Hugh Nicoll’s Weblog

Over at the TPM Cafe, Ari Berman discusses the ties between big capital and politics-as-usual, a response to notices of his recent piece in The Nation, “Hilary, Inc.” Nails it.

James Wood has a delicious review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in The New Republic. Here’s his in-a-nutshell description of dirty realism:

This was a prose of short declarative sentences, in which verbs docked quickly at their objects, adjectives and adverbs were turned away, parentheses and sub-clauses were shunned. An anti- sentimentality, learned mainly from Hemingway, was so pronounced as to constitute a kind of male sentimentality of reticence.

Although apocalyptic, dystopian memories include nuclear attack drills in elementary school, fear of racist violence during the sixties, and the horrors of Vietnam war news, my strongest associations with post-apocalyptic futures link my memories of working as a logger and firefighter with the Mad Max films that were first released in those years. (The New Republic articles are available only to subscribers, but teasers are available.)

Digging, sorting, scrounging around in search of strategies for articulating a poetics/theory of/for autonomous learning and teaching found Joan Retallack’s contribution to Jacket 32, “What is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?”

Consider this description of being in responsive flow:

The chaotic interconnectedness of all things, the dynamic pattern-bounded indeterminacy in which we find ourselves, in which we must somehow find/make patterns among contingencies not intelligently designed for our convenience alone, leads to the pragmatic necessity of ingenious experimentation as wager on the possibility of a viable, even pleasurable future together in this world with all those others.

…segues to yesterday’s post… and in the surf-trail turned up Gerald Brun’s brilliant review essay of The Poethical Wager. Another treasure for the must read stack.

Ron Silliman included a link to a Barbara K. Fischer review of Poetry and Pedagogy, edited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr, the other day. Haven’t read the collection of essays yet, but it’s clearly a must as I’ve been slowly plowing the same fields, inspired by the same notions suggested here the last couple years. From the publisher’s description:

The largest challenge facing Liberal Arts and Sciences today is how to deal with the rapidly changing and increasingly complex world that all the phenomena under the label globalization have created. This world is ‘multi’- many things: cultural, linguistic, ethnic, racial, etc. Over the last few decades, on a daily basis, some ‘we’ or another has found itself face to face with not the other but with many others, with not one language practice, but many. Educating for this world is the most pressing challenge we face. The raison d’etre for Poetry and Pedagogy is the belief that poetry is the linguistic laboratory of the times in which one lives. It is the genre in which our habitual language practices are daily stretched, challenged and reconfigured. The collection gathers together the work of a number of scholars, poets, and teachers on the challenges and productive possibilities that arise when teaching contemporary writing.

Also published by Palgrave-Macmillan, Tim Woods’s Poetics of the Limit (now listed as out of stock), an invaluable reading of the ethical turn in Zukofsky’s writing, helping me to theorize a poetics for autonomous learning and teaching.

Geof Huth has published “A reading test” on his Visualizing Poetics blog. logo-like glyph…. he’s requesting comments, which he’ll then summarize and evaluate when he explains the text in a few days.

Don’t reckon I’ve many readers as this blog space has been mostly dark for the last thirteen months, but having had the past couple of days off, “Golden Week” here in Japan, I’ve been mostly reading and sleeping, and thinking about writing. Old tinderbox friends Alwin and Doug Miller have gone silent recently, and Pierre Joris, too. Pierre hasn’t posted for two months, just before embarking on a trip to Europe. I miss his perspectives, so it feels like time to either shut down, or loosen up and add to the living web whether I have many readers or not.

Today Joe Tomei & Rick Lavin are giving a talk today at KouritsuDai on using Blogger in writing classes. I wonder what the advantages of Blogger might be over using other blogging engines or even a dedicated server.

more on poetics and music in open forms from Barrett Watten, the text of the talk Watten gave at the symposium two weeks ago.

Braxton in the air, though still underground. Check out the 2001 interview with Fred Jung from Jazz Weekly. Good comprehensive intro on the Wikipedia Braxton page.

There’s a male blackbird in a juniper perhaps 8 meters from my B&B window here in Harrogate. I can’t ever remember hearing the common blackbird sing before. Perhaps that’s because other than last spring’s visit to Cardiff, my only real stays in the UK have been too short, or in the winter. Have a listen, courtesy of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. What magic!

Doc Searls has a really interesting piece on “The Intention Economy” up on the Linux Journal site. It’s a good, old-fashioned common sense critique of the marketing jargon that’s got most of us trapped in mind-rotting rhetorical fantasy lands. Bad for the soul, bad for the earth, and ultimately bad for business. Hoo hah!

The unsurprising but no less tawdry evidence of the a lack of good faith in democracy by Bush and Blair, reported in the New York Times March 27, is given historical context by “The Founders Never Imagined a Bush Administration.” Thanks to Josh Marshall for the link.

Ron Silliman has a brief post about Anthony Braxton’s recent set of sessions at the Iridium. He links to the reviews posted on night after night by Steve Smith, a New York music writer. Also mentions the Current Free Practices in Music and Poetry symposium, which sounds like it would be a wonder to attend. But even if I dropped everything and hopped on a plane I wouldn’t arrive on time. Wonder what sort of proceedings or digital archives might become available. For now, I’ll content myself with virtual content: check out the bibliograpy/discography.

Followed a link from ReadySteadyBook to an essay on Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think by Miriam Burstein. Ms. Burstein’s study of the history of the novel, specifically in relation to identity, consciousness, and literacy, resonates in a thousand directions and can serve as a touchstone for at least hundreds of potential studies encompassing the teaching of literature, access to education, autonomous learning, the history and traditions of self-study, empowerment in social, cultural, economic, and political contexts, and on and on.

A most interesting link in Burstein’s essay is to The Classics in the Slums by Jonathan Rose. Rose’s piece is an exploration of the history of working class auto-didacts, mostly in the British tradition, and of the irrelevancy of the lit-crit/MLA perspectives on literature for a boot-strap theory and practice of intellectual self-improvement. Curious about City Journal, a site I’ve just encountered for the first time, I decided to explore a bit.

A quote from Peggy Noonan proclaiming City Journal “the best magazine in America” led me to dig a little deeper, and according to the Daily Telegraph, it is celebrated as “the Bible of the new urbanism.” Hmmm… I wondered, and scrolling down a bit revealed William J. Bennett at the head of the Publication Committee. Hmmm… I’ll keep reading, but will mind the gaps and the agendas.

Pennycooks’ “Critical moments in a TESOL praxicum” is fascinating on several levels:
1. It takes one episode in the life of a teacher trainer, and seeks within the whole of that experience, including the train journey from Sydney to an outlying Asian majority suburb, as its primary subject.
2. The essay is framed by the train journey, an obvious though nonetheless effective analog for teacher development at all levels. It is also an example of the “narrativized, quasi-ethnography” (343), which can be a refreshing change from the standard applied linguistics fare. Of interest here too is the fact that “experimental” or “creative” academic texts are not very new at all; the topic has been explored by post-modern theorists and applied linguists for decades. And yet this sort of text still seems new against the sere background of realist, empiricist, positivist texts. (No wonder so many smart people stay as far away from the academy as they can!)
3. It seeks, particularly in the final “reflections” section, to come to terms not only with the search for “critical moments” in which awareness of a pedagogical issue may be raised, but also with the simultaneous awareness that the process is inevitably messy, unfinished, and that all we can do as teachers is to sieze upon epiphanic moments, meditate on them perhaps in the same way that we can, by re-reading, come to love a poem that we may never fully understand, and keep searching.
4. It furthermore expresses a certain wistfulness for the hands on, at-the-chalkface, in the trenches metaphors through which teachers construct their identities and establish pathways of communication with their students. This suggests a subtle resignation or fatique, perhaps, with the distance from the ordinary classroom that having achieved academic sucess has created.
Citation: A. Pennycook, “Critical moments in a TESOL praxicum in B. Norton and K. Toohey (eds.)Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (2005), Cambridge UP.

Stephen Vincent published Tenderly #6 or The Gertrude Improvs on March 8. Its mysterious music captured my attention almost immediately, and I’ve gone back to his blog on daily basis to re-read. I could of course copy and paste the text of the whole poem onto my computer and re-read at my private leisure, but I’m enjoying the virtual visiting, as if I were in the room and could hear the poet reading his own evolving text. It helps, of course, that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Stephen, and seeing his way of interacting with others, in addition to the pleasures and challenges of his texts and photographs.

Here, in “Tenderly #6″ — and I’m still struggling to understand how this poem works — alliteration, enjambment, and the syncopation of the text achieve a unity that is as fascinating in its precise constraints as the soaring meditation on language, politics, and history through [a sort of] window on Cheney’s quail shooting incident.

Great stuff!

Not that I’m feeling glum, but 2005 was a very exhausting year, so I’m hoping I can increase the intelligence of my game plan and do better in the coming twelve months. I’ve been enjoying, with the exception of a rather sore back, some extreme New Year’s cleaning, helping my youngest daughter move into what used to be my study, Reorganizing, and vacuuming up the cobwebs, does seem good for the mind and the soul.

I’ve been waiting to read what Ron Silliman would have to say about Katrina for a week. And, sure enough, sharp as usual, and calling on the citizenry as a whole to look at the long-term consequences of an underfunded government, and of our shared responsibility for it — the consequence of the erosion over the last thirty years or so of a sense of the commons as something we’re all a part of.

In the 1970s, a very evil man by the name of Howard Jarvis started the tax revolt that has driven the political right’s economic platform from Ronald Reagan — the president who claimed that government was the problem, not the solution — to George W. In between, more than a few others, such as Bill Clinton, have found it convenient to pander to the same general forces. All governmental institutions in the U.S., regardless of level or purpose, are underfunded. We have troops in Iraq buying armor with their own meager funds. We have a space program today that couldn’t safely land a man on the moon if it tried. We have a president who cut flood relief funds for New Orleans by 44 percent. In the 27 years since California put into place Proposition 13, it has seen its education programs — the very state institution on which California’s wealth has been built — nearly starved to extinction.

The disaster in New Orleans was not unforeseeable. But nobody has ever put the resources in place that would be capable of responding to something on this scale, even if it were done correctly. That it was done badly only exacerbates the catastrophe that was lurking all along.

It’s not just the politicians here who are to blame. It’s the fearful, greedy, inner tyrant in every one of us. Every politician — and every voter — who ever voted for a tax cut has blood on their hands this week. Those who have built careers on this may have a little more, as do those who have funded them, but it’s a problem for which we all have to take responsibility. The stench of it is the smell of death rising up from southern Louisiana & Mississippi, rubbing our own noses in our collective handiwork.

Alwin’s latest post is a call to work and a source of hope. He’s relaying field reports and reflections from Dr. Ken Maddox. Dr. Maddox’s closing paragraph includes this beautiful blast:

Please join me and others throughout this country in providing leadership in your community to now rebuild America.

Reading that I was wishing I had a copy of The Chambers Brothers “The Time Has Come” handy with “People Get Ready” to sing along to as well as the title cut “Time Has Come Today.”

Could it be that Katrina and its aftermath will be the start of a long overdue reckoning on the true costs and consequences of race and class as social and ideological constructs in American society?

Paul Krugman on September 2

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government
that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

Anne Rice on September 4

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

I hope I hear millions of echoes in the coming months and years…

Steve Ersinghaus has posted a link to a 2001 Scientific American on what was known.

Frank Rich turns up the heat in Fallujah Floods the Superdome.