I have a soft spot for the trombone-playing of JJ Johnson. That might sound strange, since Jay Jay is definitely more “good taste”, and less wild, exciting and pushing boundaries than my favorites for the period say 1954 – 1959: Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Rollins. (Not to mention freejazz and all the other sorts of music that some people dissmiss as difficult…). Last week I was very happy to find the Complete Columbia Small Group Sessions of JJ Johnson. These are basically his recordings with either a quintet with Bobby Jaspar and Elvin Jones, and a quartet with Flanagan, Chambers and Roach. I knew some tracks and had searched in vain for it before (the library didn’t have these). It’s a joy to hear such precise playing and arrangements that are equally precise, without becoming precious (precieux). They are the definition of ‘classic’. It asks for precise listening as well — or actually, you will realize at some point that you are listening carefully (instead of just nodding your head to the rhythm). This is the kind of playing that makes me envious. I wish I could play like this — then I’d be able to play everything…

I should’ve known. Of course Raymond Federman blogs: http://raymondfederman.blogspot.com/. Federman is another PM-AmLit-writer, but he’s bilingual (French – American). His work is wildly innovative, full of life and funny, and very moving.

Years ago I translated his most dense work The Voice in the Closet / La voix dans le cabinet de debarras; my translation was published by Perdu (http://www.perdu.nl) and is since long sold out. The text is available online at different locations (probably even at my own site… one forgets what one has put online…. ah yes, there it is: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/stem.html and http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/voice.html, and also here: http://www.federman.com/voice.htm).

It was in fact one of the first things I did, after finishing my studies (with a thesis on Federman and theories of postmodern fiction) — without any real experience in translating. (Well, one has to start somewhere).

From Ron Sillimans’ blog (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/) I learn that Gilbert Sorrentino has died a few days ago. I was just reading his Splendid Hotel, a book of short prose sketches, almost poems, about the 26 letters of the alphabet. Very beautifully written, very precise. Sorrentino is best known for his “postmodern masterpieces” Mulligans Stew and Aberration of Starlight. There’s still so much good stuff to read…

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/bio_gsorrentino.html
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_sorrentino.html

Reading through De Certeau’s book, checking if there’s anything that I should read or reread (I read a few chapters in the past). Struck by the fact that De Certeau is all the time assuming the existence of power-structure/master-discourse, against which the people/users devise their own counter-strategies. In that way a common poetics will always be defined as something which insinuates itself inside, is set up against, that which is in ‘power’. (Does this make sense — or have I been reading too quickly?)

‘Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner’s constructions of a text) intersect: a social hierarchization seeks to make the reader conform to the “information” distributed by an elite (or semi-elite); reading operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their inventiveness into the cracks in a cultural orthodoxy.’ Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, inThe Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley etc., 1984, p. 172

‘[…]
As far as I know, there is still not a Decent Writing System anywhere in the world, although several things now come close. It seems a shame that grown men and women have to rustle around in piles of paper, like squirrels looking for acorns, in search of the phrases and ideas they themselves have generated. The decent writing system, as I see it, will actually be much more: it will help us to create better things in a fraction of a time, but also keep track of everything in better and more subtle ways than we ever could before. […]’

Quote from Nelson’s Dream Machines, 1974, as found on http://www.mprove.de/diplom/ht/tndm.html.

Of course he’s mad, but he also truly is a hero: Ted Nelson. Searching for images in a last attempt to contribute to this weekend’s Tomorrow Book-project, I land at Nelson’s Xanadu-page. You have to love this:

PROJECT XANADU MISSION STATEMENT:
DEEP INTERCONNECTION, INTERCOMPARISON AND RE-USE
Since 1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents — with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material.
We have an exact and simple structure. The Xanadu model handles automatic version management and rights management through deep connection.

Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.

WE FIGHT ON.

http://www.xanadu.net/

And wouldn’t it be beautiful to have “deep quotable hypertext”… if only for the terminology…

Xanadu, in development since the 1960s, never took off. I wonder what Nelson thinks about what is happening now, with blogsoftware automatically sending out (meta-)information, that is aggregated by services like Technorati.

Working on three texts at the moment:

— text for the newsletter of Fonds voor de Letteren about Poëzie op het scherm; which gives me a chance to go into the transformation of poetry (again) and the different form of new media poetry (even leading me back to Marjorie Perloff).

— text for Open on Droombeek, (http://www.droombeek.nl), let’s say ubiquitous localized/locative publishing, story networks, designing a sense of place, and the murmur of history written by many voices (something like that).

— text for Metropolis M about, of all things ‘eCulture’ as it is called in policy-documents and in advices of the Council for Culture; looking at what has been ‘produced’ and done by/thanks to De Waag, V2, Mediamatic, Steim, Montevideo, Doors, Virtueel Platform et cetera. Actually the piece I feel least happy about until now. I still have to find a format in which I can make it work without like just summing up all the ‘great work’ that’s been done, or blabbering on about how ugly the work eCulture is, yet how necessary for policy (that the right word for ‘beleid’?) in terms of getting into perspective… well, et cetera.

So yesterday night I was at De Waag to look at the work of the 12 poets/designers of the Poëzie op het scherm-project of the Fonds voor de Letteren (http://www.fondsvoordeletteren.nl/). Lots of people I know somehow, from the new media scene, Mediamatic or even, from years back, Perdu. Many people attended, no chairs and no beer crates left to sit on. I enjoyed all the works shown (though there were definitely differences in quality), but personally was most struck by the work of Rozalie Hirs (http://www.rozalie.com/) and Harm van den Dorpel (http://www.harmlog.nl/, look at Tekstverschijning geestschrijver).

I’ll have to write an article about it for the newsletter of the Fonds voor de Letteren — so I have made many notes. The notes are an absolute chaos, so they’re not fit yet to be put up here.

Therefore I will lend the words of Carolien Euser (she was on the panel discussing the works), who, after the presentations were over, said to me ‘I’m not interested in possibilities, I’m interested in choices.’ I totally agree with her. Making choices is what making art (and also new media poetry) is about, knowing exactly what you’re doing and why. Not any gratuitous exploration of possibilities for the sake of exploration. We’re beyond that stage. And these poets knew, even when they were just beginning to scratch the surface (as was sometimes true), that it’s about making choices.

Samuel Vriezen (“the frolicsome composer from hell”) — who of course was also present — has a nice piece about Poëzie op het scherm on his ‘nagelnieuwe’ blog: http://blogger.xs4all.nl/sqv.

(Which makes one think again on the amount — and high quality — of the poetry-blogs in both the Dutch-speaking countries and the USA. Poets blog so much more than other writers, it seems. I will get back to this…)

(Which makes me think as well that putting up a linkslist should be priority number one now — especially since I see that Geert Lovink now links me — thanks Geert!)

a few more links, relevant in this context (not exhaustive, sorry to those I’m not including here…):

Paul Bogaert: http://www.paulbogaert.be
Ted van Lieshout: http://home.wanadoo.nl/tedvanlieshout/
Hans Kloos: http://home.hetnet.nl/~kolos/
Joke van Leeuwen: http://www.jokevanleeuwen.com/
Rozalie Hirs: http://www.rozalie.com/
Harm van den Dorpel: http://www.harmlog.nl/
Niels Schrader: http://www.nielsschrader.de/
Tonnus Oosterhoff: http://www.tonnusoosterhoff.nl/
Mark Boog: http://www.markboog.nl/poetryinmotion.html

Usable as quotes, I suppose. But because Virno does not touch upon the role of new media at all, his 4 seminars on the multitude do not really ‘apply’ to any reality nor research I’m involved in now. Not even when he touches upon the coupling of private/public. Yet am happy to’ve read it. If only, for me, as an update on Aristotle and Marx.

‘Private signifies not only something personal, not only something which concerns the inner life of this person or that; private signifies above all deprived off: deprived of a voice, deprived of a public presence. In liberal thought the multitude survives as a private dimension. The many are aphasic and far removed from the sphere of common affairs.’ p. 24

‘I believe that in today’s forms of life one has a direct perception of the fact that the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own, that they are gasping for air, burning themselves out.’ p. 24

‘The contemporary multitude is composed neither of “citizens” nor of “producers”; it occupies a middle region between “individual and collective”; for the multitude, then, the distinction between “public” and “private” is in no way validated. And it is precisely because of the dissolution of the coupling of these terms, for so long held to be obvious, that one can no longer speak of a people converging into the unity of the state.’ p. 25

‘One could say perhaps that “not feeling at home” is in fact a distinctive trait of the concept of the multitude.’ p. 34

‘The One of the multitude, then, is not the One of the people. The multitude does not converge into a volonté generale for one simple reason: because it already has access to a general intellect.’ p. 42

‘In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes labor (or poiesis) from political action (or praxis) , utilizing precisely the notion virtuosity: we have labor when an object is produced, an opus which can be separated from action; we have praxis when the purpose of action is founded in action itself.’ p. 52

‘One could say that every political action is virtuosic. Every political action, in fact, shares with virtuosity as sense of contingency, the absence of a “finished product”.’ p. 53

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles & New York, 2004.

And then I just finished Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude. Mixed feelings about that one. It has a good and very usable explanation of the concept of multitude. (Expect quotes later on). But for me Virno seems too caught up in his past as theorist of the 1970’s Italian workers movement.

Virno’s analysis of the Post-Fordist condition doesn’t strike me as very insightful in the sense that it basically seems to repeat what (one thinks?) one knows from let’s say the newpapers. (I am almost sure one can find better analyses in economic literature, also analyses of ‘virtuosity’, and the importance of language and talk at work).

The difference is that Virno’s analysis refers often to Marxist theory and indeed to the 1970’s worker’s philosophy of Potere Operaio. That is his ‘true’ background. Very interesting in itself, and surely the Italian Autonomist movement and its theories are very, very fascinating. As Lotringer states in the introduction, Virno takes up this past explicitely instead of not simply not referring to it too much, and that is a positive thing according to Lotringer. But at some point every sentence seems to bear the imprint of Virno’s involvement with the 1970’s workers movement, with the collectives — his theorizing seems a theorizing through that experience. Or rather, maybe I should write that this is the ’emotional feeling’ of Virno’s prose. And this put me off as the book progressed. I must admit, then, that I did not read the last chapter (his 10 theses on the multitude) very well.

But then, it might also come down to the fact that I am interested in the concept of the multitude as far as I can make it ‘work’ in reference to blogging, writing, the transformation of publishing and the media, the transformation of speaking/writing in public; I — personally — am not working on the issue of a workers movement, or on a theory of labor. And ‘new media’, indeed media, are not Virno’s thing.