HOW TO CREATE AREAS OF SILENCE

THERE ARE SOME STATES OF ORDER WE NEVER RECOVER HUMAN HISTORY IS NOT ADIABATIC WE HAVE LOST THE RENAISSANCE

THAT NOSTALGIA FOR A LOST ORDER IS A FORM OF NOISE THAT NOISE HAS ITS USES IS FAIRLY OBVIOUS TO WHOEVER READS THE NEWSPAPERS OR LISTENS TO PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESES THEY CREATE A BARRIER THROUGH WHICH IT IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO HEAR OR SPEAK TO WRITE POETRY TODAY IS TO ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE OVER A VERY NOISEY CHANNEL YET AS SHANNON HAS DEMONSTRATED IN THEORY IT IS POSSIBLE TO COMMUNICATE EVEN OVER A CHANNEL OF NEARLY UNLIMITED NOISE WITH SUITABLE METHODS OF CODING HOW IF THE NOISY CHANNEL IS ALSO IN OUR OWN HEAD TO DO SO

HOW TO CREATE AREAS OF SILENCE

David Antin in
Antin, David and Charles Bernstein, A Conversation with David Antin. New York: Granary Books, 2002. 38.

Published on 10 January 2011 6:20 PM.
Filed under: poetry

Graphite

Graphite is an example of a crystal that crystallizes in the hexagonal crystal system.

< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_crystal_system >

Published on 10 January 2011 10:13 AM.
Filed under: science

REVISED AND CORRECTED

Buy a dictionary. Cross out the words to be crossed out. Sign: Revised and corrected.

Duchamp, Marcel. “Some texts from A L’Infinitif (1912-1920),” Aspen no. 5+6. New York: Roaring Fork Press, 1967. < http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/audio5E.html >

Published on 8 January 2011 11:06 AM.
Filed under: art, language

ALL THE THINGS I KNOW

Published on 6 January 2011 9:22 PM.
Filed under: art, knowledge

to an intellectual expression

My ideal library would have contained all Roussel’s writings—Brisset, perhaps Lautréamont and Mallarmé. Mallarmé was a great figure. This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I am sick of the expression “bête comme un peintre”—stupid as a painter.

Duchamp, Marcel. “The Great Trouble with Art in This Country” in
Sweeney, James Johnson, “Eleven Europeans in America: Marcel Duchamp,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin no 13, 1946, p. 21.

Published on 6 January 2011 4:09 PM.
Filed under: art, books

and was not interfered with in any way

A blank sheet of clean white paper was copied in a Xerox 720 machine. This copy was then used to make a second copy, the second to make a third, the third to make a fourth, and so on. Each copy as it came out of the machine was reused to make the next: this was continued for one-hundred times, producing a work of one-hundred sheets. The machine was used under normal conditions and was not interfered with in any way.

Ian Burn, “Xerox” Book (1968). http://www.ubu.com/papers/burn_xerox.html

Published on 6 January 2011 3:47 PM.
Filed under: art, books

one insatiable desire

I am still in the thrall of one insatiable desire, which hitherto I have been neither able nor willing to check…I cannot get enough books. It may be that I have already more than I need, but it is with books as it is with other things: success in acquisition spurs the desire to get still more. Books, indeed, have a special charm. Gold, silver, gems, purple raiment, a house of marble, a well-tilled field, paintings, a steed with splendid trappings—things such as these give but a silent and superficial pleasure. Books delight us through and through, they talk with us, they give us good counsel, they enter into a living and intimate companionship with us.

Petrarch in
Cantor, Norman F., ed. The Medieval Reader. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. 310.

Published on 1 January 2011 6:47 PM.
Filed under: books

a kind of objectivity

What is, or seems to be, new in this music? …One finds a concern for a kind of objectivity, almost anonymity—sound come into its own. The ‘music’ is a resultant existing simply in the sounds we hear, given no impulse by expressions of self or personality. It is indifferent in motive, originating in no psychology nor in dramatic intentions, nor in literary or pictorial purposes. For at least some of these composers, then, the final intention is to be free of artistry and taste. But this need not make their work ‘abstract,’ for nothing, in the end, is denied. It is simply that personal expression, drama, psychology, and the like are not part of the composer’s initial calculation: they are at best gratuitous.

The procedure of composing tends to be radical, going directly to the sounds and their characteristics, to the way in which they are produced and how they are notated.

Christian Wolff “New and Electronic Music” quoted in
Cage, John. Silence. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967. 68.

Published on 1 January 2011 1:31 PM.
Filed under: music

ELASTIC

That day, the pen I used was made of plastic, you see.

The writing could be stretched in any direction — “elastic,” they said.

That didn’t refer to the words so much

As to me, while writing, at my desk, with desk-chair, desk-blotter, desk-top, desk-toy, desk-ball, etc. I mean.

Acconci, Vito and Craig Douglas Dworkin. Language to cover a page: the early writings of Vito Acconci. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 4.

Published on 14 December 2010 12:03 PM.
Filed under: writing

HEXAGON

Published on 12 December 2010 7:39 PM.
Filed under: mathematics