Stingy Kids

Sampler

Yesterday, I participated in a poetry symposium that explored different understandings of the term "currency."  The papers presented were academic (as was our location) but I was very pleased (and even reassured) to learn that many of the participants were also poets.  Some had books out already or had published their work in a number of magazines journals, both in print and on line.  Between panels, we talked a bit about balancing creative writing with the rigors of academic work.  A hiatus from creative writing seems to be common but, thankfully, temporary.  I found several texts by some of the authors I met on line and put together a sampler:

Ethel Rackin: "Let Song Birds Sing" and excerpts from The Forever Notes

Christopher Schmidt: Three Poems  ("By the Sea" is a marvelous poem.  In Schmidt's poem, "by the sea" isn't just a location or position but a state of feeling or being that the imagery of the poem fantastically destabilizes.)

Lucy Ives: "I Saw White Flowers Race to Cover My Eyes," "Epic," and "100 Views" (audio)

Anna Moschovakis: "THE FUTURE or Optimism, an Epic" (from The Moods)

In a 2006 interview with LA-lit, Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich, editors of Ugly Duckling Presse, read from their own work (this link takes you directly to the audio file and to the reading).  Yankelevich started off with an excerpt of his long poem The Present Work, published by Palm Press.  Moschovakis read from her first book The Blue Book.

This and That, Part 1

One Day Poem Pavilion by Jiyeon Song

As the sun passes over the sky, light filters through strategically placed holes in the "pavilion," casting lines of a poem on the ground.  If you watch the time lapse video, you'll notice that the lines of the poem also move, becoming clearer and then fading.  The poem, which Gizmodo describes as "cheesy," is a Sijo written by the eighteenth-century Korean poet Kim Ch'on-taek.  Song is a student at the Art Center College of Design in California. (via Monster-Munch with thanks to Jennifer13)   

Two Portraits: Bia de' Medici and A Child with a Drawing

The first portrait is by the sixteenth century Italian painter Agnolo Bronzino.  It was commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici after the death of Bia, his illegitimate daughter.  Cosimo I never revealed her mother's name but he was very devoted to his daughter and greatly mourned her when she died of a fever at the age of six.  This is one of my favorite paintings, and I had the chance to see it at the Uffizi several years ago.  The light appears to emanate from her face, a kind of "halo" effect, which is due in part to the fact that Bronzino produced her likeness from her death mask.  This portrait became one Bronzino's most celebrated paintings and inspired Joseph Cornell's "Medici Princess."

The second portrait is by the sixteenth-century Italians painter Giovanni Francesco Caroto.  The child isn't identified but the stick-figure drawing that the child holds proudly feels timeless.  Is the drawing a self-portrait? The child's parent?  Or the child's depiction of Caroto?  The painting is in the permanent collection of the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona. The museum features the painting on its website and gives its title as "Giovane con disegno di pupazzo."  "Disegno di pupazzo" means, I think, "doll design" (in this seventeenth century Italian-English dictionary "púpa" is defined as "a baby or puppet like a girle") but the title may have come later. 

Neck Dimples

"If your listener protrudes the tip of the tongue through closed lips, take heed. Humans are like other primates in which this expression has been studied. It's always a negative. Think misunderstanding. Uncertainty. Disagreement." ("Body language in the office speaks louder than words")

*throws hands in the air*  In this context, that means "this article has problems."  The one problem I'll note is that it rests on the assumptions that body language means the same thing in all work places and that all work places are the same.  In this day and age, I think that the one thing that we can assume is that business interactions are likely to be cross-cultural and multilingual, so the author's generalizations of the scholarship cited are unfortunate. I actually know one of the scholars quoted in the article and I can bet that he or she had no idea it was going to be this silly.  What made reading this worthwhile was a link to The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & and Body Language Cues.

Demolition

Last week, Geegaw and I attended Anne Carson's reading/performance of "Cassandra Float Can" and "Possessive Used As Drink (Me)" at the 92nd St Y.  Geegaw paid far better attention than I did, so I'll point you to her summary of both performances.

Cassandra Float Can

"a sensation of veils flying up...call this sensation Cassandra"

"not translatable but not meaningless"

This was a hypnotic and distracting performance.  While Anne Carson spoke in soothing tones, several individuals dressed in black walked along the stage and through the aisles carrying large prints of architectural images.  Some of these images were also projected on a large screen.  Carson spoke about the relation between Cassandra and translation.  According to Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of the Trojan King Priam and was cursed with a gift of prophecy that no one would believe.  After the Trojan War, she was taken by Agamemnon and, in one of the most incredible scenes in literature (which I've only read in English), she stands at the threshold of his home, foresees what awaits her inside, and cries out to the spectators "Otototoi popoi da Opollon Opollon."  Carson's entire performance hinges on this one phrase.  The on line Ancient Greek lexicon that I consulted interprets "otototoi" as a cry of dismay, alarm, awe. Its translation varies.  But it's also worth speculating, as Carson and other scholars do, if it is even Greek in origin.  What language is Cassandra speaking at this moment?  Is she simply emitting sounds of dread or speaking in another tongue?  Either way, how does one translate this cry?  Is there even anything to translate? The skepticism of the chorus provokes a fascinating exchange on language and translation:

CASSANDRA: I tell you you'll see Agamemnon dead.
CHORUS MEMBER: Poor girl, calm yourself. Tone down those words.
CASSANDRA: No—no one can heal what my words prophesy.
CHORUS: Not if they're true. But may the gods forbid!
CASSANDRA: While you pray here, others move in to kill.
CHORUS LEADER: What man is going to commit such crimes?
CASSANDRA: What man? You've completely missed the point.
You've failed to understand my prophecies.
CHORUS LEADER: Yes I have—
I don't see who has means to do it.
CASSANDRA: Yet I can speak Greek well enough.
CHORUS LEADER: So does the oracle at Delphi,
but understanding what it says is hard.

(translation by Ian Johnston)

We learn later in the performance that many of these circulating images are part of what remains of Gordon Matta-Clark's "building cuts," large scale art works that often consisted of cutting holes and creating fissures in abandoned buildings or structures slated for demolition.  It seems that inevitable destruction is the connection between Matta-Clark's buildings and Cassandra's threshold.  Cassandra stands before Agamemnon's home and envisions its ruin.  It's completely unavoidable.  Her speeches to the chorus before she enters the house are stunning in their lyrical power but they are useless.  Cassandra could have stepped inside without a word but, instead, she gives prophecy another try, though she's fully aware that she won't be understood.  She's casting a light that no one will see until it's over.  Like the light in those remaining, surviving images of Matta-Clark's "cuts." 

Possessive Used As Drink (Me): a lecture in the form of 15 sonnets

"Poet Anne Carson proves that even the lowly subject of pronouns can be delicious." (via Play Gallery)

1. Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony: Part I; Part II; Part III
2. Sonnet Isolate
3. Recipe
4. Sonnet of Addressing Gertrude Stein
5. Sonnet of Addressing God
6. Merce Sonnet
7. Sonnet of Addressing Oscar Wilde
8. Deictic Quiz Sonnet: Parts I through VI
9. Drop't Sonnet
10. Sonnet of the Pronoun Event
11. Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences from the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Émile Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966)
12. Reticent Sonnet
13. Sonnet of "We Tried Doing It Without The Cue Sheet But Couldn't Remember What Color Referred To What Movement And What Had Been Done And What Was Left To Do"
14. Sonnet of the English-Made Cabinet with Drawers (in prose)
15. Crowning Sonnet (Fashioned from the Foregoing 14 by Chance Operations)

I've included links to video excerpts of this performance. 

I Call It Art

Coco Fusco

Fusco is a Cuban American performance artist whose work explores and challenges ideas on gender, race, and borders.  One of her performances was included in this year's Whitney Biennial.  You can read more about her work on her website, but I'd like to highlight two projects in particular that deal with death and gender:

Better Yet When Dead

I thought of Ana Mendieta; I thought of Frida Kahlo and the way in which she sort of dies on canvas--there was this form of performance... I started to think about these processes of idealization that are very much a part of Latin Catholic Culture, where women get shafted in reality and then deified at the moment of their death. I thought that one of the things that is kind of bizarre about this, in this particular moment in history, is that death becomes a kind of opportunity to really commodify to an incredible degree the images of these women. So I think about Evita Peron and the business that's been generated by her corpse traveling around the world for 40 years; the difference between Ana Mendieta in life and in death; what happened to Frida Kahlo who got one solo show in her entire life in Mexico and now is the best-selling artist from her country. (via MOMA)

The Incredible Disappearing Woman

So in the piece different possible scenarios emerge in the storytelling. The date rape drug, catalepsy was another version I did some research about, -- you know, people being buried alive because they looked dead and then they wake up. So one thing was to do the almost hardcore journalism, you know, asking, who could this have happened to , but another thing to think about was what would it be like to be alive when everyone thinks you are dead, to be just an object, not to be seen, not to be recognised, not to be present for people. In that sense, thinking about it in a more metaphorical way, gave me a way to tell the story. (via 3am)

Fusco's performances intentionally create a sense of complicity in the viewer.  So reading about these performances seems beside the point but, at the very least, the interviews and talks that I've linked to contextualize Fusco's works in interesting and provocative ways. 

Fusco's "Buried Pig with Moros" will be showing from April 3 to May 2 at The Project. 

Alex Colville

If you've seen Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat, you may recall a scene (scroll down for images) in which the character Neil McCauley, played by Robert de Niro, is standing at a window with his gun resting on a table behind him.  The entire scene is bathed in deep blue light.  I remember this moment from the movie and learned recently that this shot was inspired (most likely) by Alex Colville's 1967 painting "Pacific" (click here for a higher res image).

Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1920 and studied fine arts in college.  During World War II, he served as a war painter for the Canadian army and was sent to Europe.  In 1945, he was among three Canadian artists who entered the newly liberated Bergen Belsen camp.  "Bodies in a Grave" was one of the works that came out of that experience.  The website for the Canadian War Museum contains a few more images from this period of Colville's work.  When I think of a "war painter," particularly a painter-soldier, I think of someone who is like a journalist but working in images (admittedly, though, I don't know a great deal about the subject).  Colville himself describes the work of this period as "reportorial."  But a painting like "Bodies in a Grave" doesn't really report, in a journalistic sense of the word, the scale of death and disease that Allied soldiers encountered in Bergen Belsen.  It feels very personal and very partial, like a remnant. 

For more on Colville, I recommend his page on Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's website.

Frank

In his article "Honk if you see high art," Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post argues that a mural for a auto service shop is "Picassoid":

Finding an accidental work of modern art in our own urban scene may be no stranger than spotting some Constable-like beauty in the untouched English countryside. The fact that the trees don't know they're artful doesn't make them seem any less artistically arranged. (my link)

"Trees Don't Know They're Artful" should have been the title of this post.

The actual title for this post comes from The Kills version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Chanson de Slogan."