Studio Visit, Part Deuce

Amy Reckley has also (along with Stefani Rossi) graciously agreed to a February 8th studio visit.

Not sure if I'm thinking too much about this...

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
npr's story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4568035

These aren't "artists", but I believe this is art. And what does it say about our society that people feel the need to confess via an anonymous blog site? And when did it (because I'm sure it has...) evolve from honest confessions from a few to the sheep just wanting to be part of the repentant flock?

Don't look at this from the shining halls of academia. Just look at it. What do you think? Just wondering...

Mark your calendars

Stefani Rossi has graciously agreed to a studio visit on the evening of February 8th, 2008. Come one, come all.

Come on out to hear some of the MFA grads' work
this Thursday, Dec. 6, 7:30pm, Hatton Gallery.

Dana Masden, fiction
Allison Mackin, poetry
Stacey Burns, fiction

reading rooms and gallerys

is it possible to have e-rooms available that have poems or artwork strictly? i would love to see what work people are doing... possibly generate some conversation off of our pieces?

ps this is aby not "coop"--he was signed in first and i'm lazy.

pps i'd like to add other possible titles to our voting spree theme park--how to do that?

Opposites

Watching Touch the Sound and listening to Evelyn Glennie answer the question, "what is the opposite of sound?" got me to thinking about opposites. Glennie states,

The opposite of sound definitely isn’t silence . . . I don’t know if there is such a thing. Well, there must be an opposite actually, but what it is I don’t know . . . it’s the closest thing I can imagine to death.

What about other opposites, e.g., the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference because hate implies a sense of caring about the end product of something, just as love does. Also to consider is the Jewish theologian Martin Buber who frames the love and hate "opposites" as an "I and Thou" (which is also the name of the book from which I draw this quote).

So long as love is "blind," that is, so long as it does not see a whole being, it is not truly under the sway of the primary word of relation. Hate is by nature blind. Only a part of a being can be hated. He who sees a whole being and is compelled to reject it is no longer in the kingdom of hate, but is in that of human restriction of the power to say "Thou." He finds himself unable to say the primary word to the other human being confronting him. This word ["Thou"] consistently involves an affirmation of the being addressed. He [who hates] is therefore compelled to reject either the other or himself.... Yet the man who straightforwardly hates is nearer to relation than the man without hate and love.

I.e., one understanding of something can be that a full understanding does not come without understanding of the opposite, and, a partial understanding is more enmeshed in knowledge than nothing.

So I was thinking it would be interesting to do a cross media study of opposites. Thoughts?

Okay, the poem didn't post--can you cut and paste into the blog windows?

More thoughts. I think the discussion of syntax was great and is apropos "The Sense Account," for as Marius' great reading last night showed, the line b/w sense and nonsense can be very thin. And there's all sorts of possibilities for syntactical deformation/reformation (see Noam Chomsky's "transformative grammar," or John Ashbery's 

A Nest of Ninnies, or Martha Ronk's In a Landscape of Having

to Repeat, or Haryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary. 

Also, I'll be teaching an Ecopoetics grad class next semester, and one 

of the texts we'll be using is David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous: 

Perception and Language in the More Than Human World, which takes stock,"makes sense" of articulate nature, both trying to locate 

the source of language in the natural world (and so examining 

Sausserian linguistics' constructions of "arbitrary signs," and looking 

for the syntax of nature as pattern, attention, recognition. In this sense (in that sense?) Abram seeks to anneal the Cartesian mind/body split. Worth checking out--and take the class!: E630A--

'twill be experiential, project and field driven.

Okay, here's the poem:

the sense account

upon their eyes

their ears the

sense record so

full of taste

and touch too

bare finger recoils

spells out smells

the keyboard translates

makes larger space

a place for

listening is a 

plot for making

this cold November

nearly gone but

not forgotten I've 

just typed memento

mori my dear

how they linger

live in they

realms the very

haptic whorl bright

senses color me

now a larger

faculty help me

chime in refracted

ways waves particles

of speech I

say it blue

before the witness

letters mind mapping

days mine blend

All, 

lovely to see you all last night, and I hope you enjoyed the movie.

Quite a remarkable sense of "palette," the world as audible, articulate

(which is also to say I like your idea, Terry, of "the daily palette."

That's somewhat behind my idea of The Sense Account, which is my

nominee for a theme. There's a lot embedded in the idea--making

sense (start making sense!) of our fraught and fragile world; accounting for/

counting up, the senses; narrativizing our sensory apparatus, the "story of our

senses"; and taking stock, in a daily sense of our sensory record.

The calendrical possibilities are rich, too--how we might, as a group, publish,

say here on our blog and in the show, a "day book" of our sensorial worlds

and words. It's a longtime obsession (see my book DaZE), and something

behind the poem "the sense account," which is from a new project called

SPOOL. 

"What are days for? / Days are where we live"--Philip Larkin

I'm posting the poem below. Also go to matthewcooperman.com for various

links to Accidental Vestments activity of the past.

Allons!

Matthew