Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
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DISCUSSION

symbolist


Browsing The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (wonderful
bathroom reading) i came across a passage concerning the French symbolist
poets (late nineteenth century) that i thought was interesting in digital
contexts:

"Mallarme's conception of 'pure poetry' was of a point at which poetry would
attain complete linguistic autonomy, the words themselves taking over the
initiative and creating the meanings, liberating themselves from the
semiotic tyranny of the language and the deliberate intentions of the poet.
With Mallarme, subject matter is a function of an intense preoccupation with
the medium. Speculation in this direction reached its limit in Valery, who
eventually found the processes of poetic composition more interesting than
the poetry itself."

That's from the encyclopedia's entry on 'pure poetry'. Of course, the notion
of 'pure poetry' is at least as problematical, now, as many another
essentialist take on things. Problematical in many ways, not least of which
is the desirability and usefulness of any notion of 'pure poetry'. But I
found the notion of words themselves attaining some active autonomy from the
deliberate intentions of the poet a beautiful thing. And of course relevant
to digital poetics in that digital documents have not only content and style
but also behavior, so that many a digital poem attempts, one way or another,
to confer some type/degree of independence on the words themselves, give
each word (or some unit(s)) behavior/active process.

Also, I was delighted to read of Mallarme's 'intense preoccupation with the
medium'. Such a concern seems still not to be widely understood, even after
McLuhan. Media are active, whether we wish it so or not, in the rhetoric of
attention focus, meaning construction, and the general framing. Artistic
concern with media, even 'intense preoccupation with the medium' is, at its
own peril, oblivious to the other 'material' of art--the two types of
'material' are of concern, obviously, not solely the medium--but one without
the other, ie, concern for 'content' without understanding of media or, on
the other hand, 'intense preoccupation with the medium' without committment
to human affairs--each is usually without the sort of vitality we associate
with art.

Finally, I was interested to read that Valery "eventually found the
processes of poetic composition more interesting than the poetry itself."
The word "eventually" may be telling. Over the course of a lifetime of
reading and 'continuing to think to continue', it seems possible to come to
a point at which one may continue to be an artist yet hardly be interested
in "the poetry itself" or 'the paintings themselves', or whatever, and
concentrate, instead, on either "the processes of poetic composition" or
other similarly somewhat meta-level aspects of "the poetry itself".

And this needn't be erm wankery. The analogue in mathematics, for instance,
is concern not so much with 'the mathematics itself' so much as with
meta-mathematics, or formal systems. And, as you may know, such concerns
with the foundations of mathematics have, arguably, produced the most
profound results of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (non-Euclidean
geometry -> axiomatizing the real number system -> set theory -> the
transfinite -> Godel's incompleteness theorems -> Turing's solving Hilbert's
decision problem). And has resulted in language becoming a subject of study
in mathematics itself, and of course the rise of the language machines.

To which, of course, poetry must respond. It cannot go on for long that the
most intense engagements with language take place in fields such as
mathematics and its formulation of the theory of computation without poetry
comprehending it. 'Comprehending' as in taking it inside.

Symbolists. I see.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

PRIME wins inaugural peace prize


The Institute of International Education gave Dan Bar-On (an Israeli) and
Sami Adwan (a Palestinian) the inaugural Goldberg IIE prize (
http://www.iie.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Programs7/Goldberg_Prize/Goldberg_
Prize.htm ). This prize is for efforts in trying to build peace in the
Middle East. A press release from the American embassy in Tel Aviv about it
is at http://vispo.com/PRIME/goldbergprize.htm

The particular project they were awarded for is called "Learning Each
Other's Historical Narrative". Actually it's quite an interesting project
you might want to check out. As Sami and Dan say:

"This project of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME)
focuses on teachers and schools as the critical force over the long term for
changing deeply entrenched and increasingly polarized attitudes on both
sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The goal of the project is to
"disarm" the teaching of Middle East history in Israeli and Palestinian
classrooms."
http://vispo.com/PRIME/leohn.htm

I'm proud to host and work on Dan and Sami's site PRIME (Peace Research
Institute in the Middle East) at http://vispo.com/PRIME with my friend Sid
Tafler.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

history


an
an always
an always already
an always already made
an always already made plain:
one more person in generation d
than in generations a, b, and c combined.

a
/
b b
/ /
c c c c
/ / / /
d dd dd dd d

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

topleftpixel.com


interesting photos of (mostly) toronto:
http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/archives/photos_textures/040919_835.shtml . one
or more photos each day for several years.

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: eh?


This is what they say of one of Galbraith's books:

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)
Made Americans dissatisfied with the ineradicable fact of poverty. Led to
foolish public policies that produced the hell that was the 1960s.

Now there's a terrible thing to have done, 'made Americans dissatisfied with
the ineradicable fact of poverty.' While it may be that, in a capitalist
society, some amount of poverty is 'ineradicable', the gap between the rich
and the poor does not have to be as dramatic as it has become since the
Reagan era. To be satisfied with the extent of poverty in the USA and the
obscene gulf between the opportunities available to the rich and the poor
strikes me as the sort of oppressive mentality that people tried to escape
in coming to the 'new world'.

I was born in 1959, so I was pretty young during the sixties. But my friends
have usually been older than me, 'children of the sixties', whereas I was
but a kid in the sixties. Raising questions about social justice and acting
strongly and generously on these are the hallmark of that generation. They
were not satisfied that poverty was ineradicable and many of them tried
valiantly to do something about it. The sixties were a time of incredible
social ferment, artistic innovation, and social progress, in many ways.
This should not be discounted.

The apathy and smug satisfaction that followed with the suffering of others
seems more to me like hell. Galbraith is one of the shining and generous
figures of enlightenment. To read him cast as a fool is chilling.

ja

> Here is a more comprehensive 50 worst and 50 best list:
> http://www.isi.org/journals/ir/50best_worst/index.html