Entry 462 — A New Saying
Criticism of criticism: the mediocrity’s primary defense against being found out.
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Category: Miscellaneous Thoughts
Moe Brooker « POETICKS
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Entry 1110 — Commercial Visiotextual Art
Tuesday, June 4th, 2013
One of my very lazy entries, just two steals from ARTnews.
This one is an example of what many Spidertangle artists would call “asemic poetry,” but which, unlike just about everything with that tag, gets into New York galleries or the equivalent. Why? It certainly is no better than much of the pieces shown at Spidertangle, although I do like it–the colors and shapes much more than the scribbling. Is it only because made by certified painters rather than people coming out of, or too associated with, poets. For one thing, artists like Brooker never think of their work as poetry of any kind.
A related example that I don’t at all like. In the spirit of Jenny Holzer. Yeah, makes yuh think but who in the world would hand it on their walls? On the other hand, like the Weatherly Dixie Cups, these bookspines could work as elements of my long divisions. That, needless to say, would complicate them beyond all possibility of being written up in ARTnews.
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Entry 1765 — Continuing Yesterday’s Blither « POETICKS
Entry 1765 — Continuing Yesterday’s Blither
First a link on behalf of Jared Schickling, who does good things in and for Otherstream poetry. It’s to a book Jared has published of Kent Johnson’s work, for those interested, as I fear I’m not: eccolinguistics.blogspot.com. I wish I did more announcements like this one, but I’m such a lazy lout.
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Before getting back to my discussion of poetry continuums, I thought I would briefly comment on something I just read and would probably about if I did not at once take care of it. It’s an article in the latest issue of The National Review.
David Pryce-Jones, its author, is a good writer and I agree with a lot of his political views but in his article, he exemplifies one of the three greatest faults of American conservatives, ignorant philistinism. (The others are the worship of fetuses, and the like and block-headedness about the environment equal to that of the left, but in reverse. I leave out starry-eyed love of the state religion, formal education because that’s not specifically a conservative fault.)
The subject of Pryce-Jones’s article is Dadaism, and where his binary feelings about that should be easy to guess. His take is interesting and I agree with much of it. I have never been a fan of Dadaism. But much of what he says is plain wrong. Beckett’s and Pinter’s work was not “solipsistic,” but comically absurd about the human condition (which Pryce-Jones disparages for not being about. Finnegan’s Wake is not unreadable, just (for me) more hermetic than it should be. Joyce was not expressing Dadaistic meaninglessness, but too much meaningfulness at once. I think two things prevent it from being effective (as opposed, as I always try to say, important, and it may be more important a work of art than any other) an accessible plot (it does seem to have a plot; perhaps I mean narrative disunity) and going for short-term brilliance at the expense of strategic brilliance, and/or the better short-term brilliance that would result if its forests’ including clearings.
One thing I deem a fault of Pryce-Jones’s connects to my problem with the Frost/Horace view of art as instructional. People supports this philistinism when he says, People read books and go to museums to learn what writers and painters can tell them about some aspect of the human condition.” All too sadly true, except for the lack of the word “most” before “read.” It’s a fact that at least a few people—the best people–go to books and visimagery for the beauty of existence they sometimes express and, whether conscious of it or not, for its help in keeping them from suicide, or some equivalent thereof.
Note: “Dadaism” is an example of the kind of coinages that come to label new (or apparently new) kinds of art when left to the artists themselves rather than later taxonomists. Hence the more accurate term for much of Dadaism,” absurdism,” has permanently been relegated to a back seat to it. I’m speaking of effective absurdism, or art that is satirical of poor reasoning, not Dadaism at its worst, which is just wholly arbitrary . . . well, rubbish.
There are many important kinds of art that derive from Dadaism, which is definitely of great historical importance. One is minimalistic art., particularly minimalistic painting. Another recontextualized art like Duchamp’s urinal, which is not absurdist or primarily a joke regardless of how Duchamp considered it.
(Note: my thinking about Dadaism is impressionistic, and in-progress, as should be obvious, but I guess I have a need to make sure people know that I know at times that however ex cathedra some of my statements surely seem, I do not consider them at such times to be Unarguable Truths. I suppose I should be so sensitive about that, but . . .)
I can’t think of anything further to say about Dadaism so will return to my thoughts about poetry continuums. I had just described the instruction/entertainment one. It’s one of the few I would not favor the poetries occupying its middle in the middle over the ones at the ends. Whereas I think some poems will have no really aesthetical valuable components, I don’t think it’s possible for a poem not to preach something, however implicitly.
My notes refer to two other continuums, more important than the instruction/entertainment one: the plurexpressive continuum which begins with poems with no averbal components and ends with poems mixing aesthetically consequential words with aesthetically consequential mathematics and cryptography and visual images (beyond their mere visual appearance) and sound images (beyond the sound any word must make when pronounced aloud)—and who knows what else.
The other continuum is the linguistic complexity continuum going from some of William Carlos Williams’s most direct poets up to the weirdest genuine language poems.
And that does it for me today.
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My Non-Fiction Workshop « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘My Non-Fiction Workshop’ Category
Entry 1516 — The State of American Poetry, 2
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014
Having no idea of a plan of attack on my essay on the state of American poetry yet, I’m going to scatter thoughts I may include here.
1. A very standard thought of mine (although it may not have been when I first put it in print years ago, although I doubt I was the first to have it, is that serious poetry’s audience is relatively small for the same reason serious music’s is, and the research and development department of poetry is virtually ignored by the media and academia for the same reason music’s research and development department is.
2. Another standard thought of mine is that poetry has always been very popular and still is. Who, for instance, can’t quote with enjoyment at least one portion of some poem that serves as a popular song’s lyrics? Limericks, nursery rhymes and folk doggerel are continuingly popular (and doggerel may be a crude kind of poetry but it’s still poetry, at least for sensible people who prefer an objective to a subjective definition of the art). People noting the limited interest of the masses in “poetry,” mistake serious poetry for poetry as a whole.
3. Very few people have the abilities required to work in poetry’s research and development department. Most of them have no idea what they’re doing. Academics need reports on it they can understand before they can bring it to the public’s attention, and to be an academic requires more love of received knowledge of a field than will leave room for much of an exploratory drive, particularly a strong enough one to nudge the academic into an interest in the field’s r&d operations.
4. Academics generally have an innate need to protect the received knowledge of their field from any significant enlargement that will complicate it beyond their meagre ability to understand it. Ergo, academia is the enemy of R&D.
5. Academics will deny they hate R&D, and support their support of it in poetry by alluding to their interest in poets writing about subjects or points of views never getting into poems before, or inventing new metrical schemes for poems or the like, but by R&D, I mean significant R&D, which means entirely new kinds of poetry, not variations of old kinds of poetry.
6. Academics will deny the existence of R&D, too, claiming the people involved in it are not doing anything more than those making up new rhyme schemes. They’ll find poets making visual poems hundreds of years ago trying to prove visual poetry is old hat, for instance, instead of poetry’s second great R&D discovery in modern times, the first being free verse. Visual poetry has by now become too standard although still a minority kind of poetry to be considered at the R&D stage, but there much more chance that continued R&D work on it will yield tools for the poet of importance than R&D work on the poetry of Wilshberia will.
7. Genuine language poetry is the third great achievement of modern poetry R&D, and is continuing without being much noticed because ersatz language poetry is now acadominant, ersatz language poetry being jump-cut poetry like Ashbery’s going back to The Waste Land,” and most of Ron Silliman’s (much of which is admirable but not what I’d call “language-centered”–“language-centered” to a greater degree than all the poetry of the past was, I need add for the literal-minded).
8. The main poetries still almost entirely the concern of R&D departments are various kinds of computer-related poetry, my own cryptographic and mathematical poetry, sundry conceptual poetries and non-non-poeties miscalled poetry but nevertheless under fruitful development in the wrong R&D department. So far as I know.
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Formal Education « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Formal Education’ Category
Entry 1703 — A Question and Some Other Stuff
Saturday, January 24th, 2015
Has there ever been a quarrel between two people in which one of them was entirely in the right?
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A math poem that is resisting effectiveness (so far!): the sun times wonder, rhyming stairs up to a blazing need to be heroed over equals Zeus. Ah, I will replace the word, “sun,” with color. And “wonder” with “wUnder?”
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Now for a news story I read a little while ago that is most certainly worth a rant. Actually, now that I think of it, I’ve recently read two stories–no, three(!) that are worth rants.
One I read over a week ago. It was about the local schools’ recent decision to increase the school day by fifteen minutes. Since I believe the school day should be reduced to zero minutes, except for the parents who want it forced on their unfortunate children, because such parents are unlikely to have children bright enough to be made too miserable by it, I am opposed to this. On the other hand, I’d not be so against it if those running the show would dare let some random number of kids have a school day shortened by fifteen minutes, with a comparison made between how much they learned and how much the others kids learned at the end of a full years of shortened and lengthened school days. If there were an intelligent way of measuring how much each kid learned (as opposed to how much each kinds’ ability to do well on tests about moronically small portion of the significant kinds of knowledge their are), I would bet actually money that the kids with the short days would score pretty much the same as the kids with the long days, bit be a lot more happy (or less unhappy) about their time in school.
Note: yes, I’m biased: I have more than once asked myself if there was one day when I was going to school (k-12, I mean) that I looked forward to an upcoming school day. Of course, my old memory isn’t too accurate, so it may be wrong that there were none whatever. But there could not possibly have been more than a few. Oh, actually, I did look forward to all the last days of the school years, and the ones before Christmas and spring breaks.
Note #2: I believe educators, not just locally but throughout the United States, have no idea whatever as to how to determine how much learning the victims of formal education get directly from what they are taught in school. Otherwise, an interesting research project for sociologists would be to interview a large number of different adults and carry out background checks on them in depth with the goal of determining how much what they genuinely learned from school they used in their vocations.
Needless to say, such a project is ridiculously unfeasible. It also has the disadvantage of lacking enough adults with little or no formal education to compare with the ones with it. I claim that, except for those vocations making it against the law for anyone lacking the right formal schooling to practice it, those without the formal education our laws require would be found to be as effective at their vocation as those with it.
A bit of real-life support for this is the number of persons practicing medicine who don’t get caught because of incompetence but because someone disliking them checks up on where they said they got their degrees from and finds out they never went to college.
Before considering me entirely crazy, remember that I am speaking of formal education. In order to be effective at any vocation, a person has to learn a great deal. I merely contend that most people can do this better by something Americans like Edison and Franklin used to be quite good at: self-education. That means, among other things, finding the right teachers, and getting a lot of on-the-job training, and–even more–off-the-job osmotic absorption of the knowledge the person learns well because he was looking for it, unconsciously or consciously–looking for it because he believed he would find it wonderful, not because his search for it had been assigned.
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I didn’t expect to write so much on the first of the stories I read. The other two, like the first, had to do with the rapidly expanding power of rigidniks in the world. One concerns a group of scientists who want to “improve” the spelling English words, the way George Bernard Shaw (among others, I’m sure) wanted to. The other has to do with a local government’s decision to stop subsidizing a visul art gallery. I’m against all government subsidies, BUT will argue for this one because, not being a moron, I do not believe that I am compelled never to take advantage of some government law because I am opposed in principle to the law. Why? Because there is a hierarchy of principles for me, and at the top is the principle of doing what in the circum-stances seems best for me. In this case, if I were living in a free country whose government wanted to use tax money to subsidize poet, I would be against it. If the government succeeded in passing a law allowing it to subsidize poets and I were offered a subsidy, I would accept it, because I would no longer be living in a free country, and getting money would seem best to me in those circumstances.
A better argument, I now see, is that my principle would actually be of being for government which would not subsidize anything except the few things I believe a government is justified in subsidizing such as a military establishment (and, perhaps, regulation to curb a very few economic practices who probable short term effect would occur too quickly for the sluggish correction of the market to take effect such as pollution of the environment and over-population because of the limited long-term intelligence of the masses, and many who are superior to the masses but unable to say no to a quick profit). I do not see that my second principle of being also, given a government that grants subsidies, for such a government’s giving subsidies to artists of any kind.
Another example: I was against the draft, which was in effect when I was a young man, but when (in effect) drafted, I served in the military. My principle of avoiding hassle or possible imprisonment, trumped my principle of opposition to the draft.
I am in favor of the death penalty for murderers. Nevertheless, if the government passed a law requiring murderers free room and board in prisons instead of execution, and I murdered someone and were caught, I would not beg to be executed.
If the government decreed that a bridge be built over a river a mile away from a bridge already crossing the river, and I had voted against the construction of the second bridge, I would use it rather than the first bridge when it seemed more convenient to do so. And so forth.
I’m not sure I made my case that well. It’s a difficult one to make although I am completely sure I’m right. I would be extremely grateful to anyone who pointed out in a comment where I went wrong, if I did. I’ll even promise not to call him a moron.
I think those for the kind of ersatz consistency I’m against would probably tell me I ought not favor making the school days fifteen-minutes than they now are, I should not be for anything other than reduction in the school day’s length to zero.
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Tomorrow, my response to the rigidnikry of regimented spelling of English words, then one one in favor of the subsidy of the visual art gallery.
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Anny Ballardini « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Anny Ballardini’ Category
Entry 1488 — Correction
Wednesday, June 18th, 2014
Anny Ballardini recently posted a haiku at NowPoetry about red cherries by Richard Wright with a second haiku about cherries under it that I took to be by Wright when I wrote about it there, and then posted that here, but which was actually by Anny. Fortunately, I said nice things about it:
stole two red cherries expensive in plastic baskets under the electric light me
Might as well say a little more about it. I claim a haiku should try for a haiku moment, and a haiku moment should have archetypal resonance. That brings us into subjectivity, I’m afraid. But a critic should be able to show how a haiku he rates as effective as I consider this one to achieve a haiku moment of archetypal resonance. Then the critic’s readers can decide for themselves whether he’s right or not.
(1) (to go through it again because Sound Practice can never be illustrated to many times!) I consider this haiku’s two images to be . . . well, it’s not that easy to sort it out; one image is a store’s expensive cherries bright lit; a second is the haiku’s speaker’s stealing two of them; but there is a third, the shoplifter all by herself, under an electric light (for me, “electric” in this crime scene, connotes the chair). I would combine the first two–in tension with “me” because: (1) a physical act versus (suddenly) a psychological state; (2) a scene versus the tiny focal point of the scene (which I see as tinily inside the scene, the perpetrator seeing herself stealing).
(2) The tension is resolved almost instantly with the reader’s empathetic realization of an archetypal fear: the fear of being found out. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about instinctive human drives lately, and one of them I’m still trying to work out an effective description of is the need for the world’s approval. Or the need, as here, to avoid sustaining the world’s disapproval. I consider all major human drives to be archetypal, and this one is. It’s what makes us such conformists, even the most eccentric of us behaving like everyone else at least 97% of the time.
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My Non-Fiction Workshop « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘My Non-Fiction Workshop’ Category
Entry 1516 — The State of American Poetry, 2
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014
Having no idea of a plan of attack on my essay on the state of American poetry yet, I’m going to scatter thoughts I may include here.
1. A very standard thought of mine (although it may not have been when I first put it in print years ago, although I doubt I was the first to have it, is that serious poetry’s audience is relatively small for the same reason serious music’s is, and the research and development department of poetry is virtually ignored by the media and academia for the same reason music’s research and development department is.
2. Another standard thought of mine is that poetry has always been very popular and still is. Who, for instance, can’t quote with enjoyment at least one portion of some poem that serves as a popular song’s lyrics? Limericks, nursery rhymes and folk doggerel are continuingly popular (and doggerel may be a crude kind of poetry but it’s still poetry, at least for sensible people who prefer an objective to a subjective definition of the art). People noting the limited interest of the masses in “poetry,” mistake serious poetry for poetry as a whole.
3. Very few people have the abilities required to work in poetry’s research and development department. Most of them have no idea what they’re doing. Academics need reports on it they can understand before they can bring it to the public’s attention, and to be an academic requires more love of received knowledge of a field than will leave room for much of an exploratory drive, particularly a strong enough one to nudge the academic into an interest in the field’s r&d operations.
4. Academics generally have an innate need to protect the received knowledge of their field from any significant enlargement that will complicate it beyond their meagre ability to understand it. Ergo, academia is the enemy of R&D.
5. Academics will deny they hate R&D, and support their support of it in poetry by alluding to their interest in poets writing about subjects or points of views never getting into poems before, or inventing new metrical schemes for poems or the like, but by R&D, I mean significant R&D, which means entirely new kinds of poetry, not variations of old kinds of poetry.
6. Academics will deny the existence of R&D, too, claiming the people involved in it are not doing anything more than those making up new rhyme schemes. They’ll find poets making visual poems hundreds of years ago trying to prove visual poetry is old hat, for instance, instead of poetry’s second great R&D discovery in modern times, the first being free verse. Visual poetry has by now become too standard although still a minority kind of poetry to be considered at the R&D stage, but there much more chance that continued R&D work on it will yield tools for the poet of importance than R&D work on the poetry of Wilshberia will.
7. Genuine language poetry is the third great achievement of modern poetry R&D, and is continuing without being much noticed because ersatz language poetry is now acadominant, ersatz language poetry being jump-cut poetry like Ashbery’s going back to The Waste Land,” and most of Ron Silliman’s (much of which is admirable but not what I’d call “language-centered”–“language-centered” to a greater degree than all the poetry of the past was, I need add for the literal-minded).
8. The main poetries still almost entirely the concern of R&D departments are various kinds of computer-related poetry, my own cryptographic and mathematical poetry, sundry conceptual poetries and non-non-poeties miscalled poetry but nevertheless under fruitful development in the wrong R&D department. So far as I know.
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Entry 529 — Old Man Philosophizing, No. 1 « POETICKS
Entry 529 — Old Man Philosophizing, No. 1
I often kick around the question as to whether life is worth living or not–or What Makes Life Worth Living (Assuming It Is Worth Living)? Actually, my question much more usually is, what makes my life worth living? It’s not a practical question for me–my inborn wiring makes it impossible–or close to impossible–for me to kill myself. My inborn ability to reason does allow me to overcome some moronic instincts I’ve also been born with, but not that one. I seem also to have an inborn endocrinological mechanism that lights up whenever I’m really low, and overcomes my reason with an injection of optimism–I never am, but will be blest.
To be fullestly accurate, I would have to say that my main question along these lines is “what would have made my life worth living?” for I’ve been convinced for a long time that it hasn’t been, and won’t be. There’s probably no answer. I could say, genetic immunity to early-onset male pattern baldness, but I’m afraid that such immunity would also have cost me 20% of what I consider to be my superior mentality. Perhaps I would have considered my life worth living then, my lower intelligence being more easily satisfied than my present intelligence. Certainly I would have had much greater worldly success than I’ve had (the mediocrities in charge of that being much more likely to smile on my efforts), and I’m not silly enough to claim I would not have enjoyed worldly success, just that my own belief in the value of what I do, and am, is more important than the world’s. I don’t think it could have brought me the pleasure my present level of intelligence has. I would never have come up with my psychological theory which, valid or not, has seemed wonderfully brilliant to me at times. Nor achieved what I consider to have been my success (in my own mind) as a literary critic. I couldn’t have composed the poems and plays I did, either, although I suspect I didn’t need all of it for those. It’s even possible that it was a bit of a hindrance for me as a poet, and that I needed a different kind of intelligence for playwriting, which is the one area of serious endeavor that I feel I did poorly in, and probably should have stayed out of.
Perhaps my life would have been, or at least seemed, worth living to me had I been less aesthetically critical of my bald-headed appearance been more forgiving–but I wouldn’t like to have lived without that or the self-honesty applying it to myself requires. Lack of them, too, would have lowered my intelligence considerably.
Bynow, I guess I’ve fairly clearly implied what would have made my own life worth living: vocational success. To feel that I’d made a major contribution to the culture of my time would almost have been enough to have satisfied me with my life. Alas, I would also have needed the corroboration of others, at least of those reasonably conversant with the fields I’ve worked in. That I’ve gotten to some degree in poetry and literary criticism, but only from fringers, like myself, so not quite enough. I would need the recognitionof the certified, as well. However near-worthless it is in the short run, in the long run, it is the only valid recognition. The academy is always incredibly slow to accept the best, but it invariably eventually does so.
So, vocational success and recognition were essential for me. Anything else? Yes, I would like to have had a successful marriage, and kids. I think. That might have cut badly into my vocational efforts–it may well be that I didn’t have, even could not have had, the energy required to have had the kind of marriage and family I would have liked and done all I wanted to as an artist/verosopher. In fact, my belief that such would be the case was a main reason I never got married, I’m sure. Vocational success, both personal and public, and a family, would have been wonderful, but I would not want to hate looking at myself in a mirror. Yes, being bald-headed alone is sufficient for me to rate my life not having been worth living. (It is not a subjective view but an objective absolute, by the way, that a desert is aesthetically inferior to a forest.) It may even be that had I not had a bald head, I would not have needed the recognition of the certified to feel my life had been worth living.
That does it for my personal specific answer to my question. It’s time for me to return to its initial formulation: what makes life worth living for anyone. That’s easy enough to answer: it’s whatever provides a person with a maximal pleasure-to-pain-ratio for his life. As I’ve stated here and elsewhere a number of times. I would add that the ratio should probably be multiplied by the number of years–or days, or hours–the person has lived; that way, a person who has lived 70 years whose p-to-p ratio is 4-to-1 will get twice the rating as one with the same p-to-p ratio who had only 30 years of life, which seems reasonable. No, better would be a multiplication by 1.2, I think. Or multiplication by something.
Dimwits will find many things wrong with my universal answer, but I can find only one large problem with it (which I’ve also previously discussed): which is better, a life the pleasure of which has been twice its pain but never extreme, or a life the pleasure of which has been only 1.2. times as great as its pain, or even less than its pain, but was once or more times maximal? I claim that this is a (or maybe even the) centrally-important question of ethics–and absolutely unanswerable.
There are many small problems with my universal answer. How to count the hours one is asleep, for instance. I may get into them at some later time; I don’t consider them significant enough to bother with for now.
I tend to believe that one’s intelligence is equal to one’s final rating. If you’ve had a relatively unhappy life, you’ve been stupid. Which means I’ve been stupid, yes. Probably. It’s terribly difficult to pin down how happy/unhappy one has been. I know I can be happy most of a day, then ecstatic for a few minutes because of some vilely sarcastic insult I’ve dealt the Poetry Establishment at New-Poetry, then annoyed at having misplaced yet another book I wanted to look up something in, and decide I’d had a lousy day. One thing I’ve noticed about myself–or think is true about myself–is that I tend to dwell on the unhappinesses I’ve experienced more than the happinesses. This is a ridiculous flaw, but I don’t know how I got it or how I can get rid of it. Oddly, I don’t think about the times I’ve looked bad, but the times I’ve mistreated someone else. Whiteboy guilt, I suppose. Fortunately, I do get continuing pleasure from many of my compositions, when I happen to see one after not having seen it for a while. “Happen to see them” is accurate: I rarely seek them out simply to enjoy them. My greatest happinesses have been daydreams concerning the wonderful things that might happen as the result of my current literary or theoretical psychology work. (Yeah, Pope, again.)
Due to reasons already given, I consider my p-to-p ratio too low, although it may be higher than that of people who are quite content with their lives. Is that possible? Surely if I am not satisfied with how much more pleasure I’ve had than pain, that’s pain that should bring my ratio down below that of the contented. Except that maybe I’m only dissatisified with it when I think about it . . . (As opposed, I suppose I need to add, to most of my life, which consists of thoughts about subjects other than my happiness/unhappiness, or thoughtlessness.) No matter: the reasoning part of my brain will be the one to choose between repeating my life and escaping into eternal non-existence, and it will choose the latter.
I seem to have finished. Why do I feel like I haven’t?
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Alexis Bhagat « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Alexis Bhagat’ Category
Entry 1459 — Random Data Regarding Book Art
Tuesday, May 20th, 2014
The following posts are from an Internet list or whatever it’s called that I’m on that consists of friends in the arts of Richard Kostelanetz. The posts are a few concerning a thread Richard began with the question, “Who else is working with distinction at the apex of book art and literature?”
I replied, “To me your question is in a sub-category of the larger category of who is writing about otherstream art of any kind. My impression, and I haven’t researched it, is: no one visible but you, Kosti. Okay, even I can see that I’m exaggerating, but not by much. An excellent subject for a PhD dissertation would be an answer to this. With a comparison of the short list of found names with the long list of the knownstream experts like Vendler and Bloom. Which reminds me that to be fair I’d have to say that Perloff has written about the otherstream. But not about any part of it she can’t connect to Wittgenstein–i.e., the parts that count.”
Later, Alexis Bhagat had a more informed reply, which I’m re-posting here because of its possible usefulness to those interested, like I, in becoming more knowledgeable about Book Art:
Dear Richard, What does “distinction” mean in this question? Paul Chan has considered himself a devotee or descendant of William Blake. See “They make books in an expanded field” at badlandsunlimited.com
This year at CAA there was a session (go here) about book art, called “it is what it is,” organized by Tony White, special collections librarian at MICA. His opening talk charted the development of the “book art” field and the phenomenal growth of the “art book fairs” over the past four years.
lucy mulrony, the special collections librarian at syracuse, gave a very tight art historical talk, geneology and with a canon, too. she could probably answer your question, or would try. she did mention tom phillips, but did not mention warren lehrer. (Go here.)
i’m actually not sure why you single out Warren Lehrer from other graphic storytellers… there are so many amazing graphic storytellers these days, making zines and books.) the most compelling talk in the panel was by Barbara Tannenbaum (see , who is the curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum.. she is an old VSW character, i believe. (maybe someone else on this thread knows?) > anyway, barbara’s talk argued that book art has nothing to do with literature these days because the breathing pulsing heart of book art today is self-published photobooks. > > this is something that your friend Paul Soulellis would have agreed with a year ago but maybe he is now at the “apex” you’re looking for, with his libraryoftheprintedweb. this is a project that came out of his Chancebooks. his experiments in designing beautiful little books out of Wikipedia pages; he started doing these in may 2013
–in the spring of 2013, ken goldsmith was busy chatting up his “printing out the internet” which took place somehow at MoMA in summer of 2013? (i didn’t see what they did at MoMA… nor do i see it on their website… does anyone here know?) “printingouttheinternet” lives on, and ken has a team at Kunsthalle Dusselforf printing out articles from JSTOR in a tribute to programmer Aaron Schwartz this year. those are some immediate thoughts.
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leonhard Frank Duch « POETICKS
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Entry 1174 — An SASE from Brazil
Tuesday, August 6th, 2013
This one is from one of the few in the SASE show whose name I didn’t recognize. Very nice piece of work, though:
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interestingly, higgins considered dadaist symbolists