Some Mediations for Untangling,

--Belladonna has a new web page on facebook (the blog is down now, but probably--guessing here--just for remodelling).  Anyhow, go here for news & notes (you need to log in to facebook), such as: 

--New from Belladonna is Carla Harryman's Open Box (Improvisations).  Laura Elrick's write-up:

From one of our most mind- and genre-bending of writers comes a poem. Don’t expect the poem however: “The page will not inflate / lungs do.” Carla Harryman’s startling new improvisations sound the edges between life and word, text and body, presence and a future (“in the hands of a shovel”). Notes that do not sing open the transfiguring “clink between / Thud and shine”… “Between us and a thing / Not yours, not mine / That owns us.” Thus an intense sort of music arises from the “wasting” gratitude of this Open Box. Syntactically figured through doubles and negatives, its “window window” beckons while it cloaks, reveals as it extends, as intimately as that rack of garments (the plush and the frayed) hanging from our mirrored backs.

--Laura Elrick

--From friend & political economy professor (one of the planners of EconVergence) Pete Bohmer regarding the sort of death that seems like a nail in the collective coffin, Howard Zinn (he was due to speak here later this week, for my class as well as others):

Howard Zinn contributed in so many important ways to creating an understanding of  U.S. history that put at the center the struggles of oppressed people for dignity, and for economic and social justice. His classic, A People’s History of the United States, has had a profound effect in this regard. It is my favorite book.   I have probably given away  30 copies as gifts over the last 25 years and used it in countless classes. Howard was a very wise and humane person who relentlessly criticized our unjust capitalist system while believing in and giving us historical examples of individuals and movements who in ways big and small worked and struggled against all injustice and for a just society.   In language and analysis that was simple but not simplistic, radical but accessible, Howard Zinn’s  anti-racism and anti-imperialism and his strong identification with working people stood out. So did his strong anti-war commitment and perspective.  He listened to and respected the non-elites, those usually omitted in the official histories.

While motivated in his writing by his values of the right to self-determination, of the centrality of ending poverty and all forms of oppression such as sexism and racism, and for peace and justice, Howard told the truth and did not exaggerate and omit facts that were uncomfortable to his beliefs. He also acted on them by participating in countless demonstrations and other forms of activism from the 1930’s until the present.

Based on Howard’s  profound  historical understanding of the U.S. history and his respect for people and his understanding of the obscene  inequality and militarism that marks the United States today, Howard Zinn continued to have hope and believed that we, the people, of the United States, could and would transform this society into some form of democratic socialism that lived in harmony with the rest of the world.    We can all learn from this truly outstanding thinker, historian and human being. Howard Zinn presente!

Sadly, Peter Bohmer

--And yet, there are those whose hope & tireless organizing / creative lather causes various little futures to open up here & there.  Such as Jules Boykoff.  And Kaia Sand.  They're reading tonight, discussing where to go from here tonight, so please do come if you are a STUDENT, FACULTY MEMBER, STAFF MEMBER, or OTHER PERSON LIVING IN OR AROUND OLYMPIA.  Both are always on.  

Born in large part out of Elizabeth Williamson's hard work: 

Winter's first  PRESS EVENT:

Join poet/activists Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand for a tour of their latest work

The Evergreen State College

        Where: Sem II C1105

    When: January 28,7:30pm 

Boykoff and Sand helped organize the recent Econvergence conference in Portland(http://www.econvergence.org/). They are the founders of the Tangent Press and reading series in Portland (http://www.thetangentpress.org/readings.html) and co-authored a new book on guerrilla poetry entitled Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). 

 

Boykoff is the author, most recently, of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). He has also published and lectured widely on the suppression of dissent in the United States. He is a contributor to scholarly journals like Antipode, Social Movement Studies, andNew Political Science as well as popular publications like the Guardian, Common Dreams, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He was an  invited speaker at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya (2006), where he presented research he carried out on U.S. media coverage of global warming.  

Sand is the author most recently of Remember to Wave, forthcoming this winter with Tinfish Press. This collection investigates political geography in Portland, Oregon, and contains a poetry walk she guides. Her  collection, interval (Edge Books 2004), was selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year and she is also the author/designer of several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv. She is a contributor to Jim Dine’s Hot Dreams series (Steidl Editions 2008) and recently performed poetry collaged entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement at the Positions Colloquium of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, British Columbia. At present, she is at work on The Happy Valley Project, multi-media collaborations investigating housing foreclosures and finance.

Sponsored by: Performing Meaning, Translating Thought; Music and the Environment; The Writing Center; The Office of the Budget Dean 

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--Last, on Feb 3 poet Yan Li will be at our Tacoma Campus, hosted by amazing poet (and person) Zhang Er.  From an email invite she sent (more later on this blog regarding the event):

You are Invited to Chinese Poet Yan Li's reading at

The Evergreen State College – Tacoma

1210 – 6<sup>th</sup> Ave, Tacoma WA 98405, Room 218

February 3, 2010, 2:00-4:00 pm

Yan Li is a well-known poet and painter based in Shanghai. He belonged to the loose organized young poets group active in China in the late 1970s to mid-1980s, which was labeled as the "misty" school. He is the founding editor in chief of the unofficial, yet influential poetry journal First Line since 1987. He exhibited his art works in a 1979 show by a group of avant-garde artists later known as The Stars. His one man show in 1984 at People’s Park in Shanghai was the first one-man Avant-garde art exhibition after 1949 in mainland China . He has held many exhibitions and published numerous books since the 1980s. In his poetry and fiction work, Yan Li pushes the boundary between vernacular and written, capricious and philosophical, transient and historical, private and public, realistic and imaginary, humorous and solemn, contemporary and canonical. He has maintained his intellectual and artistic integrity under the not so subtle inducement of commercialization or propaganda for the party. He has also been an unfailing supporter and magnet for generations of younger poets and artists who seek his advice and help. His poetry has been translated into many languages including English.

 

The reading is supported in part by the Cycle Makers and Cycle Breakers Program.

 

MLK DAY OF ACTION & LABOR'S NEWLY ELECTED AFL-CIO STEWARDS

For us in the labor movement, like most activists, MLK Day is not a holiday, it's long been a day of action.  This year, new elected curators of most of the unions in the U.S. get to show us how they will help us position ourselves for better jobs & healthcare, rights on the job, & civil rights for all workers, former workers, & potential workers.  Whether you are fan of John Sweeney or not, immigrant and LGBT civil rights had become, during his tenure as director of the AFL-CIO, central to the AFL-CIO mission.  This has not always been the case, and in fact its taken a concerted effort on every level of organization to undo the many early years of contracts with two-tired systems (for some member unions of the AFL this was the norm across the board), followed by a long period of blase/mere vocal support for growing numbers of workers, many of whom have been, sometimes without much reciprocation, vocal supporters of labor.  After the 1950s and due to the civil rights movement this began to change pretty dramatically.  And Sweeney's call to organize and galvanize support for both immigrant workers and the LGBT community--often one and the same group of workers and retirees--was, I think, rather radically implemented/organizationally designed by director of organizing, Stuart Acuff.  If this organizing was not visible to you, it was (and is) because of the immense uphill climb, the era of Bush and perhaps the most anti-labor administration in history, a time during which membership in unions (union density) was/is at its lowest point in U.S. history.  

I'm hoping that former assistant director of the AFL, now director (president) will work with other elected regional directors, union presidents, membership, and so forth, to ramp up this organizing fight, and make it part of a radical rethinking of the AFL-CIO's ten point plan, along with redoubling of efforts to a) put pressure on the Obama administration on all civil rights issues, i.e., detainee rights & Guantanamo, and b) to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and to get this Act passed with Card Check Neutrality inserted back into the bill.  

The latter is, perhaps at this point, a pipe dream.  And this is too bad.  Because Martin Luther King was murdered while marching at a labor rally for sanitation workers, and the union I used to organize with was one of that rally's co-sponsors.  That was also a time when union density in this country was nearly thirty percent.  It's time to ramp up some of the positive organizing foci that unions within the AFL adopted in reaction to Bush, but to keep those efforts up.  Otherwise density will remain at around thirteen percent, then eventually plummet.  

For now, a rather meek but "nice" post from the AFL-CIO on the occasion of MLK Day of Action (so-called in the labor movement):

Arlene Holt Baker: Without Jobs, Civil Rights an Empty Promise

by James Parks, Jan 15, 2010

Without good jobs, the gains of the civil rights movement are empty: Just as Martin Luther King Jr. fought to secure basic rights for all Americans, we must now fight for economic justice, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said.

Speaking this morning at the Martin Luther King Prayer Breakfast in Atlanta, Holt Baker said:

The freedom to sit at a lunch counter or in the Oval Office was won for us.

Now it is our time to win for the next generation the economic strength to take advantage of those freedoms. Today more than ever, we understand that without jobs, civil rights is an empty promise. And without good jobs, there is no real freedom.

The annual prayer breakfast is sponsored by the Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council.

Unemployment for African American workers stands at 16.2 percent and a staggering 48.4 percent for black youths. At the same time, Holt Baker added, too many of the doors that helped African Americans reach the middle class—good manufacturing jobs and government jobs that have provided good wages and benefits—are closed.

She said working people must demand that Congress enact the AFL-CIO’s  five-point planto save and create millions of jobs in the next year. Nowhere is immediate action more needed than among African Americans, who have been hit especially hard by the crisis, she said. The AFL-CIO plan calls for the government to create additional jobs in distressed areas for people who desperately need them.

The plan also includes job-creating measures, such as rebuilding the nation’s roads, schools and infrastructure, and lending Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds directly to small and medium-sized businesses via community banks.

Saying “the generation coming up now is at risk of doing less well than their parents,” Holt Baker reminded the audience that freedom fighters like Dr. King, Rosa Parks and the Rev. James Orange fought so we could leave our children a better life.

She quoted King:

It’s all right to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,” but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. This is what we have to do.

Economic justice also is the focus of the annual AFL-CIO King Day celebration in Greensboro, N.C., from Jan. 14-18. More than 400 union members will call on the White House and Congress for meaningful job-creation policies.

Participants also will honor the four trailblazing students whose sit-in at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter 50 years ago ignited a nationwide effort that resulted in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Thomas Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, will speak on civil rights priorities in 2010.

Political Action Planning & UC Strike Testimonials

Please join me, if your schedule allows, in going to this important talk below.  It involves all of us: those of us paying higher tuition, and who now have trouble paying for school, and faculty who, because of budget cuts, lose their jobs.  

In today’s, January 7, 2010 New York Times, Governor Arnold Schwarznegger’s chief of staff, Susan Kennedy said, “Those protests on the UC campuses the tipping point. Our university system is going to get the support it deserves.” Kennedy made these comments immediately after Republican Governor, Schwarznegger proposed cutting money for California prisons and putting the money saved into higher ed. Right now, 11% of the California budget goes to prisons,  and 7.5% goes to higher ed.  He proposed that at least 10% of the state budget go to California universities and colleges, and no more than 7% be used for prisons. This shows the value of militant protest and a growing  student movement with faculty and staff and community support to stop and reverse the budget cuts. Let us in Washington State learn from our brothers and sisters in California. 
Come here two leading activists in this movement, Wed., January 13th!

OCCUPY EVERYTHING!

Fighting Austerity on California Campuses

Wednesday January 13, 2010

The Evergreen State College, Seminar II, E1105

 

10:00am Presentation to Political Economy and Social Movements; Race, Class and Gender(all are welcome)

1:30pm Public Presentation-Sem 2, E1105

California is the tenth largest economy in the world and one of the states hardest hit by the current financial crisis. Although the effects of the crisis continue to be felt in real terms by those living in the state, there has been little to no resistance against the financial system responsible for the crisis and the concurrent austerity regime that is decimating social programs including public education.

The public universities of California have emerged as a possible front for confronting the restructuring that has arrived with the crisis. Faced with a 32% student fee increase, thousands of layoffs and pay cuts, students and workers have begun to organize on a mass scale to fight back. Amongst the repertoire of tactics, occupying buildings has shown to be one of the most effective, providing a fresh praxis for a new and contagious movement that has quickly spread across the state.

Come hear stories from this important struggle and watch video from some of the pivotal moments during the last months of 2009. We will focus on lessons learned and future strategies as well as provide space for discussion of possible connections with local organizing efforts connected with budget cuts and tuition increases at TESC.

Carla Harryman Interview

In talking with Charles Bernstein a couple nights ago (he gave a great reading here at Evergreen this week, & was good to see him, & Leonard Schwartz, who I hadn't talked to since taking the semester off), I found myself on the receiving end of a lot of insight regarding teaching / discussing the ideology of the classroom (and ideology generally) in the classroom.  Thanks much to Charles, who helped me add some needed texts to my syllabus.  It was a serendipitous discussion, as we're both teaching at moment, both classes circling around politics and pedagogy.  A couple current texts came up for discussions along these lines--both, we agreed, are some of the best new books of late.  One was, as I mentioned in another post, Disaster Suites by Rob Halpern.  The other, Carla Harryman's Adorno's Noise.  

I've long been struck by how little attention Harryman's work is given compared to her male counterparts.  Not that Harryman isn't a major influence for contemporary artists.  But yet again, Harryman and The Grand Piano are not usually mentioned in the same sentence.  Google these via Boolean search and you'll wind up with approximately 177 unique entries.  For Barrett Watten, you get nearly 400, same volume.  Not that lack of some vast popular/viral takeover is indicative of anything to any degree of interest beyond a passing one on this topic, but I've read Adorno's Noise, released last year by Essay Press, about a dozen times now, and still very much discovering things, getting a kind of static shock from it--even "Orgasm," an essay of all of about 50 words.  The work, like Harryman's other work, is extremely difficult to place, exacting, precise in its deliberations.  It's not just that my background is in philosophy of music; the book really is, beyond everything else it is, a study in the form of the essay (which makes Essay Press the best possible home for it, in my estimation). 

Well, I'm liking Bucharest at moment, at least the American Studies Program at the University there, specifically its undergraduate journal, Intersections.  There's a nice interview with Harryman in this latest issue.  Harryman's somewhat politic to linger on genre here as to why it is difficult to "place" her work.  Part of what I love--what's influenced my work a great deal--is this genre concern, where essay for Harryman deliberately meets poetry and prose, and where the written is embodied on the page and in the literal performance of much of her work (Neo-Benshi, and other poets theater conventions).  The difficulty of placement is an act of political resistance, and so one would, and should, and want to expect that work such as Harryman's is going to remain occulted by more commercialized texts (tho, think of how many options the bookseller has when trying to file the newly acquired Harryman book!).   Gender, quite simply, as has been discussed so often, is one culprit in Harryman's (at times) backgrounding.  Not just the gender divide within the Language Poetry culture of the 70s and 80s, but more generally, and now: we just love our male-identifying(ed) poets.  Can't seem to get enough of them.  

Well, glad to see this interview.  Glad it is so rich as well--thinking of using some of it along with Adorno's Noise in my classroom this year.  

CALL FOR ACTION

As forwarded to me by the editors at Agni:

A message from Anthony Appiah, President, PEN American Center ...

 

 

We're sure you've been following the news about our PEN colleague in China , Liu Xiaobo, who has been detained for over a year in Beijing and is facing subversion charges for his writings. On Friday, Liu was indicted, and we have learned that he may be tried as early as Monday, December 21. If he is convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.

 

Even if you have already signed our petition, or sent a letter, we are asking you now to flood the Chinese government's e-mail boxes with appeals calling for Liu Xiaobo's immediate release. You can do so by using PEN's new, user-friendly software at www.pen.org/freeliu just fill in the few required fields, amend the letter if you wish, and hit send.

 

Please also pass this on to your friends, family, and colleagues, and urge them to take action.

 

For more information on the latest developments in Liu's case, and to read PEN's press release about the indictment, please visitwww.pen.org/liuxiaobo.

 

Your voice matters to the Chinese government.  Please help us free Liu Xiaobo now.

 

Thank you.

 

Sincerely,

 

Anthony Appiah

President, PEN American Center

The Ideal Glass: On Laura Elrick's Stalk

I just watched/listened to Laura Elrick's Stalk for the second time and again was deeply unsettled. This is a deeply unsettling piece, yet one that we can, like the glass window of a city, pass by.  Or, like the body of another, manipulate just this much: turn on, turn off, rewind, fast forward, skip & let go.  Interrogate.  As poem, the digital artifact becomes fleshy and vulnerable.

This time in viewing the work I was interested in looking, in seeing or sensing on the micro level, those moments, planned and unplanned, that occurred just at the edge of the frame.  

Elrick and her collaborators here--Kythe Heller, Kristin Prevallet, several others--as well as Kaia Sand, who gave a talk on Stalk for Nonsite Collective several months ago called Poem/Nonpoem, are interested in projects of dissensus, events where aesthetic and political practices collide, as Sand puts it, works that "allow the two to be translated into and through each other."  Elrick's piece is certainly working at this level--not unlike David Buuck's BARGE or Sand's own Remembering to Wave (out now thru Tinfish Press).  There has been a resurgence in contiguity between poetics and political intervention in the past decade, a re up and rethinking of Ranciere's "redistribution of the sensible."  Though still unusual in today's contemporary poetic landscape, a re-imagining of a sort of poetic terrorism, of a politicized recalibration of the happening, has become a tactical concern for increasing numbers of artists, and this interest is every bit as conditioned by our eternal present's situation of deepening crisis as it is a response to a long (in art time) period of underwhelming aesthetic production--both in poetry and in experimental music and visual art. 

The landscape of crisis is what Elrick's Stalk unearths, is what the film's tagline calls, not wrongly, "part dystopian urban cartography."  Here crisis embodied is the fragile and self-same subject, the ignored, and transparent, where a question of whether it (not I) is breakable and/or visible, is tested.  Is the crowd that which washes it ashore, or away?  Are we that crowd?  Am I both or neither?  "Is that a person?" begins the poem, the screen dark for nearly a minute of forefronting language that Elrick and others overheard, recorded, individuals who voiced from within that crowed some response to the lone, hooded figure in orange jumpsuit, shackled.  "I feel like asking: do you want me to call somebody?" Where "to call somebody" is to suggest that the figure is either crazy or the act frivolous, in need of professional cleanup.  Sand beautifully discusses the multivalent signification:

Elrick’s trudge through New York streets juxtaposed prisoner and public crowd while drawing a contour line—as geographer Cindy Katz terms it—to the prisoner that is not juxtaposed, the out-of-sight prisoner, caged at Guantánamo, for whom we are the same public crowd.

On one level of reading this work, there is the obvious interventionist centrality of the hooded figure wearing the iconic Guantanamo orange, the walk (or stalk) as both overt political protest and as dissensus--as reminder to anyone who sees and is confronted by the work (either the event or its archive in the form of video poem) that there are hundreds of detainees being tortured at this moment, right now.  But, as Sand points out through Herbert Marcuse (and this is the question that's central to my work, at least the question I grapple with consistently), what alternatives are there to work that is simply "consciousness raising"..."puppets and protest"? That is, the artform that collides politics and art without leaving both, or either, normatively fixed, intact?  How to transform both "politics" and "art" in and through this collision?  Elrick gives us one kind of tactical move in Stalk. 

I'm reminded in posing this question of Buuck's review of Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Series for Artweek, wherein the controversial paintings of tortured men, beautifully wrought, erotic, stylized gained a lot of negative and positive excitement, praise for the "empathic" and "humanizing" images.  For Buuck, these paintings are, however interesting, lacking in dissensus, perhaps (in my estimation) because under all the juxtaposing of the erotic with sadism, pain with our pleasure in watching it (Sontag echoes here throughout), the work recapitulates old divisions, normative vocabularies, becomes itself a mode of "consciousness raising" on the one hand, and painterly skill on the other, the two only joined by the singularity of the painting, and not much more:

Ultimately, it will take artists, critics, and everyday image-consumers to construct new idioms of visual criticism by which to engage such images in a manner that attends to the complexities of such travesties while at the same time risking the same kinds of confused and contradictory responses in our own politics and protests, that might move beyond the necessary exclamations of disgust and/or empathy, towards active dismantling of the image-worlds and militaristic policies that give birth to these new forms of torture and image-making. 

Then what is the vocabulary of atrocity?  What would a new aesthetic language that confronts our contradictory impulses to these particular atrocities--these images and reports of torture--look or sound like?  As if in direct response to Botero and his work's positive reviewers, Elrick's voice, with a strange, detached sadness, reminds us to shine a light on our eyes as they watch, to see in them the contradiction:

     Empathy intoxicates the premise of this place... We... We that is temporary and abundant, 

     something that waits...

Stalk takes us out of the gallery, away from the normative in many respects.  Gone are the usual conventions of the poetry reading, gone is the page with its lineations, allowing us to see where the report begins and the lyric ends, where they blur. And gone too is the straightforward didacticism of "message," as the central character in this narrative is not the hooded figure (the hooded figure is only the trigger), it's the crowd, and at times, individuals within that crowd, and the city which is us insofar as we construct it (to paraphrase Kristin Prevallet from her A Catalog of Lost Glimpses).  

During a proceeding viewing, I took notes, scene by scene, pausing, of the crowd's reactions. Sand rightly takes note of the predictability of it all:

In June, her walk through the city was planned with precision, but submitted to the unpredictability of the city. Yet much was predictable about the reactions of crowds of people.

Homeless woman under a blanket. Fervent believer shouting scripture. Orange jumpsuited prisoner shackled and shuffling. We among the crowds don’t respond, part urbane (nothing surprises us); part safe-sure (less contact, less mugging); part co-habitationally respectful (we can all do our “thing,” living in close contact while retaining partial autonomy). 

True, much of the film shows Elrick going seemingly unnoticed, or noticed but not noticed. In all, by my count, there were only two occasions in which (interesting in itself) a person took a photo (camera, phone camera) of Elrick, and only once did a person (man, striped shirt, midtown) try to talk to Elrick (since I have yet to talk to Laura about Stalk, I don't know what was said, and so will be one of the things I will ask).  For the first ten or so minutes of the work, I saw very few (hardly any) double takes, or obvious stares--yet for the second half (mostly filmed in midtown Manhattan) there were several (whether this was a purposeful edit, or whether part of midtown's psychogeography entailed this "naturally," I don't know).

The lonliness of the hooded figure, and the crowd's dynamic as crowd (it's easier to ignore the othered, the marked, among a sea of strangers) is a deeply haunting feature of the work, with Elrick's lyric interspersed with lines by Baudelaire, Silliman, others, especially at the beginning, where most of the crowd seemed not to notice or care to notice the hooded figure, this lyric dissolving into detainee reports, which, having worked with these myself for a forth. book, are both horrifying and emblematic of the way we treat each other whenever threat (unknown, othered) approaches. 

     The ideal glass, big public... again detainee was shown 9/11 video. Detainee did watch,

     but this time without exhibiting any emotion... averted his eyes... Great place for people

     watching...

And this ghostliness, this haunted glass sea of individuals, speaks to that dystopianism in the tagline, and occasions Sand to ask if we are too urbane:

Are we always among a crowd, the prisoner—shackled on the street, the prisoner shacked on an island—while we are urbane, safesure, cohabitationally respectful?

It's hard to conjecture on a whole scene of multitudes, what the mind-sets are here, and whether there is some uniformity of intention, so to speak, as there is of behaviors.  But to elaborate on what I take Sand to be getting at in suggesting the individual might "always be among a crowd, the prisoner":  what I noticed, beyond what Sand really nicely points out above, especially in the second half of the work, or what I felt I noticed, was an interest in the hooded figure, but a hurried one.  Like the man who approaches Elrick briefly, everything is brief, everything is hurried, everyone is on their way, in a hurry, always on their way.  Where are they going? We may be urbane, especially in New York, given the term's association with this diverse city of high end purchase, but we're also alienated.  We're going to work and in a hurry, and if not in a hurry to get somewhere because that is what we're told we must do, we're often thinking about being in a hurry--soon, which is also being in a hurry.  Propelled like buckshot from a gun we hurry, or we stand and ponder as marionettes on crank, and the hooded iconic figure of the detainee is a flicker in the corner of our eye, and if you only had the time to stop and ask yourself... "is that a person?"  That is, is the detainee (terrorist) a person?  Were you a tourist in one of those shots, your reasons for looking the other way, or beyond, or briefly, might not be dissimilar: you have no time for troubling matters--maybe you're liable to be dismissive even ("stupid radicals!"), because your boss gave you exactly 5 days to see EVERYTHING NEW YORK HAS TO OFFER, which includes the statue of liberty, the museums, the Empire State Building, and Ground Zero.  You'll ponder art in relation to politics, you'll have to ponder the U.S. policy on detainees and torture, later, because how are you going to fit ALL THIS IN IN 5 F-ING DAYS? I would call someone, but I have to be downtown in ten minutes, someone else surely will...  

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno gives us a rich sense of how, in part, successful art operates.  Where "success" is to have use value, and to have use value as transfiguring and transgressing sensuous material that points in its negative articulation to a world that could be, to a future that isn't necessarily a worsening of present conditions, the liquidation of the subject, the person:

“Only by immersing its autonomy in society’s imagerie can art surmount the heteronomous market.  Art is modern through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent.”  (AT, 31) 

Stalk retains the contradictions of the crowd, which is to retain and amplify the contradictions of its own behaviors and effects, the conditions of its own production.  The stark reality of our alienation bubbles up to the surface in Elrick's Stalk (and does so in different ways if you--sorry Laura--turn off the sound, which, of course, also makes it a different poem).  The great love affair between capitalism and militarism is worn not just on our faces and in our gestures, but in the temporality of our behaviors.  We are walking the streets of New York; we are individuals given over to the picnolepsy of another's performance, and in turn, our own performances: of the rushed and pushed, and of the "something that waits" for an alternative social existence.  Our eyes project back the effect of our information gathering and dispersal, the beautiful delete button talk talk talk of cable news living.  Like they say, you are what you are (made to) watch. 

 

Wheelhouse Action Alerts

Just got in the mail No Gender, Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards.  On first read through I'm stunned by the depth & warmth of this book--it is, as is edwards' work, a necessary read for anyone interested in anything.  Order it here from Belladonna Books, or here from Litmus Press; the two collaborated to co-publish the volume.  Here you'll also find Bharat jiva, edwards' last collection.  Another, longer post on this book as I get to know it more intimately.

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From the AFL-CIO & Students Against Sweatshops: Sign the Letter Here

"Justice for HEI Workers

On October 30, the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against the HEISheraton Crystal City hotel, alleging unfair labor practices including allegedly interrogating, threatening, and coercing pro-union workers and firing union leader Ferdi Lazo for his union activity. HEI has not yet answered the complaint, but will presumably deny the allegations, and the NLRB has set a January date for a hearing.  Students have joined workers in their fight because the owner of theSheraton Crystal City, HEI, receives hundreds of millions of dollars in university endowment investment. Send the message below to university administrators and HEI to stand in solidarity with Ferdi and his coworkers who are fighting for their right to organize!"

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Rob Halpern has just published his incredibly intricate essay on Baudealaire's late prose poems & the high capitalist commodity. Find it here.  CB's "poeme en prose" is generally considered one of the prose poem's "beginnings" - & here Halpern deconstructs this genre-history by delving into the form's transgressive import within the context of commodity & broadside.  Beyond the politics, density, & extraordinarily fine argument here, Halpern's question of poeme en prose's form circles around the status of (degraded) lyric in the era of high (& late capitalism).  Besides, one of my interests in writing a particular section of my forth. book, Occultations, is in whether and how the poem can matter, and uses as starting point the lyric masquerading as prose poem, & conversely--alternating & responding to one another (if that is possible) within the section of the book.  So, thanks to Halpern (#^&(*!&!!) I'm now having to entirely rethink this section.  Oh well, it was certainly worth the read.  This is an essay to teach if yr a teacher, now.

EcONVERGENCE FOLLOW-UPS

Pre-script: One of the most important (and by "important" I mean honest, full, and resistant and lovingly so) conversations about the use value of poetry, and the stakes of being HUMAN, that I've come across online--it's up at PhillySound.  A conversation between CA Conrad and Dale Smith.  Rarely do I find an online conversation to be intimate, or "life-giving."  Let's face it: all this blogging is usually a bunch of bullshit if it isn't something for which this artifice SHOULD have been designed: alerts to people about interesting things.  Anyway.  Please read.

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So, I'd meant to do this earlier here, but, hardly at the computer as of late for myriad reasons...  

For those of you who were not able to get to EconVergence (judging by the size of the crowd, most of you at least on the west coast did), there are a couple of places where you can go for some fairly thorough write ups.  I'll say here that Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand did an incredible job working poetry into the conference--from the main reading event to some amazing panels--and so my deep thanks to them for their hard work seeing that EconVergence was just that much more vibrant.  And the conference as a whole, as far as I could tell (with so many things going on and so little time to be able do anything other than catch glimpses) was energized and energizing, with most reports coming back as extremely positive--a good, important start for an integrated reup of left activism in the region and beyond.  

Go here, to Nonsite Collective for my write up, and write ups from others, including Kaia Sand, Rob Halpern, and David Buuck.  Nonsite's blog is set up as interactive and self-organizing, and the write ups are meant as jumping off points for further discussion, especially as EconVergence relates to larger discussions on the difficulties bringing "activists" and "artists" (so-called) together in non-traditional ways.  

(For below, in both cases you'll have to scroll down a bit--or, as recommended, read the newer stuff first as you work your way to the discussions!)

Go here, to PhillySound, for a wonderful discussion (recursive interview style) between Frank Sherlock and CA Conrad, who cover their experience of EconVergence (and wow: they seemed to have gone to as many panels, workshops, etc as anyone at the conference).

Doubtless there are other places online one can find coverage of the work being done at EconVergence as well as the work that has come out of it.  Important conversations insofar as we have a lot of work to do.