Conceptual Poetics: An Editorial Pause
Monday 16 June, 2008 K Goldsmith: 'Throughout the weekend, hundreds of audience members, panelists and respondents were in accord as to the general principles of conceptual poetics. Only one respondent, Graca Capinha, expressed contempt for the genre, claiming that words shouldn't be made into "objects" or "commodities" for a hungry market, something she felt was swiftly happening. She lamented the fact that these writers have not made active political change as poets in Portugal (her country) did during the dictatorship where they were instrumental in change.' Link
Poems and Poetics
Monday 16 June, 2008 Jerome Rothenberg's blog: 'TO BEGIN ... As the twentieth century fades out the nineteenth begins again it is as if nothing happened though those who lived it thought that everything was happening enough to name a world for & a time to hold it in your hand unlimited the last delusion like the perfect mask of death' Link
24: Season 7 trailer
Sunday 15 June, 2008 From Wikipedia: 'The debut trailer aired on October 25, 2007. In the trailer, Jack is seen testifying before Congress concerning his past extralegal activities, including the torture of terrorist Ibrahim Haddad. The international version of the trailer is largely identical but features an additional line where Bauer implies personal enjoyment from torturing a suspect. This line is cut from the US version.'
LRB: Iain Sinclair - The Olympic Scam
Saturday 14 June, 2008 'Much of this termite activity, the neurotic compulsion to enclose and alienate, justifies itself by exploiting temporary fences to use as masking screens, noticeboards for sponsors’ boasts, assertions of a bright, computer-generated future. In Laburnum Street, where a construction firm named Mace Plus is inserting a Close Encounters of the Third Kind space-platform school known as The Bridge Academy (an explosion of matchsticks, bubblewrap and extruded terracotta control modules), the surrounding fence boasts an exhibition of sanctioned street art: a pop-Hokusai novella of floods sweeping away the pencil-thin mosque and the abandoned Haggerston swimming-pool. A clever move: jazzy visuals, loud but on-message, pre-empt the attentions of spray-can subversives, class warriors, animal liberationists and wannabe Banksies hoping for exposure in the weekend magazines. There is no requirement now to use the rim of a derelict petrol station as an audition for a Hoxton gallery. As I said to a depressed realist painter with a unit near the London Fields railway arches: ‘The laughing crocodile splashed on your shutters is worth more than any of the stock you’ve accumulated over thirty years.’ Jock McFadyen, showing his edgeland retrievals in a Cambridge Heath Road car showroom, has taken to making painterly reproductions of graffiti cartoons found on canalside walls and condemned breakers’ yards along the broken perimeter of the Olympic Park.' Wonderful stuff. Link
23rd July
Friday 13 June, 2008 The next Openned night will take place on Wednesday 23rd July. Details soon.
Sorry
Friday 13 June, 2008 There was an outage of Openned over the last day in certain locations, ie everywhere. So, sorry. Normal service has been resumed, but if we disappear again, rest assured the responsible parties will be mullered.
From: "Source"
Thursday 12 June, 2008 in Steve Willey Around Churchill Gardens and boiler towers, Thistle lost at sea as he searched for predictive birds, Terukuni Marut, to the flattening of Beirut, bad omens are simply misplaced futures, three thousand year old Elephant tusks, suitably small even frail. Donald Hamilton the architect of Arcades for blackout shoppers designed the Internet, "a continuous covered market". On cue his hand short-circuited, faded in and out like two eighties movies overlaid, but badly. On Grosvener Rd a London Gannet circled at a height of about one hundred feet. It rose soaring and circling slowly to a great height until it was almost invisible. This was the first time… he thought, then voices… "the Cuckoo Clock" "You're worse than sums" "a fairy land "cuckoo" who gave her a lovely feather cloak and took her into the house of the Mandarins in an ivory palanquin… he had seen a gannet, yes, in London finally after twenty one years. Twenty-One years, twenty-one knarred knotted nodes, that the tree shape suggested could only have been designed to conduct electricity, like a teslacoil he felt its salubrious destruction. He took a mid-stride photograph. He understood acid as a counter balance to intoxication, and following vast hermetic networks of interlinked travel as a comparable technique. Bombsites are potentially infinite. He took photographs of the names of the housing estates that lined his pace: space. Coleridge House, Chaucer House, Shelly House, Keats House, and Darwin House. Intoxication and evolution, copulating skylarks fluttering at strange angles of complicity, what political energy either one had was drained out by the incorporation into the signed housing block; confessionals. A fork down the evolutionary road of Romanticism. Of course he hated evolution: evolution as sand timer, evolution as glass storied building. He disliked the over-arching narrative; he preferred the process, the mutation. He saw mutation as end point, as goal in its self, evolution as fashion statement. Being open to possibility wasn't enough, the situation had to be set up, excited. He felt the ground swell, dead matter screeched from a husk, Crud Lake glue fluke, as he came across Ripley House. Copper burnt back reveals immolated tracks of speak spark, a silent writing forced onto flat plain which takes your fingerprints if you let it. And interior became exterior and exterior became interior and he had to start the process again. Films: he took a photograph of the inners of the boiler house in search of the site. He did not find anything. Twenty minutes earlier that day tomorrow he found a plot of land suspected to hold a ghost. His iron filing head was drawn across the concrete and fixed once more onto the power station, which had been watching him all the time. Now he was a girl called Sophie in a yellow search of absence, having been found out and sorely wanting by a Venice distilled in monochrome, and Rome perhaps, watching Keats live between Battersea bricks. A future: where roads become poetic nodes leading to websites of continuous revolution, where administration becomes a position of responsibility not censorship, an activity that each individual is engaged within. Future as: I can talk to you face to face whilst simultaneously experiencing another country in ways far more bodily than Google maps, and democracy emerges from localities and voting is as instantaneous as the stock market without the violent exclusions. And now he was an elephant and now a young woman with a ponytail to her waist and now a bowl of goldfish all six rendered in black and white and now he lifts off and fixes onto a clock the time reading 1:45 pm and now he is a film reel filled with food and bombs and now he is Patrick… and now he is a table and now he is a ghost that emerges right off the screen and actually soars into the audience.
Augusto de Campos
Thursday 12 June, 2008 Link
When you confront colour, it becomes something different. The dearth is not a question of merit, but of economy and scale. Compare:
with
Something magical indeed!
More than the writer's words
Tuesday 10 June, 2008 Ellen Steinbaum at the Boston Globe: 'Go to enough readings and you'll see the gamut - readings going very wrong and very right and hitting every note in between. The easiest gaffes to spot are inadequate lighting, a nonworking sound system or a soft-voiced reader who refuses a microphone, a host who stumbles disrespectfully over the reader's name or credits, a reader who goes on too long or - what seems strangely more common - not long enough.' Actually, I think most of those are good things. Link via Silliman's blog.