HANEKE (I)

Of mimicry 'I' sings a million helpless rebellions
until 'the end of history' or there is a 'We' to sig

nify all messed-up and bloody we became 'Heal
thy' 'heathens' in a world-battle not even made

bright by quotation or Chopin what music do w
ords approximate that 'We' can not what exper

iences her fingers gently pressing the keys thos
e cuff-dangling hands demonstrating 'the soul'.

L E E F R I E D L A N D E R

Changes come to control the weather clouds all
Angular visions puffy 'ice cream' ones (those!)

Signs of 'literal' reality (not) really being 'Reality'
The frontal depth (of a pole) frustrates one's view

To the (monumental) or-di-nary or is a revel-
ation waiting to happen (and happening, and...)

I Keep Imagining Your Sadness in Quotes

I don't know about you
But I would really like
For you to dispute the thought

Balloon that looms just like
A picture of ocean waves above
My head and wants to say

Everything to you in scare quotes
Like you've heard every-
thing I was going to say before

Or the authorship of my words
Was somehow doubtful or clearly
Attributable to someone other

Than myself I wish you would
Burst my bubble and discretely
Sing the song I couldn't

Sing myself because everything
I do feels false without you even
The simplest things like breathing

Or making a pot of coffee they
Seem substanceless even though
You told me on the phone tonight

No one can make me happy but
Myself that you had given every-
thing up for "art" your other lover

Your friends your city and me
And if you couldn't be sad you'd
Just assume not feel anything at all.

We Are Always In the Midst of Eyes

~ for Jane and Brandon

All we ever wanted it seemed was a certain
Gentleness and care content to reason
Things out or hold the door and be absurd

Sometimes now that we’ve got that I wonder
What place of number multitudes houses
Or eyes look to reflect meshes these leaves

Rustling near in a city pastoral with no other
Object than to ramble every time we meet
Or danced I think of what you will be together.

Never was or will it be about
Love per se but a relation
Forces grant each other
As number obscure dances

With number there was always
A dance party where we were
As leaves also buttress leaves
Separately we spoke of embodied

Waters that won’t run out on us
Or what it makes or who makes it
Otherwise than what we were
Just this *pound of flesh* to be

Doled out by the universe
Truly it is love that replenishes
Overwhelms all other responsibilities
The dailiness of *you as you*

Of *me as me* the fact that we
Danced at all or found the time
For tears we can never retract
Their joy was subtlest.

Peace On A presents: John Beer & Terry Cuddy (Intro)

Peace On A

presents

John Beer & Terry Cuddy

Saturday, October 6th, 2007 8PM
recommended donation: $5

curated by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A (btwn 10th and 11th)
NY, NY 10009

about the readers:

John Beer's poems and criticism have appeared in periodicals including
Another Chicago Magazine, Barrow Street, Chicago Review, the Chicago
Tribune, Colorado Review, Crowd, Denver Quarterly, Joss, Milk,
MiPoesias, MoonLit, Time Out Chicago, Verse, the Village Voice, and
Xantippe. With Max Blechman, he edited the special issue of Chicago
Review on Kenneth Rexroth (Fall 2006). He is a Ph.D. candidate in
philosophy and social thought at the University of Chicago.

Terry Cuddy is an artist, teacher, and curator who lives in upstate New York. He is a graduate of Alfred University's School of Art and Design as well as SUNY at Buffalo's Department of Media Study. He has had three residencies at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, and was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow for Video Art in 1998. His work is in several collections and has been screened throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

work samples:

Trapped in the Closet

I love you: the first lesson
gunplay teaches. I find my breath
under the table, a tourniquet
not needed at the moment.
I open my eyes and the wall bleeds you.

Everyone dreams big these days.
For instance, universal war,
or grab a massive advance
on a memoir about growing up
in a family of bankers,

trusting in quiet accumulation
of capital, as though that's
a natural fact. Was it really me
under the table? I couldn't be sure,
but I knew my leg hurt a hell of a lot.

Everyone dreams of love, why not?
I'm no different from you,
even if I take strange pride in my beard,
the way a couple of gray strands
seem to announce a certain challenge

met: we both made it this far.
Out by the beach the jets are keeping
us safe. It only burns for a second,
this composure, this disease
we accept as the cost of ourselves.
~John Beer


on Terry Cuddy’s *The Harriet Complex* (video):
Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery and personally led over 70 slaves to freedom. During the U.S. Civil War, she led raids, and served as a nurse, a scout, and a spy for the Union Army. After the war, she settled in Auburn, NY, where she founded and oversaw a home for the aged until her death in 1913.

The Harriet Complex is about the Harriet Tubman legacy in contemporary Auburn. Here elementary school students perform plays about Tubman while local officials debate whether her significance is worthy of a memorial highway. Her name can inspire pride, expose apathy, or provoke disdain. This phenomenon is dubbed “the Harriet Complex.”

The Harriet Complex combines documentary techniques with poetic devices to challenge viewers to engage history in an experimental way. Archived texts, photographs, recorded interviews, electronic maps, and theatrical performances are recomposed into montages. This is a re-imagining an American hero and the city she chose.

"There are still too many trees"
~David Hilliard quoted in Jean Genet's *Prisoner of Love*


intro:
The Course of Particulars: introduction for Terry Cuddy

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
~ Walace Stevens

This immediacy, in the fullest sense, of relation to artworks is a function of mediation, of penetrating and encompassing experience...
~ Theodor Adorno

Since I have known Terry Cuddy, his work has existed between design, the printed book, multimedia, video, site-specific installation, live music performance (including a rock opera, *Dr. Steadfast’s Last Migraine*), sound recording, and an ongoing investigation of sound and visual image, image and text. For anyone of lesser energy and commitment such a synthesis of approaches to making art would result in a dilletantishness. With Cuddy, his variety of approach seems natural, even necessary.

Cuddy’s practice is an intensely local one that nevertheless always touches problems of global importance. Minute particulars move towards universals, extending themselves as such, twisting like an arras in this extension. In this way Cuddy is a distinctly North America ‘nominalist’ (Emerson) during a time when it is most regrettable—ethically, politically, culturally—in many ways to be one. Like Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Susan Howe and other Modernists before him he represents a genius of place as the local always remains in relation to other localities and individuals in his work—a world at large more often than not constituted by incommensurability, contradiction and conflict if not also coevalness and multitude.

During a time of goth. revival, hyper-appropriation, virtual realities, and neo-psychadelia in popular visual art there is something unfashionable, and therefore difficult, about Cuddy’s commitment to a Modernist legacy indebted to traditions of film and video art (Hollis Frampton, James Benning, Tony Conard, Nam Juin Paik and others come to mind) as much to poetry and critical theory (Barthes, Benjamin, Adorno, Wittgenstein). After these confluent Modernist strains Cuddy returns compulsively to problems of representation, how sound, image and text synaesthetically mediate our understandings of the world as political, ethical and social beings; how, what’s more, we are hyper-mediated as citizens only provisionally “democratic” in an era of American democracy’s last gasps.

In a video from 2004, Cuddy poses as the host of a home improvement program. He explains that in last week’s episode he was doing some work on the basement of a house and now he will show that work to the viewer. When, in the next scene, we find Cuddy in the basement he explains the renovations. While Cuddy explains a box appears in the center of the room. The presence of this box is unsettling in its familiarity, a text-book example of the uncanny. Before Cuddy leaves the shot ostensibly to show the viewer another room of the house he explains that he will take a photograph of the basement to document the renovation. A hand appears in the frame of the video and snaps a photograph; the photograph takes unusally long to flash, producing a stroboscopic light effect. The hand of the photographer, ominously, is wearing a white glove. The hand looks official, authoritative—like that of a doctor, or inspector. There is the pervasive sense this hand represents the law, and that we have been at this scene of a domestic crime—a crime of interiority—many times before. In the following scene we are asked to compare the photograph just taken to another one. This later photograph is yellowed and pixellated, and shows the walls and ceiling of a room damaged by water.

When I saw Cuddy’s video for the first time I had not seen the photographs of Abu Grahib yet. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them, couldn’t make a “friend of horror” to quote Chris Marker after Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in *Apocalypse Now*. I sometimes wonder what my reaction would have been to Cuddy’s video had I seen it after encountering the Abu Grahib photos, especially that of the hooded man standing arms outspread with electric wires dangling from his chest. In the following scene of Cuddy’s video we see a television. While a program plays a hand begins to draw on the television screen with a magnet (a technique of vintage video art) slowly revealing the silhouette of the now iconic Abu Grahib prisoner. As the figure is gradually revealed a voice-over explains something about the relation between figure and ground; meanwhile the channels start to change, and eventually surf rapidly rehearsing a public amnesia for the tortured and elswhere suffering.

Through such forms of mediation—the parody of popular home improvement programs like *This Old House*, the use of historic video techniques, and appropriation of popular television footage—Cuddy fuses attentive and distracted attentions, diverging from both. The result is moral critique in the form of negative consciousness. The images we receive in the video are made things—that is, they are visibly produced—and Cuddy's viewer remains aware of this throughout. Beyond such awarenesses of form, Cuddy describes a haunted content. The memory of Abu Grahib as it is both affixed by indelible iconicity (the silhouetted image of the prisoner magnetized on the tv set) and erased by an attention deficient spectatorship (that of channel surfing and home–improvement programs both).

As we might also say after Chris Marker's *Sans Soleil*, Cuddy makes us see “the black” in lieu of deferred contentment--"happiness". Procedure creates a blindness the origin and termini of an imaginative-critical faculty (and this is the dream of an anachronistic Modernist aesthetic practice as it collides with politics, the socially ‘real’, to this day). Form renders its contents senseless, anti-mimetic, and so produces meaning, has effects, instead. What is at stake in Cuddy’s work is finally consciousness itself as a form of action. Historical mediation via 'intermedia' as useful, if not instrumental. Playfully instrumental. Creatively didactic. A moralism that hints and points and winks.

In Cuddy’s most recent video, *The Harriet Complex*, we move among a series of scenes informing a controversy about Harriet Tubman’s commemoration in Auburn, New York, the final resting place of Tubman’s body and incidentally Cuddy’s home town. The specificity, the concise localness of Cuddy’s video, which features children performing a play about Tubman’s life in a local grammar school, a town counsel meeting where arrogant counselmen (and they are all men) argue whether a highway that runs thru Auburn should be named after the seminal Abolition leader (in the end, an argument prevails the highway should not be named after Tubman since this would make race an “issue” in the town, and therefore divide the citizenry along racial lines), a beautiful sequence of animated topological maps tracing Tubman’s Underground Railroad routes, and synthesized video images of town monuments commemorating Tubman, as well as photos and other documents of Tubman’s person.

Memorably, in the final scene of the video, Cuddy’s friends, family and community read letters written by locals and published in the local newspaper concerning the naming of Auburn’s highschool after Tubman (a commemorative controversy prior to debates about the naming of the interstate). During this segment each shot presents a close-up of the speaker’s mouth. That one only sees the mouths of the speakers is estranging, and distances what is said from what is seen, image from voice, ventriloquist from that thrown. That the letters are spoken by people of all different ages, genders, shades of skin, etc. provides yet another degree of reflection. The content of the letters, in their sequencing, demonstrate racial antagonism as it occurs rhetorically through the typical “letter to the editor” forum. In the very words used to state the problem of commemoration, the often absurb and illogical rhetorical arguments against the naming of the highschool, racism is revealed as banal, an everyday evil. Unpressed by events more exigent than the seemingly apolitical decision to name a school or highway, racism remains unexamined critically and therefore unabated in the town.

Through a variety of techniques and tactics Cuddy consistently returns his viewer to the fact that something is being watched, and reproduced as such (if the viewer is in fact a coproducer of aesthetic objects, and not merely subject to a work’s or author‘s authority). While certain techniques of *The Harriet Complex* would appear in loving tribute to early video art—a moment Cuddy certainly feels himself located by, and to take-up—I think they also revitalize video art’s relation to content. The content in this case is racism observed at an extraordinarily local level while extending towards problems of global import: who gets remembered, and how so on the basis of their skin-color? At a micro-political level, Cuddy’s video contains many of the problems we must still confront if racial ressentiment is to be overcome.

The key to activating this overcoming, as Cuddy’s video substantiates, is not to make speech a dirty silence clarified (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens’ terminology), but to make silence “still dirtier”. That is, the more levels of mediation between a work of art and its content—the more semblance and the 'real' are confused by craft—the closer we may feel to the actuality of a social problem in all of its messiness, contradiction, and the different positions of its interlocutors and actors. Or, to put it in the terms of Theodor Adorno: it is only through the mediation of artworks that social contradiction will be presented as truth *beside* political actions, consequences and effects. I feel this being *beside* as I encounter Cuddy’s work again.

Anti Gone (II)

I.
Alertings ached such demands fall in
A family war gains like my violin spell
In spring genome die hands or hostage
Such gestalt-hating dubs sighs allies.

II.
That which we most are breathes instead
Of this a wind of sickness or the bug
Monstrous vermin big insect of what
Unworked sickness what voice was not

At home in us staring out separate
Windows in their hugeness bloated brown
And real stilled by our need to make

Anything stick rotten with the products
Of universality tidbits and littler objects
Of thought dirt pervades invades this space
Age this was for the face whistling with
A piece of platinum in the gums where once

Was the tooth a veil the skull vibrating
Moves plates in place of thinking felt
Shakes and also shifts pain is a morsel

Of this whistling in the bones pain was
A monument couldn’t actually be felt
All at once blood was a veil flush with
The head fresh with a sense of being made.

III.
Another night of this no not now forever
You will bury your brother in a fit of logic
The anger of all men will collapse

Grace gives way to wax blood moons no
Sacrifice excepted no one allowed to live
Or die so undevoured to remembering.

IV.
That which knows the what but not
The who this arrow in time’s for you

Like a descent that must ascend like
That which is neither animal nor vegetable

Nor mercurial merely whose reward is boundary
Of undertakings committed in a field

Of force unforeclosed and disavowed
Fitted to a narrative of causes the tissue of which

In ritual the animal must give up the world
To gain anything stinking with names

For what they will do against all their purposiveness
Agape with will neither above nor below

Sewers fill with this misrecognition
The eyes of which are reeking wrecks.

V.
The stones you experience
The suffering at your lips
The stain of conscience

Doubles death’s indifference
Contrives wisdom the stars
Before your very eyes those stones
You will never experience

The nothing that wasn’t flashed
In the different incommensurable
With any bled soundtrack.

VI.
Defines the whirlwind
Deifies the thunder
Defines the simple
The simple who

Will open a window
Will desire this particle anxiety.

VII.
That sex was not your self
Nor subject to death
Listen to this wind as it
Recedes an irruption of all

That is a double-death
With swiftness siting the stones
Ageless they will always be
For you but never for us

Who was of neither death
Nor life nor entirely of law
Life poured down what could
No longer be consumed

By fire for even the gods
Reject us this sense of conscience
This sense of where nothing
Will go wherever it is put

A type of third-sex the corpse…

VIII.
When nothing takes fire
This is what is left
Of the fire our names were for
The taking unbounded on all

Sides by song structures
A dance is disaster to this
Numbers lay in wait
And wastes whatever we did.

“All pulcritude is relative”
Does is matter what Montaigne tells us is true?
All these texts are examples
MOST PLAN TA GENET

IX.
So seldom to go
Back thru what we were

Chaos O which arrow
Was the case and how it drew

Flesh out of earth
How it swerving consecrated

No thing.

X.
“Antigone dies because she’s just a girl and too proud…”

Two Poems

Someone wanted to dig a hole as deep as the Towers were tall

There were sunsets and spots in the flames no one would have believed
There were shadows like the sky doesn’t usually make them
Upwards they seemed to be falling in the play-back of all things the bodies
No one could tell what real time was or if it were a simpler distance than this
Only place was important, “always and only place,” in that motion
The auto-industries, who were largely to blame, didn’t flinch if not for oil
Democracy kept flowing and flowing channeled by our distance from history
Undulated on those tubes where its hero voice kept hailing me
Even those who should have been that event’s truth got sutured.

*

Anti Gone

The disgrace
Destroy
My sister
heard nothing

Nothing
Not a word
Not since
We lost

Our world
A double breath
A double
Death left

No further
Neither nor
Bad
In the air

Troubled trouble
A sad dead body
None can bury
Bereft bereft

Who know nothing
Condemn to death
I will never
Forsake him

Unloved
I have no power
Nothing of you
I would not permit

Not the living
But the dead
For I will
Forever

Dishonor no one
Nothing but terror
No fear
Tell no one

No scream
Denounce me
Your love
Is impossible

To seek what
Cannot be done
Will hate
No one.

Crayon 5 Subscribe (Ad)

Dear Crayon Subscriber,
Support Crayon! The Crayon coffer is near empty. There is too little money to cover the expense of printing what will be a 350+ page issue. Yeah, it’s gonna be BIG! Crayon 5 elucidates the diffi culties of refl ecting on beauty and the limits of presenting in language beauty and ugliness. Its dialogue of twenty-fi ve essays is accompanied by sixteen brilliantly complementary and contradictory book reviews, creating an intensively complex provocation and irreducible call for continuing discussion on what the art of poetry and of community will be. Crayon has succeeded due solely to the generosity and interest of its readers. We believe that the widest distribution of the 5th issue will occur if all participants, including authors, readers, and their institutions, fi nancially support the journal. Crayon 5 is scheduled for publication September 2007 – it will knock your socks off!

Please send $15 (or more) to subscribe to Crayon 5. We are grateful (we promise not to spend one cent on the maintenance of the Crayon Lear Jet) for your subscription. In order to save on your subscription, please send your check (and postal address) made out to Roberto Harrison to:

Roberto Harrison
2542 N. Bremen #2
Milwaukee, WI 53212

Sincerely,
Andrew Levy & Roberto Harrison Editors

SUBSCRIBE TO 5 NOW AND SAVE! 1/2 July 17, 2007
see Crayon 5’s contents on the next page...
SUBSCRIBE TO 5 NOW AND SAVE! 2/2

Essays on Beauty:

Beauty:
Another Reading
Beverly Dahlen

Some Limits of Ratio;
or, Aesthetic Has No Goal
Kristen Gallagher

Cardinal Numbers, Ordinal Beauties
by Joe Amato

porous, nomadic (or, para encontrar o
acontecimento impalávrel:)
Chris Daniels

K’isa/alangó
C. Vicuna

Beauty
Nicole Brossard

from Music For Porn
Rob Halpern

Using Blue To Get Black
Julie Patton

Prosodic Body
Robert Kocik

Ants on a String
Sawako Nakayasu

What Logic in a State of Insanity;
Or, Essay on the Dislogics of Beauty
Kristin Prevallet

Beauty’s Interrelation
Brenda Iijima

Beauty Note
Steve Benson

Gouging Beauty Standing
Nearer To an Action
Laynie Browne

3 Images:
* 21st Century Narrative:
Diagnostic Beauty Quilt
* 1980s Narrative:
Beauty is Perfection
* Afterlife Narrative:
Commodifi ed Love Object
Diane Ward

What Beauty after The Brothers Quay
Thom Donovan

bites from THIS IS THINKING
Alan Davies

Gentle Exfoliations /
for Andrew & Roberto
Alan Davies

A Cuff
Lisa Robertson

The Container for the Thing Contained
Michal Lando

With the Oldest Cherubim of Knowledge
Peter O’Leary

Some starts
Peter Inman

In the Planned Community,
& Stopping off at the Wetlands
Jonathan Skinner

Terrifying Angels: Aesthetics,
Digital Writing and Use
Andrew Klobucar

FORM AND STRUCTURE Reframed
A NEW “ON THE CULT OF THE ‘NEW’
IN OUR CENTURY”
Alan Prohm ‘07 translating Asger Jorn 1956
excerpting from Henry Van de Velde 1941

Poetry
A Reading: “...the Beautiful”
Beverly Dahlen

12 Poems
Linh Dinh

subliminal city
Belle Gironda

from Bicycle
Roberto Harrison

from Scratch Space
Andrew Levy

3 Poems
Corey Mead

5 Poems
David Pavelich

Ghastly Dew and Itasca (with glosses)
John Shoptaw

Those not worthy are scattered wide
Laura Sims

7 poems
Sally Van Doren


Book Reviews:
Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a
Mobile Culture Joe Amato
Dan Machlin

Liar by Michael Amnasan
Robin Tremblay-McGaw

The Hermeneutics of Rupture:
Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America
and Other Poems by Amiri Baraka
Tom Hibbard

Assertions for Steve Benson on Steve
Benson’s Open Clothes
Alan Davies

Open Clothes by Steve Benson
Brenda Iijima

“This is Abigail Child Moving”
This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics
of Film by Abigail Child
Kristen Gallagher

A Reading 18 – 20 by Beverly Dahlen
Stephen Vincent

Enthusiasm by Jean Day
Martine Bellen

Accidental Species by Kass Fleischer
Belle Gironda

Petroleum Hat by Drew Gardner
Kass Fleisher

The Destiny You Reverse May Be Your
Own – Making Dying Illegal by Madeline
Gins and Arakawa
Alan Prohm

Repression & Remnant:
Lola Ridge’s The Ghetto
Thom Donovan

Who Opens by Jesse Seldess
David Pavelich

Walking Theory by Stephen Vincent
Pat Reed

Hannah Weiner’s Open House
(& Interview with Patrick Durgin)
Judith Goldman

Nonsite at Wordpress : Halpern on Brady/Donovan, "Presencing the Disaster"

Rob Halpern and Jocelyn Saidenberg have provided some overview of the talk I gave this past Saturday, and the very rich discussion that followed among myself, Halpern, Saidenberg, Bruce Boone, Beverly Dahlen, Taylor Brady, Tanya Hollis, Brandon Brown, Lee Azus, Miranda Mellis, Brian Whitener, and Stephen Vincent:

http://nonsitecollective.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/report-a-nonsite-talk-w-thom-donovan/

You may also find at the blog Halpern's extremely generous and thorough introduction for my reading with Taylor Brady this past Wednesday at Cameraworks Gallery in San Francisco:

http://nonsitecollective.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/taylor-bradys-and-thom-donovans-nonsites-introductory-comments-camerawork-725/

Gam no. 5/summer 2007

Stacy Szymaszek's *gam* has resurfaced in NYC with sumptuous cover art by Etel Adnan. One of the great ongoing magazine cultures as far as I'm concerned...

I HAVE IMAGINED A CENTER // WILDER THAN THIS REGION (Ad)

Now out with Cuneiform Press...

I HAVE IMAGINED A CENTER // WILDER THAN THIS REGION: A TRIBUTE TO SUSAN HOWE
Edited by Sarah Campbell

With the intent of marking and celebrating Howe's years of teaching, the contributors to this volume were asked specifically to comment on her pedagogy and their experience of being her student at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she taught from 1988-2007.

Contributors include: Nathan Austin, Sarah Campbell, Barbara Cole, Richard Deming, Thom Donovan, Logan Esdale, Zack Finch, Graham Foust, Benjamin Friedlander, Peter Gizzi, Jena Osman, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr, Sasha Steensen, and Elizabeth Willis. Edited by Sarah Campbell with an introduction by Neil Schmitz.

120 pp. 23x 13 cm. (2007) 250 copies. $10.

Die Back

~ after Rebecca Solnit,
composed on Cape Cod, July 2007

Die back to what you weren't
But always were "wetback"
An architect of green space
If cement was flexible the social

Density of forgetting was
All we were the bodies inter-
Action convulsively came
Back to life jumped that fence--

Leaving you leaving me
For this grace in horizons notes
World becomes the eyes
All dunes commence

Miss all targets like a tern
Falling to rock rests here--
Not no one is them not the
Dead the invisible water

Tables what lies deeper
Beneath or their instruments
History's us and not us--
Consequence cuts like "a line

of synchronicity" size and
Quality quality and size
Consequence cuts us but
The synchronous sing not

Of synchronicity only or
Fundament all of a sudden--
No one is them and this is
Feedback a percept tucks

Folds what other sound we
Were filled with holes with
Other arrows signs take-in
This air which made a difference

The discontinuous flight
Of all eyes unjoined--
Of bodies or a whirl of green
The sight cleaved what

Heart once my body under
Yours the flow of which
Throws me grows to a price
Too great or pitch to place

Each last sense none hero
To the other thus sunburns
Address responsibility--
Shorelines process the bodies.

Moby Dick as an Original Text of Total Process / Gam 5 (Note)*

Herman Melville’s *Moby Dick* means a variety of things to a variety of people. Such is its richness as a text forming a discourse. For myself, as perhaps also for F.O. Matthiessen, Charles Olson, C.L.R. James, Susan Howe and others before me, I would like the book to remain irreducible, and to merely make that text meaningful for my own life and culture in relation to Melville’s own as I best understand them.

*Moby Dick* is so many things, and yet it may broach all things insofar as it is a book of what I am calling *total process*—an intertextuality describing a complete process of whaling more or less as it occurred until the period of the 1840’s and 50’s when Melville composed the book.

Reading *Moby Dick* these past months I have not turned to favorite passages—“The Whiteness of the Whale,” the speeches of Ahab, Starbuck and Stubbs, the Shakespearian tragedy comprising much of the later book. Instead of attending *Moby Dick* as a work of “literature,” I have looked to that which may be considered most banal about the book’s contents: the details of a culture and of a labor process as they are fastidiously, if not completely, described by Melville’s text. It is perhaps only by citing whaling in its minute particulars that Melville may express profound things about the world, his society, and so encounter the general and “universal”. Through “the whale” and whaling one proceeds to dilemmas of ontological proportion as they presuppose ones of production, craft, labor, identity, history, etc.

*Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together.* ~ Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29th, 1951

Encountering Melville again, “ontological heroics” antedate the facts of whaling as they alone may fathom a speculative aether—compose imagination, proposition, allegory and critique. Preceding William James’ *Principles of Psychology* by numerous decades there is Melville, that proto-Radical Empiricist, encyclopedically documenting whaling through research, perception, insight, and experience. That Melville could get down as much as he does about whaling is extraordinary considering his brief stint as a mariner, and that much of his information was culled from research in books—a fact the chapter on cetology underscores, as well as the “Extracts” prefacing the book.

Melville should be placed beside the most radical and thorough documentarians of the 20th century, and especially cinematic radicals like Dziga Vertov and Chris Marker, inasmuch as his book is organized through a method of narrative parataxis anticipating cinematic montage and radical collage. In this regard Melville, and not Whitman—whom Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vertov all admired tremendously—may be the true predecessor of early Soviet Realism and French Cine Verité. Beyond documentary practices, we should also consider Melville an original ethnographer in his dramatic recording of the speech and behavior of whalers in the mid-19th century. Since I’m not a scholar of the 19th century whaling industry, nor of Melville per se, the “reality” of this ethnographic practice is, for me, unverifiable. Yet I continue to be interested in Melville’s *Moby Dick* as an ethnographic-documentary method: choose a particular field of inquiry and gather the facts about it allowing much else (everything?) must follow. It is likely Charles Olson cites this epistemological movement in the following selection from his “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn”:

*And to hook on here is a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it.

And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you’re in, forever.* (*Collected Prose*, 307)

Whaling was Melville’s “saturation job,” the thing he dug most intensely, and through this thing he got to more difficult truths about his world than he probably should have otherwise had he continued to write adventure stories like *Mardi* and *Typee*, or pursued strict existential-structuralist tales like “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “I and My Chimney”. The “second book” of the two comprising *Moby Dick*—that book Olson famously argues Melville writes after reading Shakespeare closely, marking-up the margins of the *Works*—arguably grows out of the first book being a “job” for total process. Through the deliberate mediation of a total process recording many facts the world should be converted—imaginatively, allegorically, propositionally, alchemically:

*There was only one thing in the spring of 1850 which he did not feel he could afford to do: “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’”

In the end, in *Moby Dick*, he did. Within three months he took his head again. Why?

Through May he tried to do a quick book for the market: “all my books are botches.” Into June he fought his materials: “blubber is blubber.” Then something happened. What, Melville tells:*

I somehow clung to the strange fancy, that, in all men hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult, properties—as in plants and minerals—which by some happy but rare accident (as bronze was discovered by the melting of the iron and brass at the building of Corinth) may chance to be called forth here on earth. (*Call Me Ishmael*, 37-38)

What “wondrous, occult properties” are called forth “in all men” by an effort of total process?

Works Cited:
Melville, Herman. *Moby Dick*. Oxford World’s Classics, 1988.
Olson, Charles. *Call Me Ishmael*. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
______. *Collected Prose*. ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander. intro Robert Creeley. University of California Press, 1997.

*"Moby Dick as an Original Text of Total Process" appears in Gam 5, edited by Stacy Szymaszek with contributions by Etel Adnan, E. Tracy Grinnell, Deborah Meadows, Jane Sprague, Rob Halpern and numerous others.

Peace On A presents: Urayoán Noel & special guests (Ad)

Peace On A

presents

Urayoán Noel & special guests

Sunday, July 8th 2007 4PM
recommended donation: $5

curated by Paolo Javier & Thom Donovan at:

6th & B Garden
@ 6th St. and Avenue B
http://www.6bgarden.org/july2007.htm

about the presenters:

Urayoán Noel is the author of *Kool Logic* / *La Lógica Kool* (Bilingual Press)—a “books of 2006” selection by the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día—as well as two volumes of poetry in Spanish: the post-industrial object-book *Las Flores del Mall* (2000) and *Boringkén*, which is forthcoming with spoken-word cd from Ediciones Callejón. He has performed throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico, as well as in the Dominican Republic and Perú, and his rock/ spoken-word collaborations with composer Monxo López are featured on the dvd *Kool Logic* sessions. His essays, articles, interviews, reviews, and translations of Latin American and Latino poets have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattapallax; Rain Taxi; Mandorla; Teachers and Writers; and Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, and he is currently completing, with Guillermo Rebollo-Gil, a bilingual anthology of Puerto Rican poetry since the 1960’s for Terranova Editores. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, he is a doctoral candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at NYU and lives in the South Bronx, where he co-directs the arts organization ‘spanic Attack and fronts the sometimes rock band El Objeto (Opa, Objet Petit A).

Double (Consciousness) Dactyl

Higgledy Piggledy
Booker T. Washington
Screamed “Up from Slavery!”
Making some noise
Wrote a polemical
Autobiography
Dog-eared by W.
E.B. DuBois.

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Past presenters at Peace on A include Alan Gilbert, E. Tracy Grinnell, Cathy Park Hong, Paolo Javier, Robert Kocik, Wayne Koestenbaum, Douglas Martin, Eléna Rivera, David Levi Strauss, Andrew Levy, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Sasha Steensen & Charles Valle. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

“*Here*, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
*us*, and nowhere but you to be.”
~ Robert Creeley

photos*:




*photos courtesy Bill Coffel

America

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

*People* are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

*Here*, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
*us*, and nowhere but you to be.

--Robert Creeley

Unliving Democracy

"I" wants such little
--Distance to lay waste
To "me" again and touch--
The bodies I am not

The bodies I have been
--And those a mind
Has sacrificied like--
Soldiers we will never see

The guns of those
--Who'll never understand
My "self" but the desert--
Goes on in *strength*

And thus a politicking
--A policing and this "a"...
Not breaking its trances--
Not for *me* or for *I*

A greener world waits
--For no one but for here
So polluted by the voices--
Unraised by cash money

A simple tomb goes thru
--All the words of prosody
Green and yet fulfilled--
When they are spoken

A mile's nothing except
--Immeasurable 'stead of us
Negative experience suffices--
For worlds never been

Black ice or white lists
--Who go enlisted and site
Destiny like a voice--
Authority gains in aether

The little ones go and give
--Their lives away like big ones
The big ones go among them--
Susceptible to Democracy.

Demonstrations

"that which presents itself in the appearing of a situation"
~ Alain Badiou

Demonstrations are the ey
es of the mind the law of
these cannons subtracted
from our organization Spin-

oza watching a spider fight
the Left upward 70,000
dead completes the excepted
subject of the Commune


what's integral weak under
standing strong imaginati
on my lover aims names
found which formed fog of

war weapons of principle
contemplative verbs the vio
lence of all things that mo
ve somewhere in history.

Peace On A Presents: Sasha Steensen & Charles Valle*

Peace On A

presents

Sasha Steensen & Charles Valle

Tuesday, June 12th 2007 8PM
BYOB & recommended donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Sasha Steensen is the author of *A Magic Book* (Fence Books) and *correspondence* (with Gordon Hadfield, Handwritten Press). Her new manuscript, *The Method*, is forthcoming from Fence Books. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aufgabe, Denver Quarterly, Shiny, Shearsman, and the anthology *Not For Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing* (Fence Books). She is one of the poetry editors of Colorado Review and a co-editor of Bonfire Press. She teaches Creative Writing at Colorado State University.

THIS PLAIN PLACE

Nothing has happened in this place
and it happened forever
until recently.
It was forever happening
amid Method's fluctuating vision.
He heard rustling in the bushes,
the bandicoot poking around in its pouch,
to pull finally nothing
out.

He understood the animal's sorrow
to find plainly and without denial
emptiness where a relation ought to be
a deep and majestic blue
into which one carefully
places
a heart,
plainly
steps back,
places
a body around
a heart,
steps back
into a past place where
only the monks,
deathly afraid of nothing,
turn the deaf
away.


Charles Valle works in educational publishing. His works have appeared in various literary journals-- most recently,2ndavepoetry.com. He sleeps, spins records, and eats pupusas in Brooklyn.

SKEIN

She will read your arterial
curves pressed flat—gathered in a box,

she will imagine a language
for your seasons—she, who only

translates fall as the ending
of monsoons—she will create

your branch, your roots digging down…

What do you say to someone

who cannot name new worlds?

find the green one with five fingers on fire


Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Past presenters at Peace on A include Alan Gilbert, E.Tracy Grinnell, Cathy Park Hong, Paolo Javier, Robert Kocik, Wayne Koestenbaum, Douglas Martin, Eléna Rivera, David Levi Strauss, Andrew Levy, Kyle Schlesinger, & Jonathan Skinner. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog(whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

“demonstrations are ‘the eyes of the mind’”
~ Gilles Deleuze quoting Baruch Spinoza

*the above image is of Anton Van Dalen's "Migratory Dwelling".

Turning

I was when I turned when you

Turned from me believing nothing else

True a silence of all thoughts on

Your lips the truer test of which

Is for every refusal.

Despairing

~ after Kafka

All hell is hearing
Especially the way the head
Is not so alienated
That it can't diasppear

Her hand went here and
So it was bound made
Us and the gaze it was
Something different
Than all despair touched.