You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Hey, hey, to the payday, ándale
Chocolate Souffle, The Don of Diamond Dreams, Shabazz Palaces.
Honey’s proliferate my image on Monday’s, rappers look at me thinking, “One day”
My soliloquy is killer bee, I feel like I’m doing ventriloquy
Oh my, another slice of peach apple pie
[NAME] is opening up a storefront at 6572 SW 40th Street. We’re having a little party to celebrate this milestone this Saturday, February 12th, from 2-5pm. Though we’ll officially start celebrating at 2pm, the shop will be open from 11am on, showcasing the books and editions that [NAME] has produced since 2009, with artists such as Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Beatriz Monteavaro, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Nathan Carter, Brian Kennon, and Cristina Lei Rodriguez, among so many others. We will also have some of the scholarly publications that we have worked on, including Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System; Practice Space; Dark Nights of the Universe, and more.
If you’re unable to join us on Saturday, visit us soon. Starting February 16th, we’ll be open from 11–5pm.
Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, […], this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery.
Girl of the Golden West, Joan Didion.
[…] starting from the position that the status quo is unacceptable, and that some sort of change—whether transformation, disruption, rebellion, innovation, intervention, or insubordination—is therefore necessary, the works under discussion in the chapters that follow offer a version of Cage’s optimistic transferral; they expand that conviction about the intolerability of the status quo to literary modes, advocating implicitly for a more variegated canon, and then continue more radically to question the fundamental structures of language itself. Texts here are conceived not only as artifacts documenting moments in which writers have undertaken the radical reevaluation of modes of composition but also as sites encouraging readers to proceed in unconventional and innovative ways; they exhibit experimental writing and reward experimental reading. If the world requires new positions and relations, new modes of attention and perception, a refreshed awareness of material conditions, the redistribution of powers, and continually active participation, unscripted by conventions, here are the proving grounds. Those who aspire to change society shouldn’t shy from the far less ambitious task of reconsidering what—and how—they read.
Radium of the Word : A POETICS OF MATERIALITY, Craig Dworkin
[…] uncertain and adulterated, strange and unauthorized
[…] join in, for us, to change misery.
Barely, related — The Calamity Form : On Poetry and Social Life, Anahid Nersessian.
Like the commodity form, the calamity form enables an “active and in-depth knowing of nothing.” Its “peculiar achievement” is not to explain the conditions responsible for the epistemic and experiential dilemmas and contradictions of its moment but rather to put us “on close terms with incomprehension.” Through its “anti-denotative and anti-representational” strategies, the poetry “repossess[es] the occult character of the commodity and sets it not against but beside the inscrutability of its historical moment” (p. 4, emphases Levinson).
In other words, the relationship of commodity form to calamity form is one of adjacency: a serial, similarity, reiterative relationship rather than a hierarchical, logical, and causal one. The calamity form is Nersessian’s category-term for Romanticism’s way of suspending, attenuating, downgrading, vaulting over, fracturing, blurring, deforming, and misdirecting the normative relationships between signifier and signified that characterize narrative, statement, argument, and reference. The calamity form, on her reading, neither critiques nor idealizes the commodity form; it “rehearses” it …
Marjorie Levinson on The Calamity Form via Critical Inquiry
Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless.
[…]
There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human.
[…]
[A] form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the human—the insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as “nobody.”
Zadie Smith, newyorker.
In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her œuvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/toni-morrison-recitatif-short-story-zadie-smith
This essay is drawn from the introduction to “Recitatif: A Story,” by Toni Morrison, out this February from Knopf.