Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2011 | Reclaiming Public Spaces

Some quick things prior to this first Saturday’s gathering. 

1) For those of you new to this course, or who, for whatever reason, did not get the reading assignment for this week, please scroll below and click on the links to the Tzara and Retallack essays.  We’ll spend the first part of the first Saturday (tomorrow) discussing this work, answering a few more questions, posing a few more, and then getting down to writing.  “Getting down to writing” will mean beginning to form some smaller groups and doing some in-class work.  The fun will be so fun I don’t want to spoil it by giving away the exercises.  Suffice it to say, you’ll be happy in an irritated sort of way…

2) PLEASE join me in attending an evening of brilliant, politically charged performance by The Prince Myshkins, this SUNDAY @8pm at Evergreen’s RECITAL HALL.  This troupe is nationally and internationally known for its musico-performative innovation, satire, and often strange behavior.  They will be performing “Great Hymn of Thanksgiving.”  Click the link below to find out more.

Thank you to Evergreen faculty Arun Chandra for bringing them to campus–a great opportunity.  And… it’s free.  I hope to see you there!

http://www.princemyshkins.com/

3) CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!  I’d like to use this site as a quasi-journal, i.e., to post things not only of interest to me, but to all of us.  In that spirit, I’d love to see some of your creative work (prose, poetry, anything that wordpress can handle) in my inbox so that I can post it here, on this public blog.  If you’re interested in publishing your work, just send it to wolachd@evergreen.edu.  Response time will often be two or three days.  It’s only fair that I take the bait first, so here, from a small book that died on the vine, The Poison Eaters:

Cougar Advice

Yes, to tree is a verb

Best way to lose your urbanity:

            Move to fake American woods where real American woods used to be

            Ask fake people in fake woods if “cougar” = “mountain lion”

            Receive real Cougar Alert Email alerting you to fake-real

            cougar sighting in fake woods

Code orange for baby vs cougar

Code orange for house cat vs cougar

Code orange for corporate bailout vs cougar

Code orange for anthrax vs cougar

Code orange for border security vs cougar

Code orange for code yellow and other lesser codes vs cougar

Some advice:

            Your poem never was urbane

            Had it been, it would have been invited to more galas

            Urbane poems borrow suits from David Lehman, have delicate

            Sex with not-cougar, know names of tropical fauna, beach in Hamptons,

            Drive to Hamptons in Saab, drive back to city in Saab, know nothing of the verb to tree

What’s more, stop, pick up small children and don’t run

If possible avoid IRT, NJT, LIR, any commuter rail that ramrods bowels of Penn Station

Face cougar and talk in strong voice about finances, fate, ennui, why no single payer

Give cougar a way to escape, preferably not via IRT, NJT, LIR, etc

Make yourself bigger, i.e., win Power Ball last second, quit job, tell cougar to fuck self,

you are your own boss now

Stand next to other people, supposing other people are nearby in fake forest, which they

invariably are, as other people is reason cougar is near you/other people

Don’t hide, turn your eyes away from cougar, supplicate and disavow all your fornications

Never walk toward cougar, unless in Harlem, as you lived in Harlem for 10 years, many

friends there who will have your back in event cougar tries to rob/make love to you

If cougar attacks fight back, you never know, cougar might run/drive away into fake forest

All else fails, tree

Which is to say, poll

txt.: [X, Y = “all homozygous dominant modifiers”]

2.1

our mantle X has no mantle owning

Y’s not calling it

shame

Y’s not is hunting behind the house

2.2

smoke billows

yet unlike like

agitated semiconductors light these fires

2.3

desiring an is or an operator

Y gathering

2.4

engine absent river company town

sawmills raging against velvety palms, transition from language to act

2.5

translaceration:

            our vestibular systems

            lamely grunted in the face of post-mortem post-modern

            desiring the pure article

            forget Saint Francis of Assisi’s legacy

            recall Apollonia’s tooth

            dangling from a chain master’s string

X:         “The un between us is a hot

            leather couch. It would turn me on in any other context. Florida

            is our oppressor now. And we are not even there.”

________________________________________________________________________

READING INSTRUCTIONS

On December 11th, 2007, at 2:30pm, venture to The Strand Bookstore in New York City. Find a singular copy of Debord’s La Véritable Scission dans L’Internationale wedged between Society of the Spectacle and a misshelved volume of Johnathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Marvel at the sheer unlikelihood that even such a fine bookseller as The Strand would carry this rare Debord volume. Purchase it at any cost. Purchase it for $21 plus tax. Prior to reading the work, prior even to pursuing the title’s back cover, think about two chromosomes that have lived together for many years and have thus developed a certain gelid way of interacting. Muse about what kind of argument might ensue were each to read all the same books in the following manner: one reads only the EVEN pages and the other only the ODD pages; the odd page-reading chromosome would be responsible for summarizing the contents of what the even page-reading chromosome had missed. And vise versa. Call a friend. Ask your friend to come to your house. Together, go through the titles you own and perform this exercise from the hours of 5pm to 8:40 pm, January 8th, 2008.

4) FEATURED COLLECTIVES, COMMUNITIES, ETC.  Each week I hope to feature one accessible (either regional or web-based) arts/literature collective, community, or group.  Next week I will be featuring SubText, a reading series out of Seattle, currated by poet and media artist Nico Vassilakis.  Along with info about SubText, I’ll be posting a short interview with him.  THIS WEEK’s featured collective is FC2.  Fiction Collective 2 has been around for a while and is still doing what most publishers will not: pool their collective resources together to print work that falls outside the commodity stream, that takes formal and political risks.  In addition, FC2 sponsors events, happenings, and workshops worldwide. 

http://fc2.org/

FC2 is: an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction. FC2 is supported in part by the University of Utah, the University of Houston – Victoria, University of Alabama Press, Illinois State University, and private contributors.

What are your impressions of Dada work?  Of the notion of “anti-art”?  Many have situated Dada, especially pre-World War I publications and gatherings, as the beginning of “post-modernism.”  Often thought to be primarily a political performing and visual arts movement, Dada practitioners also certainly shaped the trajectory of text arts.  We’ll come to examples of later work that have been heavily influenced by the sound poetry of Hugo Ball, for instance, and the performative poetics of Emmy Hennings.  A good question to ask, however, is: what’s going on in these works?  What has shifted?  A bad question, in my estimation (or in any case, a secondary, less interesting question), is: what the hell is “post-modernism”?  Feel free to address ALL bad questions. 

If writers associated with Dada did much to influence the course of literature, in so doing help shape how many of us think about what creative writing is or can be, certainly Gertrude Stein added as much, if not more, to the conversation.  How might the early sound-oriented poetry you hear in Ball relate to the small bit of Stein we’ve read? 

If you are interested in working further with Stein, Dada, or both, follow the links below.  Tender Buttons, perhaps Stein’s most influential book, is actually public domain and can be dowloaded free thanks to Project Gutenberg.   

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s#a6032 - Stein, Tender Buttons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism - A Dada primer, wiki

Welcome to Experiments in Text.  Read my message below as a refresher.  I sent it a few days ago and it contains information about this course and readings for Wednesday.

This blog will be a clearinghouse for things interesting (links, text, emphemera), but also, from time to time, a place where we continue discussions that have come out of our time in class. 

With this week’s readings under our belt, I want to start off with a simple question: Why do we write?  And a follow-up question: What does one mean when one says “Creative Writing.”  As in: “I’m taking this, um, creative writing class.  I guess I’ll be doing some creative writing this quarter.”  What does that mean? 

Think about these rather basic questions as we head into Day 1.  Feel free to post comments.  Note that a) contributing to this blog is not required of you, but, of course, encouraged; and b) make sure to do the readings, links below; and c) feel free to check out the other links, some of which we’ll be using quite often, discussing them in the larger context of building alternative writing communities. 

See you Wednesday.

Solidarity,

David