group blogs

"Group blogs are like trying to sleep like a little prince in case somebody looks in your window."

--AK

it's nice when the senator writes back

Dear Ms. Klaver:

Thank you for contacting me regarding funding for the arts. I completely agree with you that funding artistic creation and performance is important and worthwhile.

I am, and have always been, a strong supporter of the arts, both the performing arts - music, theater, and dance - and the visual arts. Throughout my career in Congress, I have consistently voted in favor of grants for artistic endeavors, including funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and as your Senator, I will continue to do so.

New York has always served as the center for the arts in the United States, and as such it has benefitted more from Federal funding than any other state. If we are to remain the leader in the arts world, it is critical that New York continue to receive its fair share of Federal dollars.

Again, thank you for contacting me regarding this important issue. Please feel free to contact me again if I can be of any further assistance on this or any other matter.

Sincerely,
Charles E. Schumer
United States Senator


Send your own email to your senators and congresspeeps asking them to vote against cutting funding for the NEA here; it takes two minutes, and the email is already written for you, although you can add a personal message.

Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer

can be your last summer, too, if you forgot about, or forgot to enjoy, the heat-sweet of the summer of '10, when we started to think about the 90s a lot again and became the tweens of a new millennium. It was my first full summer in New York, and there's a lot of New York in these songs, so they're getting me for that reason, too.

It's out today, and Merge is streaming the whole thing here.

But you should really buy it, 'cause this "From the Desk of Eleanor Friedberger" notepad comes free with purchase:

My favorite tracks are the no-regrets "My Mistakes," the desert-miragey "Inn of the Seventh Ray," and "I Won't Fall Apart on You Tonight," which staves off till tomorrow whatever might've happened last summer.

Here's the video for "My Mistakes," of the genre feminist-quotidian-hilaritas, one of my faves since I just made it up:

(Note sax!)

The Baroness @ Jacket2

<-- "To Djuna"!

Tanya Clement and others on Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven:

We locate and situate her poetry in previous and current literary trends by introducing three previously unpublished poems, new and groundbreaking biographical facts concerning the Baroness’s German poetry, a rereading of her Dadaist poetry that situates it within the frame of feminist performance art, and a contemporary poetic response to her work.

Check out the feature, "Dropping the Baroness in the middle."

On Kim Gek Lin Short's Run

You can read my review of Kim Gek Lin Short's scary-fantastic chapbook, Run (Rope-a-Dope, 2010), by going to the Denver Quarterly reviews site and scrolling down to the bottom, or by going straight to the PDF.

Undead Influence + Notley's Doctor Williams' Heiresses

There have been a bunch of fascinating, infectious conversations about influence over at Montevidayo recently, and since influence is something I'm thinking a lot about for a PhD exam reading list on concepts of innovation & avant-garde movements, I'm trying to sort out some divergences between the received models of influence &/vs. what Danielle Pafunda, Joyelle McSweeney, and others are proposing.

I'm just culling their terms here, and creating a too-simple binary between old & new, but it's helpful for me, anyway, to see them all together in conversation, so I thought it might be interesting for others:

Received ways of talking about influence

• receiving
• inheriting
• aping
• reclaiming
• recovering
• genealogical
• archaeological
• patrilineal
• diachronic
• property
• profit
• literary progress
• "familial, incestuous, kinship, property-based, gift-exchange, legacy" (DP)
• "literary forebears, elders, teachers, or even people" (JM)
• "flow, flux, fluidity, and fluctuation, saturation and supparation" (JM)
• "innundation with a fluctuating, oscillating, unbearable, sublime, inconsistent and forceful fluid" (JM)

Proposed ways of talking about influence

• anachronistic
• synchronic
• infectious
• lawless
• viral
• mutating/mutagenic
• deformed/deforming
• monstrous
• translating
• eating
• cannibalizing
• rupturing
• leaking
• spilling
• contaminating
• toxic
• undead
• uncanny

What's so exciting to me about the latter list is that it fucks with Time, big time. Hope to have more to say about that later. For now, this from Alice Notley's Disobedience, to link back up with more on her below: "Time is another manly construction" (69).

And again, I know it's not in the spirit of the latter cluster to put concepts that want to infect and spread into an orderly list, and I also know it's messy to title the first list "received ways" in the context of the second list, but since I'm not advocating for one over the other so much as sorting loosely, I hope to get a pass, or to get schooled in a better way of sorting. (And I suppose, when one's ideas travel virally, one never knows how they'll mutate.)

It's worth noting, too, that the concepts in the latter list aren't all "new" -- there's a conscious reclamation of dead metaphors going on here. It's "the usable past," but the process of using the past isn't cheerful and utilitarian (American?): it's more like an exhumation, like wanting to live with a corpse. And the corpse is decidedly undead instead of dead in this schema.

[A tangent: Poets and theorists are always going to take their metaphors from the physical world -- biological, mechanical, technological, etc. -- but I have to admit that I have a very basic resistance to this that I haven't been able to fully articulate yet. What would it mean to make (in words or pictures) new models of influence that don't look like something pre-existing, something you can point to (family trees, viruses)? I don't know how to do this yet but I'm in training.]

*

This spring, I wrote a seminar paper on Alice Notley's Doctor Williams' Heiresses (published by Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press in 1980), a lecture which opens with this amazing perversion of influence, which seems worth sharing here.

For Notley, influence is queer, androgynous, incestuous, mortal-meets-divine. Her story of influence is also a story about the New York School, but not one told straight. And, as the title of the lecture indicates, it's especially about the generation of women that includes Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, and others, and it asks how they came to be (here they're the daughters of "male-female" poets that we think of as male poets, such as Frank O'Hara, who mate with goddesses, "evaporative non-parental types"), which is also something I wonder about, in the form of trying to study it in a scholarly sorta way.

Notley plays on mythological genealogies such as Bulfinch's, and so satirically troubles the act of trying to make any sort of lineage that looks like a family tree. (I'm also really interested in its tone, but don't have many tools in my tone-kit yet; anybody know of any great theoretical essays on tone, especially that known as the tongue-in-cheek??)

Okay, here 'tis, click to enlarge: