Jacob's Ladder: Information Technology Archives

Whole Hog...
July 14, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Self-promotion

July 10, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake

And again...

The Erotic Life of Property
July 6, 2007 File under: Information Technology , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

A few days ago, I ran across this image, which I originally posted here over a year ago, on Nicholas Manning's blog, where it had a new title, one much better, or at least more powerful, more capable, than any title I'd have ever given it.

I wrote Nicholas, to wit:

*First*

As a regular but perhaps infrequent reader of your blog, I just saw
this post:

http://thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com/2007/05/blog-post.html

And therein saw a photograph I took and posted on my blog some months
back.

I very much enjoy the title you've given it, and I am indeed quite
flattered you think enough of it to post it.

I'm working on an essay about quotation and what Lewis Hyde called
the "erotic life of property," and I was wondering if you could tell
me more about how the image came to you. I'd like to trace its
transit if possible.

All my best, and thank you for your blog,

Jake Adam York

*Second: A Reply*

Jake,

I'm really delighted to have found out where this came from, and to be
able to give you proper credit for your wonderful photo. I'd love to call
it a collaborative effort, though you deserve much more kudos than me.

Firstly, it is indeed a fascinating incarnation of the erotic life of
property: property's fluidity conferred by simple ignoring of borders of
attribution! Was your photo thus unfaithful to you? The erotics of
appropriation, perhaps. The story of this particular attribution is, I
suppose, not atypical of the flux-like, largely untraceable dynamics of
such things. I was having a conversation by letter with another friend and
poet about the hoary but still strangely pressing idea of emotionality in
poetry being justified by mirage-like "non-linguistic" or "non-rhetorical"
or "authentic" displays and mises en scene of Self. Your photo, in this
context, hit me like a gorgeous breath: it was personality's helplessness
in such justifications, a helplessness which was not, for all that,
malevolent, simply, after this century, sad and exhausted, burnt-out.
Being situated in the context of consumption was also extremely important,
for the idea of Personality somehow authentifying language was like the
commodity exchange: a stamp of garantee on the dubious product.

As you saw, Susanna Gardner said it would make a beautiful cover for an
anthology or critical book. But I'm sure it works as a stand-alone piece
as well. Maybe we can do something with it. I'll post it again Jake on the
blog this week and give you your attribution you so richly deserve.

All my best,

Nicholas

*Third: A Continuation*

Nicholas,

Thanks for your reply and your thoughts.

I wasn't concerned at all that my photograph was unfaithful to me. I always expected it to travel beyond whatever gallery I could construct for it, and I'm glad it has: for me a large part of the joy in writing and in photographing lies in knowing the work will always exceed whatever story we tell about ourselves to ourselves and whatever berth we construct for the genesis or the survival of the work. I think this is the test of work, so I'm interested, not because I feel betrayed but because something that was supposed to happen did, and I'm simply interested in the mechanics, the dynamics of conversation and community that transmit work.

I'm particularly interested in this transit because, though the photograph lost its attribution, it nevertheless never went very far afield, or at least it returned somewhat close to home: though you and I have not exchanged before, the ecosystem of poetry blogs is fairly well interconnected, so to see the photograph inside that ecosystem does not represent a radical relocation. I'm asking myself whether circulation (erotism in the etymological sense, always tending toward the other, though not necessarily sexually) within a community, however internally heterogenous, is somehow easier to accept because its easier to understand or because the traces or residues of transit are never completely dissolved.

The new question that comes to me here is why was the photograph e-mailed, rather than being linked? The internet provides for the most durable trace or residue in the link (which indexes all sorts of information), but the photograph is clearly more powerful, more capable, once it's alienated from its origin, and I wonder if the e-mailer knew this or if he/she had received it in turn from someone else.... And that's why I wrote you.

Your reading of the photograph is powerful. I would press many of the same complaints you're pressing in your reading, though I doubt many of those who know me or even read my poems would suspect me of such discomfort. And so, the query is also, as it tries to identify the moment when the photograph left my blog and its attribution, a search for the value of my name and my blog in this ecosystem, not as a narcissism, but rather as a study in rhetoric.

As for the photograph itself, I've no plans for it---indeed, almost
all my photographs just sit around (I did a few gallery shows and got
somewhat tired of them)---so the idea that someone could title it and
give it new life is very welcome. Anyone is welcome to it for a cover
&c.

Thank you, Nicholas,

Jake

***

A lot to digest here, both due to my rather lackluster blogging of late, and because of the recent adventures in the land of licensing, on which more later, as well as the discussion of posting poems on blogs....

Anyone have any ideas here?

In the Wild
June 10, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Found this in the wild:

Just a matter of time, now.

***

Also, congrats to Joshua.

And, go get this already...

Indexing Science
June 7, 2007 File under: Information Technology

I love this sort of thing, a visual representation of the density of papers in various fields of science. The little filaments are actually sentences from the papers.

Give Us the Man Suit, Carlos
May 29, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Read Zachary Schomburg on his completely killer first book.

Mixed Tastes
May 24, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology

This summer's MIXED TASTE schedule is out now. Clear off your Thursdays, once again:

Swiss Typography & TV Theme Songs
Thursday June 7, 2007
with Joel Swanson & Scott Kinnamon

Kurt Cobain & Solar Eclipses
Thursday June 14, 2007
with Patrick Brown & Jim Downing

Practical Democracy & Deadly Jellyfish
Thursday June 21, 2007
with David Hildebrand & Alyce Todd

Carnivorous Plants & Color-Field Painting
Thursday June 28, 2007
with John Bayard & Dean Sobel

Earth Art & Goat Cheese
Thursday July 5, 2007
with Elissa Auther & Michele Wells

Capoeira & Le Corbusier
Thursday July 12, 2007
with Canto de Galo & Bob Nauman

Chinese Opera & Alfred Hitchcock
Thursday July 19, 2007
with Joanna Lee & Thomas Delapa

Walt Whitman & Whole Hog Cooking
Thursday July 26, 2007
with Jake Adam York & Joe York

Tequila & Dark Energy in the Universe
Thursday August 2, 2007
with Matt Ortiz & Ka Chun Yu

Soul Food & Existentialism
Thursday, August 9, 2007
with Adrian Miller & Maria Talero

Prairie Dogs & Gertrude Stein
Thursday, August 16, 2007
with Jonathon Proctor & Julie Carr

Japanese Anime & Zora Neale Hurston
Thursday, August 23, 2007
with Alexandre O. Philippe & Philip Joseph

Marxism & Kittens, Kittens, Kittens
Thursday, August 30, 2007
with Gillian Silverman & The Denver Dumb Friends League

More on the platform comparison
May 19, 2007 File under: Information Technology

In the end, it may be that I want something new, a little different, just a change, or it may be that my ongoing quest to clear licenses for very small passages of lyrics quoted in my poems (and my ongoing payments for those licenses) are making me more and more a fan of open source everything, but I'm leaning toward moving from Movable Type to WordPress. At this point, if I can figure out how to manipulate WordPress's category structures a little more effectively, I'm probably there. Probably that would mean leaving all my Movable Type archives in place, closing the posts to comments, and then switching over. Maybe even putting the new blog in the same directory, we'll see....

Test Runs
May 16, 2007 File under: Information Technology

So, for clarity, I'm going to run the blog on both platforms until June 1st, which is two weeks. During that time I should be able to feel out which platform is the right one for me.

Going into this, let me offer the following terms for consideration....

Movable Type pros:

cooler name; reference to Gutenberg really tasty;
my own long familiarity with Movable Type; I know the back end pretty well
I prefer the verbal indexing and category direction in MT (category directories are named by category rather than by number)
I prefer the way MT displays faceted categories
MT's admin seems more robust

Movable Type cons:

MT charging clients
MT back end becoming less accessible
MT mixes Perl and PHP, meaning you need to know two languages to have full access
fewer MT plugins

Wordpress pros:

Link management seems easier: I wish Movable Type had such an application built in
Link categorization
Got the ethics: favorite of open source communities
Admin seems friendlier and also more quickly flexible
PHP only means leaner codes
Cooler slogans

Wordpress cons:

Indexing, category directorization, &c, not verbal
Conflation of tags and categories in core WP
Collapse of nested categories/tags in lists
New to me

Ultimately, I think my decision will be based on the flexibility of category faceting and conditonal (category-based) formatting, though my sense of extensibility will come into play as well. How long will MT's Perl core be practical? How much more flexible will WP's PHP core be?

Thoughts welcome, indeed...

Migration
File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...

I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.

If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

Migration Patterns
May 15, 2007 File under: Information Technology

For reasons too numerous to list here, I'm toying with WordPress and considering abandoning Movable Type after all this time. So check out the new ladder and let me know what you think....

If it works, I'll work out some migration strategy to redirect all traffic to the new site. All the old entries are already there.

Unlicensed
May 13, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Still working on the licenses, but there aren't more to go.

A few little tidbits to follow up on Friday's post.

First, Friday's Talk of the Nation included a discussion of copyright in the context of the Google Library Project. One respondent said he wouldn't be surprised if a copyright never expired again. It wasn't what he hoped for, but I fear sometimes he may be right.

(Founders' copyright, anyone?)

***

In a completely different direction, Bill Geist's CBS Sunday Morning bit today was a wonderful glimpse into the world of book sales. If he has to work so hard, the rest of us better get our shoes laced tight.

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License
May 11, 2007 File under: Information Technology

A few posts back, I mentioned that the new book might even be out in January, but I may have written too soon, because one of the things that has to happen before the book can go into design and production is the clearance of lyrics quoted in one of the book's sequences, and that is more complicated and time-consuming than I imagined possible.

Maybe I began the wrong way, going to the United States Copyright Registry, thinking a public, government, and supposedly legal document would be the first place. I should have begun at ASCAP's ACE Title Database, but I didn't know about that. As ASCAP's website notes, "ASCAP created the dial-up ACE System in 1993 as a useful tool for music professionals." Not being a music professional, I didn't know about this. Thank goodness ASCAP decided to "make an enhanced World Wide Web version of this Database available." I only wish I'd known sooner.

What makes the ASCAP/ACE system more useful than the Copyright registry is that ASCAP/ACE will separate records for composer and writers from records for performers and performances. The Copyright registry may contain more than 100 records for a single song, maybe three records for writers and composers and another 90+ for each recorded performance of the song. In my case, I only want to quote the lyrics, and I want to do it properly, so I need to find not only who the writers are but who administers the licenses, but, again, it gets even more complicated after the ASCAP/ACE search.

Let's take, for example, "Blueberry Hill." ASCAP's database lists three writers: Al Lewis, Vincent Rose, and Larry Stock. ASCAP also lists three publishers for the song: Warner Chappell, Larry Stock Music Company, and Sovereign Music. Larry Stock Music Company is handled by another company, the Larry Spier Agency, which does business or routes licensing through a company called Memory Lane Music, and Sovereign licenses all its titles through another company called LCL, Licensing Concepts Ltd. Even had I begun at ASCAP, I would still have two other calls to make before I could find the person I needed to contact, and even then things get tangled, as one call netted me a fax number in the wrong division of the licensing company, so, after waiting the obligatory 15 business days for any reply, I had to call only to discover that my fax had disappeared into limbo. As with Stock and Sovereign, Warner Chappell does not handle lyric reprint requests, so you have to go to another company, Alfred Publishing, which handles Warner's print licensing.

Once I got to the right people, things moved pretty quickly, relatively speaking, but it didn't stop there. In trying to clear one line (that's right folks, one line) from the 1926 song "Bye Bye Blackbird," I bounced around from one publisher to another to yet another then to discover the following: the United States rights are held jointly by two publishers, while world rights are administered by a third agency. In contacting the third agency about "Bye Bye Blackbird," I had to reveal the list of songs quoted in my entire manuscript only to be told that this new company also administers two-thirds of the world rights to "Blueberry Hill," something none of the three other publishers had ever mentioned. I guess that's why they ask...

But I'm left to wonder — especially after one phone call ended with the publisher suggesting I hire an industry insider, a specialist, to clear the licenses — how an author, or even a common citizen, could ever be expected to get this right.

Some might think, as I thought a few years back, that presses would have such specialists and that an author wouldn't have to know not only the fine points of the law but as well the labyrinthine course to compliance. But the fact is that many presses don't have such specialists and, even if they did, it's probably not economical to devote any such labor to doing this work: I've already spent nearly 40 hours, about half on the phone, doing this detective work, an expenditure of time that would cost a press probably around $1000, thus increasing the cost of production of my slim volume of poems by maybe 25-35%, a volume that may never make any money, may never turn a profit.

If you are an author, odds are you're going to have to do this yourself. And, I think, odds are you're going to get it wrong somewhere, so you have to become a devotional person and pray that you're not going to get sued. I imagine that somewhere there's a "due dilligence" provision or a "best effort" — has anyone else (?) noticed with intrigue the disclaimer in the colophon of a University of Iowa Press title: "All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of materials used in this book" — but I don't know.

***

Several confidantes have said to me, Well, I guess you won't be using any songs in your next book. They're probably right, but it makes me sad, to think that something so fundamental to my approach to writing poems and suites and sequences and collections of poems, something so fundamental to my Civil Rights project, might be abandoned, that there might be incentives to abandonment.

Let me say some things I don't always say clearly or all together....

First, the more specific representation: the Civil Rights project — the work to write elegies for each of the 41 people whose murders, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, mark important moments in the fight for Civil Rights in America — is a documentary project. I am executing the project in poems, but the core impulse is documentary. In some cases I am building poems around documents or elements of documents. In some cases I am creating documents, recording what is otherwise only verbal. In some cases I am writing poems that set documents in dialogue. And in some cases, in most cases, I am searching for the intersections that form accidental, perhaps unwitting, but significant documents of the times.

Many of the songs I'm trying to clear for A Murmuration of Starlings are in a single sequence, in which song titles and song lyrics help tell the stories of two of Birmingham's citizens: one is Sun Ra, who left Birmingham for outerspace and a life as a jazz musician and futurist; the other is Robert Chambliss, who was convicted of bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church. In the case of Sun Ra, it's his titles, his composition, his language that tell the story. With Chambliss, because he never wrote (to my knowledge) anything, it's what he hears that tells his story and that tells Birmingham's story. In one segment, when Chambliss is supposedly waiting to bomb the home of Fred Shuttlesworth, the poem has him listening to "Some Enchanted Evening," which was #1 on the Bilboard charts that week: my hope is to use those lyrics both to suggest Chambliss's own romanticization of his work as a white-supremecist bomber and to challenge readers to hear the disconnect between the visible or audible culture and the undercurrent that would come to overwhelm Birmingham in the early 1960s. "Some Enchanted Evening" becomes a document, in the right place at the right time, something that helps us measure the world.

I believe the most powerful documentary films work by finding these accidental documents, and I want to achieve some of that in these poems. As a poetic strategy, this is not unique to me: I admire the way David Wojahn has developed a documentary aesthetic over the years and the way he's used songs to create those documents. (I wonder if he's ever had to deal with this business? Time to write a letter.)

And since I'm undertaking this work in order to draw attentions to the (still unfinished, still unfolding) history of Civil Rights in America, since I mean to locate that struggle in our world so it will be more widely indicated, I don't think I can easily say I'll avoid lyrics in the next segment of this series. This work is a responsive work — these poems respond to facts, to texts — and sometimes the song is the text, sometimes it tells the story.

And I don't mind paying at all. I just wish there was an easier way to find out who and how to pay for this.

Second, a larger point: I think there's an important place for responsive work, for work that is by nature intertextual (as much as it is intratextual or "original" or originary), work whose intertextuality is an ethical (as much as an aesthetic) choice. And yet, the difficulty and expense of licensing even extremely short passages of lyrics (I'm using maybe a total of 50 words and it's going to cost me in the neighborhood of $600) makes the publication of certain kinds of work impractical, especially if those works are works of poetry or literary fiction.

I was talking to an editor about my situation and he mentioned to me that he had recently read a manuscript in which the author quotes lyrics in every poem, something that would effectively make the book too expensive to produce. But, of course, it's quite possible the book could be excellent perhaps even important.

(I know people are probably tired of poets talking about the potential importance of poetry books, given the supposition that they're increasingly irrelevant. But even poorly circulated works (Moby-Dick only sold 3,000 copies in Melville's lifetime) can have serious effects (it has been argued that Moby-Dick laid the foundation for post-modern fiction).)

And it's sad to think that a work that might make a serious ethical or artistic contribution might language in manuscript because it could never generate the fiscal resources to establish itself. Though I guess that's true probably of more books than any of us can imagine.

Third, another larger point: there's an important, perhaps invaluable, place for work that hybridizes genres and my current Thesean wandering through the copyright maze makes me wonder if I've entered a zone in which the legal structures in some ways militate against hybridity.

If my book were a work of journalism, not poetry, if it were a work of journalism, not fiction, I wouldn't have to clear license on these quotations. Presuming, however, that fiction is originary work, that poetry is originary work, using another originary work — a song rather than a newspaper report — requires payment, not just acknowledgment.

I had at one time presumed that this payment was to compensate for potential loss of revenue, that such use was assumed to fail the fourth point of a fair-use test, though such a determination was always confusing to me. If I quote the lyrics to "Blueberry Hill," a sound recording, in a poem, I don't duplicate "Blueberry Hill." I translate it. And I would think that my inclusion of the work is, if it does anything, more likely to send someone for that recording, rather than dissuading them from it, rather than replacing it (see the substitution test). But now it seems that such payment is not required against harm to or diminishment of the original recording to make money but against the lyrics themselves, which, because they are already licensed for fee, make money on their own and are therefore legally a separate, licensable entity. I have to pay the money because if I didn't they would have at least lost the money I could have paid them and would therefore fail the fourth point of the fair-use test, regardless, apparently of whether or not I would pass or fail the substitution test. And that, I believe, may enforce a certain conception of poetry on my present work.

Obviously, that is on the edges of things, something far away and almost slippery-slope-ish, but it's something I think about. I wonder what you think about it.

***

All of this has got me thinking again about the Bob Dylan-Henry Timrod blowup from last year (refreshers: #1, #2, #3, #4).

At the time, a local reporter asked me what I thought about it and (echoing #4 above) I said I wished Bob Dylan would rip off one of my lines: it might help me get around.

But since then I had the pleasure of hearing Katrina Vandenberg read (if you haven't heard her, go find her, and do buy her book) the poem "Record," in which eight words from Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" appear, words that cost her $100. The intersection is perfect. Vandenberg's is, too, a responsive poetry, one whose quotations are apt, whose quotations connect the work of the poet to the world beyond her own skin, important work. Amazing.

The reading was stunning, even if too brief, but I left thinking, if she has to pay Dylan for those lines, he ought to have to give something back for the Timrod thing.

The Timrod's all public domain, and I thought at first Dylan was doing his blues thing — there are dozens of blues lines scattered across the Dylan catalogue, most of them "traditional" (i.e., with no fixed author) — but I say if we're going to do the blues thing, and observe communal property, let's do it all the way. Poets sometimes are blues people who sing out of the chorus of forever, and occasionally they let you hear that chorus, they need you to hear that chorus. And I think there should be fewer barriers to that sort of thing. Or at least fair play (if not fair use).

***

And I'd go further to say that at some point there ought to be a test to see if the ethical impulse to brief quotation might be allowed to offset or override some of the other considerations. (In any case, I hope these folks get the proper remedies.) Until then, I've got to get back on the phone and keep my check-book open.

April 30, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Why is Matt Lauer's speaking voice a yell?

Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
April 28, 2007 File under: Alabama , Information Technology , Lomography / Photography

This morning a stranger tells me my digital camera is a sign that the end times are coming. He quotes Daniel: knowledge shall increase, and the people will run to and fro. Knowledge increases. Older women walk to and fro from one end of the pier to the other and back again. Seagulls, purple martins go to and fro. And I am trying to capture one of them before the end times come, before Jesus arrives. The stranger makes it more explicit: Oh yes—this always makes you comfortable doesn't it, the Oh?—Jesus is coming soon. And then: Do you know Jesus? Of course you know Jesus, he continues, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation, and I'm guessing he means that if I hadn't have known Jesus Jesus wouldn't have lead him to me, though my guess would be that it would be better for the mission if Jesus had lead him to someone who didn't know Jesus, or at least it might have made for better conversation, but I would want to be an observer of that, not a participant in it, but about that time he moves on, to the end of the pier and then back toward the shore, and everyone is going to and fro, and the end times may be coming, but now it's time to go to the conference, so my time at the pier is at an end, but the martins and gulls continue to circle while clutches of men, the ones who's names are not yet carved in the benches' wood, are casting their lures deeper into that metallic water.

Soundtrack
April 23, 2007 File under: America , Information Technology , Intake

For a Monday morning, my "War on Terror" mix-in-progress:

"The Gloaming," Radiohead/DJ Shadow
"As We Go Up, We Go Down," Guided By Voices
"Welcome To The Terrordome," Public Enemy
"Nuclear War (version 4)," Yo La Tengo
"The Horror," RJD2
"Sneak Attack," DJ Qbert
"Send Your Man To War," Johnny Shines & Snooky Pryor
"War Begun," My Morning Jacket
"March of the Pigs," Nine Inch Nails
"War Pigs/Luke's Wall," Black Sabbath
"War at 33 1/3," Public Enemy
"War on War," Wilco
"Spanish Bombs," The Clash
"Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me," Charles Mingus
"Calm Like A Bomb," Rage Against the Machine
"The Empty Threats of Little Lord," Sunset Rubdown
"Bomb Yourself," TV On The Radio
"Atoms for Peace," Thom Yorke
"Great Atomic Power," Charlie Louvin
"Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb," Pilgrim Travelers
"There Is the Bomb," Don Cherry
"Nuclear War," Sun Ra
"Warm Canto," Mal Waldron & Eric Dolphy

Tryin' Hard Not To Lose My Head
April 17, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Lomography / Photography

We finished installing the 15,000 heads that are part of the Fang Lijun exhibition that will open tomorrow at The Lab

I've got a brace of photos up here.

Check them & it out.

Blabbermouth
April 15, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology

The author with a few of the several thousand miniature busts in Fang Lijun's Heads, which I helped install at The Lab all day yesterday.

I've been helping The Lab in several capacities, but I'm most happy to tell you, I've been developing a blog for the institution, which I invite you to visit at www.belmarblab.org, where you'll find more dealings with the tiny heads.

...

Photo by Sarah Skeen

Residual
March 30, 2007 File under: Information Technology , Language , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Found on a blog that belongs to someone whose name I cannot uncover just yet:

... Jake Adam York (whose work made my palms sweat at GSU last week) ...

That's a good thing, I hope.

###

Also, among the phrases given to search engines that were eventually recorded by my stats software:

jake adam york is an ass

There it is, whoever you are. The next time you're looking for it, you'll find it, and maybe some proof as well, I don't know.

###

Both blips got me thinking about the residues of our selves, or of ideas of our selves, to which we have increasingly more access.

A few years back, a reporter told me a source claimed to have had an affair with me, and I'm still occasionally accused on the basis of that suggestion.

You never know who says it. And usually the trace is human, a change in the weather that is you in the minds of others.

But sometimes there are these electric residues.

###

Reading Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox, another treatment of such residues. He calls it a "reverse memoir," a collection of all the things in his e-mail inbox on a certain day, what other people were saying to him, and so a reverse portrait as well, a kind of Hockney photo-collage, but in writing, where the pieces of observation imply the lens, the sesne.

Noah's reading tomorrow. You should go.

He's been described as "a handful of fire." He'll make more than your palms sweat.

###

Thank you.

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Dear Allison, Dear Joshua,
March 29, 2007 File under: Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

You left just in time. This morning we woke to five, maybe six inches of snow. I am told the Farmers Almanac predicted this, but this is the first I've heard of it. Its almanac size to quote Allison.

Perhaps this is the appropriate afterward. Your visit was one of the best I can remember. The time you spent talking to our students was wonderfully instructive, even inspiring, if I may pull the raggedy term from the cedar chest again. Your readings were captivating, and the balance was perfect. What more is there to say? This silence, enforced in ice and water, seems right.

I wasn't as aggressive as Mathias in capturing your visit photographically, but I got a few shots for the record.

Joshua listening:

And Allison, I made the mistake of shooting you in digital. I think analog, or analogue, would have been better.

I'm told the control booth sustained a power failure about 3/4 of the way through your reading, Allison, and so much of the sound recording was lost, though we're combing the computer caches to discover what we can. I'm going to tell those who were hoping to hear it as a podcast that this is testament to the power of the reading. Josh, I've got most of your reading, and I'll be working on a broadcast version in the coming weeks.

Please tell everyone about the broadside. We'll have it up for sell next week on the Copper Nickel site.

And, in the meantime, please rest. I hope your memories of Denver are good ones, and I hope we'll see you both again before too long.

All my best,

Jake

Dear Mathias
File under: Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

You coveted my camera. Maybe it was the bright LCD screen. I don't know. Maybe it was just the mood at the Apache. Maybe it was the magic of Zach reading from The Man Suit.

It's a Canon SD630. Really a daylight camera. It has a flash, but I always turn it off. I want the digital camera to act more like an analogue device. More like my Lomo, so I get these shots, which I thought you might enjoy.

Thanks so much for coaxing Allison and Joshua out onto the plains. We have a lovely time, about which more later.

I'm looking forward to your visit in October.

All my best,

Jake

You Should Already Know
March 26, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus are reading tomorrow (Tuesday) on campus (7pm King Center). Think what it would be like it Whitman and Dickinson were married and wrote poems in the same house.

Quit your job and be there.

A special surprise for those with loose bills: Copper Nickel will publish a limited-edition broadside of Allison Titus's poem "The Nineteenth Century" as part of this event. Only 57 copies. A free one to the first person who can tell me why only 57.

Noah Eli Gordon reads from A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of A Sparrow and a selection of his other 24 books this Saturday, 4pm, Cameron Church, corner of S. Pearl and Iowa. Reception to follow.

Renounce all other gods.

Next week in Denver: Danielle Dutton + Stephanie Young on Monday; Daniel Alarcón on Wednesday.

&&&

And I'm told I can say it now, Southern Illinois University Press will publish A Murmuration of Starlings next Spring as part of its Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. My manuscript was chosen for the second prize in this year's Open Competition. More details to come.

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Letter of Recommendation
March 22, 2007 File under: Information Technology

To whom this may concern:

I've been asked to recommend to you as a candidate for consumption my the work of one A. Gadsden, but I have decided I cannot make that recommendation to you at this time, as I would much rather make other recommendations to you.

The first is that you obtain and read and re-read and re-obtain and re-distribute and generally repeatedly speak of and read Zachary Schomburg's The Man Suit, just published (lovingly and lovely) by Black Ocean Press. This is the sort of book that you'd want working for you. Its numerous qualifications not only suit it for all manner of endeavor but are also more engaging that almost any novel. As the apparently or semi-dead Carlos ghouls through the book, which is populated like a Hall of Presidents, the most wonderful things happen. I will tell you now, if you hire this book to operate your front-end loader, you will suddenly find that you are the curator of a museum of miniature replicas of Mt. Rushmore carved into grains of corn. If you hire this book to teach your introduction to geography, you will suddenly find that while you were sleeping your entire house was moved by ants to the shores of a lake around which those who hated you in high school are constantly mixing new flavors of margarita for you to try, but you will never get a hangover or want to puke. If you hire this book for a tailor, you will find that everyone covets your clothes, especially the legislators. You will tell them they already own them, but they will be confused and will fall into a stupor in which a true democracy will arise.

Is A. Gadsden capable of such wonderment?

I'm enclosing with this recommendation a copy of Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, which I'm calling my favorite album of the year so far. There have been some good ones, ones indeed I love, but this is it, not only a fulfillment of the promise that has been Modest Mouse for so long, but one that is inexpressably more wonderful than any of us, let alone A. Gadsden, could have imagined.

I give each of these works my highest recommendations and hope you will find an important place in your organization for each and I hope you will not hesitate to contact me if I may speak further on their behalfs and I hope you will not hesitate and I hope you will stop reading this now.

Sincerely,

You

Dear
October 12, 2006 File under: Information Technology

Do you get the blahgs sometimes?

I mean, you've got this thing, this space, this input form box which into which you stuff a little language, a pock that sometimes you think you're grouting, at other times a mail slot for a hopeful if shaky delivery. You think sometimes of pulling it out, giving it another dimension, making it maybe more soap-boxy, standing on it to say something. Sometimes the fantasy doesn't seem to require a third dimension and this input form seems like a soapbox already but you're getting maybe a little altitude sickness. Or it's your credit-card company: you know their address, but sometimes you don't want to send the ticket in.

You've got the blahgs, right?

You say, I think I'm tired of blogging. You say Maybe I'll kill my blog. You say You say Maybe I'll leave it up so folks can look at the smolder that used to be my campfire.

Maybe you say, You say Nah, I'll just redesign it, renew my interest, sort of like when I used to get a new haircut so I'd like myself more.

Or maybe you don't say nothin.

***

I'm getting more of these little chaps lately. Anne Boyer's (infra). G. C. Waldrep had a damn fine one from DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press earlier in the year, The Batteries which rightly won the Campbell Corner prize. Matt Henriksen's got one, and Adam Clay's got one, and Julia Cohen's got one, and Zach Schomburg has one coming out, and Wendy S. Walters has a very fine one indeed, and Frank Sherlock's is very nice. Sure, these are brief, and maybe it seems not cost-effective in some way, poems per dollar, but in a lot of ways these are nicer than regular books. They're hand-made, so there's a touch in the book that complements that in the poems, and I dig that. I think I want, sometimes, to stop the blog and start making these little books and just send them out as letters of s sort, but I'm not very productive, so it would take me a while to get to everyone.

***

Is blog lazy or efficient?

***

I'm off to Tucson (infra) in the A.M. RMMLA in the afternoon and then reading at Casa Libre Friday night (infra). Some cactus and carne saca, I hope. Some sunburn, I'm sure.

Dead Letter Office, Part 3
September 1, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

This morning, I found two copies of Murder Ballads, also so recently de-contender-ized in the Colorado Book Award consideration, in the bargain books section at The Tattered Cover. I picked them up for $4 each, less than I pay my publisher for copies. Anyone want one? I'll pick this one up.

I also found a $4 copy of David Keplinger's The Clearing, which is a contender for the Colorado Book Award. The book's magnificent and certainly a must-read.

David's book has been out just a little more than a year, mine not even a full year. How quickly do these books get moved to the clearance rack?

Meanwhile, what's allowed to sit indefinitely?

I know a bookstore has to make space, has to move books that persist too long, but it takes a while to move a book of poems. I'm just now starting to see some notice of Murder Ballads here and there. The Blackbird review is just four months out, and the H_NGM_N feature Nathan Pritts kindly edited, with a review of the book, has been up just a month.

And I notice with my compatriots the same. Noah Eli Gordon has recently posted a link to a new review of his book The Area of Sound Called the Subtone that's been out for two years.

It takes a while.

I've taken some advice from Noah: with some grant money, I just bought a bunch of copies and am going to send them out.

So I think, from this blog, I will begin giving away a copy a week for the next ten weeks. I'll pick up the postage and everything. Alls you have to do is leave a comment or send me an e-mail with either the lyrics to an obscure country song or a good idea for a poem that includes a bizarre historical fact. Be sure to give me your address in case you win.

Meanwhile, I remain. Denver's cooling a bit, but still clear and blue. The next issue of Copper Nickel should go to the printer next week. Look for some subscription and pre-order options there soon.

Good weekend, dear reader.

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New
August 6, 2006 File under: Editing , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

The new issue of storySouth is up, with some redesign, by me, that I'm still working through.

On Books
August 1, 2006 File under: Information Technology

Kevin asked me to answer the following.

1. One book that changed your life?

Of all, if I had to choose one, I'd say it was the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. When I was 17 and traveling with a school group in England, I was pulled into a bookstore where, among many familiar titles, I found a slim Everyman Edition of Thomas's Collected, which I bought for two reasons: (1) I liked "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night," which I'd read in Senior English, and I thought that if it was the single and this was the album maybe there were more such poems within; (2) it had some strange pictures in the back, including on of William Blake's woodcut of the Jacob's ladder (which has been mutilated into some of the graphics for this site) and a still of Le Chien Andalou showing the straight-razor cutting the eye (tasty). Something of a taste for the odd and the perverse and more of a thirst and a hunger for thick language tastier than a barbecue sandwich brought me to purchase that book, which was, I believe, the first book I purchased of my own interest and volition and with money over which I had sole possession. It turned out to be the first book I read entirely on my own, without tutoring or coersion, and the first book I managed to understand on my own, though I still don't understand every little thing in there. Basically, this was the book that taught me to read. I learned that if you ask the right questions of a text you can get a story out of it no matter how it wrinkles its Celtic nose. This lesson would help me later read more poems and things like Ulysses whatever those are. I would also say this book played a major role in my deciding that I wanted to write poems. Then comes all the rest.

2. One book you have read more than once?

Like Kevin, I find myself saying One? both because I've read many books more than once and because I do think, like Kevin, books should be for re-reading as well as for reading. Or, we might say, reading isn't just running through the pages front to back and could take years or decades and could go on for much of one's life.

So, two into this questionnaire, I'm going to refuse the question in a different way and say that I actually have a schedule of re-reading. Every Spring I re-read Leaves of Grass and every Fall it's Moby-Dick and somewhere in between I try to re-read Walden and Emerson's essays, and about 300 poems by Emily Dickinson. It keeps me grounded. I also like to re-read Absalom, Absalom! and If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem! about every other year. Other books I have a tendency to return to are Tristram Shandy, Irving's Sketch-Book, A. R. Ammons's Sphere, and Larry Levis's Elegy.

Most recently I re-read on the same day David Wojahn's Mystery Train and Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Probably Moby-Dick as it's a story and an anthology of most of what I love about early 19th-Century America. Otherwise Leaves of Grass.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Moby-Dick. Funniest book every written. Seriously.

5. One book that made you cry?

Without Sanctuary, edited by James Allen.

6. One book you wish had been written?

A Compendium of African-American or Black Comedy from Before the Civil War by Richard Pryor.

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Black Beauty, which somewhere along the way lost its subtitle "Torture Device to Be Used in Fifth-Grade Reading Class."

8. One book you are currently reading?

The Singing Fish by Peter Markus. You should, too.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler.

10. To whom would you pose these questions?

Adam Clay, Shanna Compton, Gina Franco, Zach Schomburg, Mathias Svalina.

On Community
July 31, 2006 File under: Alabama , Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

For no good reason I looked at my stats for July. The month is ending, but I haven't looked at my stats in maybe five or six months. Probably because I thought I was going to give up the blog. Also because I had much else on my mind, a lot of life changes, a new book, &c. I see today I'm averaging about 120 visitors a day.

I suppose this is good news. At one time, I would have smiled at this. And perhaps I will, tomorrow, but at present I'm mostly confused, because I haven't the faintest idea who reads this.

...

How do you know your community? How do you know what your community is, your place in it, what community to which you belong?

I used to think the answers were fairly straightforward. I used to think direct reciprocity was the best sign. You approach someone. They approach you back. In the face to face lay a recognition in which mutuality could be registered and in which community could begin. But when I think this way, I sometimes get depressed, as I am reminded again and again what gestures I've made that have not been answered, and I'm not sure if that means my gestures failed, if the lack of answer means I'm not welcomed in some conversations, if I am asked to remain apart, if I am persona non grata.

I've been counselled recently against making stuff up, assuming that the reasons are negative, against imagining the motives or the thoughts of others.

And I've entered two conversations lately that have me thinking reciprocity may be a misdirection.

I was reading today another blog, which I found through yet another blog, in which our writer discussed the feeling we can have that we need to have or are supposed to have a spiritual experience after trying to push toward one and how frustrating it is when the experience doesn't happen. We work toward the spiritual but don't arrive. The writer suggested that the sense of work must be abandoned. You can't invest yourself toward the spiritual. But you can make yourself receptive. This struck me as true, recalling how, even in my most serious religious disciplines, I felt not the transforming encounter with spirit I imagined but the structure of discpline, and the comfort a community in which reciprocity situated me. My transforming encounters occurred when I stopped asking, stopped insisting, when I just shut up.

I'm thinking, too, about an exchange I had recently in the context of a salon discussion about writing and the senses.

I was advocating for what I called a transsubstantial writing, in which one commits to putting everything into the poem, all the sensory information that can be gathered, so the poem would become not the report of the experience that might evoke response, but instead the form of the experience, such that it might be replicable in someone else. I said you put your concentration into the poem, and a reader taking the poem for the substance of the world for a moment might enter into that concentration. The poet does not withhold but provides and a serious reader, entering fully into the poem, enters what's provided, what experience. The poem is like messenger RNA, providing the ends to which a reader's knowledge might be joined, allowing for some replication. The poet doesn't endeavor to become immortal, but the poet makes way into places and lives and states neither he nor she could imagine. Through the poem, experience has a wider ken, and it can draw us together in an ethical relationship.

Someone in the audience asked what I meant by a relationship, how I would call it a relationship especially if I never knew who read my poem, if they never wrote me or told me. How is literature a medium for relation?

I was thinking of Whitman, of the seventh and eigth sections of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

7
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

8

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not?
What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach-what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

Whitman was fond of thinking the book, the form he'd chosen for the poems, into his texts. Knowing the reader would hold the book, he imagined the reader holding it, and began using that book, that thing in the reader's hand, as a meeting place. For Whitman, the book was a structure for delay of relational attention, for holding his curiosity and later delivering it to a reader (if anyone's interested, I did the scholarship on this in an article that appeared in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review back in 2001). He knew the relationship would be asymmetrical, that he might never have the return gesture, but he trusted that his hand — his physical hand, yes, but more to the point his writing, his handwriting that then became translated into the type in the book, which was designed for the hand (why he shrunk the 1856 and 1860 editions to better fit the traveling hand)— went out, open, and that it would find some hand.

So, too, I need to enter a renewed trust.

...

I do wonder, however, who reads my ladder, in part because, as a poet, I wonder where I fit, where I operate. My teachers, I would say, were what would be considered conservative, and I believe that I write poems that others would consider conservative. Richard Greenfield once described my work that way, meaning that I still held useful old concepts of line and poetic genre. And I think anyone who'd read Murder Ballads might agree: I wrote the book, most often, in song lines. Yet, I don't feel entirely comfortable understanding my self and my work situated in a community defined by poetic conservatism of one kind or another, for I value the conversation of Richard Greenfield, of Noah Eli Gordon, of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, of Hadara Bar-Nadav, of Major Jackson, of Natasha Tretheway, of Dan Albergotti, of Simmons Buntin, of Zachary Schomburg, of Adam Clay, of Tony Tost, of Joshua Poteat, of Shanna Compton, of Aaron Anstett, of Steve Mueske, of Stephen Schroeder, of Craig Arnold, of Larissa Szporluk, of Diann Blakely, of Gina Franco, and the less direct exchange I find in reading the books and blogs of Joshua Corey, Joshua Clover, Richard Siken, Gabriel Gudding, Elizabeth Robinson, and so many others. I find myself moving between two kinds of communities that have long been thought of as separate, opposed, and I have no idea what this means.

At times I'm a ghost, at others a distant greeting. Most often an open hand that, I hope, doesn't look like a slap about to happen.

...

Reader, who are you?

Where are you, so I might know, between you, where I am today?

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Industry
July 13, 2006 File under: America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

If poets, like musicians, could be assured of multi-book contracts if they had any manifest talent, if there was an industry to promote poets of all ilks and to drive consumer interest in poetry and to continually massage mass consumption, and if there was an industry that took poets on tour ("Monsters of Poetry" (yes, I know it was on The Simpsons)), would we complain as much as muscians do about their apparently execrable music industry?

Real Enough for Me
July 9, 2006 File under: America , Information Technology

Thanks, Jeff, for your comment on my last. Just to be clear, for me the question of sincerity and how it's construed becomes most thorny when the history of the music comes into play, so to speak. When I listen to Cash, it's hard for me, especially in the American recordings, not to think about the songs, where they come from, who did them before, what the songs meant in their earlier contexts. After all, though creepy per se, a song like "Thirteen" is at its creepiest and its coolest when Cash's rendition evokes and silences Danzig's original at once.

I'm no longer a very good guitarist, so I can't exactly share Jeff's experience of playing along with the records, in which case, I suppose I'd prefer some of the earliest, most unadorened versions of songs I love, though there would always be versions of songs, like some of live recordings of "Mannish Boy" in which the guitar parts are both more expressive and more clearly audible.

Still, after having been blown away by a sneak listen to Thom Yorke's forthcoming The Eraser, I find myself, though admiring the album's third track, "The Clock," preferring Thom Yorke's live acoustic version, performed recently on the Henry Rollins show where, though we miss the density of Thom Yorke's production, we hear the song's emotional rhythm more clearly.

Certainly there's value and joy in having many versions of each song. My interest, in my lecture, is in how a particular style gains a kind of cultural preference not necessarily because it's easier to hear, but because it's easier to consume, because it abets a specific political relationship to the music and, more importantly, to its makers.

...

Membra disjecta:

I discovered this week that the ascendency of the 33.3rpm 12" record lasted approximately 33.3 years.
Does anyone know what to call unpopped popcorn kernels left in the bag post-microwave?

The Sound of Real
July 6, 2006 File under: America , Information Technology , The South

Yesterday, I picked up the latest Cash CD which I am enjoying, though more than ever I am thinking about the sound of his oldness, which seems more and more important to the experience of Cash in recent years. In the most immediate frame, it's impressive in its expressiveness, not of anything in particular beyond hurt or pain, an audible measure not simply of age but of pathos and thereby of artistry. But, of course, it's also a measure of his venerability, his longevity, even of his particular biographical difficulties, his long abuse of alcohol and drugs and, more recently, the loss of June Carter Cash. And in this disc, the sound is here, the slight tired that has become the timbre of the last few volumes of the American recordings and even the interesting hiccups in the tempos of the songs, Cash's variance with the traditions he continues to engage, something you can hear precisely because so many of the songs are covers.

Like Paul, I'm taken with "God's Gonna Cut You Down," which seems to address the not-too-old performance of it (under the title "Run On For A Long Time") by the Blind Boys of Alabama. In Cash's version, drums and hand-claps help build the country-church feel that's important to the song while an acoustic guitar, played with a slide, connects the performance to the blues tradition; in the Blind Boys' version, an upright bass carried both melody and rhythm under the gospel harmonies that made me forget that even Elvis recorded this tune.

There's a wonderful feeling in the Cash album, all the way through, and it's especially audible in this song when Cash sings about God's calling him by name, by his first name. Against the background of the Cash legend, we are invited to read the song as a miniature narrative of his conversion from his hard-drinking years, a turn back to gospel roots, which is exactly what the song calls for. There's something anamnestic about it. Strongly so.

Powerful as it is in its narrative and in its self-reading, it wouldn't be nearly as affecting, I think, if it weren't so heavily acoustic. Everything here is acoustic, from the percussion to the accompaniment, to the voice. This is, again, part of the second or third coming of Cash, the unadorned, the stripped down, the bare to the barren. But in moments like these when Cash addresses a blues tradition, the acoustic—the aggressively acoustic qualities capture me particularly.

I'm now working on a lecture about the electrification of the blues and the ways in which, historically, acoustic and electric sounds have connoted sincerity (or the lack of it), with deeping interest in the racial complexity of blues diasporas, and my time with this latest Cash record is helping me bring it, somewhat, into focus.

Blues, guitar-based blues, is rooted in the Mississippi Delta. The recordings of Delta musicians in the Delta itself are often referred to as country blues, though this must be a retronym, something applied to the music after it had, in some obvious persons, moved to the city, most notably to Chicago, for what distinguishes country blues from the Chicago-based blues of, say, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf (both of whom recorded some early work in the Delta, is electricity. The tonality is the same, the scales are the same, the rhythm is the same, even the songs are the same, in some cases. Once blues moves to the city, it is louder, and it gains some new timbres—Muddy's guitar, for example, gets a little cleaner in its high-note slide solos, Hubert Sumlin's work on Wolf's records can also organize around various single-note lines rather than voluminous chords that mark the work of someone like Mississippi Fred McDowell—but in many ways, it's the same music. As Muddy Waters once explained, they just plugged in to be heard.

Ironically, however, despite a relatively strong increase in audience through the agency of modern record companies and radio stations and an importantly influential hold on American music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in some ways the electrification of the blues ensured the gradual silencing of the blues. Electrified and citified, the blues seemed to become more accessible to white listeners and, more importantly, to white musicians, who adopted blues forms, especially blues solo guitar, and by the mid-1960s the most popular blues musicians in the world may have been the Rolling Stones.

To the Stones' credit, they did a lot to recognize the influence and the importance of black blues musicians. As Muddy Waters would say: "Before the Rolling Stones, people didn't know anything about me and didn't want to know anything. I was making records that were called 'race records'. Then the Rolling Stones and other English bands came along, playing this music, and now the kids are buying my records and listening to them."

But at the same time that the rise of blues-inflected British rock was becoming more and more popular and drawing attention to blues music, the interest of many white consumers turned to the country blues, and musicologists and afficianados scoured the country in search of new talents and lost musicians, like Son House, who was "re-discovered" in Rochester, New York, in 1964 (or so), and brought to public attention as a solo acoustic guitar player and singer. More and more, authenticity of black blues music was measured by the lack of electricity. More largely, sincerity itself, in the cultural imagination, seems to have been tied to lack of electricity, as is witnessed in the uproar over Dylan's acoustic set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (or in the story of this uproar, which some dismiss as legend).

Though against these developments the perseverence of musicians like Muddy Waters and the emergence of funk and the continued rise of James Brown as a major music figure are all even more miraculous than they seem at first, there's still something about the association of sincerity with the acoustic sound that is especially tragic for the blues musicians, especially since folks like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf had to move north to gain access to electricity, even at a time when the South was extensively wired for electricity. There's something about the situation in the mid-1960s that requires blues music to return to the Delta, to sound poor, even when the increased prosperity of some of the genre's greatest musicians is largely dependent on their move out of that Delta.

Now the Delta is thoroughly electrified, in its music especially, as the work of greats like Junior Kimbrough and R. L. Burnside show, and the electric North Mississippi sound has made bands like The Black Keys possible. Even the White Stripes betray a strong North Mississippi influence as they cover songs like Son House's "Death Letter." And in many ways, this issue of authenticity seems historical rather than contemporary.

But in Cash, it's all renewed. At least for me.

I remember getting the first American Recordings album and thinking, as Cash alternated between songs of devilment and songs of prayer, that in many ways this was an answer to, if not an out-and-out remake of, Son House's Delta Blues and Spirituals. Of course, the rhythm isn't peculiar to blues, and it's even a bit problematic to separate blues from country or folk music fundamentally, especially since the musics were very closely intertwined in the days of the Mississippi Sheiks and Jimmie Rodgers, before "race records" were introduced as market segmenting devices. But Cash, in the studio with Rick Rubin, manages to evoke the intersections of race in American music since the mid-1930s.

That Cash, as a singer and song-writer, shares gospel roots with musicians like the Blind Boys of Alabama, makes this sort of evocation inevitable. That the present offering sounds so wonderful, so energetic, makes me wonder at the status of the racial dimension in this music and at how long it will continue to be a part of the experience of this music. That Cash also sounds tired in places makes me wonder if this will fade, something I both want and do not want.

Is there a peace that won't forget? And if so, what will it sound like? Will it sound real? And can we sing it together?

Reconstruction
June 8, 2006 File under: Information Technology

Fortified with 9 Vitamins and Iron
March 21, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Some shots from the show at Ironton

Entering

A glance at my 32-linear-foot poem (over 90 cubic feet in all).

The actual beginning....

I don't know if you can see it clearly, but the poem rolls in three horizontal columns.

The rolling's interrupted by this collection of photos (which I'll post again later) and a second poem that acts as a kind of a legend.

Some close-ups on the panels.

Shots of Emily's arrangements later.

We had a good opening. Maybe 100 or so folks showed. Most stayed to read some of it. Which was nice, if unexpected. I'm accustomed to folks buzzing in and out of the galleries, maybe deciding to come back later.

And a lot of folks asked for text to take away.

I was planning to turn this into a book, but not for another year or so. I may, however, go ahead and work on it, so I can offer it when the exhibit closes.

Hope you all enjoy these few shots, which partially explain my recent silences, on which more later.

Resolutions
November 21, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics

Catching

Coming back into my body now. Weeks: readings, radio spots, grading, teaching, reading, thinking.

Backwards I see in my own days where I sweated through fot with linguists and contenders...

I have witnessed and waited, but I have arguments, if few mockings.

Balance

A few weeks back, at the release reading for Murder Ballads, I began to notice things about the book's arrangement as I was reading from it, certain symmetries I can't remember intending though I'm glad are there.

I started thinking, after the reading, how your writing mind, when it's working well, does so many things you're not aware of exactly. You think the poem means a certain thing. You act to preserve that value, to value that meaning. Yet, the poem has other potentialities.

Once alienated from the moment of specific production, you re-enter the poem — again, not so much as a specific statement or a specific value (though this is important, sometimes more than others) but as a process by which meaning is made. And new meanings are made. Some of them are the same as the ones originally intended. Others are new or newly visible.

Walking

Kevin:

I've been thinking a lot about your earlier post, particularly in relation to some of the comments Nick Piombino left at my blog on Hart Crane and my own understanding of the poem as performative utterance, a dialogic exchange, if you will.

Performative utterance.

A performance of meaning.

The meaning of performance.

Notice that all three ideas place as much emphasis on the writer as the reader?

Require the reader to imagine a writer writing this poem, to become interested in those processes by which this text comes to arrive as a text capable of producing, of re-producing meaning, as much as recording it.

Not poems as reliquaries. Poems as prayers.

Prayers

I am praying a lot now.

I go to the reading. A room full of people I do not know.

I take my dark book from my coat pocket (right size) and begin to read. A poem about hate crimes, racist murders, lynchings. Yet, I look like and sound like the kind of person I'm condemning. I have to say the "n" word in one of the poems. Will it seem like I am the kind of person who has this in his idiom? Or the kind of person who needs to enter into certain reticulations necessary to arrive in a certain place?

Or will I be two people, occupying the same column of flesh and breath, a prism through which some intention is refracted into color, some into others. Which colors fall within the visible spectrum?

More importantly, what will they hear?

Love Letters

Roxanne:

What do you think of my current approach to such sympathetic reading--to read text as you would read a love letter?

I love a reader.

As in letters from a lover, we read closely, carefully, repeatedly, and search for clues to how s/he wants us to read it, regardless of the opacity (opaqueness?) of the language/style/form.

Text as a record of desire and what we want is the desiring, the rebirth of desire, the reaching out, the erotic.

How iron reaches out for iron.

Painful or fulfilling.

A connection.

A question asked.

A thousand answers.

Each one containing something you need to hear.

Exactly as Exactitude
November 13, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

In response to my late-night note about teaching poetry, Dee responds:

The word "exactly" however, is not believable. How can the ideal reader, one with the best of skills and sensibilities and sympathies, possibly reenact the process exactly? And why would he/she want an exact replica of the process?

May I say if not believable that we must act, provisionally, as if it is believable, possible?

I've been slowly, fragmentarily, as I have the time and as my mind clears, thinking toward my own articulation of sympathetic reading, and I can say (provisionally) that I think good reading begins with the attempt to read the text as the author meant it to be read. Maybe we won't enter into the writer, per se, by following the bread-crumb trail back into the forest of thought, but we should enter into the writer's productive subjectivity, his or her imagined or created author or authority, the proximate if not ultimate source of the poem. Of course we won't get an exact shit-and-sweat replica of the process, but if we use exactly as a telos then we arrive more closely. Allow me my fiction.

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What I Keep Trying To Teach My Students
November 7, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

Poems may not be products of a process that is over as much as records of process so sensitive they enable you to repeat that process exactly, if you read them carefully enough.

Brad Vice's Tuscaloosa Night
November 6, 2005 File under: Alabama , Editing , Information Technology , The South

As you may know, the University of Georgia Press recently recalled Brad Vice's recently-published Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume The Bear Bryant Funeral Train with the intention of pulping it. The Press stripped him of his award and declared "no future editions are planned."

What started all this?

As the Tuscaloosa News reported, a readers' adviser at the Tuscaloosa Public Library, reading Vice's story "Tuscaloosa Knights," "heard echoes from one of her favorite books," namely Carl Carmer's 1934 book Stars Fell On Alabama.

The reader, who (according to the Tuscaloosa News article) believed she was the first to hear an echo of Carmer in Vice's story, began comparing the two texts and then prepared a small dossier marking the similarities between Vice's story and a chapter in Carmer's book. She sent this dossier to the University of Georgia Press and as well to the University of Alabama Press, which has published the most recent edition of Stars Fell on Alabama.

Daniel J.J. Ross, of the University of Alabama Press, wrote: "This seems a flagrant case, intentional and indefensible, with the feeble efforts to alter the original all the more blatant evidence of unacknowledged borrowing" (from the Tuscaloosa News).

And you already know what UGA Press has decided.

I have been — as a reader, as a writer, as an editor, and as a publisher — troubled by the immediacy of the assumption that Vice committed plagiarism, rather than some artistic quotation or allusion or some other form of appropriative artisanship, and by the willingness of many of the principals in the exchange to damn Vice for what they see as fraud and theft.

When I first read Vice's story — he sent it to me and to Jim Murphy so we could reprint it at Thicket, the site we've dedicated to Alabama writing — I heard the echoes of Carmer right away, and I thought Vice had done a smart thing. He had written his story right on top of Carmer's, set his own characters in the very Tuscaloosa Carmer described among the very Klan that disgusted Carmer. It seemed to me a clear case of allusion.

And necessary allusion. For the echoes allow Vice to perform two difficult but important things.

The first is to suggest that Alabama, culturally, isn't all that different from the Alabama Carmer described. The more exactly Vice quotes Carmer's situation and the more exactly Vice evokes Carmer's Tuscaloosa, the more powerful is the comparison. That comparison both forces us to consider our cultural critically, which is continuously necessary, and very quickly establishes the environment for the real drama of the story, which invites us to consider how this environment conditions our love — what and whom we love, when and where and how we can love. We need to feel that the terror incited by the Klan, the same Klan, is the same terror Carmer felt, so that the climactic scene of Vice's story is one of terror.

The second is to connect not only the world within the story to the world within Carmer's memoir but as well to connect Vice's own writing, his act, with Carmer's. And this connection seems to me the more valuable and essential. In connecting himself to Carmer, Vice enters and expands the too-small sphere of Alabama's literary inheritance (where is our Faulkner, our Welty, our Williams?) and invites us to consider that inheritance not as something that is past and locked away but as something that is living and extensible. If we see Vice's Pinion as a version of Carmer's own guide, then we will understand Vice as an extension of Carmer and this Alabama as not so divorced from that one. Vice's story argues for the essentiality of Carmer's work by making Carmer's work essential to his own, and in doing so makes Alabama a larger place.

One may protest that by failing to announce this connection more explicitly Vice has unwittingly admitted intent to deceive, but I believe that such a protest misunderstands Vice's text, fails to consider the necessary conditions for the kind of allusion I seek to describe here and, at the same time, undervalues Carmer's work by requiring it to behave in a very specific way.

To make the case for intentional, deceptive plagiarism, one must say that Vice's intention is to hide from us the inspiring and well-quoted source, must say that Vice assumes we will not (could not) make the connection between his work and Carmer's. It assumes that Vice's quotation is meant not to evoke Carmer's text but to pillage and thereby erase it. But it seems difficult, at least for this reader, to imagine that one could read — and I mean really read — Vice's story or Vice's collection without considering it as an act of Alabama literature, which would necessitate at some point a consideration of Carmer's Stars Fell On Alabama, one of the few outstanding works of classic Alabama literature. And it's hard to imagine that, with Carmer's work in mind, we could read Vice's work without hearing the quotations and without understanding them as such and without understanding the quotations not as a simple homage to a segment of another work of Alabama literature but as well as an appropriately rich response to a work that is itself so heavily invested in quotation, taking its name from a popular jazz tune and frequently quoting real people in the course of its narrative.

This is to say that the quotations are themselves acknowledgments of borrowing and that the act of quotation is in some measure suggested by the source text here.

Vice has, in interviews, explicitly acknowledged his debt to Carmer. And in allowing us to reprint "Tuscaloosa Knights" at Thicket alongside a selection from Carmer's own "Flaming Cross," Vice implicitly acknowledges the relationship, allows the evidence to be made public, and is interested in his readers entering the intertextual space in which he has worked.

This is not an author with anything to hide.

To have been more explicit within the story itself, Vice would have had to have included an epigraph from Carmer's work or perhaps named Carmer, but such a gesture diminishes the allusion, which works when the reader makes the connection the author has already made. The joy of allusion lies in the reader's arrival at that place already inhabited by the author, a place in which reader and writer come to be in profound sympathy with one another. To force this arrival, as an author, is to mistrust the reader. To provide the evidence but leave the connection to be completed is not only to trust the reader but to depend on her.

Which makes the Tuscaloosa readers' adviser's reaction all the more disappointing. Except for her assumption that this borrowing was deceptive, she was the ideal reader, able to hear the echoes and identify them.

Some, who don't feel that this is intentional and deceptive plagiarism, argue that this is a case of "unacknowledged borrowing" and that this is a violation of copyright law, a charge Vice has countered by asserting that he thought his use of this material was within the bounds of "fair use."

Perusing the resources on fair use, it's easy to see how Vice could have come to such a conclusion. The Stanford University Libraries digest of copyright law states that "In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and 'transformative' purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work." If Vice views his work as a comment on Carmer's or even as a transformation of it, though Vice does not mean to parody the work exactly, it would seem that he has worked within the spirit of the law, at least as it is presented here.

Of course, the issue of fair use is more complicated. According to the Stanford University Libraries digest (and to other widely available sources, including the Tuscaloosa News), judges of copyright suits use four factors to determine whether or not a use if fair use:

the purpose and character of use
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken
the effect of the use upon the potential market

I've already discussed the "purpose and character" of Vice's use of Carmer's work (which will still, of course, be up for debate). But these other factors, which have been only partially addressed, also have a serious bearing on any determination of copyright violation.

What of the nature of the copyrighted work?

Interestingly, copyright law digests (such as the one provided by Stanford I am using as a reference throughout this post) state that if the source work in question is a factual work the borrowing may be more excusable, since the spread of information is essential to ongoing dialogue. Purely fictional works (because they are not factual or do contain facts?) are more heavily protected.

So, we have to ask whether Carmer's work is a fictional work or a factual work and whether the determination of the nature of the source work makes a different here. Though written with a literary flair, Stars Fell on Alabama is essentially a memoir, if we can take seriously the "Author's Note" that opens the book. There Carmer declares that:

All of the events related in this book happened substantially as I have recorded them. It has been necessary in a few instances to disguise characters to avoid causing them serious embarassment (for instance my hosts during the lynching). I have also taken the liberty of telescoping time occasionally—since I have attempted to select significant occurrences which took place over a span of a half-dozen years.

While Carmer's note only confuses the question of its kind for me, these statements do encourage our understanding of Stars Fell on Alabama as truthful and as factual, more or less. And that determination supports Vice's claim that Carmer's work was a historical source he used to create the Tuscaloosa for his story.

But it's the third question about the "amount and substantiality of the portion taken" that has received the most attention.

In explaining its decision to recall the book and strip Vice of his award, the University of Georgia Press stated that Vice's work "borrowed heavily" from Carmer's book.

Certainly, Vice borrowed from the work. But did he borrow "heavily"? It depends on what you consider to be borrowed. If we're talking about exact quotations of lines and phrases, it's obvious, but the amount of material that's adapted isn't a significant portion of either work. If we're talking situations and ideas, it's a much larger proportion of each. Is it substantial? As a proportion of Carmer's work, the material in question (most broadly construed), though well-known, is miniscule: we're talking about four pages of material in a 300-page work. As a proportion of Vice's work, we're talking (again broadly construing "material") about maybe five of fourteen pages (depending on which edition you're considering).

Maybe this is enough for most people. But the copyright law digests state that those borrowing for purposes of parody — and I would consider that the kind of allusive updating I've considered the story to be is akin to parody in that it builds itself on the other work, even if the purpose isn't a humorous one — may borrow much more than is normally acceptable, "even the heart of the original work, in order to conjure up the original work."

Quoting from Justice Souter's remarks in Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music, Inc may be interesting here:

the enquiry focuses on whether the new work merely supersedes the objects of the original creation, or whether and to what extent it is "transformative," altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message. The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use. The heart of any parodist's claim to quote from existing material is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's work.

Finally, what was the "effect of the use upon the potential market"?

Carmer's work was a best-seller in 1935. But judging from the difficulty of finding the title on the University of Alabama Press's website, it's not a top-priority title. My guess is that the two- to three-dozen sentences from Carmer's work that appear, often altered, in Vice's work, does not constitute the kind of reproduction that will substantially diminish demand for Carmer's work. This isn't the kind of sidewalk-table DVD that sells for a fifth of the cost of the real deal.

If anything, I would think that Vice's quotation would potentially increase interest in Carmer's book (which is a great book everyone should own). Maybe the University of Alabama lost their licensing fee which, from my guess based on my own permission-seeking, would be well less than the $950 someone is asking on Amazon today for a single copy of Vice's book.

If none of this actually clarifies what it was Vice did or intended to do or what the University of Georgia Press or the University of Alabama Press thought it was that Vice did, it does suggest how complicated the issue is. I feel certain I've gotten something wrong in the law, but I've done the best an intelligent, well-educated person could do without a lawyer, which I hope suggests something of how Vice himself might have worked though the issue.

I would think that the University of Georgia Press would have been aware of the quotations — one presumes they're careful and also well-educated and well-read and would, as the sponsors of the premiere award for Southern literary fiction, be cognizant of Southern literary history to a degree that would render Carmer's text familiar and readily accessible — and would have had the legal resources to make the proper reckoning.

In my own experiences as an author over the last few years, I have found, however, that even the most prestigious presses, like Routledge (which published my work The Architecture of Adress) like to put the burden of the legal work on their authors or their production staff, people who can do no better than to read the laws they can find.

Vice might have been left with this burden. I don't know. He might have, as I did, gone looking for a copyright registration for Carmer's text in the United States copyright database and might have, as I did, found nothing.

I don't have all the facts, but I do know that there may be a defense of Vice's quotation, contra the official response from the University of Alabama Press.

Perhaps Vice has not borrowed in accordance with fair use. But if he thought others would know, would hear, would understand, I don't understand how anyone can accuse him of intentional and deceptive plagiarism unless we treat texts solely as properties and do not consider their cultural place or value.

The University of Georgia Press has had its troubles this year, accused of corruption in its poetry contests (a dialogue instigated by the folks at Foetry and that resulted, at least in part, in Bin Ramke's resignation as series editor), and some bloggers are already making the connection. And maybe this has had some bearing on their reaction to the recent accusations.

As of this writing, I haven't received the copy of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train I ordered, and I suspect I won't see it any time soon, but I do hope to read it at some point soon, even if I have to read it in manuscript. I continue to think that Vice's writing is not only good but smart and brave as well.

I'm especially sorry to see an Alabama author treated so harshly before a thorough analysis of the facts has been made, and I can only hope, as an Alabama author with a first literary work freshly out, that this is not a sign of how hospitable things are in our beautiful, tangled state.

(This post also appears at storySouth.

Voting Irregularities (2)
November 3, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Teaching

Tuesday after voting, I went on a eight-mile bike ride. It was nice to clear my head and forget about how underpopulated my polling place was. I rode past rows and rows and rows of signs for Referenda C & D. But I saw barely more people on my ride than I did around the voting booths. I ventured later onto campus, from which I'd taken an election holiday, and the place was crawling, yet few people were talking about the election, and there were scant evidence that anyone cared.

Two students wrote that day — one to say that he just didn't vote, and one to say that when he asked people if they voted they got offended — and while I didn't exactly get depressed, I was again disappointed by these signs of the health, or the lack of health, of our civic discussions.

It always baffles me that people don't vote. It isn't hard. And it's one of the few ways in which the common citizen can act directly on the shape of the government. I'd never think that protest or discussion of any sort were not political acts, but voting is a special act, one that's provided for in our history, one for which many people struggled and died — and I'm not primarily thinking about our military but about the Civil Rights Martyrs, many of whom died in protests specifically designed to expand voting rights and voting practice, activists of whom I've thought often in the days following Rosa Parks' death. I think each of us has a citizenly duty to vote. But we have an even more powerful ethical obligtion to vote in order to sanctify the deaths of those who fought for this.

I made my memorial.

And then I began thinking about why people don't vote.

I've been personally frustrated by our university administration's official discouragement of our (professors') involvement in political discussion or political action. I know there's a state law that makes it illegal for state employees (of which I am supposedly one) to engage in political campaigns, electioneering, or generally to advocate any policy or political position that might benefit them directly or conflict with the performance of their duties (is this a sedition law?) so that it cannot be said that the taxpayers have been forced to finance their own opposition, but we, the university, is in the business of dialogue, and I find it ludicrous that the professors have been officially asked not to engage in this dialogue. So I can't do any thing more, they say, than encourage my students to vote. So I cannot motivate them toward action through dialogue; I can only suggest that it's a good idea. And since people generally avoid discussions of politics in their daily lives, this means that one of the few places in which one should be able to have an open and spirited discussion is now no longer one of those places. As far as the citizenly conversation about the direction and health of our polity is concerned, it's almost as deserted as my polling place.

And then I see that the opponents of Referendum C, having lost the election, are considering suing to stop expenditure of the money retained under this provision, effectively working to void the election, and I wonder how much effect this has on voter participation.

Last year, I took my LCA with me to the polling place. I had some black-and-white film in it I was planning to double over. This is one of the frames that came up, one I find very appropriate at present. It's hard to see, but my ballot, my actual ballot, is just below the sign, almost wiped out by it.

I wish for a day when I won't think of this picture, but I don't know when it's going to happen.

And in the meantime, both the willfull ignorance and the horrible silence of our political exchanges make me wish again for greater conversational sympathy, more careful listening.

Repetitive Stress
October 9, 2005 File under: Information Technology

A long two weeks here. Intermittent repetitive stress-type pains in and around right wrist. Ergonomic evaluations have revealed that I have been an idiot. Thankfully that pain is starting to subside. I am learning how to type again, and I am replacing some furniture. I got my materials ready for and hung for the Double Struck show I'm doing with a few other photographers. We had some folks through on First Friday, and many were interested in what were doing, which was good. Writing a bit this week and arranging for a collaborative book I've been struggling toward with another photographer, and I feel I am close to closing that one --- I hope to have a proposal out in the next two weeks. Friday night I slept for what felt like the first time in weeks. And today the skies how clouded over and they say it's going to snow, and I like this more solemn atmosphere. Today: listening to Joanna Newsom and working on this book. Maybe sleeping more later on. Maybe more.

Call-and-response sermons?

Residue (4) — Models for Responsiveness
October 2, 2005 File under: Information Technology

Work songs?

Grid computing?

Distributed computing?

Residue (3) — Toward Address, Redress, Recovery, and Correspondence
File under: Information Technology

I ask a question. If my answer comes incomplete from one and incomplete from another but if such incomplete answers fit together in my understanding to provide a complete answer to my question, even though the response and the correspondence come not from one person nor from a single act, can I say that I have my answer?

Residue (2)
File under: Information Technology

All errors are questions for the truth.

Residue
File under: Information Technology

Wai Chee Dimock:

What concerns me is the abiding presence — the desolation as well as the consolation — of what remains unredressed, unrecovered, noncorresponding.

Kevin and I are making our travel plans.

Cairo, Illinois
September 21, 2005 File under: America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

Kevin brings Raymond Williams:

I Went Down to the Crossroads...
September 18, 2005 File under: Information Technology

By 'emergent' I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created.

When I haunt the crossroads at night, Robert Johnson on the iPod, waiting for one devil or another to arrive, am I not doing the same?

(& if the devil that comes is some new devil?)

Sympathetic Reading
September 17, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

Christopher Nealon, from "Camp Messianism":

... I think we're at an impasse in literary studies, on the way to which we have sacrificed the critical potential of appreciation and advocacy in favor of what has become a rote "problematization" of texts, and a sadly narrow practice of appreciation that is only able to find subversiveness to admire. But what if the texts we admire, even the politically engaged ones, turn out to be not subversive? What if their political efficacy has been evacuated or is pending? Ascribing performative success to these objects — to pick one of our favorite strategies of the last decade — and equating that capacity for performance with agency doesn't seem to do justice to the theoretical power of the idea of performativity, which I take not to lie in our applauding the aesthetic object's performance but in our not being able to pin down when the performance is finished. Crucial to the sympathetic reading practice I want to advocate is an understanding that critical acts are not discrete. To dismiss appreciative or content-driven readings of texts on the grounds that they are insufficiently politicized, insufficiently counterhegemonic, is to mistake the work of countering hegemony (if that's what we're doing) as individual work. When I read a text that interests me, especially for its political-affective comportment, my impulse, my critical impulse, is: pass it on. Highlight it as best you can, read against the grain, or with it where you can, and make sure others take a look. This is as true for texts that I find repulsive as for those I admire: I don't imagine myself, as a critic, judging by myself.

Materiality / Orality
File under: Alabama , America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

I'm very much enjoying the breadth and clarity of this post over at Jane Dark's Sugarhigh.

I especially like the use of "residual poetics" to describe what I think Silliman would put into the "School of Quietude." I find that in my own work, I am using residual poetics but consciously, as I am most often writing about residues or traces, and it seems the right way to go.

I understand the critique of the "common sense" argument, which I find offensively ahistorical as well. So I want to separate the class of "residual poetics" into two classes at least, into "consciously (even ironically) residual poetics" and "residual poetics that presents itself as presiding poetics" (aka the common sense school).

For it seems to me that residue is not only interesting as fuel for nostalgia but as well as a form of recognition of the past's inflection of the present. It's hard to bring this off, and I think in many ways it's intellectually safer to enter into what Jane calls "emergent poetics" since the formal and significant forms this poetics creates clearly break from and can then more obviously comment on the past without being used or assumed by it. The "consciously residual poetics" I am interested in is always in danger of being assumed or subsumed by the presumptively presiding ahistorical "common sense" residual poetics, and indeed is often claimed by it and in some cases even becomes such poetics.

Take Seamus Heaney as an example. I think in his early work Heaney was playing very seriously with the traditional inheritance from both English and Irish prosody, and he used one to slighly destabilize the other, setting up through seemingly nostalgiac echoes of the Irish tradition, a kind of protest to English in his work. At the same time, his tactic was not to destroy or deform the English as sereverly as someone like, say, Medbh McGuckian, whose work is more clearly a linguistically and poetically formalized protest. So, Heaney, at once delightfully wry, is now claimed by the staunchest common-sensors (censors), as his late blank-verse and Anglo-Saxon work give him trad-cred, while McGuckian finds an audience in those who are interested in "emergent poetics."

But Heaney should not so quickly be aligned with, say, the William Logans and Timothy Steeles, those poets whose metrical histories are decidedly skewed to underwrite the claim of a "common sense" order and who more often than not seem to wish to live and write in another, earlier era. That is a more nostalgiac kind of residue, though it's not altogether clear that such a nostos existed, in the English speaking world anyway.

I'm particularly interested in this as I consider my own writing, not so much because I'd be surprised to discover that I'd been characterized as a School of Quietude poet or as a residual poet, but because I find myself uncomfortable with some of the company I'd be given in such characterizations (there are disagreements, fundamental ones) that seem to me like so many false distinctions. It's not that there's no difference in color that could or would sustain a line of demarcation, but that there's a middle ground --- and it's not just one where (as Silliman implies) people don't think about what they're doing, but a place where the gestures of encampment cannot be made with the same clarity. Some are interested in working in that area of potential dissonance achieved by emulating both signals at once, or by using one for a purpose that's been unforeseen.

Admittedly, such ruse is hard to keep up, and one can find a comfortable embrace by a community with whom one disagrees significantly, but sometimes comfort overcomes disagreement. It makes the lines even harder to discern properly, but if we're cartographing, I want some more complicating shading on this border.

...

Such strict marking says the Southern accent (and it always assumes there's only one) is a sign of ignorance and bigotry, or a witness to it, or a sign that it once existed.

But even if this sound long ago became the auditory marker of these behaviors, does that mean that its survival or its use today should so clearly be nostalgiac, retrograde, Stephen Foster?

Must the Southern diasporite always be representing the planter class or the poll-tax class?

When the answer is yes but the Southerner does not harbor such characters or positions, then there is that doubleness, a necessary, a militated betweenness.

Must I shed my accent to become emergent? Or can I emerge with these ghosts in my mouth?

...

All this to say that while I'm taken with the clarity and the general cartography of Jane's schema, I'm concerned especially by the ways in which emergence is witnessed by and militated by a demonstration of a decidedely Marxist interest in the materiality of language, over and above its oral qualities. I'm concerned because I think the belief that language can ascent above or can transcend the accident into the materialization of language is an especially middle- and northeast-American fantasy.

It's been shown again and again that there is a lattitude that marks what we enshrine as a culture as "standard" American English, and the line runs through Pennsylvania all the way west into South Dakota (Tom Brokaw, anyone?). Those who have lived near the line to the north have been allowed to participate in the fantasy that their accent is not only specifically but significantly different from the accents below the line, as if an auditory map of the United States could provide a spectrum from ignorance to genius. Those below the line carry the accent and the marks.

It is not possible, in the dominant parlence, to be both Southern, in a culturally recognizeable or meaningful sense, and emergent.

Yet we emerge.

Can't you hear it?

Sympathy (3)
September 16, 2005 File under: Information Technology

Adam Smith, from Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759):

By the imagination we place ourselves in his [i.e., our suffering “brother”] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.

Sympathy (2)
September 15, 2005 File under: Information Technology

President Bush's shirt matching and blending with the cathedral and the statue pediment is not quite what I had in mind.

Sympathy
File under: Information Technology

There are times, more and more often, when I'm talking, and I'm thinking about what I'm saying and I'm suppressing my accent properly so "mispronunciation" isn't a factor and I'm thinking about everything I know about the person I'm speaking to and trying to shape my speech to their hearing and I'm trying to hear them hearing me and I'm wishing I could make a speech that fit like a hearing aid in that whelk of an ear, and then I see that this person has no idea what I'm talking about no idea what I'm saying, or the head turns and we see that the ears are already plugged and nothing's getting through and then I am lost I wish I could turn and turn back and be heard that my words would fall into place that I would hear their not hearing me and know how to speak around that deafness a way to encourage their listening to encourage their sympathy to ask them to consider what I must be saying to encourage them to share the burden of interpretation of communication but the best I am offered is a glimpse of a cocked head and a cornshuck peaking from behind one lobe and I am hungry now.

Evidence (2)
September 10, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

On the Monk's Music recording of "Well You Needn't," just after Monk's solo Coltrane is supposed to come in. If you have one of the recently remastered copies, or if you turn your record up loud you'll hear Monk shouting to Coltrane (at 2:22), who must not have appeared ready. Sascha Feintstein, in his poem Coltrane, Coltrane" suggests Coltrane might have been in a heroin daze.

Whatever the case, the moment is a remarkable one, one of those moments in which what you think you're hearing, what you're listening to, becomes something else. The song is now not just the record of how these musicians respond to one another through their instruments. It is also a record, an evidence of Coltrane's lag, and enough of a trace of the people in the studio one can begin to imagine what was happening there.

Whenever I listen to this "Well You Needn't" (though he did), I have to turn almost immediately to the recording of Charles Mingus's group playing "Meditations on Integration" at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival. There, about a third of the way through a 25 minute composition (right at 7:01), we can hear Mingus yelling "E! E! E!" signalling a change from one segment to another. And there as well, we get to hear not just through the instruments but between and behind them as well. Though I've never seen pictures of the Monterey gig, I begin to imagine it always at this moment. The recording ends with thunderous applause and a short "Thank you" by MIngus so the imagination can expand, following from the trace into the world.

Evidence
September 9, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

The tune sticks. I don't know enough about music to describe Monk's line on a staff, but I'm drawn again, not to the apparent dissonance that gives the tune its most immediate character, but instead to the logic I find there, the way the rhythmic interplay between phrase and pause asks us to consider the present and the absent, positive and negative evidence, and the way in which the succession of the positions and omissions, so vital to the song, is also key to our sense of authenticity or authentication. There must be a trail. A chain. A record. A trace.

I've been talking about evidence a lot lately, with my colleague Philip Joseph whose been writing about racial reparation, in reading Wai Chee Dimock's Residues of Justice as a result of my conversations with Phil, and in (the highlight of my Denver) talking with Adam Lerner lately about Tehching Hsieh, of whose work Adam is preparing an exhibition.

It's taken Adam's interest in evidence in the context of Tehching Hsieh's work to make me think about evidence more directly in my own work, particularly in my poetry. Evidence is so clearly an important aspect of my scholarship, not only because the evidentiary drive is fundamental to all scholarship, but because I believe evidence to form the solid frame for any work of poetics: to show must always be the first act. But as I think about what I'm writing now toward a new book of poems, and as I think about my photographs a bit more directly, I'm increasingly interested in the explicit and implicit questions of evidence I've been thinking about for some time, and especially interested in how these questions are unfolding through my work.

Once you see Murder Ballads you will see the interest in evidence in the poems that have an archaeological concern and with those poems that are interested in historical, especially lynching, photographs — the concern with the power and the veracity of the artifact and of the document and the enormity of the disclosure such evidence makes possible or makes inevitable.

I hope you will also see, in a poem like "Negatives," the concern with the capacity of the thinker, and especially of the storyteller, to create a new kind of evidence, to create a counter-reality by creating the evidence of a state that does not yet exist, to bring a world into being by counterfeiting evidence of the world the story would find. This last move is especially important in those poems, like "Negatives" or "Vigil," that were undertaken as compensatory visions, attempts to create the world that should have existed.

The evidentiary concern, including the interest in evidentiary process, are clear.

What I haven't considered until today — because several conversations have brought me back to my photographs — is how much larger my interest in evidence is and has been for some time.

I've liked this shot for a long time for a lot of different reasons, and it's one of the few shots I have in my lomographic albums that I know has been viewed by a lot of people, so while there are qualities that feed my interest in returning to this shot there must also be qualities that draw others to it, though I don't know if those are the same qualities. (Maybe you can tell me.)

There are several histories to this photograph — several histories that intersect in this photograph and the viewing of it.

The history that's most immediately germane is the history of the photograph's subject. It's the hand of a student who had been through a difficult time, most of it seemingly centered around her troubled relationship with her live-in boyfriend. She seemed nearly destroyed by the relataionship, and the withering was hard to watch. Indeed, I refused to witness much of what was going on, though I was aware of it nevertheless.

On this day, just a few days after I had a bicycle accident and badly bruised and possibly cracked several ribs, this student, who lives but a block from me, called in sobs saying she'd decided to break it off and asking if I wouldn't mind taking a walk as she talked it out. So we took a walk, she with her break and I with mine, each of us in a pain. I took my camera, as usual. We walked east to Cheeseman Park where we sat on a bench for a rest. She lit a cigarette, and I took this.

I didn't take a portrait face-on. Maybe she asked me not to. She says she doesn't take good pictures. Maybe I just didn't want to face what was already too obvious, what was written in her face. But this shot captured it all, the burning to ash, the suppressing and quickening burn.

The shot captures the moment, which I remember well: November, dried leaves inscribing the sidewalks, chill air occasionally cutting in the lungs, my drug-numbed body.

It is evidence. But not in any compendious way. It is a trace, even as the ash is a trace of the tobacco. The photograph itself is an ash that proves we were there and that those burnings were our acts. And the record is better, more faithful to the moment, for being partial, for being fragmentary, for being incomplete.

The viewing of this photograph produced an interesting history itself when another student accused me of showing partiality to the photographed one, an accusation that produced its own evidence, revealing what many of my students thought of me (some good and some bad), revealing the partiality, the fragmentariness, of my self in the minds of others. I realized that I too was a trace of myself. I was asked to evidence myself more completely in the lives of others. I chose instead to become even more elliptically traced, distancing myself further from the evidence of my going over which others concern, which has actually made my awareness of my appearance to my students and to those with whom I work even more acute. Sometimes painfully so.

I've become interested in being hidden, in being occulted or occluded. Honestly, I've always been interested in hiddenness. Radiohead's "How To Disappear Completely" was an immediate favorite if for nothing else then for the line that keeps me sane in interminable meetings: "I'm not here. This isn't happening."

I do want to disappear. To observe from my blind. But not only for distance. Not only for protection. Not only to know what is there.

Because my interest in the hidden, as it has required a sharpening of the evidentiary hunger and the evidentiary eye, has disclosed myself to me as much as anything else.

When I stand at the window that lets me see what someone else has hidden from those within the building, when I stand to capture this hidden message's public broadcast, I catch myself as well. Even if I but make the shadow that makes the hidden visible to my camera. Even if I can trace my shadow, my outline on the window, in the other shadows, from the other shadows. There I am. Here.

Skins are peeled away. Autopsies reveal. And our staring draws a line into the near interior. Attention showing where we tend, what tendencies keep us from within.

In a strange city, the evidence that keeps me is the mark of a former city, a number etched into a long-hid post, a sign for a culture that disappeared nearby. The closed-down restaurant. The note left for someone who may never have shown. But as I stand marking these signs I become the reader for whom the sign has waited. I have closed a circuit. And now the artifact is whole, the body laid to see. What was a trace has led to the whole, has traced me into the circuit so I see the whole more clearly than if I'd stood inside its expedient electricities, seen what was thought important to be seen. We are beyond choice here. Except that what I find, what I choose to examine, to evidence, shows my choice, my interest, my suspicion that what's hidden's never hid. Nothing ever goes away. Always an echo, a shadow, a trace.

...

Maybe this is why I write so many echo and near-echo poems, poems in which the interest isn't simply rhyme, auditory joy, but the trace, the persistence, the uneraseable recognition of one in another. The next book is built on such poems, through which my commenting friends have waded, with bewilderment so often.

Now maybe this can serve as legend.

...

On the Blackhawk recording, the capture seems to widen as we work through the two-saxophone vamp and Rouse's solo, and almost two minutes in we enter more deeply not only the evidence of a night in April 1960 but as well the traces of nighclub conversation. Not just Joe Gordon's trumpet break, but as well a low tenor chatter, one man saying Oh yeah, that's definitetly....

That's definitely. Or that's epistrophy. A turning in place. Turntable vinyl. Acetate under the cutting head. Monk spinning at the keys. A turn away that turns back toward. Theme and reprise. Trace to body to trace again. Perfume haunting sheets at sunrise. A dirty glass. Hair in the drain. My fingerprint smudge on the floral card.

"Some of the very best bloggers do so at a great physical remove from any of the mainstream literary centers of our (or any) time."

July 23, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

groups form—it's natural—agglutinations, a center shaping,
a core center of command and focus: group attaches to group,
some slight delimitation still distinguishing them, and region

to region, till a public is formed, however tenuous and
widespread the building syrup now: my sympathies do not move
this way, building toward the high consolidations (except in

poems), the identifying oneness of populations, peoples: I
know my own—the thrown periferies, the stragglers, the cheated,
maimed, afflicted (I know their eyes, pain's melting amazement),

the weak, disoriented, the sick, hurt, the castaways, the
needful needless: I know them: I love them: I am theirs:
I can't reach them through the centers of power: the centers

of power aim another way from them: I reach them out in the
brush in the rangeful isolation, night:

File under: Information Technology

All Coloradoans should read Ted Wesp's analysis of Tom Tancredo's linguistic interests at Printculture.

July 15, 2005 File under: Denver , Information Technology

Spam Subject Flarf
File under: Information Technology

It spell as inaptitude pockmark
And worry he flexible paris
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With learn no hunch
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Is spend as markup
On cut be stand vestryman
Are give my alfresco
Be write no foreword abate
But say to sarsaparilla literary
An begin the enamelware expressly
In leave is host
For go it pod domiciliary
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Be lose at outpoint lacrosse
His allow or denial passport
Which spend as restock
That open an underfoot stork
Or understand a budget led
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Implode, the site isn't opening
Do sign an pant

Breaking Camp / Loud Music (A Draft)
July 12, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

Though following much of the recent discussion of Camp Messianism, Marxism, and poetics has been difficult — asymmetrical as usual, but also full of a great deal I disagree with —I’ve been grateful for those moments when someone like Josh lays bare a premise I’ve suspected by never confirmed.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been wondering, idly, whether I am a School of Quietude poet (and reading many of the archived posts at Ron Silliman’s blog, trying to find a definition of the School of Quietude I could use to answer this question) — mostly because as I read many of the blogs I’ve come to through Josh’s or Ron’s, I rarely find myself completely comfortable, rarely enjoying anything near the level of agreement I sometimes see between, say, K. Silem Mohammad and Josh Corey or between Josh and Gary Norris or….

(The question’s been interesting to me because I find that I enjoy reading much of what one would find in Fence, The Canary, Octopus, Jacket, what have you, though I admire specific poems or poets only very rarely — about as often as I find myself truly drawn to a poet whose work appears regularly in Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, or Southern Review, three of my all-time favorite journals. This is to say that while I don’t find myself opposed to the poetics most often extolled by Ron Silliman, I don’t embrace them either, and that leaves me to wonder, reading some of the Manichean geographies of contemporary poetic practice (Silliman's only sometimes included), where I stand.)

But reading over the last few weeks has helped me consider my place in the scheme of things much more effectively, particularly in light of the much more transparent discussions of Marxist principle that have entered this discussion of late. While I don’t entirely agree with either Henry Gould’s or with Jeffrey Bahr’s responses to these entries, their critiques have drawn the field into such contrast that I’ve been able to think what I’ve been wanting to think.

I will certainly be accused of a ridiculous idealism, but, as I have written many times of late, I think a certain kind of idealism is essential to a politically and culturally healthy life. Now, however, it is time to own up to my own idealisms and articulate my reasons for maintaining that necessity.

What I’ve been wanting to think: while largely uncomfortable with much in the current State of Affairs, with many of the products of contemporary capitalism (whether late- or late-late- or simply ongoing), I find unsatisfying the premise (often unspoken and only rarely examined) that a Marxist critique — whether plied in academic criticism, a discursive and argumentative arena (such as the blog), or in an avant-garde aesthetic — can provide a complete or total or even largely satisfying answer.

I object on the grounds that anything is so totally forceful that its effects can be called, categorically, good or bad or even effective, and I turn from any (apparently or real) totalizing force holding such force as an affront to the necessarily infinite quality of human life and experience (Levinas). And so, I am dissatisfied by the order of the Marxist conversation as I am by the order(s) of capitalism(s) largely because I resist the assumption that any economy is a totalizing system — if it were, how would any resistance to anything be possible — and because I resist the idea that any life can be completely accounted in any economic system, the idea that economics of one sort or another can say everything important about what we do or do not do.

This is to say, I believe that there are parts of life that exist outside of economics, that cannot be entirely commodified and that cannot be fully accessed by dialogues of de-commodification because they were never fully commodified.

Poetry and language are two of these parts of life.

My declaration should not be taken as an argument that there is no commodity poetry or that there is no commodity language — clearly there are commodities of both sorts. I simply mean to state that I believe both poetry and language cannot ever be entirely commodified. There is always a dialect, always an accent, always an idiolect that cannot be accommodated to the standard, that cannot be governed by the standard — or by the/a counter-standard.

But I would not stop here and be satisfied, for I do not believe that one’s poetry or one’s language need be entirely idiomatic or idiolectic in order to resist.

What one needs is, simply, an ideal, a strong knowledge that the self, that one, may not be totalized.

…

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

…

Must we be organized and regimented by anything other than a knowledge of our own abundances in order to resist?

Maybe we need to be organized and regimented in order to destroy one order, but won’t that call for another order? Won’t the regiment become the order then?

(“… there have always been concentrations of power …”)

…

I may not have the arguments, but I remain unconvinced as well.

…

As I say, such idealism may seem naïve.

I would say it is the root of all successful resistance.

I’ve been as frustrated as anyone who might read this blog with the current war, the current national administration, and more than anything else what seems to me a general erosion of public dialogue associated in my immediate context with the cultural and political dominance (or perhaps just political vociferousness) of Christian conservatives on the far right. My frustration may, however, have a different shape. As I was raised in a very religious Christian environment, as I have worked in the Church, as I have sought through the Church spiritual nourishment I still require, I find myself frustrated with the picture and the version of Christianity that is being peddled in the public square: the Christianity of Jerry Falwell, of James Hobson, of Focus on the Family or the Moral Majority or even of the Southern Baptist Convention or the Episcopal Church of America (of late) could not less represent the Christianity I still observe (difficult as it is to observe in my way). Just so, the political acts of Bill Owens, of Doug Bruce, of John Andrews, of Tom Tancredo, of Newt Gingrich, Tom Hastert, or Roy Moore, even of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Al Gore could not less represent the democracy I believe in and attempt to practice.

…

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not wither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

…

Frankly, the world does seem fallen at times. It is not, as many of my friends and colleagues would hold, because of the advance of the Christian right. It is just as much because of the general failures of the left — or any other wing — to meet and balance the debate. It is because of a general failure of ideals.

The ideal is the resistant. It is the teleology that cannot totalize the progress of time but can, nevertheless, shape it.

When we abandon the ideal — as over-simple (yes it is, necessarily so) and inarticulate — for a more complex narrative that we could also have, we do not destroy the ideal, we do not leave ideals altogether, we simply leave them to be occupied by others. We remove ourselves from a dialogue that though over-simple and imperfect must be had in order to regulate power, to combat “concentration[/]s of power,” to prevent commodification at a very high level.

It will seem naïve and perhaps ridiculous, but I believe that we must preserve the ideal of a humanity that cannot be described by capitalism or caressed by a Marxist resistance, that cannot be totalized in either dialogue — in order to have a joy in poetry that is more than the materialization of language and more than a superabundance of pleasure (it is an infinity of pleasures) and to have if not through that joy then beside that joy a power in a poem that is not quiet nor quieting but amplifying and amplified.

Permalink | Comments (6)

New Issue of storySouth due out this week.
July 11, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion , The South

Later this week, Jason Sanford and I will launch a new issue of storySouth after a brief hiatus. I'm very happy to announce two features, one on the poetry of Charles Wright, edited by Daniel Cross Turner, and the other on the poetry of Tom Hunley, edited by Jeff Newberry. Also, poems by Nate Pritts, Angie DeCola, Shane Allison, and many others.

Let Us Go Then
July 8, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics

Last night's Mixed Taste lecture — "Meat Sausage and T. S. Eliot — was wonderful. Pete Marczyk of Marczyk's Fine Foods introduced us to some wonderful fresh sausages and amazing European country wines, after which I rose to give my crash course in T. S. Eliot.

Among the questions were the inevitable: "What kind of bangers and mash would T. S. Eliot have liked?" To which we both responded that if he would condescend to such probably he wouldn't have had much taste for them. Interesting also: "As far as I know there is no mention of sausage in Eliot, or Shakespeare for that matter?" To which we responded that Eliot's Prufrock, while not necessarily biographical, had thin arms and legs and may have reflected a rather shallow draw in Eliot — there's not much food in the poems. As for Shakespeare, Pete remarked that "Big Billy had a known love for sausage" and then speculated that the omission of such from the plays was surely the result of bowdlerization.

Also asked to composed a poem to sausage spontaneously, we engaged in a quick stychomythia:

P: O sausage, O sausage, how I love thee!
J: "Let us go then, you and I
when the casings are spread out across the sky...

We came together at the end to promote slow foods and poetry at the same time. It was very fine indeed.

If anyone is interested, you can catch me lecturing (and serving) Cajun Food as part of the series on July 28th (b/w a lecture on Clifford Still) and again lecturing on the history and form of the Murder Ballad on August 18th (b/w a lecture on Contemporary Opera). This is the right kind of intellectual spectacle for Denver, I think. If you're in the area, you must come.

Today: sleeping, writing, reading, resting.

When this thin volume, with its ornate green jacket, crude title page, and frontispiece showing the casually dressed Whitman, was advertised for sale on July 5, 1855, few could anticipate its tremendous impact on literature.

150
July 4, 2005 File under: America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or
apart from them . . . . no more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me . . . . and whatever is done
or said returns at last to me,
And whatever I do or say I also return.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging . . . . through me
the current and index.

I speak the password primeval . . . . I give the sign of democracy"

Laughing Matters?
July 3, 2005 File under: America , Information Technology

In reply to Kevin's recent post touching on issues of comedy and race, I take the point about black comedians --- I think it is true in the most visible cases that the black comedian will be, perhaps must be, seen as speaking for his or her people.

In most cases.

I'd like to offer three complications.

First, in the drudgery surrounding Chris Rock's selection as the host of the Academy Awards, which occasioned the essay you've linked to, the question of representation --- what the host represents, who he represents, &c --- seems to me to come as much from the cultural situation of the Oscars (however much I hate them, I will admit that they are treated as the central event in public American movie culture, however much I consider that a tragedy) as from Rock's race. Whenever the Grammys or the Oscars is considering a new host, all these sorts of questions get asked, especially by pundits who apparently aren't watching enough television (if they were maybe we wouldn't see them so much).

Second, with reference to Chris Rock specifically, the claim that he's conservative --- whether based on the parsing of the abortion joke or on a more general observation that he argues "for responsibility, and most importantly, economic responsibilty amongst Black people" (which I also agree is not a conservative point necessarily) --- completely bypasses an important reading of Rock's comedic grammar if you will. More than almost any comedian I can recall, Rock's comedy is primarily based on dozens-running --- a continual one-upping. Of course, dozens-running is typically dialogic --- so part of what's interesting about Rock's work is that he's able to run dozens in monologue, either by one-upping the expected position (you think he would say one thing, so he says another) or by one-upping himself. The point of this is that one can't take any of Rock's material as propositional in a logical sense without considering a very large context --- the whole routine, the whole set. Was Rock's appearance a disaster? I don't know because I didn't watch. But I doubt it. Take a comedian like Rock --- who works in long forms, despite the apparent abundance of one-liners --- and put him in a program that prizes the short form, like the Oscars, and you probably don't have much to worry about in the way of (apparently) offensive statements motivated by the need to snap.

Third --- Kevin, I want to talk about this question of the necessary representativeness of the black comedian in long and short views of African-American comedy and American comedy in general. We could compare Chris Rock's situation as a black comedian against not just Carlin and Hicks, but also against Carlin and Hicks in their places in Anglo-American comedy.... I would suggest that Carlin's freedom and Hicks's freedom from representative office has as much to do with what happened before they arrived on the scene as it has to do with what specifically they say. After Lenny Bruce's incindiary career, I think most white Americans stopped looking to comedians --- except those of the earlier, Bob Hope generation --- as representatives of their own culture. Pryor and Murphy (pre-Raw) provide, as Bill Cosby did in the 70s, cultural representation --- not just of African-American culture, but of American culture at large --- that had been missed. The genius of Pryor and Murphy is that each one manages to take the sudden audience and turn its attention to questions of race, to public questions of race and representation, moves that ensured their elevation to representative office. What African-American comedy has missed, largely, is a truly incindiary and inscrutable comic, like Bruce or Kaufman, that challenges the assumption of that the comedian represents truthfully. I think we have to see Eddie Murphy's turn to profanity --- and after him Martin Lawrence's notoriously f-laden routines, as well as Chris Rock's --- as a measure of discomfort with the representative office (this is cryptography that keeps some people from listening in or listening well) even though it doesn't entirely combat that office.

I think the Original Kings of Comedy are trying, by presenting many voices on one stage, and by marketing themselves to black audiences, are trying to pull away and that they are succeeding to an extent --- as is Dave Chappelle, universally loved among younger consumers of comedy, but still managing to present some material that is on some level unreadable.

Kevin --- I tried to post this to your original entry but kept getting server-errored out. I hope we can exchange dueling-banjo/dozens-running style at least by keeping cross-referenced postings going.

Dine and Discuss
June 29, 2005 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake

Old information technology: have lunch with a friend.

Today: St. Louis-style ribs at Big Papa's BBQ with Rafael Fajardo. Topics discussed: barbecue, blogs, broadsides, cinnamon, collaboration, cumin, Denver, digital art, DRM, echolalia, faceted categorization, fair use, file sharing, fine press books, 4th of July, grafitti, grants administration, Grokster Decision, Kansas City, letterpress printing, moist towelettes, molasses, Movable Type, NPR, open source, podcasting, property rights (intellectual and real), RSS Feeds, Space Invaders, teaching, today's date.

June 28, 2005 File under: Information Technology

Deniability?
File under: Information Technology

Thinking through the implications of MGM v Grokster, decided by the Supreme Court yesterday. At first I thought it would be interesting to consider whether this sort of decision could open the way for creative prosecution of weapons makers. But, on further reading, it becomes clearer that intentionality a key consideration. As Doug Lictman writes:

Intent-based standards, after all, are among the easiest to avoid. Just keep your message clear -- tell everyone that your technology is designed to facilitate only authorized exchange -- and you have no risk of accountability.

What then for the purveyors of the Space Invaders Invasion Kits? Note the disclaimer:

Etendez l'invasion a votre espace. Toute responsabilite est declinee a la charge de l'utilisateur. Spread the invasion to your space. We decline all the responsability concerning future uses of this work. Enjoy Invading...

Seems to split the middle, both encouraging users to apply the product to their civic environments, to further the invasion — if you don't know what this is all about, see the root site Tristan Manco's Street Logos — but to do so at your own risk. These cats are probably European, and I don't know how international law affects these situations, but it would seem, on first glance, that the Grokster decision could create a precedent for prosecuting such companies.

Maybe this is why K-Mart and Wal-Mart have locks on their spray-paint cases and (!) gun cases.