D I U 6 8 august 94 To the Editor: Accusations of duplicity from a man with two names need a grain of salt in order to go down. Thus, Albert or Hubert's diatribe [DIU 5], though small potatoes, could definitely use some salt. If Albert or Hubert doubts my existence, that's his business. The fathers of our country granted freedom of belief _and_ disbelief. But why he links my words, which certainly do exist, to the brazen ignorance of a college teacher escapes me. I thought I was criticizing just such an animal myself. I fail to see how clarification of the context and intention of my work falls under the category of "bogus scholarship." Please elaborate. Grave crimes? Fitting punishments? People who eavesdrop on conversations in elevators--and don't have the good grace to keep what they hear to themselves--are beneath contempt. Very Truly Yours, Marianne Moore cheerleading marbleCraved O'Lintel formal gardenmaze intoned in chapel --------- Invocation Oh, VOID! by thine ovoid thighs' shine, by thy shins two, too by thy toes, by KUPFERBERG, and ATOM ANT, by all that's wholly discrepant, bless this, our holey endeavor amen --Ficus strangulensis ------ Re-Verb - Re-Wave ping Ping PING PING Ping ping ing ng g Ping pIng piNg pinG Gnip gNip gnIp gniP WaveResound soundReWave ReWeave soundWave ------------------- Gotta learn how ta Mew, Moo, Mud DownGet comma missing sipping sim-ing in the typerwriter simean chorale. 'cause it sounds like the next (sic)logical extension of the sort of place Bill Paulauskas provides for expermental 'writing'... The DreamWorld BBS winith which people, just plain joes like you and me log in jack around and leave out b4 the next 'guy' wires in and leaves traces linealogically in time laterThan lastB4 guy but if all at once can talk and all see can we but be the 3000 behind the wall or approaching orbital incertes sunHeart 2012? Hoo as in HooRay! De Jute Mill done 'SPLODE! --Ficus Loopy history. "They've closed the New York State Thruway," says the voice, and then the announcer, with the intonation of embodied events: "It's not like Woodstock, it is Woodstock." Ah, the difference. The money-back guarantee of the dialectic was that everything in the future would be like the past, like, that is, with a difference. The accumulated interest of dialectical difference was the possibility of completion, of an absolute music. The inherent danger of repeating history was in fact the very promise and possibility contained in the kernel of difference, of pure time, held in every event. We are now out of time, and the stutter of the radio commercial collapsed twenty-five years into pure repetition, into the sequence of album releases, into the Warner Brothers music catalog. Pure repetition is death: this is indeed the space of absolute music, of pure dirge. The being of history, of event, of returning, can only be our silence, stasis, our end. Rather, the return of Woodstock is a haunting, for we are already dead. The audio and visual records, the careful return to Yasgur's farm: we haunt the original site, we play with its bones, to remember that it once occurred, and thus that we were once alive. Even for those born after Woodstock, its memory ensures that there once was an event, and the recreation allows their ongoing ghostliness. Does this mean that we have to go through Watergate again? No, or at least hopefully no; we selectively haunt sites that both existed as events and seemed at the same time to portend a different history, neither dialectical nor eschatalogical We now live not on the promise of history to come, but on the nostalgia of golden oldies and instant classics, the promise that there once was history. The radio advertisement condenses the sounds of the 1969 event with the ticket sales of the 1994 concert. The broadcast pulls them both into a space where history takes second place to wavelength. Where the difference is spaced on the radio (and in our lives) as consecutive cuts off a single greatest hits album, nobody much cares. --Rocketmensch * The saturday of the original Woodstock marked the professional debut of O.J. Simpson. Coincidence? When fundamental change is predicted, it is foreseen in terms of the present A paradigmatic age expects a new paradigm, a messianic age expects a new messiah, an age dominated by a particular institution -- such as the paternalistic family or the capitalist mode of economic production -- expects new institutions to serve more or less the same function. With millennial change, however, everything changes. The informing concepts and the informing concept of the informing concept-conceptuality itself-themselves fade. This moment of total change has been practiced and failed in the name of Modernism. The core of Modernism is the persistent expectation of the event without precedence, as the advent of Jesus was without precedent. Jesus was not the classical archetype who was forever repeated on the wheel of time but the historical human who was born once, died once, and was important. This was new. History was without precedent. It was not merely that Christianity told a new story: never before had this kind of concrete, individual embodiment of a concept informed time, thus producing history. To be sure, Modernism has produced only a stylish sameness. Stephen Daedalus may hope to awaken from the nightmare of history, but Joyce as artist can accomodate him only by recreating classical prehistory. The sense of history persists even now only in the historical concept of technological and economic progress. Many believe the problem of poverty can be solved by making everyone richer or making everyone a robot. This is, of course, the distraction: the promise of secular paradise. Now the evidence that the historical project is not viable mounts dramatically. The coming change is not a historical event, not even so historical as to be the end of history. The exhaustion of history. Even the forgetting of history. History as a dimension will seem as trivial as, say, the dimension defined by the flight of portentous birds for Homeric folk. No new paradigm, no new messiah, no new institutions. Let us say that change has come about. The epoch-making change did not take place at some time. Change has forever come about. Humans did not notice; they were distracted by an impossible conceptuality, by the production of a world which could be both perceived and thought -- that is, a world to which one is habituated, a place by which one is held. Such a habitat is produced by cruel discipline: anti-sexual, anti-life, death obsessed. It is necessary to see every thing as something else: "I could see very precisely a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corp of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the book of a lake; monsters and mysteries." This is what we teach school children. Rimbaud perfected the technique, but he saw how he had been exploited. We have yet to learn his lesson. Happily the educational system which uses this cruel discipline is coming apart. The complexity of seeing everything as something else and the immense interpretive task which this complexity requires cannot be sustained. --Thus, Albert or Hubert air.txt wrpi 91.5 fm troy, ny 4 august 94 0820-1200 Wailers--"Small Axe"/Burnin' Purkinge--Lollapalooza soundtrack (4 track) C V B.--"Happiness Is A Porpoise Mouth"/The View From Here Trio Hurricane--"North"/Suite of Winds - morton feldman--"Rothko Chapel 2"/Rothko Chapel - MC Solaar--"Prose Combat"/Prose Combat Sun Ra & his Solararkestra--"Other Plane of There"/Other Planes of There Jason Martin--"Fussy Loud Bear Ornament"/cassette Bongwater--"Love to You|Reaganation|Double Birth|Bruce|Pool|Rain|Havana| Pentagon|Truth/Double Bummer - morton feldman--"Rothko Chapel 4"/Rothko Chapel - Julius Hemphill Sextet--"Flush"/Five Chord Stud Jemeel Moondoc Sextet--"Changing the Mood|High Rise"/Konstanze's Delight Fred Ho & the Afro-Asian Music Ensemble--"An Bayanko"/The Underground Railroad to my Heart - morton feldman--"Rothko Chapel 3"/Rothko Chapel - Fred Ho & the Afro-Asian Music Ensemble--"Caravan"/The Underground Railroad to my Heart Ornette Coleman/Gregory Gelman Ensemble--"Prime Design/Time Design"/side 1 Purkinge--finale Lollapalooza 8-2-94 Julius Hemphill Sextet--"Mirrors"/ - Julius Hemphill Sextet--"Mr. Critical"/Five Chord Stud Trio Hurricane--"East|West"/Suite of Winds Sheila Chandra--"Speaking in Tongues IV"/The Zen Kiss +=+ +=+ +=+ +=+ +=+ Descriptions of an Imaginary Univercity (c)irculates weekly via the logic of snowflakes + wepress. 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