Blast on line
I’ve posted here before about the modernist magazine Blast. There were only 2 issues published in 1914 and 1915. It has had an amazing influence on our culture. You can now view the contents online at a site called “The Modernist Journals Project”
Technorati Tags: words
The Blast
The bits of glued paper, the imitation wood and other elements of the same sort,
which I have employed in some of my designs, are equally valid because of the
simplicity of these compositional facts, and for that reason have been confused with
illusion, of which they are the exact contrary. They too are simple facts, but they
been created by mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of a new
spatial figuration (Braque, “Pensées et réflexions sur la peinture,” Nord-sud).
from: The Art Quarterly (Metropolitan Museum of Art), I, Autumn 1978
sighted on David Baptiste Chirot Blog
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Another Extreme Alphabet
Extreme Alphabet:
Wow a new idea for work and clothes pins.
Technorati Tags: poetry, visual art, words
Alphabet Macabre
“The Alphabet, a short film by David Lynch, examines the simple recitation of the alphabet, a common form of rote learning, the speaking of which has a certain expected cadence. But Lynch plays with our expectations, taking an innocent bit of common experience and transforming it into a spooky investigation of…what? His own mind? The images and sounds that horripilate? The ways in which animation and film can distort the world they supposedly represent?
An amazing amount of experimentation is stuffed into this short: spooky animation techniques, disturbing jump cuts, how the tone of a voice can turn the skin to gooseflesh, blood as polka dots. Although the aphabet appears on the screen, in full or nearly so, twice, and the letter A, the sturdy opener to our alphabet has special billing, this is not a videopoem but a textualized film where the letters popping up on the screen propel us through a story we already know as we learn a story only our bones knew beforehand.” - Geof Huth ,dbqp Blogspot
Technorati Tags: visual art, words
The Age Demanded
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”
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Geomancy almanac from the 16th century
I love these images from Bibliodyssey blog. The come from an manuscript that was written in the around 1552. They deal with the signs of the zodiac. This looks like some of the neo-platonists’ work but I don’t really know the relationship between astrology and neo-platonism. I do know these images are great.
Technorati Tags: philosophy, visual art, words
Happy, Happy, Happy
I’ve just red this article from the Chronicle Review on Melancholy(In Praise of Melancholy - ChronicleReview.com). It promotes the idea that Melancholy should be treated as a something beautiful and transient. Quoting from Keats and the “Ode to Melancholy” This melancholy fit is a mixed affair. It falls from heaven “like a weeping cloud,/That fosters the droop-headed flowers all.” But it also brings rain and nourishment. Indeed, this cloud “hides the green hill in an April shroud.”
This is something I think about often in our culture of “Happiness”. I no longer know what that word or emotion means in our culture. Is is a new 42 inch Plasma TV, an appearance on American Idol? I used to think of melancholy as a “depression” and in one sense it is, but it is not a depression that is cured with Prozac, Effexor or an other new pill. It is not a depression that can be cured with a self-help book or talking therapy. Instead it is an opportunity to get a new perspective on life, it can show us a path back to life. It is an emotional food that can help us grow in ways we can only imagine.
ODE ON MELANCHOLY
NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
— John Keats (The Oxford Book of English Verse:
1250-1900, 1919 edition)
Technorati Tags: poetry, philosophy
VIDEOPOEM
A videopoem by Tom Konyves
I have done a couple of these without the sound. Mine were based on the work of J. Tarbell at levitated.net and were interactive. They were a part of an installation piece about internet porn. The first is a recording of a chat room conversation, I called it Chant Room Bus Ride. Another one was KEYWORD The words were taken from the work a congressional committee did to protect us from Internet Porn, the words were identified as key search words that would lead to porn sites. The same set of words were used in PORN FRACTAL
Don’t enjoy them too much — THEY may be watching!!!
Book Autopsies
Check out this site.
A kind of Book Collage sculptor.
WNMU Faculty: Visiting Navajo Poet
Sunny Dooley tells Blessingway stories with the blessing of her family, clans, and elders. She has told the stories throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Africa for ten years.
Monday, November 5, 2007
7:00 p.m. in the Global Resource Center Auditorium,
Western New Mexico University
Free and Open to the Public.
Sponsored by the New Mexico Humanities Council and
The Millennium III Honors Program, Western New Mexico University
Charles Olsen Movie
Posted from Ron Silliman’s blog. Olsen is a favorite poet. Check out the trailer herehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/FXkn:If Polis is This: Charles Olson and The Persistence of Place isn’t the best motion picture ever made about an American poet – a claim attributed to Bill Corbett on the film’s website – it’s mostly because What Happened to Kerouac? the 1986 documentary made by Richard Lerner & Lewis Mac Adams (with major post-production editorial work from co-producer Nathaniel Dorsky) set the bar so very high. But perhaps because Kerouac in death as in life has long been an icon in the American popular imagination, while Olson remains primarily of interest to other poets, the task of these two films is fundamentally different.In fact, one of the best sequences in Polis comes early on with the filmmaker wandering around Gloucester, Massachusetts, asking the locals what they recall of Olson, who died, mind you, more than three decades before. A surprising number remember “the big guy,” a reasonable way to characterize a poet 6’8” tall – one of them is able to cite the passage where he and his buddies can be found in Maximus. This film is full of such small, fine touches, while offering a narrative of Olson’s life and an exposition of his main ideas, particularly his appropriation of Robert Creeley’s “form is never more than an extension of content” (explained here by Creeley himself with assistance from NFL film footage!). Another absolutely amazing moment is Pete Seeger’s explanation of how Charles Olson caused Woody Guthrie to write Bound for Glory. That by itself is worth the price of admission.Most of the limits of the film are the consequence of attempting to pack so much into a one-hour time slot. Polis hardly touches the last decade of Olson’s life – particularly odd given his status as a late-starter & his death at 59 – which also means that the question of alcohol is never addressed. Nor the ways in which the death of his wife Betty in an auto accident in 1964 set him emotionally adrift. And there are themes within his work, places literally, that the film could have detailed far better for the reader who has not (yet) wandered the streets of Gloucester with Maximus as their map. The Cut, for one, Dogtown for another. Dogtown once was a town itself, an alternate Gloucester that sprang up before residents understood just how dependent on the proximity of the sea the community would become. As people moved east to the shore, the houses left behind were given to the inevitable widows left by shipwrecks, etc. Finally the neighborhood was abandoned & reverted to the brambles of “open space,” tho you can still find the foundations of the old houses there. It’s so overgrown today that visitors are warned to take compasses and let friends know they’ve gone in. To be “from Dogtown,” like Olson’s alter ego, is to be from the wild, abandoned, tragic past. This is not Russell Crowe’s Maximus, but the Creature from the Black Lagoon as oversized, absent-minded professor. If this be persona, it is the most complex, fascinating example of such in American literature.Perhaps the film’s main weakness, tho, is one that it shares with What Happened to Kerouac? The scarcity of women & women’s voices. There are just a handful, notably Susan Thackery, Anne Waldman & Diane DiPrima. The most glaring omission turns out to be Frances Boldereff, Olson’s mistress during the period in which he formulated “Projective Verse” and Maximus both. Even if it’s overblown to set Boldereff up as Olson’s muse, the “secret sauce” that makes possible these epoch-changing projects, her impact was nonetheless profound. Her absence, even if it was a condition of the family’s cooperation, doesn’t serve Olson well.But the larger problem isn’t so much the erasure of Boldereff – whose existence wasn’t widely known even to Olson’s friends at the time – as it is the whole question of the New American Poetry’s way of relating to women. The Allen anthology includes just four females among its 44 contributors: Denise Levertov, Barbara Guest, Madeline Gleason and Helen Adam. Only Levertov, who died in 1997, would have made sense in the context of this film, tho she never was a student at Black Mountain and largely abandoned her New American roots after 1970. (Three of the four, it’s worth noting, were personal friends of Robert Duncan’s, who did teach briefly at the North Carolina college, but whose relationship to women as a gay male differed from Olson’s machismo.) One wonders if future conferences & panels concerning male New American poets generally won’t end up having the same unspoken requirement that conferences do today regarding Ezra Pound’s politics, where either a panel or, at the least, a speaker is compelled to address the problems of fascism & anti-semitism. We may just need an extended series of “Olson & Women,” “Creeley & Women,” “O’Hara & Women,” “Blackburn & Women,” “Duncan & Women,” “Eigner & Women,” “Baraka & Women” events.
Now Reading
Planned books:
None
Current books:
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The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky by Mark Scroggins
Recent books:
- Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime by Stephen Batchelor
- The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Roberto Bolano
- Georges Braque: A Life by Alex Danchev
- de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens
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