enter these starved and broken pieces

I don't know I don't know I don't know. Managing to forge a "whole" work out of this mess, the operation keeps getting interrupted for long stretches of time. As always, the underlying intuition is that this is the whole, that there is nothing to wait for, here we are, etc. I withheld certain parts of the mix that I put together in May while at the Visual Studies Workshop, since I thought posting them would preempt any release of this "whole;" but now listening to what I had managed to put together, while taking account of what has been collected in the meantime, I know it will all change again. Or maybe I'm closer to the end than I'm letting myself admit. In any case, I've decided to post the significantly new parts of the bigger work here, given they will probably entirely change or be folded into a different continuum. Current misgivings annotated.
Possible Intro (1 min. 35 sec.)
well, even though it's intentionally clunky, for something that I've spent so much time on it's probably not an appropriate opening, especially since the pandering, sterile beat gives it the feel of a public radio PSA on monitoring your cholesterol.
It's the locality! (1 min. 33 sec.)
I love Williams' quote that art is not "putting sugar on cake." A crucial bit from the PennSound bytes. Exposition, exposition so . . . yawn? (one person has told me it's boring for those who already know Williams-- the core audience; evidence of constant my schizophrenia concerning who it's for and who will listen. But wait, it's not all sugar on cake, buddy!)
Have you ever been to Paterson? (2 min. 5 sec.)
Cloying? Also, when editing, I had a lot of trouble making the Carole Maso samples really sound like they fit; I still think they might be a little off, even though they provide some crucial connective material and diversity of voice (I found myself overusing Bob Perelman and Lytle Shaw throughout, so any chance I had to get other material in, I took it.)
Blocked (4 min. 31 sec.)
I think this section is the most successful at doing what I wanted the piece to be doing, a mix between informational and musique concrete elements. I do think that, as it goes on it succumbs to the banality of overused effects, which, while may have some place in a more live setting, I think falls a little flat here after a while. For some reason, I think the loops and delays and filter sweeps went on for so long because I wanted to get some particular sound bites in, but but by the time that they fade up into the mix, it already feels like they've been "said" on a subconscious level.

Buried Heterogeneity: Lytle Shaw on Paterson

Writer Lytle Shaw talks about Williams, Smithson, site specific art, poetry of place, geological samples, crystals and the "stupid ass things" Williams is capable of. I had planned to save this material for mixing into another Paterson radiophonic study, but it's worthwhile posting it fully here. I conducted this interview 10-20-06 in New York City. Stay tuned to hear it make its way into a more multifarious material stratum.
Lytle Shaw talks about the relation of Paterson to his work: (7 min.)
On the songlike passages in Paterson: (1 min. 30 sec.)
Is Paterson like a fractal?:(1 min. 50 sec.)
Paterson the city, poetics of place and site-specificity: (6 min. 40 sec.)

Notes on the Paragram: Poetry and Comedy

Sometimes the best insights come while watching television in hotel rooms. I had a minor Raymond Williams moment the other night in Ardmore, PA, watching Family Guy after coming across the word “paragram” used to describe certain poetic effects (see Perloff, McCaffery, Kristeva, Roudiez, Marsh.) The episode begins with Peter playing Wheel of Fortune and it’s clear that he is so oblivious to the basic rules and generic conventions of the show that he calls the host “Regis,” rattles off a string of hilariously useless “letters,” and doesn’t understand that the “fat man in the circle” is a keyed-in video image of himself. If you look up paragram, you’ll see that it merely means a “pun.” But, I think it is used in the context of poetic theory to imply more broadly what happens when the meaning of a word oscillates because of the unstable rules by which we are to understand it. We appraise the word through a montage of contexts, rather than a montage of words themselves. Compare, for example, the use of a word in Futurism and one in Language Poetry. The Futurist word is a verbal piece of shrapnel, an object-in-itself, flung; whereas the Language Poetry word radiates in multiple dimensions precisely because we are not sure how to take it. Lytle Shaw talks about this dynamic in the Williams-inspired work of Robert Smithson, whose word pile we saw in the last entry. Shaw says that Smithson engages multiple genres such as “science fiction, geology, travel narrative, philosophy, poetry, art criticism, pulp drug novel, cartography, and film treatment” (124) to force the extreme dislocation of his non-sites, his various concrete poems (“concrete” in various dimensions; “poem” in various dimensions). So it is that, for Williams' Paterson, we are immediately given directions how to “take” the book; those directions are just as immediately thwarted. At the beginning of Book I, Williams sets out a kind of subtitle to Paterson:

“: a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration;
in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause;
hard to put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.” (2)

Subtitles tend to place and frame the work, but this list of genera is more like Borges’ example of the Chinese encyclopedia. What is Paterson? Some of the answers veer towards the surreal (Paterson is a basket) some defy the basic grammatical premise (Paterson is in distinctive terms). Rather than an exploration of the materiality of the signifier, this type of humor banks on the immateriality of the premises which give sense to the signifier. After all, Paterson can be spring, summer, fall and the sea, the batman symbol and Alex Karras in Webster.