Pages

22/02/2012

A reading of Incarnations of Burned Children



Written by David Foster Wallace.
Re-writing/structuring the short story and emphasising it's form as a prose poem by following the metre of the lines rather than the grammatical indicators in reading it aloud.

21/02/2012

A statement of expectation for Michael Portnoy + his workshop


I am the daughter of the North West + my dad's voice is dead strong. I am reading Richard Hoggart's, The Uses of Literacy. I can't say much about it just yet. Maria introduced me to Orality and Literacy by Walter J Ong last month. Although I got carried away and ended up nearly hating the practice of writing and all it stood for (not helped by Fizcaraldo + Aguirre, Wrath of God which recently watched) I realised after a while that I was less interested in getting on my high horse about writing being a conquering act than I was about how knowledge is transferred through language. 
Though I'm learning this new language of abstracts, I prefer to use my own and there can be a problem in translation - for both me understanding new words and for me explaining their meanings to others. My dad doesn't have a word for problematisation and it annoys me that I do now. One thing I have understood is that one example goes a long way. Here it has materiality, at home it makes sense. Examples are like when you're in a pub with new people and someone asks if you're having a drink. Not if you want a drink; if you're having a drink. It's altogether different. 
I'm not sure what I want from Portnoy. I'm using just his last name because the time is so short. Knowing people is important, it's not transitory; it lasts (I watched an Italian film that I can't remember the title of and the main feller gets lowered into a vat of concrete by the mafia after a performing a sort of selfless act, and he comforted himself with the knowledge that somewhere in the north there was a man who thought of him as his best friend - they'd not been in contact for over 30 years. Hit the nail on the head for me that did.) Questions like, What's your dad do again? What did you have for your tea last night? speak to me. They get you backstage and it's always better back stage because you're sort of free. There's no security guards monitoring your binary status.
I'm writing + recording poems at the minute. 
I expect you'll read what everyone's sent you, Portnoy,
and you'll think of common themes 
and you'll relate them to your lived life, 
in all it's knowledge sources, 
and then you'll want to voice the things - 
things you've thought about. 
That's all you can hope for really isn't it?
- the rest'll be down to me.* 


* 'This is not simply a power of passive resistance, but something which, though not articulate, is positive. The working-classes have a strong natural ability to survive change by adapting or assimilating what they want in the new and ignoring the rest.'
- The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart, pp.20+21

15/02/2012

ما بدا يتثنى

The circumscriber moves again!

Mehdi Messouci has released a new EP; interpretations of two traditional arabic folk songs, لما بدا يتثنى (Lama Bada Yatathana) and يا مو (Ya Mo)
I worked on the English translations.

14/02/2012

Back into the land.

i bought a book today called 'towards re-enchantment: place and its meanings' mainly for an essay by iain sinclair about clapton; springfield park, the river lea, walthamstow marshes. i read the essay and walked the route. out of the city. like home. two hours later i walked back on the opposite side of the river and stopped off in the hope and anchor, a local boozer for people off the boats. the time i spent in there and the people i met is for another time, but the essay i read in the latter half of the book, 'a counter-desecration phrasebook' by robert macfarlane, opened with a quote that hooked me.

'our task is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully writing language back into the land.' - David Abram.

home, i searched for more on him. bit of a hippy but what he is saying about the relationship between alphbetic society and ecology crisis is interesting.

walking home over the bridge there were two plastic folder pockets, make-shift notices, attached to the wire fencing with cable ties. 'don't be harsh, save the marsh.' it told me that the olympic committee are paving over the land to build a car park and some sort of training ground for the basket ball teams. they promise to put it back in 9 months.

Dr. David Abram - The Spell of Literacy

MartinInTheShakespeareSaid



(Music = Mehdi Messouci + Words = Claire Potter)

Martin in The Shakespeare said
January's a bad month
so's February y'see
people get paid
before Christmas
so the next pay
day
is any time now
but
there's overdrafts
and bills,
V.A.T's gone up -

It'll pick up again
come March,
you watch,
just you watch.

Divine Intoxication


The lesson of Wuthering Heights, Greek Tragedy, and ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world cannot bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consideration for the future. Divine intoxication, to which the instincts of childhood are so closely related, is entirely in the present.

- Georges Bataille, 'Emily Bronte & Evil' taken from La Litterature et le Mal, 1957