Tan Lin turned me on to the work David Bunn, who some years ago took possession of the entire Los Angeles public library’s card catalogue. Tan had noticed my interest in Erica Baum’s word-centered photography of old catalogues, and suggested I get to know Bunn's project.
Leah Ollman wrote an article for Art in America on Bunn in 2000, and here are two passages:
As libraries replace their card catalogues with on-line databases, the cards themselves--obsolete, bulky, worn--are usually discarded. Artist David Bunn rescued two million such cards and, in his elegant installations, directs our attention to the strong poetic voice still coursing through them. In 1990, David Bunn took possession of the two million cards in the Los Angeles Central Library’s catalogue somewhat in the manner of an eccentric heir claiming the unwanted portion of an estate. To administrators at the library, the card catalogue was not so much an inheritance as the deceased itself. Its contents had been made available on-line several years earlier, and it sat, an unwieldy, inconvenient corpse, awaiting suitable disposal. Why fill a storeroom with information that can now be saved on a chip the size of a postage stamp?
In philosophy and art humanity is no longer worthy of our enquiry or representation. Philosophy as an attention to human problems must yield to science dealing with mechanical masses of non-human material. The questions of medicine, hygiene and psychology are being relegated gradually to physiology. Art no longer attempts to mirror man, or the things in nature as seen by man, but depicts unrecognisable patterns which are like nothing on earth—lines, cubes, inhuman designs. The art of representing visible likeness is relegated to the science of photography. The philosophies and arts of one age are the exact sciences of the next. Philosophy, searching for what is true, and art, searching for what is new, may be discovered as being always out in front of society, in the vanguard; while the sciences and industries—the more utilitarian and moralistic activities—may be considered as forming the main body of the army, moving into the positions the spearhead establishes. This division of labour is rarely seen operating on a large scale, but viewing the world as a whole it will be seen that the humanism which has inspired so many of the great philosophers and artists of the past is a goal attained. We have arrived at humanity; there is work for science, enormous work—but the vanguard has to look to new goals ahead. — Harry Hooton, excerpt from "Problems are Flowers and Fade," from Things You See When You Haven't Got a Gun, self-published booklet, 1943.
Over the last few months, Harry Hooton has been on my mind. His name has been mentioned a number of times as I have progressed through this archival project, and on my first visit to Amanda Stewart's house she lent me a copy of Poet of the 21st Century: Harry Hooton, Collected Poems, selected and introduced by Sasha Soldatow and published by Angus & Robertson in 1990. I didn't open the book until I knew I could take it to bed and read it entirely. My gut told me Harry and Sasha would eat me, my night, my bed, effortlessly. And they did!
Yunte Huang on racist immigration law in sweet home Alabamaa
Who but the ever marvelous Yunte Huang could possibly get away with this marvelous opening sentence in an op-ed piece in today's TImes Sunday Review: "IMAGINE this: It’s Sunday morning, beautiful and quiet, except for the mockingbird practicing comic routines on the sweet gum tree in the backyard."
Ruth Perry of MIT has written a chapter for a volume being edited by Ellen Pollak, A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment, to be published by Berg/Palgrave. This work will be part of an illustrated, six-volume Cultural History of Women being assembled with a general audience in mind. Ruth Perry's topic is Anna Gordon Brown, whose repertoire of English ballads was the first to be tapped and written down by antiquarians and literary scholars in the eighteenth century, at a time when scholars feared that the oral tradition was in danger of disappearing forever. It turns out that Ruth Perry, aside from being an eminent scholar of the ballad tradition in English, is a talented ballad singer herself. As of today, PennSound has added to its "Classics" page a studio recording of Perry performing “Burd Ellen,” generally deemed to be one of the most beautiful of Brown's ballads.
Mere alphabetic adjacency
Tan Lin turned me on to the work David Bunn, who some years ago took possession of the entire Los Angeles public library’s card catalogue. Tan had noticed my interest in Erica Baum’s word-centered photography of old catalogues, and suggested I get to know Bunn's project.
Leah Ollman wrote an article for Art in America on Bunn in 2000, and here are two passages:
As libraries replace their card catalogues with on-line databases, the cards themselves--obsolete, bulky, worn--are usually discarded. Artist David Bunn rescued two million such cards and, in his elegant installations, directs our attention to the strong poetic voice still coursing through them. In 1990, David Bunn took possession of the two million cards in the Los Angeles Central Library’s catalogue somewhat in the manner of an eccentric heir claiming the unwanted portion of an estate. To administrators at the library, the card catalogue was not so much an inheritance as the deceased itself. Its contents had been made available on-line several years earlier, and it sat, an unwieldy, inconvenient corpse, awaiting suitable disposal. Why fill a storeroom with information that can now be saved on a chip the size of a postage stamp?
Problems are flowers and fade
In philosophy and art humanity is no longer worthy of our enquiry or representation. Philosophy as an attention to human problems must yield to science dealing with mechanical masses of non-human material. The questions of medicine, hygiene and psychology are being relegated gradually to physiology. Art no longer attempts to mirror man, or the things in nature as seen by man, but depicts unrecognisable patterns which are like nothing on earth—lines, cubes, inhuman designs. The art of representing visible likeness is relegated to the science of photography. The philosophies and arts of one age are the exact sciences of the next. Philosophy, searching for what is true, and art, searching for what is new, may be discovered as being always out in front of society, in the vanguard; while the sciences and industries—the more utilitarian and moralistic activities—may be considered as forming the main body of the army, moving into the positions the spearhead establishes. This division of labour is rarely seen operating on a large scale, but viewing the world as a whole it will be seen that the humanism which has inspired so many of the great philosophers and artists of the past is a goal attained. We have arrived at humanity; there is work for science, enormous work—but the vanguard has to look to new goals ahead. — Harry Hooton, excerpt from "Problems are Flowers and Fade," from Things You See When You Haven't Got a Gun, self-published booklet, 1943.
Over the last few months, Harry Hooton has been on my mind. His name has been mentioned a number of times as I have progressed through this archival project, and on my first visit to Amanda Stewart's house she lent me a copy of Poet of the 21st Century: Harry Hooton, Collected Poems, selected and introduced by Sasha Soldatow and published by Angus & Robertson in 1990. I didn't open the book until I knew I could take it to bed and read it entirely. My gut told me Harry and Sasha would eat me, my night, my bed, effortlessly. And they did!
Keith Tuma reviews Mina Loy
From Jacket #5 (1998)
Loy at Last
Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger L. Conover (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996)
Mockingbird practicing comic routine
Yunte Huang on racist immigration law in sweet home Alabamaa
Who but the ever marvelous Yunte Huang could possibly get away with this marvelous opening sentence in an op-ed piece in today's TImes Sunday Review: "IMAGINE this: It’s Sunday morning, beautiful and quiet, except for the mockingbird practicing comic routines on the sweet gum tree in the backyard."
'Burd Ellen,' performed by Ruth Perry
Ruth Perry of MIT has written a chapter for a volume being edited by Ellen Pollak, A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment, to be published by Berg/Palgrave. This work will be part of an illustrated, six-volume Cultural History of Women being assembled with a general audience in mind. Ruth Perry's topic is Anna Gordon Brown, whose repertoire of English ballads was the first to be tapped and written down by antiquarians and literary scholars in the eighteenth century, at a time when scholars feared that the oral tradition was in danger of disappearing forever. It turns out that Ruth Perry, aside from being an eminent scholar of the ballad tradition in English, is a talented ballad singer herself. As of today, PennSound has added to its "Classics" page a studio recording of Perry performing “Burd Ellen,” generally deemed to be one of the most beautiful of Brown's ballads.