Waarvoor excuses naar Baran Bouw, dan.

& the start of summer, they say. On friday 15th, from 20.00h on, at Mediamatic in Amsterdam: DNK end of the season event. With an installation, Open DI Night (with a.o. Yolande Harris, Brian McKenna, Marko Ciciliani, Ivo Bol, Alfredo Genovesi and Taylan Susam) and of course party with DJ Bumbum Hey and DJ Scumbag.

Be lots of fun.

Info: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-17358-en.html

& also check out the new stunning website of DNK: http://www.dnk-amsterdam.com/.

(Euh, with in the photo-section, a photo of me, looking at my laptop during the previous Open DI Night, trying to make my improvised piece work, which wasn’t a success. Luckily it was just a few minutes).

I am working on an article about epic poetry – well, epic poetry now, in the light of internet, new media. Hmm. Those kind of assignments (“those kind” – what does that mean?) for me are a reason to order books that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. The occasion presents itself.

So today the postman brought Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Albert B. Lord’s the Singer of Tales.

I’ve read quite a bit of the shorter poetry of Olson (from the Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley) and I like his prose-essay Call Me Ishmael. Olson is a bit of a strange type, and he could be a total nuthead it seems. (Is it HC ten Berge who calls him a ‘warhoofd’ in a fairly recent piece? I don’t remember). His poetry is straight out of Pound’s Cantos in many senses, and well, I’m simply drawn toward these really long poems (that one hardly ever finishes reading completely, from first till last page).

The ideas of Lord are well-known to me, as they form the fundaments of much contemporary knowledge of oral poetry and performance – but I’ve never read the actual book. So now’s the time.

I did however recently reread Bauman’s 1970’s essay Verbal Art as Performance – it was requiered reading for Literary Theory back in 1988. Rediscovering in a sense where I’ve picked up ideas on literature…

Even een aankondiging tussendoor:

Vrijdag 15 juni, van 13.00 tot 17:00
Symposium Bundel, Boek, Blog

“Tijdens de middag zal een groep literatuurwetenschappers, bloggers, mediatheoretici, dichters en vormgevers discussieren over de implicaties van het feit dat literatuur, en met name poezie, vandaag de dag steeds minder in boekvorm tot ons komt, maar verspreid wordt via websites & blogs, of voorgedragen wordt op poetry-slams. Wat betekent dit voor onze omgang met gedichten? Hoe ziet de toekomst van het boek als fysiek object er uit?”

Sprekers:
Thomas Vaessens
Arie Altena
Cornelia Graebner
Chrétien Breukers
Samuel Vriezen
Frans Oosterhof

Gratis alhier: Letterenfaculteit Universiteit Leiden, gebouw 1162 (Van Wijkplaats 2) zaal 002.

(Georganiseerd door de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap en de Opleiding Literatuurwetenschap Universiteit Leiden.)

“We were yesterday three kiple chined, by the grease of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney.”

“As for madam Lashmiheygo, you nose her picklearities.”

No, this is not from FW, this is Smollett The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Penguin Classics, p. 394-5.

Fijn: na werk op tijd thuis om nog een rondje te rijden. Goed fietsweer, lekker warm, zon, beetje wind zorgt voor voldoende afkoeling. Van Nescioburg tot Muiden in het wiel van een forens die strak 36 reed – waarvoor dank, bij deze – het ging me net te snel om over te nemen.

(Hij leek me overigens van het type dat het helemaal niet op prijs stelt dat de kop van ‘m wordt overgenomen. Ooit reed ik een stuk tegen de wind langs de ringvaart in het wiel van zo’n wielren-forens. Ik dacht na een paar minuten, goed, laat ik ook eens kop doen. Maar nee, ik werd subiet weer voorbijgereden, ik vermoed omdat de wielrenforens bang was niet de juiste trainingsintensiteit te halen).

(Overigens, verder niets dan respect voor “zulke” wielren-forensen).

Marcusstraat – Ringdijk – Diemerpark – Muiden – Muiderberg – Naardermeer – Weesp – Driemond – Abcoude – Ouderkerk – Amstel – Marcusstraat

… the Arno Schmidt-reference library (see http://www.gasl.org) is an online collection of pdf’s of books that Arno Schmidt owned and to which he often referred in his novels. Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Tobias Smollett, Herodotos. Nice for the fans of Schmidt and the literature-professors.

But in the 3 years of its existence it has already send 400.000 texts into the world. Interestingly, from december 2006 on the downloads increased dramatically because China allowed province after province access to the reference library.

Says Günter Jürgensmeier of GASL, in an e-mail to the Schmidt-discussion list:

“Die Referenzbibliothek hat damit im zurückliegenden Jahr vermutlich erheblich mehr für die Bildung getan als die Bayrische Staatsregierung. “Jaja”, rufen da die Herren Goppel/Schneider unisono, “für die Bildung der Chinesen!” Naja, immerhin!)”

Zondagmiddagrondje, 12 – 14. Warm en bewolkt. Rustig gereden.

Marcusstraat – Ouderkerk – RH West – Veldweg – Waverveen – Vinkeveen – Baambrugse Zuwe – Baambrugge – Indijkweg – kanaal – Driemond – Gaasp – Diemen – Weespertrekvaart – Marcusstraat

I’ve been searching for this quote forever. Browsing through old syllabi I find it, somewhere in the text ‘Art as language’ by Yury Lotman – very heavily underlined annotated by myself, but not this sentence:

Art is the most economical, compact method for storing and transmitting information. But art also has other properties wholly worthy of the attention of cyberneticians and perhaps, in time, of design engineers.

[I guess, with design engineers Lotman refers to what we now know as ‘programmers’].

My annotation – dating from around 1988 – “ONZIN” (=nonsense).

Yury Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, Ann Arbor, 1977, (1970), p. 23

Regarding my ‘reading matter’: I finished first Gissing’s New Grub Street, then, on friday, Smollett’s very, very funny The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. (‘Grub street’, or hack writing, being the thread that connects Smollett and this Gissing novel). So, theoretically I’d be unto reading Falling Man, DeLillo’s newest now, before finishing ATD. But I’ve acquired a taste for 18th century stuff and wonder if I shouldn’t first read Joseph Andrews (also on my to-read-list).

The result is that I picked up Vollmann’s Poor People again, although I earlier decided, after reading like 70 pages, to not finish it. Vollmann’s writing in Poor People is too repetitive. Again. It’s not really bad in the way that The Royal Family was, but if you’ver read his other work, you already know what you’ll get to read: page after page of conversations with homeless people and poor people from all over the world, plus Vollmanns ruminations about the nature of poverty, trying to come up with a theory which is a bit too much like ‘amateur philosophy’. I picked it up, because I couldn’t decide yet between DeLillo and Fielding, and well, to say I was ‘captured’ would be an exaggeration, but I was intrigued, again, and Vollmann does know how to engage you (well, me at least) with the poor people of the world. (There’s no other writer who has managed to that with this very reader). And well, Vollmann’s ruminations about respect and cultural differences might not always be as sharp as one would wish for, they are dark and realistic, never cynical. A-and then there’s the chilling reportage about this oil city in Kazakhstan…

Which is to say – that someone, one day, should write a really good essay on Vollmann’s way of engaging with the absolute underclass. I still cannot figure out if he’s too naive, too sentimental (he used to be, for sure!), just ‘too much’, or that his stance is the only really moral position. Ah well. There’s a reason to finish Poor People.