Commentaries - May 2013

Managing language in the digital age, digitally

Goldsmith’s book Uncreative Writing presented in its digital entirety simultaneously forwards and backwards, by Mab MacMoragh: [VIDEO]

Headers up!

[N.B. : My dear editors have pointed out a problem with my using this image for the commentary's header, which is to say that the black background obscures my name and the column's title.  As someone who has lived with an obscure name lo these many years, I would have been willing to chance it, but in the interests of consistency of style across our Jackets I have replaced the banner with another. The image lives on here, however, hovering over all that shall soon follow.]

 

I’m going to start simply by telling the story of this image.

Anna Everett was a young woman from Washington, D.C., who moved to Buffalo, N.Y., in the early 1970s to live with relatives while finishing her high school education.  As a new student, she was sent to Lafayette High School, which was only then being integrated.  If you’ve read about the integration and bussing battles of that era, you can well imagine the challenges she faced. There weren't attacks on school buses by angry mobs as in Boston, but there were groups of white parents picketing the approach to the school and making it abundantly clear to the small group of black students that they were not welcomed by all.  With all deliberate speed, Everett set about making her mark at Lafayette.  

Kimberly Lyons looks for Mina Loy

Photo of Lyons by Tim Trace Peterson.

In May of 1992, Kimberly Lyons gave a Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn in New York. As of today (thanks to PennSound’s Anna Zalakostas) this reading by Lyons, and several others, have been segmented. Among the poems Lyons read at the Ear Inn in ’92: “Looking for Mina Loy” [MP3].

Douglas Messerli on Richard Foreman's new play Old Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)

The Unfortunate Truth of My Situation

Richard Foreman Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)

The Public Theater, New York, the performance I attended was on Saturday, May 4, 2013.

After years and years of enigmatic and provocative plays, and after having announced that he was giving up playwriting for filmmaking, Richard Foreman has come back with a new play that at times almost appears to be a kind of film script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance). Like most of his works, this play is set upon a stage decked out with numerous alphabetical configurations, portraits of “significant” people, numerous odd props, and the strings that outline the horizontal shell of the stage, a kind of mix between a metaphorical representation of string theory and an eruv, the defining territory of the traditional Jewish community that outlines the boundaries through which certain objects can be moved or carried on holy days.

Beyond eco-slave names: gibb(ev(er)y(where(aware

A conservation with a rawlings

a.rawlings: from Gibberland
a.rawlings: image from 'Gibberland'

“Does [writing] need to be an act composed by a human entity?” a rawlings asks in her online multidisciplinary work, Gibber

This naturally leads to questions about reading: What can we read? How can we read? She writes, that “Gibber hinges on exploring notions that humans read their environments and/or that humans are in conversation with landscapes and the inhabiting non-human species.”