Blogger has
been up & down today, mostly the latter. From Sitemeter,
I can tell that it must gone south sometime around
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Thoughts
while surfing:
Jerrold
Shiroma’s weblog has
declared its affinity for the Philadelphia Eagles. While I half share this bias
in the fair-weather way I have about football – I don’t really pay attention
until the playoffs – I have this nasty gut feel that tells me that this will be
a more difficult year to be a fan of the Iggles, as they are known hereabouts, than it appears
on paper.
In the
meantime, I just want to see if Felipe can take the J’ints past the 6th game of the World
Series.
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Patrick
Durgin thinks that I used to deploy the term “avant-garde” “along
Burger’s lines (Theory of the
Avant-Garde)” back in the 1970s. This Burger being Peter,
not Mary. But I never liked
Burger, Patrick. I did cite him once in my piece on post-modernism in Poetics Journal 7, but only to
distinguish his position – which cleaves the “avant-garde” (in his mind dada,
surrealism, futurism, etc.) from a more conservative modernism (Pound, Joyce,
the cubists) that wanted to recuperate the art object – from that of Clement
Greenberg’s, who tended to see such phenomena as continuous. I agree with Greenberg that, say, Pollock
needs to be understood as a major thinker, but the positioning of that
generation of work – I would include Cage & Olson alongside Pollock, for
example, Merce Cunningham in dance – alongside (and, for painting at least,
within) the critical confines of an art-critical movement aligned with the New
Critics is a far more convoluted & problematic history that I was there
trying to untangle.
I’ve
literally never mentioned Burger elsewhere. I did a search on all my critical
writing and, with that exception & references to Mary’s poetry in the blog,
every other occurrence to burger
alludes to what Helen:
Sweetheart of the Internet would call “murdered-cow sandwich.”
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Most
irritating habit of 2003: “cute names” for weblogs. In 30 years, these monikers
will look like Nehru jackets & puka shell necklaces. I think of them as
verbal leisure suits. Like tattoos faded & distended over middle-aged
potbellies, they will come to haunt those who chose them. Especially those
silly enough to imagine they can ever leave them behind.
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Lethal art?
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The main
thing you need to know about the Lyn Hejinian weblog is that it isn’t
her. The suspicion here is that it’s Bill
Marsh in drag. Or with a sock puppet.
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I love the
story of James
Meetze’s high school teacher knowing exactly which Allen Ginsberg text to
drop on the brutal kitten. But I have to agree with Kasey about which
Ginsberg book is the one for the desert island. By the way, Kasey,
thanks for including me in that list of Ten Essential 20th-Century
Poetics Statements. I am humbled.
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The dark side of blogging.
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Maybe it’s what
you deserve when you surf the net one-handed, but Antonio Savoradin confesses that he spewed when he read my
reply to John Erhardt.
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The best
single-course website I’ve seen of late is Ben Friedlander’s class on “Modern /
Postmodern American Poetry: 1940s.” It’s right up there with Al Filreis’ English 88.
Ben’s electronic
resources page is worth a visit to the site just for itself.
I don’t
know why, but I always think of English 88 as being the name for a car,
something along the lines of a Morris Minor adapted
for surfboards. In my mind, Jan & Dean should be singing about English 88. Or maybe Wink Martindale.
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The
