Blog und Zeit

If you are a FB friend of poet Mark Nowak, you are accustomed to seeing reports of mining disasters. Miners are killed every day, in every part of the world, many if not most, while mining coal (like that which is keeping me warm at this very moment).

Mark's book, Coal Mountain Elementary, contains numerous accounts of deadly coal mining accidents (preventable) in China. It also contains an extended account of the Sago Mine disaster, the worst in US history.

At one point, I commented on one of Mark's posts: "This is an extension of your book. It never ends." By which I meant that the book never ends because the subterranean carnage never ends.

Then he commented that the real extension (in time) of the book is his blog, Coal Mountain.

It was only later that this made me think about Jen H's blog, Up From the Ground - which is her MFA thesis, and in which she is theorizing the blog-as-MFA-thesis. She (and I) has been trying to work through how blog-art differs from blog-everything-else.

Obviously, any blog that announces itself as an MFA thesis, and then proceeds to theorize itself as such, has got to be art. So there's that.

But it occurs to me now that another aspect to explore is time. The web log, like other logs, is written with time in mind - and marks time's passage. So do journals and letters. In that sense, these are all reflexive forms that invite reflection on their reflexivity. And the temporality is not just backwards (in the format), it's forward (new posts).

Moreover, there is the question of the frame. Part of a frame is temporal. Once you publish your book, or sell your painting, it's out there. But what happens when you keep writing and publishing the book - daily? Then it becomes like that John Cage piece that's going to take 8,000 years or whatever. The very fact of the work's duration creates its own context by gesturing beyond itself.

So if Jen continues the blog after the MFA defense (successful), and after the thesis is enshrined in the Library (in whatever form that may be), then it has automatically transgressed the art-frame, the parergon (which has already prompted some temporal anxiety from the Library). And by self-consciously doing so, the blog as thesis-extender will behave like those works of conceptual art or pop art that work by playing off of or against the Institutions of Art, or by making an object anomalous by moving it to a new location that is not coded as "art-space." Perhaps any Blog Art (or "bloggart," in Jen's definition) that utilizes the form - as distinct from using the blog as a delivery system for art - is itself de facto conceptual art (at least at this point in time).

But by the same token, a blog's ability to exceed the covers, in addition to being an artistic act, gestures beyond the Institution - towards the Public. In a sense, a book is private - one has to physically have it; it is enclosed between covers. It costs money and a lot of time to make it. The blog opens out to a much wider audience, and invites that audience in. Immediately. Indeed, it might double-back against the Institutions of Art, or open towards activism against non-art institutions - which is what Mark Nowak's blog does, I think.

So maybe the trick is not to turn blogs into art, but rather to blur the line between the two. And I have to think that time, as well as space, is part of that process.

Gertrude Stein; Blogging; &c.

I post a lot in the summer, less in the fall, and hardly at all in the spring. I am a seasonal worker.

But this is a pure existential activity, this blogging, this posting. Have you ever sent a letter to an address you knew didn't exist - and with no return address? That is purity.

If I wrote about my personal life, it would be so fucking fascinating, your head would explode.

Not really. Don't worry. It doesn't matter.

Soon this planet will be like all the others.

* * *

Is Gertrude Stein for real when she talks about "exactitude"? As in "exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality"? That begs the question, no? Like Pound directly treating "the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective." Like, I'm going to be able to verify your subjective reality, Ez. . . . Pls.

I once asked Walter Benn Michaels if it was possible to have an intention that one was unaware of. He responded that it was possible to have unconscious intentions. OK. And maybe the martians are channeling their intentions through me.

Now that I think of it, I think the martians are in fact channeling their intentions through me. And I haven't been taking notes!

Virgil Thomson, in his note on "Patriarchal Poetry," claims that the poem is all about emotion - that it is a neo-romantic text. "It is hermetic writing; direct communication of ideas is not its purpose. Its purpose is the description of emotion . . . " And "'Patriarchal Poetry' is not cubistic at all . . . It is rounded, romantic viscreal . . ." Hmm. Well, neither I nor my students got that. But maybe we're all fools - entirely possible. Or maybe Virg is pulling our leg.

En Ponge

I've been looking for blog lit - or for pre-blog lit that might suggest models for blog lit (esp. w/Jen Humphrey's Up From the Ground in mind). There's serialized novels. And syndicated newspaper poetry. There's diaristic books, like WC Williams' Descent of Winter - which also meanders in an unmanaged way, which blog entries do tend to do.

I also thought of Francis Ponge, and his mini-essays in The Voice of Things (Parti Pris des Choses). For instance, here's an excerpt from "Flora and Fauna":

The time of plants: they always seem fixed, immobile. One ignores them for a few days, a week, and their pose is all the sharper, their limbs have multiplied. Their identity raises no doubts, yet their form goes on elaborating itself.

* * *

The time of plants is conditioned by their space, the space they gradually occupy filling in a canvas doubtless determined forevermore. Once finished, weariness overtakes them, and it is the drama of a certain season.
Like the development of crystals: a will to formation, and the impossibility of forming any other way.

* * *

Their poses or "tableaux vivants": mute entreaties, supplications, unshakable calm, triumphs.

* * *

None of their gestures has any effect outside themselves.

* * *

A body of the most excessively complex laws (pure chance, in other words) presides over the birth and distribution of plants across the globe.
The law of undetermined determinants.

(trans. Beth Archer)

I'm skipping around here, but these are complete sections, separated by (centered) asterisks in the original. Whatever one thinks of the content, the form does, I think, open possibilities for blog lit, esp. for authors who are heavily invested in (shackled by?) the form of the traditional essay - a form which does not, in my view, lend itself to the Blog Form. And there's even pieces on goats. And manure.

(the fact that Ponge could write this stuff while the Nazis occupied his country raises some other interesting questions, which I won't attempt to address - not in a blog post)

Jen Humphrey's _Up From the Ground_

I would like to call your attention to Jen Humphrey’s blog, Up From the Ground (which is now a fixture under “Blogs ‘We’ Like,” right). Jen is the Director of Communications for the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas (which also houses the Center for Biodiversity). She is also a (new) farmer and an MFA student.

Over the next year (at least), Jen will be writing her MFA thesis on-line – qua blog. Naturally, it will involve communications, nature, and farming. But I think it will be different from other blogs on those various topics, in that she is becoming ever more aware of the possibilities and limitations of the Blog Form – and how it might intersect with farming. For one thing, I and her other committee members are going to comment on the blog on the blog – thereby becoming part of the blog/thesis. Hell, you can comment on the blog and become part of her thesis! To add to the recursive fun, I fully expect that she will read this blog post, which is a reflection on her reflections on her blog. And she may even comment.

I pointed out to Jen (f2f, can you believe it??) that writing is a technology – and one that was first used to record agricultural produce. All that's left of that Sumerian millet are those clay tablets. (One thing I forgot to suggest is that she speak to a 21 c. Large Producer or two – about how they use communications technology; Jen and Jess are just a few acres and goats).

I also mentioned the potential open ended-ness of the blogosphere (which is really more pear-shaped, in my imagination). Unlike the Traditional Essay, blog posts do not have to achieve Closure. They can be part of a series; they can include links that take you away from them; they can invite comments that become part of them; and there is always the possibility of more to come – even if there is a long hiatus between posts. Blogs never end – either spatially or temporally. Until the coal runs out, anyway.

(Here in Lawrence, we have one of the top-ten greenhouse-gas emitters in the country, in the form of the power plant that is producing electricity for the very words I am typing now. Unlike the blogosphere, the ecosphere really is a closed system.)

All of this self-reflection is crucial, of course, because what is a bigger corn-pone stereotype than being a farmer in Kansas? People in Kansas, like people everywhere, begin to take on the characteristics, interests, and language of what they are supposed to be like. You should hear me talk in reverent tones about my connection to the local landscape. I can even do it in a Bob Dole/Pat Roberts twang.

Anyway, be part of the project. Visit the blog.

Blogfull

I am so thankful for blogs, for the way they reaffirm our existence back to us. I am so thankful for the internets, with all their skeins and keens and tangles. I am posting every day to my blog, so I am full of plentitude to bursting. And stuffing. But not like stuffing in a doll. A doll is not a blog. A doll can have a blog, in which case, the doll exists, but that's ALL. I've never claimed to be a doll, and nobody would accuse me of it, I assure you. A blog is not a clone, but is the next best thing. But I am a blog, whatever else I may be. QED.

Impersonism

I do think that one feature of modernism that we have not gone beyond is its impersonism. Whether it's the diffused, contingent subject of much recent lyric, the nouveau-cutup (camp) of flarf, or various aleatory practices, it does seem that we're still keen on proving our skepticism about subjectivity. (implications for representing history/agency - subject for future post). But is that just boring repetition, or a pose, or simply the continuation of a fundamental shift dating from c. Dec. 1910 through the present? In any case, obviously a lot of people haven't got the message and are still writing soulful memoirsitic narratives about returning to the small towns where they grew up, etc. - so naturally that creates an equal and opposite reaction. And vice versa. Hence red poets/blue poets.

Impersonism is also an impersonation. But only those with impersonalities know what it means to do a good impersonation, as Eliot once said, in the voice of Rich Little.

Really, it may be that blogs will become the new (acceptable) "personal" genre for Poets who Think. That is, even those who gravitate towards snickering weltschmerzy pop-po write very personal (self-representational, ex-pressive) things on their blogs. So, blogging is the new Romanticism. You heard it here first.

Of course, snippets of your blog might end up in someone else's arch & ironical poem . . .

Non blogito ergo nil?

That's pig Latin for "if you don't update your blog for over a week, to you begin to become insubstantial?" That is, if "blogito ergo sum," as I have elsewhere proposed in these pages, then, if you begin a blog but don't maintain it, do you lose whatever ontological credit you have accrued? No - that's far too Catholic. Really, it's more that the simulacrum "Joseph Harrington" is losing its hyperreality. Or some such. In any event, I can't help but notice that I can see right through myself. And probably so can you.

And Now, For a Brief Interlude

What with grading and all, I'm going to take the next week off from this blog. I mean, it's just too stressful. So between May 6 and 17, I will cease to exist. Over and out for now.

THE COLLECTED BLOG-POSTS OF JOSEPH HARRINGTON

Can you imagine??! No? Good.

I've been perusing a collection of letters recently, and it occurs to me - correspondence was the blogging of the twentieth century! Duh!

I just hope someone is printing all this stuff out and donating it to manuscript collections somewhere, so that they'll still be around when the lights go out.

Blogito Ergo Dum

What - about 100K+ new blogs per day? Do the math - w/in the decade, no one will do anything but post and surf and read blogs. They say the Holocene Epoch is over and this is the Anthropocene, but in between is the Blogocene (not to be confused with the Poetrycene, which is already experiencing a massive extinction). Does anybody really like blogs? Or does everybody feel they have to have them to keep their name before the phantom public? Or to let all one's friends know all the things that you'd tell them if you picked up the phone. As Frank O'Hara points out, instead of writing a poem, you could just as easily be writing a blog. So why not!

Blogito Ergo Sum

Though as a nice electrical-engineering boy pointed out, I might be an A.I. blog generator. Sometimes I feel like that. I will generate a poem about it, like Data.

Fixing to go to the inaugural "Top City" reading to hear Kevin Rabas, veteran jazz poet (and musician), and Dennis Etzel, Jr., poet-programmer, who grows more flarfy every time I look around. When was the last time I went to a reading with poets who were both truly nice people? There's a thot for the day.