12/31/2013

Make it NEW

 

http://www.loa.org/excerpts/pound/sieburth.jsp

Introduction

"The artist is always beginning," Ezra Pound once wrote. "Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. The very name Troubadour means a 'finder,' one who discovers." Readers of Poems and Translations will be able to follow, for the first time in a single volume, a poet whose career moves through a series of beginnings and re-beginnings—perhaps Pound's most distinctively American trait.

In his first published book of poems, A Lume Spento, the Pound of 1908 is still very much a late nineteenth-century poet, steeped in the archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites. A mere four years later, in Ripostes, he has reinvented himself as a modernist proponent of "Imagism," before moving on, in rapid succession, to the avant-garde aesthetics of Vorticism and translations from the Chinese (Cathay), the Japanese ("Noh" or Accomplishment), the Provençal (Arnaut Daniel), and the Latin ("Homage to Sextus Propertius"). Each of these forays into new identities and new languages constituted, as Pound himself explained, a "search for oneself," which entailed "casting off complete masks of the self in each poem."

The title Pound chose for the first comprehensive collection of his shorter poems in 1926 was, significantly, Personae—Latin for "masks." Whether writing in the form of Browningesque dramatic monologues, medieval canzoni, satirical epigrams, Confucian analects, or Sophoclean tragic choruses, Pound in his poems presents us with a medley of masks whose multiple and contradictory features helped shape the face of American poetry in the 20th century.

In his dedication of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot paid homage to Ezra Pound as "il miglior fabbro"—that is, "the better craftsman"—Dante's term for the Troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel. Pound remains a vital ancestral presence in the lineage of American modernist and post-modernist poetry. The list of his descendants includes not only William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Olson, but also the Beats and, more recently, the Language Poets—all of whom in their own fashion learned their craft from his work while observing his central imperative: "Make it new."
—Richard Sieburth

Jacob Applebaum fights turnkey tyranny with new light

12/24/2013

Fenollosa Pound Olson and the Chinese written character


 
"The first was Ernest Fenollosa's provocative essay 'The Chinese Wriiten Character as a Medium for Poetry.' He found the Pound-edited text of the essay in the latter's book Instigations and excitedly copied out its main arguments into his notebook that June. Fenollosa's account of the exhaustion of poetic qualities in modern discourse resulting from a degeneration of the original capacity of language to mime the physical processes, and his implicit advocacy of a return to the state of primal verbal immediacy, with words once again becoming instrumental to the creation of 'a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature,' held for Olson the same appeal it had for Pound before him.--Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life. pg. 103.


 
 
 
 




The Mohawk Club

Mohawk Artwork by CHU www.schudio.co.uk

 

The Mohawk Club

down
to gothamsterdam
city clouds curl
like hair parting
to reveal grey root
beneath

platinum breaking
through air
to reveal silver
moonlight
streaking down

solid rays bouncing
off the puddles
street amber
tiger lightning
shattered glass
outside
that stinky moon
eclipsed by rolling
marshmallows
snatching the eye
back

cracked street light
the car lamp &
reefer torch
burning the other
out
out in the night a red
streak of light
designates the
club: Mohawk

pot smoke blows
from tangled with jazz
steam seeping out
bop

skidoobie blam
from the doorway
a rocket launch site
wings flap n’ flutter
new squawrk

bop music lifting up
cityscape
up up town up
escape into air

buildings nearby
sway loose from their
footing notes
and rise up again
steamin’ with gargoyles
they break loose to the
beat away from the grey
concrete holds

sprouting feathers
bright green &
toucan yellow
big chief pink & gold

Mohawk
gracefully leaping off
into dark skies
blackened
looping like Monk

tiny pieces of the city
pulled away in the night
inside the club
it’s hip under hazy
lemon light
the honey-bop drips
juss’ keep on jumpin

leap frog kangaroos
peeps jiggin’ &
movin’ so hard
the floor boards
wriggle loose
bop bop

another
blam boom
doors & windows
poppin’ in their
frames musical
flames lap ears of
harlem cats

wreckin the joint
the wooden stage
an amplifier
be-bop battery power
surrounded by schmaze
of musical mojos

the club a
living moseum
exotic objects
resonate to music
the players play
talismans
a seemingly ad-hoc
collection of artefacts
from africa india asia
the Caribbean
the americas
& Indonesia
crammed into

one room covering every
inch of wall space
a pink mardi gras
Indian head dress
five pots of Robert Johnson
snake oil
perch on the shelf

several rusty
saxophones hooked
over water pipes
like docked space craft

a bunged-up
silver tuba
hunches behind the bar
a mirrored ice bucket

two trombones
hang from shark teeth
trumpets & clarinets
double as flower vases
on turntable tables

a native indian
shield-canvas
looms large
like jupiter behind
the stage
shells beads belts
& wires hang from
all quarters snaking the
room
original sheet music
portraits of jazz masters
handmade flyers hang
behind smoke tinted
glass in various
frames crooked &
dusty books
embroidered with shells
& reeds
guitar picks crocodile
teeth piano
keys ostrich feathers
& white buffalo hair

to the left a
double bass pulses
like a whale heart
spitting out notes
from its huge
bass-clef gut

swinging around a
spike-axis firmly rooted
into the ‘C’ flatted floor
a human ear
shaped instrument

a bulging be-bop
skyscraper
swaying to the up
tempo uptown music

the horse chestnut
upright has viper tooth
tuning fangs
atop its snake
head head head

a hybrid trap kit
sits centre stage
kick oil drum
snare
catch the beat

get hi
hat stand from old
gun barrels
hi-hat cymbals from turkey
crash china symbols
viper head sticks
& mohawk punk
brushes

to the right
of stage the turn
tables sit atop
a grand piano
the dj rig
includes a raven
headed diamond
tipped stylus

recycled confederate
gun surplus
a tomahawk mixer
dreams of vinyl
records nailed to walls
nicotine patches
where some were
pulled down
& played and never
returned

beside turntables
a small glockenspiel
silver bullet keys
split the eye in two

a microphone
stand of gun parts
mixed with
three tomahawks

some guitar strings
peppered with bright
feathers
& sea shells
the microphone

a shaved viper head
with a mohawk
its tail wiggling off
toward the sound
board

who or what is going
to take stage here
tonight in this
shrine to creativity

here underground
in gothamsterdam
just after 4:20
in the morning
--Steve Fly
08/13 Amsterdam,
Edited 13/12/13.

12/23/2013

All powers of Europe






For my part thought that Americans
Had been embroiled in European wars long enough
Easy to see that
France and England wd/ try to embroil us Obvious
that all powers of Europe will be continually at manoeuvre
to work us into their real or imaginary balances
of power; J.A 1782 FISHERIES.--Ezra Pound, Canto LXV. Pg 377.


J.A = John Adams

12/13/2013

Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958)


Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958)
Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos: Brazil

From Concrete Poetry: A World View, 1968, ed Mary Ellen Solt


RELATED RESOURCES:
Haroldo de Campos in UbuWeb Historical
Augusto de Campos in UbuWeb Historical
Decio Pignatari in UbuWeb Historical
"Concrete Poetry: A World View : Brazil" in UbuWeb Papers
"The Imperative of Invention..." Charles A. Perrone
"Interview with Augusto de Campos" Roland Greene
"The Concrete Historical" Roland Greene
Sérgio Bessa "Architecture Versus Sound in Concrete Poetry"
"Speaking About Genre: the Case of Concrete Poetry" Victoria Pineda
"From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation", Kenneth Goldsmith






Concrete Poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms. Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent. Qualified space: space-time structure instead of mere linear-temporistical development. Hence the importance of ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax, or in its special sense (Fenollosa/ Pound) of method of composition based on direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements. "ll faut que notre intelligence s’habitue à comprendre synthético-idéographiquement au lieu de analytico -discursivement" (Apollinaire). Elsenstein: ideogram and montage.

Forerunners: Mallarmé (Un coup de dés, 1897): the first qualitative jump: "subdivisions prismatiques de l’idée"; space ("blancs") and typographical devices as substantive elements of composition. Pound (The Cantos); ideogramic method.
Joyce (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake): word-ideogram; organic interpenetration of time and space. Cummings: atomization of words, physiognomical typography; expressionistic emphasis on space. Apollinaire (Calligrammes): the vision, rather than the praxis. Futurism, Dadaism: contributions to the life of the problem. In Brazil: Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954): "in pills, minutes of poetry. João Cabral de Melo Neto (born 1920—The Engineer and The Psychology of Composition plus Anti-Ode): direct speech, economy and functional architecture of verse.

Concrete Poetry: tension of things-words in space-time. Dynamic structure: multiplicity of concomitant movements. So in music-by, definition, a time art-space intervenes (Webern and his followers: Boulez and Stockhausen; concrete and electronic music); in visual arts-spatial, by definition-time intervenes (Mondrian and his Boogie-Woogie series; Max Bill; Albers and perceptive ambivalence; concrete art in general).

Ideogram: appeal to nonverbal communication. Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects and/ or more or less subjective feelings. Its material word (sound, visual form, semantical charge). Its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this material.

Factors of proximity and similitude, gestalt psychology. Rhythm: relational force. Concrete poem, by using the phonetical system (digits) and analogical syntax, creates a specific linguistical area-"verbivocovisual" -which shares the advantages of nonverbal communication, without giving up word's virtualities. With the concrete poem occurs the phenomenon of metacommunication: coincidence and simultaneity of verbal and nonverbal communication; only-it must be noted-it deals with a communication of forms, of a structure-content, not with the usual message communication.

Concrete Poetry aims at the least common multiple of language. Hence its tendency to nounising and verbification. "The concrete wherewithal of speech" (Sapir). Hence its affinities with the so-called isolating languages (Chinese): "The less outward grammar the Chinese language possesses, the more inner grammar inherent in it" (Humboldt via Cassirer). Chinese offers an example of pure relational syntax, based exclusively on word order (see Fenollosa, Sapir and Cassirer).

The conflict form-subject looking for identification, we call isomorphism. Parallel to form-subject isomorphism, there is a space-time isomorphisin, which creates movement. In a first moment of concrete poetry pragmatics, isomorphism tends to physiognomy, that is a movement imitating natural appearance (motion); organic form and phenomenology of composition prevail. In a more advanced stage, isomorphism tends to resolve itself into pure structural movement (movement properly said); at this phase, geometric form and mathematics of composition (sensible rationalism) prevail.

Renouncing the struggle for "absolute," Concrete Poetry remains in the magnetic field of perennial relativeness. Chronomicro-metering of hazard. Control. Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back. Faster communication (problems of functionality and structure implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making.

Concrete Poetry: total responsibility before language. Thorough realism. Against a poetry of expression, subjective and hedonistic. To create precise problems and to solve them in terms of sensible language. A general art of the word. The poem-product: useful object.


Note: Original printed without capitals. The "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" presents a synthesis of the theoretical writings of the Noigandres group from 1950-58. The critical writings and manifestos of Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos have been collected in a volume: Teoria da Poesia Concreta, Textos Críticos e Manifestos 1950-1960, Sao Paulo, Ediçãoes Invenção, 1965.
Translated by the authors.

1958
(From Noigandres 4)

http://www.ubu.com/papers/noigandres01.html

12/02/2013

Letter to Harold Innis from McLuhan, 14th March 1951.

Within the small and obscure field of those who follow the tale of the tribe, as defined by Robert Anton Wilson will probably already be familiar with this letter by Marshall McLuhan, to Harold Innis.

In the letter McLuhan more or less drafts the trajectory RAW expands upon, with the addition of Giordano Bruno, Alfred Korzybski, Nietzsche, Claude Shannon and Orson Welles, RAW weaves a landscape of, dare i say, cybernetic post modernism?

Internet...probably the greatest catalyst, tool, for the evolution of language and human-language interfacing. And so, 12/13 historical characters are selected by RAW to approximate the innovations that took place to bring us here, and the human biographical tales crisscrossing with the design science revolutions and new styles. RAWs tale of the tribe.

Here is that letter that helped start it all, in some sense.

--steve fly 

Letter to Harold Adams Innis
Toronto, 14th March 1951

Dear Innis,
Thanks for the lecture re-print. This makes an opportunity for me to mention my interest in the work you are doing in communication study in general. I think there are lines appearing in Empire and Communications, for example, which suggest the possibility of organizing an entire school of studies. Many of the ancient language theories of the Logos type which you cite for their bearings on government and society have recurred and amalgamated themselves today under the auspices of anthropology and social psychology. Working concepts of “collective consciousness” in advertising agencies have in turn given salience and practical effectiveness to these “magical” notions of language.
But it was most of all the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) which have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years..

Mallarmé saw the modern press as a magical institution born of technology. The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items made necessary by the influx of news stories from every quarter of the world, created, he saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (He used the word “symbol” in the strict Greek sense sym-ballein, to pitch together, physically and musically). He saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious far beyond any informative purpose. Politics were becoming musical, jazzy, magical.

The same symbolist perception applied to cinema showed that the montage of images was basically a return via technology to age-old picture language. S. Eisenstein’s Film Forum and Film Technique explore the relations between modern developments in the arts and Chinese ideogram, pointing to the common basis of ideogram in modern art, science and technology.

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (basis of myth of Daedalus, basic for the dreams and schemes of Francis Bacon, and, when transferred by Vico to philology and history of culture, it also forms the basis of modern historiography, archaeology, psychology and artistic procedures alike.)

Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction. The technique which Edgar Poe first put to work in his detective stories. In the arts this discovery has had all those astonishing results which have seemed to separate the ordinary public from what it regards as esoteric magic. From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertizing, or in the high arts is toward participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt.

One immediate consequence, it seems to me, has been the decline of literature. The hyper-trophy of letter-press, at once the cause and effect of universal literacy, has produced a spectacular decline of attention to the printed or written word. As you have shown in Empire and Communications, ages of literature have been few and brief in human history. The present literary epoch has been of exceptional duration — 400 years. There are many symptoms that it is at an end. The comic book for example has been seen as a degenerate literary form instead of as a nascent pictorial and dramatic form which has sprung from the new stress on visual-auditory communication in the magazines, the radio and television. The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

If literature is to survive as a scholastic discipline except for a very few people, it must be by a transfer of its techniques of perception and judgement to these new media. The new media, which are already much more constitutive educationally than those of the class-room, must be inspected and discussed in the class-room if the class-room is to continue at all except as a place of detention. As a teacher of literature it has long seemed to me that the functions of literature cannot be maintained in present circumstances without radical alteration of the procedures of teaching. Failure in this respect relegated Latin and Greek to the specialist; and English literature has already become a category rather than an interest in school and college.

As mechanical media have popularized and enforced the presence of the arts on all people it becomes more and more necessary to make studies of the function and effect of communication on society. Present ideas of such effects are almost entirely in terms of mounting or sagging sales curves resulting from special campaigns of commercial education. Neither the agencies nor the consumers know anything about the social or cutural effects of this education.

Deutsch’s interesting pamphlet on communication is thoroughly divorced from any sense of the social functions performed by communication. He is typical of a school likewise in his failure to study the matter in the particular. He is the technician interested in power but uncritical and unconcerned with social effect. The diagnosis of his type is best found, so far as I know, in Wyndham Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled. That pamphlet is probably the most radical political document since Machiavelli’s Prince. But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines.

The fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener approach is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication. It is instead a dialectical approach born of technology and quite unable of itself to see beyond or around technology. The Medieval schoolmen ultimately ended up on the same dialectical reef.

As Easterbrook may have told you I have been considering an experiment in communication which is to follow the lines of this letter in suggesting means of linking a variety of specialized fields by what may be called a method of esthetic analysis of their common features. This method has been used by my friend Siegfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture and in Mechanization Takes Command. What I have been considering is a single mimeographed sheet to be sent out weekly or fortnightly to a few dozen people in different fields, at first illustrating the underlying unities of form which exist where diversity is all that meets the eye. Then it is hoped there will be a feedback of related perception from various readers which will establish a continuous flow.

It seems obvious to me that Bloor St. is the one point in this University where one might establish a focus of the arts and sciences. And the organizing concept would naturally be “Communication Theory and practice.” A simultaneous focus of current and historic forms. Relevance to be given to selection of areas of study by dominant artistic and scientific modes of the particular period. Arts here used as providing criteria, techniques of observation, and bodies of recorded, achieved, experience. Points of departure but also return.

For example the actual techniques of common study today seem to me to be of genuine relevance to anybody who wishes to grasp the best in current poetry and music. And vice versa. There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. Using Frequency Modulation techniques one can slice accurately through such interference, whereas Amplitude Modulation leaves you bouncing on all the currents.


Marshall McLuhan

from Marshall McLuhan — Complete Correspondence,
edited by Matie Molinaro & Corinne McLuhan

11/19/2013

Fungi-based plastic alternative wins Buckminster Fuller Challenge

"In addition to being one of 10 esteemed finalists in the Cradle to Cradle Product Innovation Challenge, Ecovative Design — AKA the New York-based startup behind a game-changing bio-material that's “grown” from agricultural waste and mushroom mycelia and can be used for packaging, insulation, and more — has won the sixth annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge.
 
Last year, top honors went to the Living Building Institute.
 
Deemed as “Socially-Responsible Design’s Highest Award” by Metropolis magazine, the Buckminster Fuller Challenge aims to “support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems.” In this particular instance, the pressing problem at hand would be our reliance on highly polluting conventional plastics. With this big win, Ecovative Design has exemplified a famous quote from the late futurist, "gentle revolutionist," and father of the geodesic dome himself, Buckminster Fuller: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

READ MORE

11/17/2013

Ritual and Doctrine of the Illuminati

One day, i rekon somebody will put Illuminati history to verse using such great source material. What a wonderful project, Illuminati history in verse, keeping such fellows as Joyce, Pound, and Yeats in mind when contemplating the delivery. x fly

Ritual & Doctrine of the Illuminati

Monday, August 12th, 2013

Well, the cat’s out of the bag. Jeva Singh-Anand, Josef Wäges, and Illuminaten scholar Reinhard Markner have been collaborating on an English translation of the ritual work of the Illuminati. All the rituals will be featured, from the Novice degree all the way to lesser and greater mysteries, including Regent and Provincial directives, Epopt and Doceten degrees. Conservatively, I’d estimate that the total amount of pages will be over five-hundred at the very least. This amounts to the most significant English translation of primary material in over 200 years.

Joe Wages has been assiduously collecting all of the original writings of the Illuminati with a view toward just such an endeavour. His hard work, dedication, personal funds, and especially the translating talent and hard work of Jeva Singh-Anand have finally paid off. All of this, combined with the knowledge and expertise of Markner, is really something to behold. Hats off all around – great work guys!

Jeva Singh-Anand has posted on his site, a taste – Illuminatus major – of what to look forward to. Please read and link.

As far as the ritual itself, I’m not qualified to comment. I’m not a mason myself, so I can’t assess where or whence it came from. Joe Wages, however, has come to the conclusion that a lot of the ceremony derives from the Strict Observance rite, which Knigge had much knowledge and expertise.
The good thing about this material being published for the first time in English is the fact that all of us will have the originals to look at. We can then judge it on our own level of understanding of the masonic milieu and popular philosophy of the 18th century.
The conspiratorial aspects, I’ll interject, are plainly seen for those who look closely.


http://www.bavarian-illuminati.info/

11/12/2013

The Late Great Robert Anton Wilson Event Part 1 - John Higgs


One day before heading down to London on the bus from Dudley, to see the show at the Horse Hospital i had the following experience:

yesterday, in Stourbridge i had an encounter with an Angel, or what Arthur Koestler calls...'the library angel' category of coincidence, or in my case the charity shop Angel. Let me explain, i walked into the British heart foundation shop and started scanning the books, and within just 2 minutes i found 'The Wild Boys' by William S. Burroughs for a bargain price of £1.50, and on the shelf below a copy of 'The Trial' by Franz Kafka for just 50p. A few hours later i opened up 'Wild Boys' and on the acknowledgment page i became spooked to discover that the only text mentioned, for permission to quote from is non other than 'The Trial' by Franz Kafka. A splendid intersection point and angelic contact coincidance.





"Published on 3 Nov 2013
The Late Great Robert Anton Wilson Event Part 1 - John Higgs

Watch Part 2: http://youtu.be/HsBWj5jNadw

John Higgs (http://twitter.com/johnhiggs/ http://johnhiggs.com/)
Daisy Eris Campbell (http://twitter.com/DaisyEris/)
Hosted By Scott Wood of The London Fortean Society (http://twitter.com/ForteanLondon/ http://forteanlondon.blogspot.co.uk/)

at The Horse Hospital 23/Oct/2013"


11/11/2013

Ezra Pound and Film adaptations of fragments from the Cantos

Hamilton celebrates Ezra Pound’s 128th Birthday

By Max Newman '16
October 31, 2013
Forum on Image and Language and Motion (F.I.L.M.) celebrated Hamilton alumnus and late poet Ezra Pound’s 128th birthday last Wednesday with a night full of history and experimental film adaptations.
Associate Professor of English Steve Yao opened the discussion with a detailed history of Pound from his time at Hamilton to his death in Venice in 1972. Professor Yao claimed, “Pound is arguably the most important poets of the 20th century,” referencing his controversial support of Benito Mussolini and fascism.

A graduate of the Hamilton Class of 1905, Pound portrayed his social and political beliefs in his poetry. “Pound’s goal was to solidify free verse as the dominant mode in American Literature,” Professor Yao said. Pound’s poems draw on revolutionary era American history, Chinese history and his own experiences.

Professor Yao describes Pound’s poetry as “difficult” and “mystical” because of its political commentary through romance language. This is especially true in The Cantos, Pound’s unfinished poem split into 120 sections. The poem was highly controversial as politics became heated at the start of World War II. Pound takes the reader through his ideas, focusing on oppression in China due to government corruption.

Professor Yao ended his opening words by introducing the evening’s main attraction: “Emergency-room physician in Toronto by day (and night), Bernard Dew has an aesthetic calling and artistic gift: he is a devotee of experimental poetry, and Ezra Pound in particular, and is fascinated with avant-garde film, especially the work of Stan Brakhage. In recent years Dew has brought these fascinations together in a series of remarkable cinematic adaptations of selections from Pound’s epic Cantos.”

Many of Pound’s poems are ekphrastic, written verses in response to visual images or paintings. Dew brilliantly took the text and turned them back into images through his films portraying Cantos #49 and #116. Four years in the making, Dew primarily gathered footage from Venice, Pound’s home for the last few decades of his life as well as his burial ground.

In Canto #49, Dew has a typewriter-at-work overtone throughout the movie as 15mm film images flash on and off the screen. The grainy collage of film allows the viewer, for even just a few minutes, to journey inside Pound’s complex poetic mind. The images move quickly from beautiful Italian architecture to abstract color flashes Dew filmed in his basement.

In his final completed Canto, #114, Pound reflects upon the poem as a whole. “It’s especially moving to see him questioning himself,” Dew said. Rarely do poets question the legitimacy of their work, yet Pound explores his crisis in depth.

Dew portrayed the beauty of Pound’s reflection by filming the first half of the Canto in in silence. Images of long, drawn-out ocean waves fill the screen in silence as if representing Pound’s mind at work.

Bernard Dew offers an intriguing perspective on Pound’s legacy. Although the films will unlikely appear in a theater near you, the adaptations are slowly circling around the world depicting Pound’s poetry in a language that is universal.

http://students.hamilton.edu/spectator/arts-entertainment/p/hamilton-celebrates-ezra-pound-s-128th-birthday/view

Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly

 Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly


Robert Anton Wilson spent over 50 years producing original thoughts and ideas, criss-cossing academic boundaries like a flock og migrating birds. All-at-once an independent scholar, social critic, comedian, playwright, poet and novelist. RAW lived through WWII, the cold war, the 1960s counter culture explosion, the digital technological millennium and the globalization of humanity by way of the world wide web. RAW kept a front row seat next to other great scientific philosophers of the 20th/21st century, observing patterns and communicating with great care and attention to language, meaning and clarity, what he suspects is going on.

RAWs approach to the questions confronting all American citizens, and so by default the entire planet, currently under the boot of the U.S.A, are critical alternative perspectives and insights desperately lacking from both the public and academic discourse, and that have new roads into almost every department of any existing academic center you care to think of. Yet, what i find most stimulating about RAW and his ideas circles around his fierce independence and adherence to the principle of thinking for oneself, questioning everything and constantly reformulating based upon new data.

Every human being on earth can benefit from literacy, and RAWs particular take on the human condition features the development of language and critical reasoning as tools to enable good functioning in a chaotic universe, inhabited by shadows, distractions, illusions and disinformation. I feel that RAW left us all with examples of how best to confront confusion, propaganda and low level information warfare, his life as a case study and scientific experiment, in the tradition of R. Buckminster Fuller and Dr John Lilly, where they're own mind-body system is recognized to be a scientific laboratory itself, and so the nervous system and linguistic operating system also can be seen as scientific instruments.

It strikes me, when i surf around the web and more often read newspaper headlines and/or watch TV shows, that in 2013 a large proportions of professional scientists, and almost ALL politicians seem to have not picked up on this principle of 'inprobable objectivity' at all. On the contrary, the direction of most political and popular scientific discourse seems to be skewed towards materialist ideology and a 'bad' use of language, manipulated and squeezed through various filters to attract either/or investors, voters, or whatever ends maybe required, e.g, higher carbon monoxide limits, or the use of genetically modified seeds. There are an increasing amount of people waking up the coercion and trickery played by authoritarian structures, so as to keep the position of authority right where it is, with a centrist, top down, capitalist model. An Aristotelian war-head.

RAWs ideas and special writings smash away hundreds of rotten foundations that support these authoritarian monsters, often targeting the strongest parts of his opposing arguments, so as to be sure to totally demolish them. RAW has referred to himself as a libertarian anarchist, and a 'guerrila ontologist' in the past. I think these descriptions help distinguish his kind of constructive and cheerful criticism from the dull speculations and sensational garbage i detect in many of today's so called 'exposers of the truth' not least those who claim to be uncovering the all powerful 'Illuminati'. A hugely popular meme in 2013, largely due to the bastardization of RAWs ideas, along with a handful of others during the 1960s war on some culture.

 --Steve Fly Agaric
23 November 2013.
Amsterdam

8/15/2013

The New Science of Psychedelics by David Jay Brown.

The New Science of Psychedelics by David Jay Brown.
Review by Steve ‘fly agaric 23’ Pratt.



"Cosmic Trigger is where I first encountered controversial psychologist Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model of the brain and psychiatric researcher John Lilly’s radical ideas about programming the brain as though it were a computer. These models became two of the primary maps that I have used to navigate my psychedelic experiences, and Leary introduced me to many other important ideas, which we’ll be discussing in more detail later in the book. What’s most amazing for me is that later in my life, years after I read Wilson and Leary’s work, I was fortunate enough to become good friends with these two incredible gentlemen, and they both played an integral role in my work.--David Jay Brown.

In his latest book, David Jay Brown ignites the neural synapses and builds a web of psychedelic intel. Leaking some of the most scrumptous mind spray and zesty juices from the psychedelic 'happy' mutants, the book oozes with goo and liquids beyond description. I found buckets of crystallized optimism concerning the future of psychedelic research and shared livingry. DJB on the cuts and on beat. To paraphrase Bob. Hurray for the optimists!

Brown presents the reader slices from an array psychedelic scientist/gangsters/mavericks, who stick up the reader with surprise noises, snatching them hostage with strangely delicious ideas, tying them up with super-guts and silly-string while demanding their ransom be paid in full, the price of your mindscrape. A cooler-roaster of a ride, the greatest hits of Psychedelic Science future bound. An refreshingly honest series of life adventures, way out there and back here with the sentences to make his experience true enough.

I would like to simply reproduce a small section of the book, and let Brown entice you: "In the book I quote from my interviews with luminaries such as Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Garcia, Ram Dass, Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Ray Kurzweil, Andrew Weil, Jack Kevorkian, Edgar Mitchell, Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Joan Halifax, Alex, Grey, H. R. Giger, Simon Posford, and Rupert Sheldrake. Some of the varied topics explored in the book include the interface between science and spirituality, lucid dreaming, time travel, morphic field theory, alternative science, optimal health, what happens to consciousness after death, encounters with nonhuman beings, the future evolution of our species, and how psychedelics affect creativity.”

A delight to read for anyone who follows Dr Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, Brown performs by example his reiteration of the founding principles of psychedelic science and consciousness studies, roughly ‘Think for yourself, and question everything, especially authority”.

Here are gathered great magicians of consciousness metaphor and living language, an embodiment of the scholarly compassionate ones IMHO, contextualized by somebody who knew them and their works well, and can hump the torch of a new synthesis in 2013. Cheers David.  


The New Science of Psychedelics and Giambattista Vico.

‘The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.—Giambattista Vico, Science Nuova, The Elements.

David Jay Brown, produced a kind of 'tale of the tribe' in blending his own experiences with insights gained from those great thinkers around him, and placing them in recent historical context with a particular focus on the psychedelic sciences. David J. Brown, I am very pleased to tell you, seems a happy mutant of the Robert Anton Wilson tribe, and pays particular homage to RAW who permeates the entire text IMHO. So, I dedicate this review to some expanded RAW tentacles.
 
The Italian Hermetic philosopher Giambattista Vico, outlined a New Science for the changing landscape of humanity, thought, history and language taking place in Europe during the Renaissance. I get the impression that Brown is rubbing up on Vico by using the term ‘New Science’ in his book ‘The New Science of Psychedelics’ and indeed, the sudden explosion of psychedelics and the decentralized philosophy of ‘Psychedelic Science’ across the planet, heralds the possibility of a new beginning (bigending?) which brings and slings many challenges and hurdles and roundabouts, to leap over and swing with, together, with the promise of a cohesive tolerant and pluralistic humanity (tribe) utilizing the planets pharmacopeia for fun and for profit.Why not?

While reading the book, I started trying to reduce some of the recurring themes into general terms and simplified ideas, as stoners often do…searching for short slogans that encapsulate what I view as the most important messages.Take for example, the subheading of the book: At the NEXUS of Culture, Consciousness and Spirituality. This NEXUS: Origin: 1655–65;  (Latin nexus, a binding, joining, fastening, equivalent to nect ( ere ) to bind, fasten...) yes, precisely.

This vortex of connectivity and links reflect my own study of a particular NEXUS of culture, consciousness and spirituality, as defined by Dr Robert Anton Wilson: The Tale of The Tribe. Interestingly to me, RAW and his ideas permeate this book in almost every paragraph, to my RAW biased perceptions but of course, Brown and RAW were good friends for over 17 years and fellow researchers in the field so in some sense this book ‘TNSOP’ tells us much about the tribe (all around the world humanity), and includes wisdom from Dr Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg, both of whom were specifically familiar with the tricky concept as it pertains to Ezra Pound, Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce: a modern verse epic including history and more. Plus, Brown met and studied the works of Buckminster Fuller closely, who is another node within RAWs wheel of historical hermetically charged genii.

Joyce is widely noted as being the most famous interpreter of Vico, and for me RAW is in direct line after Joyce as expanding some of Vico’s ideas into formulations and sentences that cut right into the 20/21st century, and, in this instance, illustrate how ahead of his time Vico and The New Science were in their formulations, not forgetting how liberty, humanity, tolerance and equality tend to ooze out, helping us to solve many problems today.

“What Vico is here drawing attention to is the sheer unhistorical character of many accouts of the past. They are lacking what Sir Isaiah Berlin has called ‘historical perspective’, i.e. any recognition that at different times in the past men’s mental and intellectual abilities have varied widely and that the sorts of knowledge that could be formulated and used I one age could not be formulated and used in another.” Leon Pompa, Vico: A study of the new science.

Vico is just one character among a dozen that RAW pinpoints as a major node in his Tale of the tribe Nexus. I hope that the psychedelic science researchers and those engaged in the new emergent approaches to the big questions will reconsider RAW and ‘The Tale of The Tribe’ for guidance and some rare hermetically charged historical perspective, lovingly balanced and deployed like a gang of sexy loving Ninjas.

One example of TTOTT condensed wisdom is taken from Allen Ginsberg and also quoted in a recent review of Davis Jay Brown’s book. This quote presents insight into the decentralized philosophy of Giordano Bruno (and Vico), with overtones of Nietzsche, Joyce, Pound and McLuhan, with whom which Robert Anton Wilson also liked to equate global decentralized internet, by bend and swerve of TTOTT. We may also reconsider the lofty aims of Bruno and Vico in unifying and making peace between religions, OMG, by way of better communication and translation of ideas and with balanced humanitarian value systems.  

“No, no, no, absolutely not. None of that bullshit! No Gaia hypothesis. No theism need sneak in here. No monotheistic hallucinations needed in this. Not another fascist central authority . . . You’ve got this one big thing. Who says it’s got to be one? Why does everything have to be one? I think there’s no such thing as one—only many eyes looking out in all directions. The center is everywhere, not in any one spot. Does it have to be one organism, in the sense of one brain, or one consciousness? The tendency is to sentimentalize this idea into another godhead and to reinaugurate the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind trap.--Allen Ginsburg, in conversation with David Jay Brown.

The decentralized philosophy that runs, with an emerald hue through the current of 'Hermetic philosophy' from Ficino to Bruno and Vico (maybe the last great Hermetic Philosopher) up to the present cypher-punks incarnations, seem to me, to have related principles in physics, cosmology, psychology and social philosophy. Sure. And, I might add that i think that the psychedelic sciences which may include, neuro-physics, psycho-pharmacology, botany, Anthropology, linguistics, magick, painting, MUSIC...which are also in resonance with the Hermetic principles make sense, cohere with a snuggy fit, when viewed with a decentralized pluralistic set of models, flushing the centrist reductionist atomic singular conclusion, or the empirical tyrannical certainty of authority, down the tube. What is the relationship between the individual and the state?

“The decisive sort of proof in our science is therefore this: that, once these institutions have been established by divine providence, the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be, such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case.
Our science therefore comes to demonstrate at the time an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline and fall. Indeed we make bold to affirm that he who meditates this Science makes it for himself by that proof it had, has and will have to be. For the first indubitable principle posited above is that this world of nations has certainly been made by man and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”—Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova. P 344.

James Joyce dazzles with his customized ‘Hermetic principles’ at work in his great work of cypher-punk science fiction: Finnegans Wake, and it is here. with some help from Dr Wilson that we can see the holographic principle emerging as a connecting principle between Hermetically inclined innovators, and I would add psychedelic scientists of the 21st century. Nurosiphpuqz. Mutants, the others.

Today, with the advanced state of alchemical tools both organic and software based, anything and everything our psychedelic forefathers and mothers imagined is at our fingertips, at least temporarily, in alternate virtual spaces. However, the goal of preserving the biosphere and providing all humans with an equal footing in life seems in dire need of help, and some new ideas and new directions and maps. Maybe The New Science of Psychedelics, as a broader movement can ignite the sort of brave imagination required to build our psychedelic peace-planet, here, right Facebooking now. I hold out the same species of hope with regards to the ideas and works of Robert Anton Wilson, and specifically his ‘the tale of the tribe’, and by osmosis of David Jay Brown, who reconnected some of these ideas into a new 2013 Nexus. Nice one.


Words simply cannot describe what a thrilling experience this was for me! In 1989, I moved to Los Angeles, where Bob and his wife, Arlen, were living at the time, and I became good friends with them. I dedicated my book Virus: The Alien Strain to Arlen. I began going to regular weekly gatherings at Bob and Arlen’s home, where a small group would read and discuss mind-expanding ideas. We read virtually everything that James Joyce had written, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, each other’s writings, and Bob’s books. We watched Orson Welles’ films and talked about quantum physics and primate politics.--David Jay Brown.

Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt.
Amsterdam.
http://ettt.wikispaces.com/ (My 'tale of the tribe' wikispace)

7/10/2013

SEMIOTIC MACHINES: by Louis Armand (Joyce, McLuhan, Shannon, Weiner, Von Neumann)

SEMIOTIC MACHINES: by Louis Armand, presents a number of passages that see James Joyce, McLuhan, Shannon, Weiner, Von Neumann, criss-crossing and pollinating the tale of the tribe with a Joycean, atomic, digital glossing. Also invoking Orson Welles through the reference to expanded cinema of Gene Yougblood, this essay exhibits the highest standards of critical writing on Joyce IMHO, and in the kind of prose i would like to see utilized to help explicate the questions of the tale of the tribe as defined by Robert Anton Wilson, Ezra Pound, Buckminster Fuller, and Joyce.--Steve fly

Above all, the importance of Joyce for McLuhan resides in the decisive role of Finnegans Wake in re-defining the late stages of print culture and the advent of digiculture (the so-called “postmodern moment”). In this sense, Joyce’s text assumes a pre-eminent status among the agents and historians of late modernity—among them John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion—and, along with the Mallarméan critique of the book and Marcel Duchamp’s satirisation of mechanical rationalism, the Wake becomes something of a benchmark in the early discourse of cyberspace.

Joyce’s technique of “verbivocovisual presentement”(5)—reprising the symbolist preoccupation with effects of synaesthesia—bears directly upon the conceptualisation of virtual reality and emersive signifying environments. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970?), which proposes the integration of computing technology and other forms of telecommunications for the synaesthetic and syncretistic expansion of film, is heavily indebted to McLuhan’s reading of Finnegans Wake in Understanding Media (1964) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). “The stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synaesthesia,” McLuhan writes, “may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology”—of which Finnegans Wake is considered a kind of apotheosis.(6)

http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v8/main/essays.php?essay=armand

Joyce, Bruno, Baudrillard and the coincidence of contraries.

MUSEYROOMS AND MOEBIUS EFFECTS: A RUIM OF HISTORY IN FINNEGANS WAKE
James Joyce


Interestingly, Baudrillard’s collapse of poles operates on dynamics similar to those expressed in Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity, whose coincidence of contraries extends binary values, like macro and micro, to such an extreme that they become equal, like two antithetical objects travelling in opposite directions on a single line that becomes a circle (8). As is well known, Bruno’s theory of the coincidence of contraries plays a substantial role throughout Finnegans Wake. Besides the fact that his name is often referenced and that merging binary values are frequently represented through Shem and Shaun, Issy and her mirror image, between father and sons, and mother and daughter--in all manner of conflicts familial or epic--the paradoxical function of Bruno’s theory surfaces in numerous aesthetic and epistemological issues in Finnegans Wake. The Museyroom, overture and prelude to all that follows, plays a pivotal role in complicating a system of differentials like past/present, factual/fictive, and inside/outside, thus exposing historiography and archive practices to the labyrinthine effects of paradox and inversion. -- http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/main/essays.php?essay=mcfeaters