Frankenstein vs. the World

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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 Previously unpublished Hannah Weiner interview and manuscript materials are only two of the highlights of this eclectic but highly-focused miscellany of creative criticism about and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.

I just started a Flickr “photostream” at http://www.flickr.com/photos/loginthewaves/. I’ve already uploaded a few wonderful pics from recent and distant memory.

Lake Erie sunset

CAConrad, ON East Coast Release Party, 6/4/10

Magdelena Zurawski, Philadelphia, 7/31/10

Joey Yearous-Algozin, Frank Sherlock, Holly Melgard, & Sarah Dowling, Philadelphia, 7/31/10

Joey Yearous-Algozin, Philadelphia, 7/31/10

Holly Melgard, Philadelphia, 7/31/10

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( . . . via http://ratak-monodosico.tumblr.com/ . . . )

Tags: Jennifer Zwick.

( . . . via http://ratak-monodosico.tumblr.com/ . . . )

Tags: Alfred Eisenstaedt.

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.

Tags: david trinidad.

It’s wonderful news tonight that CAConrad and Jack Krick have edited an EPC page sparkling with rare & obscure work for one of my very favorite poets, John Wieners.

Tags: john wieners.

For me there is unquestionably nothing left in the old metaphysics which has to be combated as an acute temptation or as a virulent opponent. I suspect that those who always have their daggers at the ready and pull down their deconstructive visors as soon as one speaks of classic metaphysics have not understood the situation. They fight against an adversary that is no longer able to defend itself. I suppose they do not want to let it die in peace, because they need it as a speculative opponent for their reflections; all this amounts to is postmetaphysical narcissism fighting against metaphysical narcissism. The truth is that classical metaphysics has become unobtainable for us, logically and psychologically, to say nothing of knowledge, and so we should behave toward it as toward the dead Snow White. If, in her casket of glass, she looks so pretty, as if she were merely asleep, then all the better. There is no need to mistake her death. The task is to recall that in which her charm resided and her capacity to frighten, which services she had to fulfill in her time, and to determine how they can be replaced.

– Peter Sloterdijk

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