Archive for September, 2010
CONFINE/COLOR
Maura on the skin as interface between exterior and interior life, which needs to be instructed chemically to halt its dialogue with the other. On the identification of the egg as suddenly other to oneself and its subsequent rejection. These chemical memos shedding traces or losing their way, in effect, in sparse lives. [& as [...]
SOFT ARCHITECTURE
Or why I had to make amends with the baroque: stone carved several & a half centuries ago for colloquy with this very cloud, vagula, blandula.
COMMOSSA
la luna, etcetera. From com/muovere: agitated, upset, induced to some movement (normally rapid and disorderly); shaken. Induced to pity; induced to compassion. Distanced; removed; shifted. Lifted; relieved. “Le stel del ce han cazer, nixun porrá fuzir. / E le virtú del ce illora s’an comove…” [Bonvesin, Vulgari]
ON THE PICTURESQUE
Inherently limited socially? What would Antonioni have done with it? And yet this plaza, these neighboring hillcut churches, these slates upon roses such gleaming interpellations of the severe modernist square.
GAUDFULNESSE
Dusk of a town whose duomo hosts no saint’s bones, but those of a poet clamoring in the vulgate. Seven centuries back. Lost his spouse when the floor of his house gave way during a dance. Quanno iubel c’è acceso, sì fa l’omo clamare. lo cor d’amor è apreso, che no ’l pò comportare; stridenno [...]
OVERSEAS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Thinking tremolio: ever stupefying to see how much interference can take place, at terrific times, between cognition and experience otherwise sensed. Tuesday evening’s lecture asked us to consider thinking pre-Enlightenment-As-We-Know-It: Celenza citing the premodern conception of the mind as a substance, as a vapor, which can take direct effect on the world. (The next evening [...]
EJ MCADAMS ON ‘PARK’
EJ McAdams writes about PARK at Freshkills (and at Dance Theater Workshop) for Critical Correspondence @ Movement Research: “I wanted to leave a trace of this dance, a dance that seems to have no beginning like a dream and no ending, only this awakening into the way we precariously move about on a landfill over [...]
WHICH WILL
As anticipated: assortment of holes in time: abashance in the mettle of the eternal. 18 September: Giuliano Mesa’s collected poems (1973-2008) launched at La Camera Verde. Brilliant hour-long analysis of his work by Luigi Severi, entirely spoken, not read, except when drawing from the work itself—which Severi would cite only a few lines at a [...]
AN ASPIRATION FOR THE PRESENT
The burning of debts, suspended in basilical stone. The fire even hacked away. Procession of debtors’ faces also hacked away, free. What would it take to mint money like that now? But museal in the Curia Iulia: sealed away from this din of shared language(s) & sun that conjures such conflagration in parallel, shapely, precious, [...]
IN NONIMITATION OF TIME
I’d been thinking, in the wake of being forbidden to partake of cinnamon and its chemical components, about the elliptical world of this video and how—with all-over roving visibility fishing for & panning past all miniaturized existential horrors—it resembles the flash-forum of affective noise in which we “live” a.k.a. broadcast, & which is typified by [...]
CHOICES
“The archaeology is killing the tree.” —John, the structural engineer, on a patch of Urban the Eighth’s handiwork &, outside the city walls,
ESOPHAGEAL
The last conversation at the ever longer ever echoier cortile dinner table concerns the locus, function, and etymology of the esophagus, which, as Seth confirms after a run to the library across the way, means “into” + “devouring.” (Devouring, a carnal act, as opposed to the more potentially acculturated “eating.”) In the talk piece floating [...]
BOREDOM
The week’s colors trapped in a machine for now. A placeholder: lunch question over whether classicists, versed as they are in the long haul, with a sense of the minisculity of individual life, have the capacity to be bored. Or whether stasis of mind is on offer only in the world of the presentist, caught [...]
TUNING
“Understanding is a literal idea based on a geometrical notion of congruence, and tuning is a notion of a negotiated concord or agreement based on vernacular physical actions with visible outcomes like walking together….” —David Antin, from A Conversation with David Antin (Granary Books, 2003), a dialogue conducted through electronic mail with Charles Bernstein from [...]
SUBMERGENT
Dark anniversary. Still to work in sentences through the moment of PARK at Freshkills following a hypnotic duet by Ursula Eagly and Kazu Nakamura when the realization dawned that, due to contingencies of wind, I’d be reciting an elegy for Taimour from the harbor directly facing the absence at the end of Manhattan. Letting the [...]
ON VAPORIZATION
Study in the patience of memory: every one of the cloudscapes advancing from all-over rug of grey toward the Tiepolan, fluorescent, recorded from the highest point within the walls of this city—and wondrous new neighbors with their welcome prosecco too—dome to dome—naught ultimately to this night but fleeting pixels (no card inserted, and the machine—as [...]
CYCLOFLESH
Emilio Villa, in a typical flight from Ytalyan spelled with two whys: the palimpsestic Brunt H (1968). Its punctum: CYCLOFLESH in all caps toward the center. John the structural engineer asks about the meaning of this term after my 5-minute spiel, “Stanza as Homicile.” Focus of this project on post-WWII dispersion brings to mind immediately [...]
TERROR EVERYTHING OPENED
The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom arrived this morning—or before, I just didn’t know where my mailbox was. In a video taken by Konrad Steiner on Valentine’s Day, 2010, Leslie Scalapino says she thinks it’s her best work. I cannot read more than a few sentences at a time without ricocheting away from the book into glee-spasms. [...]
CIPHERS, ENCAMPMENTS, PLUGS
Fritz, who studied at the Architectural Institute of Venice a long time ago, asks an excellent question: is it Venice’s incapacity (I’d say disinclination?) to be imprinted by the current moment in any [infra]structural way that makes it so open to contemporary art, architecture, film? So that it becomes a better cipher for what’s new? [...]
LURE
The experience of this quadrant of hilltop begins with all-over incredulity punctured by moments of cognitive synesthesia, Bulb after Bulb. Disorientation of both ratio and sense that resists being placed definitively within or without the person. In talk it is shared—tamed? Christopher Celenza suggests in our first chat that the source text of translation is [...]
RAPTERY
After rapturous reading of “hiccups,” a new talk piece by David Antin, back in the land where time is elastic, where a stranger hailing from several places at once will walk with one for six hours through jetlag, errands and outlooks, having allocated no such appointment. Having abandoned her vespers in Arabic, volunteering down to [...]