Openned - Other - Jow Lindsay's Account of Openned 6

These reviews of Openned 6 were first published on Jow Lindsay’s blog.

"The sixth Openned reading will take place on Wednesday 29th November at 7.14pm at The Foundry." I arrived late but saw a film & three great readings (Piers Hugill, Emily Critchley & Redell Olsen).

The table where there are sometimes books and flyers was bare. I remember seeing: Steve and Alex (the organisers). Sean Bonney, Sophie Robinson, Lydia White, Rosheen Brennan, Adam, Jonathan Stevenson, Drew Milne, Ceri Buckmaster, Tim Atkins, Seaton Gordon. Please tell me who else was there.

Openned 6 (part 2)

Piers read from a Wrong Sonnet sequence. The form goes like this: fourteen-line poems of two words per line, then of three words per line etc. Piers performs on the pattern of a succession of controlled explosions of dodgy TFL packages. Usually you can discern a drift of dodgy ideascrammed into them.

Like a little cloud of pirates. “Suddenly, with a loud huzza, a little cloud of pirates leaped from the woods on the north side and ran straight on the stockade” (Treasure Island).

My head (including face!) is a bolus of prejudice, and Piers a well-spoken Englishman. These two facts toy with my experience such that I periodically forget or don’t really believe that he’s reading a poem and think, “Wow, Piers is being really weird tonight.”

What is the status of the counterfactual in Piers’s stuff (“arithmetic without numbers” etc.?). I think it’s mainly to do with virtuoso jaggedness of concept: ‘try to think this . . . oh yeh then try to think this’ etc. Compared with various strengths of possibility, conceivability seems a timorous theme. But in Piers’ stuff, it’s combined with serious interest in the wetware of conception – in how concept crystallises in different languages (he goes coco-bananas for translation & many of his poems are at least mildly macronic), and in even more fundamentally-discriminated architectures (how thought occupies different bodies, environments, technologies). This interest sits snugly beside what I suppose is the Language poet’s doubts about Romantic, author-contaminated text (I remember Piers telling me about writing successive lines on different days, for example), and a hushed techno-feminist drift which I noticed for the first time that night.

POSTED BY JOW LINDSAY AT 17:39

Openned 6 (part 3)

Emily it was like The Titanic, I saw it nineteen times — I CRIED EVERY TIME.

It possesses Mallarmean vagueness but it is arctic. “Too much borg desired by him seeking the la” connected all the slots I saw apart from Emily Critchley’s. She read When I Say I Believe Women. . .

Emily’s book is in two acts and this remark really applies to the first. World-fur yes, but not cuddle-fuzz, the fuzz of lacking contact lenses and being locked out of a room of facial nuance.

Openned 6 (part 4)

Dell Olsen is a furhistor and seems to have stopped wearing glasses.

POSTED BY JOW LINDSAY AT 18:02

SATURDAY, 2 DECEMBER 2006

Openned 6 (part 5)

Marianne Morris is actually if you look the the poet laureate of impatience (Keston Sutherland), and in act one of When I Say I Believe In Women … Emily is gunning for poet laureate of petulance. It’s “centred on the kind of feminism that, surrounded by male competitors / friends, still refuses to be compromised or outdone in ethical, social or artistic terms. It rejects gratuitous self-promotion as a major cause of skin-loss & instead challenges the word at the expense of the line, to the suspicion of the phrase, at the beck & call of the sign” (Emily Critchley). Though writing is here as revenge or redress (“When […] When […] When […] When people hear you talk they think […]”), aggression is endlessly undercut by carefree unaccountable obliquity – hardly jewels of self-deprecation and concession – “When people hear you talk they think: / you’ve got a way with yourself – or: if it were / me I’d run – or: words.” – “That’s what comes from being / informal I guess. Or not cool. Or erotic.”

“Plurality, boundlessness, asserting the right to speak differently, have resulted in the absence of a united front from which to ‘prove’ the ‘rightness’ of their feminist practices over the arguments of their traditional counterparts” (Emily).

Emily mentioned Ken Edwards’s (?) characterisation of her stuff as “out of focus.” The blurring is divided ambiguously between a blur shadowing a moving target like a speed-smudge, and a blur belonging in the steel of the patriarchal .50ish BMG (delivering 12.7ish x 99mmish rounds) pointing at her. I guess maybe therein the feminist pulse. Aminal wit radiating through self-preoccupation periodically threatened as, framed as, and even begun as political and interpersonal confrontation.

“Implicit in all this was a fatal altering, in spite of rigour, succinct but weighed on. It was helpful to take a little series of pills in place of you.”

I haven’t vacuumed in hours. And there is a moth on the floor whose wings have never been properly vacuumed – never. I am too tired to work out if this is right, maybe sort it out in the morning.

Had a look now, it’s spot on.

Punk Faun. “Coarse marble on canapés.” I preferred the pacier parts of the performance, though perhaps they wouldn’t have been the same without preparatory ceremony? Redell in another context: “A writing that is already half someone else’s or that quite obviously belongs elsewhere seems to me to offer quite an interesting position from which to begin an investigation, to acknowledge those previous contexts and see where it leads.” I have written a fuller response to the visible parts of Funk Porn (we’re not dumb you know Dell) in the more appropriate medium of not going to bed.

Some parts you can hear on Archive of the Now. Go to “Dell.”

The multimedia piece. I think it was the vocalisations which Dell achieved here which made me include her reading in “Too much blorg desired by him seeking the la” catogory q.v. Mechanised hypnotism. AND ALL THAT THAT ENTAILS.

Also, amusing ourselves in the chasm between two different discourses of “survival” – I guess the darlingly hilarious language course material was not coincidentally Arabic. “How to say: ‘I don’t speak Arabic, I’ll open fire, get some.’”

There is a quality, which is like speed but is not syllables-per-minute, which Dell’s reading built up to, and which is also apparent in some readings by e.g. Tom Raworth. You might call this quality “pressure.”

Hypothesis 1. Sound is fast but well-formed (according to normative moulds borrowed from accent, tone, character, expressiveness, etc.). Phonemes hardly ever come out chipped. So maybe all I have in mind is an accelerator not permanently floored, but here and there lifting a little – before tricky turns, before stripy boys chasing bouncing red balls – though the car still always moves a little faster than it should.

Hypothesis 2. But it’s a bit different from what goes on in e.g. most of this performance, by Chris Goode, of ‘An Introduction to Speed Reading.’ That antic buggeraught, hectic, frantic, is only barely out of control – and attains a pitch only rivalled by Chris pretending to be his mother online when things is slow. So maybe what I have in mind is some“contradicted tone,” one which implies no familiar circumstance. “Rushed calm,” for example, or “rushed boredom.” Chris’s performance, by contrast, mainly deals in self-consistent tones like panic, frenzy, exasperation, anger, mania, etc. (which are often interestingly in tension with the subject matter; but I’m talking about contradiction largely contained within tone).

Hypothesis 3. A discernable compression technology: some particular consistent discarding of redundant sound. The algorithm may be bundled into an accent.

A quick and partial list of factors probably active in contributing to an impression of speed and/or pressure. Syllables per time unit. Words per time unit. Conceptuality per time unit. Events per time unit. Sonic pattern per time unit, especially rhyme per time unit. Pattern per time unit. Audience attention per time unit. Emphases per time unit. Discrete things per time unit. Transformations per time unit. Dictions per time unit. Allusions per time unit. Names per time unit. Fast or slow things described. Unmarked senses related to speed. Words related to speed, or shrapnel thereof, embedded in other language. Speaker reputation apropos speed. Syllables per word. Proportion of percussives. If music plays, the overlay of those beats and the metric emphases. Flow. Pitch. Breath: when and how it goes in, and how the voice deforms according to its levels in the lungs. Proportion of onomatopoeia or somewhat less markedly motivated signs. Introduction of superfluous sonic rubble: the twist of a syllable into an ornamental syllable-and-a-quarter, grace notes. Phenomenal sound “filled in” by the listener when deleted from a context (usually a word).

{To do: distort some recordings. Maybe Marianne makes pop music}.

See also: Keston Sutherland’s “Four Theses on Speed.” “We do not emerge from the circle of hermeneutic inquiry; we reverse around it like a pair of tweezers on a malfunctioning merry-go-round. Speed reading is the lived-experience of this problem’s actual nullity.” I don’t know if “from an ongoing series” meant there were going to be other theses; but Keston’s notes on a scandal in Quid 14 develop the theme a little, via deferment and overconceptualisation. What’s not to like?

See also: rappers. Twista (nee Tung Twista) is ideal – seek a joint known as “Frum Da Tip of My Tongue.” NoClue is the fastest rapper in the world, official, though he wears thin pretty quickly. I think there were some interesting fast rappers in the whole Grouch / Pigeon John / Sunspot Jones group but can’t at the moment remember who. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is fairly fast and ubiquitous. Sway is fast, British, and non-gangsta. This person seems to have tried too hard, and I found this compilation.

“Say this is writing London marks” etc. in performance makes for entirely unverifiable “Marx” noises throughout.

Some useful background information taken from a book published in 1982 (like me): when Marx came to London in the Summer of 1849 he started out in Camberwell before moving to 4 Anderson Street, just off King’s Road, the wee Sloane Ranger. Soon it was eviction and the bailiffs seizing even the bairn’s stuff to repay debts so they took two small rooms in the German hotel, 1 Leicester Street, just off Leicester Square. When forced out of there they moved to 4 Dean Street in Soho, then down the road to 28 for six years. Four kids (two died), a sprog (was born, later died), one maid (faithful, impregnated) and nurse: “[t]he Marx family was very cramped because Karl needed one of the two rooms for his study.” 9 Grafton Terrace, Fitzroy Road, Kentish Town (renumbered 38 Grafton Terrace, then 46 Grafton Terrace). 1 Modena Villa (renamed 1 Maitland Park Rd). 41 Maitland Park Rd. Picnics on Hampstead Heath. Drinking at Jack Straw’s Castle and The Spaniard’s Inn. Pub crawls along Tottenham Court Road. Plays at Sadler’s Wells. Creditor-fleeing holidays to Manchester and use of the same Reading Room where Swinburne fainted etc. Holidays in Algiers, Monte Carlo, Geneva, the Isle of White, Eastbourne, Margate, Harrogate. Meeting of the International Working Men’s Association in St Martin’s Hall, Covent Garden. In 1870 Engels moved to 122 Regent’s Park Road. Marx buried in Highgate Cemetary, Swain’s Lane.

Experiment: replace all the “says” in this piece with “think” or “break” or a pause. Or “is.” Or “at.” Or “wills.”

“Put some thrash on” became a pun through repetition.

After Kanye’s first album dropped everyone started doing that sped-up sample thing. Maybe Minimaus’s decision to dissolve her set into some delightful

cutesy old recording she’d found involves “her work as part of a nexus of artists and thus a range of approaches directly addressed to a contemporary milieu

and its malaise” and even lifting “out from that malaise in a combination of humour and critique” (Allen Fisher)?

getting going, getting lost in thought, getting distracted, upset, interrupted; tearing, burning work; the end, the end, the end. Mostly typewriters; a smudgen

of quills, wordprocessors). It’d be good though, to have a remix in a more mechanical manner – a structuralist and mythographic account of the Hollywood

novelist, with a strong claim to objectivity via metonymy. So Carrie off Sex in the Sic, you’re out (columnist not novelist) and Jack Nicholson is an interesting

limit case, because his ‘novel’ is the repeated sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (cf. Rachel Smith, peas psycho).

Constrained writing. Fresh blog skin is good in hexes. The first hex, for contrived constraint conformed to at all costs. A peculiar contour of disavowed choice

is sent rippling through a million unchosen, unshakeable constraints which are more directly and more deeply involved in the text’s valorisation (though as

Jeff Hilson has argued, “fun is not the only form of fun”). Naturally Blogger and Google don’t condone wussing to compromise equilibria before outcomes are

clear. But form should soak up the constraints of process, or it’s the hex. Hex number two, that’s for constraint qua poor cozen of research. Projects receive this

hex which very nearly do unfundable research into something gnarly, but waive basic scientific common sense to do with controls, sample space, isolating

variables, etc., on account of Primrose Ponce. Clearly these two hexes form a Scylla and Charybdis Venn diagram. I think remixes are the answer.

Update: astonishing screenplay. In there somewhere.