanites
hold my manhood as I ran.

When you wrap your lips
about the amber code
and urge my elected representatives,

I understand those who have said please,
who danced around and slashed
and kissed it, making him suck.

Kneel, love, between your serves.
So far I had only seen dicks in magazines
perform the ceremony.

Kneel until I come to Being
with a groan that reached the ears of this blond
that Samson really did slay.

Water Swimming

"Op art" is a pleonasm, said Albers. Like "water swimming". Like "language poetry", no doubt. Like "seeming to disappear".

Wittgenstein and Albers

Can you tell where Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Part II, xi, p. 193) leaves off and Albers' Interaction of Color (Chapter II, p. 5) picks up?

I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience "noticing an aspect".

Its causes are of interest to psychologists.

We are interested in the concept and its place among the concepts of experience.

Equally, a factual identification of colors within a given painting
has nothing to do with sensitive seeing
nor with an understanding of the color action within the painting.

Our study of color differs fundamentally from a study which anatomically
dissects colorants (pigments) and physical qualities (wave length).

Our concern is the interaction of color; that is, seeing
what happens between colors.

There is an obvious similarity of temperament here.