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July 19, 2011
Forest
Simryn Gill
Art Gallery of NSW
more
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
via arsvitaest
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Birth Of A Nation
Christian Hawkey
Did the world squat down & push out
a nation? Was it a nation before the world
called it a nation? Do they have customs?
Do they honor the power cats have over ice?
(....)
Do they speak in clicks & soft exploding accents?
Do they sound, at large gatherings, like a popcorn machine?
Do they communicate with their strangely powerful shoulders?
Do they articulate panic by squeezing air
through their tear ducts? Does this cleanse
the national language? Is it on the brink
of extinction? Is a dead language a body
that has consumed itself
to the point of having no point? Is a dead language
an empty stomach, growling? Is a dead language
capable of speaking beyond its own grave, late at night,
when a low moon drifts
through the banyan roots and a child wakes,
unable to wake, and begins whispering for the sake of
whispering, for the sake of keeping time with his pulse?
...(more)
Christian Hawkey at Poetry International Web and the Poetry Foundation
via riley dog
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Who is writing is the translator
Paul Legault reviews Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey
To quote Christian Hawkey’s quotation of Jean Laplanche:
The movement of auto-translation, the drive to translate (Trieb zur Übersetzung — to use Novalis's term) issues, springs up, not from the translator but from this untranslated or this imperfectly translated [text], which endlessly demands translation.
Ventrakl is obsessed with the idea of translation (and its discontents). It interrupts itself so consistently with critical theory on the subject — not to mention archival photographs, imagined interviews, and poems — that you soon realize the book is entirely composed of interruptions.
For Hawkey, the act of translating from one language to the next has to be blatant. The poem is to be changed irrevocably if it is going to make it across the language barrier — not to mention the century gap between Trakl and his newest translator — with the same “spirit” intact. Though the final product looks completely different — the difference between a house and houseboat — Trakl’s still in it....(more)
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composite
Wittgenstein and his three sisters
mid-1920s Ludwig Wittgenstein's photography
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The tragedy of Wittgenstein's photographs
Daniel Silliman
(....)
Making philosophy both the lock and the combination isn't a slip, either. The one image + the other is actually right. It's the point, for him, and exactly the problem. If the key is also the lock, then the act of unlocking also locks, as that which unlocks the lock is also itself a lock -- even the lock -- and thus the problem reasserts, the solution being another instantiation of the problem.
And this ends up being, for him, philosophy.
There's tragedy in this. The tragic life of Ludwig ... it's as if philosophy has infected him, has infected everything about him.
He found ways out, but "out" was still always in.
Which is what happens with his photographs.
...(more)
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On William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Ernesto Mejķa Sįnchez’s “Vigils”
Jonathan Cohen
(....)Williams’s translation of “Vigils” and other poems from Latin America (and from Spain) reflect his long commitment to advancing a poetic form that doesn’t deform the language. Concerning the role of translation for him, he once explained: “I don’t care how I say what I must say. If I do original work all well and good. But if I can say it (the matter of form I mean) by translating the work of others that also is valuable. What difference does it make?” Beyond Williams’s high regard for the art of translation, his “Vigils” demonstrates his embrace of the poetry of Latin America, which, through him and other translators, has had a marked influence on U.S. poets, and also redefined American poetry as transnational literature of the New World....(more)
VigilsErnesto Mejķa Sįnchez
translated by William Carlos Williams words without borders
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Photography by Default [pdf]
Clément Chérouxpdf
Translated by Garnet C. Butchart
liminalities issue 6.1
(....)
Such is failure. Its complex, supple, or twisted nature makes it a difficult subject
to master. It often escapes analysis and turns sometimes against those who tempt to
release it from its purgatory by attributing to it some unfathomable virtues. These are
some of the difficulties that are inherent in this subject, from which the present work
will, after all, perhaps not escape.
Failure is therefore the problem. But this may be precisely where its interest
resides. In la Formation de l'esprit scientifique, Gaston Bachelard demonstrates precisely that, “it is in terms of obstacles that we need to pose the problem of scientific
knowledge.” Usually, an obstacle collides with understanding; it is what blocks the
progress of comprehension. According to Bachelard, the obstacle can, on the
contrary, reveal itself to be a precious indicator of the processes in play within the
cognitive experience. Knowledge is “a light which always casts shadows
somewhere,” but is never fully perceived by them. Bachelard’s hypothesis, largely
reinforced by cognitive psychology with its psychoanalytic research on failure and
missing acts, has shown that a form of cognition exists via error and by orientation
towards shadows and obstacles. It is within this epistemological model that the
following essay is prepared. It looks to the shadows, for it is there that the failures,
accidents and mistakes that photography offers can best be analyzed. In short, it
argues for the photographic error as a cognitive tool.
In this case, it will not be a matter of taking interest in failed photographs, as
Rimbaud could love the “idiotic paintings,” neither to defend, by taste of using
exactly the opposite, or by simple pretty things, that which is shameful for others. It
would neither be a question of yielding to a literary tradition of the paradoxical
apology (which Anicet Le Pors recalls, a while ago, the proliferate) by praising
fautographie after L’Éloge de la folie, l’Éloge de l’échec, l’Éloge de la défaite, l’Éloge de la fadeur, l’Éloge de la bźtise, l’Éloge de l’arbitraire or most recently, l’Éloge de al vache folle. Far froma simple museum of horrors or of errors collating and aligning freak specimens, at the
permanent risk of teratology, this short treatise of photographic “ratologie,” presented here for the aesthete and the curious, asks us to consider carefully the slips of the tongue of the photographic medium in order to better understanding just what they
reveal.
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies _______________________
Politics’ Fatal Therapeutic Turn
Zelda Bronstein
However well-intentioned, advocates of personalized activism fail to realize that therapeutic motives are fatal to political effectiveness and highly susceptible to manipulation. I aim to prompt that realization and to sketch the very different motives requisite to a durable democratic politics.
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Romualdas Po˛erskis
at
Poemas del rķo Wang
July 18, 2011
Harbour of Ostend
Léon Spilliaert
1909
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Fellow Prisoners
John Berger
guernica
(....)
I’m searching for words to describe the period of history we’re living through. To say it’s unprecedented means little because all periods were unprecedented since history was first discovered.
I’m not searching for a complex definition—there are a number of thinkers, such as Zygmunt Bauman, who have taken on this essential task. I’m looking for nothing more than a figurative image to serve as a landmark. Landmarks don’t fully explain themselves, but they offer a reference point that can be shared. In this they are like the tacit assumptions contained in popular proverbs. Without landmarks there is the great human risk of turning in circles.
The landmark I’ve found is that of prison. Nothing less. Across the planet we are living in a prison.
The word we, when printed or pronounced on screens, has become suspect, for it’s continually used by those with power in the demagogic claim that they are also speaking for those who are denied power. Let’s talk of ourselves as they. They are living in a prison.
What kind of prison? How is it constructed? Where is it situated? Or am I only using the word as a figure of speech?
No, it’s not a metaphor, the imprisonment is real, but to describe it one has to think historically....(more)
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"Self-portrait in front of a mirror"
Léon Spilliaert
1908
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The Language of Hauntings
Dylan Trigg
(....)To the body of Spilliaert, to the body of those who are haunted, and to symptoms that have no rational place within the scheme of the subject: when the body of the human turns to the mirror and finds another self gazing back, then the experience of surprise is only because the body is unable to think in advance of its expression. Indeed, part of the horror written into Spilliaert’s face is as much a horror of being haunted by the premature arrival of a ghost, as it is the horror that the ghost was there all along. How does this expression come into the world? Is there a silence into which a fortuitous circumstance — Spilliaert being placed between two mirrors in a particular room — allows the expression to take shape? Finally, is this gloomy environment simply the means by which the inner world of the haunted gains a voice?...(more)
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Night
Léon Spilliaert
1908
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Biblioklept Interviews Novelist Lars Iyer
(....)
Sometimes it is necessary to depart. Sometimes it is necessary to leave it all behind. That’s how I understood the act of blogging, back when I started Spurious, the blog which shares the same name as the novel.
As someone who had made some progress as an academic – a journey which implies valuable training as well as compromise and despair – I thought a kind of exodus was necessary, from existing forms of published writing. Leave it all behind!, I told myself. Leave the Egypt of introductory books and academic journals and edited collections behind. Leave the slave-drivers behind, and the sense you have of being a slave. Leave capitalism and capitalist relations behind. Leave behind any sense of the importance of career and advancement. Leave behind those relationships that are modelled on investment and return.
Sometimes a kind of solitude is necessary. You need to be alone, to regather your forces, to marshall your strength. But what is really necessary is a solitude in community. You’re on your own, depending on your own resources. But your solitude is lightened: because you know that there are others like you, who have likewise expelled themselves from captivity; because you know that others share your sense of disgust and self-disgust, that they too have gone out to the desert to do battle with the demons sent by capitalism into each of our souls; because there are others, like you, who see writing as both scourge and liberation, others who see it as a spiritual trial, others looking to destroy who they were and be reborn, and to keep themselves in rebirth.
In the end, the desert is paradise, and the world the blogger has left behind, with its whips and fleshpots, is the real desert.
...(more)
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Swifts
Paths of Movement+Dynamic Sequences
1913
Giacomo Balla
b. July 18, 1871
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Powers Of Recuperation
Adrienne Rich
1.
A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—
is writing history backward
her body the chair she sits in
to be abandoned repossessed
The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
second world, third world, cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,
gangrenous, maiming, class
war lives on
a done matter she might have thought
ever undone though plucked
from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after
She’s old, old, the incendiary
woman
endless beginner
whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glass plundered
...(more)
A Public Space
_______________________
(....)
That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.
Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.
As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith.
Sincerely
Christopher Hitchens
July 14, 2011
Trouville
Whistler
1865
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“This World, or the Man of the Boxes”
Dedicated to Joseph Cornell
Takahashi Mutsuo
Translation from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles
presented by Jerome Rothenberg
The world to which this man really belongs is not here
The world to which this man really belongs
Is far away through the fissures of dream
Guarded by sensible, steadfast parents
This man wearing a starched collar is a clever boy
He has two beautiful younger sisters
And a younger brother with an upright spirit
This family of angels with wings hidden under their fancy dress
Is enveloped in golden happiness
That world of distant memories
Is like a box floating in a galaxy of tears
*
One morning suddenly that box-shaped boat ran ashore
In the doorway to that timeless world of happiness
When was that? A second or a hundred million years ago?
Dreams are always nightmares interlopers with foul intent
Drawn by death the father was pulled backward
And the rest of the family were dragged quickly away
It was here they disembarked the backyard of a sickly city
Here not even angels could escape human fate
The mother grew ill from anxiety the sisters grew thin
And wrinkles spread across the brother’s spotless soul
...(more)
Poems by Takahashi Mutsuo
translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context
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Nina Leen
Dial W for Weimar
a celebration of the telelphone
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from Meddle English
Caroline Bergvall
sibila
(....)I repeat what many have said, that poetic or art language must not implicitly be held to account of identities and national language, the seductions of literary history, or the frequently fetishistic methodologies of art movements, but rather seek, far and close, the indicators and practices of language in flux, of thought in making: pleasured language, pressured language, language in heated use, harangued language, forms of language revolutionized by action, polemical language structures that propose an intense deliberate reappraisal of the given world and its given forms.
More often than not, we each use a voice that speaks for us before we get to speak. Quite apart from the ideological implications and beyond palliative arts methodologies, this is why so many of us spend so much of our lives and imagination working at the undoing of a voice or identity we do not wish to be tagged as and questioning the methods of environments we might not wish to represent. It is through this confusing, seemingly self-defeating process of dissociation, of "disloyalty", that other forms of allegiances are made manifest and other conductor channels can be generated.
To meddle with English is to be in the flux that abounds, the large surf of one's clouded contemporaneity. It is a process of social and mental excavation explored to a point of extremity. One that reaches for the irritated, excitable uncertainties of our embodied spoken lives by working with, taking apart, seeing through the imposed complicities of linguistic networks and cultural scaffolds. One which is not only prompted to recognizes what it wishes to fight against: what sedates, what isolates, what immobilizes, what deadens, what perpetuates. But works at it tactically, opportunistically, utilising at will and with relish the many methods, tools, abilities and experiential attitudes it needs. Making a workshop of the surrounding world. Oiling creativity and artistry with critical spirit, since there can be no revolt nor renewal without creative impulse, without anarchic pleasure, without a leap in the dark....(more)
Caroline Bergvall at EPC and Penn Sound.....................................................
Caroline Bergvall's "Meddle English"
Charles Bernstein
(....)
In addition to its opening work of poetics, Meddle English includes a substantial selection of the Bergvall's remarkable Chaucerian vocal insinuations and extensions, as well as many other works that skirt the boundaries among sound/performance/visual/textual. Bergvall's Meddle English dwells in the space between languages, which for her is not an abstraction, not an idea, but an embodying/enveloping ground. Moving from but burrowing into ESL/PSL (English/poetry as a second language), Bergvall's bravura performances move toward a fluid third term, not bilingual but n-lingual, as in the the final section of "Cropper," woven with permutations of an English phrase in Norwegian and French, which brings us back around to her layered excavations of middle English, where the old literally melts into the new. Bergvall's is a poetics of "disfluency" (as Jordan Scott uses the term), where blockages, stuttering, error, and skips are not fragments of lost whole but stiches that make up a fabric. In Meddle English the frogs in our throats become catnip. ...(more)
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Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea
1871
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
(July 10, 1834 — July 17, 1903)
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Thomas Baumgartner of France Culture Radio selects UbuWeb's Top Ten for July
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125 Science Videos
Open Culture
July 13, 2011
Faēade and Celebration
Harold Town
b. June 13, 1924
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Passage Without Rites
Philip Edmund Booth
(October 8, 1925- July 2, 2007)
Homing, inshore, from far off-soundings.
Night coming on. Sails barely full.
The wind,
in its dying, too light to lift us against
the long ebb.
My two fingers, light
on the tiller, try to believe I feel
the turned tide.
Hard to tell. Maybe,
as new currents pressure the rudder,
I come to sense
the keel beginning
to shape the flow of the sea. Deep
and aloft, it's close
to dark.
No stars yet. Only the risen nightwind,
as we tack into its warmth,
tells us
we'll make our homeport. Strange,
angling into the dark,
to think
how a mainsail's camber reflects
the arc of the keel,
their dynamics
reversing whenever we tack.
You call from below,
hand up coffee,
check the glow of the compass, and
raise an eye to Arcturus,
just now
beginning to shine. All over again,
all over, our old bodies
breathe
the old mysteries: the long night
still to go, small bow-waves
playing
a little nachtmusik; stars beyond stars
flooding our inmost eyes.
And voices,
now, come out of the dark,
deeply sounding our own.
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I Thought You Were a Poet
A Notebook
Joshua Mehigan
(....)
People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else. It’s true that these sciences are still young and still vexed by Freud’s ghost. But, in spite of horrors like insulin shock therapy, lobotomy, and overmedication, they’ve given us the crucial knowledge that insanity is not caused by supernatural forces, lovesickness, or wrath. They’ve dispelled unhelpful belief in conditions like spirit possession, tipped uterus, astral misalignment, and humorous imbalance. True, older medicine created those beliefs. But science, unlike magic, has the advantage of changing course, and slowly there emerge life-changing legislation and therapies. In 1961, Michel Foucault worried about the consequences of this new paradigm, but fifty years later the Stultifera Navis sails upstream to the heart of Poetryland. In his conclusion to Madness and Civilization, discussing Artaud, Nietzsche, and Van Gogh, Foucault writes: “madness is precisely the absence of the work of art.”...(more)
Joshua Mehigan at the Poetry Foundation
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Testament of a Dead Leaf
1959
Mordecai Ardon
b. July 13, 1896
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Homage To Georges Perec
An Entertainment in Six Univocalisms
Ian Monk
4. Downtown
To do or not to do: Gods, how to opt?
For who knows good from wrong, or wrong from good;
who'd follow forlorn lords, bow down to clods,
stoop to Sodom, boom songs of so long loss,
or dog coxcombs, hobnob to hollow loons;
who'd down hootch, long for boons Gods know not of;
who'd drool onto dons, for whom tomfools blot
drops onto books, or low words (how now brown cow?);
who'd smooth wrongs, mock worlds from top to bottom,
or crow to crowds for blood; who'd doctor horrors,
or woo doom's pogroms, Lot's loss, Bloom's sorrows,
or woof of wolf or woof of Clotho's loom?
So do not! Good's soon wrong, wrong's soon good for
tomorrow, tomorrow, for tomorrow.
...(more)
ebr10 - writing under constraint
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photo - mw
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Talk About Walking
Philip Booth
Where am I going? I'm going
out, out for a walk. I don't
know where except outside.
Outside argument, out beyond
wallpapered walls, outside
wherever it is where nobody
ever imagines. Beyond where
computers circumvent emotion,
where somebody shorted specs
for rivets for airframes on
today's flights. I'm taking off
on my own two feet. I'm going
to clear my head, to watch
mares'-tails instead of TV,
to listen to trees and silence,
to see if I can still breathe.
I'm going to be alone with
myself, to feel how it feels
to embrace what my feet
tell my head, what wind says
in my good ear. I mean to let
myself be embraced, to let go
feeling so centripetally old.
Do I know where I'm going?
I don't. How long or far
I have no idea. No map. I
said I was going to take
a walk. When I'll be back
I'm not going to say.
thanks to Richard Hoffman at Mnemosyne's Memes
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