Mindfulness of Detail

More trundling thru Naropa archives. I'm reminded how great a teacher Ginsberg was, how highly conscious he was of the language he was using even as he was talking about it, his tools no dull calipers, but perhaps language on language, lipping further. extracting excaliber? even with the mechanics of meter, a blast from the grammar school past, which takes up the bulk of this file, he brings the foot back to the dance. Anapest, trochee, and dactyl. Mouthing and the breath stop where idiot winds go. By the time he gets through all these meters that Williams doesn't do, you get a better sense of what he actually does.

Tomorrow!: Williams @ 125 LIVE

Tune in tomorrow to the Kelly Writers House live webcast celebrating William Carlos Williams' 125th birthday (when it's 125 yrs., what're a couple months give or take?).
With its live poetics-oriented broadcasts, KWH-TV will provide mighty competition to Philadelphia's Delightfully changeless Action News Team. Watch out Jim Gardner and Lisa Thomas-Laury! There is a news that stays news longer than your staying news!
Live feed tomorrow Nov 11 @ 6:00pm EST (3:00pm Pacific)

What's There?!: Herb Blau on Paterson

I asked theater legend, writer, and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington, Herbert Blau if there was a quality of consciousness in Paterson that has analogies to what goes on in experimental drama. He took this question for a ride, uninterrupted, resulting in this hypnotic read of Book One, without me having to say much else. The interview took place on 8-8-08 in his Seattle home. I’ve known Herb for close to 15 years, but that is just a sliver of his career, which has included directing some of the first productions of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and Genet in the US. He was also co-founder of San Francisco’s Actor’s Studio; co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York; one of the conceptual architects of CalArts; artistic director of the experimental theater group KRAKEN; and author of numerous books that, with a blooded prose that he considers theater in itself, take on theater’s impossible limits and the indelible impact of the image on thought. He is also an indefagitable teacher; while some fancy professors are phoning it in at 50, Blau continues to be a tireless and available resource for his students at 82.
Theater, Consciousness, Paterson, & Various Readings of Book I: (34:58)
Bonus Fragment: (2:35)

Democracy

"Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness"

Naropa on Williams

Following up on our last post, Ginsberg starts this lecture on Williams with a discussion of smell.
Since starting this project, I haven't gone back to the online Naropa archives to discover or revisit any references to Williams. It seems there is quite a bit here to work through. I definitely need a new iPod, the collision of which with archive.org instigated my first access to the intellectual life of this western haven (which, while exerting a fascination, was always either too expensive or too distant to get a taste of). I'll report on any particularly juicy findings as I work through this deterritorialized detritus. Of other talks here, some of my favorites are Peter Warshall on red squirrels and the cosmos, anything by Burroughs or Peter Lamborn Wilson. I would steer clear of the Harry Smith recordings, which I kept giving a chance, but they never came through; they are poorly recorded, and, in addition, because near the end of his life, were mumbly and incoherent. Sadly. (If anybody can find anything in the Smith materials to disabuse me, please pass on.)
(Of interest: Naropa Remix.)