Nooz Flash!
Openned have fixed the Anthology! Amendments are available for download, and they’ve offered a full-fat version for those of you with good eyes and equally good internet connections:
Lynx:
Onward with my pick from the Anthology…
Stephen Willey, from Translations out of Walter Benjamin
Steve has been working on this project for some time, spending most of the preliminary stages researching Benjamin and laying out what appears to be an exceptionally thorough theoretical basis for his practice. Out of this comes Translations out of Walter Benjamin, a series of variations writing through Benjamin’s ghost (this is paraphrasing what Steve has told me about his work, and my apologies to him if this is inaccurate). Anyway, the result is a highly-planned and well-thought-out mish-mash of form. I don’t mean this negatively – Willey is experimenting here with various forms, some palimpsest in their approach (in one, a carefully deconstructed Battersea Power Station – a landmark notably unscathed in the Blitz, dictates the layout for an overlapping text; in another, an old Elizabeth Arden advert is détourned to subvert the existing language and set a context for the new language) some adopting the format of codes and structures to imply (in my view) a system of reading analogous with that code.
Both of these examples strike me as interesting. I am always hot for détourned media, diagrammatical systems, code structures. But Steve’s use of code structures reinforces that we should be reading his texts differently to the usual. Code (or at least the type of code he seems to emulate in this extract) is object oriented, much like regular language use. Yet it possesses its own terms of use and parsing of object, and how an object is created. Bastardised HTML code implies broken anchors, unfinished (or already finished) links to nowhere. Curly brackets contain the parameters of a function, thus redefining the possibilities of meaning in “loop + echo” in terms of quantifying qualitative values or implying that loop and echo must have numerical equivalents and are therefore extraneously referential. Lists within functions imply arrays which themselves imply a one-out-of-many decision making process – a glance at a text of which only one array per realisation would exist.1
All of this is just personal interpretation, of course, but the way Steve has jumped from form to form means that one is only just getting used to one way of reading before being jerked into the next frame.
With all this focus on form, I’m not ignoring the text itself. Yet Steve’s texts are so intertwined with the form that binds them that neither seems secondary to the other. The projection slides, for example, demand readings through their shadings which exceed a left-to-right, top-to-bottom scan. Various reading strategies based on the textual aesthetics are naturally provoked, producing several sub-texts within an overall text.
Ceri Buck, What is action?
Ceri Buck, where have you been? Or where have I been? And how do I go about talking about your work when we sat together all those times and fretted about dissertation woes through beer soaked eyes?
Of course, I know how good Ceri’s work is – I saw it. I knew. Still, it’s been a while since I saw newer work (probably the last time I saw anything was in HOW2, and her performance at the e-poetry festival 2005). What is action? is phonetic and visual pun / play / trap-setting at its finest. Like an autistic mother, Ceri’s neologisms slip you up and make you think of combinations. Combinactions. Then we’re in another crammed paragraph of open meanings with not enough seconds for the words. In the rush towards definition, we fall over the ‘wrong words’ and are brought abruptly to the surface once more:
somewhere in London a woman hijacks the supermarket tannoy to sing sweetly to the shoppers ‘combat the capitalist inside of you’ / Where was I and what did I do when Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed? A keep pressed battery hen blind of free rage
This is combined with a kind of Steinian repetition-variation-repetition trap, spanning a few mere words or travelling across paragraphs. I get pulled to and fro and I like it. My favourite:
5. Desirable bacteria
or is not ravaged by the imprint scorch of a kiss & waking up mast
Ur bating? repossess a connection in a possessive it rubs it rubs up against us Up against against Up freedom from possession(s) up
against love one how it rubs up against up free pursue against possess up love another are you sure you want to be here? Can we check in?
I’ve got that feeling in my belly gut feeling belly warmth context is everything a warm feeling in my belly a deep low belly feeling an
awareness of the belly belly deep down warm the blood spilling This coming must do something!
Demo and Die, Flickerng Bdy, John Sparrow
Such utter genius defies words. Only kidding. Big pile of shit, ignore at all costs.2
Drew Milne
Read this poem (poems) and notice how your mind runs out of breath. Milne’s punctuationless onslaught is perhaps so entertaining because it doesn’t form any kind of tirade against anything, rather it seems to collect and disperse genres or themes (in a vocabulary sense rather than a narrative sense) such as music, tools, ancient civilization, mythology, archeology, architecture and more.
However, it’s where these vocabularies cross over which strikes me as interesting. “spinal tap”, “Zildjian”, “big hair”, for example, are very visual words3, through which “set to slay in metal” “axe” (”golden axe” too – which calls to memory the early 90s computer game) “rock god” take on new meanings. It is this dense battle of contexts drives on the text, and, thankfully (for me at any rate) heavy metal wins.
Word grids make many reads, then back into juxtapolevaulting as phrases cram together emoshred:
neo-industrialists in prog lime glad rags
leopard slipper shaker all heaviest raw
denim columns to riff glow the republic
preaching the perverted ivy corinthians
cometh the shredder cometh the beard
metalocalypse beyond parody sky blue
willy-tinsel and emo schlong giving pink
spandex in thrashtastic grunt retro-stonk
loose stoic populists hardnosed to brine
scuzzy perhaps
Extra marks to Milne for inclusion of the word “stonk”, which the Urban Dictionary defines as “World War II British slang for a massed artillery bombardment on an enemy position” but which also might stir in some memories of a Comic Relief campaign centred on the “stonk”, along with suitably bad music release.
Milne ist Thrashtastisch.
- There is an interesting short essay by Loss Pequeño Glazier which discusses language in terms of array structures at http://www.dichtung-digital.com/2005/1/Glazier [↩]
- Read them. Tell your friends. Then send me lots of money. [↩]
- I’m including cymbal manufacturer Zildjian since they have such an immediately recognisable logo [↩]