on becoming a character

In 2002, during his visit to the Writers House, I interviewed novelist Michael Cunningham. Just today Jenny Lesser segmented the audio recording of that discussion into topics. You can listen to any of these segments, or all of them, by going here, and here is the list:

* introduction by Al Filreis (6:32)
* on the gap between the ideal and the actual creation (4:35)
* on youth, conventionality, creation and The Hours (3:43)
* on changing circumstances and Cunningham's Clarissa (4:38)
* on pacing ideas in writing (2:53)
* on first reading Virginia Woolf (7:18)
* on being defined as a gay writer (4:00)
* on writing from Virginia Woolf's point of view (3:55)
* on faith, doctors, and Virginia Woolf (6:34)
* on gay boyhoods and the numbness and separateness experienced by outsiders (7:10)
* on personal politics and becoming a character (5:15)
* on Golden States (5:50)
* who Cunningham thanks for The Hours (1:24)
* reading from At Home at the End of the World (3:26)

At some point during our conversation we talked about the making of the film version of The Hours. By the time of Cunningham's visit, the film was in process, or it had been made but not yet released. He spoke admiringly of the film's Clarissa--Meryl Streep--and talked about the thrill of having his own tiny role in the film (a friend Clarissa meets along a Greenwich Village street). Well, our favorite literary photographer, Lawrence Schwartzwald, was there at the moment, yes, and took the photo below of Cunningham and Streep. It was February 1, 2001, and the precise location was Bleecker and Charles.

Susan Sontag, in the same zone

When the late Susan Sontag visited the Kelly Writers House, we had a series of extraordinarily heady discussions. Anyone who has read Sontag can easily imagine this, I think. But at KWH it somehow really clicked. During my interview with her on the last morning of her visit, she gave us high praise - which I've just listened to again after some years: audio. And click here to see the whole conversation segmented into topics.

bound for Treblinka

This is the Handscher family in Warsaw, Poland. My father's mother, Jenny, was born Jenny Handscher. These people are her brothers and sisters - and her parents, my great-grandparents. In the bottom row, from left to right, we have Schloime (who survived and later came to the U.S.); Eliezer (father of Menachem/Mike and Meyer who also survived); the parents, Menachem and Tova; the youngest of the children, Bezalel. In the back row, from left to right: the youngest daughter, whose name we don't know; Jenny (my grandmother); Minnie (who came to the U.S. with Jenny). Killed at Treblinka, so far as we know: Eliezer, Bezalel, the youngest daughter, and both parents. This photo was given to my father by my grandmother, and by my father to me. Just today I heard from Eliezer's grandson, Nachum Handscher, who lives in Israel. Nachum is the son of Mike/Menachem, one of Eliezer's sons. The story of the survival of Eliezer's sons, Mike and Meyer, is a long, complex and dramatic one - not for this entry, but later, someday.

the second-floor terrace of well-being

Erica Baum's new project is called Dog Ear. Photographs of consecutive pages of what seem to be old books. Dog-ear one page to create an origami-perfect right angle and the result is a kind of cut-up, only the text of the back side of the first page runs up-to-down rather than right-to-left, so the right-to-left lines of the previous page now revealed run to a corner and then turn 90 degrees. So we get, for instance: "made her feel as if of objects shaped." Can't wait to see the real project. Meantime, see you on the "second-floor terrace of well-being."

Ubu has already added Dog Ear to its terrific Erica Baum page, so I urge all readers of this blog to go there and find the link.

See a few earlier blog posts about Erica Baum's work.

another for the "what coulda been" department

“We don't talk about the things that happened to us, ... If we didn't have some issues, I mean, what coulda been, coulda been.”--Darryl Strawberry

marginalia is no longer marginal

I'm reading Susan Howe's Melville's Marginalia. Years ago, at the start of my own antiquarianism, I got deeply into writers' marginalia myself. I looked into Melville's reading, as have many scholars over the decades. He was one of those who left traces of his responses to reading. This morning I went to the web--of course--following an impulse to see if the scholarship was still out of the way, out of print, hard to find - itself, in short, marginal. But no. There's a fabulous web site that shows us everything. Here's your link. Go deep.

does success lie in circuit? that's a real question

in the "is it worth it?" department

Despite great claims made for the introduction of computer and other new-media hardware and software into the classroom, and huge expenditures made by colleges and universities, 60% of the undergraduate students surveyed for a 2007 report by the Educause Center for Applied Research said that they disagreed with the statement, “I am more engaged in courses that use technology.”* The issue, of course, is not whether we should be equipping our classrooms with the necessary current tools; we should. No the issue is whether teachers feel that in such a setting the box marked "learners' engagement" has been checked.

“The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007,” September 12, 2007, educause.edu/ir/library.

from the blog archive

I posted this (below) in the fall of 2007. Of the 1,111 entries added to this blog, this is one of those that generates an especially great number of responses. I don't have a reply function here (for many reasons) but you can always reach me at afilreis [at] gmail [dot] com.

- - -

Tom Short, an itinerant evangelist brought to campus by the A&M Christian Fellowship, told one student that, because she is Jewish, she is going "to burn in Hell." He told another Jewish student that "Hitler did not go far enough."

This was the lead in a November 1996 story about anti-semitism at Texas A&M University.

Shortly after the incident was described on a Holocaust listserv to which I subscribed in those days, a scholar called the leaders of a Christian organization on that campus and then posted a response, which included this comment: "Subscribers may be interested to know that I have spoken with both the adviser and student president of the A&M Christian Fellowship, the organization that invited the antisemitic preacher Tom Short to campus. Both claimed that his comment about Hitler was 'taken out of context,' and that Short 'is not that kind of man.'"

(Well, what "kind" exactly is he?)

I posted these materials to my Holocaust site at the time and it has received more response from viewers than almost anything else.

Susan Howe, March 22-23

"Listening to Susan Howe read is like staring
into a lake enchanted mesmerized drawn closer and closer
until the tip of the nose touches water & then
swiftly one senses danger danger a warning a voice saying No,
no wrong way not the lake not the lake over here
& yes she's over there now &
the magnetic pull begins again."--Maureen Owen

Susan Howe will be our second of three spring 2010 Kelly Writers House Fellows. She will be visiting much of the week of March 22. These are the two public Fellows events:

* Monday, March 22, 6:30 PM - a reading
* Tuesday, March 23, 10 AM - brunch followed by interview/conversation moderated by me

Seats are strictly limited. The two sessions are free and open to the public - but, again, seats are limited and attendees must RSVP in advance. To reserve seats, write to whfellow [at] writing [dot] upenn [dot] edu or call (215) 573-9749. For more information, see: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/

KELLY WRITERS HOUSE FELLOWS, 1999-2010:

2010:
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Susan Howe
• David Milch
2009
• Robert Coover
• Joan Didion
• Mary Gordon
2008
• Art Spiegelman
• Lynne Sharon Schwartz
• Jerome Rothenberg
2007
• John McPhee
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Donald Hall
2006
• Richard Ford
• Cynthia Ozick
• Ian Frazier
2005
• Roger Angell
• E.L. Doctorow
• Adrienne Rich
2004
• Lyn Hejinian
• Russell Banks
• James Alan McPherson
2003
• Walter Bernstein
• Laurie Anderson
• Susan Sontag
2002
• Michael Cunningham
• John Ashbery
• Charles Fuller
2001
• Tony Kushner
• David Sedaris
• June Jordan
2000
• Grace Paley
• Robert Creeley
• John Edgar Wideman
1999
• Gay Talese

Miller avoided crucible

Arthur Miller might well have been a communist. He wrote for communist publications and seems to have had a significant editorial role (under a pseudonym), was involved in a series of CPUSA meetings, gatherings and projects, and there's a boatload of further circumstantial evidence. He was of course questioned by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee but managed to avert direct response to The Question, and quasi-evoked the 1st and 5th amendments to stave them off. In any case, it seems that the HUAC investigators did not have even the beginnings of the evidence Alan Wald has gathered and published in a chapter in his book Trinity of Passion, the second of his three-volume narrative of American radical writers in the 20th century. I mention Wald's Miller findings in my review of Wald's triology - in Left History's Fall/Winter 2007 issue. Here is the review (PDF).

Miller's having been affiliated with--perhaps a member of--the CPUSA doesn't alter the meaning or significance of his plays, doesn't change at least my own sense of his political views. But consider that Miller has been written about and written about--many dozens of scholarly articles, monographs by biographers and biographical critics. Are we so unattuned to the traces of American radical culture that we can't discern the evidence that Wald--not a Millerite, not a scholar of dramatic literature--found with a bit of hard work? For one thing, one has to read the long-forgotten (and in the 1950s suppressed or unavailable) communist and communist-affiliated journals and magazines. The fact is, when most academic critics of Miller's mode and genre were being trained in the graduate schools, or were getting tenure, this kind of research would not have been favored. That's saying the very least. We know a ton about his relationship with Marilyn Monroe. We know nothing (until Wald's work) about his political affiliations in the 1940s. Nearly every high school student has had to read The Crucible or Death of a Salesman but there's no way that the actual anti-anticommunism of the first play, or the anti-mercantilism (the devastating effects of alienated labor) of the second, would permit Marxist explanation if there had been a demonstrated connection between the beloved "heterodox" playwright and an actual Marxist political party in this country.

modernist democracy

Turns out that WCW's "no ideas but in things" is a localist's advocacy of direct representation. (There! That's a political reading.)

when the medium is finally the message, I say the message is the message

I jotted this note in 2002:

For people who run universities, especially those hard pressed to claim innovation and to respond somehow to the "information age," the allure of cliche postmodernity is great. The medium, to them, is the message. (Finally.) "Distance learning" is a fat pipeline, a delivery mechanism for content, the content being secondary ("x," a curricular blank to be filled out of material already in the course catalogue). But content, roughly speaking, has been the means by which intellectual communities have formed, and in the politics of the supposed coming cyber-university, real virtual communities are labor-intensive and expensive. And they have all the down sides that any communal activity does when it functions freely within a centrally organized organization. To resist, we assert that the medium is not the message. If the message has been experimental, either pedagogically or aesthetically (or both), then we can say that the message is (and has long been) the message. The phrase "distance learning" is replaced by "distributed learning." The community is enriched rather than dispersed by the introduction of e-media to teaching and learning.

"the real Filreis" as opposed to...

The Penn Current currently runs a story by Greg Johnson on the virtual Penn campus in Second Life, including, of course, our virtual Kelly Writers House.

strange wonder

Travis Nichols in the Huffington Post writes: "The discussion of poetry through digital media confounds in the same way. What will you miss if you ignore the web and just wait to read the next poet profiled in the New Yorker? Well, to name a few things, you'll miss the strange wonder that is Al Filreis Twitter feed, the alternate universe of ubuweb, and the continually maxed outrage and hype of all those poets' Facebook pages (has, as Craig Santos Perez put it, facebook killed the blogger star?)"

return on word

Today we are releasing PoemTalk #29. In this episode, Linh Dinh, Rae Armantrout and Tom Devaney talk with me about Kit Robinson's 1999 poem, "Return on Word." Click here for a link to the audio and much more.

jazz and lunch

New York Times jazz critic - and once a Writers House-affiliated student here - comes back to 3805 Locust on March 25. Listen to this for more.

free speech and literary intention

Back in the late '80s I used the opportunity to write a review of two books about the Smith Act prosecutions of American communists to put together an essay on First Amendment theory, literary intention and the political interpretation of speech. It's called "Words with 'All the Effects of Force': Cold-War Interpretation" and was published in American Quarterly (volume 39, issue 2 - Summer 1987). Here is the essay as a PDF.

Spielberg endures

Over the past year, this page has been the most oft-visited page here. Steven's dream of 6 million Oskar statuettes glittering in the sky above Cracow (to borrow an critical image put forward by Spielberg antagonist Art Spiegelman).

while I'm thinking of higher-ed pedagogy

Forcing our students to write conventional literary-critical essays is no less a form of pre-professionalism than the assignment given by a marketing professor who tells his students to create a new ad for Coke.

get rid of the workshop

If you want to get rid of the workshop poem, you have to get rid of the workshop. (Click on the image below for a larger view of the Facebook discussion.)

Michael Heller

Michael Heller at Poets' House today, where he gave a presentation on modern poetry. Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald. Here's our Michael Heller PennSound page.

sewing down the Mississippi

Jen Bervin will sew the Mississippi on your ceiling, if your ceiling is big enough.

I recently saw Bervin present on her "Mississippi" project. "Mississippi" is a panoramic scale model of the river that divides east and west in the United States. The scale is one inch to one mile, and the length of the river and gulf measures 230 curvilinear feet. The river is installed on the ceiling; it shows the riverbed mapped from the geocentric perspective, from inside the earth's interior looking up at the riverbed. It is composed of silver sequins; light shifts over the surface of them as you move through the space.

The sequins are made of foil stamped on cloth, a rare variety of vintage French sequin that comes strung in clusters. They vary in circumference — some are quite tiny. They are sewn onto a very simple layer of paper, mull, and tyvek.

The lower Mississippi, or meander belt, was completed at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in August 2009. "During that time," Bervin writes, "I found that it took me exactly the same amount of time to sew the length of river in sequins that it would have taken me to walk the same section of the river."

She also says: "You know the bulk of that was sewn listening to Penn Sound files."

Jen Bervin has done a number of great projects, including the sewing of Emily Dickinson's fascicles.

he tweets

Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/afilreis.

some other type success story

One of the longest soliloquies in the history of TV dramas:

You shut the fuck up, huh? Gimme that! Hey, you suck my dick and shut the fuck up, huh? Come here. Come on. Now then, here. The place where I found you, huh, is where this warrant’s from. Could you believe that I may have stuck a knife in someone’s guts 12 hours before you got on the wagon we headed out for fuckin’ Laramie in? No! Because I don’t look fuckin’ backwards. I do what I have to do and go on. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? You got a stagecoach to catch or somethin’, huh? Slow the fuck up. Did you know the orphanage part of the building you lived in, behind it, she ran a whorehouse, huh? Oh, so you knew? So, so what are you fuckin’ lookin’ at then, huh? God. Now, I’ll tell you somethin’ you don’t know. Before she ran a girls orphanage, fat Mrs. Fucking Anderson ran the boys orphanage on fucking Euclid avenue, as I would see her fat ass waddling out the boys dormitory at 5 o’clock in the fucking mornin’, every fuckin’ morning she blew her stupid fuckin’ cowbell and woke us all the fuck up. And my fuckin’ mother dropped me the fuck off there with 7 dollars and 60 some odd fuckin’ cents on her way to suckin’ cock in…in Georgia. And I didn’t get to count the fuckin’ cents before the fuckin’ door opened, and there, Mrs. Fat Ass Fuckin’ Anderson, who sold you to me. I had to give her 7 dollars and 60 odd fuckin’ cents that my mother shoved in my fuckin’ hand before she hammered 1,2,3,4 times on the fuckin’ door and scurried off down fuckin’ Euclid Avenue, probably 30 fuckin’ years before you were fuckin’ born. Then around Cape Horn and up to San Francisco, where she probably became Mayor or some other type success story, unless by some fucking chance she wound up as a ditch for fuckin’ cum. Now, fucking go faster, hmm?

Al Swearengen, Deadwood, season 1, episode 11, "Jewel's Boot is Made for Walking" (the very end of the episode).

Lyn Hejinian on the western desire to describe

In February 2004 I interviewed Lyn Hejinian before a live audience. Just today (thanks to the efforts of Rebekah Caton) we've divided the full audio recording of that interview into topical segments. Here is a link to page with the list of topics and links to the mp3 files. And here's the list of topics:

1. introduction (5:37): [listen] MP3
2. on Carl Rakosi (1:55): [listen] MP3
3. on "The Fatalist" (15:31): [listen] MP3
4. on Barbarism (4:18): [listen] MP3
5. the western desire to describe (4:11): [listen] MP3
6. "My Life" and compositional practice (2:09): [listen] MP3
7. younger poets and politics (3:21): [listen] MP3
8. poetry and ordinary language (4:08): [listen] MP3
9. terminology in contemporary literary history (4:05): [listen] MP3
10. social aspect of the language movement (1:47): [listen] MP3
11. truncated words (2:44): [listen] MP3
12. poetic practice and technology: engaging texts (3:51): [listen] MP3
13. the anthology process (4:36): [listen] MP3
14. wordplay vs. syntax in "Scheherazade" (4:08): MP3
15. theory and poetry: shared spaces (4:04): [listen] MP3
16. on Charles William Beebe (6:51): [listen] MP3
17. on Russian influences (4:08): [listen] MP3
18. reading from "the Fatalist" (2:09): [listen] MP3

Ashbery last night

Last night John Ashbery hosted the Tenth Muse at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd St. Y, where he introduced Marcella Durand, Robert Elstein and John Gallaher, who read from their works. Photography by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

northernmost PennSound listening

Michael Nardone and I have been corresponding about his interest in PennSound. He's currently spending a few months on Vancouver Island, but typically he and his wife live in a cabin on the east arm of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. (If you want to check this out on Google Maps, look for the town of Yellowknife and move about 150 km eastward.)

What is the northernmost listening to PennSound? It seems likely that Michael holds that record. "Probable northernmost Pennsound listening," he writes, "took place during a week up in Resolute. I remember listening to David Antin's war talk with a few arctic scientists stationed there."

manifesto: planning to stay

This talk was presented in response to a request for a manifesto to conclude a four-day conference on new writing practices. The conference took place in February 2010 at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta.

My dicta are four in total. In sum they are:

1) Writing isn’t the only thing that is changing or needs to change. 2) The other kinds of changes might demand an attention very different in kind from our usual. 3) Deep down, most of us do not really want these other changes to come. 4) The ideal site might be where things happen rather than get presented or taught.

Now I will elaborate a little on each:

1) If all this talk about true modal changes caused by (or aided by) writing in new media is going to be more than just talk, then we must also seek, or at least encourage, major changes in the institutions that were and are organized to assure the continuation of the old mode. Which is to say: if publishers and universities and art centers as organizations (with budgets, staff hierarchies, physical spaces, customs of credentialing) are set up assuming these binarisms:

I write/you read
I talk/you listen
I have/you want
I am/you aren’t yet
I have language/you need my language
I produce/you consume & purchase

--and if the relationship I write/you read is in the process of really changing (and indeed most of us here do our work on the assumption that it has already changed)--then all other aspects of the relationship must also be subject to that change. We cannot expect the traditional I write/you read binarism to disintegrate and then just hope that everything else in the writer/reader (and publisher/consumer, teacher/learner) relationship will similarly wither away, for there are actual forces maintaining it.

2) So the most obvious thing one can say is that the conversations we have been having this weekend are not just about writing. We should think every bit as innovatively about the institutions and organizations that rose up around the technology of the book as we have in conceiving the writing that goes on inside or near or astride these institutions. (Complete separation from them is a nice dream, but only as nice and dreamy as other separatisms.)

3) The honest truth is that most of us associated with such organizations - again I mostly mean universities and publishers and art centers, but also humanities institutes and foundations supporting artists – probably don't want the rest of the changes to follow from the disintegration of I write/you read exclusivity. This is especially true of I talk/you listen. (I make noise and you listen silently. I am producing something; you for the moment are unproductive.) Like the poetry reading, the lecture--being an ideology as well as an artifact of a certain phase of technology--is not something most people here are ready to give up. But I'm certain we will all be better off when we’ve put an end to the lecture; and anyway an alternative mode is among the main implications of what we do. So what is truly interactive? How many of us have been promised that such-and-such a gathering would be “interactive” only to find out that what people really want to give--but rarely to receive--is a series of monologues?

4) I do not believe what I'm saying is to come about virtually. It is very much a matter of physical design, of planning (and, incidentally, of planning to stay), of working with brick and mortar. We need to build spaces that are unconducive to what I'm doing right now.

Back in the mid-1970s, when he was promoting “oral poetry” as an alternative to the traditional presentation of writing, Jerome Rothenberg said the following: "As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have been an accountant." Yet Rothenberg did teach poetry in the classroom, and so admitted to a realization I very much admire and have myself used as a guiding principle: “the classroom [can] become a substitute for those places (coffee shop or kiva) where poetry actually happens & where it can be ‘learned’ (not ‘taught’) in action.”

As pre-digital as the metaphor of the kiva is, I still like it. I like it because it pushes the distinction between teaching and learning, and because it imagines spaces where “poetry actually happens” rather than where it is presented as if it’s not there and thus must be talked about.

KWH'ers in Banff

Here at Banff last night: immediately after Charles Bernstein's stunning performance of his poetry there was a bit of a group hug among the Penn/Kelly Writers House-affiliated people at the conference. From left to right they are: Julia Bloch, Al Filreis, Rebekah Caton, Charles Bernstein, Kimberly Eisler, Sarah Dowling, Nick Montfort, and Kenny Goldsmith. (Thanks to Erin Moure for taking the shot.)

new writing practices

I'm in Banff, Alberta, attending a long-weekend-long conference called "interventions"--focused on new writing practices. The best thing about it is that most of the presenters are practicing artists. This morning, for instance, Jen Bervin showed us several of her textile/weaving projects--one a brilliant weaving of Emily Dickinson's fascicles. Lance Olsen (an old graduate school chum) and Steve Tomasula on various forms of digital/hypermedia fiction. Fred Wah starts a talk about collaboration by talking about using tea mold for a mealtime art project. I'm meeting many Canadian writers whom I'd not known before. Erin Moure and J.R. Carpenter among them. Maria Damon riffs on connections between schmata and schema-ta, a raggy poetics, in response to the matter of the state of the sentence. Craig Dworkin (best paper, to my mind, of the conference) starts with the Poundian/imagist compression of the sentence and does exemplary literary history in a short paper. There's a ton there. I moderated a panel on the state of reading today and tomorrow I will present a manifesto in 6 minutes. Hearing tales of the Wah-bash (the celebration of Fred Wah's retirement from active teaching near here in Calgary). Finally, after all these years, met Derek Beaulieu--a treat. Kenny Goldsmith found a moment to insert his stump speech about uncreative writing, and he chose the perfect moment. Charles Bernstein started his talk by being absent, then showed us some stunning slides of his collaborations with painters over the years. Met a young man, Mike, who lives in a cabin in northern Northwest Territory, has a satellite-enabled WiFi and uses PennSound recordings as a lifeline to the world of poetry in the provinces and states below. John Cayley yesterday used the (Brown University) "cave" (3D virtual textual environment) to draw the distinction between our seeing objects floating before us (not "on" a surface) and our seeing words in such a scene. We just can't see the words as things. Chris Funkhouser performed the other night, sheet over head, as a dancing bounding text reflector, and played a one-string instrument his mother had bought him years ago. He's finally found a use for it. Christian Bok unveiled his new project: infecting can't-be-killed microbial life with text so that it will survive the death of readers. Writing that really lasts. As someone observed, he's gotten so far past the traditionalist's lament about writing for the ages that he's back to it. Humanism rears its viral head.

Julia Bloch and Sarah Dowling are taking good notes on everything and intend to write an article. Steven Ross Smith, organizer, says he will get us recordings so that we can put a selection on PennSound.

Vendlerian caffeination

Spotted at Dunkin Donuts last evening in New York: Helen Vendler. She was on her way to speak about Whitman at the 92nd Street Y, when my favorite literary photographer, Lawrence Schwartzwald, noticed her caffeinating herself in prep for a bout with the great bard's energy. I'm in Banff, Alberta, at the moment, and it's nice to know that the camera's eye is keeping track of things back east. (Click on either photo for a larger view.)

Joyce joy

Joyce Carol Oates as Writers House Fellow, February 15-16, 2010. Molly O'Neil, a student in the Writers House Fellows seminar, introduces the Monday evening reading.

George Borge Smorgasboard - Borges tonight

Philadelphia Weekly is publishing a preview of "George Borge Smorgasboard," a program at the Writers House (tonight) that will celebrate Jorge Luis Borges.

"A DJ, an English professor and two or three other academic types walk into the Kelly Writers House. In a good joke, one of them would also need to be a rabbi. In real life, they’d get together to discuss, celebrate and explore the work of the late, great Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, essayist, and poet (who you probably confuse with the living Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez), through a variety of lenses—including “the labyrinthine, the Babelian and the intertextual”— in an attempt to figure out where ol’ Gorgeous Jorge stands in the global literary canon. In a Jorge Luis Borges story, the Writers House would be filled with every 410-page text in the world and the speakers would, instead of talking about Borges, solve murders with the assistance of Funes the Memorious and An Animal Imagined by Kafka.--Wed., Feb. 18, 6pm. Free. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk. 215.746.7636."

off the wall

“[John] Tranter broke new ground in terms of serious criticism of poetry being spread all over the world,” [new editor Mike] Hennessey said.

Media Editor Steve McLauglin, a 2008 [Univ. of Pennsylvania] alumnus, is going on a two month bus trip this summer with his audio recorder to record poetry readings from all across the United States to use as podcasts for Jacket2.

“This project is an example of the kind of thing that doesn’t happen very often. Off-the-wall stuff happens at the Writers House,” McLaughlin said.

According to Charles Bernstein, American poet and Penn English professor, “the Web is the quickest and economically most efficient way to get poetry out there.”

“Jacket is one of the most appealing and best edited of literary magazines that exists,” Bernstein said.

[more]

the capacity of patterns

My former student Paul Andersen has now created a design studio in Denver called "IndieArchitecture." It's a design and research group that takes on a variety of projects—-from designing buildings to writing books to curating contemporary art exhibitions. As an alternative to mainstream, mass produced, and corporately funded architecture, the office embraces its small market status, is associated with collegiate backpack intellectualism, and consistently seeks new ways of disseminating architectural and urban ideas. Paul, the director, has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University, and is a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. "Conceptually," says Paul, "we maintain an ongoing interest in patterns—visual patterns, but also behavioral, structural, organizational and other types of patterns. Patterns have a unique capacity for integrating a wide range of materials, functions, forms, environmental systems, and even cultural trends in a coherent and technically precise project. They bridge worlds of knowledge and matter, art and science, and for us, research and practice." [web site]

an algorithmic poem/painting

Suicide in an Airplane (1919) is an algorithmic poem/painting by Brian Kim Stefans with music by Leo Ornstein, played by Marc Andre Hamellin. The text is derived from the New York Times. Download it at Brian's site Arras.net.

taking Freud out of psychoanalysis

A talk by David Antin
"Rethinking Freud – Taking Freud out of Psychoanalysis"
3:00 PM Tuesday February 16
at the Kelly Writers House

You can watch by live video stream: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv/

David Antin is a poet, performance artist, art and literary critic internationally known for his "talk pieces" -- improvisational blends of comedy, story and social commentary that critics have described as "a cross between Lenny Bruce and Ludwig Wittgenstein" or alternately as "a blend of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein." New Directions has published three books of these "talk pieces" -- Talking at the Boundaries (1976), Tuning (1984), and What it Means to Be Avant-Garde (1993). Tuning was awarded the prize for poetry for 1984 by the PEN Center of Los Angeles. Much of his earlier work was collected in Selected Poems 1963-1973 published by Sun and Moon Press in 1991. Antin has performed at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center in the U.S., at the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and performed both improvised and scripted verbal works for radio and television. Antin has designed Skypoems, short texts he describes as "commercials that aren't selling anything," that have been skytyped over Los Angeles and San Diego, and Word Walks for urban parks, as well as an ongoing electronic poem for an airport. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH and was awarded the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984. He has published criticism in most major art and literary journals, and his work has been written about in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Marjorie Perloff (Princeton, 1981); The Object of Performance, Henry Sayre (Chicago, 1989); The Jazz Text, Charles O. Hartman (Princeton, 1991). An extensive interview with him has been published in Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors, ed. Larry McCaffery, U. Penn. 1996, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted its entire Spring 2001 issue to his work. Dalkey Archive recently republished his 1972 book talking (originally published by Kulchur Foundation) with a Preface by Marjorie Perloff and a Postface by David Antin. Granary Books recently published A Conversation with David Antin, the text of a three month email conversation between David Antin and Charles Bernstein. The most recent works include two new collection of talk pieces -- I Never Knew What Time It Was (UC Press, 2005) and John Cage Uncaged is Still Cagey (Singing Horse, 2005).

in the war between flesh & paper

I picked up a copy of Tuli Kupferberg's The Book of the Body (1966). Tuli K. is an American counterculture poet, author, cartoonist, pacifist anarchist, publisher and, famously, co-founder of the band The Fugs. On the back jacket: "In the war between flesh & paper paper made out of flesh wins every time."

yesterday's Bernstein convergence

All the president's libretti. Yesterday, journalist Carl Bernstein took some time at a Manhattan restaurant to read the libretti Charles Bernstein wrote for Ben Yarmolinsky's music in Blind Witness. My favorite literary photographer, Lawrence Schwartzwald, happened by and took this photo of the productive Bernstein convergence. (The photo was taken at Barney Greengrass (the Sturgeon King), Upper West Side deli on Amsterdam Avenue.)