Saturday, September 27, 2003
Daphne Oram, electronic music pioneer: Francis Bacon, New Atlantis: "Wee have also Sound-Houses, wher wee practise and demonstrate all Sounds, and their Generation. Wee have Harmonies which you have not, of Quarter-Sounds and lesser Slides of Sounds. Diverse Instruments of Musick likewise to you unknowne, some sweeter then any you have; Together with Bells and Rings that are dainty and sweet. Wee represent Small Sounds as Great and Deepe; Likewise Great Sounds, Extenuate and Sharpe; Wee make diverse Tremblings and Warblings of Sounds, which in their Originall are Entire. Wee rep resent and imitate all Articulate Sounds and Letters, and the Voices and Notes of Beasts and Birds. Wee have certaine Helps, which sett to the Eare doe further the Hearing greatly. Wee have also diverse Strange and Artificiall Eccho's, Reflecting the Voice many times, and as it were Tossing it; And some that give back the Voice Lowder then it came, some Shriller, and some Deeper; Yea, some rendring the Voice, Differing in the Letters or Articulate Sound, from that they receyve. Wee have also meanes to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines, and Distances."
Delia Derbyshire: "'My most beautiful sound at the time was a tatty green BBC lampshade,' she recalled. 'It was the wrong colour, but it had a beautiful ringing sound to it. I hit the lampshade, recorded that, faded it up into the ringing part without the percussive start.
'I analysed the sound into all of its partials and frequencies, and took the 12 strongest, and reconstructed the sound on the workshop's famous 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs.' "
'I analysed the sound into all of its partials and frequencies, and took the 12 strongest, and reconstructed the sound on the workshop's famous 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs.' "
Friday, September 26, 2003
Edward Said: "The total rejection, the utter irrational condemnation, the blanket denunciation of complex phenomena such as Wagner is an irrational and finally unacceptable thing, just as in our situation as Arabs, it has been a stupid and wasteful policy for so many years to use phrases like 'the Zionist entity' and completely refuse to understand and analyse Israel and Israelis on the grounds that their existence must be denied because they caused the Palestinian nakba. History is a dynamic thing, and if we expect Israeli Jews not to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people, we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place, and that Israelis are all, man, woman, and child, doomed to our eternal enmity and hostility. Nothing historical is frozen in time; nothing in history is immune to change; nothing in history is beyond reason, beyond understanding, beyond analysis and influence. Politicians can say all the nonsense they wish and do what they want, and so can professional demagogues. But for intellectuals, artists, and free citizens, there must always be room for dissent, for alternative views, for ways and possibilities to challenge the tyranny of the majority and, at the same time and most important, to advance human enlightenment and liberty. "
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Spirals in Nature: The Magical Number behind Hurricanes and Galaxies: "You can visualize the effect by imagining an old-fashioned record album spinning on a turntable. Suppose you draw a chalk line from the edge of the record to the center while it is spinning -- the line will be curved even though your motion is straight."
The Globe and Mail: "Under certain weather conditions, sound can refract, and the focal point may be many miles away from the source.
The sound may actually be louder at the focal point (many miles away) than it is in the immediate vicinity of the explosion.
'Today is a typical day, with clouds, when you'll get a temperature inversion,' he said Wednesday. 'This is a classic situation where you have a focusing of sound. It might be further out than you think. It might even be in Vancouver.' "
The sound may actually be louder at the focal point (many miles away) than it is in the immediate vicinity of the explosion.
'Today is a typical day, with clouds, when you'll get a temperature inversion,' he said Wednesday. 'This is a classic situation where you have a focusing of sound. It might be further out than you think. It might even be in Vancouver.' "
Happy Birthday Glenn Gould : "The role of the forger, of the unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. And when the forger is done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly integral part of our civilization."
Why was I not informed of this?: "Some writers have genial relationships with their critics. Jilly Cooper responds to positive reviews by sending the reviewers thank-you notes and even presents. A colleague of mine received a bar of soap and a note thanking her for the 'darlingest' review, though she was later peeved to hear that the authors of some even darlinger reviews seemed to have got champagne. "
David Kipen: "This time around, according to Merriam-Webster's Wilkinson, the 11th edition bounced not just snollygoster but also microcopy, microreader, microreproduction, record changer, portapak, pantdress, pocket-handkerchief, poke bonnet, vitamin G, lantern pinion, frutescent, impudicity, wool stapler, long play, retirant, sheep-dip, ten-cent store and traffic manager. A few hundred more, too, but nobody keeps a special list. "
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Bellona Times brilliant and right on as ever today. I didn't know Yeats had said that about Keats--he'd better not come around here.
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
The day the sky stood still: "A contrail is not smoke, as I fancied as a child. It's not even an emission, really, at least not in the true sense of the word. Much of what you see when you look at a contrail is water that was present in the atmosphere before the jet came along. A contrail is a cloud, as surely as a thunderhead boiling up over a prairie on a summer afternoon. A cloud of ice, birthed by the happenstance of a passing jet."
from New Years by David Perry (braincase c/o
Noah Eli Gordon PO Box 1471
Northampton, MA 01061) :
"CAT STOPS HER PACING in response to my glance. I thought I was being smooth. "
Noah Eli Gordon PO Box 1471
Northampton, MA 01061) :
"CAT STOPS HER PACING in response to my glance. I thought I was being smooth. "
Equanimity - if not a poetics, then what?: "Involuntary sensation this morning of biting into an immense powdered donut." And when he woke up, his pillow was gone!!
After Theory by Terry Eagleton: "Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. "
Officials unable to explain powerful blast that shook Nanaimo (CP WIRE) I think it was a meth lab personally...
End of line for Redbird subway cars-- I had one of these all to myself my first ride to Coney, except for some lazy pigeons who rode free for a couple of stops.
Monday, September 22, 2003
I wanted to wait until it was actually in my hands before I said anything, so am pleased this morning to announce that my book of poems "Hammertown" is out from New Star Books. It costs 16 dollars in Canada, 12 in the US, and it's ISBN is 1-55420-000-8. It will be launched at KSW in Vancouver on the 18th of October. I will also be reading from it at St Mark's in NYC on the 22nd (with George Stanley), SUNY Buffalo on the 24th (with Bernadette Mayer) and Aerial Edge Books in Washington, DC (with George again) on the 26th. Anyone reading this within range of those spots is cordially invited.
NICK DRAKE: Exiled From Heaven : "Postmodern urban cynics will already be busy deconstructing this. A bourgeois fantasy of rural life that never existed; a dream; an evasion. Well, yes; up to a point. I've lived in the countryside for fifteen years and I can see what it 'really' is as I speed through it in my car. Certainly, it's as much a social construction as anything else is, or isn't. But after writing the previous paragraph, I went downstairs to make a cup of tea and, when I paused to look out of the window, the human-husbanded utilitarian landscape of interlocking lanes and fields and neatly-pruned woodland which I normally see was suddenly deep, suddenly enveloping. I'm living in the country, I realised, as if briefly coming awake. And it's magical. Minutes later, after the kettle boiled, my ecstasy had lapsed and the view had returned to normal. So was the experience 'real'? It arose through contemplation summoned by writing 'poetically' about the outer world as inner experience. And the fact is that if we could live in that state all the time, that enveloping, magical view would be reality. "
A Bad Impression : " I don't blame Johnson for this train wreck of a show. If anything, I feel for him, since his money, and the splashy art it lets him make, get him public scrutiny that an Ohio butter sculptor doesn't have to face"
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Hellfire Nation: "Americans commonly attribute their economic advantages over a lethargic and decadent Europe to the fact that free enterprise in the United States does not find itself shackled to a bloated public sector. While social welfare provision is much more restricted than in Europe, the prison statistics qualify the notion that Americans dislike big government. America has more than six million citizens in jail, on probation or on parole, with an incarceration rate, Morone notes, five times higher than other industrialised democracies. Inside America's slimline government there's clearly a big state trying to get out: 'Only an unusually muscular state could push 3 per cent of the adult population into its criminal justice system.' "
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