Tuesday, November 30, 2004

I wasn't feelin' it. I walked in a little late (I suck) and she was talking about semi's and capitalism and I liked that stuff. But gradually, it got, I don't know, bogged down. I know I'm supposed to have posted this beforehand, but I thought I'd try an experiment and hear her read before I posted. Thee things I read of hers beforehand, a few poems and two critical essays (one about starting her own press, which was kind of cool) were interesting. I went in and out on them. And tonight, she had my attention for some of it, like when she talked about stepping off a curb and the holding on to a dissappearing line and somehow being glad it might all come to ruin- that was very affective.

Two main problems I can put my finger. First, too many adjectives. I don't like it in prose, don't like it in poetry. Gertrude Stein says a lot of cryptic things about adjectives in Poetry and Grammar, and to the extent that one can sensibly agree with shwat Stein writes as if it were propositions in the traditional sense, I think I do. They don't ever actually say much. I know 'sayijng something' is a pretty provincial criterion, but there's my prejudice.

Second. She titled a poem "Categories" and opened with a line something like: "The empiricists decided, true and not true create a non-truth" os something like that, and it just sounded like bullshit to me. If she's talking about an historical moment in philosophy, she's got me (and I'm pretty up on my empiricists, but you never know). If she's doing something else with the word, than I don't know what that is. I think I take an opposite tact than Meg here, and instead of throwing up my hands, I get a little pissed. I'm trying to take her at her word, and if that isn't the game, if these words aren't referring to their customary referents then I'd like some indication that a different game is being played (like some quote marks, or more non-sense surrounding the words). I'm not saying you have to use the traditional referent of whatever word you put in a poem, but I do feel like you should let the reader/listener know what game is afoot.

I guess I'm being harsh because I just got the sense she was throwing around words she liked the sound of (this is tied to the adjective complaint above). That sounds like a funny complaint to make about poetry, but I'm kind of weird that way. There's enough non-sense in the world to be adding to it willy-nilly with empty verbiage (although that might be an over-the-top comment), as sometimes I thought she was saying very meaningful things). Also, there's enough beauty. That's probably the most controversial thing I'll say here, but really: beauty is cheap. And I don't mean manufactured beauty, beauty I would call beauty without irony- there's too much of it, and it's readily produced. Some of Billy Collins' lines are actually beautiful, as are some moments in Hollywood dramas (even the ones with explosions). There's even beauty in some Christian hard rock. I think only in architecture is there nothing beautiful being made these days, and that's just because it's regulated by the government and so expensive to realize that no one really thinks of aesthetics anymore (just gloss on top of shit).

Beauty bores the fuck out of me these days. Why not produce something ugly? I'm going to think about all this and then read her again, because any time I hate a poet I have to go read them to make sure I'm not just being a dick (which is often). I thin kI may have some extrinsic reasons for feeling like this at the moment. But before I go, I'm wondering what folks think of the politics of her stuff and her statement about politics in poetry in Invective Verses: that "Instead we should annoy the power mongers by using poetic propaganda to launch a ruthless critique of them and their buddies and to expose the world of contradictions surrounding us. For poetry, my friends, is like a sit-in at the luncheonette of language, and we should refuse to get up and walk across the street to the "poets only" diner. Poetry is the insistence that we partake in the expression of our lives,"

Again I thought it was bullshit, but how 'bout someone smarter, and less ugly, than me says something.

G'night
Interesting somewhat funny article at Slate...

The Anne Winters Challenge: Should a Marxist poet be stylistically ornate?
By Dan Chiasson

Wouldn't Winters' time be better served petitioning City Hall or learning carpentry than getting the cadences of her poem right?

But when you start bringing these kinds of objections up—when they start interfering with your enjoyment of works of art—you realize what an impoverished discussion we've all been having, these past years, about art and its connection to experience. We've come to imagine that there needs to be a traceable, obvious connection between "style" in art and subject matter. An art of the people better have lots of swear-words and spitting in it. And honking horns. An art of the intellect should be about Big Ideas. An art of theoretical density has got to be unintelligible. An art of great beauty should mention snow fields and sunsets. Art by Southerners should be full of dirt-roads and hounds. If this sounds parodic, read around in contemporary literature with my inventory in mind. Contemporary literature is parodic.



Breaking News- School Teachers in Athen,s Georgia are planning on returning to Aristotle's original account of gravitation or of why human beings don't float away from the Earth's surface. According to Aristotle, human beings, along with the planet Earth, belong to the class of sub-lunary things, and therefore are attracted to each other. The stars, on the other hand, are super-lunary things and thus stay away from the earth's surface. This is in response to what the teachers are calling "problems/gaps" in the theory of gravitation.

In related news, teachers in Santa Fe New Mexico have begun teaching the Zuni account of how human beings emerged from under the earth's surface when their Spider Mother told them to go look at the world above ground, as a theory on the origin of human beings. In response to reporter's questions they said, "Christians aren't the only people from the desert with ideas about where we came from- why should they get all the attention?" Rev. Falwell could not be reached for comment.
The school board has ordered that biology teachers at Dover Area High School make students "aware of gaps/problems" in the theory of evolution. Their ninth-grade curriculum now must include the theory of "intelligent design," which posits that life is so complex and elaborate that some greater wisdom has to be behind it.

In the spirit of fairness, they have also been ordered to make students aware of "gaps" in the "Theory of Jesus" including how a infinite being became finite by coming to Earth, died and then became infinite again by ascending, and also the "Theory of Evil" which holds that an all-powerful and all-good God nevertheless created an evil, intolerant world. Explanations are also to be forthcoming on the "Theory of Non-Evidentiary Argumenuts", the "Theory of Revisionist Histories", the "Theory of Selective MIstranslation from the Hebrew" and the 'Theory of Discarding the First Amendment".

A. S. Keptic, Investigative Reporter, Dover, Pa.

Sunday, November 28, 2004

rare occasion indeed. I got to translate 2 stanzas of an ancient Thai poem for my TV script! thought I place them here. And Hello everyone :)

(one stroke ( / ) indicates a pause, two strokes ( //) indicate a line break )


the night fallen, the time / lanterns float //
all men and women / out gliding //
music amidst singing / I hear //
fingers graciously saluting / I see //

lantern of precious light / amber gold //
yet without a lover, my heart shows / darkness //
fire burning low / yet persisting //
my heart smoulders / in restlessness //

and this is the original....

กรรดึกเดือนตั้งแต่ง โคมถวาย
ทุกท่วยหญิงชายแสวง ล่องเหล้น
ขับซอปี่แคนหลาย เพลงพาทย์
ติ้งติ่งนิ้วน้าวเต้น ร่อนรำ

โคมทองประทีปแก้ว เรืองใน
อกพี่คือโคมดำ คู่ได้
เพลิงผลาญกระอุใจ วนิเจต
ทรวงรลุงหลาญไหม้ ป่วนเปน
Be sure and congratulate Dan tomorrow. He is turning in his thesis.

also, some of you might be doing work that might fit into this...

Constituent Imagination
Research + Resistance in the Global Justice Movement

Over the past ten years the various tendrils of the global justice movement have developed a multiplicity of new forms of social resistance. From occupied factories and neighborhood assemblies in Argentina to raucous UK street parties and Italian social centers, these new forms of resistance and organizing have blurred, questioned, and broken down notions of political action and organization. Far from the "end of history" predicted in 1989, the circulation and spread of autonomous struggles and politics worldwide has proclaimed loudly "we are everywhere." These forms of social protagonism are developing alternatives to a neoliberal world in the organization of resistance, constructing new possibilities through the constitutive power of lived imagination.

Just as we use narratives to construct and deconstruct our social world, so narratives about forms of politics open up or delimit possibilities for organization. But the relation of radical academics and intellectuals and the social movements we work with (or more often talk about with little real connection) has had a tenuous and not always positive history. Far too often radical theorists have used their knowledge or ideas to claim leadership roles and positions of power within movements, attempting to control and direct through vanguard structures, leading to many problems despite their positive intentions. The practices of the interwoven strands of the global justice movement, creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties, or corporation, demand that radical theorists and academics critically rethink their role in and relation to movements, and the nature of intellectual practice itself.

This volume seeks contributions of essays and interviews as well visual contributions that explore the relation between research, resistance, and organization occurring in the global justice movement. That is, we wish to seek out the voices not of those who comment upon organizing from afar or from above, but engage in research and investigation from an engaged perspective and political praxis, people who take seriously the Zapatistas' concept of walking while asking questions. Contributors are encouraged to be creative with format and style (think beyond the generic academic paper format!). Please send your proposal of 500 words or less to proposals@constituentimagination.net by January 15th, 2005.


Constituent Imagination: Research + Resistance in the Global Justice Movement
Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Leicester, Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy) & David Graeber (Yale University, Anthropology)
Website: www.constituentimagination.net
For more information please contact Stevphen Shukaitis by e-mailing stevphen [at] mutualaid [dot] org or calling +44 (0) 870 015 6097.


Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Thursday- The Main Event: Ice-Block Sliding

I don't know how familiar folks are with this venerable tradition, but every thanksgiving, the righteous and sinners alike don a towel and set themselves upon a block of ice to go careening down a grassy knowel in Mill Valley. If anyone's up for the challenge, me and a pack of miscreants will be conveening at 4th St. Liquors in San Rafael to purchase some block ice and cheap hooch before driving out to the Mill Valley country club and sliding down the greens for great justice. Give me a call (520-295-7759) after 9pm on Thursday if you're in the area. It's hella fun.

Happy Manifest Destiny Day,
Dillon

Friday, November 19, 2004

Please remember to read Jennifer Moxley and post on her work.

From her intro to Imagination Verses...

Poetry is not for the passive. It is, as Mayakovsky knew, at its very heart tendentious. Even the love poem agitates the beloved to fall in love with the poet.



November 12, 2004 Friday
Late Edition - Final

HEADLINE: Stopping by the Prosaic on an Autumn Day

BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:

The nation's new poet laureate, Ted Kooser, drove without a second thought across the red-blue fissure of the elections -- two days on the road from his Nebraska home to his splendid aerie by the copper dome of the Library of Congress. He listened to Bach, not Limbaugh, as he crossed the Appalachian Mountains and headed down into this politics-crazed place, arriving as an aberration: an American filled with notions apart from partisanship.

''This is really an apolitical position, and I think it ought to stay that way,'' Mr. Kooser laconically ruled, disappointing anyone who thought that as the nation's first Great Plains poet laureate, he would perch here and make lyrical sense of the latest divide to obsess the capital city.

Mr. Kooser's worldview is hardly that parochial. He writes long-term of mankind, political and not, as one of many skeletons down at your local bone museum: ''This is the only one in which once throbbed a heart/ made sad by brooding on its shadow.'' That covers far more than electoral disappointment, and Mr. Kooser arrives with a far more exotic work ethic than the typical talking head.

He wrote poems for decades as an insurance company executive, arising at 4:30 in the morning to compose. He made sure that his secretary critiqued the 30 or 40 rewrites he did to keep them taut and frill-free.

After decades of writing, the poet likens a poem to a teleidoscope, the playful round-lens device that, when focused on life's routine, turns it extraordinary. The capital can surely use at least one teleidoscope among its batteries of 24/7 news lenses. But Mr. Kooser figures that he'll manage no fresh poems in the year he works as a kind of bardic lobbyist (valued at $35,000 a
year) for more Americans to try a poem.

''Sept. 11 happens, and tens of thousands of people try to write poems about it,'' Mr. Kooser notes, talking about the possibilities of his post. ''What it is, is our need to find order in an extremely disorderly world. Poetry is sort of a small piece of order.'' All the more reason this city cries out for his teleidoscope. But the laureate makes no promise in this bazaar of promises. '
'Maybe there's a chance I can find something small and specific here that I can work with,'' the poet says, waxing doubtful.

FRANCIS X. CLINES
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: November 12, 2004

Thursday, November 18, 2004

from that argument between thom yorke (of radiohead) & howard zinn...

(full text @ http://www.alternet.org/story/17242 )

QUESTION: would you say that there's a place for both directly political and non-political artists? What importance do you think each have?

Zinn: There are all sorts of artists. There are artists who really don't have a social consciousness, who don't see that there's a connection between art and life in a way that compels the artist to look around the world and see what is wrong and try to use his or her art to change that. There are artists who just entertain. You can look upon entertainment as something useful, as we don't want to eliminate art which is only entertaining, and insist that all art must be political, must be revolutionary, must be transforming.

But there's a place for comedy and music and the circus and things that don't really have an awful effect on society except to entertain people -- to make people feel good, and to act as a kind of religion. That is what Marx called the "opium of the people," something that people need. They need distraction.

So it does serve a purpose, but if that's all that artists do, the entertainment that you seek will become permanent. The misery that people live under and the wars that people have to go through, that will become permanent. There are huge numbers of people in the world whose lives are bound, limited. Lives of sheer misery, of sickness and violence. In order to change that you need to have artists who will be conscious of that, who will use their art in such a way that it helps to transform society. It may not be a blunt instrument, but it will have a kind of poetic effect.

Yorke: Yeah, I don't think we are political at all, I think I'm hyper aware of the soapbox thing. It is difficult to make political art work. If all it does is exist in the realms of political discussion, it's using that language, and generally, it's an ugly language. It is very dead, definitely not a thing of beauty. The only reason, I think, that we go anywhere near it is because, like any reason that we buy music, these things get absorbed. These are the things surrounding your life. If you sit down and try to do it purposefully, and try to change this with this, and do this with that, it never works.

I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape. But there are different ways to escape. I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment -- that's escape. Wherever the music came from originally is secondary to what's happening at that moment, how the music sends you somewhere else. That's the important thing.

Zinn: It's true that much of political language is ugly. We have to cherish those political writers whose language is beautiful, like Arundhati Roy, or Barbara Kingsolver, including those whose political language is funny, like Michael Moore. And it's possible to react to such ugliness by saying music should not try to be overtly political because it will lose its beauty. But that doesn't have to happen. Look at Dylan. Very strongly political, but poetic.

Yorke: My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art. The first requirement is that it's good art, and if it is, then there's a sense of escape. But I'm biased. I don't think that, to escape, it has to be bland at all. I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music. If you look at "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer, in the lyrics and the way it runs, it feels really escapist but there's a huge darkness over all the sounds and the way she is singing it. Just past that escapism is the representation of what's around you. If you paint it all away, then you have no sense of uplift, because it has no sense of identification. It's nonsense for its own sake, like much of the political discourse in mainstream media. It has a language of its own, but refers to fuck-all, really.

Zinn: I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism, or what you might call pure entertainment with no whiff of politics. We need that in our lives, not to take up all of our life, but to give us a glimpse of a world in which we don't have to think about politics and its terrible battles.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

There's this scene in Notes From the Underground where the protagonist is talking to a hooker in bed and she says "you talk like a book" and I always think of that right before I open my mouth. I wish there were an easy, conversational way to make comments which aim to analyze complicated structures. I guess that's what I'm trying to do in my poetry, but of course unsuccessfully. So, at dinner just now I was talking over my piano lesson this morning and had a kind of realization that is perhaps relevant to our current debate.

The lesson was on writing periodic melodies: melodies which are structured in a certain way according to rules of composition that have been synthesized from stylistic studies of Bach, Mozart and the gang. My teacher, who's a Mills graduate and a radical at heart, says to me "the rules aren't what's important, they're just a way to learn to hear a certain music with depth. What I've noticed listening to Bach as I get older is this incredible sense of balance in his music, a sense that is not reflected in modern music". We decided this is not a fault, as modern music shouldn't reflect the conception of Bach's day, a conception of a hierarchical world which was created in perfect order on the sixth day.

What we noticed was that modern music, more specifically music of the late Romantic through 20th century, operates in the world of the novel: a post-Darwinian world of development and change and progress. Narratives have a beginning and an end, and after the end, the world is different than it was in the beginning. Music, instead of recapitulating the opening theme, got into a pattern of further and further developing the theme to where it could not be recognized any longer, because it was following after narratives which weren't interested in repeating their earlier elements, but were instead interested in a plot arc- in going somewhere.

Speaking of going somewhere, where the fuck is this going? We're all in despair because things don't seem to change (or maybe because they get worse) yet we have to get up every morning and work at something. And if our work is poetry and we care about the fucked up state of things, where do we get the faith that what we write tomorrow will make any difference. It occured to me suddenly that the despair is engendered in part because we are waiting for the narrative to end- we are waiting for the day when the sun comes out and the dark days of imperialism and neo-conservatism are over. I think consciously or not, we're trying to fit our poetry into that narrative structure, a structure of upheavals, and big, irrevocable changes.

What else are we going to do? I asked that out loud and then got really interested in the assumption behind that question. It looks like its a question at the limits of logic, i.e.: 'either things change or they stay the same', but it's not. The throwing up of the hands in the air at this juncture is at the limits of the narrative. The dilemma itself is created by the narrative, a narrative that understands the world in terms of irrevocable change, an episodic history book. We need a new narrative, or we need no narrative at all. We need a way of understanding the world that is not Bach's world, a world which thought serfs would always work the land while the nobility did fine and good things under God, and not a world of constant revolutions followed by instantiations of equally tyrannical governments (from Robespierre's France to Washington's America), but something else. I don't know what that something else is, but I think poets couold be integral to its writing. Maybe some already are. Maybe Jessea will do it (I think I'm picking up after her thought here anyways)- maybe Erika will. I'm pretty sure I won't, as 'the world as it actually is' is too strong a puzzle for me to get my mind off. But I'd like to think that we have enough imagination somewhere in the minds of the still-here generations of poets to come up with something.

Peace,
Dillon
Before I forget, I should post on the Nealon break-out now. First let me say that tongith was really cool. It's fun to have gotten pretty comfortable with one another but still be able to have a bit of an argument (I like arguments, probably more than anything). It's way more interesting to get these poetic statements at the end than at the beginning, 'cus really these statements only make sense in the context of the work we've seen and knowing each other's idiosyncracies (robots, cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real). It's been a fun workshop, we should all go get trashed after the last class on the 1st (or just get trashed at the class, although I doubt a bunch of sloshed grad students is what Juliana had in mind for a pleasant Wednesday afternoon).

So, Nealon. It was a motherfucker of an article. He started by situating himself in an accelerated version of Adorno's summary of late-capitalism, and even coined (or maybe borrowed) the term late-late capitalism to go along with post-language poetry. Then he went into his very particular readings of some pretty funny poems of a certain generation which he all thought were up to a similar project, reclaiming the detritus of our culture's recent past and present as a way of rehabilitating the culture. Or something like that.

We three, stretched languidly on the lawn in the warm days of yester-week, began with some uncoding of the references, mostly with me getting educated on the Frankfurt boys and a Marxian refresher. Dan pointed us towards the Benjamin quote several times, as that's where he thought the action was, which went something like: one day we'll write a history that includes all the little bits that get over-written by the Great Man theory (history as the record of the deeds of guys with something to prove, insert penis joke here) and this history will redeem us. Charles had the epiphany that this is what Messianism refers to in the title, a redemption of the readers of the new poetry (yipee).

I had some issues with his reading of the poems, like are they actually doing what he said they are, but Chuck and Dan-o liked his readings, so I dropped it. In the end of the paper, Nealon gives a defense of a certain kind of very programatic reading which was kind of cool, a revitilized way to do criticism that pushes for a place for the critic in the culture revolution. The reading we focused on most was probably the Kevin Davies poem where talks about robots (cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real) taking his job and stealing the money he needs for time travel. The tongue-in-cheekness of the time travel thing got funnier every time we read it (Dan had a particularly funny way of reciting it), and his point with it was, yes this outdated notion of time travel, from a sc-fi literature predating the author, was funny precisely because it, along with the robots (cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real), is an anachronism we threw away, but is now reclaimed- it's camp. Thus the second prong of the title, Camp: the reclaimed detritus of the culture, in almost all cases, material culture.

That's where we spent the rest of our time, trying to figure out why that gesture, reclaiming and parading around these camp wares, would be a positive program for social change, which Nealon seemed to be saying that it was, perhaps without irony (though i think it's safe to say irony is looming arond the whole project). Without being able to recall how we got there, and certainly appropriating a lot of D-mack and Chaz' ideas, we concluded that the mess of capitalism is so hard to decode in the present, as quick and bizzarely as it moves, our only hope is to go searching for a decoder ring in the cereal boxes of the fifties (Ralphie, are you in there?) and try to sharpen our detective skills. Somehow, pulling these camp objects into our present, absurd, human life, will bring about some humanizing realization. Well then, what realization? I don't know, but in the fashion of Marx, we can just say, you won't know until your consciousness is changed, so go read some poems, dammit.

Peace
DECEMBER 1  holidyay party @ faculty house #6

4 pm
feel free to bring snacks or not
poets and the poetry friendly welcome

contact me for directions
I'm not resposible for unpronounced consonan's. I've got a note from my mom that says so.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

I'm really bad at chess though, does that mean I have to get good at boxing. What if I just head up the trash-talking leg of the marathon, like: "your father sells aluminum siding to the homeless", or "Yo, your uncle run like a math teacher". Or else I could dress like a sailor and talk out of the side of my mouth like Burgess Meredith: "Listen Kid, he's weak at rook's four, what'd I tell ya', ya' stupid mook, en passen, kid, en passen!"

Sunday, November 14, 2004

This is for an event in NYC, but I thought the questions are interesting and also the links are helpful...

(also, this Adorno article on Commitment is on reserve for this class. If you have not yet read it (and I know some people did last semester), I highly recommend it. Not sure I agree with it but there is a lot to think about.

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Monday Night -- 11.15.04 -- Art After Abu Ghraib? -- with Yates McKee--"Four More Years" Series

Contents:
1. About this Monday Night
2. About Presentation
3. About Yates McKee
4. Useful Links
5. Arthur Danto Text from Artforum
6. Michael Kimmelman Text from NYTimes
7. About "Four More Years" Series


http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday


___________________________________________________
1. About this Monday Night

What: Presentation / Discussion
When: 7:00pm, Monday November 15th, 2004
Where: 16 Beaver St. NY, NY 4th Floor
Who: Open to all (As Always)

For our very first event at 16Beaver since the 2004 elections, we are pleased to invite you to a presentation entitled "Art After Abu Ghraib?"by Yates McKee (see details below). The talk will of course be followed by an open discussion. Although this presentation has been in the works
for a few months, it is also an apt follow-up to last week's Cooper Union field trip.

This event will also be the first installment of a series we will for the interim name "Four More Years" (See #4)

___________________________________________________
2. About Presentation

This Monday, Yates Mckee will give a presentation entitled Art After Abu Ghraib? that takes as its point of departure Shame, a kinetic artwork produced by Marc Robinson in 2003.

Informed by Adorno's remark in "Commitment" that "by turning suffering into images" artists "wound our shame before the victims," the presentation poses the following question: at a moment when it seems imperative for artists to effectively intervene in the global battlefield of images, what do we make of an imageless artwork that apparently withdraws from political instrumentality and even history itself? What presuppositions about "critical art practice" might this throw into relief, especially in the ongoing aftermath of the global events marked by the singular place-name "Abu Ghraib"?

Robinson's work will be read as a challenge to the reabsorption of the Abu Ghraib images into a narcissistic circuit of American "self-examination," implied by Arthur Danto's recent remark in Artforum that "Hideous as the conduct they depict is, the photographs are powerful examples of how
images can change what we are, and from that perspective must from now on act as standards against which we can judge the political efficacy of art."

In the process, the presentation will consider "the mobilization of shame" as a strategy that presumes the power of images in the service of human rights, as well as the "weaponization of shame" in the "anthropological laboratory" of Abu Ghraib. How can we identify in legal and ethical terms the "culturally" specific design of the torture, without affirming the Orientalist hypothesis that Muslim men are indeed exemplars of "shame society" as opposed to the "guilt society" of the West? What would it mean to identify the "other-directedness" often associated with shame not as a collective psycho-pathology but as a constituent feature of humanity itself, a feature that divides the human from within and defines it as infinite ethical responsibility? In a Levinasian vein, Robinson's work demands that we attend to this possibility.

The title of this presentation is meant to be speculative question, an invitation to debate about the uncertain relationship of aesthetics and politics at the current global conjuncture. Needless to say, such a debate now takes place during a period of mourning for the American Left, including those in the cultural and artistic sector whose activities were said to have finally "made a difference," as Alisa Solomon put it. What becomes of the monstrous images from Abu Ghraib now that the primary task
assigned to them by the Left-exposing and defeating the Bush administration in the 2004 election-has been lost? How will we account for-and critically participate in-the post-election afterlives of these
images? Their uncertain survival is a problem necessarily at work in the exhibition Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib, which will show at the International Center for Photography until November 28th. Attendees to Monday's discussion are highly encouraged to see the show, which would be a good point of common reference.

This will enable us to address issues such as: does the exhibition of the photographs in a museum context necessarily "aestheticize" them and strip them of their proper status as documents of suffering? Can an image have a "proper" status? Is "aestheticization" inherently a bad thing? Is it something that would be desireable or even possible to evade, especially since the images are structured from within as aesthetic artefacts? How, where, and to whom, if at all, should they be shown (recognizing that they will continue to appear in an inifnity of contexts, whether we like it or not). How might the images complicate the mnemonic, archival, preservational function of the museum, without simply disqualifying it as a simply an agent of entombment and homogenization?

Our discussion will also be shadowed by the appointment of Alberto Gonzalez to the position of U.S. Attorney General. As counsel to the President, he was the one who in a memo referred to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" relics of the pre-9/11 era.


___________________________________________________
3. About Yates McKee

Yates Mckee is a writer in New York City. He co-curated the exhibiton "Empire/State" at the Whitney ISP and coordinated the recent 16Beaver event "8 short talks on bio-art, bio-tech, bio-politics" at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He has also written texts engaged with works by Alia Hasan-Khan, Allora & Calzadilla, and Thorne & Ressler.





___________________________________________________
4. Useful Links

Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," where he reiterates the paradoxical survival of art "after Auschwitz"
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/001103.php

Arthur Danto, "Art and Politics in American Self-Consciousness" (see below)
http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200407

Iraqi Artists Depict Anger Over Abu Ghraib:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0615/p07s01-woiq.html

Abu Gulag Freedom Park, Baghdad
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/96250/index.php

Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html?ex=1100408400&en=b89d89aed36a36d3&ei=5070

Mark Danner, author of the new book Truth and Torture, "The Logic of Torture"
http://www.markdanner.com/nyreview/062404_Road_to_Torture.htm

Gregory Starrett, "Culture Never Dies: Anthropology at Abu Ghraib" A useful discussion of R. Patai's canonical "The Arab Mind" (1972), which continues to inform the "cultural training" given to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0406if-comm1.htm

Thomas Keenan: "Mobilizing Shame"
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/toc/saq103.2.html

A continually updated archive of articles on Abu Ghraib, including recent material on the appointment of Alberto Gonzalez:
http://www.ccmep.org/2004_articles/abu_ghraib.htm

Maureen Dowd, "Alberto Gonzalez, The Torture Guy":
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1111-27.htm

Slavoj Zizek "Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture"
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001084.php

Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Torture Photographs from Abu Ghraib exhibition statement by Brian Wallis:
http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/introduction.html

Alisa Solomon's pre-election article "Art Makes a Difference"
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108&s=solomon

___________________________________________________
5. Arthur Danto Text from Artforum

"Art and Politics in American Self-Consciousness"

From Artforum

WITH THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE ART world, national differences among artists have grown increasingly marginal. There is little to distinguish American art from the rest in the growing list of intercontinental art fairs and biennials. At the same time, "American art," however defined, is widely assumed to reveal something of the inner life of America as it changes over time. So there is a value in an exhibition such as the Whitney Biennial, which is largely restricted to American artists, since it may, at two-year intervals, tell us something worth knowing about where we are as a culture. During just the past decade, the Biennial's curators appear to have tried meeting this challenge by organizing shows that do not merely present American art but imply something about the objective spirit of the country through art. And viewers, whether American or not, have responded to what these shows seem to tell them about America. The 1993 Biennial was vehemently political, and even though the show was widely reviled, viewers were forced to measure the art against what they believed they knew about American realities.

The Biennial's implicit invitation for audiences to measure the art against the culture makes all the more interesting the assertion by the curators of the 2004 installment that one defining attitude of younger artists in the show was a nostalgia for a certain activism that had vanished from the scene. It seemed strange to me, given the political reality of the Bush years, that young artists could do no better than envy artists of the '60s for the forthrightness of their protests. And it was stranger still that they expressed their own immediate political concerns obliquely, even while the curators suggested that in terms of involvement with current issues, the show was really as political as that of 1993. It would today be unrealistic for young people to try to be '68ers, whatever the content of current political nostalgia may be, since no one seriously interested in politics would wish the context of '68
world reality to be reconstituted. How could one wish that and at the same time want to protest it all over again? If consciousness is like a stream, as William James believed, we really cannot step in it at the same place twice. Further, why would anyone, least of all an artist genuinely concerned with the issues of the war in Iraq or inequalities at home-or the conservatism of the religious Right-have recourse to Aesopian strategies, as if a Polish dissident in the cold-war era?

Cover of Artforum, May 1993. Pictured: Daniel J. Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque-Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993.

But even if there was not this encrypted criticism, it was impossible merely to think about the art as art, and not about what it told us about the political moment in America. In some way, art is always political, and American art is always somehow informative of American political reality. When I think back to the Whitney surveys of the 1950s, it seems to me that one could feel the moral pulse of America in the landscapes and still lifes, which they comprised. In his monograph on Milton Avery, Robert Hobbs writes that Avery's political activism in the 1930s is important to his art, for "it indicates that his simple themes-his emphasis on family, his at times blank masks, his combinations of peoples of different races sitting contentedly on beaches-stem from his deep concern with social issues and his desire for a better, more harmonious life where humor, charm, intimacy, and human dignity all assume their rightful places." If Avery's ingratiating beach scenes had a political implication, it merely
requires an exercise of hermeneutical will to identify the political subtext of work that had seemed to have different agendas. So it is difficult to resist reflecting on the self-consciousness of the American
artist as an "American artist" today, given the current political landscape. What did this Biennial seem to tell us, perhaps in spite of itself?

Last year, I participated in a symposium at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the organizers framed our topic as follows: "What precisely is the relation between the fiction that nationality is a trait and the assorted uses to which it is nevertheless put in both practical and interpretive discourses of art?" Immediately after this, they asked how we are to come to terms with the political power of nationality as an idea "in the light of its philosophical poverty." To think of nationality as a fiction is, I think, evidence of having taken postmodern theory much too literally. I regard nationality neither as a fictional construct nor as a philosophically impoverished one but, to the contrary, as a palpable reality in people's lives, whatever its bearing on the practice of art. Nations have much the same structure that we do as conscious beings, according to the deep analysis of consciousness that we owe to Jean-Paul Sartre. Like individuals, nations have a being-for-others (pour autrui) and for themselves (pour soi), and the great political tensions often arise from the failure of congruence between them. Given American power, how other nations perceive us-how we are defined from without-for better or worse defines the political reality for everyone today. It is impossible, seeing America from within, to appreciate how we can be hated as much as we obviously
are. If only "They" could see us as we see ourselves, from within! "They" would modulate their resentments and their anger. But given how little power we have to see "Them" as "They" see themselves, there is scant reason to suppose that "They" can do better with "Us."

There is a distinction between being in the world as an American and being an American citizen. One can renounce the latter, but renouncing the former is impossible, like renouncing one's language. Yet they are not entirely external to one another, inasmuch as the consciousness of being American includes in some degree an awareness of what it means politically to be American. This is especially the case with being an American artist in America, whether one is a citizen or not. So one wants to ask in what way American political institutions penetrate the consciousness of being an American artist. Everyone must acknowledge that the American government has never had much interest in the arts-has never felt, for example, that America's standing in the world has much, if any, connection with what American artists have done. Indeed, the practice of art in America has taken place in an atmosphere of near-total governmental indifference, except insofar as it falls under constitutional protections governing freedom of expression. The CIA's covert involvement with the dissemination of Abstract Expressionism internationally after World War II was opportunistic but in any case had nothing to do with what made that art possible in the first place. In general, I think, the making of art has been considered in terms of the pursuit of happiness, as specified in the Declaration of Independence, and hence the exercise of a right, with no effort on the government's part to say how it should be done.

There was not a national museum of art in America until the 1930s, and even then it was not a museum of American art-though the idea of a national museum of art had been intimately associated with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Consider the Louvre, for example, which organized its collections into schools: the Italian, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the French-the latter to make plain to French men and women, to whom as citizens the museum belonged after the Revolution, that there was such a thing as a national school and that France could hold its head high among the nations because of Poussin, Claude, Clouet, Vouet, and others. The Louvre was far less a sanctuary for aesthetic contemplation and scholarly investigation than an instrument for forming a national consciousness. It was also a component of that consciousness, in that the art from the other schools had been expropriated by the French military. (Stealing the enemy's treasure as trophies, like stealing its women, is immemorially the victor's prerogative.) By contrast, our National Gallery of Art could not be a temple to the American spirit through American art, since the prevailing idea in 1937 (when it was founded) was that real art was something that happened somewhere else-a view American artists at the time shared. Duchamp addressed this point in an interview when he arrived
in America in 1915, two years after the Armory show, and tried in effect to say that Americans should have no reason to feel inferior:

Renée Cox, Yo Mama's Last Supper (detail), 1996, color photograph, 30" x
12' 5".

The capitals of the Old World have labored for hundreds of years to find that which constitutes good taste and one may say that they have found the zenith thereof. But why do people not understand what a bore this is? . . . If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished-dead-and that America is the country of the art of the future. . . . Look at the skyscrapers! Has Europe anything to show more beautiful than these? New York itself is a work of art, a complete work of art. . .
.

American artists today need no longer acquiesce in such compensatory consolations, for just the reason that American art is part of an international art scene, in which it is no longer expected that art should display the attributes of a national identity. I am not even sure that the consciousness of being an American artist is at all part of the consciousness of artists in America today. It hardly seems relevant, and I think this is reflected in the framing questions of the symposium I cited above: Being American seems to have so little to do with the "practical and interpretive discourses of art" that many individuals have made the inference that nationality itself is a fiction. I don't think, as I have been saying, that it is. But it may well be true that by the time American art began to be taken seriously-after World War II, in the '50s and '60s especially-the idea of a national spirit being expressed through art had definitively lost its appeal, largely, I think, because the idea of a
national spirit was perceived as a form of political pathology. The great political movements of the century constituted themselves as dictatorships of artistic rectitude, as we all know. Moscow and Berlin, Rome and Beijing made painting outside prescribed formats too dangerous to practice unless
one were exceedingly courageous and prepared for an underground existence. While there were pressures on painters in America-Arshile Gorky, for example, felt pressures as an abstractionist, from the American regionalists on the one side and from socialist realists on the other-a
true nationalistic coercion did not quite happen here. Gorky was never in political danger, not even when he worked for the WPA, which supported his murals for Newark Airport though they were entirely modernist.

What was remarkable about the WPA was that it was supported by the government at all, since the question in the United States had always been-and remains-whether the taxpayer's dollar should be spent on art. Otherwise the government took scant interest in what artists did or did not do. As recently as the Giuliani administration, with its perhaps cynical obsession with decency, it remained acceptable for people in the private sector to look at photographs like Yo Mama's Last Supper, 1996, by
Renée Cox, or at paintings of the Holy Virgin at which some artist (Chris Ofili) had "flung dung"-the mayor's language-since that was protected by the First Amendment. "Decent" people might care to picket and protest, but as long as tax moneys were not called on to support it, the art world was ideally a scene of freedom. In America, the separation of art and the state is almost as strong as that of church and state. I think this is an unqualified blessing, but I won't try to argue that here.

The issue of taxes is whether the people's money should be used to support art that conflicts with their moral values, and that, of course, is a political matter, since the argument can be made that people of
differing values have a right to live by them so long as they do not break the law, and we all have an obligation to support the free interchange of ideas. That, however coarsely stated, is the purview of
the First Amendment. We all pay taxes to support the exercise of free expression, and pay taxes, moreover, so that the government enforces that right and remains indifferent to the content of conflicting expressions. Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition "The Perfect Moment" (1988-90) was
funded by the NEA, which he felt entirely appropriate, since the art was too difficult in subject matter and treatment to expect commercial support. The question was whether the art had "redeeming social value," though the mere fact that it conveyed certain views of sexual conduct through images should have been social value enough, given the grounds of the First Amendment. Artists dealing with pornography can always say that they, too, are mainly interested in promoting discussion. This is more or less conceded by the government, in that efforts to legislate the monitoring of pornographic images on the Internet have consistently been voted down on First Amendment grounds.

American soldiers posing with naked and hooded Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, ca. 2003-2004. First published in the New Yorker, May 10, 2004.

There is, however, another dimension to pornography, which the recent Abu Ghraib photographs make salient to our discussion. I have not seen it mentioned that many of them could as easily have appeared on pornographic websites as with the news headlines on our browsers. I have little doubt that dominatrices will sooner or later adopt the standard camouflage fatigues issued by the army, and this returns me to the structure of consciousness with which I began, between what we are for ourselves and what we are for others. The reflex of the Bush administration has been to disclaim these images as not really Us-to maintain that torture and humiliation of this sort are not in the American grain, when everyone who sees the photographs knows that they are. The images show the degree to which American consciousness has been penetrated by the imagery of pornography. But so has world consciousness, given the ubiquity of videotapes that deal with images of sexual bondage and humiliation. Whether these images existed as fantasies before they were put on tape-or online-is difficult to say, but the archives of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Representation at the University of Indiana have photographs that show males in a posture of humiliation before women. And I have seen Renaissance engravings that deal with such subjects, which suggests that these thoughts have been part of the sexual imagination for a very long time. Plato once described the despot as performing the actions that the rest of us merely dream of, and what the Abu Ghraib images testify to is the democratization of despotic fantasy. For the time being, however, the behavior depicted has entered world consciousness as integral to the pour autrui of America. There is little doubt that America is going to have to take measures to ensure that the impulse to submit its captives to sexual torture remains unenacted and confined within the
boundaries of fantasy. And that will certainly be at least a step in the direction of changing our image in the world's conception of what we are, though such images are fairly indelible.

The 1993 Whitney Biennial showed the Rodney King tape, the appropriateness of which was contested on the grounds that it was not art, even though it was widely felt that the footage had already become
part of American self-consciousness. And if one of the aims of the exhibition was to make this self-consciousness accessible, what image could do it better? I wonder whether the same is not true for the Abu Ghraib photographs, which might well be among the exhibits of the 2006 Biennial. My sense is that, hideous as the conduct they depict is, the Abu Ghraib photographs are powerful examples of how images can change what we are, and from that perspective they must from now on act as standards against which we can judge the political efficacy of art. That measure, when applied to American art today, seems to me to imply that American artists are on balance satisfied with the existing political structure. There was nothing in the 2004 Biennial that, were we to see it from the outside, would cause us to want to change the way we are for others. That may finally be the way that, for better or worse, the art in it was political.

Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University.


___________________________________________________
6. Michael Kimmelman Text from NYTimes

Abu Ghraib returns - as art?
Michael Kimmelman NYT
Tuesday, October 12, 2004

NEW YORK Five months after they made their first shocking appearance, the Abu Ghraib photographs have become a museum exhibition. Once ubiquitous on television and in newspapers, they now qualify as quasi-aesthetic artifacts, pictures you may choose to seek out - for edification, as a
distraction, even.
.
Presented jointly at the International Center of Photography in New York and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, "Inconvenient Evidence" includes 17 of the published pictures from the notorious prison in Iraq, reminding us of the deep and symbiotic relationship between photographs and the conduct of modern war. They also demonstrate how quickly the life cycle of an image spins these days.
.
In New York, where the photographs have been printed straight off the Web and tacked to the walls, there is a more conventional show of famous shots from Life magazine just a few steps away. The comparison is useful: The visual equivalent of cellphone chatter has achieved the power to shape public opinion that Larry Burrows's classic Vietnam pictures, which Life published, had a generation ago. Now war's participants snap the images themselves.
.
Both shows are on view at the center through Nov. 28. After that, they'll be taken down and replaced by others: The Abu Ghraib photographs have joined the vast, passing pageant of American cultural experience.
.
Placing these atrocious pictures in a sleek white room and inviting us to cogitate on their visual properties raises some interesting ethical questions. Why Abu Ghraib but not images of beheadings, which are also on the Web, floating in the digital ether, fragments from the same new photographic universe? Would it be considered an invasion of the dead's privacy? Too disgusting? Politically incorrect?
.
There is a dead prisoner on view. As for surviving detainees, how might they feel about being exhibited like this? Elsewhere, their images have become tools of political resistance, but here the detainees are in a sense twice violated, first as objects of the photographers' derision, then as objects of the audience's detached contemplation.
.
Meanwhile, other images from the war remain conspicuously invisible. Photographers still cannot take pictures of the returning coffins of American soldiers; the most gruesome battle injuries still don't make it into the day's news; supposedly even more shocking images from Abu Ghraib are still under wraps somewhere.
.
An obvious danger of showing the available Abu Ghraib pictures like this is that the setting might somehow defuse the content, turning the images into just one more artful provocation. Surprisingly, the show has the opposite effect: The coolly cerebral space reinforces the distinction between the usual contrived "shock" art and these genuinely shocking amateur snapshots.
.
The art critic John Berger once drew a distinction between public and private photographs. Public photographs are comprehensible to strangers and predicated on the viewers' sympathy. Charles Moore's famous shots of police dogs lunging at civil rights marchers - one of them is among the pictures in the Life show - elicit sympathy for the subjects. Like all public photographs of suffering, it is taken as if in our name, and shocks us into a condition of moral alarm. The photographer's virtue is implicit.
.
But private pictures, never meant to be seen beyond a certain circle of friends, occupy a morally ambiguous state. The photos of Abu Ghraib detainees menaced by guard dogs, unconsciously echoing Moore's image, imply no outrage about what's happening. In fact, the intent of the pictures is precisely to compound the humiliation.
.
The moral quagmire brings to mind recently published photographs from German archives showing Nazis as war victims. Or the photographs from Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge death camp, which the Museum of Modern Art exhibited some years ago. Shot, like the Nazi photos, for the purpose of record-keeping, they show a mother cradling a baby; two men, blindfolded and shackled, holding hands; a boy, quietly standing, with his prison number safety-pinned into his bare chest, like a modern St. Sebastian. All of them about to die. All these photographs raise the same disturbing questions about the motives of the photographers. What did they presume about the people looking at their pictures?
.
That said, even the most repulsive photographs bear witness. They are evidence. And therefore a kind of gift to memory. We live in an amnesiac society. The Abu Ghraib photographs have passed from the headlines to the art pages in half a year. One can only imagine how much further they may retreat in six more months.




___________________________________________________
7. About "Four More Years" Series

What is meant by the injunction, "Four More Years"? 4 more years of what? 4 years for whom? Why not 10 or 16 more years? And what of the 4 or 12 years which just passed? The series will address what we or our invited guests deem to be critical questions confronting cultural activists today. What if anything can be learned from the past 4 years? If we assumed that behind the "Defeat Bush" agenda rested a tremendous potential for socio-political transformation, what can be made of this potential post "victory," today? Thus, the series will with modest steps examine the future of activism, media criticism, and critical cultural practice especially at a moment when "culture" is being explicitly recognized by the right and the left as the key terrain in the struggle for hegemony. It will consider plans and proposals as well as analyses of past interventions (including of course all of the sweat and ink spilled over the past 4 years about art and defeating bush). It will also traverse philosophical questions pertaining to mourning, resistance (again), revolution (?), and the status of the image and representation in this war without end, in our current, open-ended, state of exception.


Friday, November 12, 2004

To add to the list of events upcoming- Mon. 15th: Ishmael Reed and Billy Bang are colaboratin' a-go-go at Yoshi's. There's acheap late set (10pm) at this normally uncheap spot. Reed, of course, is a text person, Bang is a sound person- mostly by way of a violin, sometimes by way of shouting and generally freaking out. I've never seen either live, but live recordings of Bang I've heard have lots of energy (he's kind of Stuff Smith meets Archy Shepp). All this verbiage is in place of a real review or info about the project, 'cus I can't find either. I was just gonna show up and get surprised.

Friday, November 12, 2004 at 7:30 p.m.
Small Press Traffic presents a reading by
Guy Bennett & Stacy Doris

Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin)

After the reading a gathering at
Magdalena Zurawski's house
3839 21st Street
SF

Please join us

BERKELY reading:
Laura Moriarty and Cythnia Sailers
At Moes, on College Street in Berkeley
Monday Nov. 15th at 7:30pm


********

San Francisco, at Kelly Holt's house:
Jennifer Moxley & Stephanie Young
Come and bring snacks, beer, wine, and whiskey for:
Potluck at 6-or-so
Reading at 7p
Sunday, November 28

1336 4th Avenue
San Francisco
@Irving/ Parnassus
Like BART? take it to Civic Center, then get off and take the N outbound. It stops at 4th & Irving. Don't like BART? get off the freeway at either Duboce/Mission or Civic Center. Duboce: Follow Duboce to Market, turn left on Market then go up 17th St. when Market hits Castro (be in right lane, passing the gas station on your right). Follow 17th over the hill to (turn right on) Stanyan, turn left on Parnassus, turn right on 4th.


****
San Francisco Cinematheque and The Poetry Center at SFSU present
Moving Picture Poetics: Sampling Fifty Years of Poets and Cinema

- A series of screenings devoted to poets and the moving image -


Program 1 Musings
Thursday, November 18 at 7:30pm
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street (corner of Third)

"Notes on the Port of St Francis" (1952) by SF experimental film pioneer Frank Stauffacher matches scenes of San Francisco to Robert Louis Stevenson's "San Francisco: A Modern Cosmopolis" (1883), read by Vincent Price.

"In Between" (1955) is a rare sound film by Stan Brakhage,
his portrait in surrealist style of the renowned Bay Area artist Jess with a cameo by poet Robert Duncan and soundtrack by John Cage.

In Lawrence Jordan's mystical "Visions of a City" (1957/78) Michael McClure plays a man trapped in the glazed surfaces of late 50s SF.

Charles Olson's 1968 reading from "The Maximus Poems" is visually inflected in an early experimental video by Robert Zagone and Loren Sears.

Finally the San Francisco reprise of "Daydream of Darkness" (1963) by Berkeley Renaissance poet Helen Adam and painter William McNeill screens with a new CD soundtrack by poets Kristin Prevallet, Drew Gardner, Lee Ann Brown,
Beth Brown Al-Rawi and Nada Gordon.



Future shows:

Thursday, December 2 at 7:30pm
Program 2 Couplings
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street (corner of Third)

"Plagiarism" by Henry Hills
with Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, James Sherry and Hanna Weiner.
"The Last Clean Shirt" (1964) by Alfred Leslie and Frank O'Hara.
"A Piece" (1968) by Robert Creeley and Robert Zagone
"Videoeme" (1976) and "Re Dis Appearing" (1977) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
"The Blue Tape" (1974) by Kathy Acker and Alan Sondheim


Sunday, December 12 at 7:30pm
Program 3, Collaborations
Timken Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street (near Sixteenth)

"The Menage" (2002) by Anne Waldman and Ed Bowes with Carl Rakosi
"Descartes" (1968) by Joanne Kyger
with Loren Sears and Richard Felciano
"Dodie Bellamy" (premiere) by Cecilia Dougherty
"Before the War" (1990) by Laura Moriarty and Jiri Veskrna
"delay series" (premiere) by Konrad Steiner and Leslie Scalapino
"Aliengnosis" (premiere) by Robert Gluck and Dean Smith
"Swamp" (1991) by Abigail Child, dialog by Sarah Shulman
starring Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, Marga Gomez, George
Kuchar, Susie Bright, Kevin Killian and more.


*****
Jalal Toufic
"Saving the Living Human's Face and Backing the Mortal"


7 PM
Thursday, December 2, 2004
Timken Lecture Hall, CCA SF Campus
1111 Eighth Street (at Irwin, just off 16th & Wisconsin)
Cosponsored by Small Press Traffic and the Visual Criticism Program at CCA


Son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, Lebanese artist Jalal Toufic is a film theorist, video artist, and writer who creates works filled with philosophical reflections, humor, and curiosity about all facets of life. Richard Foreman writes that Toufic "documents the moves of consciousness in a way that leads the reader ever deeper, from impasse to illusion to new impasse?turning the trap of 'what can't be named' into a true paradise." Toufic's videos and mixed media works have been presented worldwide, and include Phantom Beirut: A Tribute to Ghassan Salhab, 2002; Saving Face, 2003; and The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins, 2002. His books include Distracted, Vampires, Over-Sensitivity, Forthcoming, and Undying Love or Love Dies.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Some models of poetix statements:

Rae Armentrout, Chesire Poetics

Kathleen Fraser, Analytic Femina

More later. Got to go teach.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

This Sunday Nov 14 at noon, at my place--
Wondering who might like to come over for brunch and an open, general discussion of the current political situation(s) and various "now-what?s" of strategic movement and anti-cynical survival. I think I am not alone in the feeling that this is indeed a ripe moment for harvesting our collective energies, frustrations, hopes, anger, passion, and setting out again on the ever-difficult work of inter-left debate and individual and collective actions towards new social vistas both near and far-term. (Plus I still have some anti-Bush panties to unload...) Please invite anyone you think might like to participate. I would like to work towards an ongoing discussion that ranges from casual community building and commisseration (sp?) as well as more tactical actions and organizational projects, both political and artistic - but welcome all stripes and types of inputs and interventions. If Cynthia makes it, we can at least end with a rousing sing-song of non-ironic collective sentiment & rejuvinationing.
I have somewhat limited space, so PLEASE RSVP if you plan on coming. And maybe yall could bring like $5 & I'll get lots of food too...
a luta continua--

David Buuck
5941 Maccall St. (at 60th st. b/t MLK & Shattuck)
Oakland
510-655-1569

"Don't mourn - Organize!"

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Sara Wintz, one of the more interesting undergraduates, is organizing this event.

JOIN UP!

All artists, musicians, writers

- art and activism minded -

Dialogue open to Mills students, faculty, and outside community

Wednesday November 10 at 9:30 PM

Ensemble Room (Music Building)

Let's organize and discuss ways to react to the current political state together!

Monday, November 08, 2004

He's fucking good. I mean, fucking, he's good. You probably already knew that shit, but it blew my fucking mind. Fucking funny poems, ese. All kinds of fucking strange shit on a street corner or maybe a tractor, like grandfather gonna' die and 'collateral calcification' gonna set in. I like how he fuckin talks, ya know? He sounds in my head like, one of those fucking guys, you know those fucking guys- the smart ones, like they think something, than they think it all over again real smart-like, then they tell it to you. He's like a fucking word saying a word.

Fucking funny rhymes: "Ferries to and from the cherries"- that's funny 'homes. You don't think that shit's funny? Fuck you then, I'll read that shit to myself-

lemmeseehearohheheyeahthat'sgoodhuhwhat'shemeanohhe'sjustfuckin'aroundthat'sajokeaboutwritingorsomethingorohIgetitit'sjusttheway"suture"and"sullen"soundtogethersomeofthatpoetryshitwhatthefuckdoes"suborned"meancoolfuckingword'homes"sogallantsoindescribablyfurious"yeahlikewhenyougetreallymadyoucan'tfuckingtalkoryourheadgetssoreditsnotaheadanymoreohI'mgettingaheadthere'sthepartaboutgrandpaIwonderifhisgrandpareallywasafarmerifhewasIbethewasasocialistfarmerwithfuckinghugehands

I should read some of his fucking criticism but the guy tell me, "no sorry we don't carry that title", so I gotta go to the library tommorrow, you know. First I gotta give back the fucking car they gave me, they say the check is in the mail so I gotta return the pinche rental, I say "you know how long the fucking mail takes in my neighborhood". Fucking insurance agents, they should lick my balls. Anyways, I got this book of poems called With Strings by Charles Bernstein, you should check it out. He's fucking good, ese.

Later

Friday, November 05, 2004

I'm going to Stephanie's.

Also, I forgot to post this earlier, but tonight at SPT there is what promises to be a great reading.

Mark McMorris is a poet, originally from Jamaica but via the US experimental scene (so an interesting mixture of influences). A really wonderful, declamatory poet and also all around amazing guy to talk to. [Strange Mark McMorris-Mills connection... He came and read at Mills a few years ago and Mills uses his image in all their publicity for the MFA program. So I'm sure you've seen his image. I keep joking to him that he should demand a fee or that Georgetown, where he now teaches, should send a desist letter.]

Rob Halpern's book just came out from Krupskaya and I've been enjoying it a great deal. It is really rich, really complicated language around desire. He is an SF poet. I've not heard him read before but I'm looking forward to it.

Friday, November 5, 2004 at 7:30 p.m.
Rob Halpern & Mark McMorris

Rob Halpern joins us in celebration of his debut book, Rumored Place, which Camille Roy says "commits itself to a lyric interrogation of power. The abjection of lyric is brought to bear as critique in a sensationalism of pure intelligence... the result is a work for our moment: exhilarating, and edged with grief." Mark McMorris' books include Moth-Wings, The Black Reeds, and the just released The Blaze of Poui, of which the Voice Literary Supplement says "Poetic equilibrium of this order is a rare thing when managing such charged material, but in a young poet it is cause for small amazement." McMorris joins us from Washington, DC, where he teaches at Georgetown University.

Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin)

Thursday, November 04, 2004

SUMMER STUFF

1. Main recommendation for those with spare time this summer is Naropa.

http://www.naropa.edu/swp/

You can go for 1 week or for all the weeks. You can do it for credit or not. It is completely fun poetry summer camp.

Those who identify as other than white, there is a scholarship, The Zora Neale Hurston Scholarships which covers partial to full tuition and local housing for the summer. Applications are due sometime in April. To receive a scholarship application, please contact the SWP Coordinator at 303-546-5296.


2. This might be fun if you win the free one...

Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg (Russia), one of the world’s most vibrant and dynamic international literary programs, announces the opening of enrollment for its 2005 session. Among the superlative-defying teaching and in-residence faculty:

From the USA


From Russia

John Dufresne
Mary Gaitskill
Mark Halperin
Saskia Hamilton
Mikhail Iampolsky
Richard Katrovas
Paul Keegan
Vitaly Komar
Jonathan Lethem
Sam Lypsyte
Glyn Maxwell
Josip Novakovich
Carlin Romano
George Saunders
Jim Shepard
Catherine Tice
Peter Trachtenberg
William T. Vollman
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Max Winter


Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
Sergey Gandlevsky
Linor Goralik
Dmitry Kuzmin
Stanislav Lvovsky
Dmitry Prigov
Lev Rubinshtein
Alexandre Skidan
Andrey Zorin

From Canada
Stephanie Bolster
Louis Patrick Leroux

From Kenya
Binyavanga Wainaina

Our annual literary contest (prose, poetry), held in conjunction with FENCE magazine, is currently accepting submissions. The authors of the winning poetry and prose entries will receive airfare, accommodations, and a full tuition waiver to the 2005 SLS program in St. Petersburg, Russia, AND publication of the winning entry in FENCE. Second place receives a full tuition waiver to SLS 2005, and third brings with it a substantial tuition scholarship. Other hand-picked contest participants from among the non-winners will be offered tuition scholarships as well, based on the strength of their work.

Send your work, along with the $10 entry fee (made payable to Summer Literary Seminars), to PO Box 1358, Schenectady, NY 12301. Deadline: February 28, 2005.

For all the detailed information on the program and the complete contest guidelines, see the SLS website at www.sumlitsem.org.

We look forward to seeing some of you next summer in St. Petersburg, a city of immense beauty, great mystery and unmatched literary history.
An attempt to be somewhat more specific about what I was talking about with Kathy and what I think we're not doing enough of, even with Reader B.

Basically, I think the easiest thing to talk about with poems is how they are made. The harder part is how they resonate out in the world.

Some examples from real life, outside of classroom...

Example 1:
Lyn Hejinian's My Life. For those who haven't read it, go read it, but this is basically an autobiography that Hejinian wrote in forty-five sections composed of forty-five sentences. The sentences are somewhat disconnected from one another. The content appears to be mainly unsorted, moving through reminiscence and observation and nonsynchronically through the past and the present. But it basically tells the story of a white woman growing up middle class in the U.S. It is not that geographically specific. It is somewhat difficult to map Hejinian's "actual" life onto it (her jobs; her books; etc.) but some critics are starting to do this work. But for years critics wrote about how My Life reconfigured autobiography by breaking down the linear narrative path and replacing it with something that was fractured and GENERIC. What was great about My Life, they argued, was that it was difficult to see Hejinian's life in it and one could imagine it being the life story of many different people. (see Lisa Samuel's article at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/samuels/mylife.html for a discussion of some of these issues.) This seems to be a clear example of what Aimee was talking about, about assuming that something that is dominant is generic. Ok, so questions I would like to be addressing in workshop if someone brought in a poem that did something similar are these: First, is it generic or not (because just because some critic said it was so doesn't mean it is or that it is read that way in most instances)? Are there any markers in the work that demand that we read this as generic? How does a work tell us to read it as generic? How does it tell not let us read it as generic? Are there any markers that instead insist that we read this a specific story? If so, is there critique of something more than the genre of autobiography in it? Where is that? And how far should we/do we cross apply the critique of autobiography to other critiques of privilege? What are the politics of a critique of genre?

Example 2:
This one is anecdotal because I don't have the poem. A few years ago at a big group reading a poet read a poem that he had made by doing a chance procedure on personal ads. He didn't say this when he read the poem (an entirely other issue but one worth talking about--do procedures free you up from responsibility about the content of the poem? Maybe call this the flarf question.). Many in the audience heard this poem as one about the subjugation of women; some said they heard it as a throwback to a time when men would write poems about women and their bodies and get up and read them regularly(?). So related questions... Why did this poem exist? Did it exist to annoy those concerned with gender? Or did it want to say something more complicated about gender but there was no way to hear it? If it wanted to say something more complicated, how could it have made it clear? What sort of things would the text have to have done for the audience to hear the poem as critique?

Example 3:
The argument about Yamanaka's work seems another classic one. For those who haven't read her work, again go read it, but she has a book of short poems written in pidgin that tell the stories mainly of teenage girls and their power struggles--Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre. The book opens with a poem where one teenage girl tells another to be scared of the Filipino man. A long argument has developed about this poem and whether it is racist or not (a debate which continues with her novels). But basically with this poem (and this is different than the argument about her novels), if you find the teenage girl an unreliable narrator then the poem becomes a critique of racism. If you find the teenage girl reliable, then it becomes racist. The sorts of questions about something like this are: What in the text lets the poem tip one way and what in the text lets it tip the other way, but basically why the ambiguity?

Similar example from class, Dillon's collage poem (which I have no desire to take too seriously but I think I had similar questions about it and I figure since he can't be too invested in it he will not mind) has some interesting questions. It opens very clearly with critique (the image of the crying and bloody Iraqi child from the news). But then in the middle it has pieces from an article on the Dutch film maker who was killed the other day. And Dillon took some phrase about raping women which was in the Dutch film maker's film as something that was Muslim and made it a prominent part of the poem. This is the part that interests me because suddenly the critique part of the poem becomes unclear and the poem gets very ambiguous. What does it do to point out such uninnocent language? Why does the critique part of the poem suddenly go out of focus there? And does the author want it to go out of focus there? And what would have kept it in focus?

Maybe the question I'm having is what are the craft issues around a poetry of critique.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

bloggerettes, don't forget to post on the bernstein reading before tuesday. and please come to the reading!

the Contemporary Writers Series with
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
Tuesday, November 9th
5:30 pm
Mills Hall Living Room

Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. Among his more than twenty books of poetry are /Republics of Reality: 1975-1995/ (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), /Dark City/ (1994) and /Rough Trades/ (1991). He is also the author of three books of essays, /My Way: Speeches and Poems/ (1999), /A Poetics/ (1992), and /Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984/ (1986).

In the 1970s, Bernstein co-founded the influential journal /L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/. Language writing, sometimes written L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E because of the journal, has been much debated, complained about, and celebrated. Basically, the term language writing tends to describe a school of experimental writing that appears in the late 1970s and 1980s mainly in the bay area and east coast. The term is more social than aesthetic; there are a wide range of poems that can be called "language poems." But if there is anything that seems to join the various forms of writing that get called language writing, it is an attention to how things are made: how language is constructed and how genres such as poetry are constructed, and then how these constructions shape--limit or expand--thinking.

Bernstein also a fine ironist and his later work in particular is distinctive for its sense of humor. He is unusually prolific (at least twenty books of poetry, probably more by now). And he also frequently takes on public issues, such as National Poetry Month.

A selection of his books are on reserve in the library.
And his website has extensive links. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein

Some suggested readings...
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/essays/difficult-poem.html, “The Difficult Poem” (from Harper's, June 2003)
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html, "Against National Poetry Month as Such" (originally for NPR)

And this in closing...

Charles Bernstein, "A Defence of Poetry"

for Brian McHale

My problem with deploying a term liek
nonelen
in these cases is acutually similar to
your
cirtique of the term ideopigical
unamlsing as a too-broad unanuajce
interprestive proacdeure.
You say too musch lie a steamroller when
we need dental (I;d say jeweller's)
tools.
(I thin youy misinterpret the natuer of
some of the political claims go; not
themaic
interpretationmn of evey
evey detail in every peim
but an oeitnetation towatd a kind of
texutal practice
that you prefer to call "nknsesne" but
for /poltical/ purpses I prepfer to call
ideological!
, say Hupty Dumpty)
Taht is, nonesene see, msm to reduce a
vareity of fieefernt
prosdodic, thematic and discusrive
enactcemnts into a zeroo degree of
sense. What we have is a vareity of
valences. Nin-sene.sense is too binary
andoppostioin, too much oall or nithing
acccount with ninesense seeming by its
very meaing to equl no sense at all. We
have preshpas a blurrig of sense, whih
means not relying on convnetionally
methods of /conveying/ sense but whih may
aloow for dar greater sense-smakihn than
specisi9usforms of doinat disoucrse that
makes no sense at all by irute of thier
hyperconventionality (Bush's speeches,
calssically. Indeed you say that
nonsense sheds leds on its “antithesis”
sense making: but teally the antithsisi
of these poems you call nonselnse is not
sense-making itself but perhps, in some
cases, the simulation of sense-making:
decitfullness, manifpultaion, the
media-ization of language, etc.
I don’t agree with Stewart that “the
more exptreme the disontinuitites . . . the
more nonsisincial”: I hear sense
beginning to made in this sinstances.
Te problem though is the definaitonof
sense. What you mean by nomsense is
soething like a-rational, but ration (and
this does back to Blake not to meanion
the pre-Socaratics) DOES NOT EQUAL
sense! This realtioes to the sort of
oscillation udnertood as rhythmic or
prosidci, that I disusccio in Artiofice.
Crucialy, the duck/rabitt exmaple is one
of the ambiguity of /aspects/ and clearly
not a bprobelm of noneselnse: tjere are
two competing, completely sensible,
readings, not even any blurring; the
issue is context-depednece )otr
apsrevcyt blindness as Witegenstein
Nonesesen is too static. Deosnt’t
Prdunne even say int e eoem “sense occurs
“at the contre-coup:: in the process of
oscillatio itself.
b6y the waylines 9-10 are based on an
aphorism by Karl Kraus: /the closer we
look at a word the greater the distance
from which it stares back./
My generation was born with a nostalgia for democracy, a dream we inherited in infantine sleep. We awoke to a nightmare. In the dream there was not a lone man on a frontier, heading off into the sunset. Rather, everyone was there, every woman, every child, every person- we all showed up, and no one was more there than anyone else. In the nightmare, we saw ourselves standing together, but getting further and further away, as from the back of a moving train. From the nightmare we awoke alone and in fear, without anyone to tell us how we got where we are.

We awoke disembodied. We walked dispossessed, through streets rumbling in their own corpulence. We entered many doors, looking for shelter; to some of us they were open, to some of us they were not. We regarded each other through windows, outside and in. Occassionally we waved, most often we looked away quickly. Eventually, we stopped recognizing one another.

At nigth we dreamed the nightmare, and awoke to live it all over again. Or occassionally we dreamed the dream, and the waking was sadder. Some of us mistook the nightmare for the dream. In that dream, everyone else was standing in back of the train, and only we were on board, and we wondered why. As they got further away, we did not wave. We mistook being on the train for being happy- we thought the train was going somewhere. In the dream, or in the nightmare awake, the train later derailed. We got off and wondered where we were, and why no one else was around. We looked down the track, hoping for another train to come along.

Monday, November 01, 2004

Funny. I was also reading this today. Trying to figure out what poem I wanted my undergraduates to read next semester.

I love that Alan Sekula book on the docks also.
Kasey Mohammad is now a reader for the West Wind Review and is looking for some good, innovative work. I highly recommend sending some work his way. The deadline is 12/1.

--------------------
GUIDELINES

1.
* Send a maximum of five poems or two stories.
* All work must be original and unpublished.
* No simultaneous submissions.
* Rights revert to the author.
* Submissions may be reproduced in part in advertisements and publicity.

2.
* Type your name on the first page only of poem or manuscript; subsequent pages should be numbered.
* Double space prose.
* Use a readable font.

3.
* Send a cover letter with your manuscript. Include your name, address, telephone number, email address and a 100-word biography.
* Indicate if you want your manuscript returned and if so, enclose an envelope of appropriate size, self-addressed and with adequate postage.
* If you do not want your manuscript returned, send a standard SASE for notification of acceptance/rejection.

4.
* If your work is accepted for publication you will receive a copy of the book.

A Note to Artists

Photographs, drawings, prints, etc. should be high contrast and reproducible in black and white. Work must be scannable and cannot exceed 8.5" x 14". Originals will be returned if you include a self-addressed envelope with adequate postage affixed.

Send work to:
West Wind Review
1250 Siskiyou Boulevard
Ashland, Oregon 97520