On my way...

to be reunited with my Papa.

poems/interviews/etc to follow

feeling inspired to write a collection of poems revolving around my family

starting with a poem about my father

as a drunken but loving and absent but golden-hearted hero

called



HAMARTIA

2 December 2009

in winter

we sleep with our feet touching

so that some part of us is

naked together

September 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

[emphasis mine]

Excerpted from "My Bondage and My Freedom"

"Aliens are we in our native land. The fundamental principles of the republic, to which the humblest white man, whether born here or elsewhere, may appeal with confidence, in the hope of awakening a favorable response, are held to be inapplicable to us. The glorious doctrines of your revolutionary fathers, and the more glorious teachings of the Son of God, are construed and applied against us. We are literally scourged beyond the beneficent range of both authorities, human and divine.

American humanity hates us, scorns us, disowns and denies, in a thousand ways, our very personality. The outspread wing of American christianity, apparently broad enough to give shelter to a perishing world, refuses to cover us. To us, its bones are brass, and its features iron. In running thither for shelter and succor, we have only fled from the hungry blood-hound to the devouring wolf--from a corrupt and selfish world, to a hollow and hypocritical church."

-- Frederick Douglas, Speech before American and Foreign Anti- Slavery Society, May, 1854.

LearningzZzZZzzzzzZZzzZzzzZzzZzz

What helped me most with my learning process this semester was the emphasis on collaboration and peer review, alongside your encouragement to use our own voice and develop forms of writing that work toward the content of our writing. Additionally, I found the way you planned the assignments out to be very helpful. Though it was a lot of work, it never felt like it was going to crush me, it was paced out very well. Alongside pacing it out well, you also checked in with us frequently; having drafts due consistently made sure that I was on top of my projects, so I never experienced the stress derived from procrastination. However, it did help that this was my favorite class: I never felt like procrastinating on my animated writing work. Beyond all of that, I really loved a lot of the writers and writings we were introduced to in this class, many of which I took inspiration from--especially DiPrima and Maso.

I think what helped me most in the class was having content that was riveting, which I could derive meaning from in intersection with the prior knowledge I brought to the class, in combination with a form that was the right blend of flexibility and control for my personality.

Getting work done in this class was never burdened by stress or anxiety...I always felt excited to do the work for this class...sometimes, toward the end of an animation I would feel stress or anxiety about the resolution to it, or the inability to do with it what I would like to within the time constraints, but maybe that just shows that I am becoming more of the kind of writer/teacher Sirc describes in the article you made available to me: a constant reader/writer/reviser, my work developing a strong life inside of me, giving birth to countless visions and revisions.

SHRT & LNG ANMTNZ: FNL VRSN

For your viewing pleasure:

Lines

&

Girl Island

Love,

Erin

The Last Break-up Poem I Hope to Ever Write

Yesterday afternoon, as I walked to my Wednesday evening class, I wrote a poem in my head. I was thinking about how "writers" might process an ended relationship differently. For example, someone who is into astrology might say "I should have known the moment s/he told me s/he was a Libra. Air and fire is a dangerous desire." (And I did say that latter part...in a song I wrote while waiting for the bus in 2007--"his wind will blow your flames so wide, from yr heart's burning no one will be spared/others said there's more fish in the sea/he said 'don't risk yr world for me'/but I'm not a fisher of fish/I'm a dreamer in a jaded skin/and I let you in I let you I let you in.") I have determined in retrospect that this relationship was completely unworthy of such eloquent, poetic measures.

So, anyway, I was thinking about a sign that is maybe more important: who their favorite author was. In the instance of the specific relationship I am talking about in my new super romantical poem, this is especially important. So, here is the last break-up poem that I hope to ever write, a goodbye to the genre, if you will, as I do not wish to ever separate from the sweet prince I currently run with.

America

1 Dec 2009
for Nikki Wallschlaeger

"What is Left" by Cherrie Moraga

What I Have Learned in This Class

This class has been very a much needed reinforcement of my ideas, strategies and abilities. I feel like everything I wanted to do I was allowed to do, that I was encouraged to have my voice and to develop it, from start to finish. It was very refreshing to be able to write how I want to write, in the way which is most effective in my eyes, which feels the most true to what I am saying, without the distance of the academic voice and inevitable lapses in the transmission of meaning it creates. This class has helped me realize ways to engage others in writing, as well as to incorporate technology into my future classroom in radical and innovative ways that I can sorta get behind...though I still don't think I will ever take students to a computer lab without first fostering a discussion about electronic waste and groundwater pollution and how it disproportionately affects people in less developed countries who cook their dinner in the same pots with which they melt down metal from computer scraps. (Gotta gotta get up; get down.) You (Anne) have proved what I have always thought might be true: that the best way to teach is to create a space that people want to create in. Thank you.

Response to Final Project Feedback

People like the way the text flows...the making of a word and the remaking of a word by adding a letter or two. (It is totally true that I never realized the phrase "I can" is contained within "American" until I made this project. Fitting.) Others dream of expatriation, think the wooden womb cutout works perfectly because something that is carved seems so much more permanent, which is what "the fatherland's" mothers seem to want for their daughters: "an American identity that is permanently carved into our skin." People like the images used to illustrate the text generally, think they work well...want me to consider keeping the images up longer so viewers may contemplate them. Others dream of expatriation and would like to come inside my own. How very flattering...they think my animation works well to support my writing. :D Yaaaaaay.

GRL ISLND: SCND DRFT

I left off in a weird spot...it's at an awkward place. Don't worry, it's not against mothers! It's against patriarchy. The girls are going to take the switches from their mothers hands and ask the mothers to fall into the girls' embrace and live with them on girl island, and will proceed to make a strong argument for theworld they have created together as opposed to returning to the old world that drove them there. But, see how it's going so far...

GRL ISLND: FRST DRFT

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLgggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

If You Were Wondering Why Our Tuition Keeps Increasing While the Courses Offered Decrease and the Class Sizes Go Waaay Up...

you might wanna take a look at what is going on in California.

(excerpt)

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Samuels, just explain the situation right now. Why are these student hikes? What’s the justification for the 32 percent increase in student fees?

BOB SAMUELS: Well, President Yudof, the president of the University of California system, says that because of state cut to the UC budget from 20 percent of the state contribution, which is—the state only contributes about—contributes only about 15 percent of the total budget, but because of that cut, they say they have to raise student fees. And our argument has been that this is actually a record year of revenue for the UC system, and the problem is they just don’t want to spend the money on instruction. So what they’re doing instead—

AMY GOODMAN: How could it be a record year?

BOB SAMUELS: They brought in a lot of money from the federal stimulus money. They had a record year in their research grants. They had a record year in medical profits. Most of their money is brought in by selling parking, housing and medical services throughout California. So they had a record year in that revenue. They had a record year in grants. And so, actually, last year they ended up getting more money than before from the state, because they got the federal stimulus money.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what is the justification then? Explain further where that money goes.

BOB SAMUELS: Well, you know, the university says that it’s poor, that it can’t spend money from its other areas on students, on instructions, and so it has to basically—what it’s doing now is laying off hundreds of faculty members, especially the non-tenured lecturers, and it’s increasing class size.

And money is being funneled into the compensation of the star faculty and the star administrators, because in the UC system there’s over 3,000 people who make over $200,000. And many of them make $400,000, $500,000. A lot of them are mostly administrators and staff, and so the university has—basically has fewer and fewer faculty, more and more students and more and more administrators.

And so, what’s going to happen is it takes students longer to graduate. They can’t get the classes they need. And I teach required writing classes at UCLA, and they just laid off our entire department. And we have required classes, so we don’t know what they’re going to do. And the dean of our division told us the university simply does not have money for undergraduate education.

AMY GOODMAN: Doesn’t have money for undergraduate education. But what about the administration, the money that goes into the non-teaching staffs at the university throughout the system? And we’re talking about three basic tiers, right?

BOB SAMUELS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that.

BOB SAMUELS: Well, in California, we have the University of California, and some of the schools are UCLA, UC Berkeley. We have the CSU system. And then we have the community college—

AMY GOODMAN: And the CSU system is…?

BOB SAMUELS: The California State University system. And then we have the community college system. And the way it’s supposed to work is there’s a master plan, and the top students are supposed to go to the University of California. It’s the top ten percent of California students. And then another large group is supposed to go to the California State Universities. And then everyone else is supposed to go to the community college.

What’s going now is California right now has the second lowest rate of students who go directly from high school to a four-year university. It’s the only—only Mississippi has fewer students. And what we’re afraid is with these fee increases, what they’re talking about doing is raising the fees and basically lowering enrollment and increasing the amount of out-of-state students. So California next year will be—have the lowest rate of students who go directly from high school to college in the entire country.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of the non-teaching staffs, the administration?

BOB SAMUELS: That the administration keeps on expanding and growing. They keep on hiring more and more administrators. We’re not exactly sure what they do. And our joke at University of California is, when two administrators walk into a room, three always walk out. So we never know exactly what they do, but there’s just more and more of them.

AMY GOODMAN: So what kind of cuts are they suffering, the administrators?

BOB SAMUELS: The administrators are cutting—are virtually no cuts. In fact, the same meeting, when they decided to raise student fees, they voted on millions of dollars of increased salaries and special bonuses to administrators and to the highest-paid people. And so, there has been several compensation scandals in the UC system. And what they discovered is the UC has secret packages that it gives a lot of its administrators and athletic coaches and some of its star faculty, a small percentage, and that it makes these secret deals, it breaks its own rules, and that money continually floats to the top of the university. So while we think the universities are often these progressive institutions, they often are run like large corporations. And that’s one of our concerns.

One of the stories I want to talk about is just that UC lost over $23 billion in investments in the last two years. And one reason why it lost so much money is that it invested heavily in toxic assets and in real estate. And it followed the Yale model of investing in these high-risk assets, and at first it gained a lot of money. And what’s happening across the country are universities, especially the private universities, they’re losing so much money in their endowments that they’re having to raise, once again, their tuition and also cut classes, cut faculty, and especially the non-tenure track faculty are the most vulnerable. And at the UC system, the non-tenure track faculty teach over 50 percent of the classes, and those are the ones that they’re laying off and that they’re firing. And they’re also basically reducing the salaries of the workers and also increasing their workload. At the same time, they’re refusing to negotiate with the unions.

AMY GOODMAN: What is President Yudof’s strategy?

BOB SAMUELS: I think his main strategy is basically to blame the state for everything, while they try to privatize the university. And a very telling moment came. After the UC’s budget was cut by the state, the UC turned around and lent $200 million to the state. And people said, how can you lend $200 million to the state while you’re giving faculty furloughs and while you’re raising student fees and while you’re cutting classes? And he said, “When we lend money to the state, we make a profit from interest. But when we spend money just on teachers’ salaries, that money just disappears.” So, from his perspective, instruction is a losing proposition, and the university should just try to get out of the business of basically teaching students and hiring faculty.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve talked about a great deal of money being lost.

BOB SAMUELS: Right. Well, that money, the $23 billion, is mostly in the pension fund and its endowment and its short-term investments. And so, that’s really a long-term problem. And the UC still has a $20 billion budget. It had more money brought into the system last year than any year before. It doesn’t have to raise student fees. It doesn’t have to fire faculty. It doesn’t have to cut courses. They’re talking about eliminating minors and majors. They’re talking about moving classes online. They’re doing these drastic things. And what we’re seeing is just basically undergraduate students are subsidizing research, they’re subsidizing administrators, they’re subsidizing things that have nothing to do with undergraduate instruction.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Samuels, the implications of what’s happening here in California for the rest of the country?

BOB SAMUELS: Well, basically, what we’re seeing, especially at the major prestigious universities, is more and more—only upper middle class, upper class students can go to them. And they’re privatizing these institutions. And the institutions—what happened about 1980 was that states started to cut their funding of higher education, and so universities looked for other ways of making money, and so they concentrated on raising funds and doing research, and especially research funded by corporations and the federal government. And so, basically now at a lot of universities, instruction only represents about ten percent of the budget, and so it’s a minor aspect of the universities.

And most people don’t know that, that universities, in some ways, are just kind of fronts for investment banks and investments, because at the University of California, the regents, who are the main financial overseers of the university, are appointed by the governor for twelve-year terms. And most of the regents now are Republicans, who not only have voted against taxes and have not only tried to defund higher education—and they’re the ones in charge in many ways—but they’re also business people chosen by Republican governors. And those—and they are real estate people, they’re investment bankers. The new head of the—the chair of the UC Regents is the former head of Wachovia, and he actually—they sold subprime student loans, right? And they profit from the student loans. And also, they pushed the UC into investing heavily into mortgage-backed securities and into real estate right when those were tanking.

And so, I really think that the Board of Regents basically is forcing the UC or motivating the UC to make a lot of incredibly bad investments, and when the investments turn bad, then they try to take it out on the students, on the faculty and the workers.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to just end with this USA Today latest study of compensation, revealing that at least twenty-five college head football coaches make $2 million or more this season, slightly more than double the number two years ago.

BOB SAMUELS: The UC Berkeley faculty last week voted a resolution to stop subsidizing the athletic department. Apparently UC Berkeley has been paying, subsidizing out of student fees, $3 million to $4 million a year. What most people don’t know is most athletic departments lose money, and the big departments lose a lot of money. And student fees often go to paying for athletic departments. And also, we found out that student fees go as collateral to—for construction bonds.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with Zen Dochterman.

Just a correction: I said that fifty-two students were arrested at Campbell Hall at UCLA. It was actually at UC Davis, at University of California, Davis, when they refused to leave the administration building.

Zen Dochterman, what are the plans now?

ZEN DOCHTERMAN: Well, first of all, I just wanted to reiterate a lot of what Bob Samuels said, is that students are fighting not just these 32 percent fee increases, but they are fighting the links of the university to the larger economic system as a whole. We are fighting the privatization of the university and the effects that has. We’re fighting the re-segregation of the university and the way in which these fee hikes also exclude people of color and working-class people from attending higher education, and that public education is supposed to have a universal—a universal scope. But what we’re seeing is an antagonism between that mission and everything that is going on.

So I think what is important for many of us is to recognize that we are part of a larger international student movement that sprung up in places as far away as Vienna and Heidelberg, and Berkeley also, of course, and London, and that really what we need to be focusing on is not so much the issue of fee hikes and layoffs, which are also important, but really that the universities need to belong to the students and the workers who work there.

And so, I would say that the next sort of step for many of us will be talking to our departments, talking to our unions. And many of us have also been working with people in the unions at the UC, such as AFSCME, the UAW, UPTE, so talking more with the unions, more with the student groups, more with our departments, and even more with our friends, and organizing.

We also have a big day coming up, March 4th, which is a public education system-wide day of protest. There have been many thoughts about what kinds of actions there might be on that day, going everything—

AMY GOODMAN: March 4th?

ZEN DOCHTERMAN: —going to everything from system-wide shutdowns of campuses, also going to tuition—tuition strike. So there are many things being talked about now, but we can definitely say that March 4th will be the next sort of November 18th and 19th in the—not just at the UC, but at the public education—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Zen Dochterman, I want to thank you very much for being with us, UCLA graduate student, on the phone with us. And Bob Samuels, president of the University of California American Federation of Teachers, runs that blog called “Changing Universities.”

A New Interpretation of Disco

Okay, this is where I am going--

The last thing I said in class, about the culture of repetition and 7" extended dance remixes? Well, here is a way that even disco has been simultaneously embraced and contested: TRACY AND THE PLASTICS. Wynne Greenwood, who acted as all three members of T&TP, is a performance artist who considers herself a "lesbo for disco." She created electronic music all by herself, but would then make video acting as two members of an imaginary band and then would interact with the other members of the band on stage, with the pre-recorded and synchronized video of herself playing both characters. Her dance songs have incredibly challenging lyrics and champion feminist and radical queer causes.

Some of my favorites:

"Mass historian: you second-handed me. Holy roller: You've got a lot to see."

"Women! Women of! LOS ANGELES! You can't clean it up until you make a MMmmmmEEEESSSssssssss!!"

There's a lot more where that came from. Also: the Margaret Atwood poem I wrote about in my response to Biggs & Leach. My favorite artists are subversive; they are highly skilled at disturbing the narratives and forms that we are accustomed to relate to most easily. That is what makes their work powerful.

The Ironic Nature of Consumption in the 21st Century...

is that I can much more easily put money directly into the hands of independent artists and small business owners via the internet than I could by going to a local, independently owned business (because most of them are dead.) It is in this manner that we are made to depend on a system that is not sustainable. I came to this conclusion while contemplating for the past month or so where I might go to find blank cassette tapes, because I am serious about becoming an advocate of mix tapes as an indigenous and threatened art form. I mean, is it better to go to Best Buy or to buy them directly from company? Can I buy them directly from the company or do I have to go through Amazon? Could I just go to a thrift store and find someone else's old tapes and tape over them? Sometimes that works and sometimes the first thing ever recorded on it bleeds through. Besides, aren't all those places owned by Walmart now, anyway? To what extent is it even possible for me to make ethical decisions in my daily life? Where did our agency go? Irony is for the birds, I want my real choices back!

What I Know Now/In the Best of All Possible Worlds..../How Will I Use This

How am I looking at writing differently? Hmm. I am thinking of writing in a more conversational sense. If you ask a linguist they would say that written language, if a language is ever written, is always more formal than spoken language. I think the main thing I have learned in this class is how to make written language have the character and emotional articulation of spoken language, as well as how to convey a state of being...

I wasn't sure. I kept my eyes down. Down to the floor. Out the window. I nod, and turn away. Always.

The form of this sentence is intrinsic to the content. Short and/or incomplete sentences function to convey the voice, not just the words and their ascribed meanings. It reads like someone talking. It's visceral.

The fact of moving words in a meaningful way in this class has effected me as well. It has expanded the capacity of words for me. Flat words on a page have elicited some striking emotional responses from me more than once...spoken words combined with images in films have done the same...but animated writing seems to function inside a relationship with the reader. In many cases, you don't just open the book and turn the pages, or hit "play" and sit back until the credits roll. You open the book, and choose the moments in whichever order you design in many cases.

IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, if I could stay in this class forever, I would want to keep making longer animations. I really enjoyed making my "short" animation (it's two minutes and thirty seconds long...) and am looking forward very much to my looooong animation project. Maybe I would just work on Girl Island forever in the best of all possible worlds. Girl Island is the best of all possible worlds, that's why it is a dream, I guess.

HOW I WILL USE THIS...I am honestly not sure yet. I think a lot of what I have learned will carry over into my future writings and readings and teachings. Promise.

"Songs have always been
man's anodyne against
tyranny and terror;
the artist is on the side of humanity."
--Yip Harburg

YIP HARBURG: My songs, like “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” caused a great deal of furor during a period in Hollywood when a fellow by the name of Joe McCarthy was reigning supreme. And so, they got something up for people to take care of us, like me, called the blacklist. And I landed on the enemy list.


And in order to overcome the enemy list–– what was the enemy list? Well, it’s, one, that you were a red; another one, that you were a bluenose; and the other one, that you’re on the blacklist. Finally, I thought the rainbow was a wonderful symbol of all these lists. In order to overcome the enemy list and this rainbow that they gave me the idea for, I wrote this little poem:

Lives of great men all remind us
Greatness takes no easy way,
All the heroes of tomorrow
Are the heretics of today.
Socrates and Galileo,
John Brown, Thoreau, Christ and Debs
Heard the night cry “Down with traitors!”
And the dawn shout “Up the rebs!”
Nothing ever seems to bust them—
Gallows, crosses, prison bars;
Tho’ we try to readjust them
There they are among the stars.
Why do great men all remind us
We can write our names on high
and departing leave behind us
Thumb prints in the FBI.

Disturbance & Novelty

I want to write about Simon Biggs’ idea that we seek to disturb our perception of things in order to “destabilize subjective experience” rather than to “author a new theoretical position” or to further demonstrate a preexisting line of thought. I had not thought intently about the word ‘disturb’ until recently when listening to a radio interview with the daughters of William Kunstler who just released a film they made about their father entitled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. This got my mind working at the word, and so did Biggs’ use of it in this text.





Something that seems relevant to this disturbance of perception and the subsequent destabilization of subjective experience in thinking about auto-poesis specifically is the idea of readers becoming authors that we have read about and I have written about before. In many forms of collaborative (frequently digitally transmitted) writing, as well as the auto-poesis discussed here in multiple but converging contexts, the reader becomes the author. This is true to the extent that a collaborative, public form such as Wiki relies on readers to write the information which is then viewable to anyone surfing the web that can read the text and edit or re-write it as they see fit. In the context of auto-poesis, the reader becomes the author in a sense because the lack of an actual author who is constructing sentences with some degree of intent, with a larger construction of meaning that each sentence construction arches towards, means that the only meaning being salvaged from the automated text is being inferred by the reader who takes on the authorial responsibility “of the creative bringing into being of the text.” Thus, when a text lacks an independent author, a disassociation is brought about between writing and meaning, and the reader takes on the work of straddling that gap and forging connections, building bridges, constructing meaning.

This strikes me as intrinsically important to the question of how value is ascribed to novelty that the text aims to investigate. The independent creativity of the author in an auto-poetic text is absent, so the text only becomes “authored” by the independent schemata and connections that can be forged by readers that encounter it. Additionally, the “juxtaposition of existing elements and understandings” is important to the reader’s ability to actually engage the text, for the text to be accessible and relatable, and to that extent novelty actually disengages what Biggs refers to as the “internal voice that arises in the reader.” I think most of my favorite writers (Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Haruki Murakami, Carole Maso, Margaret Atwood) use novelty very effectively and subversively. Atwood: “you fit into me like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye.” Immediately upon hearing or reading this first line we think of a hook and an eye, on a dress, perhaps, two pieces which fit into one another and only one another; we think this is a romantic poem, this is about a union, but then our immediate reading explodes as the images when linked before romantically are revealed to be two very different and unpleasant things, and what was originally a sensual, romantic simile is now an awful, striking assault, really. That is how it feels when you realize how your own perception has been manipulated. This poem is about pain, about rape, about the disturbing conflation of love and violence that permeates the history of sex. This to me illustrates, however, not necessarily the merits of auto-poesis as much as the power available in the disturbance of perception; the appropriation of existing understandings to, as Acker so evocatively stated, “slash apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.” Yes.

Lines: Fnl Vrsn, Pndng Edit Wrk

check

it.

OUT!

Ordinary People

This post serves as a note to myself...for the future...that I want to write about the film Ordinary People. It's such a rich film. I mean, admittedly, I'm pretty much a baby and it is very easy for most directors to get me blubbering, but the kind of hyper intense emotional reaction I have to this film seems important. Also, the abusive, controlling and emotionally distant parent is the mother, which seems pretty good for 1980. This film is as strikingly evocative for me as reading Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina was; both dare to take on horribly complicated situations and human relationships, and both are able to maintain the humanity of all of the characters...illuminating imperfection, and really getting their hands around the truly complex and dynamic experiences of people. These people do not fuck around.

Also, on the agenda: poem tracing family history through gender and class oppression; alcoholism of the men, ferocity of the women; perhaps beginning with the line "my father's best paying job was cleaning out chemical transport trucks"

I cannot do either of these things right now because I must wake up at 6:30am to take STANDARDIZED TESTS that will allow me to be admitted to the School of Education, pending how will I score on them...

Dear Wisconsin, ALL DECENT EDUCATION POLICY RESEARCH IN EXISTENCE HAS ONLY ILLUMINATED THE FACT THAT STANDARDIZED TESTS ARE RUBBISH. SO, YOU WOULD REQUIRE ME TO TAKE ONE TO BECOME A TEACHER. WAIT, WHAT?! While we're talking, could the taxpayers have back the public money that you gave people in vouchers to pay for private schools? Love, Erin

Correspondence with Derrick Jensen

Dear Erin,

Thank you for your note, and for your kind words.

back and forth:





I was the lady sitting on the floor directly in front of you with my biracial partner, Ralph, who was sitting on a couch behind me at yr talk in Milwaukee this evening.

I remember you both very well.


I didn't get an opportunity to tell you something I thought you should know. You had mentioned that cops hand out yr books to "trouble kids" and that yr books are circulated amongst gang members in prison, so I thought you should know about an interesting way your writing is being used here in Milwaukee. My partner was assaulted by a group of (white) men in May and we

I'm very sorry to hear that.

are doing a restorative justice community conference negotiation as opposed to a traditional criminal trial. As part of the community conference we had last week, we got to construct what we thought would be effective restitution. The restitution we got them to agree upon was that the offenders have to pay all of Ralph's medical costs and lost wages (the damage put him out of work for two months...he doesn't have insurance or any other benefits at his job, and these guys really lucked out because the injuries they inflicted could easily have resulted in a surgery that costs $30,000) but beyond that they have to write a letter to a member of Ralph's family, potentially correspondence with a prisoner who is locked up for the maximum of what they could have received (pending if they can find a prisoner who meets the criteria and is interested in participating), and mandatory reading of The Culture of Make Believe. Hopefully it will help them...it helped Ralph, he read it while he was recovering from his injuries this summer.

I'm deeply moved to hear this. This is one of the greatest compliments you could give me.

Thank you very much.

In solidarity,

Derrick

GIRL ISLAND: A DREAM OF EXPATRIATION

So, I would like to announce that I am scraping my previous final project idea. I have decided that I do not have the emotional/mental/physical energy and space in my life to execute that project at this time.

INSTEAD, I am going to make an animation about why I want to expatriate to a mythical girl island. What I want to explore are the plethora of reasons a member of the "most privileged" nation in the world would choose to leave, as well as the inability to locate a place in the contemporary, physical world that suits my dreams of expatriation. Thus, the longing for girl island, a place that I am pretty sure only exists as a place that I enter into when I connect with other semi-feral girl children (and I mean this to describe their spirits regardless of gender, age, etc) that is not specific to a physical place at all. I want the animation to have the feeling of the happenings in my brain. I think that I will mostly just need honest feedback and positive reinforcement as I embark on this project. I think from carrying out this project I might better understand and navigate my own desires!

I think I will have to revisit Monique Wittig's Les Guérillèras for this project.

"EITHER WE WILL ACCEPT THAT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE

(or)

WE WILL HAVE TO DE-GROW"

-Philippe Diaz

Responding to the Feedback I Got

Okay, so, as usual, some people think it needs to be slowed down. I am not sure if I will take them up on this suggestion or not. The main reason is that the end of each proverbial "line" is supposed to flow into the next...the last word of each "line" is the first word of the next, and I'm not sure if it would flow correctly if I slow it down. I think a certain level of speed is intrinsic to the meaning, maybe. However, I'm not saying I won't consider lengthening some parts. People seem to like the little pictures that pop up to illustrate what the word are describing, so I might try to incorporate more of them into the rest of it. Sometimes there isn't a picture for a while, and that doesn't mean I neglected to think to put one there, it means there wasn't anything in those lines I trusted my ability to illustrate decently. It was specifically requested that I slow the heartbeat down, which I will experiment with and see if I like it when it is slower.

Maybe you can tell me what you think about these ideas?

Happy Birthday, Anne!

If yr name is Anne Frances Wysocki

then

this one is for you.

Lines: First Draft

ladies and GENTs,

may i

preeZENT

my latest

animation

eVENT?

i hope you find it

most

magnifiCENT.

Habeas Corpus: FNL DRFT

Here she is.

Sources:

Senator Russ Feingold on The Patriot Act Reauthorization

What the Socialists Have to Say

Pittsburgh-Tribune Review

ACLU on the Patriot Act

The Willfully or Unwillfilly Ignorant Don't Ask for Answers; Those Who Question Get Ignored; The Ignored Become the Willfully Ignorant

America--

your stupidity.

I could almost love you again.

-Gary Snyder

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Representative Slezak,

I don't live in your district. In fact, I live in Wisconsin. However, we are neighbors, and I thought it important for you to know that banning abortions does not save the lives of the unborn children women seeking abortions did not plan to have. Statistically, scientifically, and IMPORTANTLY, it has been shown that abortion bans do not do anything to save the fetuses you are clearly so concerned about, but rather result in dead women. I am not sure if you just specifically disdain women, or if you think your own personal beliefs should be permitted to shape and destroy the lives of others, or if you are just looking for a way to dramatically improve the unemployment rate in Michigan by killing women who seek abortions (as they are primarily low-income women) but you need to rescind this proposal. You need to take this off the table of consideration, and then you need to apologize for presenting it. After that, you need to work on issues that are effecting the people you represent every day, such as creating new and sustainable jobs and making sure all of your constituents have adequate health care. In this way, you could demonstrate to the American people that you actually give a damn about people, even after they are born.

Truly,

Erin M. Day
Milwaukee, WI

A Semi-Scathing Critique of Glazier

I want to explore Glazier’s idea that we need to examine "the multiple possibilities of making in this [digital] medium...[emerging] from the study with wires tangled in our hair, pixels in our spirit, happy to find that physical interaction with the intangible that makes it making.” (Glazier, 179)* I see his point that we need to make within the medium, or “get into the guts” of it, and have seen the importance of that myself when I have done a lot of conceptualizing and pre-planning for an animation beforehand only to find it impossible to then construct within Flash. Despite this agreement, I do not agree completely with Glazier on the materiality of digital media or with his view that digital mediums are inherently good. Though the interactivity available in digital mediums clearly makes them material in some ways, I do not think that digital mediums have equal materiality to print text.

My main problem is that we as a culture are not critical enough of technology. We have almost always universally received technological innovations with open arms and our historic (and largely current as well) gaze toward technology has been one of subservience and blind optimism. The relationship between emerging technologies and an ever-growing monolithic capitalist stranglehold on…well…everything…is pretty clear. During the Cold War, Americans were essentially told that upgrading their car each year or replacing their washing machines much more frequently than could ever be necessary was a blow against communism. The people propagating technologies have always been the creators and producers of the technologies. Our lack of critical response has put us in a situation in which most people are convinced they need a laundry list of creature comforts to exist and to be happy, when statistics of mental illness or physical and sexual abuse would certainly point to the fact that we are not. It strikes me as very odd that Glazier includes a paragraph on “the present social condition of the disposable environment [showing] a troubling lack of focus on the material” in which he uses that position to ADVOCATE for digital technologies, describing them as “[givers of] alternative and multiple ways to ‘make’ the world” and raising said technologies to the height of necessity by implicating them as the answer to it being “culturally necessary…to broaden ways of seeing.” Though I agree that digital mediums offer new and important ways of seeing, I completely disagree that this means that the larger sociopoliticocultural vision will be affected in anyway and think his view reeks of the progress narrative. Stinkystinkystinky. Additionally, it is difficult for me to understand how he can suggest digital technology as a solution to “the present social condition of the disposable environment” and it’s “troubling lack of focus on the material” when, according to National Public Radio: “computers and computer monitors in the United States are responsible for the unnecessary production of millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In U.S. companies alone, more than $1 billion a year is wasted on electricity for computer monitors that are turned on when they shouldn't be." This is of course without taking into consideration the chemicals used in production that are largely relegated to the drinking water of people the computer-users of the developed world are permitted, and actively encouraged, to ignore.

Beyond this major dilemma, I am also just not convinced that digital media has the same level of materiality as a book or a painting. I can’t take notes in the margins of an animated writing. You need to understand, I take books so seriously, and treat them so intimately, that I make a weird, fuzzy distinction between "academic" books and “intimate” books and keep the more academic reads on the book shelf in my office and my favorite, most intimate books on a rotating media shelf in my bedroom where I can easily bring them under the covers with me. No animated writing smells as amazingly loved as the super old, leather bound copy of Sons and Lovers I found at a friend’s moving sale for a quarter. And I don’t want it to…if digital texts started to have smells I would begin to suspect the presence of something highly Orwellian (or perhaps Huxley-an is more like it). I think digital mediums are important and should be explored, but I do not think these technologies are going to save the world and I still think I love books way more than I will ever like digital texts. I love books. I will defend books as an indigenous species, along with the mix tape and the LP. And you may wonder why I never use fonts in my animations...I'm defending cursive handwriting, too!

Edit: Also, I didn't think about this until I read the news today, but up until now, the internet was limited to speakers of languages that utilize latin-based alphabets. That would seem to suggest an definite LIMIT on different "ways of seeing" (if we think about languages as containing perspectives and ideologies) that has existed throughout the entire history of teh Internets, one of the primary digital mediums for experimental literature.


*I only reference the quotes I use from the text here because I am using a version of this article that I found on the internet because for some reason my Adobe Acrobat is not letting me open the files from e-reserve and other things stored in D2L. :(

fnl prjct // I Remember

For my final project I am going to construct a (long-ish) poem in Flash following the "I Remember" form. What I most want to explore through this project is memory itself. I want to try to find different ways within Flash to communicate the haziness or the focus of a memory, the certainty of a chain of events or the doubt about it, and to communicate effectively the relative proximity or distance I am allowing the memory to be to me. I want to do this because I have a lot of weird memories and a lot of photographs that I am obsessed with and a lot of unresolved feelings, and it will give me an opportunity to focus that energy by funneling it into a project, which might have a calming effect on said energy. Also, memory is an important aspect of writing to think about. I want to use the juxtaposition of text and photographs to create a tension between the past and the present: the moment of being in the picture, the present remembrance in the text. Additionally, I want the photos to operate self-reflexively by bringing into question, alongside the text, what I actually remember versus what I have contrived from photgraphs and family stories.

I might need yr help figuring out how to most effectively present text. I am interested in maybe doing the blurry-edges-of-text-to-denote-disorientation thing but maybe I need a new technique since we've seen that a number of times in samples we have analyzed for class. I want to make something epic but I have limited Flash skills; when I look at the animation samples we have analyzed I get nervous about not having the technical skills to best do this. I will let you know, though. I think for this animation I am going to use FONTS. Yep, FONTS. I think the phrase "I remember" is going to repeat over and over. That is about all I know. I think that in carrying out this project, I might get a better layout/understanding with which to pick up work on the memoir I started in high school tentatively titled "Looking Through Light."

Don't Diss Yoko!

If you were looking for a cool poster to hang in yr cubicle at work to fight the grey monotony of things like I eternally am, I think I found the coolest poster available for sale on teh internets.

The text at the bottom reads: "Girl was famous before she met the man whose fame so completely obscured hers. She was part of the first wave of female Japanese artists who struck out for New York to revel in the new Post-War, multicultural, cross-national wave of performance and video art that was taking the world by storm. She ran a gallery out of her apartment that showed the height of avant-garde art, and was an early member of the legendary group Fluxus. She played a key role in the movement towards what we now consider a work of art to be: not just a precious object on a wall, but a total experience that goes beyond painting, sculpture and photography into performance, video, and installation. Her works often present the audience with a moral dilemma; they are beautiful, brilliant, illuminating, weird, and (fair enough) occasionally terrible. Her music is the same. She is epic. Don't dismiss all this because you heard she broke up the Beatles. Face up to the facts! Post-War American culture was uncomfortable with a sexually confident, strange and intriguing Asian woman commanding the cultural spotlight, especially at the height of the Vietnam War. We've got a cultural hangover that won't let us shake off the idea of strong women as sirens who drain mens virility. Say: Don't Diss Yoko! Say thanks for making the world a more interesting place. Long Live Yoko!"

I will tell you where you can find this amazing poster if you buy me one, as well. :D Or you can just "use the Google," G.W. style and hook yrself up.

Props to Bea Arthur

She was always my favorite Golden Girl...

Analysis of a Writing Sample: J.R. Carpenter's "The Cape"

In composing this work, I believe Carpenter intended to get people thinking about the boundary between fact and fiction. I think s/he wanted us to question why we trust our memories more than our doubts. I think this because s/he told me so in the "Author Description." I was, however, grateful for these directions because I like to have an author's note on their work to give me a framework in which to think about the piece and assess how successful it is based on what their intentions were. However, I experienced the piece before I read the author's note, which I think is important--to experience it without assistance first so you can truly gauge how successful it was based on what you took from it without their instruction. Many components of the piece point to the dichotomy between fact and fiction, however, specifically the frame with text that says "these events happened so long ago that this whole story is in black and white" combined with the slide in which s/he admits there is no picture of their grandmother but that if they had one it would be there, which suggests that we construct our own memory of things based on what we have, which is sometimes very little. Perhaps the threads we create to connect what is left to us via our own memories or stories passed on are little lies or assumptions that help us weave a tapestry to explain to us who we are.

For example: I used to think I had memories from when my parents were still married. They divorced when I was two and a half. What I think happened was that I spent so much time looking through my baby book and updating it with new photos of me as a child, that I started to recall the photos and believe that I remembered being in the backyard with my dad and our dog Freckles and my mom pushing me in a stroller down a street made of bricks and sitting in a baby seat wearing sunglasses. But I didn't remember them. I saw them, and I recalled images of myself, where I was outside myself, so I remembered things like the silly sunglasses I had on and how happy my father looked because I looked at them from a historical perspective outside of the moment I was once in and noticed things about them. (I've always been fascinated with myself.) Also: I wanted to remember those things. My real memories begin when I am four, just after my mother re-married. I have always used photographs and letters, any kind of evidence I could locate to reconstruct my parents' love. I have this picture of them in California in 1984 or something, and my dad is wearing the shortest shorts I have ever seen and that is all he is wearing, and my mom is wearing a bikini top and some high-waisted shorts and they are posed in an open parking lot in front of Mary Lou Subaru, a piece of shit car my dad bought for $100 that he had to turn off when they went down hills, and Mary Lou has a beer sitting on her hood, and in the background is a gorgeous bluff, covered in trees, with a road alongside it on which a VW van is chugging around the bend. I also have a poem my dad wrote when my mom told him she was going to divorce him that was tucked into an original envelope of photos my dad had developed (like it had our old address on it and everything) and it's horribly sad. It's like a Bruce Springsteen song. It's like "The River." It's "Downbound Train." It's deliciously sad and heartbreakingIt's my treasure. I have no memories of my parents being married, but through these artifacts I attempt to reconstruct their rise and fall, the arch of their love, some semblance of romance that I can cling to and attach myself to, to know that I am a product of this EPIC THING.

I think Carpenter actually wants to know more about their family and is constructing their history in a way to illuminate the emptiness of the threads s/he has. I know that s/he says it's about the fact/fiction binary because the pictures aren't family-related and the maps aren't to scale and are out of date, but now that I'm writing about this, I think it is about the potential empty-feeling of the threads of family history if you don't try to attach them to something with these little threads that fill in the holes and make your family history a tight knit blanket; better to have a tight knit than a loose one when the cold wind blows. We are from a linear-society, we must know ourselves from beginning to end. This idea is furthered to me by the frame that states "sound carries, especially in winter." There is a specific emptiness to winter that enables sound to carry. This suggests to me a kind of haunting, or the way in all of Bruce Springsteen's saddest songs there is that keyboard part that always, unmistakably sounds like a forlorn train bounding through the plains at night. It's that kind of sound carrying: grief, emptiness, the being without.

I think Carpenter chose not to use a traditional approach with this piece because we are talking about memory. Memory is non-linear; memory is especially nonlinear when you have very few memories with which to actually construct something. This is why I think the non-linear form has been utilized frequently in recent history for the writing of memoirs.

L I N E S

For my short animation project I will be examining lines:

rounding them,

subverting them.

I will use visual lines as well as lines of text

in this experiment.

I would tell you more

but I am trying to let my content drive my process

while also letting the medium drive my creative impulses.

R.I.P. Reginald "Omari Huduma" Blanton
6/3/1981 - 10/27/2009



"Nothing is more difficult to understand than the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to forget them."

--Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

DID YOU KNOW
THAT THE RATE OF
SUICIDE
AND THE RATE OF
SEXUAL ASSAULT
WITHIN THE U.S. MILITARY
NOW EXCEEDS
THAT OF THE CIVILIAN POPULATION?

There is a film about it premiering only in NYC because it's been effectively banned in this country.



(how

does

that

make

you

feel?)

Technological Impact on My Writings

Okay, so I don't actually type correctly. See, I started instant messaging when I was in third grade and became able to hunt and peck reaaaally fast to keep up with three or four different instant message conversations, so that is the kind of culture I grew up in. I am 22, so unfortunately a lot of my childhood was spent waiting until 5pm when I was allowed to sign on to AOL (insert weird login noise here). However, I have always been an avid reader, so I have to say that for me, personally, I feel that I have a command of standardized language as well as a fluency in the continuously emerging technologically-motivated language. I think communication has become less formal. I also think websites like "I Can Haz Cheezburger" have made it popular to speak pidgin English, which is odd to say the least. Most of my communication with friends and family is through Facebook and text messages at this point in time. This is part cultural shift and part convenience on my part.

(I had to rewrite this next part. Technology FAIL.)

Responsibilities I am taking on as a producer/reader/future teacher of texts:

SUBVERSION. I take on the responsibility of challenging language, and treating it not as an apolitical tool but as a system which works in the favor of the dominant cultural paradigm.
CULTURE. I take on the responsibility to make it clear that culture is an ongoing conflict and not a warm blanket we are all sleeping under. There are some school districts where Huckleberry Finn is supposed to be taught without any discussion of race. This demonstrates a strict separation of literature and history that I will not tolerate. There is a need in this society to separate literature and history because literature liberates history. Asking students to read a text and be able to answer multiple choice questions or fill in blanks from a word bank about what Susie had in her hand when she came into the house, or what Papa was wearing when the fire started, is not engaging our students in critical thought. It is limiting the level of cognition we ask them to think at to the lowest levels of word perception and literal comprehension. Beyond any of this, Mark Twain would roll in his grave. If America is a circle, then race is at the center of it. By agreeing to even acknowledge culture as an ongoing battle, I believe I place myself within that war. I am willing to fight.
CREATIVITY. I take on the responsibility of making art (and life) fun and engaging, with an emphasis on discovery, appreciation and play alongside commitment and compassion.
SUPPORT. I take on the responsibility of at least trying to think of everyone in the process of making something, whether it is an animated writing or a lesson plan. I think it would have benefited me a lot more to read Dorothy Allison in high school than it did to read Charles Dickens. It makes sense for multicultural classrooms to be less successful in America when we are teaching a bunch of brown children a perspective of history that further victimizes and marginalizes their people. I take on the responsibility of each individual's story in constructing my own.

Networking & Collaboration = The Future/History of Art

I want to approach this reading from the networking standpoint. The existence of the Internet has made possible many new ways to create. The existence of collaborative projects such as Wikipedia are challenging “the concept of the 'author' as it was defined by the book culture.” Someone who is reading Wikipedia can also become a writer. For example, I once was perusing the wiki page on American ex-patriots and noticed that Nina Simone was missing from a section devoted to musicians who expatriated to France in the sixties, so I added her. In a way, this type of format liberates the reader and the writer, but the writer who does not want their text to be altered or deleted might have a hard time embracing this type of online collaboration. It is interesting to browse wiki pages of current issues, for example if you go to the wiki page of Roman Polanski the top of the page will tell you something like this: “This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2009)” It is always interesting to me how Wikipedia is maligned as a resource because of the collaborative format and the fact that people do not have to have any kind of academic credentials to participate. Not that I think Wikipedia is the best source to use, but plenty of people have no problem citing the Bible as evidence for a specific argument, when there are theories that argue certain sections of the Bible may have been written collaboratively by a group of scholars.

Posting work on my own blog and reading the works of others online does shift my sense of texts and the way we judge them. The Internet has updated worldwide collaborative art projects from the mail art that emerged in the fifties as part of the Dada and Fluxus movements to participatory online websites where people can take directions from a website, create, and then post their completed work. This has given birth to many beautiful and human projects such as Learning to Love You More and The Six Word Memoir Project, among many others. The former, resulting in a number of exhibitions around the world and a book of some of the most beloved pieces, and the latter resulting in a number of books with different themes that became best-sellers. So, some of these networking projects actually cross-over into the “book culture,” which is maybe a sign that we are finding ways to navigate the old media and the new media without creating a false dichotomy or limiting the potential of each, but combining them. For example, the Six Word Memoir project functions great as an online site in that people can register, and submit six-word memoirs as frequently or infrequently as they want and be able to see the submissions of the others participating in the project. The individual memoirs work phenomenally in a book form, however, because the various typographical choices the memoirs are presented with can have a very substantial effect on the meaning a reader takes away from such a short description of a life. Additionally, there are networking organizations such as The Yes Men who execute missions and that challenge the people who discover them to copy/edit/recreate in some way the missions the Yes Men have successfully pulled off, in a kind of performance art that creates countless collaborative, nameless, genderless, faceless political acts, with their projects moving "off the screen and into the streets."

That having been said, I want to add that the possibilities networking creates for collaborative art and global action is really one of few positives in my overall evaluation of technology and digital culture. I miss pay phones and cursive handwriting and mix tapes. I wish people still listened to whole albums instead of snippets of songs, I wish people bought books from their local book stores and bought music from their local record stores, and I wish a new stylus didn't cost as much as a whole new turntable. Though networking can result in neat, collaborative art projects, the internet and networking specifically have also had a devastating impact on the music industry via file sharing, and technologies like the Kindle are seemingly the new way to read...texts. I won't call it reading a book because it isn't. There is something very important about books, they are sensual, intimate things, so intimate that we take them to bed with us. Or, at least, I still do. Reading is different on a screen versus in a book. I have started printing out the readings for this class because I stare at a computer all day at work and reading on one all night really makes it hard for my eyes to focus and that tab to the right of the one I am reading in is always whispering "faaaaaaceboookkkk, faaaaceeeeboookkkk" and I really just don't think the computer screen is an ideal reading environment for these reasons. The internet breeds hyperactivity for me, and in many cases useless forms of it. I need to have the pages in my hands; I need to touch them, write on them, interact with them.

30 Senators Vote to Protect Corporations Over Rape Victims

If you identify as a Republican, I hereby recommend that you talk some sense in your congressional representatives. This is completely callous. For those of us who do not, I think a writing campaign might still be in order, though the measure was passed. Notice Senator McCain voted against this amendment. Glad he's not our President? Oh, hell yes.

Dear Republican Opposition to Senator Franken's Amendment,

Shame on you.

-Your conscience

Six Word Memoirs

Last night while I was waiting in line to get an autograph for the first time since I was ten at the Sherman Alexie reading, I came upon a collection of these six word memoirs and wanted to share the phenomenon with you in case you hadn't yet discovered it. They are especially interesting in the book format because the typographical choices are very important to the meaning to be derived from the short sentences.

I just wrote mine:


SHE
DIDN'T

TOW

THE
PARTY

LINE

The Main Reason the St. Brigid's Cross That Hangs Around My Neck is Moreso a Question Than an Answer

My grandmother is very Catholic. Grew up in predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhoods, west side of Chicago, went to Catholic schools, had nine children before asking the pope if she could please use birth control since the doctor said another child would kill her, and still at 82 reads at mass every Sunday and prepares meals for the Father of her parish.

When my grandmother talks seriously about religion and faith and the power of god, she frequently cries. I have long thought of this as being demonstrative of the importance of faith in her own life. Only today did I first come to the idea that maybe, just maybe, she cries out of her own doubt, and her participation in the Catholic faith is a long and winding project of denial because it would be too heart-breaking, too paralyzing, to have worked so hard and suffered so uselessly for "God" to not exist as the church purports "him" to. But it's just a thought.

Today's severe skepticism of, repulsion from and rejection of religious doctrine courtesy of the Catholic Church making a "pedophile paradise" out of the remote villages of Alaska Natives.

Some Things I Have Been Contemplating

“The simpler we make social reality appear to be by reference to language defined as an instrument for speaking about things other to it, the better able we are to supplant dialectics with paradox, a mere contradiction in terms, a literary technique. And language proves it's mettle by it's ability to smooth over the contradictions which it discovers through observing its grammar.”

-H.T. Wilson, American Ideology: Science, Technology and Organization as Modes of Rationality

“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.”

-Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The most efficient oppressor is the one who persuades his underlings to love, desire and identify with his power, and any practice of political emancipation thus involves that most difficult of all forms of liberations, freeing ourselves from ourselves."

-Terry Eagleton

Rsrch Prjct: FLXS

For my independent researching project I will be reading and writing about FLUXUS, primarily because I am incredibly intrigued based on the texts we have read in class, especially the "Manifesto for FLUXUS" by Maciunas. I hope to learn about FLUXUS from an art history perspective but also connect it with the movement's evolution and present-day context. More importantly, I want to examine FLUXUS as a truly shape-shifting creative force that is innately transformative and without limitations to art as a cultural production of past time.

For my research, I have gathered every text the UWM library has available on this movement. Also, the automated lady from the central library called to let me know some additional research materials are now available to me and being held at the East library. I have a lot of very thick books on my desk that I will not be able to read before the end of the year, no less in time to turn the first draft for this paper. Thus, my first assignment is to go through these books to determine which ones I should focus my attention toward. I have books that take more of an art history perspective, a few biographies on George Maciunas, and some books of concrete poetry and collections of FLUXUS work that are half ((non?)art)works and the other half descriptions of artists, FLUXUS scenes throughout the world, and details about various projects. Additionally, I am reading The Society of the Spectacle to get more of an idea of the theoretical underpinnings of the experimental arts movements that emerged around the same time as FLUXUS, specifically the Surrealist and Situationist movements. I have a feeling I will experience quite a struggle to keep my paper under seven pages...

Anne, I might need your help narrowing down my topic for this paper! Granted, I haven't really had a chance to fully immerse myself in these texts, so I am assuming that once I do I will be more able to formulate a more specific topic. As the paper is relatively short and I do have so many books sitting on my desk, it is my first goal to narrow this down. I think you might already have knowledge of some themes or sub-movements within FLUXUS that could point me in a more clear direction.

Schedule for getting this done: Honestly, whenever I have time. This will probably consume the majority of the time that I am not working, in class or getting things done for my other classes. There is no set schedule I could make that I could actually adhere to consistently. I will probably spend my free time this month doing research, first figuring out which books are going to be of most assistance and then documenting the information and sources I want to use within my paper as I develop my understanding of the movement. I will then allow myself the first two weeks of November to get a paper started and develop it enough to meet the requirements of the first draft due. Throughout the construction of the draft I suspect I will still be researching, but will have narrowed down my pile of resources substantially.

Raising Our Obsessions to the Level of Creation!

Of what I was able to discern from this dense reading, the general idea seems to be the departure of various art movements from adherence to traditional forms and their reasons for doing so. Specifically, Drucker addressed the need for an avant-garde to “[rescue ] poetic imagination […] from the dwelling effects of ordinary graphic and linguistic practices.” This process entails the creation of a figural or visual mode that is “radically anti-grammatical” and derives meaning not from traditional syntactic structures or cliché phrases , but rather by the arrangement of language to create a form “independent of the grammatical order of the words.” She mentions exhaustively the various figures in these different art movements that agreed on the importance of making art that was presentational rather than representational. I just took Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle out of the library last night (along with pretty much every book they have on FLUXUS, minus two that I had to order online because they are renewed until the end of the year*) and the idea that art should be a presentation rather than a representation is similar to how Debord describes a modern society in which genuine social life has been substituted with representation. This leads me to believe these avant-garde movements were seeking to create art (or non-art) that conveyed this realization about modern society, though this theory was published much later than a lot of the work Drucker discusses, most of it being much nearer to the early part of the twentieth century.

What I want to hold onto as I embark on my own projects is the idea of the image and the word as different orders of symbolic activity. Additionally, I want to apply that idea to the notion that each given medium “has its own particular effect on our impulses,” in order to create animated writing that make the most out of the possibilities of image and word in the framework of animation. Furthermore, I want to follow an idea about modern poetry Drucker sums up succinctly in the text: as not lacking government, but being governed from within. I want to create pieces that work, but work in their own way and according to their own internal logic…hopefully, a logic that is new and refreshing and engages the reader/viewer.

*I'm planning on researching FLUXUS for my independent research project.