Thursday, March 27, 2008

Isidore Isou 1

MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY
A Commonplaces about Words

Pathetic I The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us.
All delirium is expansive.
All impulses escape stereotyping.
Still I An intimate experience maintains curious specifics.
Pathetic II Discharges are transmitted by notions.
What a difference between our fluctuations and the
brutality of words.
Transitions always arise between feeling and
speech.

Still II The word is the first stereotype.
Pathetic III What a difference between the organism and the sources.
Notions - what an inherited dictionary. Tarzan learns
in his father's book to call tigers cats.
Naming the Unknown by the Forever.
Still III The translated word does not express.
Pathetic IV The rigidity of forms impedes their transmission.
These words are so heavy that the flow fails to carry
them. Temperaments die before arriving at the goal
(firing blanks).

No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it.

From Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et une Nouvelle Musique. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke 1918-2008



The ultraintelligent machines will certainly make possible new forms of art, and far more elaborate developments of the old ones, by introducing the dimensions of time and probability....The insertion of an intelligent machine into the loop between a work of art and the person appreciating it opens up some fascinating possiblitles. It would allow feedback in both directions; by this I mean that the viewer would react to the work of art; then the work would react to the viewer's reactions, then....and so on, for as many stages as was felt desirable. This sort of to-and-fro process is already hinted at, in a very crude way, with today's primitive "teaching machines"; and those modern novelists who deliberately scramble thier text are perhaps also groping in this direction. A dramatic work of the future, reproduced by an intelligent machine sensitive to the varying emotional states of the audience, would never have the same form, or even the same plotline, twice in succession.

What sort of art intelligent machines would create for their own amusement, and whether we would be able to appreciate it, are questions that can hardly be answered today. The painters of the Lascaux Caves could not have imageined (though they would have enjoyed) the scores of art forms that have been invented in the twenty thousand years since they created their masterpieces. Though in some respects we can do no better, we can do much more - more than any Paleolithic Picasso could possibly have dreamed. And our machines may begin to build on the foundations we have laid.

Yet perhaps not. it has often been suggested that art is a compensation for the deficiencies of the real world; as our knowledge, our power, and above all our maturity increase, we will have less and less need for it. If this is true, the ultraintelligent machines would have no use for it at all.

-From Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Frustrum.

Gary Hill. Flap flap.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Singing Sailors


I've found alot to admire in Mark Manders' work, a witty and Peircean approach to object-making. Maybe because I've been planning a trip to islands, and most islands make me think of skull island (energetically littered with masts, mutants and cannibals), but this drawing 'singing sailors' (1998) seems more exuberant sea shanty than exhausted allegory. [www.markmanders.org]

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Monday, March 17, 2008

from My LIfe - Lyn Heijinian


Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod. I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light ledge. There as in that's their truck there. Where it rested in the weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession, and don't harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes--but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still, I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant, increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to "tell." All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of water. Serpentine is fool's jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness of plants in prior color--no dream can come up to the original, which in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life had been full of happy chance, that he was luck's child. As a matter-of fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home. Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time. Now it is one o'clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but always early for the kids. The women at the parents' meeting must wear rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a plot which involved time travel, I asked, "How do they go into the future?" and he answered, "What do you mean?--they wait and the future comes to them--of course!" so the problem was going into the past. I think my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean. The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work. But not bitter.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Civilized panic

The less subjects live anymore, the more abrupt, frightening, the death. In that the latter literally transforms the former into a thing, it makes them aware of their permanent death, of reification, of the form of their relations, which they are partly culpable of. The civilized integration of death, without power over it and ridiculous before it, which it covers up cosmetically, is the reaction-formation to something social [Gesellschaftliche], the awkward attempt of exchange-society to plug the last holes still left open by the world of commodities. Death and history, particularly the collective one of the category of the individual [Individuum], form a constellation. If the individual, Hamlet, once deduced its absolute essentiality out of the dawning consciousness of the irrevocability of death, then the downfall of the individual brings down the entire construction of bourgeois existence along with it. What is annihilated in itself and perhaps also for itself is something nugatory. Hence the constant panic in the sight of death. It is no longer to be placated except through its repression.

-Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics.

On Belief


The impasse which Leibniz tried to solve by way of introducing the notion of the "preestablished harmony" between the monads, guaranteed by God Himself, the supreme, all-encompassing monad, repeats itself today, in the guise of the problem of communication: how does each of us know that he or she is in touch with the "real other" behind the screen, not only with spectral simulacra?" - Slavoj Zizek, On Belief.

The answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter, as spectral simulacra is like a ghostly bread pudding, satisfying without the carbohydrates.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Vertiginousness - Theodor Adorno

A dialectics no longer "glued" to identity will provoke either the charge that it is bottomless - one that ye shall know by its fascist fruits - or the objection that it is dizzying. In great modern poetry, vertigo has been a central feeling since Baudelaire; the anachronistic suggestion often made to philosophy is that it must have no part in any such thing. Philosophy is cautioned to speak to the point; Karl Kraus had to learn that no matter how precisely each line of his expressed his meaning, a materialized consciousness would lament that this very precision was making its head swim. A usage of current opinion makes such complaints comprehensible. We like to present alternatives to choose from, to be marked True or False. The decisions of a bureaucracy are frequently reduced to Yes or No answers to drafts submitted to it; the bureaucratic way of thinking has become the secret model for a thought allegedly still free. But the responsibility of philosophical thought in its essential situations is not to play this game...
- from Negative Dialectics.

Homosexuality and Marxism - Jack Spicer

There should be no rules for this but it should be
simultaneous if at all.
Homosexuality is essentially being alone. Which is
a fight against the capitalist bosses who do not want
us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous.
Our dissatisfaction could ruin America. Our love
could ruin the universe if we let it.
If we let our love flower into the true revolution
we will be swamped with offers for beds.

-Jack Spicer, from Three Marxist Essays.

Monday, March 3, 2008

The Revision by Diane Williams

You should not read this. It is too private. It is the most serious. It is even too serious for me. I should make a something of this.

Here is the best part, when he said to me come here. That was the very best part of my life so far. In the doorway to his bathroom was where I was. It was where I was when I asked him, “Are you peeing?”

He said, “No, but now I am.” He was seated to do the peeing, so it would not be any problem to do it, facing me. I didn’t even hear it, the peeing, if he peed.

Well, why?–why can’t all of it be dirty parts, every part a dirty part, or quickly leading to another dirty part? –the part when he just put himself into my mouth?–or the part when he said you looked–I can’t remember how he said I looked to him, with that part of him in my mouth, but he jiggled on my jaw. He said open up before he went ahead and he peed.

Oh! That’s how babies could be made!

-Diane Williams