Parks
- I did not send around the essay I was supposed to because of being busy at first then it became a matter in my opinion of over- prescribing a reading of the text revolving around race and while that paradigm is of importance, taking this as a text and not a performance, it could swoosh by the reader that The Foundling Father is black. It is not explicit. Or perhaps I missed a word or allusion despite reading so many times. But I know from undergrad and the back of the book (w/ a black Abe Lincoln). And maybe I did miss an allusion but this fact is not obnoxiously clear from the text. And yet changing the race of Lincoln is supposed to perform something, to complete something, to build a bridge with history. “Note the death wound: thuh great black hole- thuh great black hole in thus great head. – And how this great head is bleedin.” (199)
- The Foundling Fathers reenactments of the shooting of Lincoln take place “out west” likely somewhere beyond the bounds of the United States at the time of the Civil War and so geographically digs a hole in the history he portrays.
- What about those blonde beards? Foundling Father says it’s sometimes fun to switch things up even when accuracy falls by the wayside (more on this later) but people get mad. But sometimes “inaccuracies are good for business.” People get mad that he is wearing a blonde beard but they don’t care that he’s black. Surely this disjunction signifies something, the issues of time and race racing around each other. This thought is likely something more obvious/ simplistic than Parks’ intentions, but perhaps the tourists ambling through his attraction have no problem with the inaccuracy of skin color because of racist legacies, because the imitation of a white man by a black man can be acceptable if murder is to simulated against that body with unclear racial definitions.
- What of “The sun on his fair hair looked like the sun itself.” (168). Where is Parks positing the divide between History (with a capital H because of purported accuracy) and the history of invention, hearsay? The above quote as the accompanying footnote informs us is from ‘”The Sun,’ a composition by The Foundling Father, unpublished.” Through footnotes here given the same importance as quotes attributed to various Civil War figures as well as lines from Our American Cousin. As a character then the Foundling Father digs a hole in the history he is portraying, and the text digs a hole as well which illustrates the type of historicity this play posits, one of various levels of artifice. A composition composed by the imposter Lincoln is given the same credence as “historical accuracies.”
- Levels of history/ accuracy/ realness are posited by the play, ie: “C Woman (theatrically): ‘They’ve killed the president.’” Which begs the question why a woman in a representation of a historical event in a theatrical production would need instruction to act theatrically if not for the necessity of calling attention to the artificiality of the history in which she is a participant.
- And how about the ability of the text to be cleaved for production? Some scenes seen as perfunctory/ disposable? Like the history of real life where the act of remembrance is prescribed. Social reality created by the hole, though not everyone is a digger.
- Lucy and Brazil hold a relationship to history separate from Foundling Father as it is something they are attempting to recover, rather than create/ reenact. The hole of history is what he left them upon his (offstage?) death. Facsimiles of Lincoln serve as stand-ins for the Foundling Father signifying the reception of history in the real life, the way representations come to be reality, and their recovery never quite careens towards the actuality of occurrence.
Stein
-“every generation has something different at which they are all looking.” And so temporality not only creates a sense of the real but the time in which consciousness (of the world) comes to one creates a baseline so that all understanding henceforth as in the works of the masters and etc etc can only emerge only from the base understanding from the time at which they were conscious and all future developments only pile on top of those developments but are unable to function without the below-ground basement of their genesis.
-“Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical.” And so easily establishments of taste making might be implicated and said to cull from the past as the present is perhaps not of the same baseline and so some buildings begin in the basement and some have the fifth floor as the ground floor and of course the building materials are different in all cases so that nothing can be called static. And yet it is only when static is achieved that something can be called beautiful and the dead can have hands shook but not while living because while living the coughing out of an understanding and the phlegm in the coughing is seen as infectious and the infection is only acceptable with an antibody produced in death when the body of the cell can exist as a shell but without its internal war mechanisms to bring destruction to the various buildings with various floors as their first floors (and of course it is not the naming but the naming that does make a floor into the floor it is supposed to be called or so called if it’s a floor as in the level of a building when we take the building to be worldview as built upon a shelf of linear time and so it is though we probably don’t want it to be).
- “It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.” And from this understanding one can attempt to create the continuous present the foundation upon which the acceptance of beauty could be perhaps not posthumous and but continuously present and so the date would have no bearing on the buildings but every first floor might be located at the first floor the foundations upon which they were built desired their inclusion on a floor on which nothing was built. And so no buildings would exist. And time would crumble like the glob of boogers coughed up let dry played with between the fingers.
Weiner
-Hannah Weiner is most obviously in touch with the various spirits that inhabit the rooms where humans inhabit themselves this is why people who have a defective screen between the real world of reality and the spirit world are often deemed schizophrenic and bipolar. The extreme mood swings inherent in people with what the constantly erroneous psychological establishment deem bipolar disorder veer between extreme moods as they become aligned with malignant spirits of widely varying temperaments in short periods of time. So to do schizophrenics lack the veil when they see things that not others see it is certain that what they see is to be seen by many and could be seen by all but persistent belief in the wall that holds up reality as persistently known disallows an understanding of all that surrounds one in a physical body and so leaves humans stuck with an appreciation only for physicality and materiality
At first I tried to follow Weiner’s audio with the journal, but I kept getting lost and confused, so I stopped. So I was divested of text, so I wasn’t reading anything, I was simply listening. The experience of hearing Weiner began to agitate me considerably. I tried to figure out why, and then after a bit, I reached my conclusion: she sounds like every single Long Island, NY Jewish-mother rolled into one. She’s constantly barking out orders, “eat enough,” “go away,” “go out,” “save pennies.” Telling what to do. But really she’s not telling me what to do, because she’s schizophrenic so there can be no one precise injunction, there can only be a mass of directives that are belying and contradicting themselves. The NY-Maternal Jew is neurotic, so is the schizophrenic (I suppose) and so is the Nazi tyrant. The Nazis really had no ideology, as Crispin Sartwell confirmed, they just said what they could get away with at the moment. This seems to be the aesthetic of Weiner. She’s articulating whatever enters her mind at even given second: “don’t walk tonight, don’t talk.” But Weiner, you ARE talking. But maybe the tyrant-Jewish-mother-schizophrenic doesn’t have to obey coherence or linear clarity. Maybe they possess powers that make it permissible for them to spew messes. I want to create chaos. But how? I think you need credentials. The tyrant has providence or access to some type of indelible myth. The NY-Jewish-mother has her husband’s money, and the schizophrenic/clairvoyant has disease/supernatural powers. Yet as I review this list, I realize all these traits could apply to any of the archetypes. All the traits, though, signify resources and isolation, which may be necessary in a world that hates chaos.
ReplyDeleteJoyelle compared Stein to a tyrant, warlord. I second that. Stein: “War is a thing that decides how it is to be and when it is to be done.” Well, so is art. Stein said that she just started making portraits of anybody and anything. The maliciousness in this seemingly harmless fact is first-rate. What is a portrait? A representation of someone. According to Stein, the universe is based on what is seen, as what is seen is related to what other things are seen. So we see Obama, and most of us have never seen an un-white person before, let alone an un-white person who is the President of the USA. But please, there’s plenty of handsome liberals talking about hope, future, &c (the Kennedy’s), but there hasn’t been one who’s looked like Obama, and we never seen one next to a Blackberry. But, again, Stein’s argument seems to be that nothing is really new, it’s just one long assembly line in which products are made that APPEAR new, but, if you look inside them, it’s the same old song. Because a blackberry isn’t REALLY new, it’s just another means to find out and send information. Well… finding out information has been around for a long time. So it’s only display. So back to my point: by making portraits of anyone and anything, Stein is in charge of their identity, so she gets to say how they are represented, how they are viewed, assessed. This is what tyrants want to do. They want to make sure the Germans understand that the Jews are inferior, so they show them in dirty ghettos, butchering animals. But did the Jews really live in dirty ghettos? Or did the Nazis make them live in dirty ghettos after they requisitioned their nice, upper-middle class apartments and homes? Are they are different? Or is it simply visible divergence without any substantive differences to back up the dissimilarities?
More on Stein’s warlord ways. Why does she cite war as signifying “the existence of the authenticity of the modern composition”? I know one answer. If everything simply appears different, then what you need to do is get in the inside. You must penetrate Barack Obama’s blackberry. NO! Better example: This is what Russian/China/Middle East autocrats do when they ban certain websites: they are alter the internet, because the internet then ceases to be an all-encompassing information machine, but it becomes something else, something in the hands of the tyrant’s ideology. This is why war is essential for the creation of contemporary compositions. War actually changes the structure of things, not just their appearances. If Germany won, European people (and possibly Americans) wouldn’t be THINKING the way are now: there’d be a whole truly new set of ideas and concepts. Blackberries would be obsolete. We wouldn’t need any information, because Hitler’s heirs would know and tell us everything.
ReplyDeleteSo war is beneficial. It cracks the existing composition, and those holes give way to other compositions. Those who don’t want war, like peaceniks and Neville Chamberlain, are malign influence on art. They don’t want to create, they want everything to stay the same. This is why Stein connects a country’s military capabilities with its aesthetics. Art, like war, is about conquering and expanding. The page instead of a country, text instead of weapons. But they’re both the same. Admirable wars, like admirable art, produces new modes of thought and keep us on our tiptoes so we don’t fall back into contentment and stagnation.
Parks. Like I said with Stein, representation is everything. If “Mr. Lincoln was blonde” would he have been president? I doubt it. But why? Am I assuming that 19th-century Americans we’re hair-color-racists? Am I imposing 20th-21st-century beliefs and morals on the past? Legally Blonde was probably never viewed Lincoln’s electorate. But surely, blond jokes, or their concomitants, still existed. They had to, because nothing is really different, it’s just perception. They’d still be “blonde jokes” but the “blonde” part might be attached to something else, like walking canes, so Legally Water Canes.
More to the point. We are trapped. The lesser known digs a hole and 723 graves. The Great Man was born in a log cabin. Even the name Brazil, fails to point to an environment other than America (i.e. Brazil), because the title. American Play, can absorb everything. So I don’t think of Brazil as foreign or outside the reach of America. He can’t be, he’s inside a play with American in the title. I think of Brazil as the seemingly alien castmate on the Real World. But he’s not alien, he can’t be alien, because America’s omnipresent. It’s a constrained spot, like jail. The log cabin is an enclosed space, the holes never really dig us out of the play, we never leave the play. Lucy repeats her cliché poem, “I could never deny him nothin…” There is no new. There is only Lucy repeating her poem in a place on the page surrounded by different text. The poem appears in an unfamiliar spot, so it looks unfamiliar, but really it’s not.
I’m particularly interested in the Hannah Weiner this week because it seems to want to raise all kind of questions regarding art / process / the presences of both. It seems both appropriate and strange to line all this schizophrenic chaos up with ‘automatic’ writing—appropriate because both basically entail a lack of artfulness or manual intervention (automatic writing at least purports / attempts this, whether we buy it seems our choice and ostensibly doesn’t matter) but the schizophrenic has a heavier presence to me; the ‘automatic’ is a kind of choice that was made, a machinery constructed to operate in this particular way, for fun / curiosity / as a gesture towards some particular tic of aesthetic fancy whereas this disease wasn’t asked for (one would think), isn’t doing the willful work of anyone. Does the question of artfulness / cultivation / articulation beg the question of automatic / schizophrenic writing to defend itself as anything other than a really interesting consciousness experiment? Is it art, can it be the ‘beauty’ Stein goes on about? Can it be even artistic ugliness or chaos? The real question to me can chaos be art, it seems to me at first thought to be the opposite, art to me is on some level the hand of the artist in the mix of, well, whatever. There is intrinsically it seems no hand at work here, in auto-writing the hand might be present at the beginning, to set things in motion before appearing again later to make sure whatever has transpired is recorded. Weiner’s ‘mess’ (Seth’s description seems apt) doesn’t seem to have even that hand at work, unless we can count the disease, which seems the be the only thing that we can really mantle ‘artist’ here, it’s the curator of the lifetime of cognition and experience, going to work on Weiner.
ReplyDeleteI’m curious if it can seem empty—this seems like a piece of conceptual art where the concept is conceptionlessness—pure flow / ‘mess’. Does the content actually matter? If we’ve seen / heard one page of this ‘journal’ do we need to have a go at the rest? The answer to me seems to be no; these are the Martians of Jack Spicer’s word broadcasting white noise, 10 more minutes of listening wouldn’t seem to impart anything particularly useful. CJ mentions an appreciation for ‘only’ physicality for those that can maintain the veil(s) but isn’t Weiner’s journal the result of being at the pure mercy of physicality? All the neurons are firing off & you’ve got record every result. If we take away the schizophrenia, a state of automatic writing will always ask how much we believe the concept of the automated flow, is it impossible sans this kind of disease that truly automatic writing is even possible, or is it capable only of miming the veil-less spewing? If it can only mime is the concept itself empty? If the concept is empty what’re we left with? If our brains, hard-wired as they are for categorization & pattern recognition see strands in our reception of it all we would seem to be just as liable to our physicality; this might be a genuine cite of the reader / listener / viewer as ‘producer’ as ‘writerly’; if the artistic has no real control have we met a living cite of the ‘death of the author’ author?
(Hope I'm not interrupting anyone's comment chain here.)
ReplyDeleteThis may be a somewhat roundabout way to work into an analysis, but when I approached these texts (reproductions, records) my first thoughts were not directly related to content—that is, my thoughts were not immediately drawn to the meaning of the words as they were recorded but to the formatting with which they were recorded, which ultimately, I believe, reflects elements of the content in particularly interesting ways.
Naturally, formatting in The America Play by Parks is what originally caught my eye. Just as the characters are plagued by holes, there exist rather gaping holes in the text itself: at each turn, we’re met with another “(rest)” during which we are given no other information, no indication the characters are even moving or breathing during this time period—this time period, as the rests perpetually feel much longer than the single line gap on the page implies; the passage of entire years or swaths of history feel as if they could be contained in the spaces between the wink at the cardboard cut out and the nod at the bust, between the Booth A entering the tent and Booth B, between the purported shouting of Mary Todd and the application of the blond beard. Separated as they are into these tiny lines among the larger compacted paragraphs—particularly early on—these (rest) spaces form pits, holes within the text into which content is vacuously sucked like a black hole or a gaping mouth drawing in full, full breath. If history is a record of events occurring in certain time—a single continuous record therefore of all time—then these (rest) spaces become the points devoured, dumped into the Great Hole to parade for the perusal of others, somehow permanent in a way that the Foundling Father’s replication is not, cannot be. In (rest) there is always furthermore the intimation of death, the object no longer in motion; one can have a historic death, but after death one cannot go on making history. To lay to rest is, naturally, to place in a hole.
Although the (rest) lines largely peppered the Foundling Father sections, Lucy and Brazil’s sections are nonetheless full of these same sorts of holes—both literally, in digging for wonders—and on a linguistic/compositional level, with the moments where their names are repeated but no speech is ascribed acting again as vacuum holes in the text. There are no stage directions for these exchanges—indeed, there’s not even an indication that the characters move or breath between these breaks, no sensation of improvisation there. Instead, the exchanges (and they do feel like exchanges, names batted back and forth as if our eyes should glance from one solid, frozen body to the next) feel almost like names inscribed on tombstones, echoing up out of the depths of the Great Hole but ultimately stagnant, adding nothing, doing nothing, singularity of event impossible to reproduce for the stage the way historic events are impossible to reproduce. Like the (rest) there is the possibility of a body of gesture, word, not encapsulated by the narrow (that is to say necessarily limited) text, script, play. If my own workshop poems and workshop comments were not enough evidence, I am utterly fascinated by the concept of silence in writing, the “invisible ink,” the significance of what is not said, not legible, not stated in equal proportion to that which we are clearly given; in The America Play certainly the periods of silence, rest, seem studded with the weight of history and replication like wonders dug out of the earth.
And before the silence come the echoes. Another one of the interests (perhaps the same interest really, all of it inherently connected) in something which appears in all three of our works for this week: the necessity of repetition. The echoes. Weiner’s words repeat without warning, stabbing out from the page or the voice in sudden sparking flashes of familiarity; Gertrude Stein turns words and phrases back on themselves so often they seem to disassociate from their original meanings and transform—multiple times—into entirely different concepts/meanings. Echoes are written into the very fabric of The America Play, and the ultimate act itself is one of perpetual repetition, the echoes of the historical act enacted, changed but nevertheless enacted, by the Foundling Father’s numerous visitors. The gunshot which echoes throughout the play might as well be the real gunshot which killed Lincoln, or any historic gunshot before that, or after that—the significance of the action seems to come quite literally full circle, the full embodiment of the concept of history repeating itself. It does not seem to be that it repeats itself so much as that it necessarily continues to exist perpetually in the hole parading. Whole parading.
ReplyDeleteThe copious amounts of repetition in all three of the works ultimately seem to suggest to me something about oral (aural) communication in itself—that is, it exists distinct from written form because it is an inherently performative act, existing only by retelling, confirming its own value only by restatement, interpreted in real time and delivered simultaneously on hundreds of stages. Contrary to the written word which is traditionally placed on the pedestal we like to call eternal, the oral is conceived of as perpetually in danger of being lost; it needs to be reconstructed, repeated, played with, purported, put on and ultimately transcribed into writing in order to exist at all. It needs to echo in order to have been a voice in the first place. In this way all oral works (works intended to be oral/aural) exist inside the Great Hole, observed, calling upward and out and enraptured by the returning sound of their own voices.
the first time I encountered stein I had sprained my ankle two days before opening night of a play I was in & I was strung out on painkillers in the middle of the afternoon in poetry class we were studying the avant garde & my roommate read all of lifting belly out loud to me while I was hallucinating. sent of synesthetic seizures or maybe just a possession but after that prose like a player piano & I couldn’t write declarative sentences anymore there were only punctured metallics.
ReplyDeletewhat I’m saying is, once the continuous present is established I mean really imprinted upon one’s consciousness there is never any escaping it.
in the great hole of history race becomes irrelevant so it’s put on like a costume or lincoln – skin isn’t the kind of thing you focus on when the text is making elisions like fucking or erasing itself or suggesting the possibility inside of the brackets little bricks of text explode it doesn’t have to be the primary thing but it is.
because I pick up a book it is a book even if there is a theatre inside of it by which I mean it must always be a text.
probably I enjoy being possessed why else a poet & permeable on purpose. the whole point is an act of translation a trans(mission) of the world through a spoke-punctured moment. “I am because my little dog knows me” because not to be known is an impossibility. so hannah weiner transposes the world & becomes of it therefore a text which resides in the great hole of history, her own continuous present. clairvoyance like a magnet & has to strike the keys just so, has to be voiced not vocalese; performed.
by which I mean a composition of sound perhaps has primacy. because it makes a chord mimics the thing becomes a body. pure compositional structure sets a precedent & now we can have place even in the chasm used to just be empty. the great whole of history what is that like a scream? in the america play a character can die any number of times some kind of infinite expenditure allowed by the hole, maybe, because it is inside of itself & the inside is an outside it’s a whole. this is the continuous present.
also when the world tries to speak but just a pattern a text or its spine, when everything mimics language which is a mime in that it mimics what it is which is sound. this is the only necessary explanation no narrative so weaving together some temporal fabric is simply is. this perhaps is only the result of a possession or the peeling back of the fourth wall like brecht. today I talked to a playwright we discussed that peeling back the kind of social contract that takes place between a performance and the audience, how they come to understand and expect something of each other when theatre marks itself as theatre, when there are four walls and one of them is a screen – not necessarily a real screen like a scrim I mean you can go through it or break it or peel it away but still exists & this distance is what allows reflection.
what if inside of the continuous present there are no reflections everyone is it there can’t be a mimic it is. then sound is nature sprung out from whole nowhere. an infinite motherspace like a coffin in that it is a hole inherently that means inside of but also
encompassing. therefore outside must be a part of it why else designate a concept of all. I mean I want the fourth wall but I want to break it too. like there’s something interesting about a stage full of automatons what about one without anyone. what kind of contract is that a theatre of absence.
ReplyDeletethere were no apostrophes anywhere in the america play in hannah weiner the word apostrophe puked up like a plague & I fixated couldn’t figure it out but what does an apostrophe do it’s a w/hole. signifies simultaneous absence & totality. which is the continuous present also a possession. also an infinitely repeated death. maybe it’s just sex like orgasms all the time or when language doesn’t have anything to resist, just the leaking through fingertips strike a key make a mark. theatre like a score I mean the text a punctured present. it doesn’t have to be any way it lives inside a hole.
anything inside a whole is necessarily inside of something larger or more massive perhaps a minor literature means a play because it speaks. or a composition purely explicative it reeks of grenades which are little sentences stretched strange. a strange literature by which I mean it lives inside of a whole so echolocation is the only way it’s blind. that means disabled : defective : deprived / of one sense a the synesthete goes to the theatre to hear a play it is entirely visual. or the blind doesn’t understand the sign it’s reversed. then an accrual of impression becomes the only logical paradigm. then a poet opens self says possess & makes a bodily market.
what I’m saying is, what I’m saying is, inside of a hole, some total of a pile-up. liebnitz-mobiles crashed melodic. at this point I still believe in the lyric. yet I could make a case for flat. like you know it’s a set. like everything’s made out of impermeable fourth walls so you’re sure its “safe.” but I still believe in the music like it’s a real thing you can see it almost touch it if you write it down can erase or change it.
a score isn’t set in stone moses brought down commandments they were sentenced. upon the genealogy ten declaratives lessed of lyricisms. yet some would kiss their toes like poems. or broke & willing to barter with souls. how tied to the economy the matter slips from the owners & falls on the floor. then the rabble scrambles for a vernacular, elides the structure, makes a mask. then the mimic becomes its own whole inside of an oralpelvic cavity. then the people raven upon it & then there is a birth called dictation.
take a dictation from a spirit so, nature. outside the commune iterate & refuse. then all the ways re-designed to make faces. how many to put on a mask doesn’t matter you have just got to say it. the thing if you don’t you’re going to die. “Of course it is beautiful but first all beauty in it is denied and then all the beauty of it is accepted.” then dying to wait for the present to manifest, a refusal because tethered language to passed, then the future looks back & cracks its neck.
I'm really enjoying reading this blog stream. Some interesting points. Thanks CJ for framing the discussion. There are two things I'd like to add. The first centers on the ideas of composition & consciousness and the second is the notion of schizophrenia & boundaries.
ReplyDeleteStein: consciousness & composition, say what? Seriously Carina I think I need painkillers to understand her. Is she saying that everything is the same, like this great collective consciousness exists remaining the same and composition puts a time stamp on it, so time is what makes us see things differently? If I'm understanding her correctly I see this consciousness as a huge ball (or hole as Amanda said). The ball consists of all thought, experience and history. It is being added to daily, and at any given point in time a particular culture assigns a frame to it, and one of those frames is composition. So consciousness really is a hole but a living growing hole that really is something akin to gray matter or cosmic goo with each successive generation ordering this cosmic goo in ways they name art.
So is art just a way of trying to make sense of a hole? I liked Ryan's discussion of art and process. I'm wondering if art and process is always the same with time being the difference. The interesting link I see in Weiner's work comes from the labels assigned to her as an artist be it schizophrenic or clairvoyant.
I'm truly fascinated by schizophrenia. Of what I know of schizophrenia, it is truly the dissolution of being able to interpret boundaries. One becomes unable to assign difference between the internal and external. The way schizophrenia manifests itself and how it is reacted to socially is strictly a matter of culture and time. Fun social fact about schizophrenia in the U.S., is most people diagnosed with it wind up institutionalized or homeless, but in India the people diagnosed tend not to be institutionalized but remain with their families as functioning members of the society.
So a person who is schizophrenic is very much shaped by the temporal components of consciousness but they blur the boundaries of time and space. I too became agitated by Weiner's oral & written work. I felt like I was being yelled at and told what to do. I didn't assign these commands to a specific gender and ethnicity, like Seth, but attributed it to Weiner's connection or lack of connection to appropriate boundary maintenance. Her work highlights the prescriptive nature of social existence, and it is because we accept the boundaries (for the most part) we do not notice their hostile or agitating energy; whereas, Weiner can't assimilate those boundaries and is being tormented by them.
And in a giant leap to try to connect this all with the Lesser Known Abe?? Not sure I have anything but the hole, which I am likening to the consciousness., the thing that Stein says stays the same and where Weiner is more closely aligned. I think Parks illustrated the sameness/difference of which Stein wrote. Parks plays with history and race as social constructs. I wonder if art is just "digging" and artists "diggers" of consciousness? And if my take on Stein is all wrong, maybe this is just words that I'm trying to assign meaning.
As always, thanks everybody for the great posts. I’ll try to respond to some of the points raised. Carina’s discussion of a score (both a measurement of time (and) with/of corresponding economic value—as well as a kind of script)—and Amanda’s discussion of silence have started me thinking about “rest” as it works in “The America Play.” I read “rest” as akin to the rest beat in music, which means that the silence corresponds with a particular note. Are these the silences in which History digs its plot? (A kind of underscoring—just as Mary Todd’s screaming is underscored and/or overscored: “She was given to hysterics several years afterward in fact declared insane,” “Emergency, oh Emergency please put the Great Man in the ground” becomes a kind of obliterated present as the phrase marks her panic which is a removal from a moment as well as a calling/summoning/speaking through (168, 160). Perhaps the “rest” is an open grave (Lucy says, “His lonely death and lack of a proper burial is our embarrassment” –does history allow shame? (175))
ReplyDeleteMaybe that “the Hole and its Historicity and the part he played in it gave a shape to the life and posterity of the Lesser Known that he could never shake,” relates to the difference which is not life but “the way life is conducted,” according to Stein; here I wonder about the relationship between speech and history (the digging of a plot?) (2). Stein says that “anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it” (1). SLP’s “Lesser Known” “couldn’t get the story out of his head” (190). Always “living with regretting that he hadnt arrived sooner. Being told from birth practically that he and the Great Man were dead ringers, more or less” (161). Is a dead ringer an (impossible) embodiment of hearsay? If the gunshots create/echo a pulse for the Lesser Known, he is the hole (he loves)—always sounding his resemblance (which is not quite, as he is not quite a dead ringer). Hearsay, as always detached from its source, suggests both the act of speaking and receiving at once—just as “dead ringer” signals an discomforting double (corpse)—a disruption, an interference. (Indeed, the Lesser Known was a curiosity at best. None of those who spoke of his virtual twinship with greatness would actually pay money to watch him be that greatness” (161).) The “dead ringer,” then, always registers (and sounds) alarm (behind him?—always a “little ringing in the ears”) (164). (When the Lesser Known declares that he will switch from “speeching” to the death scene, we are alerted, perhaps, to the strange descriptor which acts as or signals a glitch—one can plan to make a speech or have given a speech; this term resists its archiving, then?) He mimes “secret” communication— winks, nods, etc.—to Lincoln’s bust, an artifact (172). Brazil believes that separating “thuh truth from thuh hearsay” might remedy his sense of estrangement, while Lucy was deemed a “Confidence” for holding onto the “shapeless” (speechless) moment of her uncle’s death (198). Just as “wonder” seems like an exclamation (of the present?), can whispers infiltrate history somehow?
I (like others have stated) found the experience of HW’s Clairvoyant Journal both “stimulating” and “irritating.” What I found particularly interesting was the way the voices simultaneously raise and raze through/over/across the text. Weiner’s references to specific people and places in this journal, a record of time which is apart from it (the time in is different from the time of, etc.), which is also a record of “interference,” made me wonder about the relationship between history and the “curating” that happens in much of the work we’ve discussed (is Weiner’s work a kind of active archive?). In listening to (and reading along with)Weiner’s text, I noticed that the different voices played through different speakers (as in the speakers on my computer), which created a strange aural experience (the capitalized voice, for instance, sounded more distant)—"a little ringing" in my ears (too)--a dangerous resemblance to a dead ringer.
ReplyDeleteParticular image/memory becomes an icon and icon becomes something without substance we obsess. The icon does no longer necessarily points to the particular image/memory in accurate manner; its origin by the time it reaches that stage is no longer there. "Lincoln was dead long before." Founding father is the Foundling father. Mr.Bram Price leaves his wife and son. The gesture is lost ||: A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout:|| in the hole or repeating, replica, copies.
ReplyDeleteThe icon becomes a crippled signifier that points to inaccurate signified; no longer pointing to the particular image of the moment, memory at the moment, but something else-- Che Guevara tshirt ($8.99), Obama "Change" poster ($6.99) "inaccuracies are good for business"Lincoln's blond beard.
As you copy the copied copy the direction it points WRONG WAY, skewed a little by little; Sons that are Not quite-as-good faker or digger. But the icon persists. Keep digging! Dig on. Continuous Present.
(rest)
The silence signifies the end of the sentence and start of the next sentence, the end of the series to restart, the musical repeat":". As you hit it, it's the Beginning of repeat. and the pianist's finger slips. it is the rebelling of the crippled signifier and its copies ||:I can't go on, I'll go on:||
(rest)
||:Digging the grave: either to get something out, or to put something in.::||
"Shoot Mr. Lincoln" goes on. Penny per each entry. Once a week.
"Please put the Great Man in the ground!", but we can't.We'll go on.Keep Digging!
Thuh Hhh Uhh HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW Hhh UhhhL
The sounds droopy mouth make; its failure at standard pronunciation.
The mouthes are holes that repeat the revenge for south. The yell, the bang.
The hole in thuh great head is reenacted.
BRAZIL:
LUCY:
BRAZIL:
The Foundling Father: HAW HAW HAW HAW
The holes in the scripts, the parts that are lost as you copy the copy.(Where is the rest of Lincoln other than his digged up Bust? But still we "Nod to the bust of Mr. Lincoln". Signifier keeps pointing, digging, sending gesture.)
Hole, where the sound echoes and repeat, except the echo can be louder than its original noise. LIIIIIIIIIIIES!!!!! LIIIIIIARRRRRS!!! Lincoln's brighter beard.
The theater, that is a hole, that is theater (theatrically) And how thuh nation mourns--
(Applause)
-----------------Footnote-----------------------
ReplyDeleteJoyelle said there is no "crazy" connection between Hanna Weiner and the rest of the readings* (*Possibly the words of Joyelle). Hanna Weiner's skull becomes a hole where this reverberation of different voices occurs. It is very much like the footnote space of The American Play; The footnote space is the space where the singular/authentic/editorial voice that clarifies should come in. Instead, the "possibly" "Allegedly" makes the footnote space another space/hole of reverberation and uncertain echo. And like different words of revenge and gun shot makes the replica Lincoln/digger's ear go bad, we, as reenacter and only thing that changes, "here" temporally and spacialy and physically, can no longer distinguish them, deaf to the difference, listening to the Continuous Present, the ringing.
Words invade the body/mind and collage voice(s) in the w/ the main voice or “main” voice inside your head – it’s like being invaded by disease in the sense of it being something that you can’t control – like the way that cancer cells proliferate – and the way that viruses work – injecting their own DNA into the cell so that the cell reproduces the virus instead of the its own code.
ReplyDeleteWas really interested in the part that had a lot of numbers – pages 5-6? The proliferation of numbers is almost like a foreign language – a mathematical vocabulary (in a sense) that infiltrates words. It seems kind of a like an error in translation in the same way that word problems are (I think) are difficult to translate into a mathematical equation – the words come in and are translation or mistranslated into number when they should be words…
Domination of one voice on page 10 seemed really strange after hearing all the voices overlap for such a long time – it seems flat – sounds flat. When the voices are overlapping the work sounds much more play-like than when one voice is speaking. When all the voices overlap the pieces are much more dimensional and I think it helps the visual on the page come to life in a way that the page resists. I feel like the page resists multiple voices because the font is the same the different voices are derived from the caps, italics or lower-case words/letters. Perhaps this is my bias – and being introduced to Hannah Weiner knowing how she wrote, etc – because with other works that use caps and italics I find myself able to be more open to the proliferation of voices that can enter the text via those modalities.
I wasn’t sure how to engage with the text that is falling off the page – or falling down the page in the sense that the reading to me seemed so flat because most of it was in one voice without a heavy proliferation of the other voices – so although the page was extremely active the voice itself seemed flat - especially after hearing all the voices interact on up until then.
I’m interested in the way that the Stein and Weiner speak to each other. Stein says: “naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening” – Weiner seems much in-line with this process – not necessarily a lack of planning, or something to do with preparedness – but seems to be me to be more like being present – even beyond being present – writing that catapults into the future and is written in a future moment and/or through a future moment. Stepping back (from creation) is what creates the moment of beginning – which allows for the realization of what is happening/happened – I think that continuous creation hurtles us into moments of perpetual creation – a machine of creation without necessarily having one beginning.
Along similar lines – (I guess reading Weiner first made me read everything else through her) when I was reading Parks I was thinking being possessed – that the body of the foundling father has become a hole in which Lincoln had been inserted (also layered on – Lincoln died of a hole in his head). And perhaps Weiner’s texts are like a hole in her head – and these things that inhabit the holes in the body and/or holes in the head function to take over the reality of the holed. Inserting text, images, histories, etc. into the hole which is then filled and becomes an outward force through the flesh – or something like that?
ReplyDeleteMy friend JD posted a link to this video on the concept of “instantly person” of which he says:
the concept was explained to me as describing the tendency people have to take one event either in their own lives or in general culture and construct their entire identity upon it. "What could be worse than/instantly person?"
http://furnhusch.buzznet.com/user/video/47799/instantly-person/
still trying to wrap my head around this but think it’s definitely pertinent…somehow…
I'm also interested in the Weiner this week though I think I'll be a bit scattershot. Really though. I'm interested in the idea of automatic writing because I don't buy it, so I think the act of claiming it is exactly the right way to say "I'm intentionally not trying to intend anything" so the product is, through its self-inflicted idea of honesty, wrapped up already in this kind of falsehood. Though, of course, if Weiner is actually, literally a schizophrenic rather than another poet trying to appropriate legitimate mental illness to sound hip and interesting, then I am authentically interested in that process. Otherwise, maybe this is a space where I am just too stodgy--I'm personally bothered by that kind of appropriation/claim-making of a a specific type of experience that isn't really yours (suburban white people writing in black vernacular, claiming a mood disorder to justify your process (why can’t it just be your process??), etc. etc. ) (blah blah, who can claim experience, I know, but I can't help it) . Like Seth, after a while following along wasn't happening, so I just let the audio to its work.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in being called to obey over and over again by Weiner, where to go, what to do, what to wear even, and what to be excited about ("What a woman! No more periods! Five dollar antique chair! Be like Phil!" this is all very gendered, huh?) because I think it recalls memory and advertisement in a way that I find intriguing. The idea that what comes through in this automatic process is so like advertisement--clipped, sound byte-y, commanding, fiscally concerned—makes me wonder about marketability as an automatic process, as intuitive rather than inflicted, or so inflicted it becomes intuitive. This plays itself out for me in the way that the voices appear at difference pitches and perceived distance, such that it’s a question and answer session, almost. I don’t know if its all Weiner (it could be, I’m not great with voices) recorded a couple of times on top of each other, but it sounds to me like layers of one person convincing the other layers of what to do and what to care about. I’m interested in the way that it feels like it has nothing to do with the body-body but everything to do with a kind of layering, piling intellectual process. Jen’s question of to what degree this is an archive interests me as well, as I feel like the way that it really piles up sounds like an aural version of a logbook gone awry, almost, an advertising roster gone awry, snippets of relationships, definitely sound to me like an archive with all manner of holes in them. I worked for several years for an archivist where my job was transcribing abolitionist journals from the early 1800s into an internet database, and there were often documents to yellowed or stained or with holes in them that I had to transcribe several lines of --------------------- to denote unreadable text, and I feel like something similar happens with HW, an archived document with a certain degree of unreadable “text” that we don’t get to hear.
As far as Stein goes, when I was taught her as an undergrad, we were taught to read it very sound-minded, as Stein, at least according to my professors then, was interested in language for the sake of sound (among other things, I’m sure) and creation and recreation, so where HW feels like dashed holes in a document, Stein has always seemed to me more like a version of a language that you almost understand in a richly wrought package.
I was thinking today about how Facebook is a rhizome (and also a virus) fractal like, at the cellular level, it changes/morphs from core direction/thrust/velocity each time a new person is added to the audience roster. The trunk of it is swayed and shaped by a more dissipated, equally distributed force, and the additions of multiple multiplicities (other personas) keeps rupturing any attempt at linearity.
ReplyDeleteHannah Weiner's 3 voices, visually on rhizome, have more tangential shoots, lines of flight so that the likelihood of a singular unitary integrity is lessened thricefold.
Weiner technically resides in the language poets/new narrative genres, with a paratactic relationship between line-logic, and so I was also reminded of Dodie Bellamy, who I’ve been reading a lot of lately. I find Weiner’s act—or, the effect of it, to some degree, upon the reader/listener—similar to Bellamy’s, wherein she engages in the act of shredding the self into a bundle of minor strands and activating them all with an electric charge and the detritus of their battling it out for preeminence/privileging on the page spills over into what becomes the text, an inadvertent recording...but the impetus for the whole exercise seems to possess a blurry but neutron hot bomb of narcissistic intentionality, an exercise to register the (her)self onto the medium of us, the audience (for this is very performative Lang/poetry prose/poem), to have our registration of her data reflected back to the speaker(author) after this processing/rendering that rendered her data readable to her.
The result for the audience is an overwhelming avalanche, a repetitive minor shock torture of very intimate/personal/mundane/psychoanalytic rants/meditations/free associations/incantations.
A rhizomatic process itself, the unfurling of multiple voice-strands nonlinear growth evidence of the latent ever-present existential competition, between bodies, ideas, voices.