heuriskein / ευρισκειν

xmas wishes

2008-12-25T02:33:00.003-05:00

for peace and happiness to all

(photo of fulton street in palo alto, california by geoff holden)

upcoming performances

2008-12-10T13:06:00.004-05:00

friday december 12 in toledo, ohio

saturday december 13 in buffalo, ny

---------------
UPDATE: more notices of the buffalo performance coming in...

from the soundlab myspace page

from buffalo's weekly artvoice a nice little writeup (scroll down)

Language Foundry / Suite 440

Saturday (Dec. 13) Big Orbit’s Soundlab unites two multi-media collectives: Cleveland, Ohio’s Language Foundry (“A Forward Movement of Non-Idiomatic Expressions”) and Buffalo’s Suite 440 (“Sonic, Visual, and Written Craftsmanship”) will present (In)proper Words With(in)proper Borders: An Evening of Non-idiomatic Sound and Language. The performance features poets J.S. Makkos and Tom Orange, with guest musicians from the Language Foundry, and the Reactionary Ensemble (from Buffalo), featuring KG Price and Brian Milbrand. This will be an event that brings together experimental poets, musicians, and artists from both cities to highlight the community goal to find new and forward-thinking forms of expression and creativity. Visit www.languagefoundry.org or www.suite440.net to get a better idea (or any idea at all) of what we’re talking about. There will be small press books and CD-Rs for sale to help promote and develop the relationship and hopefully bring about future events between the two cities.

9pm. Soundlab, 110 Pearl St. (www.bigorbitgallery.org/soundlab)

439 percent

2008-12-03T08:37:00.004-05:00

that's how much college tuition has increased over the past 25 years; by contrast, median family income has risen only 147 percent. (numbers adjusted for inflation.)

these, according to this morning's new york times, from a report by the national center for public policy and higher education. (the 36-page report is available in PDF format here.)

as a share of family income these numbers are especially staggering: "Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income."

unfortunately neither the nyt article nor the report itself (whose main objective is to assess the individual 50 states measure up in terms of preparation for, participation in, affordability of, and completion rates for higher education) give much sense of the root causes of such increases: at state universities, the increases have "largely been to make up for declining state appropriations."

the center's president, patrick callan: "When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible. When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it."

except that this is visibly untrue, as the center's own graphic demonstrates with its steady upward trajectory for tuitions regardless of whether the u.s. economy is doing well or poorly.

no folks, unless you have blinders on or are simply in serious denial, it's quite easy to see (especially in private universities) where the cost increases are being incurred. it's certainly not going to faculty budget lines.

UPDATE: rodney's absolutely right: in that last paragraph i should've written "easy to see where some of the cost increases are being incurred." clearly there are other factors contributing to rising tuition costs beyond bloated senior administrator costs, including but not limited to bloated middle management ranks, bloated coaching and athletic program costs, etc.

i would also add that it's the same patrick callan, who erroneously asserts in today's article that tuition is directly tied to the national economy, this is one and the same patrick callan who with the news two weeks ago of some university presidents turning in their some of their six- and seven-figure salaries, declared: "People are getting tuition increases, some faculty are facing layoffs, it just doesn’t look too good for presidents, no matter how capable they are, to be getting so much money." notice he says, "it just doesn't look too good," not "it's fundamentally wrong." he's clearly more concerned with image than substance.

in other words, it sometimes seems those officially sanctioned to diagnose the problem are least effectively able to. (in fairness, callan elsewhere writes: "On the other hand, universities are spending huge amounts of money on construction – for new dorms, new athletic facilities, and new student centers – as part of an 'amenities arms race.' And administrative overhead at many universities has ballooned, due to an explosion in niche student services and fund raising apparatuses. It is doubtful that these developments have improved student learning.")

neoconservative tears

2008-12-02T11:14:00.000-05:00

peter gabriel's fourth

2008-12-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

peter gabriel's fourth solo album after his departure from genesis, known in the u.s. as security, was released a little over 26 years ago. "the south bank show" on britain's ITV network then broadcast this documentary on the making of gabriel's album. his compositional techniques and processes are fascinating, and it's especially interesting if you know the album to watch the songs germinate from the idea stage through the recording process and into live performance. beyond this, the documentary also touches on other interesting topics, including technology and how far we have or haven't come (on this album gabriel extensively used the fairlight computerized synthesizer, which was essentially the first audio sampler) and appropriation of non-western musics (gabriel was really a pioneer in this respect).

part one (31:18)

part two (17:13)

vintage public image limited

2008-12-01T18:34:00.001-05:00

the sophomore effort from public image ltd (john lydon's project after the demise of the sex pistols and his nom de plume johnny rotten) was originally released as metal box and consisted of 3 12-inch 45rpm discs in a film canister, subsequently reissued on 2LPs (and single CD) as second edition. this is arguably PiL at their best: a crack rhythm section anchored by the bone crushing bass of jah wobble setting down the grooves, keith levene's guitar scrapings and prophet-5 keyboard noise-sheeting, with john's caterwauling intonations and hecklings overtop.

"careering" (from the BBC tv show "the old grey whistle test," always a source of excellent viddies)

"poptones" (also from the OGWT)

"death disco"

"chant" (complete with post-performance interview walkoff)

eco-heroes

2008-11-30T22:34:00.001-05:00

the cover story of this week's riverfront times, the st. louis free weekly i picked up while i was there over the holidays: longtime missouri hog farmer russ freeman has gone back to the old healthy way of doing things and organized a thriving co-op around it.

meanwhile, former weapons engineer jim merkel lives in vermont on $5,000 a year and explains how his program of radical simplicity works.

fifth anniversary

2008-11-26T11:07:00.000-05:00

monday night of this past week marks five years since i've smoked a cigarette. according to the statkeeper at quitnet.net:

Your Quit Date is: 11/24/2003 9:52:00 PM
Time Smoke-Free: 1828 days, 13 hours, 18 minutes and 7 seconds
Cigarettes NOT smoked: 27428
Lifetime Saved: 6 months, 29 days, 12 hours
Money Saved: $4,801.12

this was based, if i remember right, on 15 cigarettes a day and $3.50 a pack so the actual numbers may be quite higher. tho i'm always curious how they figure those lifetime saved stats.

physicians, heal thyselves

2008-11-22T11:39:00.001-05:00

it's fascinating to watch the right-wing diagnosticians concoct various remedies and treatments for what ails their body politic.

The key is not to abandon conservative positions, but to explain them in novel ways to the majority who might find them more in tune with human nature — and consequently more humanitarian than their usual caricatures of being too selfish, tough, or insensitive. (victor davis hanson, NRO)

in other words, lie about them because the caricatures are accurate.

At the GOP governors' meeting this month, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota argued that Republicans need to stay conservative but also modernize. A revitalized conservatism would push for tax reform with an eye on middle-class families, not hedge-fund operators. It would seek solutions to global warming rather than deny that it exists. It would place a higher priority on making health care affordable than on slashing pork programs. It would promote the assimilation of Hispanics rather than regard them as a menace or a source of cheap labor. (ramesh ponnuru, time)

in other words, take up positions that obama and the democrats already effectively own.

The future of the Republican Party is in the hands of the party’s grass roots. In the months to come, some of us will be concentrating on organizing the people who are the real base of the party and fighting to restore the party’s values as represented by my father’s administration. (michael reagan, human events)

in other words, that portion of the electorate that is shrinking almost daily.

I think it's pretty obvious that conservatives need to find new ways to address issues, new ways to apply conservative solutions to problems, new ways to shape conservatism to make it more appealing to a broader slice of the population. I haven't figured out what those new ways are, of course. (john hinderaker, power line blog)

finally, someone without delusions!

friday news roundup

2008-11-21T13:56:00.003-05:00

how will he govern? george packer writes in the new yorker how obama's ideology is, if anything, one of pragmatism more than traditional liberalism or conservatism. he bases this on people who know obama's thinking and reading (what a pleasure itself, a president who reads!)

paleopartisanship? unfortunately the right and left are objecting to attorney general nominee eric holder from their traditional quarters. according to the nation, holder sounds like a bushie in 2002 when claiming national security bureaucrats clinging to their turf should be gotten rid of, and he was also part of the team that helped secure reauthorization of the patriot act in 2005. for the national review, the holder pick signals "a return to the September 10 mentality." quel surprise.

watch 'em squirm: salon has a feature on "the conservative crack-up" in which many of the right's leading luminaries -- and i mean actual smart people like ross douthat and renegades like kathleen parker in addition to blowdried blowhards like tucker carlson -- go round and round the bend on the fate of conservatism in america. it ain't pretty, but ah, sweet sweet schaedenfreude...

niall ferguson may well be the smartest guy out there writing about our current economic woes. he has a long piece in vanity fair which, if you're at all like me with my straight C's in college econ, you'll probably need to read two or three times, but still it's the clearest and most synoptic view i've come across. check out also his long piece from two years ago on the end of the so-called "american century," and his brand spanking new book "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" is on my wish list.

"liberal" media? finally, in what should keep inquiring readers busy for months, project censored has issued its list of 2009's top 25 list of censored stories. seriously folks, some of these are devastating, including my favorites:

#1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
#4. ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
#5. Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
#12. Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
#13. Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq

collected poems of barbara guest

2008-11-20T10:47:00.005-05:00

after a long wait, it's finally here. i picked up my copy of the collected poems of barbara guest this past weekend from rod smith at bridge street books.

and it's indeed a lovely book from cover to cover and all 525 pages in between. the dust jacket image is a 1951 collage by guest herself entitled "wheel." the text is edited by guest's daughter hadley, and contains all the poems previously published in guest's trade and limited edition artist books, along with a handful of poems composed after her final volume (the red gaze, published in 2005 when guest was 85 years old). no other uncollected or previously unpublished material is included. the volume also contains an intro by peter gizzi, a timeline of guest's life, a bibliography of her works, and an index of titles and first lines.

guest was born barbara ann pinson in 1920 in wilmington, north carolina. she spent much of her childhood traveling and being shuttled between various relatives as her father looked for work as a probation officer. education was prized: she could read by age 3 and largely grew up in los angeles so she could attend better schools. she took a year off from undergrad at ucla -- where she met her first husband, painter and sculptor john dudley -- to go to a junior college where she thought the teachers knew more about modern poetry. she eventually graduated from uc berkeley and worked in los angeles as a social worker, helping air force pilots recover from WWII bombing missions.

she and dudley moved to greenwich village in the late 1940s, which provided her entry into the world of visual artists and the company of poets who would eventually be known as the new york school poets: john ashbery, edwin denby, kenward elmslie, kenneth koch, frank o'hara and james schuyler. from there on out, her chronology is largely a list of book publications and literary awards: she truly led a life in literature.

the world of literature, however, was often slow and on occasion downright failed to recognize her. she was one of only four women among the 44 poets donald allen included in his watershed anthology the new american poetry: 1945-1960 and was omitted altogether from the anthology of new york poets edited in 1970 by ron padgett and david shapiro.

the 1980s were seemingly a fallow period for guest's poetry (discounting herself defined, the biography of the poet h.d. she published in 1984), until fair realism appeared in 1989, showing her at the peak of her powers and beginning -- again, at nearly 70 years of age -- a remarkable period of productivity that saw her double the number of book titles published previously in her life.

i won't offer anything like a critical assessment here, as i plan instead to sit down for a long slow read of these poems. instead i'll offer just a few initial impressions that strike me.

there are two of guest's books here that i've never owned and possibly never even seen, so i'm psyched now finally to read them: the location of things / archaics / the open skies (1962) and moscow mansions (1973)
the timeline lists the following plays written by guest: the ladies choice [sic?], 1953; the office: a one act play in three scenes, 1963; port: a murder in one act, 1965; the diving board, 1966; chinese ghost restaurant, 1967; the swimming pool, 1975; three of these were published in the recent special issue of the chicago review, and kevin killian staged a number of them at small press traffic in san francisco in 2000; i wonder if/when we will ever get to read or see the rest?
the timeline also makes frequent references to guest's own works of visual art: is there enough of these to mount an exhibit?
most of the poems here that are surprises because i've never heard of before are from artist book collaborations, for example i ching: poems and lithographs with sheila isham (1969): these are wonderful little permutation poems that border on sound and visual poems when reprinted here. (one wonders what they looked like in the original!) likewise biography (1980), which was apparently a chapbook by burning deck and contains nine short lyrics. somehow also stripped tales (1995), a kelsey street book with anne dunn, escaped my notice, and these are substantive prose and prose-like pieces
i wonder too if there will be any attempt to do a biography, edit some letters and the previously uncollected and/or unpublished poems. i've heard that there are quite a bit of the latter, cathy wagner's selection for the above-mentioned chicago review being just a drop in the bucket. the barbara guest papers reside at yale's beinecke library: read an overview of the holdings (36 boxes apparently, at least in the initial accession), detailed acquisition lists here and here (which put the most recent count at 42 boxes). let's get to work, scholars!

geraldine monk

2008-11-18T10:17:00.004-05:00

reading from "mary through the looking glass" at the district of columbia arts center, washington dc, 16 november 2008

regrettably i stopped shooting before she completed her lovely gloss on the noun "tuckle." other images from my recent travels here.

view the full set of photos from my recent excursions in ohio and DC here.

post-election roundup

2008-11-08T10:20:00.004-05:00

salon's michael lind offers the theory that american politics moves in 72-year cycles split in halves: an initial 36-year period of government centralization and nation-building followed by a second 36 years of downsizing and individualism; lind says we are now in the midst of a new 72-year cycle.

the good folks at mediamatters.org refute the myth that we live in a fundamentally center-right nation, with polling data showing that americans' beliefs are largely progressive even if they do not call themselves liberal or progressive.

mcclatchy's frank greve has an interesting take on how the obama campaign might use its tremendous netroots operation post-election

josie delap of the economist compiles for the new york times the reactions of middle eastern bloggers to the election results, while huffpo's jason linkins rounds up reactions from the right-wing blogosphere (which begs the question, who is it again who hates america?)

liz cox barrett of the CJR points out that time magazine's joe klein stands alone among his peers for refusing to overlook or ignore mccain's filthy campaign on the basis of his "classy" concession speech. it should be quite the opposite.

the nro's andy mccarthy attributes, falsely, the increased youth vote to "the Left's dominance of the academy" (which in fact has little to no impact on students' political or world views).

max blumenthal looks at the reclusive billionaire who funded one of this past week's political disappointments, the success of proposition 8 in california.

and peter beinart calls sarah palin, in what i hope could be the final word on her, the last of the culture warriors.

Thomas Willett Orange (1937-2008)

2008-11-03T19:55:00.004-05:00

b. January 2, 1937 - Paducah, KY
d. November 3, 2008 - North Ridgeville, OH

flickr photoset

Obama and the Weatherman

2008-10-25T10:41:00.001-04:00

[since i'm unlikely to get two letters to the editor published in two successive weeks, i include this one here. i think it's actually better than the one published last week. 200 words exactly!]

How many "associations" does a law student, community organizer, 6-year state senator and 3-year U.S. senator make throughout his career? Certainly hundreds. Yet Kevin O'Brien insists Bill Ayers is uniquely indicative of Obama's character. Indeed Ayers did some terrible things 40 years ago. A president also took us into war under false pretenses. A general told us he had to destroy a Vietnamese town in order to save it. Back home, cities burned.

Today Ayers is the ultimate toothless radical, a university professor. "Poisoning the minds of future teachers against America," as O'Brien claims? A reviewer for the conservative Chicago Tribune wrote, "There must continue to be thoughtful books like Ayers' that illustrate the profound flaws of today's juvenile-justice system and society's abandonment of the young and poor." Ayers claims his more recent remarks on "no regrets" and "not doing enough" applied only the Vietnam War, and he has publicly condemned the attacks of September 11.

According to polls, 50-60% of voters say Ayers does not matter. So talk about him all you want, Mr. O'Brien: Americans are not listening and not interested in reigniting culture wars. As Gertrude Stein said famously, there's no there there.

ACORN's activities are no threat

2008-10-19T11:19:00.003-04:00

Once again, facts must come to rescue Kevin O'Brien. His column Thursday on ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is right-wing boilerplate, this time regarding the alleged voter fraud the conservative media have gotten themselves all frothed up about.

First off, O'Brien's claim that ACORN is "one of the prime sponsors of the mortgage meltdown that's throttling the economy" is patently false. ACORN is an organization that works to achieve living wages, better housing and schools, and neighborhood safety for low-income families -- the kind of community organizing for which some Republicans have active disdain.

ACORN pays underemployed individuals to collect voter registrations, and a small number of them clearly try to game the system. ACORN identifies many potentially fraudulent registrations.

Now even if O'Brien's estimates of the number of fraudulent registrations were not wildly overblown, he never manages to explain how fraudulent registrations translate into actual voter fraud. Five Mickey Mouses registered to vote does not mean that five Mickey Mouses will show up at the polls and actually vote for the desired candidate. The likelihood of that is slim to none.

[fulltext link to Plain Dealer, October 19 2008, Page G5]

A Question of Character

2008-10-17T11:15:00.002-04:00

from tmorange
to pwehner@eppc.org
cc contentions@commentarymagazine.com
date Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 10:08 AM
subject "A Question of Character" (Wehner, 10/14)

Mr. Wehner,

Of course, character matters. But the fundamental premises underlying your case for challenging Obama's character are, to say the very least, questionable.

Consider this: how many "associations" do you think the average law student, community organizer and state senator makes over the course of his or her career? I think it's safe to estimate the number to be several hundred at least. Now if I understand your case correctly, you want us to believe that three or four association in particular -- ACORN, Ayers, Rezko and Wright -- deserve more scrutiny, or are somehow more indicative of Obama's character, than any of the hundreds of his other associations.

Many reasonable observers would, rightly I think, be unwilling to grant you even this basic premise, but I will purely for the sake of argument. You talk about, and I quote, "Barack Obama's past associations with radical figures," "Obama's radical associations" (twice), "Obama's associations with Ayers and Wright and all the rest," that he "hung around with some pretty disturbing characters," and "what we're talking about aren't isolated incidents. It has happened with a slew of people." Notice already what is happening in some of your specific language here: "and all the rest" and "a slew of people" both suggest far more than the four most infamous of Obama's associations I listed above, and yet I've never heard more than these four mentioned by name of the literally hundreds of professional associations he undoubtedly has. Have you?

Now let's move from considering the quantity of associations (these four among hundreds) to the quality, which you characterize as "radical figures," "radical associations" repeatedly, "pretty disturbing characters," and in a final flourish, "people who have a disturbing history of violence, hatred for America, and corruption." Are these fair or accurate characterizations of ACORN, Ayers, Rezko and Wright?

ACORN is a community organization that works to achieve living wages, better housing and schools, and neighborhood safety for low-income families, It also pays underemployed individuals to collect voter registrations, and a small number of those people clearly try to game the system. Indeed the Republican lawyer who prosecuted the first ACORN case (King County, Washington, 2007) said, "a joint federal and state investigation has determined that this scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting. Instead, the defendants cheated their employer, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN), to get paid for work they did not actually perform." Obama has in the past done some work for them and given them some of his campaign money.

Bill Ayers is now the ultimate toothless radical, an education professor at an Illinois university who committed acts of terrorism some forty years ago, when Barack Obama was eight years old. He claims his more recent remarks on "no regrets" and "not doing enough" have been subject to "deliberate distortion" in being applied beyond the Vietnam War and has publicly condemned the attacks of September 11. Obama has served on some boards with him and did not, contrary to GOP assertions, begin his campaign in Ayers' living room.

Tony Rezko is a businessmen with some undoubtedly crooked dealings. Obama has received some campaign contributions from him and did a small real estate deal with him that may have created an appearance of but no actual impropriety.

Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of Obama's UCC mega-church in Chicago, served in this country's Navy and Marine Corps and earned four academic degrees. His 36-year ministry was rooted in a theology of empowerment and self-determination. His decontextualized sermon sound bites, such as "God Damn America," look and sound entirely understandable given a video backdrop of, say, tens of thousands of poor, largely African American citizens of New Orleans abandoned in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. More recent Wright statements Obama has found offensive and denounced.

So I ask again: are these truly "radical associations" with "pretty disturbing characters," with "people who have a disturbing history of violence, hatred for America, and corruption" as you claim? I think the reasonable observer would concede that these four associations, of the hundreds Obama likely has, simply cannot be painted equally with so broad a brush. No, the associations themselves vary from significant to distant and incidental; the individuals themselves vary from crooked and somewhat controversial to essentially innocuous.

"This issue shouldn't, by itself, be dispositive," you concede, "Nor should it be the only, or even the most important, issue in the campaign. Nor is it fair to say that Obama's character can be understood only through the prism of his associations." Unfortunately, on October 4 the Washington Post quoted McCain campaign adviser Greg Stimple as saying, "We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans." A day later, the New York Daily News quoted "a top McCain strategist" admitting, "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose." This was the same weekend that McCain's running mate was out on the stump accusing Obama of, quote, "palling around with terrorists." Only days later, when McCain asked his audience who is the real Obama, the reply came back loud and clear, "terrorist." Visibly startled, McCain said nothing.

"The concern is not that Obama will invite domestic terrorists to the White House for signing ceremonies or private lunches," you claim. But clearly GOP operatives are stoking these very fears. I won't list all the incidents here -- the Virginia GOP chair encouraging volunteers to link Obama with terrorists, the GOP websites in Pennsylvania and Sacramento calling Obama "A Terrorist's Best Friend" and urging people to "Waterboard Barack Obama," the Robocalls going out right now that declare, "I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers."

Yes, Mr. Wehner, this is a question of character. Even close conservative friends and allies of John McCain no longer recognize this man. And whatever character he had going into this election, he has little if any left now.

P.S. Your white suprematist analogies do not apply for at least two reasons: 1) Jeremiah Wright is not a black suprematist, and black liberation theology is not about black supremacy but black equality, and 2) because black equality attempts to redress centuries of socioeconomic injustice while white supremacy attempts to maintain and reinforce that injustice, there is no moral equivalent between the two.

the ACORN myth

2008-10-12T13:38:00.000-04:00

from tmorange
to aburns@politico.com
cc jharris@politico.com, JVandehei@politico.com
date Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 1:24 PM
subject ACORN gives GOP new line of attack

Dear Mr. Burns,

Although I was pleased to see your piece in The Politico begin with the rhetorical gambit of debunking, as little more than the oldest game in the political book, overblown notions about ACORN that right-wingers are once again peddling and the so-called liberal media are lapping up this election season, my jaw dropped as your piece unfolded into pure partisan hackery.

You declare "the latest wave of ACORN investigations" and later "the latest wave of registration-fraud allegations" and yet never define what constitutes a "wave." Had you looked to facts, you might have discovered 10 current investigations, which at 20% of states nationwide might seem like a lot. But you might have also attempted to quantify whether the handfuls of fraudulent registrations alleged in each case amount to even a drop in the bucket amidst the hundreds of thousands of new registrations that have been taken place nationwide in perfect compliance with local and federal election law. Let alone whether such investigations have in the past turned up any actual fraud. They haven't, as you eventually report.

Unfortunately these are the least of your oversights. As evidence for your piece, you proceed to cite a recent Nevada raid, cite a McCain campaign memo, and list some unsourced ACORN-obama connections; you then cite three additional GOP sources (Matt Blunt, the McCain campaign website, and Roy Blunt), detail (again unsourced) ACORN's history, and cite an anonymous Republican memo. We hear not a word from any Obama campaign spokespersons. We hear barely a word about the many other kinds of work -- in terms of living wages, better housing and schools, and neighborhood safety -- that ACORN performs on behalf of local communities. (Well, "advocating for issues related to economic and social equity" amounts to 9 vague words.)

We have to get 950 words into a 1290-word piece -- that's over 70% of the way -- to find any exculpatory evidence on ACORN's behalf. We have to get 1120 words into a 1290-word piece -- that's over 85% of the way -- to hear a single word from an ACORN spokesperson.

If your editors decide to keep you on the ACORN beat -- though personally I think they should send you back to journalism school to teach you some basics of objective and unbiased reporting -- I encourage you to begin with Josh Marshall's piece entitled "The Gist of ACORN," which should help you put some of your "facts" in perspective.

cc: J. Harris, Editor-in-Chief
cc: J. VandeHei, Executive Editor

issue 1 anthology (part one)

2008-10-10T12:47:00.012-04:00

over the past week, an intriguing experiment has taken place in the poetry community. a week ago today, on october 3 -- a friday, typically the day for the release of bad news that public relations operatives hope will be ignored by the mainstream media -- kenneth goldsmith posted to the poetry foundation's harriet blog an announcement of a "3,785 Page Pirated Poetry Anthology" and proceeded with a list of 3164 poets whose work the anthology, entitled issue 1, purportedly included. "Completely unpermissioned and unauthorized," the announcement proudly declared, "pissing off the entire poetry community. Either you're in or you're not." (download the 3.9MB PDF file here.)

the provocative taunting is part and parcel of the pitch that often sells the latest poetry movement du jour, with goldsmith* as conceptual writing's most visible brand name. and although the issues such taunting raises -- regarding authority, ownership, permission, exclusivity and poetry wars -- warrant both some tongue-in-cheek levity and some serious consideration in their own right, these i think are among the least interesting aspects of the project. that is, the significance of the issue 1 anthology far and away exceeds its conceptualist brand name.

think about it for a moment. visualize a 3785-page poetry anthology: even with the thinnest, norton-style cigarette paper or telephone directory oversized pages, this beast would still need to be bound in multiple volumes. practically speaking, it can only exist in digital format and makes an utter mockery of print and codex technologies.

and besides, who could possibly read the thing? the list of contributors alone is so formidable that a number have already claimed frustration at the difficulty of searching for their names to determine if they've even been included (even though searching a digital text is relatively easy once you know how).

so the first implication i draw from the simple fact of the issue 1 anthology as object -- and it obtains regardless of whether 3000+ individuals wrote the poems in question (they didn't) or a single computer program or programmer "wrote" them (it/he did) -- can be phrased as follows:

1) we are living in a moment of poetic production so abundant that attempts to document it and consume it have approached if not fully arrived at the patently absurd.

[to be continued]

*personally i like kenny quite a bit and find his writing at its best to be some of the most interesting and thought-provoking out there today.

the ayers "relationship"

2008-10-07T15:12:00.003-04:00

from tmorange
to "Stanley Kurtz" (skurtz@eppc.org)
date Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 1:20 AM
subject NYT's Ayers-Obama Whitewash

Mr. Kurtz,

In reference to William Ayers's 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, you wrote on The Corner the other day: "That book is quite radical, expressing doubts about whether we ought to have a prison system at all, comparing America to South Africa's apartheid system, and contemptuously dismissing the idea of the United States as a kind or just country." The apartheid charge is one you have levied repeatedly: on Fox News Network's "On the Record" with Greta Van Susteren: "And in that book on juvenile crime, Bill Ayers says a lot of things, a lot of very radical things about the United States, compares the U.S. justice system to apartheid" (September 23); in the Weekly Standard: "Ayers also makes a point of comparing America's prison system to the mass-detention of a generation of young blacks under South African Apartheid" (August 11).

Since you never provide specific citations in support of this claim, I hope I am correct when I assume you are referring to the following three instances in which the word "apartheid" appears in the Ayers book.

1) On page 87, Ayers is reporting on his visit to The Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center School, in which a student named Mario is reading aloud the opening passage of a short story by Reginald McKnight entitled "The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas." Ayers writes, "'Alphabetized,' says Mario. 'Alphabetized. They didn't stick us in the back, or arrange us by degrees of hue, apartheid-like. This was real integration.[...]'" Not do these sentiments belong to McKnight's short story rather than Ayers himself; additionally, they are describing an integrated school, one exactly opposite that of an apartheid system.

2) On page 165, Ayers is reporting the words of a South African friend, Michael Freeman, "an official with the Anglican Church in charge of voter education and registration [who has] worked closely with the African National Congress during the resistance and now [1997] works with the Mandela government. Michael is in Chicago to exchange information with community-based voter projects and to meet with foundation officers about strategies for funding his efforts. 'You know,' he tells us early in his visit, 'we face a desperate problem with youth crime. Under apartheid our youth were rounded up and incarcerated in huge numbers. Now, with no formal education, and bearing the scars of growing up in prison, these young people must somehow integrate into the new society. It is a critical, monumental struggle for us.'" Here Freeman, not Ayers, is simply pointing out the implications of mass youth incarcerations based on his own experience in South Africa, perhaps in the hopes that the American justice system might learn from and correct the unintended consequences of such policies. (It's not even clear if he's truly making a comparison with the American system here at all.)

3) Finally, on page 183, the same Michael Freeman has just departed from a visit to the same Chicago classroom. "So many black boys in cages," says Freeman, not Ayers. "This feels like apartheid." Notice Freeman, again not Ayers, is drawing a point of resemblance, "feels like" in one specific respect, not "is identical to" in every respect. He knows America does not embrace apartheid but can't help drawing a resemblance in this instance.

In claiming that it "compares America to South Africa's apartheid system," you misrepresent the Ayers book in at least three fundamental respects. First, you attribute directly to Ayers words and sentiments expressed not by Ayers himself but by others in his narrative. Second, you strip these statements of any and all context that would render them even remotely intelligible: namely that one is a fictionalized account of an integrated, not segregated school system, while the other two are spoken by a South African possibly warning Americans about the dangers of apartheid and even the slightest possible resemblances to it. Third, you wildly overstate the significance of these three incidental passages for the book as a whole.

Given that a reviewer for the conservative bulwark Chicago Tribune wrote, "There must continue to be thoughtful books like Ayers' that illustrate the profound flaws of today's juvenile-justice system and society's abandonment of the young and poor. Ayers' book provides a valuable step in understanding what is happening" (March 8, 1998, page 12), one cannot help but wonder why you have so willfully distorted the Ayers book -- especially when they are so easily checked (via Google Books) -- or what precisely in the three sentences I have identified and contextualized above has anything remotely to do with Senator Obama.

Could it be you, Mr. Kurtz, and not Ayers, who is the radical here -- a radical bent on adding your own personal smudge to an ongoing, guilt-by-association political smear? You claim that the NYT piece "makes no serious attempt to present the views of Obama critics who have worked to uncover the true nature of the relationship. That makes this piece irresponsible journalism." The evidence I have presented above suggests that you are the irresponsible "journalist" crying sour grapes over the fact that the NYT wisely and responsibly ignores distortions and fabrications like yours.

Early Voting

2008-10-03T13:34:00.002-04:00

from tmorange
to deroy.murdock@gmail.com
date Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 1:33 PM
subject Early Voting

Mr. Murdock,

You wrote on the Corner yesterday: "In Ohio, most dramatically, an individual can register to vote between September 30 and October 6, then immediately receive an absentee ballot. Existing and brand-new electors also can cast ballots at early-voting centers. This is a gourmet recipe for voter fraud."

I wonder, do you have any specific evidence relevant to voter fraud in Ohio right now? You cite an AP report that "Independent groups seeking to increase poor and minority participation also transported voters from places like homeless shelters, halfway houses, and soup kitchens," except that there's nothing inherently fraudulent about these particular constituencies exercising their constitutional rights, is there?

Since I suspect your fears are based in mere speculation rather than actual evidence, let me offer you some, first-hand: I voted yesterday in Ohio. And I voted on a paper ballot since the last thing in the world I'd trust with my vote is a Diebold touch-screen machine.

Let me alleviate your fears: the election officials here in Lorain County are checking state-issued photo IDs, they are checking home addresses, and they are taking their job very seriously; there is little way anyone who isn't supposed to vote is going to be able to.

You conclude, "early balloting assaults the notion of contemplative self-government." Puh-leez. Sure, undecideds should wait. But many of us have seen all we need to see and know all we need to know. By giving more people a greater window of opportunity for exercising the vote in their already overstretched lives, it's plainly clear that early voting encourages and enhances democracy.

more to doubt

2008-09-30T15:46:00.003-04:00

from the sun sentinel (ohio), september 25, 2008, page a7. the piece appears not to have made it online, so for a better view click here. read the original editorial here.

heavy rotation

2008-09-29T00:15:00.002-04:00

middle-period genesis as i would call it: the three albums after the departure of peter gabriel and when phil collins took over lead vocals but before they made it big on the u.s. pop charts, namely a trick of the tail (1976), wind and wuthering (1977), and ...and then there were three (1978). being a devotee of the gabriel era, i never took these albums seriously because it was so easy to scoff at them.

now granted, this judgment was all after-the-fact. growing up on a steady diet of mid-1970s FM radio, i knew "follow you, follow me" and of course the big singles from 1980's duke (the ubiquitous "misunderstanding" and "turn it on again"). and the freshman year high school teacher who turned me onto prog in general certainly played us "dusk" from 1970's trespass (the first real genesis album: "from genesis to revelation" is rather expendable as i heard it). but it was precisely may 31 1984 (the date stamp on the price tag is indelible) when i bought a one-dollar used copy of 1972's foxtrot at warped records in lakewood ohio. and when you've been weaned on this one, no genesis lacking peter gabriel will really do.

nevertheless, these middle period records are not without merit. and you can find no better point of comparison between gabriel and collins than trick of the tail's opener, "dance on a volcano" (youtube) and "dancing with the moonlit knight" (youtube) the opener from selling england by the pound (the last truly great gabriel-era album before the enjoyable but completely overblown double-album concept LP the lamb lies down on broadway which gabriel entirely dominated and contributed to his irrepairable rift from the rest of the band). in many ways, trick of the tail was the surviving band's effort at bypassing the excesses of the lamb and going back to redo selling england without gabriel.

problem is -- and make no mistake, collins is a superb, entirely self-taught percussionist and a decent singer -- he sounds so close to gabriel and yet is so far. the lyrics and delivery are just never bizarre and compelling enough tho. and so the attempt to sound like gabriel but just not quite being able to pull it off gives the whole thing the slight air of parody.

but again, i'm finding them no less enjoyable as a result. "dance on a volcano" got the formula down: the acoustic guitar licked, percussion-flourished and multiple key-changed intro leading into the perfectly nimble and driving 7/8-time section that alternates twice with harder and slower 4/4 main theme ("better start doing it right") before drifting into a bit of trippy atmospherics taking us into a new theme -- all of this before we hit 2:30! but it's all a bit formulaic and just does not have the edge of "dancing with the moonlit knight."

the next two tracks on trick of the tail, "entangled" and "squonk," may be the prettiest and most anthematic pieces, respectively, that the band ever put to record. the harpsichord-like 12-string arpeggios and multi-part harmonies of "entangled" are nearly exquisite, and "squonk" gets you diggin in yr pockets for the bic-lighter to hold up in arena-rock fashion with the best of 'em.

i know i borrowed trick of the tail from friends back in the day but never bothered to buy a copy; wind and wuthering i likewise borrowed but may never have listened to more than once all the way through, and even now it still commands my attention least. tho again, the best three tracks seem to be the first three: "eleventh earl of mar," "one for the vine" and "your own special way." this latter apparently charted as a single in england and is often described as the first real genesis "love song" and thus a prelude to "follow you, follow me." again i'm struck by how truly bizarre and wonderful the verse sections are of this, particularly the slightly out-of-tune keyboards that fill in between the acoustic-12-string and collins vocal lines -- all this before the crushingly sentimental title-bearing chorus comes in and nearly wrecks the whole thing.

finally, "down and out" really does open the last of these middle-period records, and then there were three (so-named because guitarist steve hackett left the band too, leaving only collins, keyboardist tony banks and bass/gtrist mike rutherford to soldier on as a trio -- and make probably more money than the band ever had before) in classic driving fashion. "undertow" threatens to muck about in the maudlin until collins gets us to the chorus "the "stand up to the blow" and "let me live again" sections) which are probably just as sappy but i find my ears succumbing to like a complete sucker. and then the other standout, aside from "follow you, follow me" (which actually sounds like a pretty decent tune once you've gotten some distance from it), is "deep in the motherlode" which i take to be almost as anthematic and stadium-swaying as "squonk" but curiously has that "misunderstanding" slow-dance feel to it as well. honestly it's not all that far from the "loving, touching, squeezing" business that the godawful journey brought us. it's "go west young man" injunction, intended however ironically or not, is likewise nearly unbearable. but for whatever reason i find that opening and recurring keyboard figure utterly infectious and can't hear it enough.

Campaign Lies, Media Double Standards

2008-09-24T13:56:00.000-04:00

from tmorange
to STaylor@nationaljournal.com
date Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 1:55 PM
subject "Campaign Lies, Media Double Standards" (NJ 9/20)

Dear Stuart Taylor,

I'm certainly not the only reader who appreciates your genuinely balanced effort ("Campaign Lies, Media Double Standards," National Journal 9/20) to cut through the lies of the current presidential campaign but regrets that you draw the wrong conclusion. Instead of "no longer trusting the major newspapers or television networks to provide consistently accurate and fair reporting and analysis of all the charges and countercharges" you should rejoice in the fact that the press, for the first time in long-term memory, is actually doing its job by scrutinzing the claims and record of candidates who lie, shamelessly and repeatedly, even when their lies have been refuted. As recently as Sarah Palin's interview with Sean Hannity last night, for example, the Governor has still not come clean on the fact that she supported the bridge to nowhere before Congress killed it. (And she kept the money!)

In fact, some of your fact-checking needs checking. First, Charlie Gibson's purportedly "distorting Palin's meaning" about the Iraq War being "a task that is from God" is nothing of the sort. What is the effective difference between stating that the war is a task from God and praying that it is? Simply that a little doubt has replaced certainty. The effect is the same: that God has justified this terrible ill men have wrought. Hardly the "unremarkable exhortation" you make it out to be, it's cut from merely a slightly humbler cloth than this current president's presumption to be the deliverer of God's gift of freedom -- at the barrel of a gun -- to the rest of the world.

Second, Obama's claim that McCain "is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq" is indeed less than accurate. McCain wants a permanent military presence in Iraq, but his qualifying condition -- "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed" -- rests on an utterly flawed analogy. "We've been in Japan for 60 years," McCain argues, "We've been in South Korea 50 years or so." Those were conventional wars between relatively symmetrical enemies that ended with conventional treaties, armistices or cease fires; the Global War on Terror as currently conceived and waged cannot even contemplate these things. To the extent that McCain cannot articulate what "victory" in Iraq means or how we secure it, he remains delusional as ever.

anchovies and orange juice

2008-09-23T20:49:00.000-04:00

American Public Media's "Weekend America" featured three guests this past Saturday (Jesse Thorn, Amy Hungerford and Dominic Papatola) who completely missed the boat on why anchovies in orange juice are bad news (listen to the segment here). It's bad because the only way the modern food industry can add value to its products is to add nutrients that it has already processed out.

By putting pulverized anchovies into its "Healthy Heart" orange juice, Tropicana is selling consumers unadulterated nutritionist hucksterism. Omega-3 fatty acids are, like antioxidants, oat bran and countless others, nutrients du jour that the food industry adds to processed foods to make them appear healthy. A truly healthy diet rich in both omega-3s and -6s can be had from plenty of green leafy vegetables, which is where fish get them in the first place.

Listeners should forget the "Healthy Heart" orange juice with anchovies, forget the fish oil even. Avoid these other "edible (or in this case drinkable) food-like substances" altogether, as Michael Pollan calls them, read his book In Defense of Food, and follow his succinct advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Dear Jay Nordlinger

2008-09-19T14:50:00.001-04:00

from tmorange
to jnordlinger@nationalreview.com
date Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:08 PM
subject Re: Sick

Dear Jay Nordlinger,

You're actually serious, aren't you? Sure, politics can be sickening; but it can hardly be the press, for the first time in long-term memory actually doing its job by scrutinzing the claims and record of a virtual political unknown less than two months and plausibly a heartbeat away from the land's highest office, causing the sickness.

Let's be honest: the media loves nothing more than a fresh new face. And what's not to like about Sarah Palin's rather compelling story? In fact, as Rex Huppke has reported for the Chicago Tribune, coverage of Palin in the first week of September slightly edged out that of Obama and dwarfed that of Biden; it also helped give McCain 60% more coverage than Obama. What's more, "Based on 6,027 stories analyzed, LexisNexis found that 26 percent were positive, 22 percent negative and 52 percent neutral." Can you refute these numbers?

Well, you may say, that was then and this is now. Perhaps -- but as I see it the difference is this. Palin has lied, blatantly and repeatedly, to the media and the nation. Even after her lies have been refuted, she lies all the same. (You don't seriously believe in spite of clear evidence to the contrary, for example, that she "said thanks but no thanks to that bridge to nowhere," do you?)

Indeed this so-called "liberal media" of ours rarely objects to being lied to; more often than not, they usher the lies right along, swallowing them whole and shitting them out undigested upon the American public. Thing is, when you have a relative unknown competing for the highest office in the land, one with a highly questionable record that includes several pending investigations that her campaign is actively stonewalling, the press has not simply a right but a duty to scrutinize her record and subject her claims to tests of truth.

NOT because she's a woman, and NOT because she's a conservative -- but because she has proven herself thus far to be a consummate liar.

Here's to the First Amendment, and to the exercise of a free press that is essential to our democracy!

* * * * * *

from tmorange
to jnordlinger@nationalreview.com
date Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:32 PM
subject Re: Something About Sarah

Dear Jay Nordlinger,

The "hacked" yahoo email account makes you sick too? Give me a break. Until the offenders are caught and the matter investigated fully you have no basis for crying foul about this.

In fact, given that Palin has, like Karl Rove and other GOP operatives, been using her personal email account for matters of the public trust (presumably to avoid detection), and that she withheld 1,100 emails from a FOIA request filed by one Andree McLeod on a cronyism charge, Palin claiming like Bush and Cheney, "executive privilege" as the basis for the withholding -- I would not be surprised one bit if this "hacking" episode were not an altogether convenient way of disposing with such emails and the details about Troopergate and other investigations currently being stonewalled on which such emails might shed light. (After all, the only mistake Nixon conceded was not destroying the evidence...)

Palin is cut wholly from Rove-Bush-Cheney cloth.

And by the way, consider listening to the Geoff Nunberg piece from NPR's "Fresh Air" from Tuesday on the opportunism of playing the victim, which your recent Corner posts are managing all too well. If you don't have the time or inclination, here's Nunberg's final analysis:

And in fact, there were plenty of conservatives who wanted no part of this [the "lipstick on a pig" nonsense]. David Brooks described the episode as "stupidity on stilts." And David Frum warned against what he called the "inflammation of imaginary grievances." And others on the right worried that the McCain campaign might be perceived as whining, which as it happens was the word that Sarah Palin used last spring to describe Hillary Clinton's complaints about her press coverage. But whine they did, and with pitch-perfect proficiency. You decide whether that's hypocrisy or opportunism or simply adaptiveness.

What's remarkable is how naturally the idiom came to them, as if they'd been speaking it all their lives. For all the ridicule that's been heaped on the language of political correctness and identity politics--and the right has no monopoly here--there's no group that hasn't learned to work it to its advantage. Whether or not you ultimately persuade people that your grievance is justified, you can at least count on owning the discussion for the next news cycles.

Enjoy your new victimhood.

the light

2008-09-07T14:15:00.002-04:00

closest thing to a near-perfect song i've heard in a while.

april is the latest release from sun kil moon, the current operation of mark kozelek. i don't know why i've never paid much attention to kozelek's initial outfit, red house painters. perhaps someone described them as just another quiet sad and mopey acoustic outfit, but i don't know why that would've been a deterrent in and of itself, as i'm a complete sucker for that genre. though i've also had intense but brief flings with other purveyors of such: i loved the scud mountain boys massachusetts for a while, but at some indefineable point that signature pernice sanctimonious irony became intolerable for me and i haven't played that CD since.

tho as another fellow northeast ohioan -- kozelek is from massilon -- i think it's high time i investigate his back catalog.

i've never been one for the repeat function much, but last night i could've played "the light" 100 times if sleep had not become a necessity. there's something about that simple endless D-to-G chord change with the hammer-ons strummed over the warm slowburn amplifier that's irresistible.

positions pix

2008-09-05T10:20:00.001-04:00

pictures from the held by the kootenay school of writing in vancouver a few weeks ago

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmorange/sets/72157606978180144

samples...

lorraine graham, darren wershler-henry

juliana spahr, clint burnham

jules boykoff, kaia sand

rodrigo toscano

dorothy trujilo lusk

jeff derksen

catriona strang

mark wallace

full set here

heavy rotation

2008-09-04T20:20:00.002-04:00

what i'm most listening to and enjoying lately (and not on my iPod, god forbid -- right now it's either the sansa 4GB mp3 player and headphones or the computer speakers hooked up to my laptop...)

Self-Luminous -- Mark O'Leary (gtr), Mat Maneri (vln), Randy Peterson (dr)
wonderfully muted chattering amplified string and percussion interplay showing free improvisation need not be all furious bluster to be consistently engaging.

Savane - Ali Farka Toure
the malian master's final album, released posthumously a few months after his death from bone cancer in march 2006. did i realize this or just forget? why do i not yet have any of his other recordings? was it that the ry cooder thing made him too "popular"? glad i at least got to see/hear him at the 2003 smithsonian folklife festival.

Wire - 1980s releases (The Ideal Copy, A Bell is a Cup Until it is Struck, It's Beginning to and Back Again)
largely maligned when they came out -- too poppy, too synthy, not edgy enough -- these have in fact aged quite well i think. and naturally, their newest release, object 47, seems to be getting a similar rap. perhaps it was hearing a BBC live-in-the-studio performance and interview from just the other day, conducted in obvious promotion of the new release, and an especially nice performance of "boiling boy" from A Bell that made me head back to these records. even "second-rate" wire from 20 years ago sounds better than 90% of today's new music. and i'm also quite certain that colin newman's lyrics impacted my nascent poetics sensibility.

him work here all day
him got his tonsils sprained
him got no time for utensils
or words to that effect
(colin newman, "i've waited ages")

not mind we jolly jack tars i'm in disgrace
the cat sat on the carpet i just lay here like a lump
(colin newman, "life on deck")

drag my canal
you saucy old salt
pale in belief
i'm not without fault
(wire, "free-falling divisions")

smoke and mirrors

2008-09-03T08:11:00.000-04:00

watch this mccain lackey named tucker bounds dissemble, evade and lie his way through an interview with CNN's campbell brown:

what's even more stunning than the effrontery with which this tucker bounds commits his insults of public discourse is the fact that -- for once! -- a member of the so-called "liberal media" actually calls this scumsucking decepticon out on his bullshit.

observe how this works (my paraphrase and coding):

Q: given the mccain's critique of obama's experience and the apparent double standard mccain exhibits by picking an equally if not more inexperienced VP, why is palin ready to be commander in chief?

A: she's on mccain's ticket [EVASION], and he's got experience. [MESSAGE]

Q: yeah we know about him, but what about her?

A: people support obama [EVASION], and she has as much experience as him. [MESSAGE]

Q: no, you're not answering the question: what qualifications or experience does she have to be commander-in-chief?

A: executive state-level experience; more executive office experience than obama [QUESTIONABLE CLAIM, see below*]; commander of the alaska national guard that's been deployed overseas.

Q: give one example of a decision she's made as commander of the ANG.

A: any decision she's made as commander [EVASION] is more of a decision that obama has made. [MESSAGE]

Q: so give me one example.

A: certainly you don't mean to belittle every judgment she makes as commander? [ATTACK THE INTERVIEWER AND PLAY VICTIM]

Q: i'm belittling nothing, i just want to know one decision she's made.

A: in deciding how to equip and command the ANG, she has more experience than obama. [MESSAGE]

Q: but the pentagon and white house make those decisions, not the governors.

A: actually, on a factual basis, they do. [LIE, see below**] if you have an emergency in your state [EVASION (question pertains to foreign policy], the governor commands the national guard. that's more of a command role than obama, and the GOP ticket has more combined experience. [MESSAGE]

it's really a command performance: evade all questions and hammer home your message; when you get called out on your evasions, lie and play the victim. mccain will never fire bounds because he's too good and what he does -- and it's an utter disgrace. this is what passes for news, information and reasoned political discourse in this country. kudos, campbell brown

*palin does have more years in office than obama. she served four years on the wasilla city council and four years as that town's mayor. added to the year she chaired the alaska oil and gas conservation commission and the year and a half as governor, she has six-and-a-half years executive political experience. by contrast, obama was an illinois state senator for seven years and has been u.s. senator for almost four. so while she has more "executive" experience, in terms of total years in public office obama has almost 11 to palin's almost 10.

**actually, on a factual basis, they do not. the associated press reports that, according to craig campbell, adjutant general of the alaska national guard, "and Palin play no role in national defense activities, even when they involve the Alaska National Guard. The entire operation is under federal control, and the governor is not briefed on situations." sorry, tucker bounds, facts still mean something in the reality-based community.

redistributing the wealth

2008-09-02T22:38:00.001-04:00

saw this during my brief stopover in the kansas city airport en route from nashville to portland a few weeks ago and only just getting to posting and commenting on it now.

there's really no kinder way of putting this: terry love is a complete idiot. nevermind that with respect to the size of government, the joint venture of no less conservative outfits than brookings and the urban institute claims that "Since the Bush tax cuts were enacted, government spending has increased significantly in all major categories." and nevermind how an obama administration would set out to control terry love's life.

it's the word "further" in the second bullet point above that marks the sign of truly perverse thinking. that's right, terry love fears "the further redistribution of wealth in American society" under obama. as if there is some redistribution of wealth we have already been experiencing and obama would bring more.

no, terry love, what the bush presidency has brought us is a further polarization of wealth, as the san francisco chronicle reports today:

The rich-poor gap also widened with the nation's top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

god willing, an obama presidency will begin a redistribution of wealth and a renewal of the social contract that 40 years of conservative economic policy has all but decimated in this country.

gonzo documentary

2008-07-27T17:17:00.011-04:00

at age 20 i first began reading seriously on my own and for myself. naturally throughout my education i read, and even growing up i read very intently in very specific areas of interest (stamp collecting, peanuts cartoons). but at age 20 i started reading outside of curricular contexts, specifically in what might be considered european modernism and american counterculture. i think the motivation was partly a broad dissatisfaction with my academic curriculum (international affairs) and a desire to seek out confirmations or validations of my lived experience. there was music -- i was led to camus by the cure's song "killing an arab," bauhaus had a song called "antonin artaud," the doors got their name from aldous huxley quoting william blake, and so all these required investigating. and there were also the beats challenging their experience: the trilogy of cut-up novels by william burroughs, which i remember friends picking up, reading a few sentences and shaking their heads in dismay; kerouac's on the road i read that summer -- vicariously, in a basement bedroom sublet.

very much a part of this context was fear and loathing in las vegas by hunter s. thompson, the subject of a new documentary by alex gibney. i remember liking the book a fair bit but not being overwhelmed by it or wanting to rush out and read more of thompson's work. (as any indication, it's one of the pocket paperbacks from that era no longer in my possession, though it's quite possible i gave it away, left it somewhere or otherwise lost it.) and so i went to see Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson last night to see if there was anything new i could learn about his life and work and come to any kind of judgement about his puported liberal, libertarian or anarchist politics.

but i plowed through his wikipedia entry first: eldest son of an insurance adjuster and a reference librarian from an old louisville neighborhood. the film played up his "middle class" background, his rich high school friends getting bailed out while he had to spend the night in jail after some high school pranks. still i'm a bit dubious of how "middle class" this really is. (dual income white-collar household in the 1940s and 1950s?) in any case, dad died while he was a teenager, upon which mother suposedly took to drink. decent athlete at a prestigious public high school, a few years in the air force, and a number of years doing piecework journalism before his hell's angels book (written while having infiltrated the group) made his name. this was 1966: two years before, he and his wife and newborn son had moved to san francisco, right on the cusp of hippie culture's full flowering. it's subsequent hyping and spectacularization, followed by the events of 1968: the rfk & mlk assassinations, and the riots at the chicago democratic convention especially, disillusioned and demoralized thompson greatly.

by this time the thompson family had relocated to a hamlet in woody creek, not 10 miles outside aspen, colorado.

In 1970 Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, as part of a group of citizens running for local offices on the "Freak Power" ticket. The platform included promoting the decriminalization of drugs (for personal use only, not trafficking, as he disapproved of profiteering), tearing up the streets and turning them into grassy pedestrian malls, banning any building so tall as to obscure the view of the mountains, and renaming Aspen "Fat City" to deter investors. Thompson, having shaved his head, referred to his opponent as "my long-haired opponent", as the Republican candidate had a crew cut. (wikipedia)

this is indeed, as a number of the commentators in the movie state, a kind of highwater mark in a hunter s. thompson politics: an utterly idealistic, completely impractical program at the local level that came everso close to actually working. as if for a moment the plain truth in all its apparent bizarreness could finally and successfully subvert the politics-as-usual routine of the truly bizarre hyperreal. this dynamic plays itself out at the national level on the campaign trail of 1972, which thompson of course covered, putting his stock in a likewise improbably mcgovern who also could have actually succeeded. this is probably the thompson book to which i will return, a little more knowledgeable about 1970s politics than i was at age 20 though still with much to learn.

thompson was doubtless a complicated individual. and i'll leave it to others to judge the literary merit of his work. i think his mark on journalism is indisputable, and for those occasions in which he saw and described the grand stupidity of this country with all his outrage, irony and humor, thompson is to be given full credit. ultimately tho, and perhaps from that moment in late 1974 when he went to zaire to cover the ali-foreman "rumble in the jungle," spent the whole fight drinking at poolside and came back with no story at all, the work became less important than the myth of himself he helped create. he saw the wave of rollback coming but could not keep up the fight, instead tacitly renouncing the public good by retreating into the romantic and individual solace of personal rights (for guns and drugs mostly) and self-mythologization.

an instrument of sound

2008-07-20T11:24:00.001-04:00

Palöngawhoya, traveling throughout the earth, sounded out his call as he was bidden. All the vibratory centers along the earth's axis from pole to pole resounded to his call; the whole earth trembled; the universe quivered in tune. Thus he made the whole world an instrument of sound, and sound an instrument for carrying messages, resounding praise to the creator of all.

(Palöngawhoya is one of the twins created by Kókyangwúti, the Spider Woman charged with creating life and movement on Earth in the Hopi creation myth. From the Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters from source material by Oswald White Bear Fredericks.)

film quiz

2008-07-19T15:34:00.002-04:00

what do these films all have in common? it will probably seem like a very random and unrelated list, and on some level of course it is; but the more of these films you know the more the answer will probably be apparent.

Mad Dogs & Englishmen (Dir. Pierre Adidge, 1971, starring Joe Cocker)
Fata Morgana (Dir. Werner Herzog, 1971)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Dir. Robert Altman, 1971, starring Warren Beatty & Julie Christie)
Pump Up the Volume (Dir. Allan Moyle, 1990, starring Christian Slater)
Exotica (Dir. Atom Egoyan, 1994)
Natural Born Killers (Dir. Oliver Stone, 1994, starring Woody Harrelson & Juliette Lewis)
Breaking the Waves (Dir. Lars von Trier, 1996)
Shrek (Dirs. Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson, 2001)
Secretary (Dir. Steven Shainberg, 2002, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal)

(answer in comments box)

new sonny simmons

2008-07-18T11:43:00.004-04:00

the jazz world is subject to notable disappearances -- players who take the spotlight and then are rarely if ever seen or heard from again. in fact i'd even argue that structural absences and disappearances are built into the very structure of a commercial marketplace: it's a given that if your recordings are not popular or do not sell, you will experience a social and possibly literal death.

sonny simmons broke into the scene in the early sixties, playing with the likes of mingus and dolphy before leading his own sessions for ESP, something of a rite of passage for anyone who was anyone in the free jazz scene. several more strong releases followed, then after 1970's burning spirits, next to nothing for 22 years. there were recordings in 1982 and 1990 that did not get much notice, but during this period simmons was living mostly on the street, somehow managing to keep some working groups together and making private recordings while battling family problems and substance abuse.

1992's ancient ritual, released on the minor-major qwest label (there's a story that needs to be told, how that record deal came about), marked the beginning of simmons' comeback -- one that has only accelerated as simmons reaches his 75th birthday. just this year we have three new releases: a recent quartet date, a recent solo effort, and a 4CD compilation of recordings from the "lost years." they are reviewed by jeff stockton for all that jazz.

simmons has a brittle, acrid alto tone somewhat reminiscent of jackie mclean to my ears, though he has also studied his coltrane and is capable of brilliant flurries of notes as well. his phrasing is definitely rooted in charlie parker and hard bop but also makes recourse of freer idioms. when doubling on english horn (an oboe cousin), his tone and phrasing tends to take on an eastern air.

notes on the obama new yorker cover

2008-07-16T23:30:00.004-04:00

1) it's stupid, tacky, in poor taste, not worth further attention or discussion -- tho it's possible i react this way knowing that the cartoon itself is already packaged in controversy; were it not i suspect i might linger over the cartoon and try to figure out what is going on in it, and perhaps that moment of lingering is of some value, but i suspect i would eventually end up with the same conclusion

2) but ooh, it's a lightning rod of controversy! does the cartoon cross the line, how far is too far, or are we just plain too sensitive and politically correct today? the answers are predictable and uninteresting: we'll ask ann coulter and al franken coming up after this commercial break

3) controversy sells!

4) nothing new here really, just the nature and function of satire

5) satire stratifies its audience: at the top is a) the satirist himself who always assumes a superior position to the object of satire; slightly below are b) the audience members who "get it" and thereby partake in the satirist's genius and share in the chuckle had at the expense of c) the schmucks being satirized, who only "get it" at the literal level, or what's more likely, see the satire but nevertheless remain committed to the ideas or values satirized

6) satire presents something of a rorschach test: you will see what you are predisposed to and are unlikely to change your perspective

7) this is said to be the great "risk" undertaken by the satirist: that he will be misinterpreted, misunderstood, even disliked; in fact all writers take this risk, it is not unique to the satirist

8) the greater risk is that, in an area where hearts and minds need to be changed, the satirist's work has left the two sides doubled-down and further entrenched

9) this can be cause for great anger; i can get great anger from newspapers, cable tv and the internet i don't need it from cartoons

10) does the new yorker have the right to put this artist's work on their cover? well even though no rights are absolute, hell for all i care they can put hardcore porn on their cover if they want (see point 3)

11) just don't claim it as some new or cutting edge form of insightful or incisive critique and not expect me to reiterate with insistence the preceding ten points!

12) and by the way, isn't this the magazine known for enigmatic cartoons and terrible self-important poetry, i.e. the height of east coast elitism? score another validation for the red-staters...

UPDATE 7/19/08: don hazen has a nice recap of the commentary over at alternet, which includes a useful look at linguistic framing as well.

links to orono photos

2008-06-16T15:47:00.008-04:00

my flickr photoset
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmorange/sets/72157605643590948/

ben friedlander's photoset
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mongibeddu/sets/72157605574002837/

kaplan harris' photoset
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kpharris/sets/72157605640463750/

also some short videos...

clark coolidge reading his recent poetry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3qhaXZOxro

kit robinson reading from ted greenwald's book-length poem You Bet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cacCpad801g

2008-06-03T16:53:00.000-04:00

excerpts from rodrigo toscano's "pig angels of the americlypse" performed in olympia, washington as part of the PRESS cross-cultural literary conference, may 24 2008

Jonathan Williams (1929-2008)

2008-03-24T16:42:00.002-04:00

A Bibliography

Garbage Litters the Iron Face of the Sun's Child, engraving by David Ruff, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1951.
Red/Gray, drawings by Paul Ellsworth, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1951.
Four Stoppages: A Configuration, drawings by Charles Oscar, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1953.
The Empire Finals at Verona, collages and drawings by Fielding Dawson, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1959.
Lord! Lord! Lord!, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1959.
Amen/Huzza/Selah, preface by Louis Zukofsky, photographs by Williams, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1960.
Elegies and Celebrations, preface by Robert Duncan, photographs by Aaron Siskind and Williams, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1962.
Emblems for the Little Dells, & Nooks & Corners of Paradise (includes a reproduction of a page of Samuel Palmer's sketchbook of 1824), Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1962.
In England's Green & (A Garland & Clyster) (poems), drawings by Philip Van Aver, Auerhahn (San Francisco, CA), 1962.
LTDG (Lullabies Twisters Gibbers Drags) (poems), covers by R. B. Kitaj, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1963, reprinted with new introduction, Design Department, Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), 1967.
Lines about Hills above Lakes (prose), foreword by John Wain, drawings by Barry Hall, Roman Books (Ft. Lauderdale, FL), 1964.
Petite Country Concrete Suite (poems), Fenian Head Centre Press, 1965.
Twelve Jargonelles from the Herbalist's Notebook (poems), graphic design by Ann Wilkinson, Design Department, Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), 1965.
Ten Jargonelles from the Herbalist's Notebook (poems), graphic design by Arthur Korant, Graduate Graphic Design Program, University of Illinois (Champaign, IL), 1966.
Four Jargonelles from the Herbalist's Notebook (poems), Lowell House Printers, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), 1966.
Paean to Dvorak, Deemer & McClure (poems), Dave Haselwood, 1966.
Eight Jargonelles from the Herbalist's Notebook (poems), graphic design by Dave Ahlsted, Design Department, Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), 1967.
Affilati attrezzi per i giardini di Catullo (selected poems in English and Italian), translations by Leda Sartini Mussio, drawings by James McGarrell, Roberto Lerici Editori (Milan, Italy), 1967, published as Sharp Tools for Catullan Gardens, introductory note by Guy Davenport, Fine Arts Department, Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), 1968.
Mahler Becomes Politics . . . Beisbol (poems), silk-screen prints by Kitaj, Marlborough Fine Arts (London, England), 1967, revised and enlarged edition published as Mahler, Grossman (New York, NY), 1969.
50! Eplphytes,-taphs,-tomes,-grams,-thets! 50!, Poet & Printer (London, England), 1967.
Les Six Pak ("disposable six-pak xerox edition"), Aspen Institute (New York, NY), 1967.
A French 75! (Salut Milhaudious), Dave Haselwood, 1967.
Futura 15: Polycotyledonous Poems, Edition Hansjoerg Mayer (Stuttgart, Germany), 1967.
The Lucidities: Sixteen in Visionary Company (poems), drawings by John Furnival, Turret Books (London, England), 1968.
Descant on Rawthey's Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting, Gnomon Press (Lexington, KY), 1968.
Ripostes (poems), silk-screen print and design by William Katz, Edition Domberger (Stuttgart, Germany), 1969.
On Arriving at the Same Age as Jack Benny, Finial Press (Dent, Cumbria, England), 1969.
An Ear in Bartram's Tree: Selected Poems, 1957-1967, introduction by Davenport, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1969, New Directions (New York, NY), 1972.
Six Rusticated, Wall-Eyed Poems, graphic realizations by Dana Atchley, Press of the Maryland Institute of Art (Baltimore, MD), 1969.
The New Architectural Monuments of Baltimore City, lithographs by John Sparks, typography by Robert Gotsch, Press of the Maryland Institute of Art (Baltimore, MD), 1970.
The Apocryphal, Oracular Yeah-Sayings of the Ersatz Mae West (poems), lithographs by Raoul Middleman, Press of the Maryland Institute of Art, 1970 (not released).
(Editor) Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute (prose and poetry collection; festschrift for Dahlberg's seventieth birthday), David Lewis, 1970.
Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets: A Garland for the Appalachians (poems), photographs by Nicholas Dean, graphic realizations by Atchley, Grossman (New York, NY), 1971.
(Author of preface) The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1971.
Strung out with Elgar on a Hill, plates by Peter Bodner, Finial Press (Dent, Cumbria, England), 1971.
(With Thomas Meyer) Epitaph, typography by Benvensite, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1972.
(With Thomas Meyer) Fruits Confits, decorations by Gardner, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1972.
The Loco-Logodaedalist in Situ: Selected Poems, 1968-1970, embellishments by Joe Tilson, Grossman (New York, NY), 1972.
Pairidaeza, lithographs by Ian Gardner, typography by Ronald Pearson, Blue Funnel Press, 1973.
Imaginary Postcards (Clints Grikes Gripes Glints), drawings by Tom Phillips, typography by Asa Benvensite, Trigram Press, 1973.
Much Further out Than You Thought, drawings by Furnival, Turret Books (London, England), 1973.
(With Thomas Meyer) Gone into When (seven epitaphs), William Katz, 1973.
Selected Essays (Poeticules Criticasters Kitschdiggers & Just-folks), edited by Herbert Leibowitz, (New York, NY), 1973.
(Editor and contributor) Epitaphs for Lorine, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1973.
Adventures with a Twelve-inch Pianist beyond the Blue Horizon, photographs by David Colley, Finial Press (Dent, Cumbria, England), 1973.
Five from up T'Dale, Finial Press (Dent, Cumbria, England), 1974.
Who Is Little Enis?, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1974.
(Editor and author of preface) Lyle Bonge, The Sleep of Reason, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1974.
Hasidic Exclamation upon Stevie Smith's Poem "Not Waving but Drowning," University of Connecticut Library (Storrs, CT), 1974.
My Quaker-Atheist Friend (poems), drawings by Ian Gardner, privately printed, 1974.
(Author of introduction) John Clarence Laughlin, The Personal Eye, Aperture (Millerton, NY), 1974.
Hot What? (prose), Mole Press, 1975.
A Wee Tot for Catullus (poems), Moschatel Press, 1975.
A Celestial Centennial Reverie for Charles E. Ives (poems), Donald B. Anderson, 1975.
Gists from a Presidential Report on Hardcornponeography, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1975.
GAy BCs, Finial Press (Dent, Cumbria, England), 1976.
In the Field at the Solstice, Finial Press (Dent, Cumbria, England), 1976.
Untinears & Antennae for Maurice Ravel (poems), Truck Press (St. Paul, MN), 1977.
An Omen for Stevie Smith (poems), Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University (New Haven, CT), 1977.
Super-Duper Zuppa Inglese (and Other Trifles from the Land of Stodge) (poems), drawings by Barbara Jones, Aggie Weston's Editions, 1977.
(Editor with Allen Ginsberg and contributor) Madeira and Toasts for Basil Bunting's Seventy-fifth Birthday, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1977.
A Blue Ridge Weather Prophet Makes Twelve Stitches in Time on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, illustrations by Carolyn Whitesel, Gnomon Press (Lexington, KY), 1977.
A Hairy Coat Near Yanworth Yat (poems), North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1978.
(Editor and author of introduction) "I Shall Save One Land Unvisited": Eleven Southern Photographers, Gnomon Press (Lexington, KY), 1978.
Portrait Photographs (photographs and prose commentary), Gnomon Press (Lexington, KY), 1979.
Shankum Naggum (poems), Friends of the Library, North Carolina Wesleyan College, 1979.
The Delian Seasons (poems), Topia Press, 1979.
St. Swithin's Swivet (poems), Circle Press, 1979.
Glees, Swarthy Monotonies, Rince Cochon, and Chozzerai for Simon (poems), drawings by Furnival, DBA Editions, 1979.
Elite/Elate Poems: Selected Poems, 1971-1975, photographs by Guy Mendes, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1979.
Homage Umbrage Quibble and Chicane (poems), drawings by Furnival, DBA Editions, 1980.
Jonathan Williams--A Poet Collects: February 27-April 30, 1981, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC), 1981.
The Magpies Bagpipe: Selected Essays of Jonathan Williams, North Point Press (San Francisco, CA), 1982.
Get Hot or Get Out: A Selection of Poems, 1957-1981, Scarecrow Press (Metuchen, NJ), 1982.
April 19, Lexington Nocturne: A Poem, as interpreted by Keith Smith, Visual Studies Workshop Press (Rochester, NY), 1983.
Get Hot or Get Out. Audio Cassette. Washington, DC: Watershed Tapes, 1984.
Aposiopeses: Odds and Ends, Granary Books (Minneapolis, MN), 1988.
(Presenter) Uncle Gus Flaubert Rates the Jargon Society: In One Hundred One Laconic Presale Sage Sentences, Hanes Foundation, Rare Books Collection, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 1989.
No-nonse-nse: Limericks (Invented in Ireland c. 1765), Meta-fours (Invented during the Non-Summer of 1985 in Lower Stodgedale) and Clerihews (Invented in 1890 by Edmund Clerihew Bently) 1993 by a Perdurable "True Descendent of Aristophanes and Catullus," Perishable Press (Mt. Horeb, WI), 1993.
Krino, 1986-1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, Gill and Macmillan (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.
(Author of essay) Harry Callahan, (photography), Aperture Foundation (New York, NY), 1999.
A Palpable Elysium, (biography), David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 2000.
Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, and Photographs, Turtle Point Press, 2000.
Some Jazz from the Baz: Excerpts from Basil Bunting's Letters to Jonathan Williams, 1963-1985. Scaly Mountain, N.C. : Press of Otis the Lamed-Vovnik, Skywinding Farm, 2000.
A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964-1968. Haverford: Green Shade, 2004.
Kinnikinnick Brand Kickapoo Joy-Juice: Meta-fours. Isla Vista, [Calif.] : Turkey Press, 2004.
Orpington via Pratt's Bottom: JW at 75 ; a festschrift for 'Fess Williams. New York: Brown Roux, 2004.
Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems. Port Townsend, WA : Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

[updated from "Jonathan (Chamberlain) Williams," Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Accessed March 24 2008.]

more louisville

2008-02-28T12:49:00.002-05:00

friday started off with a heavy-duty panel on music and mysticism in nate mackey's work, four good papers (norman on poet/speaker as shaman, robert on music esp as treated by jankelevich in music of the ineffable, joe on sufism, and dylan on the latest installment of broken bottle)and not a lot of time to discuss afterwards (or rather lots of interesting discussion that could not be accommodated in the space we had), and then it was off to the panel that my paper was being added into: lynn k on ecopoetics (and specifically on srikanth reddy, a cal press poet new to me), me on coolidge, and michael b on slam and langpo. lunch was at the food court in the student center, big crowded tables with all the usual suspects, and a belated arrival of carla b whom i was delighted to see and had not seen in again probably 8 years (photo courtesy of laura h).

then into the afternoon sessions, and the carla harryman panel organized by laura h and went on in spite of some tech difficulties. good papers, and ran into bonnie there who's now in colorado and whom i first met in baltimore this summer. the papers were good -- christine's more reader-response, carla b's more theoretical, laura's more focused on performance -- and then back to the dudes and a ronald johnson panel that was put together in conjunction with the forthcoming life and works volume from the NPF. very interesting to get a sense of where RJ scholarship stands at present (joel b), a coming-of-age memoire from peter o'l, anagrams by mark s, and a teaching experiment by eric s.

the keynote reading by mackey followed, featuring excerpts from bass cathedral (the latest installment of the epistolary life-in-jazz from a broken bottle traces of perfume still emanate as well as from the latest poetry collection, splay anthem. scott and i sped back to the hotel right after, stopping along the way for some provisions and hanging out in the room a bit talking about life, scholarship, pedagogy etc before join the cash bar at the seelbach shortly before the conference dinner. sat with bonnie and jill among others, the meal was distinctly mediocre, and everyone retired to the seelbach bar afterwards: a great, old, wooded place with a fine selection of bourbon (too sweet for me so i had rye instead) and an excellent house jazz trio (keys/vibes, bass, drums) amidst which there was much mingling -- barry w, joel l, alan g, aldon n, laura h, megan s, and finally tyrone w after most others had called it a night.

saturday morning i jumped panels, first to hear scott's paper on stein and benjamin -- who knew that she described something very much like "aura" in the gradual making of the making of americans? (i think that's the text) -- and then to a panel kristen p had organized. i missed kristen's paper on the helen adam archives in order to hear scott's (but got part of the scoop from her: some 50 boxes of adam's books and MSS discovered in a NYC warehouse!) and stephen c was unable to give his talk on oppen, but in his place had a very interesting paper that had been postponed due to weather on thursday (was actually scheduled to be in the same panel as me): jessica l wrote on a deaf poet, josephine dickinson and the cognitive aspect of sound/image processing. margaret k presented some archival research on laura riding's editorial/collaborative work on the poetry of robert graves.

then it was off to the panel i was chairing on "black arts: mackey, baraka, and music" with excellent papers all around by amy h (collaboartion as a way of contesting autho/ownership), luke h (music and/in poetics) and joel l (theory and anethics). lively discussion ensued. scott and i took a jaunt in the honda immediately after this panel, just to get out, stretch the legs, get some air and take in some local color on bardstown road, where a quick trip into ear-x-tacy where i found a few things, very appropriate for all the music we were disussing in such scholarly fashion: marion brown's 1977 LP la placita: live in willisau (not to my knowledge reissued on CD) and dewey redman's musics also from the late 1970s (on prestige CD reissue).

then back to campus for critical keynote by aldon l, once again showing how the best scholarship is the kind that teaches us something we did not know before, and al's work always does this. who knew that russell atkins, a black small press poet and publisher in cleveland, was writing theoretical articles using the term "deconstruction" in a way not altogether dissimilar from derrida, in his own magazine the free lance in the mid 1950s? who knew? "now we know." and now that we know, what do we do with this knowledge? it might not simply be accommodating the knowledge of atkins to our already-existing understanding of (white european) deconstruction but, more complexly, an entire rethinking of deconstruction along the lines and terms proposed by atkins. hard work, since the texts are largely unavailable, and no one is going to rewrite the OED and put atkins' use of the term ahead of derrida's translator's in the chronology.

by this time bill h had roughly arrived from oxford ohio, satchelfull of slack buddha chapbooks in tow. he and scott and i met in the seelbach bar, went back to the room to sort out all the poetry goods, and then found our way to saffron, a fantastic persian restaurant where we had delectable spinach and eggplant (separate) appetizers (pureed in mildly spice yogurt sauce) and then braised lamb and chicken stew, also delicious. then it was to the annual post-conference party at alan g's house, in many ways the capstone event of the conference. plenty of mingling, celebrating and, in a newish tradition now apparently in its second year, a quick three-minutes-a-piece reading by any and all poets present. great to hear quick shots from everybody. i was able to plus slack buddha via my new chap, and bill actually sold enough chaps to cover his expenses and then some. (thanks to all who enjoyed and bought!)

we were a bit noisy and rowdy on return to the hotel, and scott had to dash off in the early morning for his flight back to the great white north. bill and i arose later and found a down-home brunch buffet at cunningham's just down the street. it was the only way to get breakfast food there, which was fine: i was more than eager to follow up a plate of eggs, sausage, bacon, biscuit and gravy with a plate of roast beef, roast pork, gravy, stuffing, mac & cheese & southern green beans. (i'm sure my arteries were just as eager). light flurries fell, unusual for the good folks of louisville, and bill and i made our way a half price books in the louisville suburbs wher ei foisted all kinds of goodies on bill while limitin myself to a purchase that excites me greatly, a signed hardbound copy ($7) of a book i already own in paperback and love, john godfrey's dabble.

more pix as/if they become available (my own new digital camera still intimidates me and so i did not bring it with...)

(view the full program in PDF here.)

louisville conference

2008-02-27T17:31:00.001-05:00

this past weekend was the first time i'd been to what used to be known as the louisville 20th-century literature conference since, as i now tally it up, 1999 (which was at the time my fourth year in a row). it was great to be back, see some old friends and make new ones, hear some interesting scholarship and some great poetry, and be amidst the general company of people who like the same stuff you do.

the journey to louisville thursday last week was rather potentially perilous. i left nashville with what should've been plenty of time, and forecasts for both cities suggested that i would miss most of the precipitation. less than an hour into the 3-hour drive, just over the tennessee border into southern kentucky, i even stopped for a sit-down fast food breakfast. big mistake. shortly after that, I-65 in the bowling green area became a parking lot: no one moving, no apparent precipitation on the road or in the sky, no emergency vehicles, nothing. we more or less remained stationary for over an hour and a half, finally passing a state trooper and a slight crumpled car in either shoulder. we got back up to speed for only about 10 minutes when traffic ground to a halt once again.

since by this point it was clear i was going to be late if not miss altogether my 1:30 panel, i tried dialing 411 from my cell but was disconnected the first time and then given an inaudible/incorrect number the second. so i phoned my family in ohio and asked if they could get online and get me a number off the conference webpage. cleveland was experiencing frigid temps and bluster conditions already, but my aunt managaged to get online and read on the conference homepage: all conference activities for thursday postponed due to approaching ice storm. well thank god, my anxiety was relieved that i was not going to miss anything and i could take as much time as needed to get there -- but there was still no precipitation on the ground or in the air. salt trucks and plows passing to be sure, but otherwise the traffic backup made no sense whatsoever.

finally i got off the highway to stretch my legs, grab a snack and mebbe have a look at a map and see if there wasn't a better way to go. and when i pulled into the gas station parking lot i began to understand what all the traffic was about: the lot was coated in a sheet of ice. a map inside indicated that US 31W paralleled the interstate clear up to louisville so i considered taking on the backroad. but, i thought, at least the interstate was being salted and plowed. so i started back up the onramp to I-65 and, seeing its traffic again at a complete standstill, i did a complete reverse gear back down the ramp and set my course for 31W, which was slow going through cave city, ky, but once we got through the town was salted, plowed, and essentially empty of vehicles.

a perfect backroad tour of southcentral ky: cave country, tumbledown shacks, cheap motels and abandoned storefronts. hart country looks especially hard hit: horse cave ("sleep in a wigwam!"), munfordville etc. but i love it, and so much better than sitting on an interstate. after 60-90 minutes of steady 40-50 mph making steady progress on 31W we paralleled I-65 and it appeared to be quite clear, so i hopped back on it and sailed pretty much straight into louisville, ice-covered as my little red honda was.

immediately checked into the seelbach and met up with my roomie scott p, who'd arrived from thunder bay a few hours earlier, very happy to see him after 8 years (not seen since MLA 2000 in DC). a number of conference goers were conspiring in makeshift panels throughout the mezzanine level attempting to make up for a whole day's worth of cancellations. conference honcho alan g was among them and said this was the modus operandi, to make up for cancellations where possible and add people into subsequent panels space permitting. he thought of including me in a panel the next day with himself and lynn k, which i was more than honored to do.

then back down in the lobby ran into ewa c out of knowhere, she was planning on dinner with phil m and wanted to know i we'd join them. of course. so we went for the nearby japanese steak and sushi house at her suggestion, good food and fine company. after which scott and i just went back and flaked out in the room, unpacked, read mags, watched the pres debate and crashed.

[more to come...]

Catherine Wagner "On Writing"

2008-02-25T15:46:00.003-05:00

Catherine Wagner's February 15 discussion "On Writing" at Vanderbilt University is now available as a podcast.

Stream or Download audio (mp3, 128kbps, 68.7MB)

Press Release

Tiny URL

campaign news wire 2/8/08

2008-02-09T15:16:00.000-05:00

Latte liberals v Dunkin Donut democrats
By Gerard Baker / Times London
Mr Obama wins disproportionately among people who may be considered the winners in the global economy: the well educated, the mobile and the financially secure. Mrs Clinton's voters are the strugglers, the class that feels itself left behind by an increasingly unfair global economic system.

Can Mrs. Clinton Lose?
By Peggy Noonan / WSJ
Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing. It's not one big primary, it's a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor. She is having trouble raising big money, she's funding her campaign with her own wealth, her moral standing within her own party and among her own followers has been dragged down, and the legacy of Clintonism tarnished by what Bill Clinton did in South Carolina. Unfavorable primaries lie ahead.

He's got Obamaphilia
By Joel Stein / LATimes
Obamaphilia has gotten creepy.[...] He's a politician so soft and safe, Oprah likes him. There's talk about his charisma and good looks, but I know a nerd when I see one. The dude is Urkel with a better tailor. All of this is clear to me, and yet I have fallen victim.

Gloves off: The Dem plan to hit McCain
By Jeanne Cummings / The Politico
From the economy to Iraq to immigration to abortion, the Arizona senator's lengthy voting record and his primary season offerings to the Republican Party's conservative wing provide a deep vein for opposition researchers to mine for shifting positions and policy inconsistencies.

The Nightmare Scenario for Democrats
By Chuck Raasch, USA Today
Hillary Clinton is running an heir apparent campaign that is heavily connected to the successes of her husband's administration. There are too many Democrats who view the 1990s as Happy Days, and there are too many others who believe she is a candidate of destiny as the first serious female contender for the White House.[...] Obama's campaign is the closest thing to a movement the Democrats have had in a long time and one that appears to be on the upswing. There is evidence that the longer Obama is exposed to Democratic primary voters, the better he does. The primaries and caucuses over the next four weeks favor him and should boost his fundraising. If you have money, momentum and parity in delegates, why even talk about giving in for the good of the partyhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif when your movement is all about a generational takeover of that party?

Taking Issue With the Democratic Race: An empty primary
By Jonah Goldberg / NRO
Obama is "the one" — in Oprah's words — not because of his policies but because his is a transcendent, unifying, super-nifty-cool personality. Hillary, meanwhile, is staying aloft largely through her ability to guilt-trip female liberals into sticking with her. Her cultivated weepiness and dour lamentations about how she's been so picked on sometimes make it seem like she's setting up a political version of one of those "how-does-a-Jewish-mother-change-a-lightbulb?" jokes. Answer: "It's all right; I'll just sit in the dark."

McCain Disdain: Why some Republicans won't vote for the senator
By Mona Charen / NRO
"There is a strutting self-righteousness about McCain that goes hand-in-hand with a nitroglycerin temper. He flatters himself that his colleagues in the Senate dislike him because he stands up for principle, while they sell their souls for pork. Not exactly. He is disliked because on many, many occasions he has been disrespectful, belligerent, and vulgar to those who differ with him."

Left Wing and a Prayer
By R. Scott Appleby / NYT
In short, the Democratic Party's long string of counterproductive responses to the enduring influence of the religious right has had the cumulative effect of driving away any type of base with the word "faith" attached to it, and opening the door to the Republicans' shrewd, if cynical, courting of religiously conservative white Christians. It's been a self-defeating failure, since there are millions of moderate and progressive Christians ready to embrace a reasonable alternative.

Beyond Bush
By Alan Ehrenhalt / NYT
Frum's fundamental thesis is that Republicans must move beyond the policies and ideology not only of the Bush years but of the past three decades, even if this means repudiating some of the political axioms that brought it to power under Ronald Reagan in 1980. But it is never quite clear just how much renovation Frum is willing to undertake. Loudly denouncing government, as Reagan did, will not be enough in the 21st century, he proclaims. "There are things only government can do," he argues, "and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of the government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well."

Questions for Dr. Retail
By David Brooks / NYT
The next states on the primary calendar have tons of college-educated Obamaphile voters. Maryland is 5th among the 50 states, Virginia is 6th. But later on, we get the Hillary-friendly states. Ohio is 40th in college education. Pennsylvania is 32nd.

welcome to the middle ages

2008-02-07T10:56:00.000-05:00

"The wrath of God is the only way I can describe it. I'm used to seeing roofs off houses, houses blown over. These houses were down to their foundations, stripped clean." -- Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, after surveying tornado damage there. (depicted left are what remain of dorms at union university in jackson, tn)

i respect people's faith, but why must we look to god as the chief or immediate if not only way to explain and/or describe natural disasters? isn't it a little self-centered to think that the complex systems of nature, however governed (directly, indirectly or not at all) by a higher power, have a direct causal relationship with human beings, that is, that storms are a form of punishment for our misbehavior? is our christian god really that mean and vengeful? did union university do something bad to deserve the destruction wreaked upon it, or are they sort of taking one for the team here?

Mick Turner + Six Organs

2008-02-05T13:15:00.000-05:00

a fine show at the end this past saturday night, and my second visit to the space. (my first was a WRVU benefit a few weekends ago with a whole mess o' local bands.) located on a stretch of elliston place just a block away from the northern edge of the vanderbilt campus known as "the rock block" because it includes other live music venues (most notable the exit/in) as well as nashville's oldest soda shop, a secondhand bookstore and a number of restaurants and pubs of various qualities and cuisines. proceedings opened a good hour-and-a-half after the door time -- i have yet to determine the proper arrival time for shows in nashville, i think largely because there is no consistent formula. anyway, the cherry tomatoes opened, featuring an amateurish (in the best sense) and whimsical take on the folk genre, which i appreciated although it was at times not terribly to my liking: the swooping vocals would have send joanna newsom fans into rapture.

mick turner was the guitarist for the dirty three, whose sparse acoustic instrumentals provided quite a contrast to most of the recordings coming out on the touch & go label in the mid-to-late 1990s. blue trees, a new release on drag city, caught my eye because of the striking and pleasing cover art, bearing a clear resemblance to the dirty three's cover art because, in fact, turner painted them all. -- and in a quasi-expressionist style full of fuzzy lines and stark color contrasts along with a common mythos (slightly distended mammals against natural landscapes for example). blue trees is a compilation of otherwise hard-to-obtain tracks recorded by turner and tren brothers, the moniker used when he's teamed with former dirty three drummer jim white.

turner was accompanied by a different drummer on this tour (whose name i did not catch), and the formula is even more impressive to witness live than it is on record -- and not only because the live performance is accompanied by a video projection. photographic stills of turner's paintings alternating with video footage of various landscapes shot from inside a moving vehicle provide the image-track accompanying the music, which could have stood alone (and of course does on CD). turner works with a softly amplified and lightly distorted electric six-string (could have been a hollow-body but definitely equipped with a tremolo bar), catch a chord progression or lick in his digital delay pedal and then playing overtop that looped signal. he frequently bows the strings to catch and add a wash of glissandi or harmonics into the mix as well. all the while the drummer reinforces the implied beat or improvises underneath in a seamless blend of premeditation and improvisation.

six organs of admittance headlined, and perhaps by the time ben chasney took the stage (1 am) i was just a little too spent. he opened with a series of solo acoustic numbers, some from his recent drag city offering shelter from the ash, that were deft and resonant. later he was joined by magik marker elisa ambroglio (just friends?) for a nice bit of twin electric caterwaul. it's the times when chasney is reaching for the darkest depths of mordor that his work perhaps least convincing, but otherwise this is inventive post-rock worth keeping an eye and ear on.

small victories

2008-02-01T15:23:00.000-05:00

the recent and long-awaited publication of george oppen's prose has the poetry world buzzing. well, at least that's my intuition in a kind of incidental way indicated, for example, by paul's recent comment on mark's blog.

until any such time as i have further thoughts on the oppen book, i'll just note another telling coincidence in the pages of the latest issue of the nation.

reviewing the oppen prose together with the recent critical study of oppen by peter nicholls, james longenbach concludes that "Oppen's victories are no less great for being small." (not unrelated to my previous post on sectarianism.)

turn the page, and in an omnibus review of recent books chronicling late 1960s radicalism, maurice isserman points out how elinor langer assesses the great failure of the new left was that "it mistook revolution, a rare historical event, for a moral choice." she goes on:

"John Brown is a good symbol for us," Langer noted in passing. "At one point he wanted to run a school for Negroes but he came to find the idea too small: he had to attack Harper's Ferry."

score one for small victories.

sectarianism

2008-01-29T13:06:00.000-05:00

in the latest issue of dissent (print-only), avishai margalit makes a most intelligent and articulate refutation of the kind of "new atheism" pitched by sam harris. it is not his direct intent, though, which is to explain the dynamics of sectarianism -- a tool that can help us how christian and islamic fundamentalisms alike are dangerous without drawing moral equivalents between the two or throwing the baby of faith out with the bathwater of religion altogether.

let me back up by explaining my sense of the critique of belief registered by sam harris (in this book the end of faith). i'm getting this not from the book itself, which i have not finished yet, but from a c-span broadcast of a lecture he gave on his book tour. the argument goes something like this: faith exists completely outside the boundaries and conventions of rational thought, evidence and argument; as such, we treat it in special ways that it does not really deserve, e.g. we tolerate almost anything if it rests on the grounds of faith. this kind of deferential treatment to matters of faith is doing great harm to us as a species and may end up getting all of us killed in the religious wars we are increasingly seeing. and it's not just the extremists who are to blame; people of modest or moderate religious faith are just as much to blame for their toleration of extremists or thinking that extermists can somehow be talked out of their extremism. conflicting religious beliefs can only end in the elimination of opposing dogmas. we should all, for the salvation of the species, simply give up our faiths, which will one day seems as quaint as all primitive deities, a flat earth and a geocentric universe seem now.

margalit's analysis begins by distinguishing two lenses through which politics can be viewed: market economics, in which infinitely interchangeable commodities only have value in relation to each other and not inherently; and politics, in which sacrifice is more important than satisfaction, and has an overarching sense of what is needed for the collective good and the individual's duty toward that collective good. he continues,

Most of us see both pictures of politics. We have a stereoscopic political perception, recognizing that some aspects of politics are better covered by the first picture, while other aspects are better covered by the second. In a time of war and crisis, the religious picture may have the upper hand in making sense of politics. In a time of business as usual, the economic picture has the upper hand. But there are people who lack stereoscopic vision--the perception of depth that comes from the use of both eyes--and they look at the political world with one eye, and one eye only.

two implict and important critiques of the harris position are already registered. first, a plurality of views is not only needed, but indispensable. one cannot simply jettison faith as a category of experience (which harris probably would not deny) or judgment (which is what i think harris wants to eliminate).

second, faith itself is not the problem; sectarianism is the problem. and it is not exclusive to those of a professed religious belief: mao for example was an atheistic sectarianist who nevertheless clung to his dogma with a religious fervor. margalit is still more precise:

Sectarianism in politics is an extreme case of viewing politics with one eye--the eye of politics as religion. [...] Sectarianism is a mode of operation and a state of mind. The operation is that of splitting the party rather than splitting the difference. The state of mind is that of keeping your principled position uncompromised, come what may.

in short: no compromise of principles, my way or the highway, with us or against us. margalit then proceeds with some additional characterizations of sectarianism.

1) strength in small numbers: sects are not interested in democracy. polls and surveys do not matter, nor does having a sizable numbers in one's ranks. sectarians are an embittered minority and a vanguard. while missionary zeal is not out of the question, it cannot happen at the expense of principles.

2) the difference is everything, no matter how small: to the uninitiated, sectarian principles may be drawn over very faint lines. (what christians can fully explain the historical split between shia and sunni muslims? few i think.) but those differences are indeed the basis for rigorously maintained and defended principles.

3) it's all black and white: otherwise known as manichianism. there are no grey areas. but this can also fuel the siege mentality: there are no trivial contests, every fight is a fight to the death.

4) purity: not just of one's own principles, but the logical contrary which is the complete defilement characterizing opposing principles. any intermingling pollutes and taints that which must be kept pure. as margalit puts it with zizekian aplomb: "Shit is the negation of the pure. The sectarian craves life without shit. Compromise is part and parcel of the shitty world."

the piece goes on to do other things -- distinguish sectarianism from sectorialism, for example, and weight the latter's relation to social democracy -- against the real backdrop of the israeli-palestinian dispute, but i find the above analysis especially useful. margalit's clarity and examples throughout are commendable. contact me if you are interested in reading the entire piece.

altman's three women

2008-01-27T23:46:00.000-05:00

easily the most interesting american film i've seen in years. incredible that this was a hollywood production. a study in identity merging to rival bergman's personautterly enigmatic and yet captivating from start to finish. of its time and yet speaking well beyond it.

david sterrett's essay for the criterion collection is excellent, giving the historical context and placing the film in altman's oeuvre, as well as suggesting where interpretation might go in what is ultimately an irreducible film. (you may also want to watch once with altman's commentary, as he reveals his own take on the film's famously mysterious closing sequence.)

truth and lies

2008-01-25T17:43:00.000-05:00

[...in their nihilo-political sense: a reply to mark's post found here.]

hi mark,

your lead image is particularly timely for me, as today while driving the outskirts of nashville i saw a sign in someone's frontyard that is quite common in those outskirts as i first experienced them months ago: it reads, "eyes on jesus."

now this is of course terrible advice to give someone whose eyes should more properly be on the road. however, if you keep your eyes fixing on jesus (wherever he may be) while you're behind the wheel, you may well see him very soon -- from your vantagepoint inside a totaled automobile!

which is another way to say that if you believe strongly enough your faith will probably be rewarded: He will come to those who believe. (non-believers need not apply.)

which leads me to turn a phrase, a truth if you will, made popular by the seinfeld character george costanza and manifest with a vengeance by this current administration: it's not a lie if you truly believe it. another way of saying it's true if you believe it.

but, says the enlightened liberal humanist, what about facts? yes, there's this whole tricky business about facts. "the left," if it's possible to speak in such terms, has been in the curious position of asserting an antifoundationist epistemology (via foucault, derrida and the like) while at the same time insisting that its politics are born out by the facts (on global warming, evolution, globalization, u.s. foreign policy, etc.). i realize i may very well be talking about two lefts here, one academic and one political; regardless, neither's agenda has been well served.

meanwhile, the right has pulled a very shrewd and efficacious double move: first, it has embraced (or simply mimicked) antifoundational rhetoric when it suits its aims, on global warming and evolution and the like (what are facts and theories? they don't really prove anything, nor do they completely remove all doubt...); second, it has understood the power of the spectacle (again a tool of critique originally devised by the left) and used it to construct a whole series of interconnected myths that many people find compelling. (radical islam has proceeded in this fashion as well.)

in short, while the left was pronouncing the end of grand narratives, the right happily picked up those pieces and ran with them.

you hit the nail on the head, mark, when you write that

If the Left needs to reclaim the power of truth, that’s not because they are necessarily speaking the truth, as indeed they cannot purely be, but because the concept of the truth is a lie so powerful at this time that no one can do without it and succeed.

i'm curious tho how you see the afflicted powers argument comparing or playing out with respect to your claim here; they write that

If the Left is to survive as a political entity, it seems to us that its great (theoretical) task is to think this atavism and new-fangledness together, as interrelated aspects of the world system now emerging." (13-14)

how do they think this through, do you have a sense?

call it what you want: meaning, value, truth, whatever. but whatever it is, it appears to be indispensible. which is why "the new atheism" of hitchens, cockburn and others i think is hopelessly naive. i include the "end of faith" narrative of sam harris as well: people should just stop believing, altogether. yeah, good luck with that, pal.

stephen duncombe puts the problem quite well in his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy"

The problem comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The ideological inheritors of the May ’68 protest slogan “Take your desires for reality” are now counseling its reversal: take reality for your desires. Conservatives are the ones proclaiming "I have a dream."

he says if the left is going to make and inroads with its agenda it is going to have to learn and use the power of spectacle. which is an interesting argument in is own right. essentially it's that it doesn't matter if "the facts" are on your side, you've still got to have a myth that resonates with people. and of course that myth should not be a complete lie, but it cannot be complete truth either. it has to be, as you say, a situational or situated truth.

i mean the flat earth and a geocentric universe were situated truths: they worked fine until "better" ones came along. but don't think that people were sold on that "betterness" right away: a lot of bloodshed had to happen first.

as we are seeing now unfortunately. your question "But for what purpose?" points precisely to what nietzsche described with such great accuracy and insight in the notes on european nihilism that were collected in the will to power.

For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect. (3)

the upshot of this, though, has to be positive, as deleuze maintains for example (whereas debord and his spectacle remain at the level of passive nihilism as i read him). nietzsche again:

For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusio of our great values and ideals--because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had.--We require, sometimes, new values. (4)

Global Music Archive

2008-01-24T12:06:00.000-05:00

from the vanderbilt news service:

Three years ago, Vanderbilt University ethnomusicologist Greg Barz realized that American popular culture was sweeping Africa and could very well threaten centuries-old musical traditions.

He traveled to Uganda and Kenya to begin archiving music and performances before they disappeared forever. Barz’s pilot program set the foundation for The Digital Collection of East African Recordings and helped launch the creation of the Global Music Archive at Vanderbilt University.

The Digital Collection of East African Recordings, the first database in a series of databases in the Global Music Archive, is the largest streaming audio archive of East African music. It consists of more than 2,000 musical performances, most of which were recorded in the field by East African musician Centurio Balikoowa. In addition to its size, the archive is unique in that the artists provide written consent, allowing Vanderbilt the freedom to license and share the music with the world via the Internet.

read the full story here. the global music archives is here. the files stream in real audio and are searchable by artist/group, region, district, language, ethnic group and musical instrument.

campaign 2008

2008-01-23T10:58:00.000-05:00

in the spirit of true schadenfreude, nothing gives me greater satisfaction than this. once touted by some as the true conservative that would fulfill all the GOP's hopes and dreams, thompson has fallen flat on his face. could it be that true conservativism has been flatly rejected by the electorate and has no future in this country?

on the other side, the clinton-obama squabbles should be seen as productive, toughening up the candidates for what they will inevitably face from the GOP smear squad in the general election. already several weeks ago though, patricia williams made in the nation the first published expression of my long-held sentiment:

It is my audacious little hope that the two of them, in whatever order, will become running mates by November.

read her full piece, one of the smartest i've read on the campaign so far, here.

the other oil shock

2008-01-19T13:15:00.000-05:00

Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material.

This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.

so writes keith bradsher in this morning's nytimes, in what appears to be the first in a series "the food chain: the high cost of eating." stay tuned...

bad economic news

2008-01-16T12:05:00.000-05:00

Citigroup, the nation’s largest bank, reported a staggering fourth-quarter loss of $9.83 billion on Tuesday and issued a sobering forecast that the housing market and the broader economy still had not bottomed out.

i'm sorry, did the nytimes say 9.83 billion dollars? in a single quarter? this does not bode well, friends, not at all. this morning's story continues:

More bad news is coming, with Merrill Lynch expected to report sizable losses this week and major financial institutions like Bank of America retreating from their investment banking business.[...] "It looks like the financial sector as a whole will see a big decline in profits, and the only time this happened in the last 100 years — financial firms’ going from making good profits to negative profits — was the Depression in the 1930s," said Richard Sylla, a professor of financial history at New York University.

lest this all seem to abstract, let's not forget the folks who are immediately losing or have recently lost their jobs with citi: "the bank said it would also lay off another 4,000 workers, on top of announced reductions of 17,000 employees."

recent reads

2008-01-14T11:22:00.000-05:00

"God is in the details. But there are no details anymore." -- Donald Fagen of Steely Dan on current music production techniques geared towards an MP3-consuming audience. Quote in Robert Levine's "The Death of High Fidelity," in this month's Rolling Stone.

"As we cast our eye over the sheer effulgence of American food, there appears to be no limit to the type and number of food products for those who are motivated by taste, environmental concern, animal welfare, political correctness, or simple virtue." Mark Winne shows the class contours of fight for food in this country: alternet.org runs an excerpt from his new book Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. Fortunately he offers answers beyond his indictments.

Joglars at Google Books

2008-01-12T15:36:00.000-05:00

i've stumbled upon a strange discovery. google books seems to have made available the 1974 arno reprint of JOGLARS, the little magazine edited by clark coolidge and michael palmer (1963-1966) -- though it has misidentified it as "American foreign policy currents documents 1963" published by ayer in 1971. (this information itself is incorrect: arno did a reprint of something called "american foreign policy, vol. 1" in 1971.)

the link is here.

naturally some of the pages are not viewable and i've not gone through the whole thing closely. but there's still a lot of great stuff that is viewable.

i wonder if there is any way to correct the misinformation on this item or how else it might be put to better use. please circulate this to whomever you feel might be interested, and i welcome any suggestions you or others might have.

henri chopin (1922-2008)

2008-01-06T16:36:00.000-05:00

bio and links at erratum
sound at ubu
commentary by pierre joris
recordings at forced exposure
films at WFMU
wikipedia entry

upcoming airtime

2008-01-03T17:40:00.001-05:00

i'm scheduled to be on the air a fair bit during the upcoming week, before the students all return for the new semester and the station gets its spring schedule set. please note the times given are central standard time:

thurs jan 3, 3-4pm
fri jan 4, 3-5pm
sun jan 6, 4-6pm
tues jan 8, 4-6pm
thurs jan 10, 4-6pm

go to http://wrvu.org/ and click on "listen to WRVU"
or go directly to http://wrvu.org/sounds/wrvu.ram

it streams in realaudio format.

i'll be playing indie rock mostly -- unless something else strikes my fancy. (sunday will probably be some free jazz.)

drugs, money and names

2007-12-19T13:00:00.000-05:00

From this morning's Chronicle of Higher Ed, "Northwestern U. Sells Royalty Rights From Blockbuster Drug for $700-Million":

In what could be the biggest windfall of its kind to date, Northwestern University has received $700-million for selling some of its rights to future royalties from a new blockbuster drug. The drug, marketed under the name Lyrica, is used to treat pain associated with fibromyalgia, shingles, and diabetes.

That's right, the brand name of the drug is Lyrica. The generic name is pregabalin, much less melifluous.

This is no accident. Does Pfizer intend for this pain medication to invoke poetry? Who knows exactly. But you can be sure that the name was chosen very carefully and deliberately. Donald G. McNeil penned a very interesting piece for the New York Times a few years back on "the science of naming drugs," in which he cites James Dettore, president of The Brand Institute -- not an institute at all but a Miami-based company specializing in naming drugs. (Lipitor and Clarinex are among its successes.)

Here's how Dettore's "phonologics" works:

"Lipitor is 'lipid regulator' with the -tor of atorvastatin, the generic name," Mr. Dettore added, with the plus that "-or is grounded as a cardiovascular-sounding suffix." Levitra, the Viagra competitor, comes from "elevate," he said, but "we tested and it sounds European, elegant, with premium connotations." "Le" indicates masculinity in French, he noted, and "vitra" can allude to vitality. (Viagra is also said to make men feel vital -- and like mighty Niagara Falls.)

Fascinating. What is it about "-or" that makes it sound cardiovascular, or does it even? And what precisely are the "premium connotations" that add to Levitra's European elegance? -- which we still like with drugs apparently even though we despise the Europeans for their approach to our foreign policy.

I recall reading somewhere that big pharma likes to give generics really awkward, hard-to-pronounce names so that they are harder to remember and therefore harder to "ask your doctor" about. Anyone with more and/or interesting link along this line should let me know, as I'm fascinated by this essentially poetic, Adamic function of naming and creation, and the psycholinguistic aspects of it, perverted by and for the marketplace.

improving phd completion times

2007-12-17T22:38:00.000-05:00

harvard has found a way to improve phd completion times: putting a clicking clock on supervising professors and not just phd students.

For the last two years, the university has announced that for every five graduate students in years eight or higher of a Ph.D. program, the department would lose one admissions slot for a new doctoral student. The results were immediate: In numerous departments that had for years had large clusters of Ph.D. students taking eight or more years to finish, professors reached out to students and doctorates were completed.

read the full story at inside higher ed.

tales from the poetry stand

2007-12-17T22:17:00.000-05:00

douglas goetsch reports in the autumn 2007 american scholar on how his high school students faired in writing free poetry on demand for all comers at the poetry stand they set up in princeton nj one afternoon last year.

Stockhausen beyond collage

2007-12-16T23:24:00.000-05:00

What I'm trying to do, so far as I'm aware of it, is to produce models that herald the stage after destruction. I'm trying to go beyond collage, heterogeneity, and pluralism, and to find unity: to produce music that brings us to the essential One. And that is going to be badly needed during the time of shocks and disasters that is going to come. Models of coming together, of mutual love, of love as a cohesive force. I'm sure that if I'm in my best state, my music will have a unifying effect. (Karlheinz Stockhausen, from an interview originally published in Music and Musicians, May 1971)

I am not striving for a "synthesis" where everything is swallowed up in a gigantic mishmash. Quite the contrary. The characteristic structures must even be emphasized in the chosen context. I don't want to destroy anything. I want to preserve the autonomy of the individual phenomena within the polyphony achieved. Individual aspects of a creation are brought into relationship with other specific features. The idea isn't to obliterate existing music but rather to diversify its effectiveness. (From an interview on the composition Telemusik, 1968)

Serialism is just a way of thinking. As Schoenberg said, it establishes an equality of right between the different elements. But it doesn't mean levelling them out or making them all equal, a misunderstanding that you find reflected in much American music. Serialism tries to go beyond collage, beyond the multiplicity of things. It tries to find unity without destroying the individual elements, and that means to interconnect, to -- yes, to try to balance out the different aspects of sound. (Music and Musicians interview)

solid gold

2007-12-15T22:29:00.000-05:00

If Gang of Four's Entertainment! is an all-time top-five album -- and for this listener it very much is -- then their 1980 follow-up Solid Gold has to be considered not simply a close second but very, very near its equal.

One does one's self a disservice not to know both albums. Conventional wisdom is fond of sophomore syndrome, or the follow-up to an often brilliant debut that fails for any number of reasons, usually distillable to either a failure to reach the heights of that first album or not having sufficiently broken new ground from that first album. Does not apply here: where Entertainment!cuts with the quick knife on the front lines, Solid Gold pounds with the sledgehammer and digs into the trenches. Andy Gill's guitar attack is less brittle but just as biting and dirty, the rhythm section as relentless as ever. And the lyrics: wiser and more mebittered than ever.

My ambitions come to nothing
What I wanted now just seems a waste of time
I can't make out what has gone wrong
I was good at what I did

Could I be happy with something else

Each day seems like a natural fact
And what we think changes how we act

Everything has been cynically shot it's gone

the true price of real food

2007-12-15T20:47:00.000-05:00

"Nobody considers what the true price of real food is," writes Jamey Lionette in "We Are What We Eat," an article posted at alternet.org that is also an excerpt from Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed edited by noted food activist Vandana Shiva (South End Press 2007). Lionette runs a neighborhood cafe and market, so his perspective is from the front lines of food activism -- and it's not a rosy picture that he paints. It's a plea for sustainable food that is also partly a history of cheap food in this country, partly an indictment of big agribusiness that extends equally to niche-market chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joes whose mass-produced organics assuage liberal guilt and yet perpetuate neolib economics, partly an obituary to the small farm, and partly a big finger of blame pointed at every one of us. It's inspiring, frustrating, maddening, and every bit correct: food is the definitive real, tangible example of alienated labor, spectacular consumption, big agribusiness biopower, American exceptionalism and individualism. It's spot on with statements of fact, point-blank like "Eating can no longer be an individual act," or more long-ranging like

Our planet's fertile land has decayed, been poisoned, and been transformed into factories while we have been too busy and out of touch with our food to notice. The people who know how to use the land to produce food have lost their place on the land, and we did not notice because we no longer know who produces our food.

He concludes, "We have to ask ourselves what we want, food or our current economic system. We need to realize that our system itself is not sustainable and has failed."

grammar and neuroplasticity

2007-12-10T14:17:00.000-05:00

Philip Davis has a fascinating piece in The Reader (UK) entitled "The Shakespeared Brain" which addresses an issue I for one, and I imagine many of us who have read and studied experimental poetry for any extended period of time, have suspected to be the case -- that non-normative grammar might change the way the brain works.

Beginning with "a specific intuition – about Shakespeare: that the very shapes of Shakespeares lines and sentences somehow had a dramatic effect at deep levels in my mind," Davis conducted an experiment with Neil Roberts, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, regarding the cognitive effect of a characteristic Shakespearean rhetorical device known as "anthimeria," or the syntactial forcing of one part of speech to perform the labor of another, i.e.

to try to see what happens inside us when the brain comes upon sentences like 'The dancers foot it with grace', or 'We waited for disclose of news', or 'Strong wines thick my thoughts', or 'I could out-tongue your griefs' or 'Fall down and knee/The way into his mercy'. For research suggests that there is one specific part of the brain that processes nouns and another part that processes verbs: but what happens when for a micro-second there is a serious hesitation between whether, in context, this is noun or verb. The main cognitive research done so far on the confusion of verbs and nouns has been to do with mistakes made by those who are brain-damaged and thus on the possible neural correlates of grammatical errors and semantic violations. Hardly anybody appears to have investigated the neural processing of a 'positive error' such as functional shift in normal healthy organisms.

The results are fascinating, and vary depending on whether or not the resulting shift creates sentences that still make some sense or not given the violation of normative grammar. But Davis goes on from this evidence to muse further (and in ways that will not surprise anyone who has worked with victims of traumatic brain injuries whose neural functioning has moved and thus been regained):

Shakespeare's syntax, its shifts and movements, can lock into the existing pathways of the brain and actually move and change them – away from old and aging mental habits and easy long-established sequences. It could be that Shakespeare's use of language gets so far into our brains that he shifts and new-creates pathways - not unlike the establishment of new biological networks using novel combinations of existing elements (genes/proteins in biology: units of phonology, semantics, syntax , and morphology in language). Then indeed we might be able to see something of the ways literature can cause affect or create change, without resorting to being assertively gushy.

Upon reading this I was immediately led to recall the audio file of a Bernadette Mayer class on experimental writing techniques, held June 1978 at Naropa, during which Mayer reads passages from Clark Coolidge's Polaroid (page 69), Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation (LIII), and Shakespeare's Sonnet 105 and invites students to explore the connections. It's a 39 minute audio file, and the passage in question takes place beginning at 7:00 minutes into the file. I won't reproduce those texts here but will include a subsequent experiment conducts, namely to offer three lines, one each from the three authors in question, and invite readers to consider which is by which. (Answer key in the comments.)

Test #1:
to one of one still such and even so
itself in come as same
and now and hours not at all

Test #2
once more to add feeling to feeling
off near to points in itself
one thing expressing leaves out difference

I reproduce Mayer's exercise in fun but also in the spirit of the very serious implications of Philip Davis' insight, namely to consider form his Shakespeare example what neuroplasticity potential lies in the writing of Stein and Coolidge among others.

2007-12-08T15:01:00.000-05:00

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)

"That which in my music is not Stockhausen -- the most essential part -- is timeless, universal. 'Stockhausen' is only a nameplate. When I have gone, it is no longer there. But the music lives on. . ." (From a conversation with a Dutch cultural circle, 1973)

White Chalk

2007-12-03T23:13:00.000-05:00

The eighth full-length release from Ms Harvey, this is sparse and hauntingly powerful stuff. Nothing rockist about this one at all: no electric guitars, no bass and minimal drums. Instead, a bit of plucked guitar or strummed autoharp but mostly piano, lots of the piano she taught herself to play over the past three years and on which many of the songs were composed. Her voice sounds different too: lighter, airier, almost childlike. (Which she can of course pull off because unlike, say, Joanna Newsom, PJ can actually sing.) Yet all the classic PJ obsessions are there, perhaps even moreso this time around. Take those haunting piano numbers on Cat Power's You Are Free and with the same intensity do a whole CD of them that clocks in just under 34 minutes -- surprise, you thought time stopped for a moment, didntya? -- and you've about got the picture. I'll leave the final word to AMG's Heather Phares: "In fact, this may be Harvey's most undiluted album yet. When she's at the peak of her powers, as she is on this frightening yet fearless album, the world she creates is impossible to forget, or shake off easily. White Chalk can make you shiver on a sunny day."

britpop gems from philly

2007-11-30T13:27:00.000-05:00

What happens when you combine The Beatles and The Yardbirds/Cream in equal parts, played in 1968 by a bunch of kids from Philly? Something like the first Nazz album. (Many reviews also name-check The Move -- anyone know that stuff?)

Known perhaps mostly for their single "Open My Eyes," whose opening riff nicely turns The Who's "Can't Explain" inside out, and "Hello it's Me" which Nazz guitarist Todd Rundgren would later turn into a hit for himself. The record execs marketed this as a boy band and they never really took off past the singles. This first LP is fun stuff that never quite manages to achieve originality. (Dig especially the note-for-note Yardbirds covers included in the bonus tracks; CD available via the ChrisGoesRock blog.)

Not at all the case with their followup a year later, Nazz Nazz. There are still a few derivative tunes here and there (the blues knock-off "Kiddie Boy" among them), but otherwise this is a perfectly crafted album of pop gems. The opening track, "Forget All About It," has some absolutely exquisite hooks and trebly boy vocals. "Not Wrong Long" and "Rain Rider" do not quite have the drive and edge of early Big Star, but it's almost there. Likewise "Gonna Cry Today" is a weepy, self-pitiful Chiltonesque ballad with just a little bit of sunshiny keyboards. "Meridian Leeward" gets written off as a piece of failed psychedelia but I think it's porcine pilot narrator would make Bob Pollard proud. "Under the Ice" is the "Who's Next," "Live at Budokan" rocker. "Hang on Paul" might in fact be pointing backward to a little "Ballad of John and Yoko" thing going on. "Letters Don't Count" is the sole acoustic entry that makes you wish they did more such. And "A Beautiful Song" is the epic closer, a loose instrumental rocker complete with string section (Jeff Lynne, you listening?) that (surprise!) embeds a pretty little three-minute ditty in the middle.

I know I'm doing a lot of name-checking here, and indeed you can draw a straight line from this through Big Star, Cheap Trick, the dBs, Guided By Voices, Elliot Smith and Sloan. But Nazz Nazz belongs in those ranks as an equal. Don't miss! (Orion awakes has it.)

whither the center?

2007-11-30T12:30:00.000-05:00

Curiously conflicting testimony this week on locating the center of American politics. No one would deny that the center has shifted right in the last 40+ years, so the question is whether or not a shift back is on the horizon or already begun.

Michael Lind writes unequivocally in the Financial Times:

What formerly was the left – welfare-state liberalism – is once again the centre. To its left (in economic, not social, terms) is protectionist populism; to its right, neoliberalism.

Kim Phillips-Fein, revewing Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal and Jonathan Chait's The Big Con for The Nation, disagrees, or at least maintains that if the country is indeed shifting leftward or ready for such a shift, our political figures are refusing the big new liberal ideas and programs that such a shift would seem to demand. he piece concludes:

Indeed, perhaps the most striking difference between the conservative activists and intellectuals who built the right and modern-day liberals like Krugman and Chait is how tentative the latter are when it comes to offering a new vision of how to go about "putting material things in their proper place" and fashioning a relationship between the individual and the state that can foster liberty and equality. When Goldwater (OK, Bozell) wrote The Conscience of a Conservative, he knew he was calling for a dramatic change in the country's direction. Ronald Reagan in 1980 also claimed to want to break with history. But these contemporary liberals insist that they are not calling for anything particularly far-reaching; their politics are to be found in the past, in the moderate consensus, in the New Deal. They want to move forward but only by moving back. The internal weaknesses and flaws of the New Deal, or of postwar liberalism, which might seem manifest in the ease with which it was ultimately dismantled, seem to trouble them not at all. Yet if the conservative movement has any political lesson to teach to those who disagree with its motives and goals, it should be that sometimes only a willingness to be radical really brings about change.

I tend to agree with Phillips-Fein, if only because Lind never offers the specifics to support his case. Nostalgia for the New Deal is not going be the banner under which a new liberal majority emerges.

recent reads

2007-11-26T14:51:00.000-05:00

Resistance is Surrender: Slavoj Žižek is lucid and on the mark as usual (in the LRB):
Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’?
Roscoe Mitchell's Wolf Tones: Brian Morton (of Penguin Guide to Jazz fame) has an insightful career overview (in The Nation; subscription required, contact me for details); from the penultimate paragraph:
Like most exploratory artists, Mitchell prefers the forward glance to the retrospective and fears repeating himself. But even in this most formally conceived of performances, he has managed to bring together elements that have been part of his work from the beginning: pure sound, sound that obeys or resists hierarchical organization, rhythm as fundamental rather than embellishment, improvisation not as a gone-in-the-air end in itself but as an inseparable element of the composition process, composition as a dynamic rather than an ossifying procedure, passion, cerebral abstraction, a sense that musical "meaning" is always subject to slippage. Multi-instrumentalism has only enlarged and enhanced his playing personality rather than obscured it; at base, Mitchell's only "instrument" is sound itself.
Pious Populist: Abbas Milani's Boston Review piece is more than just a biopic on Ahmadinejad, it's the most thorough-going discussion historical contextualization of Iran's geopolitics I've read in a while.

for ever mozart

2007-11-24T22:22:00.000-05:00

"Knowledge of the possibility of representation consoles us for being enslaved to life; knowledge of life consoles us for the fact that representation is but shadow."

-- JLG, For Ever Mozart (1996)

Modern Masters from Cleveland

2007-11-23T12:08:00.000-05:00

Coincidental with its massive $258 million renovation and expansion project, the Cleveland Museum of Art packaged up many of its best works of modern art and sent them on a show that has travelled the globe. It makes a brief stop home before continuing the tour (including a stop at the Frist), ultimately to return home in time for the completion of the project.

It was a good “test of painting” to remind myself or discover what I like and why.

Tho impressionists get top billing in the exhibit's subtitle ("Impressionist and Modern Masters from the CMA"), I was glad to see that some of the darker realist predecessors made it into the first few rooms of the show: my favorites, Courbet and Degas (Manet too, tho he was decidedly underrepresented). A generous showing of Degas in a variety of media, even sculpture.

Then about three or four rooms in come the ubiquitous Monets (with a few Pissaros thrown in there just to fake me out). I can certainly respect Monet but do not like his work, the whole waterlilies and Rouen cathedral thing. It's so overdone, so symbolic of a certain sense of good taste. That's it precisely, actually: it has become tasteful. Blech. It's that warm, fuzzy, gauzy light thing.

Now Degas can be that way sometimes, especially with his dancers, just as Monet can be dark from time to time. Maybe it's the whole en plein air thing I dislike -- Degas is far more likely to stay with interiors, whereas Monet gets too godlike with his casting of light.

Now by these criteria I might also dislike Renoir, but somehow I don't. Perhaps it's because he's more human somehow – is it simply his inclination to include human figures more often and even while en plein air? Maybe it's more that his human figures are believeable, they have a certain human roundness. Or round humannness. Mary Cassatt has this too.

I love Les Fauves and Nabis because they take the warm fuzzy softness of impressionism and ratchet it up, make it garish. (Their Germanic counterparts do it real horrorshow style and call it expressionism.) And Cezanne I suppose wins because his fuzziness is not the soft fuzziness of Monet et al., it's harsher and is starting to distort reality, making it proto-cubist.

Redon's Orpheus – yes! Deep, dark, and "Symbolist" where that term denotes proto-surrealist. Because this is not a musician and his lyre anymore, these objects have been extracted from reality and subjected to the condensation and displacement of the dreamwork (in 1903 and in pastel no less!)

Likewise Redon's Portrait of Violette Heyman (1910) – the temptation, because he's a "symbolist," is to read the flowers as purely decorative. (learned a new word for this: "cloissionism, surrounding forms with pronounced decorative outlines.) But if you literalize the decorative, in fact Ms. Heyman is staring entrancedly into an overgrown "field" of flowers. What does she see in them?

Bonnard – yes! Like Vuillard I love his work for being a perfect embodiment of late style. The Dessert is dark and garish, like Gaughan meets Degas or something – but this is 1921! Utterly behind the cutting edge but still worth exploring.

Likewise Vuillard – his Andre Benac is a dark, realist portrait that is some 70-80 years belated (done in 1936), while his Under the Trees is more timely (or perhaps less belated, 1894) but is not really distinct sorta looks like everyone else, possible Seurat, or a Monet that had been darkened, klimted (sorry "cloissionized"). His Cafe Wepler is a classic late impressionist (1910) interior, gaslit deep gold-beiges against mauves

And then the Picassos – why do even his sketches and knock-offs command our attention? His Bottle, Glass and Fork is classic cubism – but really quite ugly with its browns. And crowded, claustrophobic.

Back to late impresionism with Derain's Houses of Parliament – totally garishly colored and illuminated, wonderfully belated. Why did they place this after the Picassos? (as opposed to any other equally belated stuff)

Rouault is someone I should learn more about – his Head of Christ is something like a Cezannean Leger – the lines are thicker than Cezanne's but not as precise as Leger's, the fuzziness starting to distort the image but not by much.

Matisse, yes -- for his color and line.

Juan Gris' is a better cubism -- his Coffee Mill is more flexible, the shapes can move and breathe easier (approaching a zero degree that would be something like arp's cutouts).

Kupka! -- I could not remember his name but knew his was an intensely bright, mystic Russian futurist. (well, Czech.) Not Kandinsky but expressed “the spiritual in art” before Kandinsky put it down in words. Kupka has Cezanne's fuzzy distortions but the are no longer made to serve the mimetic function. Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors II is purpose-drive abstraction.

Soutine is i guess considered and expressionist, but his Still Life with Rayfish is to me very much a surrealism with menace. Someone else whose work I should get to know better.

I love early (mimetic, pre-1917) Mondrian for how it is a consistant fake-out – you can never tell that it's going in the direction of pure geometric abstraction. Taken in isolation, His Field with Young Trees in the Foreground is, for all intents and purposes, garden variety late impressionism. But in the context of his own trajectory, it's almost the exact opposite of late style: instead of working out implications of innovations already made, early Mondrian has almost no relation (preparatory or otherwise) to his hallmark mature work. Which apparently had a utopian/spiritualist impulse – wonder if there are any extant writings of his along these lines. (Wonder too if his chrysanthemums were serialized and if this might be an indication of his later geometrical works.)

Reached visual processing exhaustion before the time I arrived at the surrealists.

transforming structures of the world proposed

2007-11-22T11:01:00.000-05:00

Work by Matthew Kolodziej and Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson currently on display at William Busta Gallery in Cleveland propose to this viewer ways of rethinking and renewing the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. It's as if, paraphrasing what Busta said in agreement with me when I visited yesterday afternoon, we have enough distance now from Pollack that an "all-over" approach to the application of paint to canvas is possible again. Where Kolodziej and Jonsson depart from their forebears, however – and it is a significant but of course arguable departure – is how, eschewing formalism for its own sake, they subtly reinscribe the social and material world into their paintings.

Dan Tranberg's write-up in this Sunday's Plain Dealer and the reproduction of a Kolodziej painting it contained are what caught my attention (see, for example, Enhance [2007]). The interplay of line and color seemed to arise from spontaneity into abstraction while somehow retaining vestiges of order; the PD's caption, "the artist begins his process with photographs of buildings, which he projects and traces onto his large canvases," was enough to make me stop reading, put down the paper and plan to head down to the gallery (located in near midtown, not that far from where those classic Pere Ubu albums were recorded).

Buildings, constructions, sites, non-sites, exist and are inhabited in both space and time. So also, Freud mused in The Interpretation of Dreams, "that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one." Architectural time passes much slower than clock time (but not as slow as geological time). A building can survive for centuries and yet be collapsed in a matter of minutes or seconds, the event of evacuated space leaving a traumatic scar that can reverberate at length.

Kolodziej's paintings capture and convey those spatial and temporal transitions, objects and moments of human construction and destruction that are transformed. But into what? Hard to say. The vestiges of structures remain, giving the paintings their formal necessity; nowhere however (save perhaps in the painter's studio or personal effects) are these structures identified with their material specificity. Kolodziej does not name names of buildings or sites: instead, these (non)sites are frequently transformed into abstractions, with titles like Pretense, Restoration, etc. Additionally, with (in Tranberg's words) "Kolodziej's color palette, which ranges from chocolate and carmel to raspberry and lemon, makes it difficult to see these scenes as true tragedies. [...] it's difficult not to read these paintings as representations of an absurdist, candy-coated culture of destruction."

An intriguing reading, but I don't quite agree. Kolodziej does not strike me as the cool ironist or cutting satirist. At least not entirely. These works won't be reduced to brute materialism or pure aestheticism; they capture and transform transitional, multiple states of matter and energy. From the artist's statement: "These improbable structures fluctuate between forming and deteriorating synapses." Indeed as Freud already suggested, this language of neuroplasticity is no mere metaphor when applied to physical structures.

"During the past 12 years, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson has created series of works based upon images of brains scans, celestial objects, and most frequently, the landscape of Iceland" (WBG exhibition brochure). These might be seen serving an analagous role to Kolodziej's (de)construction (non)sites, namely as the formal necessity for the painting. Jonsson's processes and results, at the very least, are quite different. Her paintings are equally textiles, as she weaves together singly-dyed strands of silk fiber. Her Sandstorm, depicted here, is the only image i could embed here and does not immediately resemble (and may have been achieved with a different process) her latest series, The Vatnajökull Paintings, named after the Icelandic glacier that is Europe's biggest. (Some of these are on display at WBG; you can view them at her website.) The exact nature of weaving process and the extent to which the paintings reference the glacier itself is not entirely clear to me; regardless, the effect is quite stunning. I was reminded of Gerhard Richter's squeegee-smeared surfaces, but Jonsson's woven silks have a depth that evokes overprinting, while the dying and staining evokes Helen Frankenthaler (who stained raw unprimed canvas but never single threads).

Like Kolodziej, the real word is serving as Jonsson's template here, and an order derived from the tangible world. These are no unfettered expressions of the genius ego. Instead, rigorous application of method in both cases works a transformation upon structures of the world proposed.

who said war crime doesn't pay?

2007-11-22T10:25:00.000-05:00

reported elsewhere tho not terribly widely (i only heard about it on democracy now yesterday), discredited AG alberto gonzales is taking his case on the road for some cool cash; his gainesville audience at least responded with a little heat.

think progress has the story and the video. you think he had to sweat at all for that $40K? AP reports he's going to get another $30K from the good folks at washington university in st. louis. the UF student protestors spent monday night in jail and were released the next day pending a subsequent court appearance where there will probably be sentenced to community services. well done, guys!

most disturbing tho perhaps is this little tidbit:

Gonzales is being offered to audiences by New York-based Greater Talent Network, the same organization that arranges speaking tours for "Sex and the City" author Candace Bushnell, outed CIA operative Valerie Plame and ice cream guys Ben & Jerry. Calls and e-mails to the firm, which bills itself as "America's leading celebrity speakers bureau," were not returned.

"greater talent network?" what talent of gonzales are they touting -- his twisting of well-established legal precedent into justifications of torture? seems to me the folks at GTN are the real scumbags. and you can bet that when plame comes to speak at my campus next week, even tho i am 100% behind her, i will ask her about this.

in the meantime, here is GTN's website and contact email address: . or better yet, write straight to founder and CEO don epstein: .

still another note on irony

2007-11-21T19:00:00.000-05:00

...to add to the ones from before (and to the recent avant-garde discussion as well), this time from rae armantrout's interview with tom beckett, in a wild salience (1999):

Right now I feel pretty pessimistic about social space. Contemporary American culture is such a degraded linguistic environment. Have you seen that Taco Bell ad where a chihuahua, dressed like Pancho Villa or Che Guevara, encourages a cheering peasant army to try the revolutionary new taco, the Gordita? So much for the avant-garde. What do we do?

Stop watching television someone might say. But this stuff is so telling. What do we do? Put it in poems (and interviews) and perpetuate it? Hope that this culture can get its tongue so far into its cheek that it will implode??

recently reviewed

2007-11-17T08:47:00.000-05:00

hopefully a regular feature as i continue to program recent releases for WRVU and share them on amazon...

Pride by Phosphorescent
Even in the Midst... by Ahleuchatistas
Sorrow by Lonely China Day
Slow Speed: Deep Owls by Bear Claw
Random Spirit Lover by Sunset Rubdown
Comet Ride by The Willie Williams Trio
Intersections 1 by Bob Ravenscroft Trio
Lightning Dust by Lightning Dust
Boss by Magik Markers
Phoenician Terrane by Bevel
Mantaray by Siouxsie
Little Eyes by Ed Askew

must we burn the avant garde?

2007-11-14T17:14:00.000-05:00

a belated follow-up to mark's ten-day-old post (a blogworld eternity) that nevertheless seems an appropriate occasion for heuriskein's tentative return to form after a nearly 5-month hiatus. mark mused:

Is the time of any idea of an avant garde over with? Do we need more insistence on the value of aesthetic extremes? Is it important to remind people that it’s not really possible to reject the avant garde before you understand what it was in the first place? Can avant garde possibilities be found in a Stan Apps-style defining of avant garde practices, or in an impulse to unsettle accepted pieties in numerous contexts that’s both broader but perhaps dangerously general? Both? Is the idea of an avant garde old news, or one that we’ve already gone too far in forgetting? How would we know, right now, avant garde work if we saw it?

and i'll only be able to address myself to those directions where a line of inquiry is clearly fleshed out, beginning with what i commented then:

i'll hopefully respond more directly to what you and others have said, mark, in a subsequent post. but for now my initial impulse is to insist that the spirit of the avant-garde is still quite vital but that it might be more useful to think less in linear/temporal orientations (after, ahead, progress) than in spatial ones (centers and peripheries).

and i think this is the significant development of the past few years in contemporary poetry, namely the proliferation of peripheries relative to the centers of poetic production in this country -- and peripheries with less explicit or definable affinities for the historical avant garde.

that is, there are always central locations (literally or figuratively) of cultural production, and usually those centers exercise a certain amount of control or authority over that production -- defining not only its terms but just as if not more importantly its values. and then there are peripheries of cultural production that operate to some extent without abiding by those central or dominant terms and values.

if by avant garde we mean such peripheries, then by no means has the time place or work of the avant garde come to pass: for as long as there are those dominant centers of cultural production that would presume to dictate terms and values for other modes or production -- or worse yet, operate as if their terms and values are the only ones in existence -- then it will be incumbant upon avant garde peripheries to challenge those terms and values by boldy asserting their own.

it is only in this sense that the "historical avant garde" is not a contradiction in terms that needs to be finessed or nuanced away through the use of a term like "post avant." if anything, "post avant" means to acknowledge and attend to this apparent contradiction.

the problem with the historical avant garde, its obvious militarism aside, is the very notion of progress definitional to it. art, science, knowledge -- these do not move in a linear forward trajectory; innovations, paradigm shifts (kuhn), epistemic breaks (foucault) are registered and then consolidated, refined, even codified (so much so even to achieve power displacements in/of/at previous productive centers). extremity, transgression, innovation cannot be maintained perpetually, nor are these the sole values to which peripheries must always adhere.

take the case of gertrude stein. her primary innovative stylistic achievements are by now at least 60 years old. those innovations have been revisited & refined by poets and writers probably every decade since then. her peers in the visual arts (like picasso) have been long canonized and commercialized. (i had a print of his don quixote on my freshman dorm room door.) and yet still it is quite common today, as i pointed out in a post to the buffalo poetics list, to run across such journalistic drivel as this by one philip hensher of the daily telegraph:

"I happily admit I haven't read The Making of Americans (1934) and have no intention of doing so, since it's half am illion words long, and almost all of those sound like this: I mean, I mean and that is not what I mean. I mean that not any one is saying what they are meaning. I mean that I am feeling something, I mean that I mean something and I mean that not any one is thinking, is feeling, is saying, is certain of that thing, I mean that not any one can be. And so on and so forth. [...]

Her charm emerges periodically in her books. The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933) is a perfect, lucid delight; Tender Buttons (1914) sounds, not unattractively, like the work of Edith Sitwell after a pint or two of vodka; and Wars I Have Seen (1944) is disconcertingly indistinguishable in style and in every respect from the Anita Loos novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925).[...]

But was Stein really all that interested in anything? You would be hard-put to extract any cogent statement on any subject from almost any of her books."

it's not just that there is a set of values being articulated here -- that writers should always accommodate the demands of all possible readers, that writers should never challenge the expectations or abilities of readers, that a writer's entire corpus must be read(able) in order to be valuable, and so on and so on -- but that these values are an unchallenged and unchallengeable, uncontested and uncontestable given. there is no space wherein any deviation or dissent from these values might inhabit. to the periphery with you!, sneers these values; little wonder is it then that the periphery dweller does so gladly and proudly. (not to mention the fact that mr hensher's attempt at a stein parody is quite possibly the worst and lamest attempt at such ever.

another case in point: there's an early (1973?) article (contact me if interested to read in full) by one marjorie g. perloff that explains in great detail and with full supporting evidence how charles olson's 1950 manifesto "projective verse" derives nearly all its crucial argumentative claims and moves from the imagist and vorticist doctrines expounded by pound and williams some 30-35 years previous. olson is by this account retrograde, rear guard; and yet such an account fails to recognize that in those intervening years the force of those pound-williams injunctions had almost completely dissipated and that certain poets in 1950 needed those dictates to be reiterated afresh and anew.

personally i think this is a period in post avant writing that is most distinguished by consolidation, assessment and refinement rather than breakthroughs, transgressions and innovations. there is no perpetual innovation: at some point one must stop, look around and do some stock-taking, see what the trailblazers have done, what they have left behind, what work can be put to rest and what work still needs to be pursued.

as i write this i must also acknowledge a dimension in which there are "advances" being made, and this involves what might be called the growing post avant diaspora. that is what i referred to in my comments to mark, namely the increasing numbers of poets coming out of mainstream poetic institutions who are dissatisfied with the available mechanisms of poetic production and distribution and are turning towards those modes formerly adopted (largely but hardly exclusively) by the historical avant garde -- but without any deep or lasting affinities with the historical avant garde's varied aesthetics or politics. less vulgar minds would have once described this as a compromising or sullying of the purity of the avant garde. by contrast i see this as a quite healthy development. it also makes our work harder as there are now more books and magazines and poets then ever. welcome, fellow travellers!

mary ellen solt (1920-2007)

2007-06-28T09:06:00.000-04:00

elegy for the astronauts #4 (1964)

geranium, from flowers in concrete (1966)

dogwood, second movement (1966, from artpool.hu)

from prentice-hall author biographies:

Mary Ellen Solt was born in Gilmore City, Iowa, and spent much her life in the Midwest. Her poetry and essays were heavily influenced, however, by her international travels. Moreover, Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: a World View established her as a powerful influence on the genre of concrete poetry around the world.

Her international travels would produce more than poetry. A university professor on teaching exchange in 1977–1978, Mary Ellen Solt spent time living in Warsaw, Poland, with her daughter Susan. She was instrumental in establishing the American Studies Center at Warsaw University. Back in the United States, she served as the first director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University, established in 1977.

Married for nearly forty-seven years to historian Leo Solt, she is the mother of two daughters, Catherine and Susan. In her retirement, Mrs. Solt moved with her daughter Susan to California. She continues contributing to education and the arts by serving as a Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts. She remains a Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.

Some other works by Mary Ellen Solt:

* Creator of Poor Old Tired Horse—a volume of poetry
* Editor of Dear Ez: Letters from William Carlos Williams to Ezra Pound
* Poems Marriage, Rain Down, Moonshot Sonnet

east european mytho-folk surrealism

2007-06-19T11:14:00.000-04:00

picked this up at the half price books in north olmstead ohio last week. born the same year as jackson mac low, vasko popa is the great serbian surrealist. he tends to write short poems arranged into short cycles. his palette is colored with myth and the idiom of folkore (riddles, games, etc.) and allegory, all adding up to something quite different from the revolution and amour of french high surrealism. it's much closer to lorca i find. some of popa's animal cycles are a bit too totemistic for me, preferring as i do the more ludic, aggressive and philosophical cycles.

the cycle Games, for example, reads very much like a dick higgins or yoko ono piece from the fluxus days. i even imagine my nephews (ages 9 and 6) having some fun with these:

Before the Game

Shut one eye then the other
Peek into every corner of yourself
See that there are no nails no thieves
See that there are no cuckoo's eggs

Shut then the other eye
Squat and jump
Jump high high high
On top of yourself

Fall then with all your weight
Fall for days on end deep deep deep
To the bottom of your abyss

Who doesn't break into pieces
Who remains whole gets up whole
Plays

here's another from the same sequence, far more wicked and telling of la condition humaine, and very much echoes something from a 1978 robert duncan naropa lecture i transcribed a while back, "I mean there’s not a living form that isn’t working away day and night to demolish the earth it lives on -- chew chew, chomp chomp, scrabble scrabble, dig holes in it, the whole thing, uh -- in this fabric, where are you gonna put yourself?"

Race

Some bite from the others
A leg an arm or whatever

Take it between their teeth
Run out as fast as they can
Cover it up with earth

The others scatter everywhere
Sniff look sniff look
Dig up the whole earth

If they are lucky and find an arm
Or leg or whatever
It's their turn to bite

The game continues at a lively pace

As long as there are arms
As long as there are legs
As long as there is anything

these are anonymous translations from a nice little 32-page PDF (132K) of translations done mostly by anne pennington, while charles simic did the selection from the oberlin press book above: apparently the two collaborated on a 1997 anvil press edition of the collected. (now out of print?) this PDF tho is noteworthy to me for the inclusion of the little box sequence, along with another, far within us, not included in the simic selection.

here's one i can't resist including, from the little box cycle:

The Tenants Of The Little Box

Throw into the little box
A stone
You'll take out a bird

Throw in your shadow
You'll take out the shirt of happiness

Throw in your father's root
You'll take out the axle of the universe

The little box works for you

Throw into the little box
A mouse
You'll take out a quaking hill

Throw in your head
You'll take out two

The little box works for you

here's a few from one of my favorites, the cycle give me back my rags

Give me back my rags

My raglets of pure dream
Of silken smiles
Striped premonition
And my lace-like sinews

My raglets of polka-dot hope
Of filigreed lust
Calico glances
And the skin off my face

Give me back my rags
I’m asking you nicely

(Simic)

later in the sequence things get a bit more aggressive and insistant:

Get out of my walled infinity
Of the star circle round my heart
Of my mouthful of sun

Get out of the comic sea of my blood
Of my flow of my ebb
Get out of my stranded silence

Get out I said get out

Get out of my living abyss
Of the bare father-tree within me

Get out how long must I cry get out

Get out of my bursting head
Get out just get out

(Pennington)

definitely one of my favorite opening lines of recent memory. read the whole sequence in simic's rendering online at the exile quarterly.

follow the oil law

2007-06-18T09:21:00.000-04:00

with the increasing (albeit belated) realization that this president's "surge" strategy is not likely to succeed, it becomes increasingly important to monitor progress on iraqi oil law.

this is one of the so-called benchmarks for progress that would enable u.s. troops to begin leaving iraq, and thus the ongoing status of the debate over iraqi oil can serve as a useful index less to iraqi than to real (as opposed to stated) u.s. intent and design.

one story that went unreported in the mainstream media last week was the nearly-averted strike by the largest of iraq's largest oil workers' union. seems they have a legitimate concern that these oil law benchmarks run the very real risk of making too much of their oil revenue open to foreigners.

david bacon has a good piece at truthout about this. and kenneth anderson at opednews goes further. follow his links, especially to the piece in american lawyer by daphne eviatar about the DC lawyer who's purportedly advising the iraqis on how to manage their oil interest. eviatar includes this choice tidbit of background info:

Under Saddam Hussein, foreign investment was strictly limited, as it is in most major Middle Eastern oil-producing countries. Under the new law, the Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of only about 17 of Iraq’s approximately 80 known oil fields.

be certain tho that, when this president's surge is declared the failure that it inevitably will be in september, it will be the iraqi people who will take the blame for not meeting their benchmarks.

a return to form

2007-06-17T18:47:00.000-04:00

...or perhaps a somewhat new form: updates on random topics. otherwise heuriskein as we've come to know it will probably be put into indefinite retirement until i find an appropriate means and manner of keeping people abreast of nashville developments.

* * *

i love the drive between cleveland ohio and london ontario: you can make the whole run in under five hours but the time goes by really quickly because no leg of the trip takes longer than 90 minutes. (cleveland-toledo, 90 minutes; toledo to detroit; 60 minutes; detroit to port huron, 60 minutes; sarnia to london, 60 minutes.) flat farmland punctuated by urban rustbelt. best also to go through the border at sarnia-port huron rather than windsor-detroit so as to use/buy less gas in canada. the 402 is one of the flatest and most desolate highways around. (the photo in the wikipedia entry looks positively lush by comparison). good trip for listening to whole box sets.

* * *

renewed affection for all things london ontario.

freud's bit in civilization and its discontents about how "in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish -- that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances... it can once more be brought to light" -- from which he lauchnes his epic simile comparing the mind to the city of rome with all the buildings that ever stood in it over time all copresent in space -- is never more apt. i'm convinced that through neuroplasticity space hardwires itself not just into our thought process but our physiology as well, proprioceptors or whathaveyou. wandering throught downtown london upon my arrival -- on a weekday summer night it was bound to be a bit barren, but it's fallen on hard times all the same -- heading north on wellington the words "scot's corner" came to mind for the first time in probably twelve years. ten seconds later i turned west onto dundas street and there before me sat one of my favorite old haunts, the scot's corner.

* * *

the range of ontario regional brews otherwise unavailable in the u.s. has grown considerably since i lived there. this is a product line that even the brickskellar in d.c. (which boasts of the largest bottled beer list in the city) is hopelessly clueless about.

go ahead, yanks: visit the beer store (ontario's province-wide retailer) and do a brand search. you will be dumbfounded by the amount and range of beer you've never heard of let alone tasted.

all i could bring back with me was a sleeman's sampler pack. sleeman is the premier regional brewer in the province (located in guelph), running a full line of its own products as well as picking up some other brews (like the upper canada line) from indie brewers that did not survive the consolidations of the late 1990s and early 2000s led by the biggies. sleeman makes a light, premium light, lager, "clear," IPA, dark, porter, and the three that come in the sampler pack: cream ale, honey brown, original draft. the cream ale is very clean, the honey brown nice and malty.

brick breweries of waterloo has managed to avoid selling out to the majors while simultaneously buying up a number of smaller regional brewers and yet still maintaining those product lines. red baron is their lager, and their waterloo dark was always a personal favorite, and the red cap ale was a popular brand in the 1950s that they resurrected. they also do the british-style conners best bitter and formosa springs line of cold-filtered draft products.

other great brews you are unlikely to encounter in the states: wellington brewery in guelph makes an excellent range of british-style ales (arkell best bitter, country ale, special pale ale, iron duke strong, imperial stout); creemore springs (not quite two hours north of ontario) makes a lager, pils and ur bock; and from out-of-province, keith's makes an IPA and amber ale from halifax, while big rock is the calgary microbrewer to beat with their pale and traditional ales along with a grasshopper wheat and warthog cream ale.

* * *

undying affection for pere ubu. could not quite listen to all 5 CDs in the datapanik in the year zero box as i would've liked, and still finding my way through new picnic time and songs of the bailing man (which i've only just heard for the first time recently), but i do think dub housing is far and away the masterpiece. musings from the post-industrial sublime.

* * *

do want to recommend the charlie parker pershing club recordings from chicago in 1950, formerly available only an an obscure 1976 LP release from the zim label of jericho ny (pictured below) but now reissued thanks to the good folks at definitive/disconforme (one of those fine spanish budget-priced reissue labels). the quality of the recordings is lousy and the rest of the band (chicago pick-up band featuring von freeman on tenor) is largely irrelevant sadly. but bird soars. makes me wanna get the benedettis and all the other live dates just for those solos...

edwards on the war metaphor

2007-05-25T11:25:00.000-04:00

john edwards is increasingly emerging as the legitimate candidate of the true left. in the following speech given before the council on foreign relations the other day, edwards adopts the position that i've been waiting for some national political figure on the left to adopt for some time now, one the george lakoff has already staked out -- namely, that the notion of a "global war on terror" invokes a frame that is in fact ill-suited to the realities of the present situation, that it is in fact an bad metaphor.

some quotes from the edwards speech:

The core of this presidency has been a political doctrine that George Bush calls the "Global War on Terror." He has used this doctrine like a sledgehammer to justify the worst abuses and biggest mistakes of his administration, from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to the war in Iraq. The worst thing about the Global War on Terror approach is that it has backfired -- our military has been strained to the breaking point and the threat from terrorism has grown. [...]

The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics, not a strategy to make America safe. It's a bumper sticker, not a plan. It has damaged our alliances and weakened our standing in the world. As a political "frame," it's been used to justify everything from the Iraq War to Guantanamo to illegal spying on the American people. It's even been used by this White House as a partisan weapon to bludgeon their political opponents. [...]

By framing this as a "war," we have walked right into the trap that terrorists have set -- that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war against Islam.

The "war" metaphor has also failed because it exaggerates the role of only one instrument of American power -- the military. This has occurred in part because the military is so effective at what it does. Yet if you think all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

naturally, this challenge to the governing trope of our myopic worldview is drawing fire -- which is not surprising. the truth pisses people off.

"When you go so far as to suggest the global war on terror is a bumper sticker or a slogan, it kind of makes the point that I have been making over and over again, that the Democrats, or at least some of them, are in denial." -- Rudy Giuliani

"Remember that old Edmund Burke quote, it's a famous quote, 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.' And that, I am afraid is the boiled down version of what John Edwards said, is that good men should do nothing. Put their head in the sand and hope it all goes away." -- Mitt Romney

of course edwards does not advocate doing nothing -- the entire second half of his speech details it all quite clearly. only time will tell what other democrats besides biden and kucinich will get behind this position and what kind of traction it will develop. if there's one thing the democrats still have not learned from the republicans that they must, it's to get everybody on message and repeat that message, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

judicial activism in missouri

2007-05-10T11:21:00.000-04:00

just when we thought attorney general alberto gonzales had "weathered the storm" surrounding the apparent politically-motivated dismissal of eight federal prosecutors last december, a ninth has been added to the list: todd graves of missouri. (congressional sources are telling mcclatchy newspapers of three more.)

in november 2005, the department of justice's civil rights division wanted graves to proceed with a lawsuit against the state of missouri for failing to purge it's voting records of ineligible voters; graves refused, claiming insufficient grounds for the suit. DOJ went ahead with the suit anyway, thanks to acting civil rights divsion chief bradley schlozman. a few months later, in january 2006 graves' name (unbeknownst to graves himself) was added to the lists of federal attorneys to be "replaced," and graves was told by a senior DOJ offical to start looking for a new job. graves resigned in march 2006, and, under the special powers to gonzales to make interim appointments given him by the patriot, was replaced by none other than bradley schlozman.

before reviewing scholzman's track record before and after his interim special appointment by gonzales, we should pause for a moment to recognize and name this activity for what it is: judicial activism of the most pernicious kind. conservatives learned a bitter but very valuable lesson through the 1950s and 1960s: you know the right-wing rallying cry that chief justice earl warren ought to be imeached for his landmark 1954 desegregation decision? they have cried "judicial activism" ever since but have also learned well from the liberal example of using the courts to achieve an objective. (and again, this is all contrary to true conservative beliefs is limited government and local control.)

only in the case of civil rights, there were real injustices being done that needed to be corrected. in schlozman's dossier their is only a trail of elcection law manipulations to achieve bogus political aims; schlozman:

helped get approval for tom delay's redistricting program in texas,
allowed a controversial voter ID law in goergia to go forward despite objections from career prosecutors in his office that the legislation probably violated voter rights (the legislation was evenutally repealed),
pushed the lawsuit against missouri for failing to update its voting records against the advice of todd graves whom he subsequently replaced (the lawsuit was eventually thrown out as baseless),
broke with long-standing DOJ policy and rushed (legitmate but trumped-up) voter fraud indictments just days before the crucial mccaskill-talent seatorial race in the november 2006 elections

will be very curious to see how mr schlozman's testimony before the senate judiciary committee on may 15 proceeds...

UPDATE 5/11 2:45pm
warren olney's to the point from tuesday hosts the boston globe's charlie savage among others providing excellent background on this...

UPDATE 5/12 2:45pm
josh marshall reports that schlozman won't be appearing before the senate judiciary committee anytime soon: seems he had already planned a vacation...

collapsible poetics theater

2007-05-02T12:08:00.000-04:00

extensive photo documentation of the five pieces from rodrigo toscano's collapsible poetics theater performed as part of the yockadot poetics theater festival that took place this past weekend in alexandria, virginia.

from "spine":

from "first box":

never stop singing for liberty

2007-04-21T17:19:00.000-04:00

We’re very happy that Nancy Shaw has been holding an appointment as a Visiting Professor of American Studies at New York University, for it’s a far easier journey here from New York than it is from Nancy’s more recent home in Montreal or her more lasting attachment to Vancouver. She’s the author of Affordable Tedium from Tsunami, Scoptocratic from ECW Press, and most recently a collaboration with Catriona Strang entitled Busted from Coach House Books. According to this book’s afterword by Christine Stewart, "Busted razes the discursive frames that still the possibilities of reason, society, nations, identity, persons, morality and justice; it records, fragments, listens to generations and the generation of historical agency and/or control to note the articulation of social relationships; it rails against the flaccid generic -- the justifications of historical subjugation; corrupts convention’s larynx and cruel pretty lyric in triangular (self-supporting) seen metrical pediment." In introducing Nancy I want to focus a few remarks around four notions, namely community, culture, collective and collaboration.

First, community, an idea that we take as such a given here in D.C. and that has been so valorized in the recent history of experimental writing that I wonder if perhaps we lose sight of what it actually means. So I think we can always look to The Kootenay School of Writing as an exemplary kind of community. Yes you can take classes there, but no it is not a degree-granting institution. Nor is it, as has been a common misperception from our south-of-the-border perspective, some subsidiary or branch office of Language Poetry, Inc. The KSW’s roots are in grassroots writing workshops that sought to develop and foster the class consciousness of the workers, and thus its subsequent efforts in experimental practice have never been far from its proletarian origins.

Second, culture. As a scholar Nancy is a true interdisciplinarian. And while Cultural Studies has come to be defined less by the specific disciplinary objects it studies and more by its constructivist, materialist disposition towards those objects, whatever they may be, clearly one object towards which its disposition has been most problematic is poetry. Poetics becomes a buzzword in cultural studies, with catch-phrases like "the poetics of x" or "the politics and poetics of y" effectively and safely neutralizing the transformative capabilities of poetry as a productive making. For Nancy, to articulate "the politics and poetics" of something is to articulate redundantly. Or, as she and Catrioana Strang put it in Busted: "Politics and art are never free of lyric poetry."

Third and fourth, collective (to gather together) and collaboration (to work together). How many recent poetic collaborations still retain the signatures of individual authors for individual poems? Busted is a true collaboration, something of a manifesto, a catalog of bulletins, gripes, credos, shuffles, flags, edicts, anthems, torch songs and protocols. It’s small enough to carry with you in a pocket or purse; and as the poem "Just watch me" tells us, "History turns on small events; an emphatic hit delivered with such sincerity, and we are suddenly resonant." Busted is an emphatic hit, and the song we resonate with is both simple and profound: "never stop singing for liberty."

[introduction to nancy shaw's reading with lorraine graham, in your ear at the district of columbia arts center, april 21 2002]

nancy shaw (1962-2007)

2007-04-19T11:58:00.000-04:00

ornette wins pulitzer

2007-04-17T09:26:00.000-04:00

from the AP:

Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for music on Monday for his 2006 album, "Sound Grammar," the second jazz artist to receive the honor.

a small sign that something is right with the world, as i just wrote jessica who sent word of the news. surprising? well, it's one of those things, i think, kind of like when robert duncan won big awards for poetry in 1978 -- major artist releases first new work in ten years -- in duncan's case, the groundwork book. and likewise as duncan's work had circulated privately and in limited editions, so coleman had been touring with his two-bass quartet for a number of year. so anyone who was listening knew this was great music, tho i had no idea there was a CD in the works until it was released. and it as i wrote a while back, it is a pretty special recording.

what's more shocking is that coleman is only the second-ever jazz musician to win the pulitzer, and when wynton marsalis won it in 1997 it was for his three-hour oratorio on slavery. so this is the first time it's ever been won for a jazz work since it was first awarded in 1943!

a little flipper

2007-04-13T11:38:00.000-04:00

listen to "sacrifice" (mp3, 7mb) from the 1984 gone fishin' lp by flipper. even more relevant today.

the tip of the attorney firing iceberg

2007-04-12T09:31:00.000-04:00

from this morning's nytimes:

Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday.

Of the 1,000 White House officials with political duties, 22 — including Karl Rove, the chief political strategist — have Republican National Committee accounts that are supposed to be used only for campaign-related work. But recent revelations that some officials have used those accounts for Bush administration business, including discussions of a plan to dismiss United States attorneys, has prompted a Congressional investigation.

Vision Festival XII

2007-04-11T10:24:00.000-04:00

A Dozen Years Of Visionary Music, Dance, Spoken Word, Film And Visual Art
Tuesday, June 19 through Sunday, June 24, 2007

Angel Orensanz Foundation
172 Norfolk Street, New York, NY
$30 per night in advance / $35 day of show / $150 for 6 night pass
on sale April 5 at http://www.BrownPaperTickets.com or 800.838.3006
More Info: http://www.visionfestival.org or 212.696.6681

Vision Festival XII Schedule

Tuesday June 19
Poet/Host Lewis Barnes

7:00 Opening Invocation
Patricia Nicholson / William Parker / Hamid Drake

7:30 William Parker – “Double Sunrise Over Neptune” – World Premiere
Lewis Barnes trumpet / Rob Brown alto saxophone / Sabir Mateen reeds
Bill Cole double reeds / Joe Morris guitar, banjo / Jason Kao Hwang violin
Mazz Swift violin / Jessica Pavone viola / Shiau-Shu Yu cello / Brahim Fribgane oud
William Parker bass / Shayna Dulberger bass / Hamid Drake drums / Gerald Cleaver drums

8:30 Fieldwork
Steve Lehman saxophones, compositions / Vijay Iyer piano, compositions
Tyshawn Sorey drums, compositions

9:30 The Keyboard Project: Cooper-Moore Quartet with Marlies Yearby
Darius Jones alto saxophone / Cooper-Moore keyboards
Nioka Workman cello / Chad Taylor drums / Marlies Yearby dance

10:30 Spiritual Unity featuring Marc Ribot (with special guest Henry Grimes)
Roy Campbell trumpet / Marc Ribot guitar
Henry Grimes bass / Chad Taylor drums

Wednesday June 20 – Bill Dixon Lifetime Recognition
Poet/Host Barry Wallenstein

7:00 Barry Wallenstein and Friends
Barry Wallenstein vocals, poetry / Daniel Carter reeds, trumpet / special guests TBA

7:30 Bill Dixon with the Sound Vision Orchestra – World Premiere
Bill Dixon trumpet, compositions
Graham Haynes trumpet / Stephen Haynes trumpet / Taylor Ho Bynum cornet
Dick Griffin trombone / Steve Swell trombone / Joe Daley tuba
Andrew Raffo Dewar soprano saxophone / Michel Cote reeds / J.D. Parran reeds
Will Connell, Jr. reeds / John Hagen reeds / Karen Borca bassoon
Glynis Lomon cello / Andrew Lafkas double bass
Warren Smith vibraphone, percussion / Jackson Krall percussion

9:30 Co-Pilots: Henry Grimes and Marilyn Crispell
Henry Grimes bass / Marilyn Crispell piano

10:30 Survival Unit III
Joe McPhee reeds, flügelhorn / Fred Lonberg-Holm cello
Michael Zerang drums

Thursday June 21
Poet/Host Alexandre Pierrepont

6:00 New York – Paris Poetry
Tribes, New York
Miguel Algarin, Steve Cannon, Steve Dalachinsky, Post Midnight, Ishle Park
The Weavers, Paris
Thomas Gilson, Mathias Gross, Alexandre Pierrepont, Laurence Pierrepont, Daniel Vassaux

7:30 Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble – Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler
David Young trumpet / Nicole Mitchell flute / David Boykin reeds
Justin Dillard piano / Tomeka Reid cello / Josh Abrams bass
Arveeayl Ra drums / Marcus Evans drums / Mankwe Ndosi vocals

8:30 Hardcell
Tim Berne alto saxophone / Craig Taborn piano / Tom Rainey drums

9:30 Local Lingo
Jason Kao Hwang violin, viola, compositions / Sang Won Park ajang, kayagum, voice

10:30 Jayne Cortez and The Firespitters
Jayne Cortez poetry / Bern Nix guitar / special guests TBA
Al MacDowell bass / Denardo Coleman drums

Friday June 22
Poet/Host David Budbill

5:30 Panel Discussion Part I – Art in America: A Grassroots Struggle

7:00 50 Violins for Leroy Jenkins
Memorial tribute led by Billy Bang, coordinated by Jason Kao Hwang

7:30 Matthew Shipp Solo Piano

8:30 Roy Campbell’s Ahkenaten Suite – World Premiere
Roy Campbell trumpet / Billy Bang violin / Bryan Carrott vibraharp
Hilliard Greene bass / Zen Matsuura drums

9:30 Dance/Music/Art Installation “A State of Mind” by Patricia Nicholson
Dance: Miriam Parker, Julia Wilkins, Gus Solomons, jr
Music: Lewis Barnes, Rob Brown, William Parker, Hamid Drake
Artists: Jo Wood Brown, Katie Martin, Kazuko Miyamoto, Phyllis Bulkin-Lehrer, Lili White

10:15 Fred Anderson Trio
Fred Anderson tenor saxophone / Harrison Bankhead bass
Hamid Drake drums

11:15 Spindrift for Leroy Jenkins
Myra Melford piano, melodica / Mark Taylor French horn
Brandon Ross guitars / Shuni Tsou di-zi

Saturday Afternoon June 23

2:00 Michael Bisio Quartet
Stephen Gauci winds / Avram Fefer winds
Michael Bisio bass / Jay Rosen percussion

3:00 SYNERGY Sight and Sound
Amir Bey costumes, set design / Saco Yasuma alto saxophone, compositions
Ras Moshe reeds / Dave Ross guitar / Christopher Dean Sullivan bass / Lou Grassi drums

4:00 Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone
Mary Halvorson guitar, vocals / Jessica Pavone viola, vocals

5:00 Corey Wilkes Quintet
Corey Wilkes trumpet, flügelhorn, vocals / Kevin Nabors tenor saxophone
Junuis Paul bass / Isaiah Spencer drums / Jumaane Taylor dance

Saturday Night June 23
Poet/Host David Budbill

7:30 Ganelin Trio Priority
Vyacheslav Ganelin piano, synthesizer, percussion / Petras Vysniauskas soprano sax
Klaus Kugel drums, percussion

8:30 Eddie Gale All-Star Band
Eddie Gale trumpet / Prince Lasha reeds / Kidd Jordan tenor saxophone
Valerie Mih piano / William Parker bass / Alvin Fielder drums / Patricia Nicholson dance

9:30 Rob Brown Quartet
Rob Brown alto saxophone / Lewis Barnes trumpet
Todd Nicholson bass / Guillermo E. Brown drums

10:30 Whit Dickey Trio
Sabir Mateen reeds / Todd Nicholson bass / Whit Dickey drums

11:30 Amiri and Amina Baraka’s Blue Ark
Amiri Baraka poetry / Amini Baraka poetry, vocals
Dwight West vocals / Rene McLean reeds / Adegoke Steve Colson piano
Curtis Lundy bass / Pheeroan akLaff drums

Sunday June 24
Poet/Host Alexandre Pierrepont

3:30 Panel Discussion Part II – What Is “Serious” Music or Art?

5:00 T.E.C.K. String 4tet
Tomas Ulrich cello / Elliott Sharp acoustic guitars
Carlos Zingaro violin / Ken Filiano double bass

6:00 Hamid Drake now
Hamid Drake drums / Paolo Angeli prepared guitar
Sabir Mateen reeds / Patricia Nicholson dance

7:00 Thomas Buckner Trio
Thomas Buckner vocals / Jerome Bourdellon flute / Roscoe Mitchell reeds

8:00 Daniel Levin Quartet
Daniel Levin cello / Nate Wooley trumpet / Joe Morris bass / Matt Moran vibraphone

9:00 Louis Moholo and Friends
Kidd Jordan tenor saxophone / Dave Burrell piano
William Parker bass / Louis Moholo drums

Visual Art at The Vision Festival
A State of Mind
Dialogue Amongst the Arts

Amir Bey – installation
Jo Wood Brown – installation
Kazuko Miyamoto – installation
Yuko Otomo – installation
Maura Sheehan – installation
Cassie Thornton – installation

Bill Mazza – live drawings
Jorgo Schaefer – live drawings
Jeff Schlanger – live drawings

Bill Dixon – painting
Robin Kahn – painting

Phyllis Bulkin Lehrer - video
Katy Martin – video
Lili White – video

Peter Gannushkin – photographer
Luciano Rossetti – photographer
Michael Wilderman – photographer

sol lewitt (1928-2007)

2007-04-09T14:47:00.000-04:00

49 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967-71 (oberlin college)

Serial Project #1 ABCD 6, 1968 (thecityreview.com)

Cube Structures Basedon Five Models, 1971-74 (Crown Point Press, San Francisco)

1 2 3, 1978 (artcritical.com)

Wall Drawing No. 681 C, 1993 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)

2-3-1-1, 1994 (university of iowa)

Loops and Curves No 4, 1999 (Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston)

Wall Drawing #1113 On a wall, a triangle within a rectangle, each with broken bands of color, 2003 (hirshhorn, washington)

mccain's dirty campaigners

2007-04-05T09:44:00.000-04:00

"straight talkin'" john mccain has a history of hiring real dirty tricksters for his 2008 campaign and brushing it off. in march 2000, mark mckinnon's maverick media team ran an ad for the Bush campaign charging mccain with being against breast cancer research -- an ad which then-mcmain spokeswoman nancy ives said showed "the Bush campaign trying to distort John McCain's record. . . . this is a desperate tactic that the voters of New York simply won't stand for" (quoted in the boston globe, march 2).

the firm stevens reed curcio & potholm created the swift boat veterans for truth campaign against john kerry in august 2004. "I deplore this kind of politics," McCain said. "I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable." (quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 6). finally, mccain hired as his campaign manager terry nelson, the man responsible for the ad run in the 2006 tennessee senate race that was widely perceived to be playing into stereotypes of black male promiscuity directed towards white women.

mccain's response to george stephanopoulos on the february 4 edition of ABC's "this week" was:

these are good people who were doing as they were instructed. They are people who shape the message, don't dictate it. But the second thing is, most of them are good people. They are all good people, otherwise I wouldn't hire them. And they have done a good job in the campaigns they've been -- myriad of campaigns they've been involved in.

the latest "good people" mccain has hired, as david corn of the nation has reported, is fred malek, who "counted jews for nixon."

coolidge at naropa

2007-04-04T19:09:00.000-04:00

more from the naropa archives, clark coolidge
reading a long poem -- unpublished in its entirety tho i believe portions have appeared at least in sulfur or oblek -- called "city in regard," july 12, 1991. intro by bobbie louise hawkins. robert creeley followed but i've edited the file down to make it more managheable. (it's still clocking in at 15M so i won't be able to keep this file up indefinitely). total time 31:35 minutes; coolidge is a bit low in the mic for the first few minutes but eventually the levels come up. enjoy... (photo credit to randy roark for the cover of friction 7; link to the full program at the naropa archives here.)

the iron whim

2007-04-04T13:36:00.000-04:00

joan acocella reviews darren wershler-henry's The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting for the new yorker.

visits to syria

2007-04-04T10:25:00.000-04:00

oh, that "liberal media" is at it again! house speaker nancy pelosi's visit to syria has received resounding condemnation. she's undercutting the troops, she's undercutting this president's diplomatic efforts (!), and so on. the white house took the lead on the attacks: on march 30, white house deputy press secretary dana perino attacked pelosi's trip: "I know that Assad probably really wants people to come and have a photo opportunity and have tea with him, and have discussions about where they're coming from, but we do think that's a really bad idea."

naturally we'd expect the right to follow with an uproar. glenn beck calls the trip "a little sun and sand and an unauthorized negotiation with our enemies" and also referred to it as "Nancy's little play date in the Middle East." on the april 2 edition of fox & friends, co-host steve doocy asked: "What the heck is she doing in the Middle East?" adding, "This has got the White House flummoxed." on his april 1 fox show, sean hannity said that pelosi "decid[ed] to spend her spring break frolicking with Tehran's terrorist minions." bill kristol on the april 1 fox news sunday claims that "Pelosi, having undercut our troops in the field, is now going off to see -- to Syria to pay her respects to Bashar Assad, who's allowing terrorists to come across the [Iraqi] border to kill American troops."

but it's not just the right, but the entire "liberal media" that has gone nearly altogether silent in neglecting the fact that a delegation of three house republicans -- frank wolf (r-va), joseph pitts (r-pa) and robert aderholt (r-al) -- met with syrian president bashar al-assad in damascus on april 1.

lexis-nexis search results prove it. search the previous month for "wolf" and "pitts" and "aderholt" and "syria" anywhere in the body text and you get only five hits:

1. The Nation; Bush faults Pelosi over trip to Syria; He says the House speaker may undermine policy. A weekend visit by GOP lawmakers drew no comment., Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2007, Johanna Neuman
2. Both sides say other supports 'failure' in Iraq; Bush prods Congress to pass a timetable so he can veto it and 'business of funding our troops' can begin, USA TODAY, April 4, 2007, David Jackson
3. PELOSI REJECTS CRITICISM OF TRIP, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 3, 2007
4. AROUND THE GLOBE, The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), April 3, 2007
5. Planned Visit to Syria by Pelosi Is Under Fire From White House, The New York Times, March 31, 2007, JEFF ZELENY

search instead for "pelosi" appearing within ten words of "syria" anywhere in the body text, however, and you get 35 hits

1. White House condemns Pelosi on Damascus visit, The Australian (Australia),April 4, 2007,
2. White House condemns Speaker's Syria visit, The Australian (Australia), April 4, 2007
3. SUN NEWS DIGEST, The Baltimore Sun, April 4, 2007,
4. Bush attacks Pelosi over talks with Syrian president, The Daily Telegraph , April 4, 2007, by Toby Harnden
5. Inside Today, The Gazette (Montreal), April 4, 2007,
6. United States: Bush hits out at House Speaker's visit to Syria, The Guardian, April 4, 2007
7. Controversy over Pelosi's tour; World News IN BRIEF, The Independent, April 4, 2007
8. The Nation; Bush faults Pelosi over trip to Syria; He says the House speaker may undermine policy. A weekend visit by GOP lawmakers drew no comment., Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2007, by Johanna Neuman
9. On speaking terms; Bush's criticism of Pelosi's visit to Syria is off-base. It's time someone from the U.S. broke the ice., Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2007
10. News Summary, The New York Times, April 4, 2007
11. Pelosi, Warmly Greeted in Syria, Is Criticized by White House, The New York Times, April 4, 2007, by HASSAN M. FATTAH
12. Pelosi diplomacy, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, April 4, 2007, EDITORIAL
13. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, April 4, 2007,
14. Bush talks tough in struggle over war funds; With Congress on break, he makes use of news vacuum, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, April 4, 2007, by Edward Epstein
15. International, South China Morning Post, April 4, 2007
16. Both sides say other supports 'failure' in Iraq; Bush prods Congress to pass a timetable so he can veto it and 'business of funding our troops' can begin, USA TODAY, April 4, 2007, by David Jackson
17. Bush Backs Richardson Trip to North Korea; N.M. Governor in Group Claiming War Remains, The Washington Post, April 4, 2007, by Glenn Kessler
18. Israelis seek Arab summit, Hobart Mercury (Australia), April 3, 2007
19. ROAD TO DAMASCUS - DEFIANT PELOSI DEFENDS SYRIA VISIT, The New York Post, April 3, 2007, by GEOFF EARLE
20. NANCY'S NONSENSE, The New York Post,April 3, 2007
21. Mideast dissonance; Arms buildup imperils Arab-Israeli talks, Newsday (New York), April 3, 2007, OPINION
22. PELOSI REJECTS CRITICISM OF TRIP, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 3, 2007
23. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, April 3, 2007
24. Pelosi seen moving around Bush in Mideast; A BOLD STEP: Analysts call speaker's trip 'a big deal,' but how much can she do?, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, April 3, 2007, by Carolyn Lochhead
25. AROUND THE GLOBE, The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), April 3, 2007
26. The World; Olmert invites Arab talks; In a surprise move, the Israeli premier offers to meet regional leaders in Jerusalem to discuss a Saudi peace plan., Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2007, by Richard Boudreaux
27. PELOSI'S MESSAGE FOR SYRIA, The New York Post,April 2, 2007, by NEIL GRAVES
28. White House slap at trip to Syria peeves Hobson; Bush team says visit to country reinforces its terrorist support, The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), April 1, 2007, by Jonathan Riskind
29. Planned Visit to Syria by Pelosi Is Under Fire From White House, The New York Times, March 31, 2007, By JEFF ZELENY
30. MISS SYRIA - WHITE HOUSE SLAMS PELOSI TERROR TRIP; DICTATOR'S GUEST PELOSI THE DARLING OF DAMASCUS, The New York Post, March 31, 2007, by IAN BISHOP
31. -$6 MILLION SCRATCH N' WIN - NEW CARD MONDAY; TODAY'S NUMBERS -FANTASTIC FINAL FOUR - MARCH MADNESS-MISS SYRIA - WHITE HOUSE SLAMS PELOSI TERROR TRIP, The New York Post, March 31, 2007
32. WORLD & NATION BRIEFS, Newsday (New York), March 31, 2007
33. Pelosi to lead mission to Syria; Stop on Mideast fact-finding trip draws White House criticism, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, March 31, 2007, by Matthew B. Stannard
34. Ellison begins 9-day trip to Mideast; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited the Minnesota representative on the trip. The stop in Syria has raised criticism., Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), March 31, 2007, by Brady Averill
35. Pelosi Plans Trip to Syria Next Week; White House Says Speaker's Damascus Visit Sends the Wrong Message, The Washington Post, March 31, 2007, by Elizabeth Williamson

in other words, the pelosi trip is covered roughly 7 times for every single mention of the repubican trip. that's quite an advantage the "liberal media" is giving the republicans.

the stats for news transcripts (radio and TV) are even more staggering: "wolf" and "pitts" and "aderholt" and "syria" anywhere in the body text since march 30 yields only two results; "pelosi" within ten words of "syria" during the same time period? 541 results.

duncan at naropa

2007-04-03T18:45:00.001-04:00

the naropa archives are a fantastic resource of recordings, containing many readings and lectures by many famous poets of the post-WWII era. the searching is very easy, made even more so by the excellent descriptions and keyword tags assoicated with the files; actual listening, however, can be tricky: the files tend to be enormous, and portions of multi-part lectures are often not clearly identified.

time and patience will be rewarded, however. and for me this was especially the case with a lecture by robert duncan i downloaded. given on june 10, 1976, the lecture is listed as being titled "warp and woof," and "cover[ing] truth vs. fabrication, Homer, Ezra Pound, imagism and Plotinus, magic Neo-Platonism, Pound's usury, effects of personal experience on poetry, dictionaries, etymologies, Denise Levertov's fairy tale experience, revisions, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Ginsberg and aboriginal poets."

in fact, that's barely the half of it; and the fact is that duncan can cover the above listed topics in a minute or two without even batting an eye. hearing his mind work is as delightful as it is awe-inspiring -- truly one of the great poetic minds of the century.

and so to give the uninitiated a taste, i've resurrected the audio feature i first (and to date only) used with horace tapscott many months ago. yes, heuriskein is an audioblog once again, this time featuring a 5:39 minute excerpt (mp3, 2.3M) of duncan's "warp and woof lecture" in which a few of the above-listed topics are given whirlwind treatment. i also transcribe the excerpt below in case you'd like to read along. (makes me wonder how many other equally stimulating duncan lectures are out there and if we night all be well served one day to have them transcribed and published. lisa j, you out there?) links to the full lectures are also included below.

-----------------

[18:10] … because we’re so coming together that the fabric throughout is beginning to be consubstantial. And it’s poets who announce very early -- okay, we’re back at poetry of all things! -- poets announce very early that that fabric is consubstantial. And one of the great poets who make -- and his greatness, for our, in my inheritance, is this that he saw, and he is the person most disturbed by our coming to recognize that it’s consubstantial -- and that is Pound. He said all events in history are contemporaneous; but… had he added “all human spirit is identical, and our true identity is as a matter of fact human,” we begin to see that if you were to name yourself human, you were an enemy of life, and if you were to name yourself living, all life ravens upon the universe as if it could, and so you’d be an enemy of the universe. I mean there’s not a living form that isn’t working away day and night to demolish the earth it lives on -- chew chew, chomp chomp, scrabble scrabble, dig holes in it, the whole thing, uh -- in this fabric, where are you gonna put yourself?

And yet the great adventure was to even have an identity in the species. Pound, with this “all times are contemporaneous,” then identified the image in a different way than Plato had proposed before and than where the Greeks thought it. All men see things -- and I’m now talking about a seeing that in its seeing will flood throughout your life, but that’s anything that you see as matter of fact it turns out -- Plato talks about it as if, or he proposes that ideas… are… that there are ideas of ideas, and ideas are over there, in one of the interpretations of Plato. But the great trouble was, what do you see -- when you see inside your head what do you see?

By the time Pound, he described that same idea, all of the Imagists -- one thing they don’t tell in school when they give you Imagism, they behave when they give you Imagism as if you were writing a poem about a flower you saw? That’s not it at all! Because when Imagists reviewed Imagists they related it right straight off to Plotinus. And they also related it to the magic Neoplatonists at this stage, of Proclus and Iamblichus, where… In Plotinus, the Platonic image is suddenly really conceived of as emanating throughout the universe and illustrating in decreasing degrees itself, so it would be present throughout but at one place it really is. And by the time you come to Iamblichus and Proclus, their magic consists of rituals in which you bring into presentation and to be into the present. Now, we’re… let’s think about “present”: a present given you, but also the present, the moment right where we are… the idea would be present. And in the presence of the idea, or “the poet presents” -- this was the great term Pound had, one term he had, “we work for presentation not expression,” we don’t squeeze it out of ourselves, we evoke a presence, a presentation -- but it was of the idea, and he said that the image, of the imago, and he said the image was, happened in a nexus of time, and it was a complex, and he related it…

Now, he already had his anti-Semitism so he was a little haunted by where this word “complex” comes into the picture. So he lays it off on a psychologist by the name of Hart in England, and it’s a little disappointing to go over there and find out that can’t possibly be what was on his mind. Isn’t it beautiful? That you can be a determined anti-Semite, but your head will be flooded, since the whole world is flooded, with ideas that emanate from Einstein, from Freud… you don’t not hear the news! You yourself can be in a great rage and finally you want to… well. Pound in the Cantos calls two people “kikes.” Ordinary language calls people “kikes” when they’re angry ‘cause they got cheated in some bargain, and they’ll call anybody “kike” in that situation. No, Pound uses it where it really shows up the whole situation, he uses it on Marx and Freud! The two minds that are radiating throughout this fabric, have transformed and transvalued all of the fabric we’re going to see, if we’re gonna take two people that are most powerful forces… And then he calls them, and then he puts the word there!

Well then, when the word’s there I think it blows up, doesn’t it? That’s a crack [correct?] thing, poets have real instincts. What if he just loaded it off on somebody we didn’t like? And that’s where we usually use such words, somebody we’d throw away. Say, “that bad guy’s a so-and-so,” and that’s alright. (We can refer to Nixon with lots of terms because we feel he’s disposable.) But if we brought it up to something we revere where it ought to be used… If you’ve got a bad term in your mind, bring it up to the very top, and then put it there. But Pound still was not gonna attend the blowing up. So he blew up, hm? Okay.

But that still tells us something about the fabric. That’s my inheritance, I’m telling you where I’m coming from. If you’re really worried about why I don’t sound very coherent, if you’re really the child of a blow up it’s not going to sound very coherent. I’m dutiful, I understand you have duties when you undertake a discipline, don’t you? A poem… poetry is a duty, ok? But poetry’s happening across centuries and things are happening in it. I don’t get to jump way ahead to a good poem, I have to inhabit the poetry I inhabit. [23:44]

------------
links to the full lecture, parts one and two

exchange with stan apps

2007-03-23T13:29:00.000-04:00

there's an interesting exchange between me and stan apps, stemming from his brief comments on my serial poem "brakhage notes," which just came out in the latest issue of primary writing. it's going on mostly in the comments box, so i pull it from there and reproduce below -- but read the whole post for his take on joseph mosconi (in the same issue) and stephanie rioux (in the very interesting previous issue).

----------------

Tom Orange in his “Brakhage Notes” aims to provide a language of “defamiliarize[d] vision” in order to “discover a more natural, primal vision” similar to the vision that Brakhage’s films share with the viewer. I can’t reproduce Orange’s spacing but a typical series of images is:

undermerged / climbingdown mouth / pickedup armheld / fingers / eye turns to eye / to mouth / fingers / taste / from spoon

branchlined / glitterbreeze / playground / relearned mass skeletal / shaken scream

This language does enact an interestingly primal narrative of childhood sensory experience, the romanticism of which presents an interesting contrast to Mosconi’s fierce critique of the legacy of Romanticism in the same issue. Orange’s work here seems unlike much of his other work; “Brakhage Notes” seems to succeed at performing a rather limited intention. The sensory narrative it constructs seems to be offered entirely for its own sake, with no intention of recuperating it for any broader purpose or project. So when we are given the image of a playground climbing structure as “skeletal” and shaken with children’s screams (assumedly mostly happy screams), I find myself with nothing to do with the image but to relate it to my own experiences; this particular work resolves into narrative for me.

#

At 7:48 AM, tmorange said…

hi stan,

just to clarify: by claiming brakhage's cinematic goal was "to artifice and defamiliarize vision so as to discover a more natural, primal vision," i did not mean to infer this to be the goal for my "brakhage notes" piece as well.

i am, however, interested in the plausibility of this goal for any creative endeavors -- even tho i'm suspicious of modifiers like "more natural" and "primal," which i think are far more important to brakhage than they are to me personally.

as i think about it now, the "brakhage notes" are concerned primarily with the (failure of) translating of visual experience into language on the field of the page. that is, much of what's going on in the brakhage films cannot be captured on the page. (as a multi-track sound-text performance, the piece comes closer i think to a more faithful rendering of the visual experience.)

thanks,
tom

#

At 12:12 PM, sa said…

Hi Tom,

That's very interesting! I seem to have seriously misread the intention of your piece. I read your piece as a sort of reconstruction of the Brakhage, whereas it's actually more intended as a critique of mimetic processes.

I'm always trying to decide how interested I am in this question of can a work in one medium be reproduced in another. It seems to hinge on whether one is reproducing "content" or "sentiment".

It seemed to me that your piece did reproduce sentiment typical of a Brakhage film, and that was why I read it the way I did--these notions of "natural" and "primal" are interesting sentiments. You must have had some sense that you were re-transmitting these?

#

At 9:52 AM, tmorange said…

stan,

well you're right actually -- i guess in a similar fashion to joseph's bristling at the idea that he had written "persona poems," so i initially bristled at the idea that i was striving for brakhage's "more nautral, primal vision." to the extent that my poems are a verbal record of the visual experience of the films, it's inevitable that brakhage's "content" will find its way in -- "a sort of reconstruction of the Brakhage" as you say.

and the passages you cited and commented on certainly reflect that kind of "more natural, primal" content, going back to childhood and all. so i guess i'd say i admire brakhage's goals but don't thereby identify with his natural/primal framework, or the sentiment that inheres to it.

quite the contrary, i'm suspicious of something like "human nature" as a fixed, unchanging, transcendent category, as well as appeals to origins and the primitive. it's all a bit too noble savage, child is the father of the man for me.

if instead we take "more natural" to mean more enabling of our untapped human potentials (wcw's "the perfection of new forms as additions to nature") and "primitive means complex" (rothenberg) -- then i'm on board.

allbests,
t.

p.s. i'm curious tho, if by "sentiment typical of a Brakhage film" you mean the natural/primal thing or something else.

executive priviledge

2007-03-23T13:11:00.000-04:00

Dear Editor,

The White House claims that the conditions it has placed on its officials testifying before Congress over the politically-motivated dismissal of eight federal prosecutors last December -- that they be interviewed only in private, without transcripts, and not under oath -- are based on "executive priviledge." This may be legally sound.

Unfortunately, this administration has demonstrated a compulsive inability to tell the truth. Justice Department officials have changed their story over these dismissals numerous times, and now we see a gap in the e-mail messages released by the White House -- between November 15 and December 7, the very weeks leading to the dismissals. Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and the others need to testify -- in public, for the record, and under oath so the truth can be compelled from them.

[sent to Chicago Tribune, USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, NBC News, Washington Times, American Conservative, American Enterprise, American Prospect, American Spectator, Congressional Quarterly, Inc., Cook Political Report, Human Events, Insight On The News, National Journal Magazine, Public Interest, Roll Call, RollCall.com, Washington Monthly, Weekly Standard, New Republic, Sojourners, US News & World Report, C-SPAN Radio, National Public Radio (NPR), C-SPAN Radio, Pacifica Radio, Voice of America, Cybercast News Service, Dow Jones Newswires Washington Bureau, Gannett News Service, Hearst News Service, Reuters America - Washington Bureau, Scripps Howard News Service, States News Service, Capital Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Florida Times-Union, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Times-Picayune, Charlotte Post, Cincinnati Post, Columbus Post, Denver Post, Dover Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Post and Courier, Post-Standard, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington Post Writers Group, Dallas Morning News, Detroit News, Duluth News Tribune, Knoxville News-Sentinel, New York Daily News, News & Observer, Patriot-News, Pensacola News Journal, San Antonio Express-News, Savannah Morning News, San Jose Mercury News, Springfield News-Leader, Union Leader & New Hampshire Sunday News, Wheeling News-Register, Wilmington News Journal, Arizona Daily Star, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Indianapolis Star, Kansas City Star, Lincoln Journal Star, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pasadena Star-News, Tribune Star]

Library of Congress Jazz Film Series

2007-03-23T10:59:00.000-04:00

April 2-30, 2007
Mary Pickford Theater
James Madison Building
Library of Congress

All programs are free, but seating is limited to 60 seats. Reservations may be made by phone, beginning one week before any given show. Call (202) 707-5677 during business hours (Monday-Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm). Reserved seats must be claimed at least 10 mins before show time, after which standbys will be admitted to unclaimed seats. Programs subject to change without notice.

Monday, April 2 (7:00 pm)
Cecil Taylor: All The Notes (2003)
directed and produced by Christopher Felver (73 mins)
This insightful portrait of the avant pianist, composer and poet Cecil Taylor finds the free-jazz firebrand playing, dancing, reciting, performing with a big band and talking about life, art, music and memories.

Monday, April 9 (7:00 pm)
Home (2005)
directed and produced by Dorothy Darr (72 mins)
Just two months before his death in 2001, drummer Billy Higgins visited saxophonist Charles Lloyd at his home where they recorded a series of duets eventually released as the two-CD set Which Way Is East. The artist and film maker Dorothy Darr rolled both audio tape and video, revealing an intimate celebration of spiritual connection between two musical giants.

Monday, April 16 (7:00 pm)
Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation (2005)
directed and produced by Mike Dibb (85 mins)
Pianist Keith Jarrett discusses his creative life in music with rare clips, interviews and performances featuring his American and European Quartets, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, the Standards Trio and producer Manfred Eicher.

Monday, April 23 (7:00 pm)
Los Zafiros: Music From The Edge of Time (2004)
directed and produced by Lorenzo DeStefano (79 mins)
Music, emotion and rarely seen archival film clips from Cuban television fuel this bittersweet, award-winning tribute to the beloved vocal group Los Zafiros (The Saffires), known as the Beatles of 1960s Cuba. Thirty years after their breakup, the two surviving band members, Manuel Galbran and Miguel Cancio, reunite in Havana sharing songs, celebrations, memories and tears.

Monday, April 30 (7:00 pm)
Irene Schweizer (2005)
directed by Gita Gsell; produced by Franzika Reck (75 mins
Swiss pianist, composer Irene Schweizer has performed and recorded with many of the most important American, African and European improvisers. Since the 1980s, she's been associated with both the Feminist Improvising Group and the European Women's Improvising Group, as well as the collective trio Les Diaboliques, with Maggie Nichols and Joelle Leandre. Gita Gsell's stylized, visually stunning documentary features Schweizer talking about her work and performing with Les Diaboliques, Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, Han Bennink, Louis Moholo and others.

This screening is co-sponsored by the Embassy of Switzerland.
----------------------------------------------------------

Series curated by Larry Appelbaum
For press details or further information: lapp[at]loc[dot]gov

favorite bill berkson poems

2007-03-20T14:35:00.000-04:00

a list in advance of the career-spanning selected poems due out from coffee house in a coupla years...

from Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press, 2007)

No Danger of That
Never Happened
Last Look
English Suite
Merit
Heine Song
Thuringian Equals
After the Medusa
Salad Spinner
"I thought they were beautiful but they're really glamorous"
Glass Hoist
Compass Points
Cuban Fives

from Fugue State (Zoland Books, 2001)

A Head at the Covers
Shelter
Way How
Melting Milk
Graphics
Enough Already
Saint Francis Dark
The Reader's Lover
Binding Grievance
Camera Obscura
By Halves

from Serenade: Poetry and Prose 1975-1989 (Zoland Books, 2000)

Basis
From a Childhood #101
Poem ("cutting brush...")
Voyage from Jericho
Anti-Poem
Tint Guard
On Ice
Try Again
Ocean Grove
Burckhardt's Ninth
First Turns
Source
Stopping Is Nothing
You Know What Crazy Is?
End-of-Century Thrush
Start Over
On the High Window
A Fixture
Chocolate Chocolate Chip
At the Skin
Chasing the Slip

from Blue is the Hero (Poems 1960-1975) (L Publications, 1976)

Floors
Carolinas
Oscar

[still working on this book...]

second commandment republicans

2007-03-20T14:28:00.000-04:00

from tmorange
to letters@time.com
date Mar 20, 2007 9:37 AM
subject Joe Klein, "The Second Commandment Republicans" (3/15)

Dear Editors,

I wonder if you and Mr. Klein appreciate the ironies in your story that tries to point up a kinder, gentler Christian right in the person of Mike Huckabee ("The Second Commandment Republicans," 3/15).

If Huckabee's January 28 performance on NBC's "Meet the Press" is any indication, he's hardly the "political inconvenience, a destroyer of stereotypes" that Klein makes him out to be. No, he's an evasive, backpedalling waffler whose extreme right-wing positions are out of step with the American mainstream. All he could say to Russert about how badly this president has botched the War in Iraq is that "he's had a lot of struggles" and "it's been a struggle for the president." How about the struggles of the families who have sent their children to die in Iraw under false pretenses?

At a conference of Southern Baptist pastors on June 7, 1998, Huckabee said: "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ." Asked by Russert to clarify, he offered, "I think it's dangerous to say that we are a nation that ought to be pushed into a Christian faith by its leaders" -- which is of course exactly what he called for at the pastors' conference. Finally, he told Iowa's Christian Alliance in March 2006, "In our lifetimes, we've seen our country go from 'Leave It to Beaver' to 'Beavis and Butt-head,' from Barney Fife to Barney Frank, from 'Father Knows Best' to television shows where father knows nothing," subsequently defending this blatant piece of contempt for homosexuals and an affront to an elected offical a "rhetorical device" that "wasn't any particular attempt to be derisive of him." Rubbish.

Huckabee "talks like a liberal" only out of one corner of his mouth: with the other he backpedals and doubletalks his way through extreme right-wing positions. And as for the "moderate candidates who live like liberals" (referring to the multiple divorces of Giuliani, Gingrich, Romney and McCain), in fact the complete opposite of the time-worn stereotype of liberals reiterated unflinchingly by the so-called liberal media is true: Obama, Clinton and Edwards each remain married to their first and only spouses.