A few of us, let's admit it, are incredulous when it comes to postlanguage. What the heck is it? It's first of all an historical, that is, chronological fact. Something something that follows the first language generation, some hyper criticism of now that may sound tonal for a moment, that may open into al fresco narrative if it wants to, because the visual is back -- what a relief! -- at least bits of a hungry, peek-aboo lyricism, then, among other options amid political downtime masking horror. One key is that there are options for urgency ("calling out to you," almost personae-driven) to compete with a self-reflexive linguistics ("the invasive assertions crowding in..."), both unfolding measuredly within a list of grievances (even as the calling is drowned by discursive officialese -- "giving onto. Making free with"). And get this, because this is also key; postlanguage is often best practiced by language poets, as with this text published in The Likes of Us last year; it takes us from the start to halfway through the poem "Where Once It Was Deemed An Advantage To Know So Many Words," a title so layered with critique, we can absorb it all in a single swoop.

seeing how the tables have turned

that terrible foreknowledge sinking into the west

Those vasty deeps calling out to you

the imperial aloofness of the overpass, the flyover, the dress-rehearsal,
the four-in-hand, the signature cowlick

NO FOOD USE -- FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY

a top-down command profligacy

the alike. The superb, canny sloth flecked with benign rancor

prompting for any sign. As in, "I wonder what the poorer rabbits are
doing this season?"

A gorgon demonstrating motion furniture. A giantess astride the
Bowery

nameless and unshod, the invasive assertions crowding in upon us just
before the return-date

the wayward surgical appliance stumping across the access road

giving onto. Making free with. What was once afoot, and bruited

Gas. Food. Lodging

shriven and rent, all-too-knowable, that low mittel-european scent like
a serge [...]

-- Michael Gottlieb

Stupidity after stupidity. William Logan assess Frank O'Hara's new Selected Poems with warped, arthritic insight cum generosity of a crippled censor. "O'Hara's wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest," Logan chirps. Or this: O'Hara sounds like Wallace Stevens "at the soda fountain." Funny, I thought the Wallace Stevens of Key West bathed in soda. Guess it depends which meds you're drinking. For the new selected, editor Mark Ford, inventor of a nervy, revisionist NY anthology, the nastily truncated The New York Poets, inserts "a small sheaf of the poet’s rambling prose statements and reminiscences, some of which sound more like Ernie Kovacs or Lenny Bruce than the author of these insouciantly unserious poems," Logan, continues -- most vivifying – then adding parenthetically "O'Hara loathed academic hauteur, though he needn't have sounded so oafish about it." Needn't he have? Insouciant but loathing hauteur? Oafish, Kovacs, soda fountain -- how far down will the censor dig to mine cadavers for metaphor? Other life support for O'Hara: grindingly self-conscious; sounds like Ezra Pound on happy pills; O’Hara treated contemporary art with far more deliberation than he treated poetry; [i]t's hard to care about a lot of O’Hara’s poems. Boo.

A rooming house. Inside, every room is named canonically after a poetics. Defence of Ryme, Habits of Empire, Preface to Sordello, Being and Event, Chicken in the Field, Prepositions, Camera Lucida, and so forth. Collecting rent every week is like rereading each critique. The kitchen is Untitled.

Untitled

Last night or in the last few nights anyone dream of waste treatment? Dropped off in a maze around some toxic water's edge. Preemptively let go in sulfurous smoke without a mask. 'Normal' folks with misleading directions for the way out. Taking the wrong bus. Passengers forcing down black powder, part of a 'test.' Told to get treatment and report back. Any of this sound familiar, send me an e, address top right. Thanks.

Sometimes Pound can be put to good use.

The Age demanded you-know-what
And what-have-you, a kind of
Weeping in laughter, and laughter
In weeping, not, anyhow,

The dance of the mind about the word,
Not (oh, brother)
Talking rats, the "moron," --
No. This is not what we require.

At last the "age demanded" the laughter
Of a machine, applause,
A machine hard-on, not (my god!) a sigh,
A gasp left in the throat.

-- Aaron Kunin

Rodney's 1970s conference look-backs (6/23, 20-17) are great, and more to come. Also, Philip Metres, 6/21, 19.

My 1970s Syllabus, Week One


An Anthology of New York Poets, w/ a couplet handwritten by David Shapiro, first edition, $45.50

Own Your Own Body, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, inscribed "with love," $220.00

Maya Angelou's Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, signed in large cursive, "Joy! Maya Angelou," $400.00

Hand imprints from 24 beats, The Poet's Hand Book, inscribed w/ mantras by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, others, $6500.00


Hard cover, A Serious Morning, signed by Andrei Codrescu, $100.00

Gregory Corso's Ankh, no. 13 in the Pheonix Octavo Series, $120.00

Peter Inman, What Happens Next, one of 100, $113.05


Summits Move with the Tide, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, 50 pages, $95.00

Michael Mcclure's Grabbing of the Fairy, signed, $29.95

John Wieners's Invitation, three poems, signed first edition, $122.50

Larry Rivers and Kenneth Koch, Diana Latin Goddess of the Moon, no. 8 of 19 copies inscribed by Rivers, four artist's proofs hinged in three dimensions, $14,000.00

Untitled

Every poem with a title is conceptual.

Enjoying.

Arguably the saddest three capitalized letters in a group, ABD.

Objectivists, beats, language, unoriginal geniuses, et al., the further you go out in time the descriptors for these moves or movements peel away. These are people who hang for a zine, a conference, careers. They're social verbs, nominalized. (Beats more so, and less.)

Some of this has turned a corner, hit the window, earning 90,000 or more. Ninety thousand grammars.

Vicarious Orono treats (cont'd.) --

Access to abstracts and a few papers at Thoughtmesh.

Jasper Berne's double entry, 6/17, on Bernadette Mayer and a Debriefing.

Photo sets at Tom Orange's FB page.

Triple Canopy is more than a new poetry site. It looks and sounds new, argumentative, smoky.

Having blown the chance to hear great papers and performances, and missing all the people at Orono over the last week, I'm reading Tony Brinkley's "Lyotard's Cage" and regretting most I wasn't there to intake its big store of insights firsthand, aurally. The paper begins:

"From the moment we set a stage and speak here," Lyotard said at Cerisy in 1972, "we are within representation and within theology. The walls of this castle [the conferences at Cerisy were held in a chateau] are the walls of the museum—that is, the setting aside of feelings and the extraterritorial privilege granted to concepts, the setting in reserve of intensities, their quiescence, their presentation in a staged-setting." The setting (Cerisy) to which Lyotard was referring was a conference, Nietzsche aujourd'hui, at which some of the more remarkable of 1970s readings of Nietzsche were offered (Derrida's reading of the feminine in Nietzsche, for example, which Irigaray would later re-enact in response; Deleuze's presentation of Nietzsche's nomadic thought ). And in that setting, though not at first but in conclusion, Lyotard offered Cage, Cage's Silence, within the "walls of the museum."

That "setting aside of feelings and the extraterritorial privilege granted to concepts..." coupled with the notion of attending to the stage (e.g., attending a conference) as being "within theology" serves up a healthy portion of antidote to any facile redefintion of the conceptual as quintessentially the production of artifacts to arrive at a done deal, a topping off or closing down, indeed, of the concept. Here's my book of reframed X. QED. That's it for X, conceptually. "It is imprudent to win," Brinkley's Lyotard observes. Again, the qualifier "extraterritorial" speaks to an associative halo effect that the terms concept, conceptual enjoy. (No wonder you want to grab for them.) The nonnihilistic rub is conceptualization is not game ending but generative in its affect, rendering artifacts into ideas, nonartifacts! Here is more of Brinkley's translation of Lytoard's Nietzche and then Lyotard.

Lyotard begins with an aphorism from Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, in which "it is always a renewed surprise for the writer to find that his book continues to live a life of its own as soon as it has abandoned him... [H]e might not even understand it anymore" but the book "seeks out its readers, kindles life, inspires joy and dread, engenders new works, becomes the soul of certain projects." And "if we now consider that all human action, and not just a book, in some way eventually determines other actions, resolutions, or thoughts, that everything is indissolubly linked to what will happen, we recognize that there exists a true immortality, that of movement... [A] free thought, very powerful, fully grown into its own, will bear witness that somewhere there is an ardor of sentiment extraordinarily magnified." "It is a matter of metamorphosis," Lyotard writes. "Intensive reading is the product of new and different intensities" where "the book itself, as non-book ... is simply metamorphic form ... by no means a negative loss ... [I]nsofar as it is incessant process, infinite, always displaced, decentered, shifted, the metamorphosis acts affirmatively," as Eternal Return.

The language hits a conference-going register, theological as Lyotard would have it. The argument is plainly empirical. A concept moves, "not 'innovative' ... but something unheard of," changing impulsively. Tony Brinkley's paper is here -- choose a) "discourse," b) "Lyotard's Cage."

Dear June,

I went to your reading dreaming of cutting out. I thought I went and cried. I need a new computer, just remembered. Heart shape culinary holding your tongue on the verge of resisting control, thanks to notes of civet and benzoin. Sexuality itself, pumped up to stroll the gardens' lost, slightly compact surfaces, rejoined with silver chains of seltzer formed of mercury selenide, spent in strings of carefully modulated banality.

You're Robert Duncan "rendered true." You're he, mazer, did I tell you like geometry I take up.

I long for Provincetown of the eyes. Fidgety, atwitching, acquainted with men's affairs, a gas ringed, a dun hill adopted to sever the head from the vines. "In each house he has a different name," a polygamist's modality, Oberon all about the child I was.

Far as I can tell Anne Boyer is first up on Orono, 6/16. Clark Coolidge is the best dressed, she says.

More nominees for authored-conceptual poetry. Chris Funkhouser. Jack Spicer. David Melnick. Sawako Nakayasu. Larry Eigner. Sappho. Peter Inman. Robert Grenier. Blaise Cendrars. Barbara Baracks. Sianne Ngai. John Coletti. Alli Warren. Lydia Davis. William Bronk. Anselm Berrigan. Tina Darragh. David Cameron. David Bromige. Eddie Berrigan. Aaron Kunin. John Donne. Francis Ponge. Joe Elliot. Steve Benson. Kathy Acker. Gertrude Stein. Michael Scharf. Thomas de Quincey. Karen Weiser. Suzanne Stein. Marcella Durand. Alan Sondheim. Doug Nufer. Yves Bonnefoy. Eileen Myles. Brenda Bordofsky. Emily Dickinson. Wendy Kramer. Stéphane Mallarmé. Tom Clark. Michael Scholnick. Del Ray Cross. S. T. Coleridge. Jennifer Moxley. William Shakespeare. Dodie Bellamy. Douglas Rothschild. Rod Smith. Rodrigo Toscano. Carol Mirakove. Jen Scappetone. Robert Fitterman. Kurt Schwitters. Juliana Spahr. Jeremy Prynne. Geof Huth. Katie Degentesh. Jerome Rothenberg. Brandon Brown. Lytle Shaw. David Buuck. David Larsen. Stacy Doris. Peter Seaton. Brendan Lorber. Bill Bisset. Joe Brainard. Susan Howe. Laura Elrick. bp Nichol. Keith Abbot. Richard Kostelanetz. Ben Friedlander. David Antin. Steve Hamilton. Kevin Davies. Jackson Mac Low. Brent Cunnigham. Alice Notley. Steve Malmude. Drew Gardner. kari edwards. Ted Berrigan. John Keats. Chris Nealon. Antonin Artaud. Macgregor Card. Jean Cocteau. Alexander Pope. David Schubert. Among others mentioned, below, 6/5, 6/10, 6/11.

Best free-verse critique in a comment box this week (1st post by Nicholas Manning).

Getting some miles in, taking them on board. Yes.

A soulful lab mix of appliance and beast, user-taxed, jumbles slabs of pork tortilla, melon and sausage sorbet on a woodenesque platter, putting me in mind of a future photo realism, a live feed from the network, the Fed network. Yes.

Am I . . . postracial? Yes.

$ or €? Yes.

I want all the trees shaken.

It's unnerving trying to come up with good examples of authored-conceptual poetics.

If we value novelty in conceptual artifact production, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, and colleagues outperform most writers composing poems. They do this by adopting procedures that downsize personality, rejecting as Bök puts it "the lyrical mandate of self-conscious self-assertion," favoring plagiarism, falsification, data management and, per Goldsmith, other "extreme" processes.

Yesterday, for starters, I suggested a strain of New York School poetry, gabby, sometimes persona-driven work that speaks, often wryly, expressively, to (and, egad, through) itself about poetry, art, all sorts of aesthetic thought and composition. Irony notwithstanding, this strain of poetry cannot be viewed as unself-conscious. Further, when we compare work of this strain with pieces by Bök, Goldsmith, et al., the monitor swivels and dims. It's that lopsided. The meta-texting New York poets write about their ideas; the processual poets enact them.

I'd like, then, to offer just two or three more examples of work that seems suggestive of an authored-conceptual temperament, work that might stand up better for contrasting with the processual poetry featured last week in Tucson. As I suggested 6/5, Bernadette Mayer's list of writing experiments operates as a long conceptual piece. In this regard, the list parallels texts by Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, among others, in that it constitutes a set of instructions toward artifact production. For instance:

Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that happens is in relation.

This, as well:

Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks, drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this.

It's not farfetched to see any number of younger poets taking on these ideas, Kristin Prevallet in Scratch Sides finds interest in 'looking and focusing' on snapshots and found texts, creating "The Catalogue of Lost Glimpses," a "faux-ethnographic text." Brenda Coultas's language proceeds from lived praxis evinced by "The Bowery Project," subtitled "An Experiment in Public Character" in which a narrator / researcher enacts a new life, walking already-familiar streets until they surround her entirely with their detritus, picking up discards like a dripping wet t-shirt, "seeing garbage with new eyes."

Finally, for a sustained enactment of authored concepts tinged with not a little irony and falsification, I appreciate this suggestion, from Robert Baird (in correspondence): for "an example of non-process oriented conceptual art, I think you need look no further than Araki Yasusada, who (which?) performs another kind of operation (certainly not apotheosis, but not quite destruction) on the author-function. It's obviously tricky to call that 'authored conceptual poetics,' but I think it's along the lines of what you mean..."

This just in, smut kitchenware.

Robert Baird writes in reply to my 6/5 post.

I think there's something to your argument that much of what gets described as conceptual is better described in terms of process, but I do think that one can talk about the former without talking about the latter. I actually think that KG's post about his own talk at Arizona gets right to the point when he says, "Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts." For me, the simplest way to say what "conceptual art/poetry" might mean is to say that the idea itself is the art. This stands in vigorous contrast to traditional conceptions of art, which nearly uniformly qualify art as requiring a medium, which means qualifying it as something material (or, in the case of language, symbolically material). My little pseudo-definition here obviously doesn't perfectly fit the way that Conceptual Art was used historically in art criticism, but that's a fight for another day.

Yes. Sign me up! ideation as the controlling agent to most any construct of / for the conceptual is uncontroversial. We can follow Baird, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Sol LeWitt who said it first in his numbered "Sentences on Conceptual Art," most succinctly in Number 10: "Ideas can be works of art." The greater issue and the reason I posted in the first place is that conceptual poetics, like most neologisms, is an elusive category. The Tucson conference covered a few but not all types of the new (? new-ish?) poetics, as Goldsmith has suggested in recent comments at harriet and Lime Tree. On the other hand, he still equates "uncreative" with "conceptual," a predicate for concentrating on process and procedure. Goldsmith would argue, I believe, that (c) framing boring or uncreative (b) processes within critical exposition is another element to the poetics, while the (un)original (a) idea behind the frame and the process makes the apparatus conceptual. Yes, the (a) idea of retyping or scanning a daily newspaper as poetic text, (b) doing it, and (c) calling it poetry, for example. I see these elements (a, b, c) as clear invention, common to other poetries, conceptual or not. Like any other writer, Goldsmith searches for topoi and forms to put them in. Shall I compare passion to a summer day and put it in a sonnet? Goldsmith asks, shall I transcribe weather reports to outwit commonplace representation of day and season?

These (a, b, c) comprise a processual fixation on invention, certainly a parcel of conceptualization. But where are alternative, unprocess-y or non-automaton methods for doing conceptual poetry? We can begin to think about alternatives by considering conceptual art practices. Some say only the tipping point of invention, (a), is necessary for a purely conceptual piece. Joseph Mosconi (in his commentary on Charles Alexander's post, "conceptual artists' books?") offers Lawrence Weiner and, more extreme, Marcel Broodthaers as conceptualists whose artifacts were often in the form of texts rather than physical executions of ideas. Barbara Henning (also in response to Alexander's post) suggests that Miranda Maher is another case of a practitioner who made (and altered) books of ideas.

An artist turns to a writer's tools, words and books; to what does a poet turn for capturing points of invention (a)? How would a purely authored conceptual poetry come about? The poet would have to start speaking about speech and what prompts her to do so. Last week when I took up the notion of meta-texting as one type of an authored conceptual poetics, I hastily put together an incomplete list of mostly New York School writers, hardly accidental. The meta-conversation among New York poets and artists has been longstanding. Key works from at least the first three generations of New York School poets are saturated with self-reflexive art production. Here are the first two stanzas of a piece from Tony Towle composed in the era when conceptualists LeWitt, Weiner, John Baldessari, others first put their ideas down on paper. The poem is not so ironically titled "Works on Paper."

Columns and pilasters, in general

spread over much of the composition,

then periodically erased, by sweeping reforms,

and when I climbed to the first of the pinnacles of recognition,

the highest tower I had so far caused to be made,

there was all that I could see, and the rest, which I could not

Towle's piece is a good place to begin thinking more broadly about authored conceptual poetics. (The full text is available here.) Towle and other practitioners of an ironically-conceived poetry overrely on metaphor, metonymy, and the like to outwit commonplace representation in nutty yet extremely efficient ways. Compared with privileged texts in Tucson, Towle's is a poetry that is as informed by art / lit conjectures, such as the woeful fatigue that's settled upon the author-function. Since it was written in the 70s there's no cutting edge technology, just the centrality of off-handedness "bringing out another bottle at the height of my popularity,
 / but intending to mention it to break the tragicomic composition // made wholly one or the other
 / by forgetting what I would say." Towle's meta-texting reaches in a few directions simultaneously, "all that I could see, and the rest, which I could not." It's not an idea, but ideas. One hundred stanzas of ideas. One after another, one superceding another, rapidly. For those who can quell a bias toward the non-expressive, it's a good read as well as good ideas -- some things to think about.

What is a replica poem and how is it different from the real ones? A replica poem is made similar to that of the real ones, except, at a much lower emotional cost and less time, too. 
A real Robin Blaser or Anne Waldman can go up to hundreds of hours and that adds up to dollars, but you can get a replica similar to that one,
 for only a few minutes if you know how. This allows the normal everyday poem writer to be able to look and feel classy, 
without having to actually spend such ridiculous amounts of time or thinking on it.

This seems right for an air-conditioned afternoon.

          ...in this land of lonely aliens
          shall I put away my care

none of it bears my baby
        when she tried

no facial features
or distinguishing marks
        on the ocean

-- Buck Downs

Q: If I make up a text about a text that's spoken on a tortoise shell on a tortoise shell, that is, if I write on or about the shell of a living tortoise supporting a woofer, am I a conceptualist?

A: Maybe. Sketches to follow.

There is a definitional flaw with the Kenneth Goldsmith-Marjorie Perloff experiment in theorizing: their retrieving the superordinate term conceptual to promote an array of processual poetries -- a categorical overreach. Little doubt the term conceptual evokes, first, audacious gesture, readymades from Marcel Duchamp, legendary erasure of a drawing by Willem De Kooning by young Robert Rauschenberg, or more recent, Damien Hirst's sharks suspended in formaldehyde. Hirst, Rauchenberg, Duchamp -- I imagine both Goldsmith and Perloff enjoy associating with these types of daring and achievement. Second, and more parallel to the Goldsmith-Perloff experiment, conceptual is a descriptor of New York-based art projects of the late 60s and early 70s, with linkages by broad association to Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, et al. I think this is the primary linkage intended. Indeed, Sol LeWitt comes closest to the Goldsmith-Perloff processual paradigm, having famously uttered, "idea becomes a machine that makes the art." This is only one construct from that era, however. Lawrence Weiner, in contrast, describes conceptual art as thought conveyance through which texts, written instructions, for example, substitute for or obviate artifact. With this formula we have text that proposes vignettes and procedures for imagining artifacts such as poetry, which results in an Occam's razor-like approach to conceptualization, a lean and potentially cool treatment or abstract, a metatext, in any event. Around the time LeWitt, Weiner, and Baldessari first practiced, poets were meta-texting with varying coolness, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Aram Saroyan, Ray DiPalma, Jennifer Bartlett, Ted Berrigan, Bruce Andrews, Jamie MacInnis, Ron Padgett, Larry Fagin, Jim Brodey, and others, their poems built in part on compressed vignettes and linguistic what-ifs, propositions about (and within) propositions, each an idea "that makes the art."

The reasoning to follow needs to address Mayer's Studying Hunger, her list of writing experiments as well as Charles Bernstein's adaptations, additional samples from Coolidge, Ashbery, and others building their ideas toward ideas. We need to make the more specific case for their having maintained the so-called author-function versus shifting that function via mechanics and other maneuvers of process (transcriptions of radio broadcasts, e.g.). In sum, it's necessary to distinguish between at least two kinds of temperament for conceptual poetics, one authored, if you will, and one processed. For sure, there are numerous examples of text production that conflates these temperaments. Also, with regard to the novelty of contemporary process constraints on practice, fiddling with authorship, authority, and originality underpins the impassive gaming and automaton features common to earlier process-oriented text experimentation by John Cage, the Oulipo poets, others who are precursors to the Goldsmith-Perloff paradigm. Robert Baird argues in the comment section under Goldsmith's entry at harriet (5/30) that in effect the salience to today's unoriginal (or uncreative or boring) processual poetry centers not so much on the power of its ideas or concepts as on its distillation of author-function:

Goldsmith's originality lies not in destroying the author-function but in raising it to its purely formal apotheosis: he's demonstrated that the most radical refinement of the author-function so far is the author who doesn't have to write. And allow me to repeat: securing that apotheosis is an achievement, it is an act of genius, but it is both of these things because it's original.

Why not, simply, a processual poetics? One problem in conferring the broader term conceptual poetics to process-oriented production emerges within the presumption that a regulated methodology is essential to conceptualization, and by extension, such methodology achieves a higher scale of reasoning and mental prowess than other kinds of text, evident in Craig Dworkin's rhetorical questions from the Introduction to his "Anthology of Conceptual Writing," published on Goldsmith's Ubuweb:

...what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with "spontaneous overflow" supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process?

These descriptors point to a subset of conceptual poetry, but not the whole set.

A colonel-general. What a night. No problem
Erasing the storied narrative and
The ordinary stuff that was normal, believable

Then that,

Waking up, hay-feverish, stuffed-up spirit
Standing far off across
Yours, just dreaming it up

In the very era or epoch of arctic night, vision
Making -- it will never move or transform
Even a mote so that something goes away

Not even the mote as subject, nothing
To keep from you forever
Nothing, seen forever.

Twisted I am, torn putting together reflections on Marjorie Perloff's downgrade of language poetry and, my good woman, reducing her own analytical field of concentration to "period style." I don't have her paper as a primary source so I'm referencing Kenneth Goldsmith's summation / advert of 5/30 at harriet. Until I have more from Perloff, I'll register my resistance to the new war cry, unoriginal genius, through which Goldsmith and Perloff finalize their merger. She seizes the term as a title for her new book, he teaches workshops deploying uncreative as a rubric. At minimum this intergenerational combine demonstrates how it's done -- hammer out a procedural, formalist bias into a theme, roll it into a conference (to which you invite celebrities you come to bury), devise ad hoc teaching methods, publicize papers and then a book around the package. Deal.

Bo Diddley, R.I.P.

Protection, no outreach. Thanks.

I could begin with holy shit! But what I will say is nobody illustrates the foreboding and the inexorable foolishness to sublimity better than Ron Padgett. From "The Alpinist."

From up here I can see both my head
and my body and the river between
and when the river stops flowing
I will find myself next to a hut in the Alps
with cows and flowers but without words

But that's for later

Yves Saint Laurent, R.I.P.