xx Diu 5 december 94 "intrinsically" although hackers die too i play electric guitar hare krsna --er "The Lime Works"/Thursday 10 pm - midnight/WRUB-SUNY at Buffalo/October 20, 1994 Eskimo Lung We Magazine Tory Miller SkittleRama/Screaming Slugs " NEWBAND Silent Scroll (Joan La Barbara) Microtonal Works Jin Hi Kim Eternal Way Komungo 'Round the World Margaret Leng Tan Primitive (John Cage) Sonic Encounters Haydee Schvartz "Variationen" (Arvo Part) New Piano Works Tenko/Ikue Mori Rain Death Praxis Lou Harrison Sonata no. 2 for Cembalo Music from Mills Lois V. Vierk Cirrus (for 6 trumpets) Simoom John Cage Cartridge Music Music for Merce (realized by David Tudor, 1988) Cunningham Steve McCaffery from "The Curve to its Answer Live at the Ear Margaret Leng Tan "Gong" (fm Ancient Music Sonic Encounters (Ge Gan Ru) Joseph Celli Sky (S for J) Organic Oboe Haydee Schvartz I Shesha-Shayi Vishnu (fm New Piano Works Quattro Illustrazioni - Giacinto Scelsi) Thomas Buckner The Angle of Repose Sign of the Times (Annea Lockwood) Jin Hi Kim/Eugene Howdy Partner Komunguitar Chadbourne ** We play cassettes! ** ----- Interesting report on the poetics conference/thanks for same. Fascinated by the person who thought the "Canterbury Tales" dirty, as opposed to "Hiawatha" -- social conservativism and romantic nationalism continue their long alliance, I suppose. Will someone provide an account of Longfellow's "invented traditions" in this poem, and burst his bubble? ----- IDENTIFICATION It is bound to happening, a curve that passes through us, accidental cross-pollination of purposes. It has bright edges. Something broken inside, thirsty for light. It is the psychic hygiene of blue sky and wide open spaces. It is a certain form of sensorium, hyper-sensitized, prehensile. It is the origin of spices, indwelling coiled splendour, allusive perfume. It is the inspiration of the waning moon. It moves to define the possibilities (from which we read (climbing the tree) eternity). It is a luminiferous aether. It is the fortuitous conjunction of sunlight and water, wind and leaves. It is hologrammic, emblematic and ubiquitous. It does not exist, in a special way. It is living information, tele-erotic and abstract, ineffable. It has tusks of ice and the elongated snout of alchemistic fishes. It is beautiful as the aquatic nymphal stage in the life cycle of certain insects. It is a strange loop to move within, without meaning to. It sings to itself, softly. Of moonflowers and morning glory, starswarm and shadow. It is the emerald word hidden in dendritic thickets. It is something else that is being said. Listen: wind in a shell, in the water a woman singing. Echoes, confusion of voices, senses (splash, sunflash). It is. --djd STUDENT MANIFESTO NO. 1 Poetry begins with what language cannot say (or perhaps, because of ideological constraints, refuses to say). Poetry exceeds its instrument (currently fashionable language- centered work relies on its instrument, turns poetry back in on its means as an end). Coltrane highlighted the in- ability of the instrument to, in Williams words, "say what needs to be said." The limit, however, should not be confused with limitation, but rather, should be revered as the malleable condition of dance. Between the possible and impossible is friction, heat, fire (the virtue of words, someone has said, is that they burn, and cannot be understood). Meaning is not a statistically produced truth but an impossible gift eclipsed by a future that is _always already_ determined. The love that such a gift bears forth makes the world disappear. --scope : WEIRDS my attention span grows shorter. my music and words nearly evaporate. a few haikus to illustrate: Elegy (for a pop icon) Underneath the bridge By a slender thread you hang Stomach full of pain DNA Denature me girl Change my poison to blood Teach me the meaning Diet Of Iron And Dream Walk on the fine line Tally chickens and purge ghosts Eat fossils and eggs As I Lay Dying Choking convulsions Inexpressible delight Dome of emptiness --"Finney" if necessary George Spencer-Brown: "....a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart." William James, on Nitrous Oxide: "There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference." Both true. Random shooting in a crowded street as a work of art is hackneyed. That many people still find it interesting illustrates the painful lowness of the general taste. Try something else. --Thus, Albert or Hubert Although I can honestly agree with and even egg on many of Alexis Bhagat's complaints about the 'scene' of poetry today (*The Poetry Strike*), things haven't been significantly different since we developed/inheirited our notions of what poetry 'ought' to be, and perhaps more importantly, 'what poetry is.' To blow the lid off the construction of High Modernism, as Cary Nelson's *Repression and Recovery* does, is not just to resuscitate some leftist impli- cations of Langston Hughes or bring back to the light of day some poetry which wears its social commitments as a badge of honor, rather than the shamed and obscured politics of the high modernist aesthetic. What is important is the way that the opening of the field of inquiry, from a canon of the art of a few great white men (& 2 or 3 women) to a historical frame of all art produced between WWI and WWII, exposes the vast multiplicity of voices, styles, attempts, frustrations, signifiying practices in general, etc. which were occuring at that time. In one way, it can be depressing to try to speak in/to a chaotic world in which there are no universally accepted rules for what one's voice is *for*. But this kind of depression is based around an idea of what the poet & what the poetry is/does which is nothing less than a nostalgia for a high modernism which never existed, a nostalgia for a hypostasization which was merely constructed out of the polyphonous past. The lack of discernible rules, the profusion of crappy, devalued, and generally pandering poetry is a situation which, if not exactly a step forward (and the only reason it's not a step forward is that it's been this way before), is at least still desirable when the impulse toward centralization would lead to the elision of a lot of work which is testing and stretching boundaries of expression, boundaries which we NEED to stretch if we are to even attempt to escape the condition of Circe's swine, men who could but oink. These swine were speaking to Odysseus, and if we too sometimes ask for there to be an Odysseus, a grand arbiter of what is artistically and communicatively possible, then it is only the smallness of the individuality of our minds which asks for this. To address the heteroglossia, you need many directions, and less rules to fall in line with. Isn't it ol' CF2785's line (don't you feel like Zamyatin sometimes?) that goes 'It takes a million voices to sing a millenial song?' Isn't there something to this, even on the level of the strike? To withhold one's labor from the continual accumulation of wealth in the ruling classes' hands in order to contest power is one thing. But unless you're willing to argue that all our efforts at art and communication are merely pawns in a mass colonization of our minds by the cultural logic of late capitalism, I see zero cause for a poet ry strike in the sense of withholding, and every cause for a poetry strike in the sense that poetry, even at its smallest, most shrivelled, least listened for and least likely to be heard by other swine as 'I am' or 'are we,' yes, POETRY IS A BLOW AT THE ANNEXATION OF OUR BRAINS TO THE ARISTOTELIAN LOGIC OF CONSUMERIST CULTURE. It may not have great effects, in magnitude. But it's all we've got. If you want to talk about the way we think as being structured by language, by our relationship to the body of language itself or even as the complex interaction between ourselves (solitary) and the world (human and not) through language (Williams' practicing consciousness as I understand it), it's poetry which keeps us from being completely immersed in 'what is' so that we would even forget to ask about 'what could be.' If there's going to be a poetry strike, then let's strike first -- before even this impulse is lost. --MC Playlist, Conference of the Birds, KZSC, Santa Cruz 11/14/94 George Russel Sextet/ Volupte/ At Beethoven Hall Geri Allen/ In the Morning/ Twenty-One ... Boubacar Traore/ Kale/ Mariama Agepe/ A Tua Presenca/ Me Leva Maria Bethania/ Sonho Meh/ Alibi Ritmo Oriental/ El Gue No Sabe, Sabe/ Volume 1 Duo Cubano/ Los Perros del Curro/ Casa de la Trova ... Leadbelly/ Cry for Me/ last Sessions Odean Pope Saxophone Choir/ Terrestrial/ Epitome ... Eight Bold Souls/ Lonely Woman/ Sideshow Hukwe Ubi Zawose/ Chilimba-Lusungo/ The Art of Hukwe Ubi Zawose Pierre Dorge and the New Jungle Orchestra/ A Rainbow Over the Bamboo Forest/ Soneyhaning Kanow ... Anonymous Greek Zirna Hedi Habbouba/ (titles in arabic) ... Evan Ziporyn and Nyoman Windha/ Kekembangan/ American Works for Balinese Gamelan Orchestra Marilyn Crispell Trio/ Solstice/ Trio 1992 ... David S. Ware/ Flight of i/ Flight of i Betty Carter/ If I Should Lose You/ Feed the Fire Pharoh Sanders/ After the Rain/ Crescent With Love PEOPLE GET READY Dept. ACTION ALERT! The new Republican leadership in the House of Representatives will begin a reorganization of Congress when they meet in early December that includes the elimination of the House Africa Subcommittee. Incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich has pledge to cut the size of Congress by 25% and as part of this effort he plans to eliminate several full committees as well as almost two dozen subcommittees. ACAS urges scholars to write the incoming House Speaker, Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich, and the expected chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, New York Rep. Benjamin Gilman, to urge them to maintain a separate subcommittee devoted to Africa. A separate sub-committee on Africa is the only way to guarantee that Congress will remain engaged with the issues confronting U.S. policy on that continent. Please also send copies of your letters to the Congressional Black Caucus. Rep. Newt Gingrich 2428 RHOB U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 Fax: (202) 225-4656 Rep. Benjamin Gilman House Foreign Affairs Committee Rayburn Building U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 Fax: (202) 225-2541 Rep. Kweisi Mfume, Chairman Congressional Black Caucus, 2419 RHOB U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 Fax: (202) 225-3178 Readlist, Last Days of the White Race Radiofree North America, 12/5/94 TWILIGHT, Anna Deavere Smith When they killed Tiny-- when I say "they," I mean the police. They shot forty-three times. Five bullets went into Tiny. No bullets went into nobody else's body. I think what they do, they want to make it look like a drive-by shooting. --Theresa Allison I told you this whole thing is too much. It's hurting an' then you're happy, 'specially when I get to thinking about such treacherous people out there. We weren't raised like this. We weren't raised with no black and white thing. We were raised with all kinds of friends Mexicans, Indians, Blacks, Whites, Chinese. You never would have known that something like this would happen to us. And now it's such a shock. --Angela King because dreams are made of some kind of indelible substance. --Josie Morales These people have no heart. These people don't deserve to live. Sorry for getting emotional, but I mean this is not my Unites States anymore. This is sicko. Did you see him shoot him? Did you see that? --Judith Tur And then there's so much you can say. In life once you've hit bottom, there's no way to go but up. --Elaine Young We know you're not supposed to steal, but the times are such, the environment is such, that good people reacted in strange ways. --Maxine Waters Playlist for "Nubian Roots" 90.1 KZSU, Stanford Friday 06:00-09:00 November 18, 1994 DJ Cat http://kzsu.stanford.edu/dj/cathya.html 1. Strata Institute Slang Cipher Syntax 2. Cassandra Wilson Redbone After the Beginning Again 3. Mal Waldron Status Seeking The Quest 4. Rodney Kendrick Dance, World,Dance Dance,World, Dance 5. The Last Poets Jazzoetry Chastisement 6. Leroy Jenkins Albert Ayler (His Life The Legend of Ai Glatson was too short) 7. Albert Ayler Holy Ghost The New Wave in Jazz (orig) 8. Ernest Dawkins Maghost Two South Side Street Songs New Horizon Ens. 9. Sun Ra Somewhere in Space Interstellar Low Ways " " Interplanetary Music "" 10. Billy Bang Seeing Together Outline No. 12 11. Bang/Harris/ Riding with Ra hip hop be bop Threadgill 12. 8 Bold Souls Lonely Woman Side Show 13. John Coltrane Blues Minor Africa Brass 14. Grachan Moncur III Medgar's Menace II Echoes of Prayer Drum Transition African Percussion 15. Geri Allen Stop the World Twylight 16. David S. Ware Stritchland Great Bliss Vol 2 17. Beaver Harris Is Glo There ? From Rag Time to No Time 360 Degree Music Dawn in Brazil Experience African Drums No Time 18. Music Revelation In Time In the Name Of... 19. Maleem Mahmoud Peace in Essaouira The Trance of 7 Colors Ghania/Sanders 20. John Carter The Mating Ritual Dauwhe 21. Betty Carter Love Notes Feed the Fire FaGagaGa's playlist 1 Complete Bud Powell on Verve 2. Charlie Haden The Montreal Tapes 3. Praxis Scarifist 4. Tina Brooks True Blue 5. Junko Onishi Crusin 6. Stolen Moments Red Hot and Cool 7. Charlie Brown Christmas NEW WORLD ORDER Divide and thou shall reign! It's the order of the day! >From Zagreb to Medellin, >From Haiti to Tel Aviv. In Somalia, Irland, Berlin, >From Cape Town to Madrid. The Third World shaped after thee! Soulless, stingy; who wants peace? Education?, shelter?, ease?. Hungry, ignorant, depraved, Let the masses all prevail, All achievements down the drain, Culture chiseled through millennia To crumbs fallen by disdain. Aloof, haughty leaders sneer. In ivory towers shielded, "safe". Swift runs time, inexorably thin. Who will save us, God declining? The Pied Piper of Hamelin?. --DER MUSENSOHN NOTES ON PROPHECY All our words, at least implicitly, are addressed to a person (often only one, sometimes all or any) who hasn't yet received them, who awaits them (if, indeed, our words are awaited at all) somewhere altogether else. Past or future, beyond the borders of a text--beyond those borders which _define_ a text. For only with the margin's establishment can reading begin: Even the friend who sits beside me, watching the script appear on the page, watches from outside--from outside the act of writing, and from outside the words written; reading my own words, I find myself greeting them from this same outside, from a point beyond the margin I myself define, first internally (in the act of writing), but now _ex_ternally. Strictly speaking, a writing without spatial or temporal limit, without relation to exteriority, would remain unreadable. For to be received, our words must leave us. Without such a structure of address, and the distance, the temporal displacement, address assumes, language would be incapable of surprise. ***** Surprise: Insofar as we direct our words outward, and insofar as their arrival is in doubt, our speech becomes, upon receipt, a kind of prophecy--resembles prophecy in structure if not aspiration. How else describe a language which goes forth to its community seeking to predict--if not effect--the future? Predict or effect, but not necessarily in a mystical sense, for our words become prophecy in many ways, some simple, some unavoidable. First, and most generally, our words become prophecy when we assume that they'll be heard--heard or read, perhaps understood, acted on; second, our words become prophecy when they name their addressee, directing themselves to a _particular_ future; last, our words _resemble_ prophecy when the message they bear includes a command--a command or plea, description of some desired outcome. What all these instances of speech hold in common, what links them to divination, is their relationship to the future, to a future grasped--graspable--here and now, in the _act_ of speech. Offered in ignorance or knowledge, to a friend or stranger, to times and places known or unknown, our words assume the privilege all vatic utterance assumes--the privilege of hope. ***** Hope: I don't want to belabor the comparison--or obliterate the difference--between ordinary speech and the divinely inspired language of a Jeremiah. The point is not a mystification of poetry, but rather a poetics of the mystery--the mystery of intersubjective relations. And yet . . . poetry's role in this mystery would depend for its effect upon a displacement of time and space similar to that bridged by the prophet. A displacement many poets incorporate structurally into the poem proper, inaugurating the poem as a kind of charm against annihilation. (And isn't annihilation the prophet's principal theme?) Take Shakespeare, for instance, whose sonnets (especially those beginning "When . . .") summon up seance fashion "remembrance of things past." A pursuance of redemption. Or as Shakespeare himself puts it: But if the while I think on thee, dear friend All losses are restored and sorrows end. (Sonnet 30) ***** Steadfast in his desire to solicit response, complex in his understanding of how poetry does and doesn't achieve this goal, Shakespeare in the Sonnets offers wise testimony on the subject of prophecy: When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rime In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights; Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have expressed Even such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring; And, for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. (Sonnet 106) ***** If tongue would speak a praise adequate to eyes' wonder, so Shakespeare avers, the praise must be written with antique pen. Antique or anticipant, or even antic, anticipating failure; for in moments of bleakest apprehension, Shakespeare would still direct himself toward the future. A paradox? Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye, When love, converted from the thing it was, Shall reasons find of settled gravity: Against that time do I ensconce me here Within the knowledge of mine own desert, And this my hand against myself uprear To guard the lawful reasons on thy part. (Sonnet no. 49) _Knowing you will one day desert me, I seek (already) to woo you back_--do this by promising obedience, by promising ahead of time "To guard the lawful reasons" of the rebuke. _I_ do this, sent in advance by _Thee_, against time, to preserve the margin "I" nevertheless hopes to cross, like a desert, even now, in full knowledge of the task's impossibility. _This my hand, already antique, yet preserved in these words_ ("hand" in another sense, handwriting), _I charge with the task of uprearing--against *myself*_. In a future we might best await together, cradled in poetry''s subjunctive embrace. --Monotonous Ghandi ** ** ** ** descriptions of an Imaginary Univercity *** *** *** cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet