g-point almanac: passyunk lost by Kevin Varrone


I've never felt a sadder spring, then a spring in Philadelphia.  Or at least that's the way I feel today on this unexpectedly slowly falling day here in Houston.

Let's meditate on snow falling, try to remember the bits of light sloughing out of the empty expanse of sky and grayness.  The gray of the snowstorm.  But wait.

snow is not sky falling, pollo
poco, it's sky
sloughing bits
of wissahickon mica
schist 'til
heft is on us,
high brought
low, fly weight, exfoliation.

And suddenly I can remember the snow, the weigh it sloughs, its heavy weightlessness, its heft.  These are careful words, weighty Middle-English words (not that I looked them up to check, they just feel that way, have that feel of long f sounds).  I also have not googled "wissahickon mica" but just from spending time with this book (g-point almanac: passyunk lost  by Kevin Varrone) I have a feeling that this is a particular kind of geological sediment.  And I am guessing this geological sediment is around Philadelphia.  And I have not googled "passyunk" either, but I'm guessing it is a street in the city of brotherly love.  Brotherly.

This book feels like a series of wintry experiments,  a continuation of a quest to keep on writing through the dismal grays of the long, barren snowfalling.  Many of the pieces are titled what look like dates, beginning with "1.7" and getting progressively more February, then more March.  The first poems in January are in a section called "a fortnight for st. distaff."  It is made of slippery square boxes of text, justified mostly and yet sometimes a line pushes out the side and sometimes a line doesn't reach the justified line.  As if the lines themselves were resisting the Word justification strategies, pushing or pulling their way out of the text block:


 One with more well-behaved lines:


I was reading here with the light filtering through the blinds and through the one missing blind and thinking about the sentences in the photo, how light falls, quickly, headlong.  Light's tail.

What does light do?  What does light make?  What are words about light or the world able to do, to make?

I realized that if I were a strophe
or an imp or an ooze--a great stroke
                                                     on canvas--
I could not make a building
make a building great
make anything.

Repeat.  Make.  Repeat.  Make.  What is the difference between poetry and architecture?  Painting and architecture?  What is a building?  Do we make anything lasting in the process of our art?  Does a building last longer?

History pervades and invades:

passyunk avenue was a footpath

& several (from the anglo-french several,
"existing apart").

I've been thinking and writing around rivers, through rivers, through others words about rivers for some time now.  Often it feels rather hopeless or at least strange and repetitive (like crossing rivers).  Boring or lost.  And then sometimes when I feel most at a loss about why I've been obsessed with these rivers and I can't take it anymore, I pick up a book, like I picked up this one (recommended and lent by a friend).  And inevitably, I stumble on a line like this one that makes me realize it's okay to be lost among the rivers:

perhaps the city has risen
not from ashes
but from the foam of its rivers,

Yes, we can write whole books about so little. Yes, a day can be full with so little.  Or so little full of itself.  When I finished this book, one line kept re-occuring in my mind.  Spring has never seemed so sad as a spring in Philadelphia.  And in the background of this sentence, Jack London's old dictum that "The coldest winter I ever knew was a summer in San Francisco."  I haven't googled anything yet, so if I fractured the quotes, forgive me.  I wanted to rely on memory though, because this book lingers in memory, its deceitfulness, its perpetual habit of getting lost.  It lingers on winter days after the equinox, the days ever-so-slowly lengthening.

The end (and the whole) is winsome and full of ennui (a word that comes up numerous times).  There are tiny poem-letters to "e," a lost lover or loved one of some kind.  The end:

dear e, the traces
                       don't stay

as they pass (save as
a million flecks of mica
in the sky).

day keeps putting on

its cloak and darkness

keeps putting things away




Endnote: Wikipedia confirmed my feeling: "Passyunk Township is a defunct township that was located in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania. The township ceased to exist and was incorporated into the City of Philadelphia following the passage of the Act of Consolidation, 1854. Passyunk, spelled in old deeds and records Perslajingh, Passayunk, Passyonck, Passajon, Passajungh, Passaming and Paisajungh, the name of a Native American village. It formed a tract of land computed at 1,000 acres (4 km²), originally granted by Queen Christina, August 20, 1653, to Lt. Swen Schute in consideration of important services rendered to the Swedish colony of New Sweden by the said gallant lieutenant."

Is modernity, then, a lost cause or an inconclusive project?  With respect to art, [Habermas] maintains that we must take up and deepen the modern project of autonomous experimentation so that its renovating power does not dry up.  At the same time, he suggests that we find other ways of inserting specialized culture into everyday praxis so that the latter does not become impoverished through the repetition of traditions.

- Néstor García Canclini

The Exercise Writing Laboratory presents

¡Copy Paste!

What: A ten-week temporary workspace for the exploration of generative practices in contemporary experimental writing. The goal of the space is two-fold: 1. To read, discuss and debate contemporary approaches to experimental writing. 2. To produce new work in innovative ways that engage with contemporary strategies of appropriation, erasure, recycling, remixing, framing, stealing, copying, pasting, recovery, documentation, translation, transversions, constraint-based writing, collaboration, ekphrastics, book objects, investigation and more.

The workspace is meant to allow us space to play. The techniques and strategies presented provide ways to break out of old ideas, habits, boredom or what has been called "the burden of self-expression." The focus is on contemporary production, primarily work from the last two years, in order to allow us to engage with a community of our peers, people like you and me doing this work now.

The sessions will be divided into two parts: 1) Presentation: Focus on the particular strategy and authors for that week with a mixture of lecture, discussion, oral readings, videos and recordings of contemporary work. Each week, I'll produce a PDF of readings for participants; I'll ask you to read as much as you can prior to coming to the workshop, but then we will spend some time reading and listening in class as well. 2) Exercise: the second part will be a hands-on experiment with the particular strategy we're looking at on that day. We'll have time to share what we write and discuss our experience of the particular strategy. Many of these writing exercises will be explicitly collaborative.

Possibilities for the closing of the workshop include a public reading and group DIY publication of a chapbook of our work. As a group, we'll make decisions about what we want to do.

For whom: A small group (max of ten people). The workspace is open to anyone interested in working with text and the language arts, regardless of predefined boundaries of genre (i.e. poetry, fiction or non-fiction) or discipline (i.e. visual arts, performance, design, dance, etc.). Important: participants need to commit to attending all sessions.

The workshop will be conducted in English, but participants are welcome to write in English, Spanish or any language (or mix of languages) desired. The workshop facilitator is bilingual and it is expected there will be participants writing and reading in 
English and Spanish.

When: Tuesday evenings from 6pm-9pm beginning September 20 and continuing through November 22.

Where: Project Row Houses @ 2521 Holman (between St. Charles and Live Oak Streets) in Houston, Texas.

How much: The workspace is independently-produced and unfunded by any institutions. There will be $10 fee per session with a 20% discount for advance payment of the entire sum prior to the first day of the workspace (i.e. $80 for all ten weeks). Payment plans are possible. Just ask. The payment is meant to foster a sense of commitment and group membership.

Who: The workspace will be organized and facilitated by John Pluecker. Here is a bio: John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter and translator. He recently completed an M.F.A. at U.C. San Diego in experimental writing with a focus on radical aesthetics and cross-border literary production. His work has appeared in journals and magazines in the U.S. and Mexico, including the Rio Grande Review, Picnic, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HMTLGiant and Literal. He has published more than five books in translation from the Spanish, including essays by a leading Mexican feminist, short stories from Ciudad Juárez and a police detective novel. There are two chapbooks of his work, Routes into Texas (DIY, 2010) and Undone (Dusie Kollektiv, 2011). More info on his work is at http://johnpluecker.blogspot.com.

For more info, email plujo7 [at] gmail [dot] com.

What is the EWL? Historically, "exercise" is derived from the Latin word exercitium, from exercere which is comprised of two parts: ex- "off" + arcere "keep away, prevent, enclose, shut up, restrain." The word was primarily used to refer to driving forth animals out of an enclosure or pen. The mission of the Writing Lab is to drive our writing and our words out of prescribed, delimited practices based on language control and subordination.

Here's the short and sweet flyer version:

Early on, living in Houston developed an interesting syndrome in [Dominique de Menil], which I might compare to that which an explorer can experience far from home. It would be appropriate to call it, for the sake of argument, the Lamberéne syndrome, after the site of Albert Schweizer's hospital in Gabon. Isolated and away from the metropolitan centers of culture, Dominique developed an unexpected sense of insecurity, which sometimes made her overvalue the opinions and advice of guests passing through town. This sense of insecurity made her feel that she was missing something--removed, as she sometimes felt, from where the action was.

- Bertrand Davezac in Art & Activism: The Projects of John and Dominique de Menil

But let us come to the point: you must not go to London, Paris or New York to be cosmopolitan. Just open your ears and your eyes and you have it, right in Houston

- John de Menil

A letter from one WWII soldier to another.
Click to enlarge.

La ciudad

No soy una persona apolítica.
Tengo mi opinión sobre cómo se deberían
hacer las cosas en este país para obtener buenos resultados.
Considero que la paz es nuestro pensamiento más valioso.
Pero yo no quiero destrozar
con la tijera de los grandes sueños
el tejido de los sueños pequeños.
Es la hora del día
en que el remolcador Rex zarpa rumbo al archipiélago
para traernos la salida del sol.
Es la época del año
en que el gigante de las montañas de Skinnarvik
lleva el pelo cubierto de lilas.
Pronto abrirá sus fauces y escupirá
sobre la ciudad una bandada de gaviotas reidoras.
Me parece hermoso, sencillamente.
Me parece humano, a veces.

Werner Aspenstrom (Del libro "Uno debe saber dónde vive".
Trad. del sueco: Francisco Javier Uriz)

(I'm trying to find out if an English version has been made. I'll let you know.)

Lo que no he expresado termina siendo lo que dije, puesto que no puedo decir la realidad, el poema es lo que escapa al lenguaje.

- Ferreira Gullar

TACOCAT!


TACOCAT Uno has just published some texts from a larger set of work of mine called "A Manual for Living a Line." Here's some info on the super-cool project:

TACOCAT, a cartonera, was produced in a quick n' dirty fashion from salvaged materials by Greater Than Or Equal To Press out of San Diego, CA on the occasion of the Durruti Free Skools in Berkeley and San Diego. TACOCAT seeks to align itself with proles, salsa and pop rocks, wave patterns and you know, gatos.

What we're interested in, mas y mas: experimental poems, translations, dérives, short critical essays on radical politics and poetics, essays on the politics and poetics of the Inland Empire, San Diego, Los Angeles and/or Mexico (historical materialism, direct action, tactics, space and the border, architecture, technology and aesthetics) visual poems and calligrammes, black and white artwork or collages, manifestos or anti-manifestos, communiqués and comix. Deranged kittens. Contemplations. Spry anti-lyric lyric. "Grimy froth."

So Close to the Knives (So Close) or How to Amuse Yourself in Texas

Just fell in love with David Wojnarowicz and his book Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. A friend had asked Eileen Myles at a reading a while back for books that use queer gossip as a strategy and Eileen said, of course, Close to the Knives. So I read it. And fell in love. (And I'm kinda psyched because I think David and I look a little similar.) Two quotes:


D: I've been told all my life that I'm "too sensitive," as if you could just turn the tap off and feel a little less sensitive for the rest of your life and everything will be okay.

Sylvia: "Too sensitive"⎯oh, definitely. Too smart, too sensitive, intuitive. It is "much sensitive," not "too sensitive," as if it were derogatory. Excuse me, that is what I am. I'll spend my whole trying to maintain this rather than trying to turn it off. That's why it is hard. I want to be as smart and as sensitive as I am and see things the way I do. I want to be strong enough to stay that way. I don't want to dull that.


+


J: A person like Dakota couldn't live for too long in a place like texas. He couldn't be satisfied. Did you hear how he'd amuse himself down there? One thing I'd heard he was doing as breaking into people's houses and putting on these cowboys' cowboy hats and like putting on their gun belt and walking around the house naked and fantasizing about being involved in these people's lives, I guess, and jerking off into their beds. I mean, if those people found him they probably would have shot him, y'know, like he was going to great lengths to amuse himself in texas.

[out of nothing] | 5 | "out of a system declaring nothing out of relevance"


So there is a new issue of [out of nothing] out there in cyberspace. It is issue #5 named "out of a system declaring nothing out of relevance." No links yet, let me explain a bit.

First, [out of nothing] does have a main site that makes logical sense. A list of issues, submission guidelines, the usual. But if you click on any of the issues, things get increasingly complicated from there. Especially in this most recent issue. Let's talk about this most recent issue. Here is a screen shot of the "cover page" of the issue:


It looks like an awkward, messy bastard child of a Google no-match, failed search page. Each time you open the page, it encourages you to search again, this time trying "a more relevant keyword." And each time it suggests a seemingly random word for searching like "hurricane" or "atmosphere" or "dolls." If you click on one of these words, it searches the issue to find instances of the use of this word. You can also put in your own search terms. If you put in the search term "aestas" (which is a kind of subtitle of the issue?), then I think you get a table of contents of the whole issue (mainly because the word "aestas" appears on every page.) I was very pleased when I discovered the useful result of searching for this word. I felt like I had broken the code. :)

And then each of the pages for individual pieces of writing by individual authors is its own strange mix of webpage design. Some of them seem pretty straightforward, like Micah Freeman's page. Often, the writing ends up lurking behind other icons or images or words that you may or may not click on. Like Veronica Gonzalez's page where you have to click on the cut-off page numbers in order to read a clean copy of each page of her text. Or Marcus Civin and Saehee Cho's page, formatted to appear as a Gmail message. Also there are re-purposed Wikipedia pages and Web 1.0 blinking images and intervened Skype videos. You can even copy embed code to embed Amarnath Ravva's (silent) Vimeo video on your own site, like I have:

Vi-ka-ta-ka-vi from [out of nothing] on Vimeo.

All I can say is you better click on everything you can click on or you might just end up missing a lot of material.

[out of nothing] is arming an attack of the difficult webpages.

It's an invitation to interact, to scurry down the rabbit hole. To not take website design for granted or expect websites spoon-fed to you. Most litmags I surf for a few minutes and then move on. But this awkward, difficult design made me push through, it gave me something to think about and struggle through and, as always, there are rewards if you persevere. Find the hidden treasure lost in the Interweb. Surf that shit.


* Update: another great engagement piece with the site is here at Rhizome.org. The unknown author of the text says: "by appropriating and, in some cases, defacing, these "looks and feels" and by making the contents of the journal primarily accessible via a search function, the editors invite their audience to consider what it really means, experientially, to write, read and exist, both physically and virtually, online."

Craig Santos Perez hecho Craig Santos Pérez

Échenle un ojo a La cámara verde, una sección curada por Cristina Rivera Garza en el Periódico de poesía de la UNAM en el DF. En la sección actual, aparecen unos poemas de Craig Santos Perez traducidos al español por su servidor y Marco Antonio Huerta.


Craig Santos Pérez ha intentado crear un “espacio extraído”, no tanto des-territorializado como re-territorializado, en el espacio del cuerpo y de la página. Ahí, entre el océano de palabras en inglés, encontrarán sus sitios movedizos y procesionales algunas del nativo Chamorro que no logró aprender (ni olvidar del todo) en los sistemas escolares de las Islas del Pacifico. La selección que se presenta aquí viene de su primer libro y se mueve del inglés hacia el español gracias a las labores de traducción de John Pluecker y Marco Antonio Huerta, ambos poetas por derecho propio, ambos compartiendo ese espacio fronterizo que une y tensa los límites que van desde Tamaulipas, en el noreste de México, y Texas. Ambos, pues, en el continuo proceso de construcción de sus propios “espacios extraídos”.

Fue un reto y algo rara (y desestabilizadora) esa experiencia de traducir poemas del "inglés" al "español", desde la lengua supuestamente materna a la lengua supuestamente madrastra. Se supone que no se debe de hacer tales barbaridades y atreverse de esta manera. Uno se abre al riesgo de tropezar y cometer graves errores. Pero uno siempre se abre a una infinidad de posibles malentendidos y errores cuando está transitando entre idiomas o traficando palabras. El desafío implicó todo un proceso rico de colaboración con Marco Antonio y al final, allí en tu pantalla quedan las huellas de este proceso de re-escribir, traducir, debatir y discutir. Espero comentarios de los lectores. Ójala. Se puede leer las traducciones aquí.

Rue

Check out a new text by yours truly called "Rue" that was published as part of the wikiloot project of valeveil. I used an erasure technique on a U.S. Embassy cable from Mexico: 10MEXICO518, CALDERON VISITS JUAREZ, ANNOUNCES NEW STRATEGY.

A little more info on valeveil and the project: valeveil is a small publishing press and Stockholm-based curatorial node devoted to strengthening connections between America and Scandinavia via ongoing ventures. valeveil is compiling submitted critical and/or creative writing responses to one or more Wikileaks web link(s) of one’s choice, alongside the written responses of other contributors. Text results are being archived and made publicly accessible.

The project is interested in doing this because the people at valeveil think the Wikileaks phenomenon is of particular importance to Americans, Swedes and others who find themselves influenced. It has been reported that Wilileaks founder Julian Assange’s rapport with these countries has been under scrutiny. Yet, Wikileaks as an open source of relevant information―once classified documents―is significant to anyone aspiring for a more realizable freedom of speech and expression. This writing-as-response archive exists because the Wikileaks issue remains unresolved and a topic of concern.

Submissions are currently being accepted to the project.

Broke!

Tomorrow night in Houston, Hank Hancock reads from the his serial novel Broke as part of the Poison Pen Series. I initially started seeing Broke some years ago (around 2006?) as Hank passed out each chapbook-like entry of the series (in true guerrilla fashion) not to his extended network of friends and acquaintances, but rather direct to the wider community in small stacks around town. I understand the urban, random approach: everyone has a right to his work and it is out there on the street, the same streets where his characters are wandering around. Hank wanted everyone and anyone to stumble on his text, including his characters: Carla and Mica and Vernon and Janine. But for me, it was frustrating. I wanted to collect-the-whole-series like I collected Garbage Pail Kids when I was younger. I had a capitalist need for the whole set. Or a collector's dream of possessing them all. But Hank didn't make that possible. At first.

Now, thankfully, the whole series is up and on-line on a gorgeous website at broke-houston.com. All of the entries are there, or at least all of the ones that have been released so far. Right now, that's three chapters with each one divided into four smaller sections. This week Hank presents the fourth chapter (or entry or section).

And what is Broke all about?

A hurricane is sweeping into Houston. Actually, it's Hurricane Rita. The local denizens of the central city, the adjunct professors and art workers and retail shop clerks and waiters, are all deciding what to do. Hurricane party or traffic jam in the Piney Woods? Fleeing or wandering through the empty landscape of the depopulated city? At the same time, police are pulling a body out of the bayou downtown. All around the trees are growing and swaying and building canyons and structures; Hank names most of the trees, chinaberries and crepe myrtles and more, and a ton of the plants, saw palmettos among them. The street is alive and the city is tense and on-edge as routines are broken and everyone prepares for the expected onslaught with its totally unpredictable effects. The highways are crowded and stopped and suddenly the city can see "how the earth had been moved to shape a roadbed that rose above culverts and gullies, and that cut angles into inclines ... how velocity shapes the world, and how inhospitable that world became once the imperative of velocity had been compromised."

One of the enjoyable things about the text is that it is still very much in the process of being made. It's not perfect or always primly polished, and it doesn't purport to be so. In one installment, in the middle of the page, is the message: what the? what’s going on? this page is in the middle of some edits… I'm going to read this as intentional. As just another kind of footnote. There's a panoply of footnotes, as the offstage narrator tells us where we can read more about a particular item of interest in a novel from 1974 or a Le Tigre song we should listen to from 2004 or a store in Massachusetts that sells the same T-shirt a character is wearing. Everything is in the process of being made in collaboration with the reader. And often what is in the story is drawn from other, obscure-to-me novels, like John Hawkes’ 1964 Second Skin or 1951’s Beetle Leg.

There's a lot of strangeness in the situation, this clearing out of an entire city, and there are moments of humor sprinkled around: "Jacob could not seem to keep his finger out of his nose. It was not the cool nose-wiping of the cocaine user, but honest-to-goodness, mouth-agape, index finger pointed straight up and in. He seemed to be trying to get at his own brain." Sometimes the characters and the situations feel like those moments from the movie Slacker, people walking, talking, smoking cigarrettes, going to house parties, playing chess at a café, extremely educated people asking questions and interviewing, making political speeches. But it's a slacker who is preparing for the impending Rita doom.

Broke is gentle with its (anti-)heroes, always kind with their quirky eccentricities and their often belabored emotional engagement with the world. There's not a lot of irony here or mocking. The characters are cared for, looked after by their all-knowing narrator. And since many of the characters are often cruel to themselves, it's nice to feel like someone is looking out for them.

I'm happy someone is writing this story about this Gulf Coast in this way, in public and in installments. Serial fiction has a long and "storied" history, stretching all the way back to the One Thousand and One Nights; Broke a sweet blend of nineteenth-century publication strategy and zine culture and chapbook arts. But I will say I'm too thrilled that I don't have to wander Montrose looking for a copy in random stacks anymore, since it's all on the Interweb. But I still want a copy of this fourth installment tomorrow night. And I want the book when it finally (hopefully) comes out in all its broken-chinaberry wasteland glory.

Not infrequently, there are calls for “negative criticism” among poets and poet-critics. I am opposed to negative criticism so called--a performance in which one "takes down” another's work in order to enact evaluation or judgment--opting instead for criticism that is highly interested, motivated, desirous, devotional, conversational, dialogic, coeval, conative, and which--yes!--elects affinity. Affinity which may perpetually off-set the struggles for power that even poets so often fall prey to. Affinity, or connection, which seeks new gravity, which redistributes singularities through a process seeking love. To elect affinity is, as Bhanu Kapil suggests, to mate with the things (or people) that you may most want to become (or may already feel like you are becoming). It is, in other words, to work in the present for what we will have wanted to have been.

- Thom Donovan on the Elective Affinities site