Abstract(ions)

I, like Lindsey, am having a difficult time writing a traditional abstract for my final paper.  It has evolved, in fact, away from being a paper, and being instead a sort of performance poem that includes video, sound, and text, and that intentionally plays with sound, images, and writing that does and does not signify.  

The piece centers around the idea, put forth by theoretical physicists working in quantum mechanics, that the world as we know it is really a two dimensional recording of our world--a holographic recording--at the event horizon of a black a hole.  If this is true, and if we are ourselves simply a recording, then how does this problematize the concerns about authorship and authenticity that were posed earlier during the semester?  How does it impact the claims to a certain radical shift away from intellectual property suggested by DJ culture?  What, even, does it mean that each part of a holograph contains all the information necessary to generate that holograph... so there is no "after Aushwitz" in which it might be barbaric to write a poem:  there is only the constant now of the recording, and our limited access to portions of it from our position within it.

At the moment, the project is a little bit of a hot mess.  I am reaching toward things I am not at all confident I will fully grasp.  But the ideas themselves are compelling, and suggest (at least to me) a way to recover a sense of unity within the fragmented selves of post-modernity.  

The Authorship has Sailed...

 

http://thejoycetravesty.hostrator.com/ac_vs_lindsey.mp3

First, let me say how grateful I am to Lindsey for reading the original essay and finding a DJ to “remix” her reading.  I think the real magic of this piece comes the process that brought it where it is now; a place that has nearly nothing to do with the original work, and is better because it isn’t burdened with trying to capture the original meaning. 

The original piece, which is still in draft form, is a list essay of apologies that I owe, but have not given, to people from my past.  So, in its original form, the piece is still an aggregate of smaller pieces that hang together without a larger context.  The only connection they have with one another is that they are were all written by me, all come from my life.  The original idea behind the essay was to bring persona into the writing through the back door; to show the reader a life told only through unmade apologies.

I chose this piece because it relies so heavily on authorship for it’s coherence, and I wanted to see what would happen if it lost that mooring. 

The result surprised me on several levels.  The opening was lovely and absurdist… “As I’m sure you guessed halfway through the last sentence, I’m sorry for hiding your favorite box of tampons in the bottom of the grandmother of a friend, but that may have been someone else, but you looked poisonous, and I needed to get into the shower.”  The cut-up, in this section, is almost slapstick, and although it’s funny, it didn’t really lend much to my understanding of either the original piece or of the soundscape.  Again, I’m grateful to Lindsay and her DJ friend, but the opening felt a little like going for the obvious joke. 

Other pieces of the cut-up, though, elevated the original text and showed me where passages had particular power—or failed to deliver.  For instance, listening to Lindsay read, “I remember pulling you leg first into the room while you stole panties from the wet pile of leaves…” evokes the tone of the three sections from which those words come, though none of the meaning.  Hearing the phrases stripped of meaning, it was possible to hear in them a way that they couldn’t be heard in context. 

The same is true of the phrase, “Who would from then on be a piss-soaked dead body in the living room.”  Although the piss-soaked person and the dead body are not, in the essay, the same person, in the cut-up they become one… and, since I know the narrative, I am suddenly given a composite—my father and my stepfather, now both implicated and both dead on the floor of the living room—in a way that is unexpectedly lovely.

At the same time, I find myself repelled by the juxtaposition of the phrasing “and raped—with a chicken—almost daily.”  The “with a chicken” is the bit pulled from another section, the “raped almost daily” part of an apology to a boy in my elementary school who was the victim of a pedophilic Scout master.  There is a way—although I expect it’s a way I should simply get over—in which that one smash-up seems to be a violation of something in the text.  Of course, only I would have the context to know that; does that make it unimportant?  Forgivable?  Is my reaction a holding-on to an outdated sense of authorial right, or is it just the squeamishness of making rape—a bad enough thing to begin with—even more hideous and absurd by mashing it up with a section about feeding chicken soup to a vegetarian?  And what would every other listener make of it, since for her this is the piece itself?

It is, of course, impossible for me to imagine how this piece works for someone who does not see the fragments as pieces of a larger hole.  There is something compelling about the rhythm of it, and the individual images taken fully out of context, but is it nonsense or has the collaborative process created something new that has value?  I can’t tell. 

All of that said, I like what we came up with.  I like the intensity in Lindsey’s voice that seems to have nothing at all to do with the content, particularly not the cut-up “script.”  I like the music, which is dark and heavy-handed and suggests a sort of intentional, over-the-top maudlin quality.  I think this worked, although I am not certain if that’s a judgment I could make, because what I hear will not be what anyone else hears.  Ever, of course, but particularly here.

The Death of the Audience...

Gibson

I found the most compelling part of Gibson's "God's Little Toys" to be his argument that audience, like record, is an artifact of the past, and that we are moving away from the idea that we are passive recipients of media and, instead, are becoming active participants in its creation.  I am a big fan of King Tubby, of the idea (if seldom the reality) of fanfic creations, of machicema, and the transgressive beauty of "soulless corporate units" transformed into works of art by individual intervention.  I would like to believe Gibson's vision is a true one.

But it begs the question, as did much of DJ Spooky's work for me, about how we generate new source material in a world in which art is primarily done through remixing.  There is a vast catalogue, of course, of cultural material to draw from at what Gibson calls this "peculiar junctire, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist."  But what happens to the process when the object ceases to exist?  What is it's base, where is the shared cultural knowledge that allows us to understand the meaning of the pieces that have been pasted together?  Is there a danger here that, to borrow from They Might Be Giants, art will become "a snake head eating the head on the opposite side?"

Doesn't the recombinant need the record as a place from which to start?  And if the process never stops long enough to generate an object, how do we communicate meaning to one another?

Goldsmith

I have a hard time reconciling Goldsmith and Gibson.  Goldsmith seems to be saying that sampling is an unexplored literary practice, and yet we have Gibson's wonderful examples.  We have appropriation of Greek myth by the Romans--maybe the ultimate literary remix--and we have Jerome Rothenberg's "Horse Songs."  We have the allusion, that limited borrowing of phrase or image meant to infuse our reading of a new work with our reading of an older one.  And we have all those reimagined texts-- Mary Reilly as a take on Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Wicked as a remix of The Wizard of Oz.  I don't see the hole in literary practice that Goldsmith is suggesting.

Nor did I ever fully grasp the point of his exercise, and I was a little troubled by its elitist overtones.  He spent a year ridding himself of all creativity by doing exactly what the hordes of workers (mostly women) who earned their living in typing pools used to do all day every day:  retyping text that had little or no value, certainly as creative capital, and largely even as corporate record.  This is evidenced in how little they were paid.  In what way does his exercise render their work even more meaningless?  Is he suggesting that this work also somehow "cleansed" them of all creativity?  What does this suggest for the people in similar jobs today:  data entry clerks, for instance, who type meaningless strings of numbers into spread sheets day in and day out.  

What makes the retyping of the New York Times any different than that, except for the self-congratulatory tone of Goldsmith's own writing about the typing?  I fail to see the difference, and thus also fail to see the point.

    

Ooh... Spooky!

Miller's text is dense in the same way the listenings on the CD are dense... and in this way, I think, pose the same risk that we will designate those elements that signify for us with the properties of "voice," allowing the others to be relegated to the role of "noise."  It is with this in mind, and with an awareness that what has signified for me may not be at all the entirety of what Miller intended for me to hear, that I pose these questions.

 

1.  Miller writes, "The basic idea is to use the digital to try and make a bridge between the interior and exterior... (W)e are able to send our visions and ideas in ways our ancestors would have thought were god-like (16)."  Given this concept of Dj culture as that which allows interiority to become shared, public experience, I am surprised at Miller's continued insistence through out the book on the ideas of creativity and of some persons, but not all persons, as artists.  These words, which are heavily laden with their history of allowing for criticism--for the determining of "good" and "bad" art--seem to me to be in opposition to the idea of the interior exposed.  Are we really meant then, in what Miller calls the "current" age, to judge one another's interiority?  Does the act of participating in the cultural move toward these "shared hallucinations" require us, then, to begin to craft an alterity that has artistic merit?  This seems to me to open the door to a very dangerous kind of elitism in which critics become the gatekeepers, monitoring who may join in the "shared hallucination" and who must simply continue to stand outside of it as a consumer.

 

2.  Miller writes, "To name, to call, to upload, to download... So I'm sitting here and writing -- creating a new time zone out of widely dispersed geographic regions --- reflect and reflecting on the same ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapdily moving into what I like to call prosthetic realism.  site and sound, sign and signification:  The travel at this point becomes mental... it's all about how you play with the variables that creates the art piece (85)."  It seems to me that much of Rhythm Science is an act of prognostication, and attempt to guess at the impact of borderless information, as much as it is a work of description or a manifesto.  Rhythm Science brings to mind other mixtures of the digital and the musical... Jaron Lanier's interactive dance floors and walls (which never really worked when they were at Click and Drag in New York, but which maybe actually work now), Laurie Anderson's Big Science (which has always worked), and even the eery sound of the Theremin.  With the exception of Anderson's ground breaking music, the other two experiments never got much past being cultural curiosities.  

 

While it seems undeniable that everything will change, and that digitization will be part of that change, I’m unpersuaded the Dj culture is a catalyst of that change instead of simply an artifact of it.  I am unsure exactly where Miller posits the enduring value of Dj culture, or of how this culture avoids becoming so endlessly self-referential—as future generations have nothing to sample but the already-sampled, reforming it through their own lenses, but still stuck with the source material?  

Crying "UNCLE!"

1.  I spent an inordinate amound of the weekend reading (okay, that's an exageration... becoming frustrated because I could not read) Shannon's “A Mathematical Theory of Communication."  I tried reading it sober.  I tried reading it after a little too much Gnarly Head Cabernet. (An amazing wine for about fifteen bucks a bottle, if you're a wine drinker, but it won't help you with the Shannon one bit.)  I tried reading some of it to my husband, who is himself a scientist, to see if he could help me figure it out.  "I think there are clothes in the dryer that need to be folded, and I'm busy," he said.

Then, this morning, I went downstairs to wish Lori D'Angelo a belated happy birthday.  She wasn't in her office, but Tony was there, half-hidden by the jumble on Lori's desk.  And he, who has a thick math background said something to the effect of, "I don't think this is what it proports to be."

So I came home and I opened it again.  I read around the parts that had previously given me a headache, and I came to the same conclusion.  And so now my question:  Is this art, rather than science (or, more accurately, engineering)?  Because, on closer inspection (and without the Gnarly Head, so it wasn't very pleasant closer inspection), I think maybe it is something of a math poem?   Or perhaps a short story about fictive theories?  

2.  On the other hand, I loved Ron Rice's "A Brief History of Anti-Records and Conceptual Records."  And not just because Adorno made another cameo, though it's always nice to see him in these bit parts.  The litany form here is lovely, although I guess this isn't a workshop class, so maybe nobody cares that I think the essay is lovely.  My question:  So many of these works seem to exist simply to problematize our willingness to accept the validity of recording in general.  Is there, then, a point at which they stop speaking to us as an audience and end up only in conversation with one another?  How dependent is each peice on being part of the larger body of works, and does this dependency require again another idea of recording--an idea that has also something to do with curating?

Sterne and Eluction Lessons...

I am particularly struck with Sterne's discussion of attempts to normalize spoken language as part of the modernist project of equalizing social class.  

I'm going to digress for a moment into personal history.  I took elocution lessons--yes, I know, how pretentious--from the time I was six until I was twelve.  So did nearly all of the upper-middle-class children in my home town at the time.  We spent an hour a week in the studio in Mrs. Page's basement, where we recited bad poetry that we had memorized between lessons.  (I still know too much Emiliy Dickenson, and this ridiculous poem that begins "Henry Horton Humberdickle/Spent a dime and saved a nickel..." as a result.)  There was no hidden agenda here:  our parents were very clear that we went to these lessons so we wouldn't pick up the speech patterns associated with southern West Virginia.  The class distinction between people who spoke heavily accented English, and those who did not, was explicitly acknowledged.  

I find myself particularly aware of this as an English 101 instructor.  It is, largely, my job to teach students to turn their authentic, spoken speech into a more rule-bound, formalized version of English that will allow them to pass the higher-level courses in their individual majors.  Last semester, I could hear certain phrases dropping out of usage as we discussed their grammatical "flaws."  For instance, by the end of last semester, at least two of my students had stopped speaking the very Appalachian phrasing in which the verb "needs" is used instead of construction "needs to be" and the gerund form is applied to the modifier.  (As in, "My dog needs walking," or "this blog post needs revising.")  

So, I suppose my question would be:  What is the value of preserving a way of speaking that acts as a negative social marker for the speaker?  What is the epistimological cost of creating a constructed version of a person's first language and privelaging it above the traditional, spoken version?

Second Question:  Stenre writes, "At the most basic level, sound-reproduction technologies presumed some kind of social network, a cooridination of people an actions over time and space; they were partial machiens that, from the outset, depended on the presence of possibilty of other machines."  This reminded me of Sandy's assertion that, really, in Ong's analysis, things like Facebook would be speech rather than text.  My question is, then, looking over Ong and Sterne both, what is the liminal role that "ephemeral text" plays in briding the gap between the two sorts of language?  And is this ephemeral text--which exists for a longer time than a spoken word, but a shorter time usually than a recorded one--a new thing, or can we find an analogously temporary form of writing elsewhere?

To Still Write A Poem... Instigation on Ethnopoetics

First:  Questions of Barbarism and Poetic Colonization

Theodore Adorno said famously, “To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  I think ethnopoetics must be understood, in part, in the context of Adorno and of Rothenberg’s response to him.  Embedded in his poem Khurbn, Rothenberg answers, “…after Auschwitz, there is only poetry.”  What does it mean for ethnopoetics that it was born, at least in part, as a direct response to the attempt to silent Rothenberg’s own languages, and how does this effect the politics of ethnopoetics?

On the Kelly Writer’s House blog (http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Rothenberg/Signature/Rothenberg-Jerome_and_Morrow-Charles_Signature_02.mp3), I found an interview by Mara Gordon with Rothenberg in which he discusses Khurbn at length.

Q: We've talked a lot about the spectrum of Holocaust art and literature in this class, having read Art Spiegelman's "Maus" earlier in the semester, and our professor Al being "obsessed" (self-described) with various representations of the Holocaust. You've quoted Adorno's famous line about no poetry being possible after Auschwitz; no metaphor, no language (a metaphor in and of itself) is adequate to describe genocide. At the other end of the spectrum is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List -- an oft-quoted trope in our class to represent "bad" Holocaust art: art that is too authoritative, too confident, too simple. It's almost silly to refer to Schindler's List and Khurbn in the same sentence, but they have more in common than the idea that no art should exist -- can exist -- that refers to the Holocaust. Where do you fall in this debate? What were some of your concerns writing Khurbn (and to a lesser extent, Poland/1931) and how did you approach them as a writer?

 

JR: I'm writing this in Berlin, where the Holocaust still haunts all of the Germans I've been with – even the younger ones – so that gives us a kind of common ground. For me, although it was far away from me while it was happening, the Jewish disaster was very vivid, and the sense of loss was also unavoidable. I think it was a presence behind the push I was feeling into poetry, but it didn't enter directly for close to 25 years after the war, while I felt an unwillingness to claim somebody else's suffering as my own or to tie the question of identity (Jewish or otherwise) to a kind of death cult. In the course of assembling Technicians of the Sacred, however, I began to consider the possibility of writing an ancestral poetry of my own – taking a pass at a form of ethnic writing that I otherwise thought of as degraded. The book that came out of that was Poland/1931, and I wrote it (or thought I did) without a direct reference to "holocaust" but with a sure sense that "holocaust" was the underlying subtext. For this I had to dig pretty deeply – "investigate," to use Ed Sanders' favorite word – to make a fantasy world that had some degree of credibility. I was more interested anyway in the archaeology of the Jewish life than in its destruction, and I wanted not to idealize it but to construct it with a regard for its dark and dangerous side – "the world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen" that I've mentioned elsewhere. (A Big Jewish Book from the mid 1970s is an ethnopoetic extension of the same impulse.) That intention was helped along further by an early meeting with Isaac Bashevis Singer and a later one with Paul Celan. The conversation with Singer raised the issue of cruelty – rhyming at the time with what we were reading in Artaud – and let me push forward a sense of the absurd / comic / demonic that was waiting to come to surface. For this I needed a further range of investigations to bring the reality – the fantasy – to light and to allow other voices to speak or (if that were possible) to drown out my own.

 

A central question for me, as for Lindsay, has been about the ways in which much of Rothenberg’s work could be seen as appropriation.  In this interview, he says, “…I felt an unwillingness to claim somebody else's suffering as my own…”  This seems, in some ways, in opposition to his willingness to claim other’s words as his own, and to rework them to his own purposes.  (See Linsday’s blog on his “translations” of Native American poetries.)

I have come to believe that there IS a saving impulse in Rothenberg’s work; a working toward something admirable that forces the risk of appropriation in an attempt to rid poetry of the silencing insistence that the poet may only speak in a voice to which he has been granted access by virtue of his identity. 

In Rothenberg’s 1994 talk, “Ethnopoetics at the Millenium” ( http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/ethnopoetics.html ), he warns, “…as that time unfolds, we see again the dark side of that strange force I used to speak about as ethnos - the side that shows up (in Bosnia, Rwanda, elsewhere) in a terrible conjunction with the nation-state, erupting into ethnic violence & hatred. I would therefore be wary - & hope you will be too - of the politics of ethnic exclusivity, to insure thereby that our ethnopoetics will not stop with a useful but centrifugal multiculturalism but will push (again) toward anintercultural (centripetal) future.” 

I’m going to steal the first line of Professor Dennis Tedlock’s syllabus (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/tedlock/syllabi/ethnopoetics.html ).  “Ethnopoetics is a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now.”  If we consider this definition, and pay attention to Rothenberg’s own warnings about ethnos, I think an argument can be made that Rothenberg is accessing, rather than appropriating, and that this accessing is an act of both including and preserving.  I think it even likely that there is a distinction in his praxis between cultural imperialism and a very dismodern sense of the radical interdependency of all peoples.

Is it possible for an act that would clearly be recognized as colonizing—such as the “translation” of the poetry of an oppressed people by a person in the dominant culture that, among other things, made changes intended to create a work more pleasing to the esthetics of that culture—can be rescued from being an act of aggression or colonization by the theory behind it? 

Listening for this question:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Rothenberg/Signature/Rothenberg-Jerome_and_Morrow-Charles_Signature_02.mp3

Two:  Endangered Languages, Translation, and Yiddish Poetry

Perhaps because so much of Rothenberg's poetry is accompanied by Klezmer music, or perhaps just because it is a personal interest of mine, I found my reading of A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values heavily colored by my surprise at the centrality of, and reliance upon, a specific sort of translation in Ubu web's collection on ethnopoetics curated by Rothenberg himself.

I was surprised, having read the theoretical texts first, to find that Rothenberg's poetry is largely devoid of Yiddish in spite of the fact that he includes many other conventions of post-Shoah Jewish literature.  And, while it's true that Yiddish makes some very brief cameos in some of his work (particularly in the title of Khurbn), I found myself asking, "Where is this endangered language, and how does its ommission speak to the Poetic Rights and Values?

In the section entitled "Signifagance of Translation," the authors make the very interesting assertion:  

Translating certain poetries from lesser-spoken or stateless languages and dialects into more dominant languages has been important because it has given poets who desire it a chance to have their work more widely read. On the other hand, if performed with care, it can also be extremely important to translate poetry written in dominant languages like English, Spanish, or Mandarin, into lesser-spoken tongues like Navajo, Ki’che, or Tibetan. While people all over the world begin to have increasingly more access to one another’s cultural traditions through travel and media, poetry may also find a significant role in helping to share worldviews and lifeways between many different language communities.

It seems to me that something key is missing here.  The authors talk about the role of existing works--in both their original languages and in translation--in the creation of shared world views.  What they fail to discuss, and seems to me of great importance, is the role of new work written in endangered languages.  

I'm surprised to see that Yiddish is not on their list of endangered languages.  It is, in fact, a language kept alive primarily by the insistance of Jewish poets, writers, playwrites, and musicians.  Born of a very specific time and place, it no longer functions as a first language in the way it did in pre-Shoah Europe.  Other languages, notably Gaelic, which have been simlilarly displaces as primary languages also continue mostly as a language of the literature of identity:  these languages allow for the expression of ideas unique to the cultures in which they are (or were) spoken, and permit a sort of linguistic subversion within the dominant culture whose language has subsumed them.

What does it mean, then, that ethnopoetics seems so comfortable with translation and puts so little emphasis on the creation of new poetry (and other literary forms) to be the agent of perservation for endangered languages?

The listening for this section is by the Yiddish poet, Itzak Manger.  Here, I link to the page containing both the sound file for his reading of oyf der stantsye Kolomey and to the translation, transliteration, and original text of the poem.  The authors of A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values deal with the related issue of translating work that also includes some ceremonial or musical component, but they don't touch on the act of transliteration itself.  How does the recreation of the sound of a poem--perhaps, even, the creation of a "sound poem" version of a the original?--differ from translation?  What does it add to have both?  Why is transliteration so conspicuously absent from the conversation?

Listening (and looking):

http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/czernowitz-voices-manger.htm