December 18, 2014
December 18, 2014
late flurry
1946
A.J Casson
Poetry by Joseph DonahueVoices on Joseph DonahueThe Secret History of Secrets
(....)*
Touch each of your open
eyes with a forefinger, now,
feel a breeze sweeping
across a glacier; afterwards
you will begin to truly see
exactly what you’ve been
awaiting your whole life:
an upside down Christmas!
Trees hang root end up
from the rafters; slowly turning
as bodies weave through the tops,
gongs ring out, a weird music
wells from beyond a sheet
the smell of the pine
is delightful and eerie, in
this tribute to whoever lay
beneath the last pine lid
ever sanded smooth in this
abandoned car garage
once a coffin factory;
a dangling, Cabbalistic
wilderness, each branch
is a stage in the arc of
divine energy pouring
down in deep seeps in this
apparent art-space
where a woman’s voice
elaborates a single syllable
that wraps around and
through the trees …
*
(....)*
There’s no real way,
an authority assures me
to locate an event in time
or in space. There is only
before and after, only here
and there, there is only
a point when, wide awake,
its like you came home
after many years and found,
much to your delight, the old
kinship system had kept
a classification for you, like
that tangle of bare branches
that is a horizon with light
flying across it towards
the kind of defeat rarely
ever heard of, because it is
followed by so great a joy.
*
...(more)
Edited by J. Peter Moore
jacket2
The art of the unanswerable question
Geoffrey O'brien
As near as I can see — and this is just in riffling through one of Joe Donahue’s books, not even attempting to dig far down but just gathering from what is scattered so availably on the various emerging surfaces — we have here, at one point or another, letter, memoir, history, philosophical dialogue, mantra, aria, imagist snapshot, news flash, plot line, art critique, joke, memorandum, oracle, marginalia, tourist guide, surveillance tape, weather report, playlist, glossary … and none of those in isolation, none that is not so spun together with the rest as to be inextricable without risking rips and warps.Joseph Donahue poems, Blackbox Manifold 6 _______________________
Yet interwoven as the elements are, there is no turn that does not yield bare statement. “Ralph Albert Blakelock / paints black trees”: this is information of the most straightforward kind, a guide to the identification of work, yet also the creation of an eternal present in which Blakelock is never done painting, and yet again, maybe, a whisper of astonishment at what is going on — did you hear? — in an asylum, as we have just previously been informed, an asylum where the sun is present at night (“At night the sun is in an asylum”). All of this is only the continuation of a stream of painterly evocations, Frederick Church followed by Thomas Cole. Art history, except that nothing can remain history. A present in which all of history is contained, and in which all its elements leak into each other, continuously imposes itself: “For the first time, we feel / what it means to live on a planet. … the water in the lake / has turned to a white mist. … Mist is spilling from the hollows. … The sun is the light of revelation.” It is that sun of revelation that leads in the most natural fashion into the mad blackness of Blakelock’s trees, “black trees without leaves / on a starless night.” The poem (“Hudson River School” in Terra Lucida) does not end there — it trails off into silence or perhaps into a different sound range inaudible at this time. I call it a poem, but it is a section of a larger section of a book which is part of a longer ongoing threadlike work....(more)
Backwater
A.J. Casson
_______________________We'll Leave a Light On
Tom Clark
Without it, what savage unsocial nights
Our ancestors must have spent! All those deadly
Winter nocturnes in caves and unillumined icy
Fastnesses: they must have laid around and
Grumbled at one another in the dark like the blind,
Fumbling each other's features for the wrinkle of a smile.
What tedious repartee must have passed! Perhaps
This accounts for the dullness of much archaic
Poetry, whose somber cast is notorious and must
Have derived from the traditions of those
Long unlanterned nights. Jokes came in with candles.
(....)Wasn't it by the midnight taper all writers once digested
Their meditations? By that same light we ought
To approach them, if we ever expect to catch
The tiger-moth of inspiration that dances
In the word incandescent.
...(more)
Rooftops
(1924)
A. J. Casson
1898 - 1992
Using New Social Media Technologies to Promote the Virtues of Jacques Ellul
Brian Lightbody
(....)_______________________Facebook is interesting from an Ellulian analysis for two reasons: first, a user is responsible for enframing herself. What is interesting about this phenomenon, is that it is usually the Other (with a capital O) who is enframed—I view the stranger as a means to my end. Sartre, for example, discusses this tendency in terms of his notion of the “instrumental complex”—I cannot help but view the world, including the people within it, as objects of use for me. I absorb them as part of my totality of narrative as Levinas might say. Of course there is a dialectical dimension to this relationship between self and Other as Sartre well- understood: “Hell is Other people”, Sartre wrote because they enframe us as well.
Ellul, too, is of course interested in establishing communities whereby we treat each other as neighbours and not as useful strangers who simply do things for us within the system. Facebook, I think Ellul would argue, does nothing in removing my perceived strangeness to others. If anything it acts as a powerful reductive agent in that I am become best known according to the pictures and comments I have made online. And certainly many corporations agree: scanning a job candidate’s Facebook profile has become a better interview tool than the interview itself.
A second interesting aspect of Facebook and the hobby of “Facebooking” itself, is that text is clearly subordinate to the images contained within a person’s profile. Most profiles simply consist of pictures with brief comments. Facebook, I would argue, is carving out new and mostly icon driven forms of subjectivity for 21st century persons. One presents one’s totality as it were as an avatar—an artificial character created through uploaded images, comments, as well as ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ which is then interpreted and judged by others, namely, ‘friends.’ But the consequence of this technology, I am sure Ellul would argue, violates the sacredness of the word. Pictures are substituted for description. And acronyms like lol, omg etc. are nothing more than canned expressions that are substitutes for real dialogue. Facebook, as a technology, would appear to be a form of social media that Ellul would abhor.
So what is to be done? Should one simply turn off and tune out from all forms of social media? Are we to retreat into some Luddian silent utopia?
...(more)
A.J. Casson
_______________________ Social Media Is Not Self-ExpressionRob Horning
1. Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it’s the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. “Being yourself” is inherently limiting. It is liberatory only in the sense of freeing one temporarily from existential doubts. (Not a small thing!) So the social order is protected not by preventing “self-expression” and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage. Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control. The more that individuals express through these codified, networked, formatted means to construct a “personal brand” identity, the more they self-assimilate, adopting the incentive structures of capitalist social order as their own. (The machinations of Big Data make this more obvious. The more data you supply, the more the algorithms can determine your reality.) Expunge the seriality built into these platforms, embrace a more radical form of difference.Marginal Utility...(more)
Rob Horning
A blog about consumerism, capitalism and ideology.
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