A Music Long Before Meaning

Dickens

2012-02-07T13:15:00.003-05:00

Happy 200th Birthday Charles

My first (and by far the greatest) professor of entomology had a passionate love for the Hemiptera, the music of Johannes Brahms and writings of Charles Dickens. My only contact with Dickens had been in junior high and high school. Though I can't say I hated the reading we did, it left no lasting memory. But when Carl Schaefer many years later convinced me to try Dickens again it was with a sense of wonder that I discovered the many pleasures of his enormous output. I began with Bleak House, loved it, and immediately set about reading all of his novels, in chronological order (with the sole exceptions of the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the, I think, unreadable The Old Curiosity Shoppe). Thus began a few years of memorable delight. This might be a good time for others to take up the challenge. Listen to the piece on Dickens on NPR here.

2012-02-03T12:13:00.001-05:00

Sakra Boccata

2012-01-30T12:39:00.002-05:00

José Antonio Mazzotti: from Sakra Boccata, five poems
Translation from Spanish by Clayton Eshleman

In his Introduction to the book, Raúl Zurita writes: “These poems display a carnal, erotic version of the never-exhausted Neo-Platonic theme of perfect love achieved by two beings to erase all the physical and mental distance between them ... a merger not only of bodies searching for each other but of language itself ... as if the poems would like to devour themselves in a grand sexual act in which culture, eroticism and nature would once and for all erase their borders.”

On Raul Zurita's visionary poetics

2012-01-20T09:32:00.000-05:00

Don't miss this review : On Raul Zurita's visionary poetics by Leonard Schwartz. Stunning.

An excerpt:

Grace of its linguistic and visionary commitment, its capacity to imagine what is perforce outside experience, Zurita has written a poetry that surpasses what a more politically committed poetry could have achieved. Zurita’s poems might be figured as an eco-poetry in which the space between nature and history is closed up, once we realize that the work reimagines the entirety of the ocean in such a way as to include those thrown from planes into that ocean. And reimagines the mountains in such a way as to include the Disappeared thrown from planes into their snows until one can only speak of those mountains as containing those people. And renders the desert no longer conceivable except if the voices and the deaths in the desert are made a part of that desert. It was Camille Dungy, the editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry who pointed out in her CCP appearance (#221) that the poets in her book do not necessarily view a tree as simply a tree, since it might also be the case that someone was lynched from that particular tree; they do not look at an agricultural site as an idyl, since one’s ancestors might have worked that land in slavery. Indeed, only certain privileged, bourgeois perspectives can divorce “nature” from “history” in order to yield a “nature poetry” that refreshes us in its aftermath. I have argued that to view Nature apart from other discourses and entities (like language for example) is analogous to the pornographic (without taking any position pro or con on pornography), where one function (Nature) is fetishized and isolated from other functions and possibilities (as sex is in pornography). By contrast to a nature poetry, an eco-poetics seeks out complicated interrelationships between multiple modes of the sensual. Zurita’s is one of the great poetries to overcome the artificiality of the nature/history distinction, to give us the Tree and the invisible histories enacted in and around the Tree, as Dungy calls for.

Infidel Poetics

2012-01-12T14:17:00.004-05:00

Infidel Poetics, Daniel Tiffany, 2009.

& on google books

this looks potentially exciting - I hope I get a chance to read it.

Silliman on Anthologies

2011-12-21T15:05:00.000-05:00

Read Ron Silliman's short post on poetry & anthologies, from which comes this:

"It is interesting to ask what community is represented by the poet who proposes him- or herself as the representative of some transcendent value (the way Jack Gilbert cast himself as the doomed spokesperson of beauty & inner nobility), but mostly it is very sad. The isolato in American literature is little more than a tribune for the most imperial and corporate of impulses, even when – as in Melville, as in Olson, as in Gilbert – he is conflicted & brilliant. If you are responsible to no one, you are in the exact same position that capital and profit play in the world economy." Whole piece here...

2011-11-28T09:17:00.001-05:00

Dreamtime: An Introduction to the Alcheringa Archive
Dennis Tedlock

Food, again

2011-11-17T14:21:00.001-05:00

News from the Leopold Center at Iowa State University as reported in Mother Jones:
Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag

Duncan Biography due in May 2012

2011-10-18T07:56:00.001-04:00

Robert Duncan : The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography

Lisa Jarnot

University of California Press

Hardcover, 481 pages

ISBN: 9780520234161

May 2012

$39.95, £27.95

At long last...

Also don't miss the audio of Jarnot commenting on Duncan & Duncan's lectures at the Harvard Vocarium.

Oh Those Odonates...

2011-10-17T21:26:00.000-04:00

Never thought I'd see this in the New York Times...

Read the article:

It’s Complicated: Dragonfly Love Comes Calling

Sir Ken Robinson on Education

2011-10-11T09:46:00.001-04:00

Violence in the Modern World

2011-10-07T11:37:00.003-04:00

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

From the Publisher: We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse....

Reviewed by Peter Singer.

This is an important book.

"the high blasphemy of literary genius"

2011-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Edgar Garcia on the HD Book

also this

on the Homer Study Group

Transtromer!

2011-10-06T09:29:00.001-04:00

An Interview

LVNG

2011-10-01T19:28:00.001-04:00

LVNG 12 (I might suggest "Poetry is a Domestic Art" by John Martone as some measure of the wonders here)

which leads us to

More LVNG

and

Flood Editions

and

more LVNG

and

other wonders

(thanks, indirectly, to Steven Toussaint (and his terrific homage to Tarkovsky))

Slow Food

2011-09-28T08:40:00.001-04:00

Slow Food International

One of the most important movements of our time.

Robert Bringhurst

2011-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

2011-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

Blessed 350: Bill McKibben and Paul Hawken

On September 8, at Climate One, two of the most influential environmentalists of the past 30 years shared the same stage for just the second time in their long careers in public life. Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and author of Eaarth, and Paul Hawken, entrepreneur and author of Blessed Unrest, came to Climate One to talk about the ailing economy, the economy we must build to succeed it, and the forces that stand in the way.

A very good forum - podcast available on the page. If you don't know of these guys, you should.

2011-09-21T13:44:00.001-04:00

The 2011 Common Ground Fair

Depth Theology

2011-09-19T11:48:00.002-04:00

Depth Theology, poems by Peter O'Leary. University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Here are some reviews worth reading that grapple with issues raised by O'Leary's poetry:

Leafing the Now by Chris Glomski

A Critique by Joel Weishaus

2011-09-13T12:42:00.001-04:00

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
James C. Scott

September 4, 2011 - The Battle Over Zomia : Scholars are enchanted by the notion of this anarchic region in Asia. But how real is it? REVIEW in the Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-09-07T20:46:00.000-04:00

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
Obit in The Independent
Collected Shorter Poems

I bought this volume quite a few years ago. When I didn't know very much about "poetry." I know slightly more now, but not much. I have written a good bit about the "imaginal" - which I know to be true - but I live on a farm and we cut our own firewood and grow a good deal of our own food and Wendell Berry remains a hero. I am sitting tonight, again, with this book and wanting to share it because it is so beautiful and so very real. I don't know that anything the "critics" can say about these poems can have much meaning. And yes, I do think it matters whether you have ever split your own wood. Not that it makes you a better person. But it does signify.

Clayton Eshleman reads César Vallejo

2011-09-04T07:56:00.001-04:00

Peter O'Leary

2011-08-15T13:05:00.004-04:00

Peter O'Leary - on religious poetry, Robert Duncan and much more. Great interview.

An Interview with Peter O'Leary

(Here is his essay on Duncan that he mentions in the interview.)

Skinner - Ecopoetics

2011-08-11T08:45:00.001-04:00

Jonathan Skinner on ECOPOETICS from Jacket2... with many links.

A Duncan Delirium

2011-08-09T10:56:00.000-04:00

Thanks as usual to Ron Silliman (here), I have this great back issue of "W" from the Kootenay School of Writing. W10: A Duncan Delirium
Spring 2005 Contributors: Leslie Scalapino, Pauline Butling, Peter O’Leary, Lisa Jarnot, Leonard Schwartz, Stephen Collis, Miriam Nichols, Kim Duff, Jordan Scott Material submitted in connection with the KSW’s Robert Duncan Festival “Before the War”, held in April 2005. Includes critical writings by Butling, Schwartz, Collis and Nichols, Duncan-related poetry by Scalapino, O’Leary, Jarnot, Duff, and Scott, plus a mystery bonus feature. Edited by Stephen Collis. Download PDF of this Issue

2011-08-07T00:00:00.006-04:00

WHY LOG TRUCK DRIVERS RISE
EARLIER THAN STUDENTS OF ZEN

In the high seat, before dawn dark,
Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging in Poorman creek.
Thirty miles of dust.
There is no other life.

----------------------------------------------
Gary Snyder - Turtle Island 1974

Pairidaeza

2011-08-06T11:59:00.001-04:00

Paradise: late 12c., "Garden of Eden," from O.Fr. paradis, from L.L. paradisus, from Gk. paradeisos "park, paradise, Garden of Eden," from an Iranian source, cf. Avestan pairidaeza "enclosure, park" (Mod.Pers. and Arabic firdaus "garden, paradise"), compound of pairi- "around" + diz "to make, form (a wall)." The first element is cognate with Gk. peri- "around, about" (see peri-), the second is from PIE base *dheigh- "to form, build" (see dough). The Gk. word, originally used for an orchard or hunting park in Persia, was used in Septuagint to mean "Garden of Eden," and in New Testament translations of Luke xxiii.43 to mean "heaven" (a sense attested in Eng. from c.1200). Meaning "place like or compared to Paradise" is from c.1300.

Norman Fischer

2011-08-04T13:38:00.007-04:00

Zoketsu Norman Fischer
ZenPoetry Homepage - Poetry, Essays, Interviews
Norman Fisher: A Test Case for Being, by Brian Unger in Jacket 2

New Poems, March 2011.

Books

My initial interest in Fischer, poet and zen priest, was sparked when Ron Silliman told me that he was an important influence on Leslie Scalapino.

From Unger's essay:

"Norman Fischer’s work is best described by Hank Lazer as part of a new spiritual realism that has developed in the past fifty years, first noted by Gertrude Stein in the 1935 essay “Poetry and Grammar,” which was a riposte to Emerson’s “The Poet.” Stein wanted to get writers to move away from Emerson’s focus on the poet’s transcendental relation to nature and divinity onto language itself, “in which a form of divinity resides, not wholly beyond words, but within them.” This is developed by Lazer and Fischer. Lazer describes his creative poiesis as investigative, spiritual, and heuristic:

" … a phenomenology of spiritual experience — a writing that engages momentary experience and that embodies particular intervals of consciousness.”

Cope on Stein

2011-08-02T08:36:00.003-04:00

Cope, Karin. Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2005. [Cope's blog]

Must read. Also a really beautiful book - shows the influence of Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style.

Reviewed by Heather Cass White (pdf)

The Imagination of Music

2011-08-01T12:04:00.001-04:00

This is one of the most amazing things I have ever heard of. You must listen.

A 4 Track Mind - on RadioLab
It's a story about Bob Milne that you won't believe.

Image: Tom Johnson: Syncopated Texture (in Imaginary Music; Paris: Editions 75, 1974)

2011-07-28T14:39:00.004-04:00

Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises - 1923-1934
Ulla E. Dydo, Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Stein's “rejection of the rigid conventions of language led her gradually to dissociate herself from all inflexible forms, including hierarchical thinking, authoritarian organization, prescriptive grammar, and chronological narrative — aspects of the patriarchy. In a sense, all her work is a demonstration of possibilities of grammar for democracy.” (Dydo, 17)

Ron Silliman's review
Logan Esadale's review in Jacket

Photo of Stein & Toklas here.

Brief Note on Foley's "Visions"

2011-07-27T15:33:00.003-04:00

I'm nearly done with Volume 1. No doubt I will finish this & read the second, even longer tome. It's a bit of an odd book, and that's not a criticism. The subject matter hardly lends itself to a narrative history. Foley wants to review ALL the poetry (& some art) that was centered in California from 1940 to 2005. Even the uninitiated will be able to imagine the range and variety of this task. For someone like me, learning this history in any detail for the first time, there is I am quite sure, nothing remotely comparable. I really can't put it down. The text is fragmented and choppy as befits the subject. I enjoy that - and the uneven treatments of the various events and people. Two things do slightly annoy which are perhaps worth mentioning. The typesetting is inelegant and I do wish someone had cleaned it up a bit. Second, and I must say it doesn't annoy me as much as it ought to, Foley lifts sections, sometimes quite long ones, right out of Wikipedia. Somehow that seems appropriate given the non-academic thrust of this whole project and of the lives of most of the people it chronicles. But the point I want to make is that I am terribly grateful to Foley for undertaking this enormous task. As a survey and overview it is, for me at least, just what was needed. It occurs to me as I write that it has something of the feel of that first Whole Earth catalog that opened up new worlds for me many years ago. I am learning a great deal. It is an encyclopedia that I will read and refer to for a long time I think.

David Antin

2011-07-27T10:57:00.002-04:00

Next on my Reading List (after I get through Foley's two volumes):

David Antin. Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

A review by Douglas Messerli Here in Jacket2

Art in the Streets, again

2011-07-14T08:03:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned a while ago, I went to the MOCA Art in the Streets show back in May - it really turned my head around. Controversial for lots of reasons, but so very much worth seeing. Here's an interesting review...

Twombly, again

2011-07-13T14:19:00.008-04:00

Leeman, Richard, Cy Twombly, and Isabelle d' Hauteville. Cy Twombly: a monograph. Paris: Flammarion, 2005.

My sense at the moment is that this book is a very good place to start with Twombly. (Best website here).

And this, from John Berger:

"I know of no other visual Western artist who has created an oeuvre that visualizes with living colors the silent space that exists between and around words. Cy Twombly is the painterly master of verbal silence." READ THE ESSAY

And, if you happen to be in London: Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters (thru Sept 25) - where you can see Tacita Dean's 2011 film on Twombly, "Edwin Parker." AND see the set of videos from the exhibition with narration at the Dulwich Gallery multimedia channel!

Charles Olson on Cy Twombly

2011-07-13T13:42:00.003-04:00

Charles Olson on Cy Twombly:

"Cy Twombly," (1952) in Olson, Charles, Donald Merriam Allen, Benjamin Friedlander, and Robert Creeley. Collected Prose. Berkeley (Calif.): University of California press, 1997, 175-8. Read it here.

"For Cy Twombly Faced with His First Chicago & N.Y. Shows," in Olson, Charles, and George F. Butterick. The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 244. Read it here.

The Vegetable Orchestra

2011-07-11T11:38:00.000-04:00

The Vegetable Orchestra - don't miss the video.

Visions and Affiliations

2011-07-08T22:14:00.004-04:00

Visions and Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline
Poets & Poetry 1940-2005
Jack Foley
at amazon here

I've just received the first volume. 2nd on the way. Just amazing.

This is magnificent - I actually think I'm going to read the whole thing...

Narrative of the Image: A Correspondence

2011-07-07T13:06:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Ron Silliman for this link. A topic that interests me greatly. This is a correspondence between Charles Wright and Charles Simic on the differences between image and metaphor. It begins with a paragraph Wright gave to his graduate poetry workshop and then sent to Simic for comment:

"If it is true (and I think it is) that an image is, as Pound put it, an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, and if the "logic of metaphor" is, as Crane put it, constructed on a series of associational meanings and thought-extension, then the narrative of image and the narrative of metaphor are different, if not generically then surely perceptively, and poems employing them will act and react differently. The narrative (or logic) of metaphor will be more of a time-release agent, giving the reader a slower, longer contemplation; more time to think about the associations. The poem is perhaps more susceptible to a flow-through story line inside the poem. The narrative (logic) of image, on the other hand is more explosive, gives the reader less time to ruminate' opens itself to impressionistic perceptions. The How, such as it is, is intermittent, interrupted, and tends to exist outside the poem, as though a series of things glimpsed quickly, but indelibly, from a fast train. A difference not in kind (as both are defined as "figures of speech") but in degree. But a difference nevertheless, although this is not written down in any book." Read their ensuing correspondence.

Cy Twombly (April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011), Quattro Stagioni: Autunno, (1993-5) via Tate Modern

Goethean Science

2011-07-01T12:32:00.003-04:00

This is a thread I have long thought of following. I may yet. I picked it up once for a while after reading Corbin on Goethe's Theory of Colors. You will find David Abram taking note of Goethe in his work. Two key texts are these:

Goethe's Way of Science, Edited by David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc. See Seamon's webpage for more connections of considerable interest - including Christopher Alexander - and you can read the introduction to the book there too. Arthur Zajonc also seems to have done very remarkable work - look at his amazon page.

The Wholeness of Nature by Henri Bortoft.

Picture of the Urpflanze from here.

Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan

2011-06-30T11:20:00.000-04:00

"Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan" is on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery through July 31 and will travel to the Meadows Museum from September 11, 2011-January 8, 2012 and the San Diego Museum of Art February 18-May 27, 2012.

Silencing Speech

2011-06-27T12:22:00.001-04:00

"... given our current environment — of oppression, revolution, intervention, war, pseudo-war and ever-present human power relations — it is worthwhile bearing in mind the dangers of the manipulation of language. What may begin as a temporary method to circumvent reasoned discussion and debate for the sake of a prized political goal may very well end up permanently undermining the trust required for its existence." - Jason Stanley in the NY Times - The Ways of Silencing

Though the kinds of silencing involved are different, this reminds me of Uwe Porksen's book Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language that Ivan Illich has talked and written much about.

Sea Birds

2011-06-27T09:03:00.000-04:00

Eastern Egg Rock, Maine

Audubon Society: Project Puffin
The Puffin Tour: A wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon

http://projectpuffin.org/PuffinTours.html

View Larger Map

2011-06-25T18:59:00.000-04:00

Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition
James Simpson

This is a truly remarkable book. I chanced upon it in the Colby College art library and couldn't put it down. Here is a decription of the book by the author on ROROTOKO. Read this review from Paul Rogers.

First Contact

2011-06-24T11:16:00.000-04:00

New Isolated Tribe - Al Jazeera

New Uncontacted Tribe in the Amazon - Guardian

Cultural Survival

2011-06-24T09:37:00.000-04:00

CULTURAL SURVIVAL: Partnering with Indigenous Peoples to Defend their Lands, Languages and Cultures

Oldest American Art

2011-06-23T15:12:00.003-04:00

A roughly 13,000-year-old mammoth bone inscribed with an image of a mammoth is the real deal.

Photograph courtesy Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institute
Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic News
Published June 22, 2011

The Americas' earliest known artist was an Ice Age hunter in what is now Florida a new study confirms.

Alcheringa Archive

2011-06-23T00:32:00.000-04:00

Alcheringa Archive: A Journal of Ethnopoetics, 1970-1980

from Jacket2:

"Reissues is excited to launch an online archive of Alcheringa, the trailblazing ethnopoetics journal edited by Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg through Boston University from 1970 to 1980. Commisioned for Internet distribution by Dennis Tedlock and Jon Cotner in 2010, with site design and information architecture by Danny Snelson, the Alcheringa archive presents a robust network of resources including searchable PDFs, high-resolution images, rapid magazine browsing, and full information on each issue and disc insert of this essential journal operating at the crossroads of translation, ethnography, performance, and contemporary poetics. Download searchable PDFs and high-fidelity MP3s in the Reissues sidebar or navigate the archival interface at ethnopoetics.com."

Vivian Maier - Street Photography

2011-06-22T08:08:00.000-04:00

Watch the video:

Then take a look at the new Website

which is so full of breath-taking images that it

is almost literally unbelievable.

Ron Silliman had posted several links last January.

Fukushima

2011-06-21T14:55:00.002-04:00

From Al Jazeera:
It's Much Worse Than You Think - June 16, 2001.

And on CNN:

Of Nematology

2011-06-21T07:57:00.000-04:00

This is Caenorhabditis elegans. And here is a fabulous diagram of (part of) this creature's nervous system. Don't miss the article:

In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain

They've come a long way since I last taught undergraduates about these things.

Symposium of the Whole

2011-06-20T15:03:00.005-04:00

Rothenberg, Jerome, and Diane Rothenberg. Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

This is long out of print and I had thought completely unavailable, but I am delighted to see that there are now copies used on amazon.com.

This is a terrific book - maybe a great book. At least it seemed that way to me many years ago. The table of contents is itself a guide to the literature and a veritable history. It can be seen here on Google books

Olson at Goddard

2011-06-17T14:09:00.005-04:00

CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE APRIL 12-14, 1962

Foreword by Basil King. Edited with an Introduction by Kyle Schlesinger.
Paperback. 112 pages. Cuneiform Press, 2011. $16.95 USDOrder from Cuneiform via Dale Smith HERE.

"In the spring of 1962, poet Charles Olson descended upon an experimental college in rural Vermont to read from The Maximus Poems and The Distances, and to lecture on Herman Melville. His captivating performance sparked lively debates with the audience on the nature of myth, history, etymology, narrative, knowledge, and sexuality. CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE is an enthralling and indispensable annotated transcript that celebrates the intersection of Olson's poetics and a hopeful moment in American education."

This volume is on its way to me. More when it arrives. Audio files of the lectures can be found at PennSound HERE. I found these among the most interesting of his recorded lectures - highly recommended.

Slow Food, Slow Poetry

2011-06-16T00:00:00.012-04:00

From Big Bridge 14:

Slow Poetry: An Introduction
by Dale Smith

Pondering the meaning of the "movement" he started thinking about last summer, Dale Smith wrote of what a poem does, that

"It's like opening a sliding-glass door, stepping outside, for a moment, and rubbing one's eyes in the sunlight of what's real."

He comments: "Suddenly, in that final sentence, I felt as though I'd moved into a place proper to the goals of Slow Poetry. It's a place familiar to readers of Charles Olson, who said, "Whatever you have to say, leave the roots on, let them dangle, And the dirt, Just to make clear where they come from." Regardless of what we face individually or communally or collectively, my sense was—and still is—that by our affection and affinity for disclosure of what is so often barely perceptible—life raw and undefined—we might advance a little toward better understanding what's happening to us. And through this knowledge we may be able to help each other, with greater resilience, adapt and respond to the changes we may face." READ THE ENTIRE ESSAY (please!)

Smith's remarkable poetic and political Introduction and the poems and essays that follow seem to me to open onto a world I've been sporadically visiting for many years. Every time I've left, I've wanted to go back. I want to live there permanently now. Everything I really care about is there. This collection has enough really fine and important pieces in it to keep one busy for a long time. Don't miss Karl Young's great essay Notation and the Art of Reading (and his introduction to it). I am particularly fond of Robert Bertholf's piece "The Vocabulary of Taste: Carlo Petrini and the Poetics of Slow Poetry" (it is the 2nd essay here)

Collage by Brooks Johnson

Agribusiness and Slavery

2011-06-15T07:58:00.030-04:00

Mark Bittman's column in the NYTimes today is a must-read for anyone still unaware of the social and political impacts of the industrial food system. Don't miss The True Cost of Tomatoes. And as a general rule: read his column regularly - he's excellent. It is wonderful to have such a high-profile voice for food sanity in the mainstream media. He mentions Estabrook's new book, which I have not read, yet, but will.

Tomatoland : How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
by Barry Estabrook

Giraffe-Necked Weevils

2011-06-13T15:52:00.001-04:00

I can't resist sharing this one - thanks to Alex Wild once again for this link.

The Whole Earth

2011-06-09T10:02:00.001-04:00

Reading Tom Friedman yesterday, The Earth is Full, I was reminded yet again of my long, slow and persistent astonishment that facts which I have taken for granted for my entire adult life are now slowly coming to the attention of enough people to (maybe) make a difference. My awareness of these things is due perhaps almost entirely to the FIRST WHOLE EARTH CATALOG that appeared in 1968 when I was 16 years old. It was in this and subsequent issues that I first read Gary Snyder, Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry, among many others. The Whole Earth people, including Stewart Brand, are still around and doing good work. Visit them here.

Eliot Weinberger on Omar Cáceres

2011-06-08T10:11:00.007-04:00

This is surely one of the strangest, and strangely beautiful things I've read in a while. Not to be missed.
Eliot Weinberger on Omar Cáceres - from Jacket3 April 1998.

Rick London on Jung

2011-05-31T09:49:00.000-04:00

The Receptive: A Radio Play
(a monologue in the person of the elderly C.G. Jung)
by Rick London in BIG BRIDGE 15

Review of Fanny Howe's Emergence

2011-05-30T17:34:00.002-04:00

Emergence

by Fanny Howe

Reality Street 2010, 64 pages, £7.50, ISBN 978-1-874400-47-9

From "Fanny Howe's Revelation"

A Review by Stephen Toussaint in Jacket2:

...Thinking about the heretical, that which questions, complicates, disrupts in order to illuminate, helps form for me an entrance into the poems comprising Emergence, Fanny Howe’s most recent publication from the small British press Reality Street. The book collects poems originally published in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that are now largely out of print. Howe is an experimental poet and a Catholic. She is also deeply immersed in a long tradition of Christian history, theology, mystical literature, and heresy. In her prose meditations collected in The Wedding Dress, she discusses with acuity and enthusiasm influential yet controversial Christian thinkers such as Marcion, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Simone Weil, and Edith Stein. Gnosticism, Quietism, Apophatic Theology, Thomism, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim thought all appear in her work as mooring points from which the poet casts her broad net.

The structure of Emergence maps a trajectory, the aesthetic evolution of Howe’s career over the past decades. It shows that Howe, at her core, is a poet of deep disruption — of complication — but also one of contemplation, which is to say, a poet for whom humility and reverence walk hand in hand with restless inquiry. Hers are poems sharpened by questions designed not to elicit totalizing answers from God or reader, but to dredge up new possibilities for both faith and poetry... READ THE REVIEW

The Jung / Pauli Letters

2011-05-29T00:01:00.007-04:00

Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958

Edited by C. A. Meier
With a new preface by Beverley Zabriskie
Translated by David Roscoe - Princeton University Press 2001

Out of Print, sadly.

A crucial late dream of Pauli's which he communicated only to Marie-Louise von Franz was published in English in Harvest 48 (2002) and is available online here: The Piano Lesson.

Also see this account of a fascinating encounter between van Erkelens and von Franz: Bridging the Gap between Physics and Depth Psychology

2011-05-28T10:32:00.001-04:00

How Phenomena Appear to Unfold

Leslie Scalapino

Cover art by Petah Coyne

view the entire sculpture

The Century of the Self

2011-05-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis

2011-05-13T14:58:00.002-04:00

Open Books, Seattle

A terrific shop. Must-Visit.

Art in the Streets - MOCA

2011-05-09T10:34:00.000-04:00

Art in the Streets - MOCA 2011 from Roger Griffith on Vimeo.

Geopolitics of Food

2011-05-04T11:24:00.000-04:00

The New Geopolitics of Food by Lester Brown.
In Foreign Policy's FOOD ISSUE

2011-04-26T09:44:00.001-04:00

Poetry Center Digital Archive makes available significant portions of early audio recordings from the Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives collection, supplemented by select archival texts and images. New files will be added incrementally as recordings are prepared and as we proceed through the collection from the 1950s onward. The Poetry Center, founded at San Francisco State College (now SFSU) in 1954 by English professor Ruth Witt-Diamant, has been recording and archiving tapes of its public events for nearly six decades. We have compiled and maintained one of the most significant public collections in the USA of original recorded performances by poets and related writers reading their work. In 1974, poet Kathleen Fraser, serving as director, created within the Poetry Center, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Poetry Archives. This collection, together with the Poetry Center housed within the SFSU College of Humanities (Department of Creative Writing), today holds over 4,000 hours of unique original audio and video master-recordings, 1954–present – an inestimable cultural asset.

Jarnot on Duncan

2011-04-26T09:02:00.000-04:00

Gnostic Gospel The secret history of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. by Lisa Jarnot

Bonnard, again

2011-04-22T09:38:00.001-04:00

Bonnard by Timothy Hyman

A very good book. Shows why Bonnard is so important, and what he was actually doing.

A short note on Clark on Olson

2011-04-20T13:04:00.006-04:00

Anyone who spends time reading about Charles Olson's life and writing will soon discover that Tom Clark's biography is the subject of some dispute. I am a rank amateur in this area, and my feelings about Olson's poetry and life project are a bit mixed at this point, but I will weigh in with some observations anyway which may be useful to other tyros in "Olson Studies."

One of the first things I read about Olson was Ralph Maud's "reactive biography" Charles Olson At the Harbor. It's a response to Clark. It does not claim to be a complete account, is much shorter than Clark's book, and simply aims at putting the record straight on many issues. I thought it was excellent and very useful, and it certainly seemed balanced, exceedingly well documented and thorough. Maud is arguably the premier Olson scholar and was a friend of the poet for several years. He takes issue with the general tone and attitude of Clark's work as well as with a rather large number of quite important factual claims that Maud shows convincingly are simply not true. In several instances he suggests Clark is actually slandering Olson. Though I knew full well that Maud was a friend of Olson and thus hardly disinterested, his book made me very wary of Clark, and I put off reading his full biography for quite a while. I read Charles Boer's Charles Olson in Connecticut a few weeks ago. Boer too was a friend of Olson, but his small volume about the poet's last months is hardly a paean of praise and reveals something of the nature of Olson's very difficult and flawed personality. Still, I was reading mostly accounts by Olson's colleagues and followers and I was, and remain, largely sympathetic to this outsize figure of modern literature. As I got deeper into my study of Olson it became apparent that there was too much about his life I simply did not know, and the only place to go for a full account is Clark's book. I read it last weekend in a few long sittings.

So I headed into it with an attitude, and my comments probably have to be taken with a grain of salt. But right from the first few pages I thought "why would you write a biography of someone you didn't like?" Of course there might be lots of reasons, but eventually it occurred to me that perhaps he had begun with an open mind, and had discovered that his subject was in the end rather a sad, conflicted, failed and distasteful character. That is surely possible. I'll leave the details of the critique, of both tone and facts, to Maud. But it is quite clear from the first chapter why Olson's many admirer's find Clark's account upsetting. I did learn a great deal from the book, but it cannot stand alone. Anyone who is looking for a "balanced" view simply must read Maud's "reaction." I came away from my weekend with Clark feeling very much deflated, saddened and unsettled. This is in one sense absurd because there is no law that decrees that a great poet must be a great person - Ezra Pound is enough to prove that. And it is also true that "worship" of the Great Man is a danger we really should all have learned to avoid by this time. Still, I couldn't help but feel that if Olson was as pitiful a figure as Clark tries to paint, then it would raise yet another barrier to my understanding of his work. Surely there are enough contradictions and conflicts in his life and writing even in the views of those who admired and were influenced by him.

I wondered how others reacted to the book. The few reviews I have found are largely uncritical and at times laudatory. Most puzzling to me is Robert Creeley's Preface to Clark's book. He seems to have no qualms about Clark's account in tone or substance. So, I am left wondering. In sum, Clark's book is certainly essential but needs to be filtered carefully. I trust Ralph Maud and Charles Boer for accurate but hardly uncritical accounts of Olson's life and persona. There is plenty more to read if I stay with this, and it is good to know a bit of the nature of the territory. I got into this business in the first place only because Olson made such important use of Henry Corbin. The really interesting thing is how wildly different Olson's world was from Corbin's. I find it important to rub these two fellows together to see what fires might be lit. I have little doubt that Robert Duncan was far closer in spirit to Corbin than Olson ever could be. And that may be useful to ponder. I suspect that in the long run I will spend more time with Duncan's writing than with Olson's.

[ Update... Have re-read Maud's "At the Harbor" - much better than I remembered it. And it seems to me a devastating critique of Clark. I will now read Maud's "other biography", Charles Olson's Reading.]

Origins of Language?

2011-04-15T00:01:00.001-04:00

Languages Grew From a Seed in Africa, Study Says
By NICHOLAS WADE
NYTimes: April 14, 2011

The "Best Spider in the Galaxy"

2011-04-14T11:02:00.000-04:00

I found this thanks to Alex Wild's MYRMECOS blog which I have pointed to here several times. The film is from Jurgen Otto - it is beyond commentary. Watch it all.

Voices

2011-04-11T11:25:00.002-04:00

I have been spending many wonderful hours listening to audio files of readings and lectures available through PennSound. It's a revelation. In my case it's been Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser (so far). Keeping my mind occupied throughout the otherwise tedious hours of my day job. Highly recommended. Seems to me an almost indispensable aid to grasping their work - tremendous insights into their personalities and modes of thinking, feeling and writing.

Jacket 2

2011-04-08T19:54:00.000-04:00

Jacket2

Olson at 100

2011-04-03T18:12:00.000-04:00

Kenneth Warren alerted me to this new issue of The Worcester Review.

Charles Olson Resources

2011-04-01T10:24:00.002-04:00

-Looking for Oneself: Contributions to the Study of Charles Olson (Charles Olson Society)
-PennSound Charles Olson Audio
-Slought Foundation (Search for Charles Olson: Additional hours of 1963 Vancouver Reading & Discussion not on PennSound)
-Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (Henry Ferrini's Documentary)
-Charles Olson Research Collection at the University of Connecticut
Olson Now blog
PROJECTIVE VERSE AT FIFTY by Jack Foley.
The Battle of Gloucester: Vincent Ferrini Meets Charles Olson — By Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Thomas Eisner 1929-2011

2011-03-31T09:13:00.001-04:00

Thomas Eisner, Who Cracked Chemistry of Bugs, Dies at 81
By KENNETH CHANG NYTimes March 30, 2011

"... In the introduction to Dr. Eisner’s 2003 book “For Love of Insects,” the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson called him “the modern Fabre,” after Jean-Henri Fabre, the French pioneer of insect research. Dr. Eisner realized early in his career that in addition to sounds and visual cues like colored markings and elaborate dances, insects often communicate through chemical signals..." This is a wonderful obituary with some great stories about the lives of Eisner and the insects he loved.

Olson, again

2011-03-26T00:01:00.002-04:00

While I'm on the subject, here are a few words from Ralph Maud that help explain my interest in Olson - and why his appropriation of Corbin's work is such a fertile field for digging.

The Post-modern — Olson was the first to use this word “post-modern”; but, given his clear and meaningful definition of it, he cannot be held responsible for the later careless and muddled application of the word in literary and art criticism. He pointed out (in letters to Robert Creeley at first) that to go ahead from the present stasis requires absorbing the lessons of the very different distant past — before Plato, who started what we now have. The post-modern, for Olson, would have a lot to do with Sumer and pre-Homeric Greek mythology. Olson was a “Professor of Mythology” at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the year 1964-65, or he claims that title as a reality, as a “myth.” In a word, the “post-modern,” for Olson, is the “archaic.”(This is from Maud's "Topics" page. He expands on this in the fine short essay "Charles Olson's Archaic Postmodern." That essay has a little surprise for me at the end where Maud brings in Stuart Kauffman, who taught me a great deal some years ago.)

Charles Olson and Robert Richman, Big Cranberry Island, Maine, August 1969 (Ralph Maud collection)

The Charles Olson Society

2011-03-25T08:02:00.000-04:00

It seems to me that the last time I visited this site, quite some time ago, there was much less available. For anyone with an interest in Olson & his work, this is utterly indispensable - a delight and a real treasure trove of information. Don't miss it!

Looking for Oneself: Contributions to the Study of Charles Olson

Berry on Williams

2011-03-22T10:15:00.000-04:00

Here is a gem that I long to get my hands on.

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 2011.

Read a review in the Englewood Review of Books

Leo Steinberg 1920-2011

2011-03-19T15:56:00.001-04:00

Leo Steinberg, Art Historian, Dies at 90
By KEN JOHNSON NYTimes: March 14, 2011

Leo Steinberg, one of the most brilliant, influential and controversial art historians of the last half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. READ THE OBITUARY.

At ArtStory.org with bio, bibliography and links.

The Times obituary prompted me to start reading Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. It is magnificent.

Rika Lesser: Two Poems by Göran Sonnevi, with a note on Translation

2011-03-17T13:44:00.000-04:00

Rika Lesser: Two Poems by Göran Sonnevi, with a note on Translation

Thanks to Jerome Rothenberg for this. Read it. As soon as I have some money again I'll get the books:

A Child is Not a Knife
Mozart's Third Brain

The Red Book of Carl G. Jung: Its Origins and Influence

2011-03-11T14:39:00.000-05:00

The Red Book of Carl G. Jung: Its Origins and Influence
At The Library of Congress - & Online Exhibit

June 17–September 25, 2010

Features the preeminent psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung’s famous Red Book, which records the creation of the seminal theories that Jung developed after his 1913 split with Sigmund Freud, and explores its place in Jung’s work through related items from the Library’s collections.

Pierre Bonnard, etc.

2011-03-09T11:15:00.000-05:00

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors, A Special Exhibit at the The Metropolitan Museum, NYC, 2009. I have embedded below the first of the FOUR YouTube Videos in that link. It turns out that the Met has a YouTube Channel. I find that absolutely marvelous - a quick search also revealed Art Babble.
So many videos, so little time...

Desert of Forbidden Art

2011-03-07T19:28:00.001-05:00

‘Decadent’ Russian Art, Still Under the Boot’s Shadow
By ELLEN BARRY, NYTimes - Published: March 7, 2011

Trailer for the Film.

This is an incredible, stunning story. Don't miss it.

Wendell Berry Honored

2011-03-04T00:01:00.001-05:00

"Kentucky author Wendell Berry was honored at the White House Wednesday for his writings and conservation advocacy, receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

Berry, 76, a Port Royal novelist, essayist, poet, farmer and activist, shook hands with Obama, and the two whispered to one another briefly. The president then draped the red ribbon and medal around Berry’s neck.“The author of more than 40 books, Mr. Berry has spent his career exploring our relationship with the land and community,” said the citation that was read aloud during the White House East Room ceremony, attended by Vice President Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama and heads of federal arts agencies." from the Louisville Courier-Journal. Read the whole article.

On the Lobopodians

2011-03-03T00:01:00.001-05:00

Cactus Walking On 20 Legs Found In China

The classic book on this is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life. It's a wonderful read.

Opabinia has long been my favorite:

Rothko Chapel

2011-03-02T00:01:00.001-05:00

Meditation And Modern Art Meet In Rothko Chapel by PAT DOWELL on NPR
"The Rothko Chapel is an interfaith sanctuary, a center for human rights — and a one-man art museum devoted to 14 monumental paintings by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. The Houston landmark, commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil, opened its doors 40 years ago, in February 1971.

For the past four decades, the chapel has encouraged cooperation between people of all faiths — or of no faith at all. While the chapel itself has become an art landmark and a center for human-rights action, the sanctuary's creator never lived to see it finished. Rothko committed suicide in 1970."

And no one should miss Simon Schama's essay on Mark Rothko from The Power of Art:

Hillman Interviews

2011-03-01T09:29:00.002-05:00

Jungian Analyst Explains the Psychology of Political Polarization "Here we are, this great country with all our emphasis on the individual, and yet we fail the individual?"

America and the Shift in Ages: An Interview with Jungian James Hillman The American psyche has always stoked Hillman's reflections; the following is the second half of an edited version of our conversation on the current zeitgeist.

mud-pies

2011-02-21T12:07:00.000-05:00

The greatly under-appreciated American philosopher Suzanne Langer taught for many years at my undergraduate alma mater, Connecticut College. Since my mother was the circulation librarian there, I spent a lot of time in the library while I was in high school. I have vague but persistent memories of Langer, a small woman with intense, bright and widely-staring eyes that seemed always to be looking into some other universe. She had not taught for many years by the time I was a freshman, but I read a good deal of her work. I am sure that I learned from her books, but oddly, one sentence from the preface to the first edition of Philosophy in a New Key has stayed with me all these years. At the end of her acknowledgments she writes,

"Above all I want to thank Mrs. Penfield Roberts, who has read the entire manuscript, even after every extensive revision, and given me not only intellectual help, but the constant moral support of enthusiasm and friendship, confirming for me the truth of what one lover of the arts, J. M. Thorburn, has said—that 'all the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people the mud-pies you have made; and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mud-pies to each other’s sympathetic consideration.' "

I find now, with some help from the internet, that the quote, appropriately, is from Thorburn's Art and the Unconscious, 1925. The often-recurring image of those mud-pies, and the deep truth of Thorburn's claim have probably had more influence on me than most of the philosophy that I have read.

Silk Road Exhibit

2011-02-20T18:32:00.001-05:00

Another Stop on a Long, Improbable Journey By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN is a review of The Secrets of the Silk Road at the Penn Museum. Don't miss the website and the IMAGE Gallery. It's magnificent.

Enigma

2011-02-17T09:19:00.001-05:00

The Voynich Manuscript
All pages
But it is 15th century.

Rothschild Hypothesis Disproved!

2011-02-10T08:53:00.001-05:00

On my long drive to work this morning I was surprised, to put it mildly, to hear a report on NPR about recent research on the jump of the flea. It concerns the results of this new paper: Biomechanics of jumping in the flea, Gregory P. Sutton and Malcolm Burrows, Journal of Experimental Biology 214, 836-847 (2011). I once met Miriam Rothschild (photo right) on one of her visits to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington. We discussed, among other things, my taxonomic and morphological researches into the fleas. She was quite a character and we got on very well. She proposed one mechanism by which fleas jump, and Henry Bennet-Clark another. It turns out that Bennet-Clark was right (though his rather dismissive comments about Rothschild's proposal at the end of the radio piece are quite unfair - her idea was not what he suggests). In any case it is not everyday that I come across items recalling my past life among the Siphonaptera. Do listen to the radio story - the bit about St. Tiggywinkles is worth hearing.

And there is this marvelous video:

The Invisible Columbia

2011-02-08T09:05:00.001-05:00

Ron McGaughey - Paintings of the Columbia Plateau

Nabokov's Blues

2011-01-26T10:16:00.001-05:00

Nabokov Butterfly Theory Vindicated - NYTimes

This is so great... the traditional taxonomist in me is thrilled.

Patrick Dunagan on the eco language reader

2011-01-20T12:34:00.000-05:00

The Eco Language Reader, edited by Brenda Iijima, Softcover, $19.95, Nightboat Books 2010

Continual Critique: After the After of Ecology
a review by Patrick Dunagan - an excerpt:

...Engaging questions such as, “How will we continue to read and write ecological engagement?” insistently point toward that very situation, without seeking to erect limitations around it. One possibility for how such a project may be framed is offered by Leslie Scalapino’s remark, “Seeing at the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one’s living make? What difference does one’s living make in ‘that’ space, and in relation to spaces all existing at once there?” The writers and thinkers here engage language while, all around them, that same language, by its very structure and referential nature, is a force for domination and destruction of the various natural systems within which life exists. Poets are in a unique position to critique that situation. They are intimate with the force that language yields, not only in regards to realms beyond the window, but also to interior social environments. Poets as language-bearers have a vital role to play in the engagement and exchange of ideas, as Leslie Scalapino quips: “I don’t find the relation of language to so-called ‘political’ events to be illogical.”

On Tarkovsky

2011-01-10T10:36:00.000-05:00

Andrei Tarkovsky: The Elements of Cinema
by Robert Bird.

I am finally making the time to read this very excellent book. Essential reading.

"Bird has benefited from extensive archival research and he illuminates Tarkovsky's career in sharp detail . . . His range of references, from classical Russian literature and philosophy to contemporary video art, is wide and refreshing, often triggering new reactions to films that are in danger of passive veneration . . . this is a richly argued and referenced case for Tarkovsky as heir to the symbolists' quest for spiritual enlightenment." – Sight and Sound

Pavel Florensky

2011-01-08T10:56:00.000-05:00

Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius by Avril Pyman

Continuum, 2010.

From the publisher: This is the first biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union. He has been compared to Pascal, Teilhard de Chardin, even da Vinci. Florensky was, at one and the same time, a supremely gifted philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer and theologian. He was also a poet and wrote studies of history, language and art. Although he taught philosophy for most of his working life, his interests were wide-ranging and profound and included the study of time and space, theoretical and applied physics, aspects of language, and the properties of materials and geology. His book The Pillar and the Ground of Truth is widely seen as a masterpiece of Russian Orthodox theology. Avril Pyman looks at Florensky’s life, from his childhood as the son of a railroad engineer to his mysterious death, and provides a populist perspective on his achievements. Her book celebrates the life of a little-known twentieth century Christian genius.

"Avril Pyman’s marvelous biography of Pavel Florensky is a labour of love and the fruit of decades of dedicated research into the intellectual culture of Russian modernism. Over the past thirty years Florensky has emerged as a giant of European culture of his day, but his lifelong intellectual project to a large degree remains poorly understood (which is understandable given the breathtaking variety and spectacular ambition of his endeavours). With Avril Pyman’s book Florensky has finally begun to receive his due. With the deft touch of a seasoned biographer Dr Pyman uncovers the intricate and poignant design that lies at the base of Florensky’s various intellectual activities and engagements. Displaying a complete command of her subject Avril Pyman draws on the vast corpus of Florensky’s published writings, most of which have never been translated into English, on the memoirs and correspondence of his family and friends, and on the constantly expanding body of scholarly literature on him. Eminently readable and authoritatively precise, Dr Pyman’s biography will be a touchstone for all future work on Pavel Florensky." -- Robert Bird, Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Chicago

Visible Language

2011-01-04T11:05:00.000-05:00

Visible Language: The Earliest Writing Systems
Lecture - Jan. 12 in Chicago - Christopher Woods.
Oriental Institute Museum Publication (With pdf link to the entire book): Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Middle East & Beyond
Oriental Institute Special Exhibit (through March 2011)