Julie T. Ewald Reviews MAKE BELIEVE

@ Galatea Resurrects

The idea of the island creating a sort of sanctuary while imposing seclusion is confounded even further with the quotation Donovan uses to begin this piece: “An island / Has a public quality.” The quote comes from objectivist poet, George Oppen. This quote re-envisions the notion of the island that one gets from Ben-Ner’s film or from the content of Donovan’s poetics as it suggests that an island is not a place for sanctuary or separation, but a place that is open and accessible. This could also be a red herring, as the piece is dedicated to another poet, Gregg Biglieri, who is known for a masterful use of puns.

Krist Gruijthuijsen
Could you expand a bit more upon this usage of existing languages, forms and images? In other words, could you explain what the term quotation means to you?

Adam Pendleton
I think it changes depending upon what you’re trying to achieve. Critically, I think the idea of quotation is a problematic track. As an idea, it opposes a necessary engagement with pertinent critical forms or discourses. I think in the realm of language, within certain linguistic vocabularies, appropriation is a very liberating idea, but quotation is a very limiting one. Within the sphere of art it’s the other way around, wherein quotation can feel more expansive as a position while appropriation is more limiting as an operating space. Any kind of definition that I do have is a functioning one. It is one that works itself out in my work. The making and the doing is its own definition. Quotation or appropriation is a way of confronting reality on its own terms.
--from Quote Number One. (Or how to thrive on linguistic prospects.)

Mic Checks

"the ear is the only orifice that doesn't close"
--from Sharon Hayes' Parole

Your silence blows the
Ears off my head

So that what I'm hearing
And what isn't seen
Structures the rupture

What's left-over
From speaking privately
In a public place

Some ways to imagine
Not being them
Being sous rature
Or simply tongue-tied

If the tongue
Had eyes and they
Were here

If they
Looped like history
Like the history of
A scream

Or steam from that
Whistle not yet blowing


The voices absent in this present
In their presence coheres a statelessness
Without subject

Sentiment is the tenuous
We screaming again
Words one lip-synchs for their life (RuPaul)

Discourse schools a public void
In private just because
You put a mic

On me doesn't mean my voice
Will carry

Or anyone is out there listening


We are archivable which means
We can easily be forgotten

We are public which means
We are double/multiple/substitutional

Through no lack of repression
Do the words finally appear

However private we are however
Rich our interior life

[politics which pressures the inside out]
[politics will smoke us out]

[politics will drive us into the world]
[politics will drive us into the open]

Where any one may listen


To this resonance pattern
To these distances wherever you go
Voice a form of intimacy without control
Emotions before they formed and hardened
Into a public speech

Which summons us all these voices verbs
Recorded but not sufficiently heard
Stricken from the record it would seem
Before sound could appear
Thinner than the thing-in-itself
The magnetism of all lost futures


In the breaks silence sticks
Wakes the dead from trace

The living from paradise
Semblance sleeps in our ears

Across eras cross-phasing hatch
Private spaces in public

Tongue in my mouth in
Your mouth mic checks.

Check out David Wolach's generous response

to my piece about Nonsite Collective at the (former) Harriet blog:

http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/2010/05/nonsite-collective-on-harriet-blog.html

"Giant oil-services provider Halliburton may be a primary suspect in the investigation into the oil rig explosion that has devastated the Gulf Coast, the Wall Street Journal reports. Though the investigation into the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon site is still in its early stages, drilling experts agree that blame probably lies with flaws in the ‘cementing' process -- that is, plugging holes in the pipeline seal by pumping cement into it from the rig. Halliburton was in charge of cementing for Deepwater Horizon."