On discourses
There is something really curious about discursive thought and where it belongs. Perhaps this is an essay that should be entitled, “In defense of Foucault” for all those criticisms about his lack of historical or academic soundness. It reminds me of Kittler at bit, too. What are these thinkers not trying to create but noting a complex pattern of behaviors or structures that permeate thinking on every level of existence?
Something strange, indeed, as to why this form of writing exists. What makes it so convincing to the reader outside of scholarship, when these texts have no citations? So, I think about what other things do not need citations: music, perhaps. Poems, perhaps. Literature and creative energies.
This brings to me the thought that good discursive writing is a writing that reveals a common truth of human behavior that could only be synthesized in this way. That the truth lies in the resonance, the immediacy to us, of its existence in our society. Our experiences are the citations. Our knowing of society and thinking at this time, this day. That is what makes something in literature “true”. Why not the same for theory? And that is why we think of new discourses, new literary forms. It is not an act of re-invention but an illustration of changing forms, of changing minds. The modulating consciousness of a society that must be followed and examined lest it run into itself like a snake.
When we write new discourses, we build on the old (sovereignty to discipline to control to desire). And these discourses do not serve or wish to prove themselves as much as literature does not try to prove itself. Rather you, the reader, are the citation. You know certain things to be true from your perceptions, your experiences in life. We live and create in the same world. The objective reality is on the whole experienced similarly in our intersubjectivity. Discourse is the ambient underlaid pattern that we are all aware of, living, breathing. The discourse writer is not trying to create something new from discourse, but rather trying to give voice to something in us that is wholly familiar and true already. It is a shared human experience. Therefore it must be literature.
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he whistles his hounds to stay close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us play up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped
He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue
stick your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky
you’ll then have a grave in the clouds where you won’t lie too cramped
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
—Paul Celan, “Deathfugue,” trans. John Felstiner
Movements in Breathing © 2013 Yanyi Luo
Edited, designed, and printed my first collection of poetry this week. It’s a halfway compilation and mostly consists of my work from January of this year until now (though there are three or four of poems preceding then).
As luck (and my coffers) would have it, I could only print seven copies, most of which are going out in the mail this week. They cost about $15 each to print and put together, but I think I would like to do a second run one day, if demand exists.
i
am
the
path
along
unseen
heather
Snowball (also called a Chaterism): A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. One of the constrained writing techniques utilised by the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature).
o
we
all
have
heard
people
believe
anything
Given the mathematical genesis of the Oulipo and the interest in the movement among other programmers, I thought that someone must have created a program to generate these, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find one even after some pretty thorough Googling. So I wrote one myself. The C++ code is here.
(source: nossidge)
On my early writing
Most of it is buried somewhere beneath an avalanche of digital dust and many memories. I think I would be mortified on some level to have it brought out, and then nostalgic on another. I was outwardly arrogant, inwardly insecure about my work. I wanted to compile and publish a book at the same time I never wanted comments or ideas on it. To be honest, I didn’t know what I was doing until I did it, and then was so engrossed in the love of words and their look on the page that whether it was poetry did not matter much. It captured that me, that cliché of young love and hate and disappointment. I was learning in a vacuum. I only read poetry in translation and rarely much else. I wanted to write in a way removed from that place, even that emotion I was feeling, in order to feel my alienation and solitude in a way fitted to words. I wanted my poems to fly and be free for me and fuck the rest. I still do, to some extent.
I would be mortified insofar as the writing itself did not know itself as I did not. This continues. I’ve realized since that although I have a better grasp on the sentences, the granular rhymes and rhythms are a language as intelligible as hearing music in the wind. You do not know where it comes from exactly, or how it got there, but you are grateful to hum along. Cage and music as the activity of life. Sometimes I feel teeming and every rumble is that sound of feeling, of the world and I pressing closely to breathe some warmth into a beloved image, whether it’s dead or merely disappearing.
On loops
Contrary to Kittler’s conception of the world ending by coming to a grinding halt through infinite loops, mayhaps we could entertain something of a faith in loops manifesting in a natural human desire.
The loop of last actions
: Memory which we replay in our minds again and again, hoping to feel for an instant the cause of some unbearably light sensation that permeated one moment of time gone forever from us. We have only the excess, the physical relief of what was, to give us the constant echo. And something in me believes in this human wanting for sensation and feeling. For time again and again. It cannot be simply a result of tumblr gifs; Philip Glass’s music is attractive for its atmosphere, for unspeakable emotion which it glazes past over and over in attempt to capture it. This is also the way that an unsure artist draws—by short lines, feeling the small of the contours of a shape in the world rather than boldly placing the line on the page. But the boldness of all good artists comes from nothing more than practice and discipline, just as a poet who speaks iambically has the churn of rhythm in her bones so that her being is her poetry.
How unfortunate that a sensation can bring back echoes of a time, but no actual time, and that no perfect loop in the world can rein in exact sensation!
typewriter-poems by anatol knotek
from my »anachronism« chapbook
»usually a book is just a copy - but not this one. every poem is individually written with my typewriter, so each single page is unique. out of about 50 poems i chose 16 for each book, therefore also the contents varies.«
if you like to purchase the book, you can use the paypal button on my blog, or just contact me on tumblr or via email: anatol(at)anatol(dot)cc
It’s hard to fully express my delight, surprise, and happiness at seeing the juggling gif, and to think about the future of writing and poetry forever and ever.
Record-keeping
The explanation for a multimedia project that I am taking offline today. An art piece that doesn’t show the piece, if you will.
_____________
The Ruse of the Gulls [Spring 2012]
The Ruse of the Gulls is an inquiry into the space of matter between digital and physical. It is a confluence of several definitions of literacy and cultural permanence: that of image, text, sound, and space. Motivations and themes:
Imagistic literacy - Text, in the hierarchy of digital media, occupies the lowest currency of communicative exchange. As both a designer and a writer, this has always rung false. There exists another type of literacy: a familiarity that grows as a person accumulates cultural cues and meanings. The scanned page both hearkens to an offline existence for text and the history of the printed word itself; the typefaces and paper stocks all cue to different time periods, different moments in the history of the printed word. This is something I like to call imagistic literacy: something that can only increase as people continue to proliferate and prescribe meaning to images by including them as conversational statements (i.e. responding in a discussion with a humorous GIF) or as a medium of expression (i.e. image-collaging blog sites).
Transformative permanence and legacy - Let’s reflect on three definitions of permanence for the written work: the physical entity of the book, the digital entity that is infinitely reproducible, and the complete and infinite sharing of a work within society, usually posthumously. And each of these understandings of permanence are valid and integral to a transformative existence of a cultural work that simultaneously occupies a conceptual and actual space. In the same way that we see text in two interacting ways (once as image, the second time as concept), the root of a cultural work in the time of its existence lies once in the physical: that is, it cannot be divorced from the environment, the people, the ideas of the time from which it sprung. The physical object is permanent because it can live beyond human memory; this is also why digital space feels so murky, so less permanent to us. Yet, digital information is infinitely replicable: although it can be encrypted, deleted, or lost in some way, it still exists as long as it occupies some space in someone’s hard drive (itself a physical object, but that relationship is another conversation). But with both of these levels, we come back to the third of collective memory and social cognizance. Assume that, contradictory to Marshall McLuhan’s famous words, the medium is in not the message. Depending on its characteristics, the medium has a grain of its own that interacts with a message, attributing meaning with each other (this is why I have provided the text with as many existences as possible, and why the recording and geographical placement of the poems are also integral to the experience of The Ruse of the Gulls). If the medium is mitigated, we are left with understanding the last definition of permanence.
Modeling social cognizance of a cultural work - I could have framed this in simply a question: “Why Tumblr?” My choice to publish here is quite deliberate. Every part of this site is designed to help a user shape her own identity with media, and to make each action knowable and attributable. It works on the very network model of the social and cultural graph in which almost no action occurs in a vacuum. It tracks influence in a very numerical way, creating motivation for user activity in the same way that we react to each other offline. This, perhaps beyond all other factors, is why Tumblr has been able to ascend beyond the stagnation of other blogging websites. In addition, Tumblr has a substantial userbase that engages with imagistic literacy beyond any other social network, and a large enough userbase that explores literature in a sophisticated way, that attracts me more than say, Pinterest’s.
The author
I like writing that floats slightly off the ground. My current topics of interest are war, old people, and magical realism. All work that appears here is © 2010-2012 Yanyi Luo.
Contact me at me[at]yanyiluo[dot]com.
