Jacket2 launches & this blog

Jacket2 magazine is now launched, I'm happy to say (as its proud publisher). At J2 we have created commentaries and I as publisher will be one of the permanent commentators. Many of the kinds of blog posts I have been posting here since 2007 will now be published in J2. I will continue posting from time to time here, but these will be less frequent and they will focus more on issues and concerns and events not related to the work and purpose of Jacket2. I hope readers of this blog will continue to check here, but I urge people who mostly like what I have to say to go to http://jacket2.org/content/alfilreis and follow me there. Very soon there will be an RSS feed there, and I will transfer my subscription service there too.

digital humanites

I'm pleased that on nicomachus.net, a digital humanities blog, I'm described today as a "tireless purveyor of recorded, digitized, and archived poetry readings."

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praise for PennSound

Sina Queyras talks to Johanna Skibsrud and the transcript of their conversation appears now (entry dated November 9, 2010) on Sina's wonderful blog, Lemon Hound. Along the way, I'm pleased to say, Johanna praises PennSound (see above). Johanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists is up for a Giller Prize (the "darkest horse" in the race according to the Toronto Star), but she is also a poet, and the author of two collections, most recently I Do Not Think I Could Love a Human Being.

dementia blog

I've read Susan Schultz' Dementia Blog - the ongoing blog project and also a book published under the same title (excerpts from the blog). The blog is the diary of a daughter who cares for her mother as the parent's memory quickly fades, one crisis and change after another, in the usual sad and disorienting progression. But "progression"? Or "regression"? That, in short, is the key question. What is it that we call this human anti-narrativity? How do we describe it? Blogs, written in order, happen to feed to the browser last entry first, and so we read a blog, as it were, from last page to first page. Books conventionally turn this around. The reversal revealed itself to Susan as she wrote. Her primary response (to her mother's changing identity) yields to a secondary response (what is the apt mode for telling others of this) and then the primary/secondary distinction dissolves. To witness is to adjust. The illness becomes the medium.

As you read this work you go backwards into the daughter's recent past to a point just when the mother begins to lose a grasp on her past. Ironically, conventional novelistic progression is repurposed for the digital mode that would normally undermine it. As we move toward the end (the beginning: Susan's return home from a vacation abroad to deal with her mother's first crises), we arrive at wholeness. Not Pip realizing his realistic place in London, nor Emma right-siding the world into appropriate family pairings, nor even Clarissa Dalloway's party which brings the whole fractured cast together, but a happy-ever-after that is a moment in time just before the decline begins. In the end are things as they were.

I recently asked Susan if she would make audio recordings of her reading selections from Dementia Blog and I'm happy to say that she obliged and that PennSound's Susan Schultz author page now features recordings of nine of the diary entries, moving backward in time of course. In addition, we have a 1-minute "about me"--Susan on herself.

elective affinities

It's time to check out the poets featured on ElectiveAffinitiesUSA, a blog managed by Carlos Soto-Roman.

megachurches for spring break

When the gospel garage-rock we had so tolerantly been appreciating came to an abrupt end, Lon Solomon's face appeared like the Wizard of Oz on shining silver screens. A shiver ran down my spine and kept running as his dark mouth opened wide around words like "trustworthiness" and "veracity". My discomfort came on so strong because, well, Lon is an atavistic crossbreed of game-show host and far-right cult leader, fluffing his feathers in high perch as the Senior Pastor of the McLean Bible Church. His position gives him the opportunity to preach to ten-thousand people every week, offering sermons that cover the burning bush, gay marriage, and everything he misrepresents in between.

That's the opening paragraph of the latest (final?) blog entry posted to a blog titled "religioUSA" - written by students Kim Eisler, Hannah McDonnell, Sarah Souli, and Adrian Pelliccia. They traveled to Florida recently to study--for a second year--the role and function of the mega-church in southern culture.

hiatus

I'm taking a week's hiatus from almost all things digital. Back on Monday, April 5. I know you'll miss me.

security? what security? we don't really mean security

Every once in a while I've been checking the blog of unnecessary quotation marks. Scare quotes and other similar infelicitous uses of quotation have long driven "me" "crazy." The title of the blog entry featuring the massage sign above is: Real Pros. Ah, the unintended euphemisms of our daily lives.

closed for good

Once you've closed down, what more is there? If you're coming back, does that mean you're unclosed, that closed has been cancelled? Unlikely. More like: closing gives way to closed for good. This is no longer about putting on a sale.

Linh Dinh is quickly becoming my favorite political photographer. I'm pretty sure Linh would brush aside auteur-centered praise, since--at any rate this seems to be so--he's doing precisely no more than just looking closely at what's around him. He gets to affirm his positions just by pointing his camera this way and then that, sensitive to both easy and hard ironies especially in the visualities of language along the rotted cityscape. His blogs are State of the Union and Detainees and there I'm always feeling detained, indeed. I'm reminded of Cid Corman's minimalist meta-text: I make my art in order to detain you, here.

third most oft-visited blog entry

My diatribe against Schindler's List (which, I'll admit, risks accusations of elitism) is the third most-often visited entry in this entire blog, and it dates back to March of 2008--a while back--and is thus not all that easily viewable other than through web searches. It's not, by any means, that my criticism is well known or well linked, but rather, probably, that there's a nation full of high-school kids who are made to watch the movie in school and are being asked to write papers about it. I wonder if any of them, upon reading my concerns, absorb that into their analyses. (If you are such a student, please let me know by clicking the little envelope below this entry.)

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transcontinental hypnotics

Poet Linh Dinh is on the road now - I should say the railroad; he's taking trains from the east coast to Chicago, down to Austin, out to L.A., giving poetry readings along the way and taking photographs for his superb blog Detainees. His blog's photos depict the American economy as keenly as any medium I've seen/read. When I heard Linh would be traveling by train I immediately fantasized my own version of such a mode: reading a stack of books, and writing. No, said Linh, I can't do that. I will just sit and stare.

denied to those who only drive & surf

Speaking of the poetics of street life, and of blogs, over at Detainees, Linh Dinh's blog, Linh and Murat Nemet-Nejat are having a back-and-forthish exchange in response to Linh's photographs taken along Philadelphia's streets. At the end of which Linh has now said: "A tangent to this discussion is our shared interest in street life, how the body needs to regularly swim through a common space while being exposed to a multitude of mostly unknown others. This intercourse, both comforting and menacing, is denied to those who only drive and surf."

Linh's caption for the photo above at right: I wasn't trying to confuse him. He had asked for a smoke. "This ain't a dollar, man." "Yes, it is!"

what's next? hand-smashed avocado

I've been reading Beth Kwon at BK 2.0 probably longer than any other blogger. Simple daily observations, life in Brooklyn, smart person with camera and satirical sensibility--yet needy and loves to see. She's at her best when snapping a photograph, often on the street, and permitting herself a momentary snark in response. Captions, in essence. Her response to this sign: I can scarcely think of anything less appetizing than avocado that’s been man-handled by a food service worker in New York City. Yet that is not stopping Chipotle’s pathetic knock-off, Qdoba Mexican Grill, from using “hand-smashed guacamole” as a way to lure customers. By the way, BK 2.0 (as BK 1.0, I think) started as a hand-typewritten (yes) xeroxed newsletter mailed to subscribers - a zine. Started in the latest zenith of such zines: 1999. It made the transition to blogging already very much bloggy in its mode and style. Mundanely observational, unapologetically personal and yet widely appealing. That it was a blog before its time I find also appealing.

against the cavalcade of nice

"Don’t let a poetry organization be put in charge of placing poems on buses. It upholds the cavalcade of nice. If poetry is nice then it is dead." Eileen Myles writes for the Harriet blog of the Poetry Foundation on why she hates poetry.

More Myles.

new app kicks my butt; or, I only intended apples & oranges

I'm happily using a new iPhone application that works pretty seamlessly with blogger. I can't imagine what real advantage this gives me or anyone other than sheer speed and super-presence or ridiculous immediacy. Yet isn't blogging already so immediate (at least in tone and diction) as to be ridiculous? Yet again I can imagine real live-blogging - for instance from a reading or art event. I'll try it soon so stay tuned. The photo below I found just now in my phone's camera log - taken during the reception last week at our Silliman celebration. Erin Gautsche and the KWH students went through "The Alphabet" looking for food references and then served us only items mentioned in Ron's poetry. I was never gladder than at that moment that Ron had spent so much time in California. He is by no means a foodie poet (an understatement) but the New Sentence does tend to grab up a few of the nutritions in the environment. "I don't mean to presume uh if you could it seems that is I only intended apples and oranges" (from Garfield, p. 49).

fast becoming

Gosh, thank you Alex Davies at Openned! (Here's the entry to which he refers.)

don't know butkus about football

Get your daily Al.

war inaugural

The blog "Change in the Wind" does more with the choice of Elizabeth Alexander to give the inaugural poem, and refers to my earlier entry on this topic.