1) Why do poets dislike language? Poets dislike language.
2) The altered book: a violent exploration of the (violent) reading process
3) Movement on the page: like a musical score or like music? A difference?
4) The recipe is most often the stationary command to move in a set, ordered, way
5) Nelson (the UDP book): the dissolve of 1 particular history / 1 particular author
6) Gardner's altered book is more a critique/attempted erasure of its found materials
7) The meaning, where's the meaning? Especially in the altered book: what does it matter, in certain cases, what book you choose?
8) Attempted generation of otherness in the writing process using certain procedures and prompts: perhaps this is performing text, or that is the outcome, but the unearthing of otherness or the "alterior selves" is an illusion. We cannot escape our histories, our (imposed) identities.
9) The problem of the found work: is Osman's argument dialectical or one-sided. In the end are found materials that use the language of mass media, appropriate these materials, doomed to perpetuate the schema of mass culture? Do they always necessarily add to the excess? Is being American one reason these images and tropes and procedures "attractive"? (Vecunia). Or are we able in some small way to investigate and deconstruct the spectacles around us by appropriating the languages that appropriate us every day? (No firm conclusion in class or in the reading...)
Showing posts with label altered books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label altered books. Show all posts
Friday, April 24, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Alter (ed) Book, Red(e)ux
[THIS POST IS IN PROGRESS: FULL POST WHEN DAVID FINDS TIME TO SIT ON ASS]
Speaking as one who likes to work with physical objects (the book in the hand, say) but has been niched as a digital composer & editor: It's certainly very difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate the altered book from the vantage point of the digital snapshot. Not to say that Drucker's repository, for instance, is not an incredible resource, doesn't provide an approximating kind of information, as well as a prompt to seek out. But artist books, as most altered books are, rely on their materiality - that is often the necessary condition for a work's being an altered book as opposed to, say, a used book. Many examples of this exist in the world - see Drucker's repository and seek out - but one clear example that is in my head right now, that of the necessary condition of materiality, its un-reproducibility online, is this: last week a student in my class (ours - I teach this course with fantastic book artist Steven Hendricks) "scented" her book object, a handful of altered pages from Beckett's trilogy. She did several other interesting things with the pages, as did the other students, but I pick this out out for obvious reasons: the altered book, altered by the scent of a particular flower, cannot be smelled differently online. Not yet, anyway.
Sometimes exceptions breed whole new sub-categories (noting that categories are always negotiable despite what the advertisers and snake oil salespeople may say - let's just call them "phenomena"). One phenomenon I've become increasingly interested in since delving more deeply into Matina Stamatakis's work, is that of the digitally altered book artifact - a form of altering via scanning, typographical erasure, warping, hyperlinking, among other things, that allows for the appearance of materiality. Or, more precisely: the digitally altered text that gives the appearance of depth. Since, in reality, the digital artifact is also sheer materiality, such that this clarification highlights the obvious fact that change in medium or materials is a change in the work, with the underlying question (or challenge) being: of what traces of the former can be retained or exploited in the later, and why may the exploitation of the trace be interesting? Susana Gardner's ruby large enow from her Dusie Press is the best example I've seen of the altered book, digitally scanned, that retains depth of field, the sensation of perforation, shadow, erasure by brute force or excision, etc., that the work-in-hand has - an aura, in a Benjaminian or Mallarmean sense. And this appearance is not simply mimetic - if that were so, it'd be something like "an attempted copy" or akin to the "reproduction" in painting. Rather, the work's apparent tactile elements cause a direct tension with its lacks - precisely these elements. It also causes the tension between its lacks and its typographical content - the characters & line structure. We have what I'd call "a performance of the text" in a double sense - the initial alteration of EBB (the work from which ruby large enow emerges) and its digital iteration of itself. Gardner, it seems, is aware of these tensions, as the poetry anti-communicates (in Herbert Brun's sense of the term) its dissolution out of surgical maneuvering and scanning...
Speaking as one who likes to work with physical objects (the book in the hand, say) but has been niched as a digital composer & editor: It's certainly very difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate the altered book from the vantage point of the digital snapshot. Not to say that Drucker's repository, for instance, is not an incredible resource, doesn't provide an approximating kind of information, as well as a prompt to seek out. But artist books, as most altered books are, rely on their materiality - that is often the necessary condition for a work's being an altered book as opposed to, say, a used book. Many examples of this exist in the world - see Drucker's repository and seek out - but one clear example that is in my head right now, that of the necessary condition of materiality, its un-reproducibility online, is this: last week a student in my class (ours - I teach this course with fantastic book artist Steven Hendricks) "scented" her book object, a handful of altered pages from Beckett's trilogy. She did several other interesting things with the pages, as did the other students, but I pick this out out for obvious reasons: the altered book, altered by the scent of a particular flower, cannot be smelled differently online. Not yet, anyway.
Sometimes exceptions breed whole new sub-categories (noting that categories are always negotiable despite what the advertisers and snake oil salespeople may say - let's just call them "phenomena"). One phenomenon I've become increasingly interested in since delving more deeply into Matina Stamatakis's work, is that of the digitally altered book artifact - a form of altering via scanning, typographical erasure, warping, hyperlinking, among other things, that allows for the appearance of materiality. Or, more precisely: the digitally altered text that gives the appearance of depth. Since, in reality, the digital artifact is also sheer materiality, such that this clarification highlights the obvious fact that change in medium or materials is a change in the work, with the underlying question (or challenge) being: of what traces of the former can be retained or exploited in the later, and why may the exploitation of the trace be interesting? Susana Gardner's ruby large enow from her Dusie Press is the best example I've seen of the altered book, digitally scanned, that retains depth of field, the sensation of perforation, shadow, erasure by brute force or excision, etc., that the work-in-hand has - an aura, in a Benjaminian or Mallarmean sense. And this appearance is not simply mimetic - if that were so, it'd be something like "an attempted copy" or akin to the "reproduction" in painting. Rather, the work's apparent tactile elements cause a direct tension with its lacks - precisely these elements. It also causes the tension between its lacks and its typographical content - the characters & line structure. We have what I'd call "a performance of the text" in a double sense - the initial alteration of EBB (the work from which ruby large enow emerges) and its digital iteration of itself. Gardner, it seems, is aware of these tensions, as the poetry anti-communicates (in Herbert Brun's sense of the term) its dissolution out of surgical maneuvering and scanning...
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Altered Book as Performing Text?
After Linh Dinh went to great lengths, for his journal, formatting a long excerpt of my altered book, Living Rooms, I've been thinking about the altered book as - beyond an artist's book - a performance of text. That the work, in this particular case, is constructed (in part) via statistical software I've been tweaking, questions emerge, not necessarily fully formed. The altered book in one sense is a killing off of that which, often enough, one either dislikes in its originally published state or loves beyond comprehension--for why otherwise alter that which one is inclined to attach "ironically bad" (reason 1) , "usefully outmoded," where "useful" here means "for appropriation, " (reason 2) or "aura" (reason 3) in the first place? The murderous retrofitting is also admittedly an erotic endeavor--this sort of impulse (or compulsion?) to mix somewhat violently. Nonetheless - to take the notion of "killing off" here and situated within an erotics/and or ritualization of the book, the act seems like so much sacrifice (on the one hand) and attempted resurrection (hope for rebirth) on the other. Of course, I'm a Jew, and a secular one at that, so what do I know?
What interested me this time--after doing a few book alterations already--was that the added use of machine meant that I turned otherness into otherness. Hell, after I wrote the program, and until I began to sculpt the thing, I simply pressed a button. And so viz. performative poetics on which I've written a great deal, the term "performance" was, through this process, complicated. Reading to self is a kind of performance, I'd argue, albeit of a not-so-elaborate or public sort. So, the term can stretch in all sorts of ways, and definitions are not particularly interesting to me. Rather, what kind of performance is the alteration process absent (or missing for much of the time) its author? It isn't, as in the case of much of the performative poetics on which I've written in the past, seeking the liminality between "poem" and "poem event," this anxiety the poem has of its status on the page, its book as no-longer-enoughness - or, the moment the poem becomes aware of its own discomfort as potentially obsolescent form. No, here is a reaching for ritual, almost a devolution back into the practices of the sacred (or sacrilegious). Or, since I am a Jew: its regression back into the room of rooms, The Book, as Jabes might have had it, the Talmudic practice of continual self-reimagining within the space it is (was) afforded.
Needs be more thought here. I think this has to do with LW: "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy." Which, in itself, is a religiously-inflected frustration with the impulse to masturbate, sometimes quite literally. And when the machine began to pray.... Hayles came out with another book.
So: more later - interested in thoughts. Meantime, from Linh Dinh's The Lower Half (thanks, Linh):
Excerpt w/o drawings & schematics [altered book: S. Weil, "Surgical Anatomy," 1901]
--------------------What interested me this time--after doing a few book alterations already--was that the added use of machine meant that I turned otherness into otherness. Hell, after I wrote the program, and until I began to sculpt the thing, I simply pressed a button. And so viz. performative poetics on which I've written a great deal, the term "performance" was, through this process, complicated. Reading to self is a kind of performance, I'd argue, albeit of a not-so-elaborate or public sort. So, the term can stretch in all sorts of ways, and definitions are not particularly interesting to me. Rather, what kind of performance is the alteration process absent (or missing for much of the time) its author? It isn't, as in the case of much of the performative poetics on which I've written in the past, seeking the liminality between "poem" and "poem event," this anxiety the poem has of its status on the page, its book as no-longer-enoughness - or, the moment the poem becomes aware of its own discomfort as potentially obsolescent form. No, here is a reaching for ritual, almost a devolution back into the practices of the sacred (or sacrilegious). Or, since I am a Jew: its regression back into the room of rooms, The Book, as Jabes might have had it, the Talmudic practice of continual self-reimagining within the space it is (was) afforded.
Needs be more thought here. I think this has to do with LW: "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy." Which, in itself, is a religiously-inflected frustration with the impulse to masturbate, sometimes quite literally. And when the machine began to pray.... Hayles came out with another book.
So: more later - interested in thoughts. Meantime, from Linh Dinh's The Lower Half (thanks, Linh):
Excerpt w/o drawings & schematics [altered book: S. Weil, "Surgical Anatomy," 1901]
(relaxation, amplitude >16mz)
we rind round the spines & gutters
of the ischia
“won’t go much deeper than”
line B
drawn from
the anus as is
line A
as are lines D
E
F etc
gerald stern?
billy collins?
loop of bowel?
3 different volumes of robert frost?
herniated groin?
necrotic striations at the right upper tibialus?
three thousand clams for 15 min “visit” w/o happy ending
“Demands lateral incisions!”
“Implies lateral promotions!”
“Suggestive of lateral sclerosis!”
“Definition is always a pity!”
go to the rack
go in the direction of the C D
the pelvic fascia
the M P 3 the inject-able dialec-table
gizmos
that aren’t
here
ad hering to
the base of the body
“The baseness of the body”
“The baseness of any body”
“The baseness of anybody”
enter orbital
house
or if thresh-
old keeps
questions & visions
make do
& like-
wise find no-
thing approxi-
mating barthian
bliss why is it that poetry is
at best
dialysis?
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