Al Filreis

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

athematic informal music

A little more on modernist pedagogy.

I've pointed out here before, in various entries, that the irony of the lecture on modernism has become increasingly obvious and disabling. The problem will be to define or at least describe an alternative.

Although he was not writing about teaching when he wrote this, Bruce Andrews imagines a specific practice when he expresses the hope “for a revived radicalism of constructivist noise or athematic ‘informal music’” in the world of poetry and poetics. In the spirit of this, I wonder if the poetry classroom could be filled such noise. The “use” of new technologies to aid the teaching of poetry is not going to make a bit of difference unless some sort of fundamental pedagogy change accompanies it, and I believe the quality of that changed environment might indeed sound something like Andrews’s athematic informal music.

In modernism's materials must at least implicitly be a meta-pedagogy. The trick is in bringing out that implication.

Be precise. Use a pen.

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Rock & the Right redux

"To argue against rock and roll is now as quaintly irrelevant as arguing for the divine right of kings."

So writes Mark Steyn in the right-of-center New Criterion. He is commenting--interestingly--on conservatives' views on rock 'n roll. He looks back on Allan Bloom (the late Closing of the American Mind guy) who hated rock.

Steyn: "The 'Music' chapter is the most difficult one for young fans of The Closing Of The American Mind — because it’s the point at which you realize just how much Allan Bloom means it" when he said he loathed popular music.

But royalism as merely "quaint." It's a cute analogy but think about it long enough and it starts to seem more than a little disturbing.

Here's the whole article.

Patchen, can't type, turns to picture-poems

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Monday, November 05, 2007

each little phrase a sub-property (Mailer 2.0)

Earlier I mentioned how dazzled I was when I re-read Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago. I'm still dazzled. I love the way his figures (windy, awkward conceits) run amok. Here's one...about styles of speechifying:

Where Lyndon Johnson spoke and wrote in phrases which could be hyphenated like Mayor Daley's temporary fences on the way to the Amphitheatre, making you keep your eye off the weeds in the vacant lot, and on the dual highway ahead, so Hubert Humphrey's phrases were like building plots in sub-developments, each little phrase was a sub-property - the only trouble was that the plots were all in different towns, little cliches from separate speeches made on unrelated topics in distinctly different years were no plumped down next to each other in the rag-bag map of his mind. He went on for many minutes planting shrubs in each separate little plot.... (p. 119)

And about the Yippie experience in Chicago:

Some went out forever, some went screaming down the alleys of the mad where cockroaches drive like Volkswagens on the oilcloth of the moon, gluttons found vertigo in centrifuges of consciousness, vomitoriums of ingestion; others found love, some manifest of love in light, in shards of Nirvana, sparks of satori.... (p. 135)

second greatest generation blah blah

When did the Sixties really start? Go here and find out.

Darfur now (not later)

Darfur NOW tells the story of how the crisis in Darfur developed and it follows six individuals who in their own ways have worked to try to stop the genocide before more people die and more are displaced. These six include the actor Don Cheadle, who also served as a producer on the film, and Adam Sterling, a young, recent graduate of UCLA who became involved in fighting the genocide partly because he knew the stories of how his grandparents had fled the Holocaust in Europe.

Watch this film. If you can't see the information on the image above, click on the image and you'll get a larger view.

where's the pedagogy to go with close listening?

In the preface to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998), Charles Bernstein describes the book – a collection of essays on the poetics of sound and performed poetry, the audiotext (including digital forms) in general – as “a call for a non-Euclidean…prosody for the many poems for which traditional prosody does not apply.” What I want to say here simple in this context: where is the non-Euclidean pedagogy to go along with this new aural consciousness?

For surely, if it is true, as Bob Cobbing put it in 1969, that "[s]ound poetry dances, tastes, has shape," then those of us who have been teaching poetry-as-printed (poetry on the page, unsounded poetry) would presumably have to add at least these dimensions to the realms of approach in the classroom. This is perhaps too elaborate a way of saying that to have been prepared to teach words on a page, no matter how complex, is not necessarily to be prepared to help present a language as a kind of dance or as something that has a physical shape. “When the audiotape archive of a poet’s performance is acknowledged as a significant, rather than incidental, part of her or his work,” Charles writes in the same preface, “a number of important textual and critical issue emerge,” and he goes on to name these. Here I add another issue to his list. The technology that enables this – our ability to acknowledge such material as significant rather than of additive or illustrative quality – must itself become a part of the story of the poetic art taught to students of that art.

"Leonardo da Vinci,” Cobbing liked to say, “asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems to me to be achieving this aim." Same problem here, I'd suggest. Seeing and even hearing we can manage, albeit the latter with special effort. But touch? That's difficult in the traditional poetry classroom. (And although seeing a printed poem - really seeing it as a thing, in William Carlos Williams's sense - poems aren't beautiful statements; they're things - is something we think we do in a close reading when often it is not what we're really doing.) All this strikes me as relatively easy to discuss in theory, but actually doing it, creating a consistent practice, seems daunting.

We can enlarge from sound poetry to poetry in general that is aided by – though in the case of sound poetry was never dependent on – new computing media. The contributors to New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (2006) make precious little mention of the impact on pedagogy made by poetic technotexts, yet at nearly every point in this collection an altered practice is at least implicit, even in the section titled “Technotexts”-—meant to show examples of computer-generated or –enabled poetry. An essay on Cynthia Lawson and Stephanie Strickland’s Vniverse, for instance, describes the “social reading space” required by this work in a way that suggests rather specifically what a teacher would need to do in the classroom in order to “teach” such art: while the text is performed through the artist’s viritual interaction with the site—which can of course be apprehended without its creators present—“the audience is also reading while being in a social space.” However, the artists add, “we do not read it as they do.” Thus their “performing new media poetry” is a kind of teaching, assuming teaching to be a dynamic three-way interaction: (1) technotext, (3) performer/instigator of the site, (3) audience that reads/interprets in a social space.

One of the several innovations inherent in such poetics is that the artists’ “creative process is [itself] an initial model for th[e] interaction” of the sort that can take place in the classroom, so that students can glimpse the creative process and, if the technotext succeeds, can experience it.

celebrate terrorist but please be safe about it

Okay, I want to understand this picture.

A nation commemorates the pre-terrorist attack capture of a guy who long ago wanted to blow up the building where the leaders of the government were meeting. And to celebrate this event the people of this nation go a little hog-wild: bonfires that rage out of control (and in the morning sometimes animal bones are found in the ashes), fireworks that sometimes blow people's hands off, general unsafe craziness. Fair enough. It's somewhat like the various topsy-turvy carnivalesque celebrations that occur throughout Europe (e.g. in France). The day, it could be said, marks the moment when in England values such as Reason, Order, Lawfulness--emergent modern democratic values--won and the Unreason of terrorism lost. Except that of course the reasonable leaders of the nation, having protected themselves successfully through good advance-warning intelligence, deemed it certainly okay to torture the captured man, before executing him. All very public.

Nothing really odd about Guy Fawkes Day. What's odd, to me, today, is that the New York Times would run one of his mildly condescending oh, those silly foreigner "Journal" pieces on all this. You know the column: a little bit of quaint something going on elsewhere around the world, dubbed a "Journal" to suggest that it's all by the way--not really of or in the news, but somewhat beside the point.

Today's piece, "York Journal" by Sarah Lyall, finds it mildly amusing that the English are having trouble working through some contradictions in how they feel about Guy Fawkes Day. On one hand, the local folks, loving the annual wildness, would like to celebrate it as always. On the other hand, England is the very "Nanny State" that several of the American Republican candidates for President claim the U.S. is becoming, at least the U.S. that their coddling, liberal, Democratic opponents would like to create. This is the England of a myriad government regulations on what people can and can't do. England has gone all security- and safety-conscious. So for instance no bonfires. How can one celebrate the capture and torture of the great historical terrorist without a bonfire? Well, see the photo atop this entry--which ran along with the story in today's paper: some members of the Devon rugby club, watching a film on a giant screen that shows a bonfire that had been held and videotaped from a previous celebration.

That photo is remarkable, really. These young English rugby toughs, standing there, on Guy Fawkes Night, staring at the big screen, video representation of a wild bonfire.

The implication of the Times story (from its tone and also by way of what it doesn't mention) is that the Brits, with all their regulation, have caught themselves in a cultural paradox - one that can be observed with some dispassion from the paper of record on this side of the Atlantic. The celebration of the capture of the terrorist has always about it a joy over his craziness and daring. The glee about his torture is matched but not negated by the relief that modern democratic England was spared.

No mention here of 9/11, which is all over the background. Nor any reference to the current relevant discussion of torture and when it's permitted, for the sake of a nation's security, to use it against those who would imminently destroy our government. I'll bet anything that if we go back to American commentary about Guy Fawkes Day in the years 1948 through 1954 we would see all kinds of references to communists and the threat they pose and joy over their capture (e.g. about the snagging of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg). But no such cognizance of the American relevance here, perhaps because on both sides of the ideological aisle we don't want to admit that we will never have a Nanny State, and perhaps too because we so no similar contradiction for ourselves.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

like the red & brown of a verboten flag (Mailer 1.0)

I'm not especially a fan of Norman Mailer's sentences - and not too much more, of his books on the whole. But Miami and the Siege of Chicago is in all respects a beautiful book. The writing of it and in it is, by far, I think, the finest and most interesting of all Mailer. Wow, these sentences. This writer was chugging in '68.

In the first half of the book--the section about the Republican national conventional in Miami, at which Nixon easily put down Rockefeller and the Nixonite GOP rolled over all opposition with smiling faces and louder-than-thou celebrating on the convention floor--Mailer finds himself heading for the bar, and then, typically, back to the hall to drink in the scene. Mailer noticed that Nixon had not won over the Goldwater Right even at the same time that he believed he had. Here are two paragraphs, and please notice that the second of the two is fabulously gonzo, drunken language:

Nixon might have his dream to unify the land, but he would yet to have to stare, face to face, into the powre of his own Right Wing, soon to rise on the wave of these beer-hall blasts, the worst of the Wasp, all bull in his muscles, all murder in his neck - would Nixon have the stance to meet them? Or would he fall captive to the madmen in the pits of his own party, those madmen absent from Miami, those madmen concealed this week? The convention had been peaceful, too peaceful by far.

At large on the ocean, would people yet pray for Nixon and wish him strength as once they had wished strength to old Hindenburg and Dollfus and Schuschnigg and Von Papen? Oom-pah went the tuba, starts! went the horn. Blood and shit might soon be flying like the red and brown of a verboten flag. It had had black in it as well. For death, perhaps. They always did. And shave the shorn. God give strength to Richard Nixon, and a nose for the real news. Oom-pah went the tuba, farts went the horn.

Al's pantheon, just out

That's the late Terrence Des Pres, once my teacher, intermittently my mentor, brilliant and complex and probably tragic. When I teach my Holocaust course, it's largely based on his - which was, so far as we know, the first literature course on the Holocaust ever taught at a college or university (this was the mid-1970s). Terrence wrote an op-ed Times piece about the second running of this course: find it here. Of course my students read his brilliant (but, in the end, probably wrong) book The Survivor.

Terrence Des Pres was nearly the first person whose photograph I thought of to add to "Al's pantheon," an album in my new Picasa picture site. As of this writing, the others in the pantheon are my father, Bud Cox, Bob Lucid, Halbe Brown, Dave King, and John Giannotti.

Friday, November 02, 2007

George Washington never owned a camel

A transcript of Gil Ott's interview with Jackson Mac Low, done in 1979, has been made available by the PhillySound blog folks. Mac Low talks about a particular development of his procedure that dates to early 1961. What does George Washington's camel have to do with anything? Well, go here please and find out.

Above: sketch by Mimi Gross that is part of a series linked to EPC.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

when Harold met Wally

Harold Bloom was "madly in love" with the poems of Wallace Stevens from the time he was an undergraduate at Cornell University. He traveled from Ithaca to New Haven in 1949 and found his way somehow into the reading Stevens was giving that night for the members of a New Haven (not Yale-affiliated) humanities group. That night Stevens would read a short version of what became "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Norman Holmes Pearson, the legendary Yale English professor (and conduit between Yale and the OSS/CIA), saw the lonely-looking young Bloom and took him under wing, at least long enough to encourage the young man to approach the great poet, which Bloom did.

I don't how many times Bloom has told the story of his one encounter with the beloved poet, but a few years ago it was recorded as Bloom taught an undergraduate class at Yale, devoting all hour and twenty minutes of his lecture to a discussion of one poem, "The Poems of Our Climate" of 1938. Today, as I did household chores, brought in the houseplants from the back deck, made my lunch, etc., I listened to the entire lecture, hilariously and brilliantly digressive (at several points Bloom admits to being insane and that the main issuance of his madness is an addiction to never approaching the finality of any point). I then edited the recording and here is the 5-minute segment in which Bloom tells the story of meeting Stevens in 1949.

The title of Bloom's book about Stevens is indeed taken from the poem he taught the day the Yale podcast people made their recording: "The Poems of Our Climate." In that book, not surprisingly, he discusses "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," and here are a few pages.

la fuck fashion

Lucie Kind's music. French techno with anti-style style. MORE...

nothing but sharp stones, similar to bones

Guillaume Apollinaire was stationed in February 1915 not far from where my father and I visited recently - the edge of Provence along the Rhone River between Martigues in the south and Vienne (almost to Lyon) in the north. To Apollinaire that country was "like a skeleton. It's just like a graveyard. Nothing but sharp stones, similar to bones." Charles Dickens steamed down (we went up) the Rhone from Lyon and got to Avignon, where we also stopped and walked around and through the medieval walls. Dickens noticed the distinct color and his remark, when fitted together with Apollinaire (even the tone is the same somehow), tells better than photographs what the pervasive coloring of the region is. If it's been sunny a few days (as it was for us, happily), I'm referring to a hue you can still see after you close your eyes. "The broken bridge of Avignon," Dickens wrote, "and all the city baking in the sun; yet with an under-done-pie-crust, battlemented wall, that never will be brown, though it bake for centuries." That just it, it seems to me. The sense one gets is of a under-done/not-quite brown. With limestone gray-brown, sandy orange, dull green-grey (a landscape with chestnut trees and maybe some olives), etc.

More photos from the trip.

Coy flappertoy! I am adult citizen with vote

After a dozen years of the Kelly Writers House - which I like to think of a learning community with a poetics - there are a few things that Writers House-affiliated students do each year that just thrill me, keep me going, make me want to put still more effort into this literary-communitarian project. One such moment has already happened this academic year. Kaegan Sparks, a spunky aesthetic Texan who's absorbing avant-garde energies like a sponge, dressed as the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven for Halloween.

I've long been a fan of the Baroness - as writer but still more as a figure, a modernist personage. In being what she was (or posed to be - same difference), she performed the modernist word. My English 88 course/site includes a page that serves as a quick (very quick) history of early U.S. poetic modernism. If you go to that page and scroll down to the section entitled "'Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind': modernism at extremes" you'll see links to materials by and about the Baroness, including a famous excerpt from William Carlos Williams' memoir, and several audio clips of people reading about the Baroness, and also a link to scans of photographs from the Fall 2002 Fashion of the Times issue which featured a model modeling what the Times at least considered a 21st-century version of dada style.

It's possible that Kaegan got her idea for her costume from these photos, but I rather think she held more closely to the original dada that did the Times. Don't you? Well, no matter: it's the spirit of the thing that counts, for sure.

The Baroness cut the most compelling modernist figure. She literally wore New York dada, thus inventing it as a pattern of aesthetic costume to be worn so tight that it was her skin, her self. She was, as Irene Gammel puts it in her remarkable biography, an "assemblage of paradoxes embodied in one body." That the Baroness knew and inspired or inspiringly repelled nearly everyone associated with the rise of modernist practice in New York has been already part of the story, but it has never been so richly detailed. In Gammel's presentation the Baroness emerges as far more than an ingenue. She became a mature, self-conscious dynamic artistic force--and remarkably productive in her own right, not despite but because she exhausted herself up from the inside out.

where are you now, Blue Line TeleVillage?

I think quite a lot about the headiest days of what was then called "the internet revolution" - roughly 1996-1999. This slightly predates the bursting of the economic tech bubble, and when I think about the era I mean I'm only half-certain that what I'm thinking about coincides with economics so much as broad and nearly messianic hopes. At the same time there was a good deal of concern, typically expressed on the political left, about the gap between segments of the U.S. (and sometimes of the world) that had some way to connect to the internet and those that did not. This was and still is called "the digital divide." But have you heard about the digital divide lately. Not much--as least for the U.S., Europe and northeast Asia. That's in part because so many urban and rural schools have gotten access, and because connectivity is available in many public buildings and generally because the price of computer hardware has gone down.

In 1999 a report on the digital divide was issued. I linked it to my web site then and it got a good deal of response. Toward the end of this report - mostly a dull piece of writing - there was a list of several hopeful communal and even communitarian digital projects. One little section today seems both very relevant and also quaint in its tone, diction and word choice. Geez, it's only '99 - not long ago. And yet this little paragraph seems to come from another era. Here's a phrase: "public transit for the information highway." The little section of the long report is called "Public Transit For The Information Highway," and here it is:

Blue Line TeleVillage -- a project in Compton, CA developed by Los Angeles consulting firm Siembab Associates with the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority -- is as a non-commercial network access center (NAC) that was strategically created to simultaneously reduce environmental pollution and provide community groups with access to high-tech digital broadband networks. Blue Line TeleVillage is located near the center of community activity and is close to bus and train lines. According to Walter Siembab of Siembab Associates, NACs can transform urban communities by making them more sustainable environmentally and commercially. By adopting this policy -- which he calls public transit for the information highway -- NACs can be positive examples of good-quality neighborhood or village life.

Siembab Associates, a very good planning firm, issued a "final report" on this project, by the way. It's 125 pages and available as a PDF file. (I've read about 40 pages of it. Am I a little insane? Don't answer that, please.)

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

four cheers for literary history

Blogroll please: Mark Scroggins' "Culture Industry". Mark has recently published his long-awaited critical biography of Louis Zukofsky. MORE...

Up with literary history!

A while back, Mark wrote this: "Maybe I’m just expressing my hankering for informative literary history that is able to synthesize large amounts of data, and to draw the sorts of connections that one doesn’t get merely from reading the poets’ books and the poets’ biographies – Alan Filreis’s book on Stevens in the 1930s, for instance, which not merely changes one’s view of WS, but rewrites the entire landscape of 1930s American poetry. There has been no even half-way decent overview of post-war American innovative poetry that can compare with the various histories of modernism out there."

And here's a paragraph from Mark's paper, "Blood to the Ghosts: Biography and the New Modernist Studies" - delivered at Cornell in October 2002. Thank you, Mark!

The ideological bases of "high" modernist poetics, poetics which for so long were taken as self-evidently heroic ruptures with fin-de-siècle stasis, have been examined in unprecedented detail and sometimes subjected to withering critique, as in Gilbert and Gubar's No-Man's Land, Peter Nicholls's Modernisms: A Literary Guide, and Raymond Williams's posthumous The Politics of Modernism. And the writings and ideological commitments of the canonical modernist poets have finally begun to receive adequate historical contextualization. Literary scholars have rarely written about "The Waste Land", The Pisan Cantos, or Auden's "Spain, 1939," without at least nodding towards historical context, but those nods were often exceedingly perfunctory. Far more detailed, careful, and revelatory are Alan Filreis's work on Wallace Stevens, for instance, or Lawrence Rainey's on Ezra Pound. Filreis's two books, which examine Stevens's career during the 1950s and the 1930s, have demolished once and for all the image of that poet as an ideologically detached contemplator of reality and the imagination. Rainey's Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture has demonstrated not only the idiosyncratic, ad hoc, and ideologically motivated routes and methods of Pound's appropriations of Italian Renaissance culture, but how Pound criticism has in its turn largely overlooked or ignored those idiosyncracies and ideological motivations, implying instead that Pound simply drew upon some monumental, homogeneous archive of "true" history. MORE...

Monday, October 29, 2007

what they didn't tell you before you went to war

What exactly was it that they didn't tell him? And how would he know the answer to this question? By looking at the glint of the sun off his weddding band. Is this another instance of Make love, not war?

The second show in my new podcast series, "PoemTalk," features a lively discussion about Adrienne Rich's poem about the Iraq War, called "Wait." The recording of that show is now available. Please have a listen and let me know what you think.

Friday, October 19, 2007

we want Wystan

We are hoping to bring Wystan Curnow to Penn in the fall of '08: poet, art critic, curator, maker of beautiful exhibit catalogues, editor of the most important anthology of essays on New Zealand literature.

Wystan Curnow was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939, the son of the noted New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow. Wystan studied English and History at the University of Auckland, and took his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Back in the USA, Cancer Daybook, Castor Bay, and, most recently, Modern Colours.

Of Cancer Daybook he wrote: "I should say the first of these poems had at the time of their composition a peculiar purpose: that of distracting a disease. On a day to day basis, it seemed best to delay their publication as a volume until such time as that purpose had been well and truly served."

In 1998 Curnow brought out a stunningly beautiful retrospective catalogue of the life and work of Imants Tillers, the Australian visual artist, curator and writer. Tillers has exhibited widely since the late 1960s, and has represented Australia at important international exhbitions such as the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1975, Documenta 7 in 1982, and the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. Since 1981 Tillers has used his signature canvasboards to explore themes relevant to contemporary culture, from the centre/periphery debates of the 1980s, to the effects of migration, displacement and diaspora. Most recently, his paintings have been concerned with place, locality and evocations of the landscape. For his catalogue of Tillers' work, Curnow wrote substantive new art-critical prose, focusing on Tillers' great work, The Book of Power.

Curnow is also a writer of short stories, and in 1971 won the Katherine Mansfield Award for fiction.

At the time Essays on New Zealand Literature was published (1973), as we learned from the dustjacket: "Dr. Curnow is married with four children. He lives in Birkenhead and has a good view of the sea."

If we are able to bring him to Penn during the fall term of '08, Curnow would be given workspace at and use as a home base the Kelly Writers House. Students in Al Filreis' and Charles Bernstein's courses on modern and contemporary poetic and poetics would study Curnow's work, meet with him both in and out of the classroom. Students in poetry writing workshops (through the Creative Writing Program) would receive from Dr. Curnow commentary and guidance on their own poems. The students in Kenneth Goldsmith's experimental writing workshop, called "UnCreative Writing," would work closely with Curnow on their projects. All the while, events - a grand public reading, informal lunchtime workshop, recordings of Curnow's poems for PennSound (in front of a live audience) - would be on the Writers House events schedule. Students in Fine Arts and Art History will participate in any and all of these events, as woudl faculty, staff and students associated with the ICA. Finally, Curnow would be featured on two episodes of the ongoing poetry podcast, "PoemTalk," which is a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Poetry Foundation of Chicago.

[] Wystan Curnow PennSound page
[] review of 2001 Venice Biennale
[] Writing History on the Margins: New Zealand
[] three poems in Jacket 2006
[] bibliography
[] "Matisee Asleep"
[] "High Culture Now! A Manifesto
[] Best New Zealand Poems
[] "Max"
[] review of Curnow's Imants Tillers and the Book of Power

get your daily PennSound

New! Get your daily PennSound update. Click on http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/daily.xml and then choose where (for instance, Google or Yahoo) you want to be able to see the latest additions to PennSound every time you log on.

beware those ecdysiasts on campus

Time magazine, December 1947*: in its "Education" section there's a squib (a little more than one column) under the title "Unwelcome Guests," and it begins thus:

"In less dogmatic days, most U.S. colleges were places were all sides of many questions were heard. Student groups sponsored after-hours speeches by Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Buchmanites, Zoroastrians and ecdysiasts. But times have changed. Last week, six colleges barred their doors to speakers who were Communists or fellow travelers." And it goes on to say that one of those barred was novelist Howard Fast (shown above), and we have a photo of Fast set into the piece above the phrase "No one-syllable refusals."

I've read an awful lot of news articles like this from the period 1946 or so through around 1962, so I think I know and can place the rhetoric here.

In 1947 anticommunist rhetoric had not yet set in. In 1952 or '53, the article - if it took this approach at all, if it covered the "barring" of such speakers from campuses at all - would have intensified the mock of all the -isms that are out there. Here it's satirical enough: we go from what were in the 1930s three major voices (right, liberal-left and radical left) to a minor passing sect of radical left (Buchmanites) and then immediately to tiny far-flung minority (Zorastrian) with its tone of a little ridiculous to deliberately obscure (isn't America great that there even exist such voices?!). A classic list assuring diversity: starts serious and ends by mocking this multivocal craziness our forefathers guaranteed. So as I say a few years later we might have gotten such a list, but the earlier period - the 1930s - would not have been described as "less dogmatic days." In Time in '47 we could think of these days as "dogmatic" and those ideologically fraught days (the Red Decade) as "less dogmatic." In 1952 those days would dogmatic and these days, a time in which, alas, it's a necessity to keep communists from speaking at colleges, would be less dogmatic. The terms later were: sane, reasonable, mature, pragmatic, strategic, post-ideological, settled, sane. Did I already say sane?

What's even funnier about all this - and makes me think that the anonymous Time squib-writer was having a nice go at the early anticommunists - is that an ecdysiast is a performer who provides erotic entertainment by undressing to music. Much, much, much more common to colleges campuses (at least behind the closed doors of fraternities) than Zoroastrians or even Communists ever were.

At the end of this little forgotten piece, Eleanor Roosevelt, contacted in Geneva for comment (where she was attending a meeting of the Commission on Human Rights, of all apt things for her to be doing just then), is quoted as saying that Americans "are not completely sure of our ability to make democracy work." It's '47 and Truman hasn't quite made his rightward move away from the Roosevelt legacy, and Eleanor is quoted approvingly approving, in effect, human rights extended to American communist speakers at universities - in short, free speech despite the risks of subversion.

[] Fast bio
[] Fast on the Peeksill riots
[] a short story by Fast
[] a 1959 sci fi story by Fast, a fascinating political allegory

* Dec. 22, 1947, p. 50.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Mainecoast post office outlasts the classics

The PoemTalkers talked Oppen yesterday. George Oppen. The poem is "Ballad", recorded in Brooklyn in 1979. And... A LINK.

small boxes

Back on September 26 Tom Devaney was celebrated at the Writers House on the occasion of his new book, A Series of Small Boxes. The reading was recorded for PennSound. Here is an mp3 of the whole reading. The final poem in the new book is one Tom wrote for my 50th birthday. Oh man, I'm hitting clean-up. MORE...

Below: Randall Couch happily chatting with Jessica Lowenthal at the party after the reading.

as if some family breach were healed

Adrienne Cecile Rich was the Phi Beta Kappa poet at the College of William & Mary in December 1960. She read her poem "Readings in History." Above is the poster that was printed by the PBK chapter and posted around campus that month (courtesy William & Mary Archives). MORE...

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

the Confucian side of Disney

Q.: Do you think that the modern world has changed the ways in which poetry can be written? A.: There is a lot of competition that never was there before. Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. MORE...

you're a commuter in a station of the Metro

Wordsalad features a short entry on PennSound and in particular points out as useful my podcast called "PennSound pedagogy", "which discusses the reasons for setting up this audio archive and how educators can use it. For example, how can a teacher help students make a connection between Emily Dickinson and a contemporary poet like Rae Armantrout?"

But Wordsalad is not primarily a blog. It's "a weekly radio program on WSUM featuring recordings of contemporary authors reading from their own works. Imagine you’re a commuter in a station of the Metro, hearing bits and snatches of conversation as you pass by Modernist, experimental, performance poets, and Language writers. Wordsalad streams live on Thursdays from 1 to 2 pm Central at www.wsum.org and airs at 91.7 FM in Madison, Wisconsin."

www.wsum.org is Madison Student Radio - and naturally you can listening to a live stream. I'm listening as I write this: The Weakerthans are singing a song from their album Left & Leaving: extremely quiet punk (that possible?). Try this one.

Of course for the most interesting radio internet stream, there's FMU, independent freeform radio. FMU gives you ten or more options for internet listening.

Monday, October 15, 2007

the rest is noise

I recommend J. Henry Chunko's October 6th John Cage wrap-up, which begins with his apt admiration for Cage's 1977 performance of Empty Words. He calls it "this jaw droppingly incredible recording." (He's pointing to this.) And then he just enthuses across other links and references. Along the way he mentions my Cage stuff in English 88.

The new book, The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, was reviewed yesterday by the Chicago music journalist Marc Geelhoed on his "Deceptively Simple" blog. Lots of John Cage there too.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

humanistic informatics

Lately I've been reading Scott Rettberg's blog. Scott, a Chicagoan who lives in Norway, writes about electronic poetry and new media. He's associate prof of humanistic informatics at the University of Bergen. His Kind of Blue is a serial novel for email. One of his current projects is called "Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature." From what I can tell, Scott has worked with Nick Montfort and Brian Kim Stefans, both of whom I admire. Good nexus.

As these things go: I ran into Scott's blog while I was googling myself in order to find an old photo that I knew was tagged near my name. Up came an entry about my English 88:

I'm teaching my first hybrid distance learning course next summer (Books into Movies), and I'm participating in a committee at Stockton that addresses distance ed. I ran across Al Filreis' course at Penn, English 88V, and think it's a great model for a web distance course — lots of online resources, short video clips, position papers, and synchronous and asynchoronous discussion. I especially like their short guide to position papers and the realvideo lecture that accompanies it. I might even send my New Media Students over there — the type of position paper they describe is exactly the type of work I look for NMS students to write in their reading journals.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

reminding you of silent doubles

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, teacher, critic, editor: her newest book of poems is Torques: Drafts 58-76, out from Salt Modern Poets since September. Drafts is an ongoing long poem (Rachel calls it her "endless poem") written in canto-like sections, and Torques is the third collection of these to appear since 2001 (she's been writing the drafts since '85).

Rachel has prepared a grid that helps to organized the whole project so far (well, at least as of March 2007). So, for instance, draft 59 is "flash back" and 62 is "gap" and 69 is "sentences" and 85 is "hard copy."

The new book stops at 76, but of course Rachel continues to create drafts of this endless poems, and I've been reading "Draft 85: Hard Copy" lately and here are some of my favorite passages:

Even the simplest things
Their provenance--
a shoe, a prosthetic
post-war leg
reminding you of
silent doubles
unfinished, imperfect,
imperfect, shadowy.

Slowly the particulars
get scattered to the wind....

and

Chickens come Home.
And Us Chickens.
Two old sayings.
High crimes and low cunning,
One must refuse. Easy, so far.

Yet a clutch of events
hatches in the world at large
leaving a rash, a stain, an infection, a pandemic.

and here is all of section 18:

Stet atrocity
Stet astonishing events fast come ordinary
Stet particular Presidents

Stet plum of smoke
Stet people burn

With an increase of allusions and referents.

Draft 85 is "mapped loosely on, thinks about, and responds to" George Oppen's masterful 1968 work, "Of Being Numerous." There are citations (marked as quotations from Oppen) and allusions to Oppen and variations around keywords in Oppen's sections.

[] Rachel's PennSound page.

[] Rachel on Virginia Woolf at the October 2000 "nine contemporary poets read themselves through modernism" event.

Friday, October 12, 2007

speak of it as if it is just new

Last March Jamaica Kincaid visited for three days as a Writers House Fellow. She was a marvelous presence and we got along extremely well. Here you'll find links to video recordings of her reading and also the interview/conversation I conducted the next morning--as well as photos taken during the visit. Today Andy White finished editing a 16-minute excerpt from the interview, and it is now part of a Writers House podcast. Listen to it here. Anna Levett, a student in the Fellows seminar, wrote this:

That Ms. Kincaid so values youth-that she so values newness-is reflected in her work. Before meeting her, we spoke often of the deceptive simplicity, almost childlike, of her writing. Al told us that his favorite line in all of her work came from My Garden (Book), where she writes, "I shall speak of it as if no one has ever heard of it before. I shall speak of it as if it is just new."

Lisa Tauber, a student in our class, wrote, "One of the things I really love about her writing is the seemingly simple choice of metaphors and descriptions, so that it appears the world is being viewed by a child. I remember when we went to lunch, one of the first things she did was tell us some little anecdote, and then she said, 'It was as clear to me as this glass of water.' I was struck by the use of her writing style in her everyday speech. It was a nice moment where I felt I saw her artistic sensibility outside of her work."

Indeed this may be the best thing about Writers House Fellows-the chance to see from where, from who, the words on the page arise. It's nice to be reminded that even famous writers are real people.

Though she doesn't refrain from criticism (particularly when it's political), Ms. Kincaid herself likes to remember that we are all human. As our Fellows class discussion came to an end on Monday afternoon, she encouraged us to be bold, to go at the world with the same directness as a beam of light.

"That's the thing about being young," she said. "You should say all sorts of things-because you have to have something that you should be forgiven for when you're old."

notes toward a modernist pedagogy

I'm interested in what it means to teach modernism in the manner appropriate to the modern text. I do not think that doing this enacts the imitative fallacy - that is, why would someone need necessarily to teach modernism in a modernist way? What's the advantage? These would seem to be a legitimate doubt, but please read on and tell me if I'm wrong. Let me start here with the final lines of a famous poem by Gertrude Stein:

They cannot.
A note.
They cannot.
A float.
They cannot.
They dote.
They cannot.
They as denote.
Miracles play.
Play fairly.
Play fairly well.
A well.
As well.
As or as presently.
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.
--Gertrude Stein, “A Completed Portrait of Picasso”

History doesn’t teach that history teaches. Modernism is a topic but also a mode, on the other hand, in which the recitation of what history teaches is ironized. The conventional denotative pedagogy ([teacher points to text:] “This is what it means”) is not up to the challenge of permitting the performance of this self-reflexivity. In modernism’s materials is implicitly a meta-pedagogy. In the years since the emergence of digital media and ubiquitous connectivity – and as its effect on the delivery of materials to the classroom but also its storage outside it becomes profound – the irony of the lecture on modernism has become increasingly obvious and disabling.

At a conference sponsored by the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management on "The Virtual University" in early 1995, the urban sociologist and former university president Martin Meyerson said: “The best lectures have always been those that deal with ‘tentative materials’ that result from the professor's research. If they cease to be tentative, don't include them in the lecture; print them. The main teaching function has to be interactive.” The world wide web was new then, and when Meyerson said “print them,” it was quickly pointed out in the discussion following his remarks, he might now have meant, “digitize them and make them available on the web.”

But the pedagogical change these remarks augured was hardly in error. The sociologist’s slip about printing suggests that the advent of the web was not required to bring on this reform, but it certainly has catalyzed it. (So, too, new versions modernism arising since the mid-1990s bear with them methods and even some technical practices that pre-date digital connectivity, but the emergence of the latter can still be said to coincide with further developments. My point is that teaching has as yet changed only superficially in response to all this.) The great change, I would submit, is especially difficult for, let us say, historians, for whom disciplinarily the display of “tentative materials”—in the classroom or in scholarly articles and books--is generally greeted with concerns about professionalism – where, as Gerald Graff negatively contended in Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), arguments about the state of the field have already taken place and been more or less resolved by the time the professor walks onto the classroom stage to perform the current state of knowledge and even of method. Historiographers, focused on method, would rightly call this generalization into question, but my point is that the field of modern poetics is utterly different: the whole idea we want our students to grasp is that modernism itself promulgated tentative materials—that the texts we study are tentative in this very basic sense, that (to take Wallace Stevens’s classic modernist formulation) the poem is the act of the mind finding what will suffice for the moment. And, so, what of the mind of the teacher?

The pedagogy of fixed materials is a fundamental, potentially disabling irony. The call to move fixities – for example, informational materials about literary history, the chronological flow of aesthetic movements, etc. – to a shared retrieval space (the web is ideal) literally frees the teaching time and space for a tentativeness that is not just characteristic of the art itself but must also be of the manner in which it is presented. Meyerson’s sense of “research” here refers, in the context of modernism, to some sense of sharing with the orientation to process in the poetry itself. While the books and articles produced by the teacher as a disciplinary expert (and tenure-seeker) might well eschew the flux and openness of the texts under study there, I would insist that the practice of teaching cannot. The irony produced by such a refusal closes off the main avenue by which the student interacts with a kind of writing that seeks interactivity and is (often) about it.

Kenny Goldsmith, founder and curator of UbuWeb and creator of a course called "Uncreative Writing," responds:

[H]aving come to teaching in an age of non-fixed materials, I can't imagine the classroom situation as otherwise. So, I might be the wrong person to comment on this: for me, it's always been this way. And I've never taught in a room that's not wired -- at the Art Institute last semester, I insisted on a networked classroom with projector and screen or I told them that I would refuse to teach at all. Such is the environment today.

I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, "We are getting nowhere fast."

The flip side of all this is that the web itself is a non-fixed space. Much of what is there on Weds afternoon is gone or unavailable on Thursday morning. So, I must, within reason, somehow fix that space for lecture purposes. I PDF like mad and archive; I always bring an external hard drive crammed with hundreds of gigabytes should the thing I'm looking for not be available. Also, much of the stuff I teach is so non-fixed that it never appeared in any sort of stable form, rather its nature is ephemeral. So, the teacher becomes an archivist (but haven't we always?).

The secret, though, is making the materials available in a sharable form that can be passed around. Xeroxes can only go so far. So in that way, the pedagogical materials need to be truly non-fixed, even at the risk of breaking arcane and outdated notions of copyright law. The students need things to take away with them, to listen to on their iPods, to share, to love... to possess.