[TOC] |
Hyperzine 06... #1 /
Hyperzine 06... #2 /
Hyperzine 06... #3 /
Hyperzine 06... #4 /
Hyperzine 06... #5 /
Hyperzine 06... #6 /
Hyperzine 06... #7 /
Hyperzine 06... #8 /
Hyperzine 06... #9 /
Hyperzine 06... #10 /
Hyperzine 06... #11 /
Hyperzine 06... #12 /
Hyperzine 06... #13 /
Hyperzine 06... #14 /
Hyperzine 06... #15 /
Hyperzine 06... #16 /
Hyperzine 06... #17 /
Hyperzine 06... #18
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 12:37 PM
Subject: Sketching ideas
Stephen,
|
Thinking point: I was skimming
and noticed, in a couple digests, your comment on what you didn't want
discussions to collapse into. I got the impression one egregious example
was somebody explaining why something critiqued should work,
though apparently it hadn't. Other examples seemed also to be
explanations, defenses of content and so forth. Arguments. Confused
audience volunteers. Queries about, "Do you need this line...?"
What doesn't seem, ever,
to come up, is how to do something, how to get an effect, a sound. This is
why I referred not to "First Date", but to the conversation Mugsy and
Winnie might have had. Incidentally, nothing anchored "First Date" in
time. I read the exchanged posts days after a Van Morrison concert in the
city. My step-daughter attended. She taught herself guitar playing along
with Morrison records as a teenager. She was good enough to be in UCB's
"Jazz Ensemble", later. So, there's a whole lot poem that just ain't there
at all. But, back to the conversation.
Mugsy might have, if the
lumber mill was where it was all going down, mentioned those two
missing "the"s in the first and second stanzas, mentioned with it that
relative to the rest of the poem, those stanzas seemed rough.
Nothing about content,
words, extra or missing content. Just, they played rough. After a sentence
or two on that, Mugsy could take one stanza at a time, type it like Winnie
did, playing it, no cut and paste.
"Here's how you played
it, Winnie." Type it as is. Then, "Here it is with a "the" in there," and
type it with "the" back in. Stress playing, typing, hearing it and getting
the felt feedback of saying it, too. Better comment on that so it doesn't
look like a typist plugging in the word. Then, play it again, after
commenting on the roughness.
The music involves all
of it, the imaging, the statements, and the language, placement in the air
and on the page. So, playing that first stanza (the second might be in
more than one piece), there's the static tongue in mouth dis ease
...and you might get that playing after tongue.... Not
just to set the image to playing, but tying back to Morrison's playing and
forward to the forms, motifs, of play when the date gets
going.
Back and forth in posts.
Winnie c'n play, too. All of it's "reading" and it's just readings in the
air, later, when alone, sitting at the keyboard Winnie begins to play a
rewrite....
And it's not just what bounces
off those missing articles. Take her "blindfolded" pushed off the end to
be a stanza by itself. You don't get profundity by a blurt - even with a
horn. You might play that last stanza and "blindfolded" is just
the last line. Still, you want Evans' "little blues thing for the right
hand" to tip off the echoing. I'd play breaking up the word, but no
hyphen,
...
blind
folded
and the listening
reader actually hears,
...
blind
blindfolded
folded
and Morrison'd like it. Now, as
I remember the heft of that stanza, that blind comes in too
fast.... You want to push it out along it's "line". Not, touching, though,
because you've been playing that in the stanza. Redundant and kind of
dead. No, you want to play with time, with memory, with forward looking.
So,
...
reaching
blind
folded
And you "fold" up the poem,
except for echoes, all the "blindfoldeds" buried in the recombined word in
the listener's skulletarium.... The "image" of reaching blind
just might put a chill under that warm scene and thoughts of lost
memories, a receding past's good moments....
Nobody plays titles. They tack
on titles like poems were school paper, along the lines of "How I spent my
Summer Vacation" Somebody playing in a post, finding a title in the poem,
though Winnie tacked it onto the poems as a kind of explanation, might
play Beginning..., though that's going to call for that time
anchor (partial) I mentioned somewhere in there.I know she wanted to play
this First date off, the usual, first dates, maybe even wanted
the How I spent my weekend. But to make it play, you'd actually
have to fake what comes naturally. And leave some quiet after it.
Maybe, A date before.... Suggestures something to follow from it.
Hey, Tuxedo Junction ain't a label. It's part of the darned
tune.
I probably seem to be
digressing, but all that's to get some atmosphere to carry sound as I put
out the thinking point (used to be talking points) here. A blab? Re-sum
what you don't want people to do, recently covered piecemeal. But, then
explode into things you'd like 'em to do. In the "ordinary course", and
not in the wilder doing I've been pushing for. You were doing some sorting
out when calling them on the erupting excesses. You've likely got "good"
and "bad" examples still swirling in your head. You c'n show two very
similar things said about poems and show why one's bullshit and the
other's perceptive.
Anyway, this is just a
thinking point. |
Most people, listening to Bill Evans, or
Glenn Gould, or any music, musician, c'n likely get a tingle from something that
comes out at them. But maybe it takes a Houseman or a Bennett to get goose bumps
from reading a, or remembering a read, line or phrase of a poem, not even
hearing it played in the moment. A listening reader, of course. It's spoken
somewhere. In that part II of Shards, I think, after a quarter century,
what melts distance is in the last line, it's no longer a wild deer,
but just the deer, the dear, ...touched.... Even the beat is
pulled up short with the dropped out word, the deer almost pulling back to let
itself be touched.... You can't plan that, or compose it. You have to know that
the deer always has the choice and, then, play your action and the
deer's choice, though it's left for after the last note dies, it's played as an
implication.
How would I explain that as a technique. A
horn player, or Shakespeare 'd say, elision. Leave out a note. But you c'n
only know when in the playing. And your Houseman or Bennett has to
enter into the playing. Here's Evans again.
Some people
just want to be hit over the head, and then if they’re hit hard enough maybe
they feel something. But some people want to get inside of something and
discover maybe more richness.
Maybe with music, keyboard or
horn, it's going to register as only richness, though I'd guess, for Evans,
that's a shortcut term, a placeholder term. Anyway, for the complex instrument
we call language, a tongue, it's a symphony of meanings wrapped in
revelemes, sensemes, phonemes....
I don't know how I got off into this. It's
all the 2005 rants of a shaman and the 2006, maybe 7, 8, 9, of a live artifact,
like Whitman a "once and future" critter (see the top of my archive page for the
spelled-out parallelism). I wonder what is thought when a Subject line like
"Wild jazz on the other side of the line-break" is read. Cute, decorative,
surreal? Not intended to say anything? Maybe it's zzaj dliw on the
other other side. (After all, there's no designated first
side.)
After all, all this was supposed to
be about hyperzine design.... It's difficult to sort out some objective
discussion of hyperzine design from subjective experience. Why? Because most
cannot see it when you hold it up in front of them. They still have
mid-20th century perceptions locked in place. They can't see what you
hold up any more than a cat can see the photograph of it you show to the cat.
They see ...well, some "projection" of the newer, larger perceptual
possibilities. It's necessary to sort of prepare the subjective receptor
fields each time you show or even mention anything. You
confront them with assemblages and they reduce them to assemblages they "know"
and sometimes only to jumbled pieces of those.
A way in is with something they know only
imperfectly. This is why I start toward the hyperzine by discussing
hyperperfect binding. Most of today's poets, as against our golden era
of COSMEP time, don't know about perfect binding. they don't get
involved in the physical business of publishing. Those who do remember have a
little head start in becoming immersed in what I describe, but nobody has any
trouble picking it up. The use of "perfect" (implying completion or
well-made-ness) passes for a familiar sort of humor. Well-made cloth or leather
binding, a craftsman's work, would be what's really meant by perfect,
but, with the warmth of humor washing over, anybody can grasp the perfect
binding concept. A stack of pages in a vise, glue spread on the spine and
forced down a bit between pages to grip them and, then, a paper cover wrapped
around.
Then, I can point out that our "book on the
Web" invites a new kind of binding and a good name for it is hyperperfect
binding. No stacking of the pages for the vice and glue. The pages are
bound by a system of links. A table of contents or an index will be a
list of links under listed information. A page will have two links top or bottom
or both for previous and next pages (and these will have information, not just
"prev." & "next" or non-existent scroll numbers). Maybe one to the TOC.
And cross-references in the text will be links, taking you to the referenced
material or a note directing you more fully. Anyway, all this describes a
system or, if you prefer, a web, of links. The system is the
binding and in a sense it's the book. The same materials can be the content of
two or more different systems, though there'd rarely be a situation calling for
that. Such a system is hyperperfect binding.
All that is preparing the subjective
reception, really, and linking it to old receptors. What changes in a poet's
head, affecting his or her working with sets, for readings or printings, or
"books" is that bindings can, inside the imagination, and in virtual reality,
dissolve, become transient. The poet, in e's thinking, c'n rearrange
the poems or let them, within e's intuitively organized cognitive fields,
allow them to arrange themselves, pulling together along associative "lines of
force".
At this point, of course, it's just fading
off into a kind of gibberish and listeners' faces go slack and their eyes behave
oddly.
A lot of pretty well-known psychotherapists
(Jay Haley, Earnest Rossi, etc.) who considered Milton Erickson a mentor of
sorts pushed out into general usage a term like reframing and, of course, under
it, framing. Philosophers, of course, fed into this with theories of
framing. In conversations with Erickson, as well as in books, they
spoke of reframing. Erickson didn't say anything. But he never used the
concept. He spoke of associating, dissociating and reassociating. The
idea of framing is to put a frame around a picture, though the edge of the
canvas will do, and there is what's included and, though hardly listable, what's
excluded. Sure, it's slang. But it's mind-numbing slang. In the actuality
they're working with, these therapists are taking associative clusters and
they're loosening them up and they're doing some reassociating. Erickson stated
this accurately. The others don't.
Ask a child to draw a star. E will draw a
constellation, a nice symmetrical one. A bright kid would look at you like you
weren't very bright. E would then take the side of e's pencil point and darken
an area. E'd then take a block eraser, sharpen a point on that with an Exacto
knife and, in that leaded area, erase a tiny point-source of white (light). To
have fun playing with the constellations, these mind-numbing frameworks, try the
fifth Hour in waking. Alas, as Bucky (Fuller) says, a
child not damaged before or during birthing, is born fully geniused (it's a
self-triggering series of developmental processes, not some question-answerer
already formed) but then, often only motivated by love, adults around begin the
processes of degeniusing the attending and absorbing and coordinating little
being. That's why my imprimatur for Waking the Poet was The
Re-geniusing Project. It has to do with some course-correcting, not regressing
to some child-like state. that'll come soon enough when we're wreckage about to
drift off the edge of the world.
A poet c'n get metaphorically into an image
that carries the "framing" sense, but not the mind-numbing results with, say, a
reference to everything "inside the horizon", with the horizon disc not
specified. Still, reassociations, not reframings will occur in this restricted
space.
Anyway, Juice 2005 becoming a thing
of beauty and all this meander is only a meander...,
