Frankenstein vs. the World

“We renew our affection for work because economic survival becomes more difficult and daily life becomes lonely and tedious: metropolitan life becomes so sad that we might as well sell it for money.”
– Franco Berardi

Tags: franco berardi.

Sean and I just opened the long-awaited boxes of WILD ORCHIDS vol. 2 today and are thrilled to announce that as of this afternoon the issue is officially out. Previously unpublished Hannah Weiner interview and manuscript materials are only two of the highlights of this eclectic but highly-focused miscellany of creative criticism about and inspired by Hannah.  Contributions by Stan Apps, Charles Bernstein and Hannah Weiner, Jeremiah Bowen, Laynie Browne, CAConrad, Corina Copp, Kaplan Harris, Jennifer Karmin, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Jennifer Russo, Hannah Weiner, Marta Werner, Juliana Spahr, and Joey Yearous-Algozin. Only $9: http://wildorchids.endingthealphabet.org.

Tags: caconrad, Charles Bernstein and Hannah Weiner, chris kraus, clairvoyant writing, Corina Copp, Eileen Myles, Hannah Weiner, Jennifer Karmin, Jennifer Russo, Jeremiah Bowen, joey yearous-algozin, Juliana Spahr, Kaplan Harris, Laynie Browne, Marta Werner, Stan Apps, wild orchids.

One nearly has to be a diviner of the low-res video-game arcana posted on his blog to realize that Chris Sylvester is selling a book, but I think this weird tome is just about worth the mere $5.84 that’s being asked on Lulu. A conceptual poem, GRID is (as they say) “deceptively simple” to paraphrase: it’s basically a googleable walkthrough of the world/map for the Nintendo Entertainment System’s original Legend of Zelda game, spread out line-by-line (i.e., screen-by-screen) over 130 sparse pages. Which is funny, because one of the first things you’ll discover when you do google the source text is this comically ambivalent disclaimer by its original author, an (I speculate) “In the Garage” type who published it some years ago under the awesome handle “AceC-DC”:

This FAQ was created by AceC-DC. It is copyrighted under my name and is my property. I am not usually so anal about these things and even if you did copy it is not the end of the world but I am saying this mainly because if somebody is going to try and make a profit of what is mine, then this is to stop it. That is basically why I want it. If you want to post this on your site, I suppose you can, I don’t care really, just as long as you are not making a profit from it. Try to give the credit to me though, that’d be nice. On that note, the copyright is below.

Copyright 2003-2004 AceC-DC

Ambivalence is an affective motif of GRID, a current that runs from this odd disclaimer (omitted in the walkthrough’s second life as poetry), through AceC-DC’s unamused editorializing (”quite pointless really” . . . “Another plot of cemetery” . . . “They really put too much cemetery in this game” . . . “There are not even any enemies on this screen” . . . “Another pointless screen,” etc.), and on to the book’s ultra-minamalist design aesthetic and almost imperceptible release.

But in its kinda-sorta utter pointlessness, GRID makes for a surprisingly absorbing read. Conspicuously listed under the “Travel” section on Lulu, the “pointlessness” lamented in the lines above takes on a curious new significance in Sylvester’s appropriation. Although game walkthoughs are nothing if not purpose-driven, object-oriented enterprises — cheat-sheets meant to accelerate a player’s quest through a game’s world by organizing it around a strategic, narrative teleology — GRID suggests something a bit more like nomadic drift simply by honing in on the way map overviews like this one actually reorder game spaces under a logic that would seem relatively pointless in such a context. Unlike the proper “Walkthru” section of AceC-DC’s full study (a prose essay more like a traveler’s guidebook), the “Map” portion from which GRID sources its text (a lineated list of coordinates visually closer to poetry) actually doesn’t begin with the home screen of gameplay and take the reader step-by-step though essential objectives, but instead proceeds in a strict Cartesian fashion from the upper-left to bottom-right of the game’s total territory (& for the most part omitting any advice about gameplay). The overview thus becomes a peculiar species of landscape art; levels appear and disappear out-of-order, as the priority is instead on the aesthetic and on a Lewis-&-Clark sort of journalism or reportage (”A bridge crossing the creek that divides the region east and west” . . . “A valley. There is a cave” . . . “To the south is an ocean which leads to more vast lands which are not in this game,” etc.).

Another instantly likable aspect of the book is AceC-DC’s persona itself; he is a fine wordsmith, and his extemporaneous & agrammatical asides throughout GRID provide some of the book’s best moments. Although I myself feel a kind of ambivalence in general about the current trend of Conceptual writing, partly because so much of the work so avowedly eschews the personal, there’s a funny undercurrent here that breaks through that. AceC-DC’s entertaining combination of apathy and expediency (e.g., “A dead end at the end of Death Mountain. There is virtually nothing here at all” . . . “If you walk into the waterfall then there will be a lady that will let you gamble for the information she wants to tell you. I know that information so no need gambling with her” . . . “It does have a cave here on the mountain although I honestly do not remember for sure what is inside which I apologize for”) add a goofy verism to the text that both strangely characterizes it and makes it eminently quotable.

Probably some of my appreciation for the book has to do with my fondness for the game itself (for whatever reason, the 8-bit Zelda was the only video game that ever truly absorbed me; the fact that AceC-DC penned his walkthrough in 2003 speaks to the cartridge’s enduring charm.) Nonetheless, Sylvester’s bizarre but impassioned project (he posts somewhere in the neighborhood of five video-game poems a day on SisterAct) should not be mistaken for nostalgia . . . Etymologically speaking, nostalgia identifies a desire not for home but for going home; while it may do other things, this pointless book certainly won’t take you there.

Tags: chris sylvester.

Tags: charles reznikoff, divya victor, hello kitty.

I finally finished David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives when I was in nyc a couple weeks ago and it was so nice and like a reminder of something I’d forgotten to just read writing again that’s so excessively beautiful.  For instance:

How the world is so much like dream sleep with my glasses hidden somewhere along the windowsill above the bed; there’s a slow stir of measured breath from next to me and through the 6:00 a.m. windowpanes I see what appears to be a dim forest of trees in the distance, leafless and shining, but it’s just some old summer plants in a windowbox gone to sleep for the season.  I think of these trees and how they look like the winter forests of my childhood and how they were always places of refuge: endless hours spent among them creating small myths out of myself alone or living in hollowed-out trees or sleeping in nests twenty times larger than the crows’ nests made of sticks instead of twigs.  I realized then how I always tend to mythologize the people, things, landscapes I love, always wanting them to somehow extend forever through time and motion.  It’s a similar sense I have for lovers, wanting somehow to have some degree of permanence in my contact with them but it never really goes that way.  So here I am heading out into the cold winds of the canyon streets, walking down and across avenue c toward my home . . .

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ON Contemporary Practice 2

East Coast Release Party

oncontemporaries.org

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I was delighted to write a long-distance intro for Bruce Boone’s reading in Portland’s Spare Room series this past Wednesday:

Bruce has been all over the place lately. Robin Tremblay-McGaw quietly reprinted the entire Ted chap in question a couple months back over at X Poetics, alongside her own not-so-mini essay on the text to boot. Plus more reviews of Century of Clouds popping up at 3 A.M. (by Colin Herd) and Sustainable Aircraft (by Dana Ward). And Rob Halpern takes on Boone, Jameson, and Perelman — all via Steve Abbott’s Soup — over at Jacket.

Tags: bruce boone.

Check out Joey Yearous-Algozin riffing on Bob Grenier’s Sentences, alongside Jena Osman and Bob Perelman, in the current issue of Al Filreis‘ PoemTalk. Here’s a snippet:

JY-A: They all look very, very similar. But when you start going through all 500 of them, they are doing some radically different things. There’s some that aren’t even words. Or, I think there’s one that there’s Ds just spalyed out, almost like a concrete poem, that’s just sitting in there. Which doesn’t seem to fit with this other sort-of very . . . we’ve kind of been talking about maybe domestic, or ‘throw-away’ words.

AF: The celebration of young Amy learning to speak . . .

BP: Bits of household conversation . . .

JY-A: So there’s all of these different moves. And I think that he keeps it various enough that our tendency to fix on wondering whether or not that one suffices — ’cause there’s 500 of them, right? And they all sort of sit in that network of the 500. So in a weird way it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the individual card as you experience it. But then taking away that pressure as it sits in that network. And so as you start to isolate it and remove it, in different contexts, then I think you can say ‘I have a liking for this.’ Which is really subjective. And really wonderful that you are able to say . . . like, “Walking down Washington Avenue.” Every city has a Washington Avenue, and I remember the first time I was walking down Washington Avenue in Madison, Wisconsin, and I realized, ‘I’m Walking down Washington Avenue.’ Walking down Washington Avenue. And you know, you repeat it to yourself, and you have an experience with it. And the poem has sort-of that strange existence.

JO: Until you come to Philadelphia and walk down Washington Avenue.

AF: Get hit by a trolley!

Tags: joseph yearous-algozin.

I have the inclination and the need to connect to all the ages of my life, past or future. From my childhood until today, I don’t see those sections, those famous stages, that all normal men go through, each time denying and forgetting the age that came before. I slip inside myself as if along a river that you can travel up- or downstream; I rediscover and am in harmony with myself wherever I am. As for old age, I was very unhappy at the beginning of adolescence because two-thirds of life seemed to be spent in withering and dying (real death was nothing but an insignificant corporal formality at the end of another interminable death). I’d send feelers, images, in the direction of these future years. And it is only when I was able to live, to feel, for example, like an old queer sucking off brats (and had foreseen, worked out what I would be in that situation, as well as an infinite number of others) that I finally began to live what was left of my youth without too much apprehension. Such fancies certainly have little to do with what I’ll experience; but they take in hand the difficulties of the future, sketch out the tactics I’ll use to survive there as I do elsewhere.

– Tony Duvert, Diary of an Innocent, trans. Bruce Benderson

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I just mailed several consignment copies of Satellite Telephone to the sparkling oasis that is Ooga Booga in LA. If you’re in the area, look out for the new issue there soon.

Tags: satellite telephone.