On The Edge

"Thematically, film noir examines the role of the individual within a diseased modern society. The issues of noir films are alienation, entrapment within a powerful industrial system, paranoia, fatalism and inevitable doom of mankind. In a sense, one can argue that film noir is a psychological examination of modern man’s existence. And along the way it thrills the audience. Film noir forces the viewer to think and grapple with its themes. Viewing a film noir is not a passive experience, rather, it is active and sometimes quite disturbing. The characters of noir live on the edge and take the audience along with them."
~ Tony Kashani, "Film Noir Form and Content," from Chapter 12 of Deconstructing the Mystique

Nothing to Be Done

From Giorgio Agamben's Profanations:

Each of us has known such creatures, whom Walter Benjamin defines as "crepuscular" and incomplete, similar to the gandharvas of the Indian sages, who are half celestial genie, half demon. "None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading its qualities with its enemies or neighbor; none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence." More intelligent and gifted than our other friends, always intent on notions and projects for which they seem to have all the necessary virtues, they still do not succeed in finishing anything and are generally idle [senz' opera]. They embody the type of eternal student or swindler who ages badly and who must be left behind in the end, even if it is against our wishes. And yet something about them, an inconclusive gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain mathematical boldness in judgment and taste, a certain air of nimbleness in their limbs or words -- all these features indicate that they belong to a complementary world and allude to a lost citizenship or inviolable elsewhere. In this sense, they give us help, even though we can't quite tell what sort of help it is. It could consist precisely in the fact that they cannot be helped, or in their stubborn insistence that "there is nothing to be done for us." For that very reason, we know, in the end, that we have somehow betrayed them.

[as quoted at Ads Without Products]

Music #5

More oldies...

"It Don't Come Easy," Ringo Starr

"Feelin' Alright," Joe Cocker

"The Look of Love," Dusty Springfield

Called By Other Names

"Quid ergo amo, cum deum meum amo?"
~ Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book 10 (Chapter 7)

.OOOOOOO.

"[Jacques] Derrida was intrigued by Saint Augustine, a fellow North African. With Saint Augustine he asked, 'What do I desire [love] when I desire [love] my God?' This question has no certain answer but it is worth asking because it opens up expectations and possibilities for God's action. Derrida compared his mother with the mother of Augustine, Monica who worried about their children's faith. He writes, '...my religion about which nobody understands any more than my mother who asked other people a while ago, not daring to talk to me about it, if I still believed in God ... but she must have known that the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I rightly pass for an atheist, the omnipresence of what I call my God in my absolved, absolutely private language being neither that of an eyewitness nor that of a voice doing anything other than talking to me without saying anything, nor a transcendent law or an immanent schechina, that feminine figure of a Yahweh who remains so strange and so familiar to me..' (Derrida in 'Jacques Derrida' p.154)."
~ John Paolini, "The Possibility of God: An Essay in the Philosophy of Religion" (2003)

Wasted

"No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. All the better, then, if he could have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music-hall comedian."
~ T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

Music #4

Oldies...

"Buy or Beware," Mellow Candle

"The Nitty Gritty," Gladys Knight & the Pips

"Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again," The Fortunes

The Metaphysical Organ

"The process of making sense of the world is closely connected with the word. Speech is the metaphysical organ of man. And yet over time the word grows rigid, becomes immobilized, ceases to be the conductor of new meanings. The poet restores conductivity to words through new short-circuits, which arise out of their fusions. The image is also an offshoot of the original word, the word which was not yet a sign, but a myth, a story, or a meaning."
~ Bruno Schulz, "Mityzacja rzeczywistosci"
("The Mythologization of Reality," transl. John M. Bates)

An Experience

"'To read a poem should be an experience, like experiencing an act' [Wallace Stevens, 'Adagia,' Collected Poetry and Prose]. The idea of the artwork as an experience also produces a basis for aesthetic judgment. One can (and should) ask, 'Does this artwork provide a unique, distinctive experience, one that hasn't already been experienced, known, understood?' Walter Benjamin describes shock and distraction as the modern mode of consciousness (or unconsciousness), in which most of our experience is not really experienced and doesn't actually exist for us at all. Although art should be the antidote to this nonexperience of distraction, most of what we read simply repeats and re-presents what has already been experienced (or nonexperienced). A real work of art makes us stop and pay attention. It breaks through our crust of habit and routine."
~ Reginald Shepherd, "On Difficulty in Poetry"

The Artist

The Artist

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist: capable, practicing, skillful;
maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

The true artist: draws out all from his heart,
works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,
works like a true Toltec*, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents;
arranges materials, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,
makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things,
works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

~ author unknown; mid-fifteenth century Náhuatl text
Translated by Elvira Abascal and Denise Levertov, from the
Spanish translation of the Toltec Codice de la Real Academia.
__________

* "...[T]he word, toltecatl, simply means 'craftsman' in the Nahua languages. Toltec was simply the word used to distinguish the Mexican peoples which retained the culture and much of the urban characteristics of the culture of Teotihuacán from other peoples; even the Aztecs primarily referred to themselves by either their tribal name (Tenochca) or as 'Toltecs.'"

Tribes of Art

Click on image to see full article at The Guardian's Books blog.

"Hang out at any big gathering of artists long enough and, [Scott] McCloud argues, you will see the artists gravitate towards four clusters, or tribes. These tribes represent the fundamental values those artists hold and strive towards in their work. They are not impermeable concrete bunkers, and most artists have their feet in two or more tribes."

* * *

"But every tribe has weaknesses to balance their strengths. For all their ability to move an audience, Animists are often the most colloquial and narrow-minded artists. Classicists might know what is great, but in constantly repeating it can easily become boring. While style-conscious Formalists can be so concerned with experimentation that their creations lack heart and soul. And the Iconoclasts, determined to change the world, risk making art consumed by negativity and anger. Whichever tribe you belong to, it's worth opening your mind to the strengths and values of your opponents, even when enjoying a really good argument with them."

[via Silliman's Blog]

To Examine "It"

"I don't write to express myself. I write to examine 'it.' There is a lot of 'it' out there. This is what my poetry does. That I have standpoints emerging from my social locations (class, religious culture, gender, national origin) is a true statement; that I make intricate weaves of these elements is true; that I can learn more about any social location and respond to it if sufficiently moved is also true. I begin by setting out from myself, as you say -- precisely, because by beginning I get beyond the boundedness of 'self' into something more. As for 'me,' -- forget 'me' or 'I.' It's as if we are yearning toward a new pronoun to understand something else than what subject positions emerge from the pronouns we already know and use."
~ Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an interview with CAConrad

Rules of Thumb

Mary Biddinger: "My Unwritten Poetry Rules" -- with several others sharing their own self-imposed guidelines in the comments section.

.OOOOOOO.

"Craft and style are essential to honing emotional content into something greater than mere confession or less appealing forms of monomania -- I'm not wholly enthralled with the idea of poetry being a substitute for therapy or group-groping apologetics -- but the continual emphasis on poets and poetry as subject matter represents a flight from the standard practice of poetry as an extraordinary way to fathom that unexplainable condition of being human."
~ Ted Burke, "No More Poems About Poetry"

.OOOOOOO.

Young Poets
by Nicanor Parra

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

(trans. by Miller Williams)

Working Class Poem

"To assume that the 'true' working class poem is only a narrative exposition of working class 'experience,' is to buy into normative reading patterns established by post-WWII academic poetries in the U.S. This assumption precludes the full possibilities of language, isolating working class poets to a particular kind of expressionism. It would be difficult to find a parallel prescription placed on the depiction of class in other art forms."
~ Kathy Lou Schultz, "Talking Trash, Talking Class: What's a Working Class Poetic, and Where Would I Find One?" (1998)
[via wood s lot]

Only States of Being

"I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being -- all stories have become obsolete and clichéd, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine -- time itself: the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds."
~ Béla Tarr
[via Spurious]

__________

About Béla Tarr:
"Hope Deep Within - Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies," by Gabe Klinger
"The Melancholy of Resistance: The Films of Béla Tarr," by Peter Hames

Theory

"There is no such thing as a poem without a theory."
~ Ron Silliman (12 August 2008)

"When a writer says that he or she 'has no' theory or just simply writes whatever they may be 'given' to write, it does not mean that there is no theory, but rather that they refuse to look at these things, and that that is a critical, indeed foundational, part of their own theory, i.e. their own practice as poets."

One-Liners

"Poetry today has as one of its tasks that of clearing public life of images and giving us art instead."
~ Lyn Hejinian, "The Sad Note in a Poetics of Consciousness," in Poetry and Public Language (2007)
[As cited by Catherine Martin in "No Way Out" (Pores, August 2008)]

__________

"Too often, the focus on literal truth presents us not with the essence or core of the poet's being, but with the patio furniture of his or her life."
~ David Alpaugh, "The Professionalization of Poetry" (2003): Part One, Part Two

__________

"There is a weather report in almost every folk poem. The sun is shining; it was snowing; the wind was blowing.... The folk poet knows that it's wise to immediately establish the connection between the personal and the cosmic."
~ Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (2008)
[Excerpt at Poetry Daily]

Berrigan's Influence

"What [Ted] Berrigan's Sonnets granted in some sense was permission -- to cut up and collage diary entries into poems, to cannibalize friends' letters, to collaborate with other writers and artists, to leap remorselessly from image to dialog to signs in the world, to let B-movie icons commingle with literary luminaries, to transpose lines from one poem to another, to use disjunction and disruption as (un)conscious strategies, in short to stuff the stuff of life into the suitcase of art. This influence is felt deeply (though very differently) in the work of [Anne] Waldman and [Anselm] Hollo."
~ Ravi Shankar, "Anne Waldman, Anselm Hollo, and the Authentic Avant-Garde" (in The Quarterly Conversation, Summer 2008)

[via wood s lot]

Making Unfamiliar

"Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.... And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important."
~ Victor Shklovsky, "Art As Technique" (transl. Lee T. Lemon & Marion J. Reis)

[via Ravi Shankar, via wood s lot]

Accidental Aphorism #1

"Don't crowd flowers and candles or petals could be singed."

In the Process

"[Robert] Creeley's first principle is that you find out what you have to say in the process of saying it: poetry becomes a way of making not representing. This presents a stark challenge to an approach to poems that begins with ideas or sentiments or messages and then represents or approximates them in the poem. Composition (including editing and recomposing) becomes the active agency of the poem. Immediacy and immanence of expression precedes essence."
~ Charles Bernstein, "Hero of the Local: Robert Creeley and the Persistence of American Poetry"

.OOOOOOO.

"The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity."
~ William Carlos Williams, cited by Creeley in "The Release" (The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley)

Packing & Unpacking

"Our metaphors for the poetry are generally those of packing and unpacking: Clark Kent pressing coal down to diamonds (Emily Dickinson) or Mallarmé distributing words over a chosen field. The question of poetics is how extensive or intensive the distribution should be. All poetic form is arbitrary, strategic, and emotional. The task of the author is to decide, how much 'jack' to pack into or out of the given box. The heroic couplet and Ron Silliman's 'new sentence' gaze out differently at the same rainy day."
~ Paul Hoover, "Black Painting Divided by a White Painting"

[via wood s lot]

Fate

"This is probably what we mean by the term 'fate'; were it not inevitable, we would not employ that term; we would, instead, speak of bad luck. We would talk about accidents. With fate there is no accident; there is intent. And there is relentless intent, closing in from all directions at once, as if the person's very universe is shrinking. Finally, it holds nothing but him and his sinister destiny. He is programmed against his will to succumb, and, in his efforts to thrash himself free, he succumbs even faster, from fatigue and despair. Fate wins, then, no matter what."
~ Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

See also:
PKD Official Site

About Flarf

Gary Sullivan, interviewed (May 2006) by Tom Beckett at E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S:

"Many have seen a connection between Flarf and Language Writing. The connection, so far as I can tell -- other than many of us having been influenced as much by Language Writing as by anything else -- is in the extent to which we seem focused on decentering and exploring subjectivity."

* * *

"So, though I've been talking largely about Flarf as a sensibility and how appropriation plays a role in that, there is the other issue, which is very easily summed up: We literally appropriate other text for our work. But not just any other text. A key aspect of most of the text we appropriate is that it is a manifestation of some other person's subjectivity."

* * *

"I wrote a lot about flarf on my blog several months ago after noticing that the word 'flarf' seemed to be getting around. What I noticed was that flarf was being used as shorthand for 'Google-sculpting.' I felt that it was important at the time to talk about the word's origin. Not because ownership was an issue, but because I felt it was important to distinguish flarf from Google-sculpting. Important because Google-sculpting, considering everything available on the Web, could look and sound like anything. Flarf, on the other hand, doesn't."

Derivative

"Makes me feel bookish as hell -- all these being poems made out of other pieces of writing. Then again, I've always carried as a touchstone a weird little moment of television I caught on a moniter in an airport when I was in highschool: a young Italian fashion designer was being interviewed by a woman who accused him of being derivative. 'I combine the things I love, the things that fascinate me, things that have already been made. I am not ashamed of this.'"
~ Robert Archambeau, "Two New Poems" (at Samizdat Blog)

Music #3

"F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)," Frankee

"Oh My," The Gray Kid

"Think," James Brown

Card-Poems

"In the early 1970s, on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, and in complete ignorance of each other, Russian poet Lev Rubinstein and American poet Robert Grenier initiated a series of poetry raids on the fortress of the book: both began composing poems on small cards, a practice that would culminate in Grenier's Sentences (1978), a box of 500 such card-poems, and Rubinstein's own boxes of serial cards (beginning around 1974)."
~ Philip Metres, "Installing Lev Rubinstein's 'Farther and Farther On': From Note Cards to Field Walks"

* * *

"Rubinstein catalogs remarkable speech fragments, disjointed bits of various discourses and staggeringly bad 'traditional' rhymed poetry. These found objects he presents as poems, which the reader or listener feels she must have heard somewhere hundreds of times before without noticing."
~ Northwestern University Press (re: Rubinstein's Here I Am)

Free Meaning

"The practice of making photo albums from found photographs is similar to Surrealist film practices. Both practices rely on fragmentation and de-contextualization, followed by an imaginative recombination that does not respect the intentions of the original owners. For the Surrealists, existing films were 'found objects' to be fragmented and used. Finding obscure details within a film aided in the dissolution of the film, and thus to the interruption of its ideological effects."

* * *

"Is it any surprise, given their interests in fragmentation, that the Surrealists became collectors and exhibitors of found objects? The Surrealists understood that context 'fixes' meaning. They tried to free meaning by destroying or altering context."

~ Barry Mauer, "The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning" (Enculturation, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 2001)

Music #2

"All These Things That I've Done," The Killers

"I Need Love," Sam Phillips

"1979," Smashing Pumpkins (Moby remix)

Music #1

Sertab Erener, "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)"

Jim James & Calexico, "Goin' To Acapulco"

Fun Boy Three, "Our Lips Are Sealed"

Some Definitions

from Wikipedia:

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to the exploration of "the inappropriate" in all of its guises. Their method was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts.

Found poetry is the rearrangement of words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages that are taken from other sources and reframed as poetry by changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions.

Spoetry or Spoems are poetic verses made primarily from the subject lines of spam e-mail messages.

Memorial Day

memorial
1374 (adj.) "preserving the memory of a person or thing;" 1382 (n.) "something by which the memory of a person, thing, or event is preserved, monument," from L.L. memoriale, lit. noun use of neut. of L. memorialis (adj.) "of or belonging to memory," from memoria "memory" (from memor "mindful, remembering," from PIE base *men-/*mon- "think"). Noun sense of "memorial act, commemoration" is from 1468.

Memorial Day (from Wikipedia):

• Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. men and women who perished while in military service to their country. First enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War, it was expanded after World War I to include casualties of any war or military action.
• The alternative name of "Memorial Day" was first used in 1882, but did not become more common until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967.
• It was observed for the first time on May 30 of [1868]; the date was chosen because it was not the anniversary of a [Civil War] battle. The tombs of fallen Union soldiers were decorated in remembrance of this day.
• On June 28, 1968, the United States Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved three holidays [Washington's Birthday (which evolved into Presidents' Day), Veterans Day, and Memorial Day] from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend...
• ... [S]ome, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW), advocate returning to this fixed date, although the significance of the date is tenuous. The VFW stated in a 2002 Memorial Day Address, "Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed a lot to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day."
• The southeastern U.S. celebrates Decoration Day as a day to decorate the graves of all family members, and it is not reserved for those who served in the military. The region observes Decoration Day on the Sunday before Memorial Day.
• Some Americans also view Memorial Day as the unofficial beginning of summer and Labor Day as the unofficial end of the season.

Trance

Once you were reduced by my story to the role of a passive spectator in a state of mild captivation, I could lead you down to the next level of vulnerability: trance. I asked you to envision yourself reading the book in your hands right now. Like a hypnotist asking you to watch your breath, I employed a standard trance-induction technique called "disassociation": You are no longer simply reading this book, but picturing yourself reading the book. By separating your awareness from your actions, you become the observer of your own story. Your experience of volition is reduced to what a New Age psychotherapist would call a "guided visualization." From the perspective of coercion technicians who call themselves "neuro-linguistic programmers" (hypnotists who use the habits of the nervous system to reprogram our thought processes), this state of consciousness renders you quite vulnerable. The moment you frame your own awareness within a second level of self-consciousness is the moment your mind is most up for grabs.

~ from Coercion by Douglas Rushkoff

Caper

(typical plot structure, based on Drew Casper's DVD commentary for The Asphalt Jungle)
1. Explanation
      a. Why
      b. Who
      c. How
2. Demonstration
      a. Rehearsal
      b. Execution
3. Outcome
      a. Success or failure
      b. Consequences ---> a new "Why"

Sifting

"In the traditional detective genre, the protagonist must sift through competing narratives to uncover the truth. In these ontoteleological films, the protagonist must sift through the multitude of subjective states to realize the self. Chris Nolan's Memento, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, and John Woo's Paycheck all feature protagonists who must discover their identities through the course of the narrative (although each director approaches this in different ways and with different levels of cinematic success)."
~ Davin Heckman, "Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman"

Corrupt Heart

"The detective story aims to represent, within the pride of bourgeois progress, the corrupt heart of the city. This corruption is both hidden and pervasive, but it exists everywhere that modernity exists."
~ Davin Heckman, "Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman"