Itch Away blog

From Battles’ Mirrored album. Which is a GREAT album I can’t stop listening to.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

The other day, I came across an old sound file I made and posted up to my old blog.  The link seemed to get lost in the transition to the new blog.  I used it for my Flash workshop the other day.  Hey, it’s not like I’ve got any actual CONTENT for the blog at the moment, right?

Anyway, this track made me realise that you can put any monologue delivery, anything whatsoever, to Black Dog and it becomes funny.  Anything.  Try it.  If only the recent UKGOETRY babble had been in audio.

More content soon.  Soon.

In the meantime, gonna make you sweat.

Bob Cobbing on Sound Poetry

Steve McCaffery’s Sound Poetry Survey

On Henri Chopin (with sound files – see also the score to Sol Air)

Bob Cobbing performances

Four Horsemen’s Live in the West album

Christian Bök does Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (see also the Schwitters score)

It shouldn’t be a surprise that tickets to the first My Bloody Valentine show in 16 years sold out in minutes this morning, and I wasn’t able to get one. The proverbial carrot has never seemed more tantalising.

To all the f**kers on eBay who are already selling tickets for obscene profit: you are the scum of this earth, and you are preventing real fans from watching their favourite bands of all time. I hope that some of your tickets don’t sell, and you end up having to go to the show, to watch a band you actually don’t like too much just so that – in line with your horseshit priniciples – you feel less cheated.

Then I hope that you develop mild levels of tinnitus from the show, making sleep difficult at nights and serving as a faint, persistent reminder of the selfishness which caused other genuine fans to miss out.

Ok, I’m off to sit in the bath and sob like some pathetic boy who didn’t get Super Optimus Prime for Christmas.¹

EDIT: They announced another London date to help meet the demand, and my friend bought a ticket for me.  I am so. Happy.

1. This never happened to me. In fact, one Christmas, my hinting proved successful to the point of receiving not one but two Super Optimus Prime toys. I was able to return one and buy many other goodies. I hope my grandmother is not reading this post. [↩]

I’m working on a large piece of work, one of whose incarnations will be a generative text to be performed. Here’s a snippet from the current test:

you could come up with new solutions or inventions, you have a lot of energy as well as a positive attitude, it is your turn for decision-making, there is a great deal you learn from a boss or mentor this thursday, be it life, you have an inborn sense of mass psychology, there is a feeling of being at peace and stable on the emotional level, to a new way for the big tanker trucks to be safer on the highways, old emotional wounds heal as you glean some truths by meditations, the types of birds in your area may surprise you, involvement, or to help them choose a large purchase, your social life is more fun than ever, you might enjoy a bit of bird watching from time to time, this evening you visit with a young person about school and studies, this could include teaching someone to balance their accounts, a wish is coming true, create a presentation for any change you might see that is needed — you would have the winning hand today, scientific research, although you hold friendship in high esteem, intense and serious in the afternoon

I was most upset to miss the screening of the documentary on Kenneth Goldsmith, “Sucking on Words” at the British Library a couple of weeks ago. I meant to keep an eye out for the DVD, being as I am a huge fan of procedural, constraint-based, or ‘conceptual’ writing of which Goldsmith is a pioneer. Thankfully, the whole documentary has been made available for download on UbuWeb (350MB shocker – make sure you’ve got some tea to make, y’all).

The documentary itself is an exceptional insight into Goldsmith’s practice (several readings of short excerpts feature – arguably enough for most, as Goldsmith would attest) and a provocative discussion of the concept behind conceptual writing without ever becoming overly analytical. Goldsmith’s poetics shares the traits of other procedural poets in that it uses the ‘language of the everyday’ and places it into a formal box which allows it to stand out opaquely. Jena Osman, in her essay on Tina Darragh in Telling It Slant, explains the methods used by Darragh for opening up language from paradigms which render it transparent:

[... M]any of Darragh’s poems create liberating environments for words, places where “they can move / more than one way” (“Scale Sliding”). The liberation of these words does not negate their historical ties, however. Instead, the “freeing” activity dramatizes the way methods of transparency hide the social import of their vocabularies.¹

Darragh’s, as with Goldsmith’s vocabularies, maintain the social contextual origin of their sources. Then, by taking this language which has been treated with an ordering system to be most efficiently filtered for use value, and placing it in new forms, or new systems, the language once again becomes stark, perhaps absurd, and foregrounds the previous system which was designed to be transparent. In some ways like Darragh, Goldsmith’s presentations of language do not fragment the semantic coincidences of the word / phrase, but present the flow of language in a way which disrupts such transparency. “I’m interested in the defamiliarisation of normative structures in language,”² says Goldsmith in the documentary.

“This is what we do every day, all day long. Some of us call it writing, shifting material from one form into another [...] I believe that information management is the way we are writing now, and will continue to write in the future.”³

seems to echo the newly-defined role of the poet in an information society responsible for its own edited representation of history as discussed by Kristen Prevallet:

The poet is a researcher, investigator, interpreter, singer, and prophet who engages in an active relationship with the political, social, and cultural forces around him or her. [...] The poet is busy creating verse grids out of whatever materials are present before him or her at the time; the poet is an appropriator of sources, a thief of facts, a collage–creating scoundrel in a hyper state of awareness and inspiration. Flowcharts, newspaper articles, photographs, etymology, and ethnography become the raw materials for the poet’s unique assemblage.⁴

It is perhaps, therefore, unsurprising that these sources – which are used by Goldsmith in his practice, are themselves forms of editing, defined by what they don’t document. A photograph is conspicuous by its absence of temporal totality – literally a snapshot in time which not only asks what is either side of the time unit but also what are the reasons, circumstances for the taking of the picture in the first place – both of which are heavily socially weighted. Other textual documents represent a similarly edited–out culling of information for the sake of clarity. This, as Goldsmith recognises, often involves an objectively absurd simplification and realignment of information which is anything but the whole picture:

The absurdity of reducing meteorological occurrences to a one-minute reduction is the most useless and ridiculous thing in the world; this is the most complex system happens to be the weather system, the atmosphere which we breathe, and it’s reduced down to something that either aids or abets our commute.⁵

The cataloguing of such information, bringing it forward in new assemblages, presents not only a ‘punctum’ for the familiar soundbytes, but, subsequently, an often surprisingly entertaining poem.

Except of course, when it’s boring.

Watch the documentary. NOW.

1. Jena Osman, ““Multiple” Functioning: Procedural Actions in the Poetry of Tina Darragh,” from Telling It Slant, pp. 265-6 [↩]
2. Goldsmith, “Sucking on Words [↩]
3. Ibid [↩]
4. Kristen Prevallet, “Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source,” from Telling It Slant, pp. 115-6 [↩]
5. Goldsmith, “Sucking on Words” [↩]

14 November: Sophie Robinson: ‘Techno/gender/mess: Digital poetics & politics’

Room B20, Birkbeck College, Malet St

Saul Williams and Trent Reznor.  This is an extremely important gesture in the music industry.  Publishers and artists who kid themselves that 80s cassette copying didn’t boost their sales (hello, Metallica) still try to kid everyone right now, in the 90s, that free distribution of their records is stealing from them.  Well, here’s how it should be done.  I would bet money that this method makes money.  And so it should – the artist should gain. Perhaps the record industry is worried about the royalty weightings?