WordStars, word processors:
Wallace Stevens
W.S. Di Piero
W.S. Graham
W.S. Merwin
W.S. Gilbert
W.S. Rendra
Word Stew. Warning Sign.
Home » Reflecting
Category Archives: Reflecting
Blog entries having to do with issues concerning the way I blog here. Blog entries about my blog entries. Think reflexivity, self-referentiality, and other such concepts. Think vanity and narcissism.
From Spectres Of Marx
was my reply to
Masha tweeted that right after she multi-tweeted the following bit from Spectres Of Marx:
Tweet Lookup
When I hit Google with a search string from the tweets that appear on my timeline, it leads me to wonderful wonderful things. To wit:
Read Paul Celan’s entire poem here.
http://twitter.com/#!/MichelleMcGrane/status/111131540926365696
From the W.S. Merwin interview conducted here.
Palmer’s poem is at the bottom of this blog entry and Jorie Graham talks about Palmer and poetry in general here.
Foucault On Nietzsche And Mallarme
The great task to which Mallarmé dedicated himself, right up to his death, is the one that dominates us now; in its stammerings, it embraces all our current efforts to confine the fragmented being of language once more within a perhaps impossible unity. Mallarmé’s project — that of enclosing all possible discourse within the fragile density of the word, within that slim, material black line traced by ink upon paper — is fundamentally a reply to the question imposed upon philosophy by Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, it was not a matter of knowing what good and evil were in themselves, but of who was being designated, or rather who was speaking when one said Agathos to designate oneself and Deilos to designate others. For it is there, in the holder of discourse and, more profoundly still, in the possessor of the word, that language is gathered together in its entirety. To the Nietzschean question: ‘Who is speaking?’, Mallarmé replies — and constantly reverts to that reply — by saying that what is speaking is, in its solitude, its fragile vibration, in its nothingness, the word itself — not the meaning of the word, but its enigmatic and precarious being. Whereas Nietzsche maintained his questioning as to who is speaking right up to the end, though forced, in the last resort, to irrupt into that questioning himself and to base it upon himself as the speaking and questioning subject: Ecce homo, Mallarmé was constantly effacing himself from his own language, to the point of not wishing to figure in it except as an executant in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself. It is quite possible that all those questions now confronting our curiosity (What is language? What is a sign? What is unspoken in the world, in our gestures, in the whole enigmatic heraldry of our behaviour, our dreams, our sicknesses — does all that speak, and if so in what language and in obedience to what grammar? Is everything significant, and, if not, what is, and for whom, and in accordance with what rules? What relation is there between language and being, and is it really to being that language is always addressed — at least, language that speaks truly? What, then, is this language that says nothing, is never silent, and is called ‘literature’?) — it is quite possible that all these questions are presented today in the distance that was never crossed between Nietzsche’s question and Mallarme’s reply.
from Section 1 (“The Return Of Language”) of Chapter 9 (“Man And His Doubles”) of The Order Of Things by Michel Foucault (pp 332-333)
1 And 100, 1 And 1000
(Self-indulgence, here we go.)
This was my first tweet and here was my 1000th (lines taken from “The Walled Palace,” a poem from Ann Lauterbach’s Before Recollection):
This was my first published WordPress entry, and this was my 100th. This one you’re reading is my 101st.
Torque, Thrice, Recently
- I’m currently looking into David Rivard; one of his poetry collections is entitled Torque.
- Tiffany Atkinson wrote about WS Graham‘s late work as “putting so brilliantly the torque of writing poetry.”
- From Brenda Hillman: “The language of authority makes necessary the torque of the lyric.”
From Bishop To Deane
“The Nit Pickers” is Ward Sutton’s new Drawn To Read (a book review in comic form) about the “centenary editions” of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, prose, and correspondence with The New Yorker.
(I’m trying not to get excited over the title of Bishop’s “In The Village” for reasons that have little to do with her, although I was thrilled to have discovered a poet named Nichola Deane while looking for links about Bishop.)
Aside from an abiding interest in Romantic poetry (an area I’m currently pondering), Deane has nine blog entries about Nick Cave (she also has PJ Harvey‘s official site on her blogroll), once interviewed Clive James on F. Scott Fitzgerald, has a poem-cycle about Lee Miller in Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, and counts Bishop, Patti Smith, and Maya Deren among her triptych of influences. They’re certainly on mine, too.
What I’m Not Blogging About
I’m doing it again with this blog: letting it lie fallow when I so want to write on it. I have four drafts of blog entries waiting for completion, revision, and publication.
That’s admittedly not as much as the bits and snippets that made up the Notepad files I used to keep back when I was on LiveJournal. Why, four WordPress drafts is half the number of Facebook Note drafts I have at the moment.
But still: Editions of You is new, and four drafts is also half the number of blog entries I have here so far (not counting my About page).
My drafts include something about my initial encounter with “principles” of Deleuzian pedagogy, a list of links to a handful of poems I enjoyed reading, an attempt to revise a Facebook Note on Patti Smith, and another one about Nick Cave.
I’m hoping to have these out sometime, but I must admit that I may not get around to them. My mind and my Web browser are also busy with links I want to write about and share sometime soon: espionage and treason, the Dalek Masterpiece Theatre, etc.
I want to talk about how my wife and I have grown selective about the films we watch in the cinemas, and how our thrift is contradicted by how we’ve seen two films this year twice…just because. (For the curious, it’s Star Trek and Drag Me to Hell.)
Now I’m not sure how to tag and categorize this entry, so I’ll just go back to my reading now.
Waggish
I’m pretty sure I’ve read one of Waggish‘s blog entries before, but one of those I read this morning cracked me up. I wish I knew enough to take a crack at Choose Your Own Philosophical Adventure #1: Escape from the Dialectic.
ASIDE: I’m unsure why Waggish mentions Erica Weitzman there (it doesn’t seem like they’re the same person) but so far, I’m enjoying what I find online.
This includes poems and an essay about punk entitled “I Wanna Destroy: Towards an Aesthetic of Violence” (PDF). That and “No fun: aporias of pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory” seem to reveal what might be Weitzman’s pattern of writing essays with punk rock allusions in their titles.
Back to Waggish: other highlights include a brief discussion on “Freud on the Uncanny/Unheimlich” and a series of pieces entitled “Thoughts on Genre.” Three entries under the latter focuses on blogs and ties in with my own attempts to figure out what’s up with this blog:
Editions of You “fails” on most counts.
Up on “About”
I need to do something with my About page. I realized this the other day when I began drafting another page, in the middle of which I interrupted myself to ask:
“Why am I drawing up a list of items I’m trying to sell [more on those some other time] when I’ve provided nothing about myself to the people I’ve added to my blogroll?”
(All of them, save two, are strangers to me. And while I have a friendly relationship with those two exceptions, one is someone I only know online and the other was a teacher of mine. This explains my use of quotation marks in this entry’s title, and perhaps also why I have been unable to tell you who I am pace that familiar adage.)
Based on my blogroll, you might draw conclusions about aspirations I (may) have towards certain kinds of blogs.
Editions Of You 