
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
slogans as contrivances

Labels:
Wallace Stevens
Sunday, September 27, 2009
teaching the hard stuff

Labels:
bearing witness,
holocaust,
pedagogy,
Terrence Des Pres
the fan (1)

The baseball fan. The most ridiculed of all crucial points of view. It seems to me that all the many books and films made of baseball assume the fan. The event--the thing itself--is one of those things, an X, where X = 0 unless it is being observed. Certainly it is true of retrospect (which is, after all, only what writing about baseball is): no description of, or memory of, a game makes a bit of sense unless it had been once observed in the present; it's a re-narration rather than a narration. There are a few writers about baseball who forget this, but just a few. Surely one who never forgets is Roger Angell, who has made an anti-theological creed of the fan's subjectivity. He might be going on and on about the similiarities and differences between the pitching pacing of Whitey Ford (Angell's favorite retired Yankee) and David Cone, writing for a moment--a paragraph or two--as if standing on Olympus, or in the press box, but then comes the crucial line in which we know that it is a fan, sitting where fans sit, who is saying this, who is responsible for these words. He's describing Ford's low pitch counts, his efficiency, comparing this with Cone, "prodigal with his pitch count." Then back to Whitey, who moved very quickly. "[W]ith Whitey you'd look up from your scorecard or peanut and find that the inning was already over."* Writing about baseball means not looking away from X, yes, but first and foremost it means that the fan is always the subject. Your scorecard. Your peanut. You'd look up.
* "Style," p. 280, Game Time.
Labels:
baseball,
baseball fan
that Aramaic chant

Labels:
Judaism,
Yom Kippur
Friday, September 25, 2009
dial-a-poem

Labels:
Kelly Writers House,
podcasts
poetry on the web! it's a revolution

Thursday, September 24, 2009
it doesn't represent...
Three students' response to Schindler's List:
Lily: Rather than acknowledge this and do something like direct his artistic vision to conveying th[e problem of] inefficacy [of representations of the Holocaust generally] by, for example, dizzying us with an overwhelming amount of images and scenes or using unconventional camera angles or resisting one story line, Spielberg ploughs through, wants to pass off his movie as an 'accurate' portrayal, and that's that.Rachel: Schindler’s List is not only easy because it tells us what to feel. It is easy because it tells us to feel obvious and uncomplicated emotions. The terrible contradictions and the ambiguity of moral questions are largely forgotten in his film. Schindler’s List is a blockbuster, with some interesting characters; but I don't think it represents the experience of the Holocaust victim.
Sami: As I watch Schindler's List I can't help thinking that a movie representation of the Holocaust is the least effective way of getting us to understand the X. Whereas Levi and Wiesel struggle with bearing witness, Spielberg is thinking about how to make an intriguing, compelling story. How can you take the occurrences of the Holocaust and try to produce the story for an audience? How can you hire actors who cannot possibly understand the X to pretend they were part of the Holocaust? The more I think about these questions, the more I find the film offensive and presumptuous. That's just my initial reaction....
Labels:
holocaust,
Steven Spielberg
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
no heart so hardened that Henri cannot breach it

Labels:
holocaust,
Primo Levi
running after Eigner
This morning I went for a run just long enough to enable me to listen to Robert Grenier's introduction (written June 2009) to the forthcoming collected poems of Larry Eigner. In his essay Grenier does a more or less close reading of five poems. One of them is this:
And here's Grenier's fabulous comment:
Indeed: "how would Larry Eigner know that, given his circumstance?" (disabled; bound by his body, to say the very least**). I should say now that I listened to this introduction because before I took off I quickly converted the text I found on the web (pre-dating publication of the book in December) into an automaton-voice-read sound file which I loaded onto my iPod, and off I went. I have choices - I chose a male avatar and set the voice-speed to low speed. The avatar does a pretty bad job of pronouncing the words. And perhaps because of a quirk in the way I block-copied the text into the text-to-voice program I use, he did not handle possessives well at all. Grenier likes to use "LE" for Larry Eigner and "LE's" I had to hear as "el - ee - ess." But I got used to it and began, especially in hearing the excerpts from the poems, a weird distended language spoken, something that made me have to listen hard. And then came this easeful perfectly balanced skateboard skateboarding down the middle of a poem, visually and metrically. Heart beating, faster running to the end, down the middle of Osage Avenue, I began again to understand, bodily this time, how to hear a poem as a sense.
** For one of many commentaries on Eigner's physical limitations, see this.
July 26f 90 # 1 6 9 0
footwork
skateboard
middle of the street
between trees
sunlight
And here's Grenier's fabulous comment:
This is a real ‘moment’ (evoking the appearance and vanishment of all such into and out of existence, and time)—but ‘for the time-being’, accomplishing itself inside an interwoven ‘narrative-of-this-poem’—a very closely observed and ‘animated-in-the-poem’ skateboarder skateboarding down the middle of McGee Avenue in Berkeley—see how the trochaic accent emphases (“footwork”/“skateboard”/“middle”) get balanced by that iamb “between”, so as to evoke (for the reader) actual experience of two feet balancing on the board of that skateboarder (an interesting new word for LE)—and how would Larry Eigner know that, given his circumstance?—going down the middle of the poem (as if it actually were the “middle of the street”)—all this in lines which (seem to) ‘look like a skateboard’ (now that I think about it!) moving forward steadily (one space at a time) rightward from the left margin.

** For one of many commentaries on Eigner's physical limitations, see this.
Labels:
disabilities,
Larry Eigner
Monday, September 21, 2009
Bengali poetry/electro-magnetics guy

Labels:
Indian poetry,
PENNsound,
PoemTalk,
translation
Sunday, September 20, 2009
just 3 poems

Labels:
Wallace Stevens
Saturday, September 19, 2009
which side are you on?

Labels:
1950s,
painting,
Spanish Civil War
Friday, September 18, 2009
letterpress pleasure dome

Labels:
Kelly Writers House,
letterpress,
printing
PoemTalk #22

Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
the sun came

Labels:
African-American culture,
poetry
Monday, September 14, 2009
Wormwood's return

Labels:
1960,
little magazines
Sunday, September 13, 2009
mad about folded cut-ups

Labels:
conceptual poetics,
Erica Baum,
photography
Friday, September 11, 2009
those debilitating dreams
My dear friend John Giannotti, the noted sculptor, reminded me yesterday that Jean Shepherd once called for a "Dream Collection Day." Here's what Jean said:
John writes: "Although meant to show the utter uselessness of the creative spirit, it had exactly the opposite effect on me -- which Shepherd probably knew anyway."

9/11 at KWH

Labels:
9/11,
Kelly Writers House
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Dominick Dunne

Labels:
Joan Didion,
photography
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
obsessed with details but oblivious

3 new PennSound Daily entries for your iPod

PennSound Daily is written almost daily by our Managing Editor, Mike Hennessey.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
I wish I were an Oscar Wilde weiner
Apparently we at the Kelly Writers House have a new house band. That's what a hear. In any case, the group performed at the recent SRO inaugural 2009-10 "Speakeasy" (open mic night) in the KWH garden. The song is "I Wish I Were an Oscar Wilde Weiner."
Labels:
Kelly Writers House
lessons in hate

He taught that the American Civil War was a Jewish plot. He taught that World War II was caused by the Jews and that Hitler didn't kill any Jews. (Where did they go? "Hundreds of thousands went to Madagascar.") He made his students memorize the "fact" of the story of the Illuminati - a sect of Jews in colonial America who were given their instructions by the devil. He taught that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish. When a student wrote in a paper that Lenin and Trotsky were athiestic, he scrawled in the margin that that was incorrect--that they were Jewish, for the communist revolution in Russia was primarily a Jewish plot against the state. He says he most fears "that hard-core communist Jew, the financier, that hard-core rebel, that rabbinical Jew."
"The people who oppose me just do not know their history," says Keegstra.
A Canadian TV magazine - like 60 Minutes - ran a 20-minute segment on Keegstra. It was called "Lessons in Hate." I'm now making this segment available here.
Labels:
anti-Semitism
Monday, September 07, 2009
only the ideology you hate indoctrinates the young

Labels:
conservatism,
ideology,
Obama,
socialism
Sunday, September 06, 2009
if it demonstrates form, they can't read it
Marjorie Perloff on Ron Silliman's "Albany":
From her essay, "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject." Here's the entire section of the essay devoted to "Albany."
As in his long poems Ketjak and Tjanting, both written a few years earlier, "Albany" relies on parataxis, dislocation, and ellipsis (the very first sentence, for example, is a conditional clause, whose result clause is missing), as well as pun, paragram, and sound play to construct its larger paragraph unit. But it is not just a matter of missing pieces. The poet also avoids conventional "expressivity" by refusing to present us with a consistent "I," not specifying, for that matter, who the subject of a given sentence might be.
At the same time--and this has always been a Silliman trademark--indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude an obsessive attention to particular "realistic" detail. Despite repeated time and space shifts, the world of Albany, CA. is wholly recognizable. It is, to begin with, not the Bay Area of the affluent--the Marin County suburbanites, Russian Hill aesthetes, or Berkeley middle-class go-getters. The working-class motif is immediately established with the reference to "My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room." And this is the white working class: "Grandfather called them niggers." Later, when the narrator is living in a part of San Francisco where, on the contrary, many ethnicities are represented, we read that "They speak in Farsi at the corner store." The poet is a political activist: he participates in demonstrations and teach-ins, is briefly jailed, avoids the draft, and so on. There are many explanations of everyday things the activist must deal with: "The cops wear shields that serve as masks." But the paragraph is also filled with references to sexual love: couplings and uncouplings, rape, miscarriage, and abortion. And finally, there is the motif of poetry: "If it demonstrates form they can't read it." And readings: "It's not easy if your audience doesn't identify as readers." Writing poetry is always a subtext but one makes one's living elsewhere: "The want-ads," as the last sentence reminds us, "lie strewn on the table."
From her essay, "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject." Here's the entire section of the essay devoted to "Albany."
Labels:
Marjorie Perloff,
Ron Silliman
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)