This getting ready to be gone from work thing turns out to be far more work than one would have hoped. But meanwhile, SPD has a new site and a new blog. Live the dream!

Thanks to Brent and Neil and the whole team who have been working hard on this for months but especially thanks to Andrew Kenower who has also gotten more of the Aggression Conference talks up on his site.

More soon, with any luck.

I was very sorry to hear yesterday that Alfred Arteaga has died. He was a friend and member of this blog whose writing and teaching, most recently at UC Berkeley, were hugely valued. Here is a note about him by Barbara Jane Reyes, one of many.

Bruce Conner has also died. I never actually met him but have been a huge admirer of his work forever.

They were two of the good ones.

Notes on The Route by Patrick Durgin and Jen Hofer (Atelos, 2008)

1.

I spent last weekend luxuriating in the extra day, staring out the window, holed up in my garage/library in my giant office chair, writing my head off, seeming to myself like a crazy ham radio operator in touch with other planets. While writing I like to listen to the radio along with such musics as Tim Hecker (Radio Amor is my fave though I should like Harmony in Ultraviolet & do), Stockhausen, Rachels, Steve Reich (18 Musicians for how it reminds me of my past), an old Micheal Hoenig album (ditto) burned for me by Andrew Joron (Departure to the Northern Wasteland) and various by Andrew Bird, on tour with whom, if I am not mistaken, is where Patrick is right now. That might mean that if you like these kinds of things, you will like The Route. But, trust me, even if you don’t, you will like it anyway or even if you are not destined to “like it,” it is worth reading because Patrick and Jen variously address many issues that a lot of people are thinking about right now. Some of these are paradise, politics -- both in thinking about effectiveness and the language we use to speak about it -- translation, synesthesia (a lot about this), poetics, of course, & multiply. Love comes up -- for each other, for people, for music, for drops on the window. (Jen apparently spends a certain amount of time staring out hers as well.) The genre of letters, contextualized by poems, contextualized by other letters and more poems is nice, making you want to begin immediately composing your own letters/poems/ aphorisms to your friends or to them and so I have and so I will continue to do for a time or two.

2.

Say there are two people at a table and both have a lot of power but

(“So” “Little” “Time”) [p. 28]

They joke thinking of the swiftness they share

(Rapport Plastics Thistles) [p. 81]

These are just letters

As in true notes

Like this is a list

Or these words

Coded additions

Make up the poem

Part of the poem

Risks

A sense of the word is

Achieves

“becoming other than
completely cool” [p. 129]

More soon