last on january's cdr

As of earlier this evening my first of 12 monthly CDRs year tare can be bought via PayPal from the link at the right, or you can do the same at sonic obnoxion machine records' MySpace, where you can listen to 5 of the 7 tracks and download 2 of them. As previously mentioned the cost is £3.

Normal service will resume after this post. Each CDR will be announced as it arrives, and you'll be able to use the button in the sidebar to buy them. I'll also have them at readings.

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tare - sound poetry cdr available now

It's been a very long evening, but tare, the first of this year's projected 12 monthly sound poetry CDRs has been completed and is available from me at £3. You can see the very lovely hand-drawn minimalist sleeve below.
In fact the sleeve's been modified a little since the scan was taken, but you'll have to buy a copy to find out how. I haven't finished all the fiddly little bits yet, but tomorrow afternoon I'll be sticking a PayPal button here so you can buy this charming item. I'll also be completing and linking to the MySpace I've set up for the 'record label' I'll be issuing these on.

The tracklisting is:


1. hum
2. tier
3. tare
4. tore
5. tear
6. wait
7. weight


The CDR lasts just over 33 minutes


If you want to make queries about the CDR then please mail me at sonicobnox@googlemail.com rather than my usual address just to avoid confusion. See also sonic obnoxion machine records on MySpace.


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sound poetry cd's - 2009 x 12

In which I launch an idiotically ambitious project late in the day...

I realise it's late in the month and all, I also realise there's not a huge market for this stuff, and I do have other stuff to do with mutapoem. But I have decided that I am going to attempt to release a CDR of new sound poetry every month for the whole of 2009.

This actually won't be a very different workload from the one I've been keeping since May last year so I'm confident I can keep it up as long as the neighbours don't protest and kick me into the street. I think the CDRs are likely to be around £3, and I'll try to have the first one available on Wednesday this week. The material on the first CDR is likely to be loud, feedback-heavy and minimal with a couple of reworkings via Audacity.

Watch this space for more detail.

Update: The first CDR should be available late Tuesday (27 Jan 09) and will be called tare. It will have at least 6 tracks - tear, tier, tare, tore, weight and wait. More details on how to get your CDR, and the MySpace for this project (including the no-budget label the CDRs will be released on) will follow. Be aware that as with all the stuff posted here the sound quality will be rudimentary.

Further update 21:20: Recording of the main tracks including one called hum not mentioned before is now finished. Only the reworkings weight and wait to complete now, as well as a couple of bits of admin and tare should be available tomorrow (Tuesday).

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tarkovsy's mirror

Here is a new theory. For me at least. I come up with these all the time of course and usually forget them. Right from childhood I have had blinding revelations about something or other on a regular basis. Often I wonder whether I should write it down but every time I think, no, this one is so special that I will always remember this date and this place. I am always wrong and I have no way of knowing whether my epiphanies are worth anything. So my new theory. There is art that is disorienting and there is art that is frightening and both of these are good. I am thinking particularly of film at the moment. I just finished watching Godard's Alphaville which is in the disorienting camp. But after that I watched Tarkovsy's Mirror which something else again. It is a third art that is both disorienting and frightening. I am not sure I can think of any other films immediately that accomplish this even from my other favourite directors. I can think of other pieces of art that have this effect on me - the border ballad Long Lankin is one. I was working towards a theory that this art which is both disorienting and frightening is perhaps better than other art but that is not the case. I would say though that there is a special resonance to such art with very basic very overgrown parts of us that other art cannot achieve.

I want no comments from anyone claiming that they have seen Mirror and were not frightened. I believe you but I do not believe it to be a good thing. I suggest that anyone who wants to write that comment should go back and watch the film as many times as it takes for them to become afraid. This is not sensitivity to art this is sensitivity to yourself. Perhaps this is what the surrealists attempted in a crude sort of way. But set any surrealist film against any Tarkovsky and see how macho and juvenile and literal the surrealists appear in comparison.

What is the value of this sensitivity to self? I wonder whether it might be moral? That to be sensitive to one's self and frightened by that is perhaps to be more truly sensitive to others. But I do not believe that. I am not any more moral or sensitive than anyone else I know and I have not done much to improve the lives of other people. In a lot of ways I am quite selfish. Is there then any value to this sensitivity to self or is it just a common part of the aesthetic experience and of no special value? The idea that it has no value is upsetting. Disgusting even. But that might only be because it feels like an attack on the individual's need to be special and different and for experience to have meaning. But this is a diversion. The sensitivity to self is the thing that makes a piece of art disorienting and frightening and fascinating and beautiful.

Another brief digression. This is one reason why I am poor critic and cannot write extended prose whether fictional or factual. My ideas are often only half ideas and run away before I have caught more than a shadow of them. But still I chase after them as they change and hide and double back. My arguments get more tangled and nonsensical and my prose becomes progressively more confused. Again this is why I dropped the philosophy component of my English and Philosophy BA. In poetry even if it is sound or visual I can be more allusive and can go further back behind language closer to thought closer to the place where I am disoriented and frightened.

Rather than something unique in the viewer it is in the skill of the artist. They communicate their disorientation and fear with a directness that we rarely experience because we learn quickly how to avoid disorientation and fear. Without intending to I have come back to something I only alluded to at the beginning. I wrote that there is a special resonance to such art with very basic very overgrown parts of us. I nearly wrote very old and even considered primordial but in each case would have had to qualify it. What I meant by both and what I meant by basic and overgrown are those parts of us that are associated with childhood fears. They may simply be a product of childhood. But this still does not explain why this experience feels so valuable.

And again before any comments come in I am not willing to accept any supernatural agency in this. I will not accept any suggestion that it represents a sense of awe in front of some power or an awareness of separation from the same. These are only attempts to give a name and a concrete form to something unknown and difficult that may simply come down to biology, neurology or the brain attempting to observe itself. For me all appeals to god are an attempt to provide a full stop at an arbitrary point. I will accept that religion might come from a similar impulse to that driving the creation of art and that each has its tendency to provide consolation as well as the much rarer impulse to uncover our discomfort.

Possibly this is getting close to the value of an art that disorients and frightens, and explains why it makes us sensitive to ourselves. It takes us away from the illusions that we cushion ourselves in most of the rest of the time and closer to the world we actually inhabit. Perhaps this particular art has the value of making us more aware and more alive. That in older and much harder times it was an art that could have helped you stay alive. That as thinking creatures fear was something we needed to practice. We may still need to practice. This is not an answer this is just a thought.

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b - sound poem

b

Messing around with microphone and different tins.

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more on philoctetes center

More on one of my favourite things of the moment the Philoctetes Center. Last week while working on a commentary for uni I was also watching one of their roundtables on literacy and imagination - January 11, 2009 Literacy and Imagination under Past Programs. Part of the discussion as about the impact of contemporary technology on literacy, which it was agreed was not destructive but rather opening up different potential. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with the file and I can't play the last 11 minutes or so which are part of the open discussion at the end.

The discussion of the impact of contemporary technology set me thinking. Clearly with texts, social networking, Twitter, email, blogging and so forth there's a massive proliferation of written language out there and no obvious threat to literacy. But it occurred to me that with vlogs, YouTube, podcasts, tv/film players, and things like Philoctetes there's also potential there for a return to something almost pre-literate - a kind of technological oral tradition. I've felt watching Philoctetes roundtables that I'm using parts of my brain that I've neglected a little, and I think part of that is not being dependent on something written down. Not that this negates the need for reading, but that we use technology to augment some fairly basic capabilities. Up until 2002 I had a lot of phone numbers by memory. I then got a mobile phone while I was temping, which I still have, and now no longer remember any numbers. I'm not certain quite what idea I'm working towards here, but there's something there.

I've now watched eight of these roundtables amounting to around fourteen hours so you'll understand I've had a lot of ideas. Some of those will make it on to santiago now I have my work for this semester of the MA completed and once preparations for the mutapoem event are more advanced.

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hammer - visual poem

skul - visual poem

sppend - visual poem

january - poem

Unfortunately this poem contains formatting that I can't be bothered figuring out how to reproduce here (formatting these posts is an absolute nightmare) - so to read you'll have to click on the image to be taken to a bigger version - sorry

tic 2 - visual poem

It's been busy at santiago central for a week or two while I finished off this semester's work for my MA so I wasn't able to post as much as I would have liked. Although I did manage a bit over at insult blog, and some new stuff over at god is a sloth. And watched a lot more roundtables at Philoctetes Center. Don't expect too much this week though as I have to get on with organising the mutapoem event.

In the meantime here's a new visual poem. And don't forget that The Other Room returns on 4 February.

contemporary symposia

This is going to make me look like a no-life pretentious geek, but this weekend I decided to see if I could find any filmed interviews of Susan Sontag online. Naturally the longer the film the more I wanted to watch it, which is how I came across a roundtable discussion of Sontag's life and work. This seemed to be in a university or institutional setting, and after I'd watched the 90+ minute film I set out to find more. Which is an elevated way of saying I clicked twice, once to get from the video to the stream from which it came, and once to follow a link to the organisation where the stream and the video originated. This turns out to be a centre based in New York called The Philoctetes Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute who hold and record regular multidisciplinary roundtables on creativity and the imaginative process. These are available on the website under Past Programs, and on YouTube, and last about 90-120 minutes from what I've seen so far. What I've seen so far are discussions on Susan Sontag, on Psychogeography, on Samuel Beckett, and on Place, Imagination and Identity. If you're at all interested in the brain, in ideas, in art, and if you have a broadband connection and a lot of time then I'd really recommend you get yourself over there. It's fantastic. It's been like taking an intellectual bath in a way that I haven't done for a long time. I love it, I love it, I love it. Go, go now, you'll thank me later.

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feeling dumb

I frequently feel very stupid. I am not an expert on anything. Worse, there are important deficits in my knowledge - not specific facts, but an ignorance about scientific method, about how to analyse statistics, a limited mathematical knowledge, and a poor ability to construct and analyse arguments. This means that whenever I encounter arguments I disagree with it is difficult to formulate a response on anything more than a reactive level.

It does not help that writers and thinkers who have helped to shape my opinions through their writing appear to have such seriousness, clarity, and the discipline to support that with research. And having not grown up with many friends, having been more interested in what adults had to say than my peers when I was child, and having a greatly elevated sense of self it is an unpleasant truth that I will compare myself with great thinkers. I am not a great thinker, but at the same time I constantly revisit what I think and believe.

One thing I have found immensely frustrating over a lot of my life is a progressive hardening of ideological positions. I am not sure why this is - I have an unsubstantiated idea that it might be that since the cold war dissolved people are less certain what they know about anything, that there is no longer an enemy. But since almost the whole of the last century was poisoned by two world wars and a cold war we have become accustomed to hate. It has become normal to adopt antagonistic, intractable poses against those with whom we disagree. It is no longer possible to negotiate and accommodate, instead arguments have to be won by whatever means are possible.

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border ballads - visual poetry

all over with a pin - visual poem

coming in february - the other room

You know the score - The Other Room 6 on Wednesday 4 February at 7pm with Richard Barrett, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Patricia Farrell in the Old Abbey Inn.


Click on the image above to connect to The Other Room blog - it's beginning to develop nicely. There's video from the last programme up there now.

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how I write

Here is a vignette that may tell you something about how I write. For the majority of my 100 word novels I have no plot in mind. There will be a starting point or a single incident - a carpet draped over rock at the sea's edge, a child staring up at snow - but usually nothing more. The ending and any other incidents are settled only as I write each piece.

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3 accidents - a 100 word novel

Amber's car slid sideways into another vehicle parked at the side of the road. After a short time she eased forward and sat shaking. Her partner did not take the accident seriously.

Two years after they split Amber lost control on ice. Her car slid downhill and through the low wall at the bottom, landing on its side in a stream. Amber was knocked unconscious.

Months later as she parked on the road outside work Amber's car slid forward and gently bumped the car in front. She walked away, dropped the car keys in a bin, and phoned her sister.

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