To make webs of her days. Remembering again each morning the fortune she has to be able to be preoccupied. The sense of a richly deserved sentence, concretizing her abysses into those cigarettes, these flowers, that asphalt. She lives off of a main road, hears cars going home, some too fast; she’s the type who would yell at you for going too fast in a neighborhood. Futility dealt from serving dish in list form, receipts also, diagonally creased from being in the bag with the product. She has no laments, nothing is broken and what will be broken will be fixed, she welcomes it. Who is this?

Sun Side

 She programs the oven, first getting out the manual and patiently reading over the directions while sitting on the patio, smoking a cigarette and sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Later, she picks up dog shit, washes her coffee cup, puts on some music. She got up at 6, which she feels is the perfect compromise between earliness and lateness. She took her shower efficiently, regarding the water guttering down the curve of her breasts with a cool everyday-ness, bemused if anything. She feels a sense of giddiness, alone in the house; her husband left at 4, after which she took over his side of the bed until 6, then, cleaned and rosy she hummed to herself as though concealing something while she made her morning sweep of the house. She is concealing her pleasure, the fullness of it, her sense of being invisible and alone thrilling in her spine, down, almost, to her base. The static crackle of the towels as she pulls them from the laundry, the slant of morning light across the kitchen floor, the sheer inconspicuousnenss of the cooking utensils in their case which she could turn round and round; each a private secret in the pit of her stomach. She and her husband no longer make love, but this is fine. The house and her have a spiritual, perhaps Platonic, love; it gives her such comfort waking in 600 thread count Egyptian cotton, coccooned in warmth from the heater, which automatically turns on at 5:30, she can’t imagine anything more delicious.

Frankly, I’m still ill; and information has kept dilating behind my back. Every time you think maybe you have time to sit down and just read a book… So I listened to The Magic Puppy (amazing btw, that I can say that in all seriousness) and realized that I had no idea what the hell it was talking about, perhaps this is always a gamble when chatting with Magic Puppies; luckily we have Google. So I was like: ‘hybridity;’ ‘two-program model?’ Sounds like the Economist, but then I was like: ‘why not investigate, see how the other half lives.’ So apparently I am woefully unschooled in the present-day discourse of “Poetry;” despite the fact that I am a practicing poet and have read pretty widely. This is an interesting bit of evidence in itself, what does it mean? Am I negligent, or naive? Obviously the gaps in my vocabulary are owed to the fact that I haven’t kept up with works of poetic theory. So ok, obviously the debate is about canonization, it’s about the need to make and sell anthologies because people need to know what progress is within language, and it needs to be relayed to them in theories; ok, this I have gathered after frequenting the Debate and its eccentricities on a number of blogs (exoskeleton; acompulsivereader; ). After bouncing within the limits of the arguments surrounding this attempt at codification, I will admit to feeling frustration raise itself up within me, but also fascination. What is this we are able to witness in real time, this little disagreement that, around itself, has called into life this little territory which ‘takes place’ completely beyond the bounds and outside of the book which perhaps made it necessary. Ok that sounds a little too postmodern-ey formulated like that, and so here I willl make it chewable and bite size: 1) a book has a finite limit, it can only fit a certain number of poets, regardless of how Bible-thin the pages happen to be; 2) there was an unprecedented proliferation in poetry after about 1970 into a greater and greater diversity of styles, an exponential increase that continues still 3) the internet is indefinite, never needs to be printed, and, as such, can publish an indefinite number of poets all writing in idioms derived willy nilly from God-only-knows-where 4) the blogging community debating about the book online is hilarious for these reasons, because they simultaneously supersede and look jealously back upon it, as though it really were in a better position than they.

Here I Attempt to Play Detective:

What is quietism? This could qualify an actual gap in my education, heaven forbid; I will admit I can be a lazy reader, but hey, I’m not getting paid for it. Couldn’t find much on it outside of the blogosphere, namely at exoskeleton blog where the trail was quite hot. The author tosses out a handy definition “it is the dominant literary system in the US as it was organized with the creation of Creative Writing Programs in the 1960s and 1970s.” Cool, familiar with that. “This system allows for a certain level of stylistic variation (though really not much). But certain values have remained pretty constant. It is also not without internal conflict, which serves to hide its basic homogeneity.” Apparently, Ron Silliman is the progenitor of this paradigmatic widget. So does that mean Quietism is institutional poetry in general, as though there were a single range in which voices could articulate within a given American university? In that case, which is by no means THE case, it would seem to specify an effect common to poets who have been exposed to certain systems of critique, structured interaction, rhetoric; in that case we could almost think of it sociologically, from an interactionist view, as a state one achieves in relation to a structuring of interpersonal poetic relationships, call if professionalization. But this is an unorthodox reading of my own, have found no precursors to it in the blogs I’ve perused; on those, mainly, the view seems to be that it is an attempt to retrospectively define a movement or (familiar term alert) a SCHOOL, which is opposed to the other school, broadly classed as “post-avant.” Now, “post-avant (garde) school” is shorthand (or longhand?) for non-institutional poetics, experimental poetics which took many cues from performance art, modernist and contemporary avant-gardists, etc. I do have to question myself on my OWN division here (into institutional and non-institutional) (so fun to accuse oneself): isn’t modernism/contemporary art avant gardism an institution as well? I’ll let that one simmer on the back burner momentarily.

Reading further in the post on the exoskeleton blog, I do find many of my paths presupposed; that it is institutionalization (professionalization is implied), the author (Johannes) also brings up the reenforcement of this caused within the formation of the award system, the giving of professorships, etc. He however still allows it the status of a school or a tradition (nouns) rather than as an ongoing structural process which arise incidentally alongside and completely as a consequence of the milieu it creates. It is a verb, an active force which can only be viewed within the lives it touches, in the present. This view is Foucauldian of me I guess, he would talk about it as a strategy of structuring visible and audible information; context, basically. The workshop is a context; a site, as much as the hospital or the prison, for Foucault, were the sites, for certain programs allowings effects of power to be circulated and imparted. Ok enough Foucault jargon. But point taken. So carrying it into the realm of experiences, and yes I have been in my share of workshops, what range of motion does the workshop dynamic allow for? I can’t go straight for the heart on this one, mainly because I had particularly permissive, low-level workshops, and am very articulate in defending my work; plus I have not been able to witness the very heart of the system which is the graduate workshop. This is where professionalization must take place. I’ll poke around and see if I can find any more grist for this mill online.

In his responses to Johannes (in the comment section to Johnnes’ post) Seth Abramson disagrees that Quietism exists at all, he breaks up contemporary poetry differently, along the lines of semiotic/linguistic language theory (pragmatic, syntactic) and refers to issues of rhythm as “surface effects”. This is striking, rhythm as a surface effect. This, I wouldn’t say heavy handed, but definitely power-effect inducing, usage of terminology calls to mind the primary verbal element of the power dynamic in a workshop; that is, the confident usage of terms and theories to shore up one’s position. Because, let’s face it, what is it being manufactured in MFA workshops but positions? Is that the case? Well, if one wants to be the target of grants, awards, professorships, fellowships, one needs to be visible on an intellectual horizon ie to take up a position on it, to do otherwise would br Naive, or Art Brut (madness). Articulation occurs through some mesium which imparts effects of power on what is said, as I myself am now doing through the medium of Foucault’s work; but does that mediation negate the validity of my observations? Or: not the validity of them, the generality. Because generality does seem to be the prize, doesn’t it? Generality is perhaps the highest power of knowledge, as such. Without it all we have are individuals floating in a medium, no schools, no anthologies with tidy little names, no yardstick for the handing out of prizes. But now the argument in me has gone to its limit; I cannot say anything about pragmatics or syntactics, I have no claims in that field, or very few, and only in its most airy regions. So for now this argument will conveniently tuck itself in good night.

Realized wasn’t at all clear, got caught in spiral, such things do occur. Points that were meaning to be made prior to the incipience of spiral:
1) jargons, technical terms (in this case, linguistic/semantic) are necessary, in no sense can one ever be BLAMED for utilizing them; however, their necessity springs from the fact that they impart power in dealing with objects (and we are throwing workshopped poems into the category of ‘objects’ for this one). How one deals with this power is individual; as seen above, I use it, handle the object and then let the ‘lens’ (the terminology, that is) re-dissolve into a state of indeterminacy (this is vaguely Baudrillardian of me, and ‘super bitch’ (private joke (sorry for the nesting)));
2) I do NOT view rhythm as a ‘surface effect;’
3) I do not lump Abramson in with the Quietists (which may, by the arrangement, seem to be the case), reading his comments just tangentially made me think of the power dynamic in a workshop environment and how terms can be made to monopolize the floor in various ways.

I want to settle these thoughts back onto firm ground, but I do not wish to disturb the order or content of what came before; I think of this in the same way as, having just been ill, I cannot, nor would I want to, rearrange or alter the different stages of fever, because they were all necessary for the healing of the sickness. But there is something I need to rectify, information I haven’t yet digested, namely, the original article by Ron Silliman which put this paradigm into play. So I visited his blog, found it incredibly difficult to navigate, then fell back to google to regroup. Before I go further I would like to come to the heart of what writing this blog has taught me. There are two relevant quotations which I will first cite:

1) from Giorgio Agamben’s lecture on Youtube about paradigms: “Feuerback once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. If a work, be it a work of science or art or scholarship has some value, it will contain this philosophical element. It is something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands to be unfolded and worked out.”
2) from Henri Focillon’s The Art of the West II p 3: “In the first years of the twelfth century, there appeared in France… a new structural member which proceeded, by a sequence of strictly logical steps, to call into existence the various accessories and techniques which it required in order to generate its own architecture and style. This evolution was as beautiful in its reasoning as the proof of a theorem. Everything that sprang from the vault rib—in the course of a few years, rather less than two generations—revealed the consistency, continuity and vigour of a closely reasoned argument. Its initial appearance was not made in the Paris area. But it was there that architects first drew the inevitable conclusions from it, by which, from being a mere strengthening device, it became the progenitor of an entire style.”

For me, these two statements fully articulate the theme this blog was seeking in its communication with the controversy raised by the hatching of that paradigm from the pen of Mr. Silliman. First, that is valuable in that it raises questions, like ‘is there a consistency in academic work?’ ‘what is that consistency?’ and ‘what is a school now; or a style?” All these are within, as Heidegger would say (or maybe Husserl, dunno), the horizon of questions the paradigm makes visible. This horizon is the edge of what the theory or paradigm has to offer. But its contents, that which is stated explicitly, the terms and their definitions, this is where the power or the prestige of the author is invested; just as the great cathedrals studied by Focillon were investments of power by the Capetians, geared towards perpetuating their authority. They permitted the architects to have their formal dialog within their domaine royale, permitted the developments and took credit for them. This is the opposite side of the coin, the part everyone knows because it is in the history books, Focillon later notes that latter generations misused the elements which the argument had put into play because they had not been privy to it while it was still undecided, for them it had simply become a display of power, a certainty. So that is the opposition I am fielding, up in the air/developing vs finished and developed. Perhaps the most ‘ethical’ way to use a theory is to keep its limits in the foreground, to maim it as one uses it and thus keep it open for others, it becomes open source. On the other hand, the most strategic way to argue is to close up the terms, to be secretive and to deploy certainties (which are closed off by nature) as a sort of bludgeoning instrument.

So the source, the article, the fountainhead, whatever… Off to peruse it now…

boo ya

So here we have the usual issue, having begun, where to begin? Well, where I began was at the beginning, page 1, having decided to conduct a cover-to-cover expedition through the Notley archives, even though my ADD frequently rebelled, baffling my attempts at every turn. But this is the usual American reader’s response, I wanted my good American response, since this is good American poetry. Specifically, if you have to slap a category on it, New York School poetry. Notley cites Frank O’Hara as being one of the first poetic voices she recognized as her own, though not exactly, however it made her’s that much more possible. So expect that beautiful casualness with which O’Hara is able to finesse all those little forks in the road which take place in the mind of a city dweller. Though from Needles, CA; Notley is a city poet, in the sense that she contains a throng of voices, casts of characters, events, what have you, which no island oasis could contain.

And to the meat, the stuff, the poetry…Let’s see, when did she start ravaging me… Not exactly from the beginning page, no, it takes some time to warm up to her, to get past her strange syntax (which she FUCKS with), the airiness and ‘barely there’-ness of her early poems, with their sketch-like quality, little flashes here and there, of life. It is like seeing the synapses firing, of new life, life which you almost understand but for it’s combined simplicity and strangeness. And familiarity. And plainness. But then these intricate jewels begin to turn up, phrases like:

“But I and this he (and he) makes ghosts of/ I and all the hes there would be, won’t be// because by now I am he, we are I, I am we.// We’re not the completion of myself.” 
(Dear Dark Continent)

“how, do you suppose//the wonders/that would be facts,/from dreams,/get lost” 
and
“That every movement naturally produces/noise/which attracts, pursues, tears to pieces,/utensil and wing,/the thing/til she lives”
(I, Songs for the Unborn Second Baby)

This type of convolution, wherein maybe what we see is common sense, common words, in the process of making itself as intricate as poetry. But also a fusion of dream life and real life, which may be that exact process of making intricate just phrased differently. If we wanted to pretend Notley were a metaphysical poet, for instance, her form of metaphysics would be no different from walking around a house, nursing a baby, perhaps occasionally peering out a window, and sitting down before a TV. Many of her works could be headed: “A Meditation on…;” but the target of her meditations are dailiness, as in “Your Dailiness,” in which she recalls deaths (of her grandfather, of her aunt, of Neal Cassady) within a narrative string which keeps us very much in touch with the scenes of these thoughts, the life that contains and sweeps them along so that they are hers. Thus we get exposed to this beautiful universality which exists within the borders of what we all live without it needing all the ‘trivialities’ to be subtracted or ‘cleaned’ off of it.

“The poetry of the New York School—whose original practitioners include Frank O’Hara, Lew Welch, Paul Blackburn, and later on Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, and Anne Waldman—has all the paradoxical easiness of a Zen koan. It is flux without the rhetoric; spun on wit, the seriousness of trivia, it takes place entirely in the conversational mode… Wryly and offhandedly, O’Hara puts his finger on the great discovery of American poetry during the twentieth century: that poetry is living speech, transcribed (William Carlos Williams); that it is a map of a person’s mind (Phillip Whalen); that it is an exchange of energy between the writer and the reader. The writer Ann Rower describes this gentle tampering with live speech as a criminal act, like breaking and entering, “smash and grab.”

Chris Kraus: “Ecceity, Smash and Grab, The Expanded I and Moment”

This is one of my main scoop-it-all-in interpretations of what the New York School was doing inside of the common language, they were living in it. Alice Notley lives in her poems, the early poems are homey, eccentric, sweet, challenging, ribald, drunk; this is not PR. But in a way it IS PR, in the strictest sense, because she is relating to the public, through public language, through TV, through death, birth, pop music; Notley invest these with her own voice in these early works. She is getting at that thing with which everyone in America is bound up with, dailiness, and she is making it hers. Here’s some more words:

“O me being me/designed/to satisfy the gods feeling it/just as one//need not know it that/every experience is a mystical/one/the sun/shines the lamp shines the Albers/glows/What a nice day!“
(Endless Day)

But you all know all of this, or maybe you don’t, but eventually either you will or won’t; so I have to wonder again about the context of this little essay, and how to re-begin again. So now we know who Alice Notley is, check; we know who she’s like, check; we’ve heard from her a bit, discussed what I think that sounds like she’s doing, but is there a non polemical way to get at this ‘stuff’ other than be saying it’s good or ‘it means this?’ Because, reading Notley, it does become very difficult, worrying what you’re saying, what she’s saying, what you’re reading; all these problems get neatly strapped up in a tough little package.

Here’s something I did: when I’m struck by a poem, I’m always taken by a somewhat cruel, maybe a little egoistic, whim: to recreate what it is they are doing in my own way. Of course, it ends up being more what I think they are doing than what they are actually doing, barring all philosophical digressions. Doing this I spend a few moments thinking as she appears to think, on the page, trying to see how is it that she uses these thoughts that enter her, what spin does she put on her past, where is she looking? So I did that, what did it mean, what happened to me? When poetry happens, how does it happen to you; that is a good question. Somewhere in Grave of Light Alice notes how she understands her dreams as a surface, or maybe feels them as a surface. But if you’re skeptical maybe you’re like: sounds like typical poet bullshit, dedicated to post-Freudian knowing winks. I guess these could be on the mark, to an extent, but they don’t cover all the bases; for Alice, poetry is an extension of her life, just as analysis was for Freud, but the goals are not the same at all. ‘Notley dreams as a surface‘ means that dreams are something else, sticking out in time, where her events are gathered, somewhere where words have to go for her; but the specific problem for Alice is: “how do you get back to real life from there?”

Let me break a second, took Thera-Flu, now feeling kind of like a balloon, not fun at all. I wonder how my body will speak differently now, keep making misspellings, impatience, feels like I’m kind of pulling out of the mood a bit. If the body is the center for all these words, my body, living over here, wanting to talk about itself, it’s life, all that stuff, how is it anyone can make something affecting. Biggest challenge I think, for writers, not being ego maniacal, and not making too many misspellings. Alice Alice Alice what is the I saying, who is the I of this essay, perhaps the art of the essay is to keep an I stable and confident for the duration, so how does this work with “the expanded I?” Won’t that just be confusing? Unless there are threads, or unless there are other ways of reading, being clear. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth, getting out these words; sometimes it is a flow which barely could stop even if I wanted to. What is the range of her I?

This is where I have to begin to differentiate Alice from the New York School. So if we have this handy list of traits: living speech, mind map, “an impersonal I;” which direction is Alice’s direction? A little later in the book, I discovered a mini “book” inside of it, “September’s Book.”  It’s gorgeous…

But wait, I have to cut in on myself, I slept after I wrote this, despite that the theraflu was daytime (my sister didn’t read the label) but that fact caused my sleep to be shallow, I kept waking up, going back to sleep, waking up. So this led me to have a ton of dreams because my whole sleep was in a shallow state, and who did I dream of but Alice Notley. This is probably just a case of “had it on my mind before bed,” but some of these little vignettes were profoundly strange. One episode from my dream involved Alice trying to demonstrate for me one of her cyphers, a way she decodes and recodes language into dream talk: the main part of this is in separating a word into its individual letters, which I sensed, after that point, become like slivers in the flesh, or in the mind. Specifically, in this way: slivers when they can’t be pried out from under you’re skin tend to develop, not from their own material, but from the irritation they cause in the flesh, they cause puss and scar tissue to build up. Now, disregarding that this image is gross, in fact, elevating it up to the brain, the mind, wiggling maybe up through that little pinprick Descartes thought joined the two at the pineal gland, we find ourselves in the situation of the word. But the splinter word, the word that needs to be built, and this is what she told me, she rebuilds them. Now, this may have several phases but I only explicitly recall one (the more typical) and vaguely recall the image of another: the first is your run of the mill association, so that each letter becomes a new word, this, to me, seemed very basic; the second involved some sort of tabulation, perhaps this tabulation of variables is merely the back end of the association or a whole other procedure in itself, numbers were involved, and long lists. The name for this method was promptly forgotten by me after my first wakeup, though it was a strange word, maybe with a ‘z’ and a ‘k;’ but a replacement word was, in a later dream, provided for me by my friend Darlene, who in the dream seemed to be taking complete credit for the method, which, she objected was derived from Akkadian scripting procedures and was referred to by the name Ak-Ak-akakak (with the first two syllables being distinct, the last pronounced quickly). This scene took place in a model home out of or into which I was moving, make of this what you will…

Anyway, if you found that bizarre I apologize. Right now I’m striving to get back to the main thread but I have one last (?) detour to make. I forgot to note that both my friend Chelsea and I are braving Alice’s mind at the moment, and we’re bothing finding it quite… adventure-ey. She lives in Southern California (I’m in Washington; Kirkland at the moment) so we have gossipey chats on the phone about her (Alice).  I would leave it up to your imagination what a gossipey chat about Alice Notley between two twenty-something poets might sound like; but I’m also teetering on the edge of making a recording for posterity’s sake.  She’ll be like: “I really think she [Alice] is actually fucking with syntax, like FUCKING;” and I: “god, I know, she’s such a cunt about it, and then she just piles on deliciousness and then just like fucks it again, ohhh.” And then sometimes I’ll be pacing around my cabin (I have a cabin) and pick up the book (which is a cream colored cloth bound, can’t find the dustjacket for the life of me) and just make appreciative noises at it. This sounds insane, but it’s a real life part of book appreciation. Chelsea and I have hypothesized (we used to go on long walks in the suburbs and hypothesize) that there is a separate sexuality for poets called ‘textuality.’ It’s when you feel like a book is fucking you, does that make sense? It’s a rhythmic thing. Which reminds me, my sister’s girlfriend was watching The Tyra Show the other day (like a week ago) and Tyra had on an objectumsexual woman who had recently married the Eiffel Tower. She (the objectumsexual), said that she achieves intimacy (her word for sexual intercourse) with the objects through exchanges of heat, how far are words off that? Not very.

 On a separate, still not quite related to Alice Notley, but in the realm of the arts, note: this is one of the themes of the work of Paul Chan (the rhythm part that is), he discusses this towards the end of his talk for the Renaissance Society in Chicago, for the exhibition of his ‘My Laws are My Whores.’ I believe he brings this up in the context of the soundtrack to ‘Law & Order’, and also in the modalities he employs in going about making his font sets. Scanning for a take away quote, however the fast-forward mechanism on their audio player SUCKS. “A new form of of pornography that didn’t use bodies”; which he gave up on, but which led to the fonts (which are still bodies I suppose, though specifically devoted to sound and rhythm and much less devoted to the image). Another takeaway quote: “I think you CAN fuck a brain.” Yep. It’s in there, check it, and listen to the lecture anyway cause it’s amazing.

Now that I’ve sidetracked this essay all the way into contemporary art, I’ll courteously circle back: is Alice Notley a pornographer of the word? No… I’ll try again: is she a porno star of the voice? Which neatly returns me to ‘September’s Book.’

4) categorize/group the phrases using these tags.
5) collage away as one deems consistent

so i was doing something, i think i was looking at the work of pierre huyghe online and i came across a video on google vids that had this very distinguished yet vaguely skanky looking curator explaining why pierre sanding part of a wall down was part of his practice.

and guess what i was more interested in.

yummy silver haired curator alert, i’m on the edge of making a fan page in the exact style of a 13 year old girl.

apparently his name is peter eleey. really one of the best things about art is smart hotties who are vaguely or more explicitly international. internash.

i’m sure he’s great and everything but i wonder if he gets objectified enough? probably, i’m definitely not the first on this one, and why shouldn’t curators be classed among their objects, that tasty little silver headed object certainly didn’t hurt in attaining that position, or maybe it should be called an exhibition?

so what i’m getting at, or where i’m getting to is: can institutional positions be read as exhibitions? perhaps this has already been hit upon, institutional criticism and all that. but i’m of the opinion that thirteen year old girls and boys are the best critics: OBJECTIFY OBJECTIFY… MAKE A SPARKLY WEB PAGE OF IT!!!

sex

spent day with virtual LIS, was nice. took very scattered notes, and here they are:

light as time object, tv as a simple object with content, OR as pure time-light emission surface

indirect perception numb inventions extra sensory deprivation bath

what the brain does in relation to what it gets from the world, prisms made of fatty tissue (not really)

different albedos, reflectances, greynesses,

frequencies colors derived from comparisons of grey

quotient of complexity as the yardstick/divisor for the world of form (Kubler note)

patterns

usually facilitate an understanding of the intended usage of an object so, in a way, utility and aesthetics blend there

style as temporal refraction-situation call and response with the shape of ones era

the complexities emitted in certain time-spaces which are their metric; but the content and the fervor are of a separate metric, draw from a different basin, a differently stored area of memory

“the moment of discovery and its successive transformations as traditional behavior” “outline only the main articulations of historical substance”

—- Kubler Shape of Time p 4

“what is the survival value of white?” —someone at LIS, end of day

“every position is keyed, as it were, to the action of a certain range of temperaments.” (Kubler again)

you are currently living out an agreement where you have, before you were born, consented to be made and also changed by others. (New Age style statement example)

one of the differences between the discipline of biology and the discipline of history is that the former aims to study the sequence of adaptation; the latter, the sequence of purposes. purposes does not merely mean utilities but also other forms of purposiveness: fervor, interest, fascination. adaptation is the response in matter to the need for a purpose, or the suiting of matter, within its own terms, for functioning activity. history is another garment altogether, history contains the forms of biology within itself and with the addition of what one might term the human soul, the time consciousness of the biological entities, and the need to feel purposive beyond, one might say over and above, the functions described in biology. (academic style statement)

“transmission of some kind of energy; with impulses, generating centers, and relay points”

————————–

anyway all this stuff is still only a baby. the discussions on the site survey topics much in excess of what i saw fit to appropriate for my own uses in this note form.  the bulk of the talk hovered around the topics of color, what role light has in it, how objects emit it, how it is mediated, how produced or altered, how culturally laden (as with language).

as far as my own use goes, i love the idea of a meaty prism, which is kind of my complete misprision of the talk on Goethe, but the image of my own body being some system another system is holding at arms length to catch radiations I find both useful and appealing for my own work.

i also love the idea that i could so belatedly attend a day of talks given in germany, such a gift. and so fits my style of getting up in the morning.

From the lovely Free Online Dictionary:

Vent n.

1. A means of escape or release from confinement; an outlet: give vent to one’s anger.

2. An opening permitting the escape of fumes, a liquid, a gas, or steam.

3. The small hole at the breech of a gun through which the charge is ignited.

4. Zoology The excretory opening of the digestive tract in animals such as birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish.

5. Geology

a. The opening of a volcano in the earth’s crust.

b. An opening on the ocean floor that emits hot water and dissolved minerals.

1. To express (one’s thoughts or feelings, for example), especially forcefully.

2. To release or discharge (steam, for example) through an opening.

3. To provide with a vent.

1. To vent one’s feelings or opinions.

2. To be released or discharged through an opening.

3. To rise to the surface of water to breathe. Used of a marine mammal.