“You
know, when you use these arbitrary things it's amazing how what you
come up with may have the consistency of something that doesn't have
that much arbitrariness and that's what the beauty of the arbitrary
was. John Ashbery was very effective 35 years ago in his use of the
arbitrary. He could make something just come out of infinity into
this place that seemed to have had some kind of finiteness about it,
something concrete about it. He just pulled in this thing that
didn't belong there and made it fit. I mean your mind would make it
fit and it would bounce you into this place that just had nothing to
do with our conventions of thinking, of logic.” 'An Interview with
John Godfrey,' by Lisa Jarnot, Poetry Project Newsletter
April/May 1997, #165, reprinted in What Is Poetry? (Just
Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from thePoetry Project
Newsletter (1983-2009), ed,
Anselm Berrigan, Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2017 ,
p. 99.
Thursday, December 28, 2017
Monday, December 25, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
The Politics of Immigration: Next Up: Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parent...
The Politics of Immigration: Next Up: Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parent...: The security threat on our borders? Photo: Jennifer Whitney/NY Times The Washington Post reports that the Department of Ho...
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Friday, December 22, 2017
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Coltrane's epistemology
But
what these pieces are, and what is the road to attain the knowledge
of them, that I don't know. –
John Coltrane
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
James Baldwin on Palesine
In
a letter from 'Israel' written on October 8, 1961, James Baldwin told
his agent, Bob Mills: “I personally cannot help being saddened by
the creation, at this late date, of yet another nation – it seems
to me that we need fewer nations, not more: the blood that has been
spilled for various flags makes me ill [. . .] O perhaps I would not
feel this way if I were not painfully – most painfully –
ambivalent concerning the status of the Arabs here. I cannot blame
them for feeling dispossessed; and in a literal way, they have been.
Furthermore, the Jews, who are surrounded by forty million hostile
Muslims, are forced to control the very movements of Arabs within the
state of Israel. One cannot blame the Jews for this necessity; one
cannot blame the Arabs for resenting it. I
would – indeed, in my own situation in America, I do, and it has
cost me – costs me – a great and continuing effort not to hate
the people who are responsible for the societal effort to limit and
diminish me.
Monday, December 18, 2017
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Foucault on history
I would like to distinguish between the “history of ideas” and the “history of thought.” Most of the time a historian of ideas tries to determine when a specific concept appears, and this moment is often identified by the appearance of a new word. But what I am attempting to do as a historian of thought is something different. I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem for people who behave in Specific sorts of ways, who have certain types of habits, who engage in certain kinds of practices, and who put to work specific kinds of institutions. The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting of other ideas which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were familiar and “silent,” out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions. The history of thought, understood in this way, is the history of the way people begin to take care of something, of the way they become anxious about this or that—for example, about madness, about crime, about sex, about themselves, or about truth. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, Semiotext(e), 2001, p. 74.
Friday, December 8, 2017
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
After watching the wonderful Tony Conrad documentary last night, as part of No Response Fest fun(d)raising, I'm wondering whether anyone in Ohio is working on Beverly Grant's archives? (Could be my new pet project, if no takers.)
Grant left New York in 1973 to move with Conrad to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Conrad taught at Antioch College. During this time, she earned a master's degree from Wright State University, and performed in local theater. After she and Conrad divorced in 1976, Grant remained in Yellow Springs, raising the couple's son, Theodore.
In her later years, Grant worked as a drug- and alcohol-abuse counsellor in London, Ohio, where she died of lung cancer at the age of 54 on July 4, 1990
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