Notebook from February

Some fun stuff here: Andrea Long Chu diagnosing the problem of the "far center", Foreign Affairs diagnosing the problem of "competitive authoritarianism", Velimir Khlebnikov on folk speech and pagan spells, Charles Bernstein's list of poets working with the "imploded sentence", Maureen N. McLane's list of recommended readings (one, two) from the back of My Poets, Gregory Bateson's criteria for determining what qualifies as a "mind", a disquieting Internet observation that "all there has ever been is surface," plus... well, lots more.

Oldest to newest:

1. Jim Goldberg's "Coming and Going"

2. Economic and political destabilization

3. Autocrats and market economies

4. The global economy since the 1980s

5. 1990s neoliberalism

6. Capitalsm vs democracy

7. Brian Judge's "Democracy in Default"

8. Subjectivity in "My Life"

9. Subjectivity is allegorical

10. "The excluded are within"

11. America and the other

12. The cultural presence of nationalism

13. Change, in Leslie Scalapino

14. The pleasure of seeing and the phenomenal field

15. Civilization and "the landscape"

16. Hejinian on "existing"

17. "True existence" vs "conventional existence"

18. Works of despair (and hope)

19. Suffering in Scalapino

20. "Continual conceptual rebellion"

21. Poe and "absorptive fiction"

22. Bernstein on "the addressee"

23. "If only the plot would leave people alone"

24. Perelman and "coherence"

25. Nicole Brossard's "A Book"

26. David Antin's talk poems

27. Is "meter" absorptive?

28. Rae Armantrout's "Mainstream Marginality"

29. Cecil Taylor as composer

30. Harry Lanz on language's "transparency effect"

31. Sigrid Burckhardt on words and their meanings

32. Poems as recognitions, or not

33. Official verse culture

34. "Song melos" vs "charm melos"

35. "Fabrication" by Imogen Reid

36. J. O. Morgan's "Pupa"

37. "The Authoritarian Personality"

38. Grant Morrison's "The Death Reaper"

39. Achille Mbembe's "On the Postcolony"

40. Upcoming releases from Blank Forms

41. Brendan Joyce's "Value Form"

42. Catherine Weiss' "Big Money Porno Mommy"

43. Jared Pappas-Kelley's "Stalking America"

44. Jared Pappas-Kelley's "Solvent Form: Art and Destruction"

45. The "readable"

46. Listening to poetry

47. Information in the poetry of Marianne Moore

48. Marianne Moore and the "multiplicity of things"

49. Marianne Moore's "Marriage"

50. Inadequate language

51. Early Frank Herbert

52. The "aesthetic register" and the pleasure in pattern

53. Nick Piombino; Nicole Brossard

54. The linguistic resistance to common values

55. High art and provincial culture

56. Inadequate language for art and its reception

57. Nicole Brossard on writing

58. Nicole Brossard on the body

59. Body, energy, and language

60. The patriarchal field of language

61. Reappropriating language

62. Research, intelligence, and pleasure

63. Wittig's "The Lesbian Body"

64. Nicole Brossard on prose

65. Andrea Long Chu on the “far center”

66. The word "as"

67. Systems, networks, coherence, unity

68. Mistakes of knowledge

69. Camus' abyss

70. "To live means to leave traces"

71. Hanne Darboven

72. Folk speech, pagan spells, and "beyonsense" language

73. Anti-absorptive traditions within twentieth-century poetry

74. Basil Bunting's "Briggflats"

75. "Imploded sentence" works

76. Peter Seaton

77. Steve McCaffery's "Panopticon"

78. The performance of nonabsorbable texts

79. “Competitive authoritarianism”

80. "All there has ever been is surface"

81. The "non-family anchored hero"

82. Genre as reading

83. Stability and complexity

84. The Koran as fragmentary song

85. The Koran as performance

86. Hypersignification / oversignification

87. Allegory and meaning

88. Hejinian on our current crises

89. Poetry and the social

90. David Buukck & Juliana Spahr's "Army of Lovers"

91. Lyrical confession vs formal complexity

92. Signifying and information

93. Fragmented units and syntactic turbulence

94. Inger Christensen, "To Go In"

95. Brecht's doubling of attention

96. "Distanced" theater

97. Eroticism and identity

98. Poetry and eroticism

99. Things that won't resolve

100. The utopian ecstatic

101. Inside ideology, but with a different perspective

102. Consciousness, experience, and poetry

103. Piombino's "combinatorials"

104. Nick Piombino and poetry's functions

105. Nick Piombino's "Boundary of Blur"

106. Stein, Creeley, and attention

107. Grenier's "Phantom Anthems"

108. Bernstein on Scalapino

109. Ronald Knox's "Enthusiasm"

110. Mystical reluctance

111. T K Oesterreich's "Possession, Demoniacal and Other"

112. The treatment of women's posession

113. Tarantism

114. Tungus shamanism

115. Shamanic seance

116. The global picture of altered consciousness

117. "Marriage" between humans and spirits

118. Indeterminate malaria

119. Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly"

120. Ecstasy and authority

121. The shaman's calling

122. Michel Leiris' work on possession

123. Possession and domestic conflict

124. Ichiro Hori's "Folk Religion in Japan"

125. Christianized slave cults and the gods of Africa

126. Trinidad's Shango cult

127. Voodoo and resistance

128. Voodoo syncretism

129. European shamans

130. The hypertextual poem

131. Poetry as "privacy overheard"

132. Poems as "invitation to subjectivity"

133. Not rhythm but thought

134. Language, incipience, and subjectivity

135. Art vs seriousness

136. Language and public life

137. "Affect"

138. Hejinian on happiness

139. Watten's "radical particularity"

140. "The device in the rug"

141. Morton Feldman's "Crippled Symmetry"

142. Hejinian on Watten

143. Randomness and readiness

144. Circular causal systems

145. G. Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form"

146. Rene Thom's catastrophe theory

147. When is an aggregate a mind?

148. Cause and effect vs relational difference

149. Circuits and organisms

150. "Steady state"

151. The Batesonian "switch"

152. "Ontological choreography"

153. Pathology in medicine

154. Complaints as medical ontology

155. The meaning and definiton of disability

156. Foucault's escape from dominant modes of thinking

157. The knowledge in "practices"

158. "Disease is a process in time"

159. Enacting reality

160. Hannah Arendt on poetry and thought

161. Schiller's "the naive" and "the sentimental"

162. Louise Glück on the "hidden world"

163. Daisy Hay's "Young Romantics"

164. Revolution is religious, not political

165. McLane's recommendations, round one

166. Adam Phillips on adolescence

167. Maureen McLane on "corrupting the youth of America"

168. Shelley, poetry, and the imagination

169. McLane on Shelley's longer works

170. McLane's recommendations, round two

171. Lisa Robertson, "The Weather"

172. Olena Kalytiak Davis, "The Lyric 'I' Drives to Pick Up Her Children from School"

173. Éric Chevillard

174. Susan Howe, "Frame Structures"

175. Paul Virilio's "Bunker Archaeology"