Dress
Pierre Cardin, 1968
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A clear example of what I like to call “absent saxophone”.
Hard to get a photo showing how cool the Bank of America Theatre in Albuquerque is, but it is mad cool and that wall is enormous.
I could honestly do this all night, but I won’t.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8hJXLW6kKk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN1nMpmC0n4
as for her, ha.
Love the internet. And yeah, it’s Wednesday night and I’m listening to Jim Croce while drinking Guinness. I don’t think there’s a way to make this more awesome… unless I put on some kind of hat.
Damn, I missed the meeting where we decided that today the Internet would turn into one massive diatribe on usefulness of arts vs. science. I would have objected.
This never would have happened if they taught Richard Feynman to children. Then we’d all know that both are great and both are even better when they interact & trust each other.
“Nelson says: ‘Few people read print poetry beyond the classroom, and even before the net age, poetry books rarely sold. Yet with my admittedly strange and frenetic digital poems, I’ve been successful in attracting millions of readers — people who will share the work, post blogs, write essays about it.’ But this to miss the point entirely.”—
This article, along with the New Scientist article about digital poetry that spawned it, is over a year old, but I just ran across it.
The “Nelson” Bantick refers to is Jason Nelson, who puts weird things on his website. Digital poems, or whatever you like to call them - objects? Virtual installations? I find the navigation confusion and the work baffling, but interesting too.
I come down against Bantick’s idea that poetry (or things like poetry) can “miss the point entirely” by the author “justifying” the work on the grounds of certain amount of public engagement. That does, in some way, justify it. Engagement is a poem’s oxygen.
Bantick concludes:
Digital poetry is largely anything-goes-versification. Random associations, clever, arty imagery, soundscapes and innovation do not take the place of knowing why something has merit, why it can be defined a poetry and why fluidity of interpretation is a danger to meaning. It is not something that is likely to endure beyond the transitory digital world.
He draws a false dichotomy between things-that-you-can-know-have-merit and digital poetry - can’t digital poetry be judged? Does the democracy of the medium mean that the digital poetry culture, such as it is, can have no standards - no experience of success or failure, just a bland soup of existence containing all work ever done? Some people have feared as much ever since the debut of Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable-type printing press. Now, the type moves a lot faster.
Digital poetry, though it can do some new things, is really nothing new: it uses sound and image and language, just like games, films, music videos. It’s all just how you scramble ‘em.
My favourite thing-like-a-digital-poem has been this thing about tea, which is a so-called expanding narrative that gains detail as you click the words in the sentences, so that three words end up as a whole paragraph. That’s cool stuff, it’s not flashy, there’s no arty music or out-there imagery. It’s a good example of what digital literature might be, because it relies on its medium to be what it is. It doesn’t especially care if you finish or not. If you want more, it’s there. And along the way the text will have various forms decided by the order in which you click on words to expand. Crucially, every one of those forms makes sense. You can’t do it wrong.
I love stuff you can’t do wrong.
[video]
Samuel Beckett (born April 13, 1906)
my loneliness I know it oh well I know it badly
I have the time is what I tell myself I have time
but what time famished bone the time of the dog
of a sky incessantly paling my grain of sky
of the climbing ray ocellate trembling
of microns of years of darkness—Samuel Beckett translated by Philip Nikolayev, Poetry, February 2008
I love Beckett, but he seemed constipated in this photo. That realization made him seem constipated in every other photo, and if you think about it, Waiting for Godot could be the ultimate dramatic rendition of constipation. I could explain that in great detail, but I don’t want to plagiarize myself in a doctoral thesis someday.
[video]