pills Statement for N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921

[Posted to colloquium participants list]

1. Bio

The Pacific Institute for Language and Literacy Studies (pills) was founded in 2003 to formalize an ongoing intellectual collaboration between Roger Farr, Reg Johanson and Aaron Vidaver that commenced during discussion groups at Runcible Mountain College and ksw (1998-2002). As a small affinity group of individuals who are active as writers, teachers, archivists, editors, scholars, parents, caregivers and/or cultural organizers, pills’ mandate is to carry out collaborative research and co-authorship in the intersecting areas of language, literacy and social reproduction. Current activities include co-research into protest genres, utopian pedagogy, and lumpenproletarian resistance, and publication of Parser: New Poetry and Poetics, The Rain Review of Books and Working Papers in Critical Practice.

2. Citations from Recent Work

(from XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics 15/16, 2006)

Enclosure: The end of collective control over the means of subsistence brought about through the collaboration of property owners and the state. First theorized by Marx as “primitive accumulation,” the enclosures signaled “the historic movement which changes producers into waged workers.” Marx described the enclosures as a discrete stage at the dawn of capitalism, in which the English countryside (“the commons”) was literally enclosed by fences, thereby uprooting peasant communities and transforming subsistence agriculture into the industrial production of commodities intended for distribution on an open market. The term has been resuscitated recently by autonomist Marxists, who argue that enclosure is in fact a continual process – the very foundation of capitalist reproduction, witnessed today in SAPs (the manufacturing and management of a global “debt crisis”). The Midnight Notes Collective argues that the terrain of these “New Enclosures” is both immaterial (the internet, information technology, communication) and profoundly material, transforming the very fabric of life itself (genetic engineering, seed patents, privatized water, etc.). Historically, popular response to the old enclosures included arson, theft, property destruction, and rioting. While certain wings of the contemporary anarchist movement have embraced this “diversity of tactics” [see LUMPENPROLETARIAT], most replies to the New Enclosures have been expressed as a desire to “Reclaim the Commons.” Such nostalgia for a lost “organic society” was critiqued by Williams in The Country and the City. As the British autonomist collective Aufheben notes, in advanced capitalist nations the pressing task is not to reclaim the commons, but rather to transform capital into a commons. [RF]

Lumpenproletariat: The surplus population said to exist outside of the productive apparatuses of capitalism. Riff-raff. Bums. Vagabonds. Beggars. Jailbirds. Hooligans. Lazzaroni. Blouson noir. Goldbrickers. Petty criminals. Ne’er-do-wells. Prostitutes. Hobos. Junkies. Rotters. Knaves. Defectives. Scavengers. Thugz. Layabouts. Despised by Marxists. “The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass” (Marx-Engels 494). “The harshest measures of martial law are impotent against outbreaks of the lumpenproletarian sickness” (Luxemburg 74). Adored by anarchists. “They are ‘individual bawlers’ who offer no ‘guarantee’ and have ‘nothing to lose,’ and so nothing to risk” (Stirner 147). “That rabble ... which alone is powerful enough today to inaugurate the Social Revolution and bring it to triumph” (Bakunin 48). Central for mid-to-late twentieth century anti-colonial & national liberation struggles. “At the core of the lumpenproletariat ... the rebellion will find its urban spearhead” (Fanon 103). “We downed that [Marxist] view when it came to applying it to the black American ghetto-dweller because we were off the block too, Stagolees” (Seale 153). Recent theoretical debate revolves around whether the term “resists the totalizing and teleological pretentions of the dialectic” (Stallybrass 81) or leads to “bolstering of identity cut-off from social relations” (Thoburn 436). “You are not born dangerous-class. You become so the moment you cease to acknowledge the values and constraints of a world from which you have broken free: we are basically referring here to the necessity of wage labour. This line is one that very precisely separates the working classes from the dangerous classes” (Becker-Ho). [AV]

Standard English: The syntactic, grammatical, and lexical form of written English enforced as the norm. Non-Standard uses of English are stigmatized as “errors” and as signs of failed or incomplete enculturation or socialization. The ideology of Standard English maintains an idea of a pure, transcendent, acontextual correct English in denial of the varieties of English as a global language and the realities of everyday speaking and writing. In the English-speaking settler colonies the failure to reproduce Standard English is also taken as a sign of the failure of a migrant or indigenous person to integrate into the dominant white national culture. Educational institutions demand that teachers apprehend, detain, and “correct” students on the basis of their ability to reproduce Standard English, putting teachers in the role of language cop and border guard. In return, English language, literature, and composition prerequisites for other programs justify the institutional space English departments occupy, and return to them the sense of moral purpose that feminist, queer, marxist, and postcolonial critics had threatened to relieve. It is often argued that “students [need] access to those standard forms of the language linked to social and economic prestige” (Pennycook) but writing that aspires to social and economic prestige would need to conform to the dialect of the socially and economically prestigious, a dialect that may be antagonistic to the representational requirements of most users of English. [RJ]

3. Statement

ksw: “How is poetry a political field of action? What can poetry un/do? What do 'limits' mean for poetry? What are the crucial issues in taking a social (ideological) position with in a poetics today? What relationships arise between cultural production and broader social projects?”

RF, for pills: Historically, the political agency of the avant-garde has been understood largely through the politicization of artistic form, and through a critique of the relationship between “the work” and the process of its institutionalization within the academic field of “art history”. The avant-garde artist, in this account, rejects the commodification of praxis (lived experience) in favour of a renewed, direct engagement with “everyday life”, producing works which are intended to interfere with or empty out exchange value and to return to the work its political and social agency (cf. Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde). Or, in another formulation, the avant-garde work is viewed as a “pre-figuration” of new social relations, a site in which “structural homologies” (Bourdieu) between the work and the world (read: political economy) may be read, struggled with, and rearticulated. In both of these readings, we see a foundational formalist axiom: namely, that “the work” is capable of producing certain affective experiences that are denied to the audience due to the instrumentalization of life under capitalism. For instance, the “noise and politics” magazine Datacide describes the political efficacy of avant-garde sound this way:

“Musical time is radically different from the time of capital in which our public life proceeds ... musical duration is measurable only in terms of sensibilities, tensions and emotions...”

Thus, the aesthetic or poetic practice of creating “radically different” temporal, spatial, emotional, cognitive experiences—what Jameson in Marxism and Form calls “the administration of linguistic shocks”—becomes “political” at that point where it overlaps with what could be called an activist project of “consciousness raising”: both are aimed at the production of “experiences” which open cognitive space for the emergence of “new subjectivities”. This affect, one hopes, will (somehow) open the possibility for more material or tangible transformations in a broader social field.

In the case of contemporary avant-garde music, the transformation of lived, material social relations by the experience or reception of the work has had some success. The “temporary autonomous zone” of the rave or the festival, as limited and recuperable as it was, at least allowed for the exploration of alternative forms of sociality, largely via the poetics of duration: in other words, there was a more or less concrete relationship between the temporal duration of the work (whether measured in BPMs or in the total duration of the gathering/performance), and the emergence of new subjectivities and social relations. Alternative sociality is, in this case, consequential to the experience of temporality in the work: both meet in “real [historical] time”.

In the case of contemporary avant-garde poetry, however, we feel it must be said that a concrete relationship between the work and its reception in the social field is absent, and that the promise of new forms of social organization is deferred for too long. To be clear, we’re not calling for greater “efficacy” (Andrews) and we’re not lamenting the absence of a literary avant-garde “sub-culture” that might surround our work; rather, we mean that the affective potential of poetry is neutralized by the extent to which it fails to materialize as, or to directly influence, social organization. Because of its theorization as working mainly through the production of “cognitive effects”—a form of “cerebral compensation”—that are mediated through cultural and academic institutions, the politics of the literary avant-garde are more or less exhausted in the work. In short, there is little, if any, material site in which avant-garde poetics become more than pre-figurative. [Note: the ksw, as a writer-run collective that is often in an antagonist relationship to other actors in the cultural and political fabric of Vancouver and Canada, could, we think, be understood as an attempt to address this limitation].

“What do ‘limits’ mean for poetry?”, you ask. pills is interested in approaching this question by straying collectively into the badlands that lie between avant-garde poetry and radical social struggle. What can anti-capitalist, decolonization, and other autonomous social movements tell us about language? What can the avant-garde poetics of the last half-century tell us about the police? In preparing for tentative forays into this terrain, and in addition to the terms we have defined above, we have found the concepts of affinity, autonomy, and recomposition to be particularly helpful in charting a course of investigation and action – in establishing our “position,” so to speak. We hope to nuance these concepts in the context provided by the work of the writers and artists gathering in Vancouver this Summer.

References

Bruce Andrews. “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis.” Paradise and Method: Poetics and Practice. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1996.

Mikhail Bakunin. Marxism, Freedom and the State. London: Freedom Press, 1950.

Alice Becker-Ho. “The Essence of Jargon” in Roger Farr, ed., Parser I (May 2007).

Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: UP, 1977.

Peter Bürger. Theory of the Avant Garde. Minneapolis: UP, 1984.

Harry Cleaver. Reading Capital Politically. San Francisco, CA: AK/AntiTheses, 2000.

Tony Crowley. The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Datacide. June 18, 2008. <http://datacide.c8.com/>.

Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

Ghassan Hage. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Frederic Jameson. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: UP, 1971.

Rosa Luxemburg. The Russian Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected Works. Volume VI. New York: International Publishers, 1976.

Midnight Notes. New Enclosures. Jamaica Plain, MA: 1990.

“Negri, Hardt, and Immaterial Labour.” Aufheben 14 (2006).

Alastair Pennycook. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. New York: Longman, 1994.

Bobby Seale. A Lonely Range. New York: New York Times Books, 1978.

Peter Stallybrass. “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat.” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 69-95.

Max Stirner. The Ego and His Own. New York: Benjamin Tucker, 1907.

Nicholas Thoburn. “Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnamable.” Economy and Society 31:3 (August 2002): 434-460.

Raymond Williams. The Country and the City. New York, NY: Oxford, 1973.

See also: “On the Absence of First Nations in the Colloquium” and “The Neocolonial Divide and the Expansionist Language”.

I didn’t know Martin Sikes past 1985 when I dropped out of the BBS scene in Vancouver and thus missed the entire Excursionists era proper except for a few late-night proto-adventures before that group was formalized. For over twenty years (until I fell victim to cloning) the PIN for my bank card was the last four digits of the telephone number for Blue Hell (8192) so it was natural for me to think about Beelzebub and hum the Commodore 64 jingle for a moment every time I conducted an automated bank transaction. I was never adept enough to achieve something as simple as connecting the lower case add-on to my used Apple ][+ (let alone carry out a bit o’phreaking). So, for me, the scene was never primarily about technical aspects of computing but, rather, about itself: a decentralized utopian social network (of teenagers) that one participated in via pseudonyms (I was The Fandango) and at a distance. These monikers allowed for a wide range of encounters where one’s identity was more malleable than the limited version one might have been stuck with in the codified day-to-day slog of the first couple years of public high school. Martin’s contributions to that network were central. He established both a tone and structure of hospitality through the functions he built into his software (the Blue Board which was put into use far beyond the local milieu) and as a sysop then as a convener of events. There isn’t much written about this as far I know (see “Geek Communities Then and Now” by Derek K. Miller for a sketch) but I was pleased and amazed by Johan Thornton who presented this provocative “M” diagram at the recent celebration and explained as follows (I apologize in advance for my errors in transcription).

“This is a typical Martin friend network. So the ‘M’ in the middle is Martin and the orange lines are Martin’s immediate friends and they all have in common that they like someone like Martin. But then you can see that they make friends (which is the green) and they keep their people that Martin never met but they’re friends with the people that like Martin and they inevitably also like someone like Martin. And then there’s some blue lines that show where they all meet because of Martin. And then the red lines show how those people also who have friends who get together because of Martin and also meet and they meet all the other ones and because of who Martin is they’re really strong friendships. So the purpose of this diagram is to show how much cross-bracing there is in this friend network so that if you unfortunately take away the ‘M’ this network is still strong. It is made out of people who like someone like Martin. People who were attracted to someone like martin. All those people haven’t changed. This network is just as strong.”

I’ve posted my raw audio recording of the memorial (temperamental server warning) but Johan is preparing a DVD that will no doubt have much better sound quality. Anyone who hasn’t read the posts on Martin’s Facebook page should check them out (you may need to join the Vancouver network first) and since obituaries published in Canwest papers are taken offline after thirty days I’m reproducing a copy of the one that appeared The Vancouver Sun (08/01/02): D6.

“SIKES, Martin. Martin is finally resting having passed away unexpectedly on Christmas Eve at age thirty-nine. He is survived by his daughter Brooklyn, parents Rita and John, sister Belinda (Calvin) and nephews Oliver and Toby, as well as his Aunt Jane (Peter) in England and many more relatives there. He was much loved and will be greatly missed. Martin attended West Van Secondary, then UBC where he became president of the Electrical Engineering student club. He went on to a successful and prosperous career in the video game industry beginning with being a founder of the highly regarded development studio, Black Box Games. He had a particular talent for building communities. This first became clear in the computer modeming scene of the early eighties, then at UBC, later in the video game industry, and perhaps most vividly when he became a prominent disc jockey and the prime mover of the Soundproof music collective. In each case, Martin’s enthusiasm and drive would draw people in and get them involved. The enduring connections that were formed in these communities are a significant legacy. To say that he lived life to its fullest would be an understatement. His many friends were very important to him and he was loyal and generous in return. Martin had a passion for trains, from his childhood to his tragically premature death. He travelled extensively to exotic places like Easter Island and the Antarctic, as well as to visit friends in Australia, Africa and South America. No funeral service is planned, as Martin would not have wanted anything sombre. Instead a celebration of his vibrant life will be held at 4pm, Sunday, January 6th at the Kay Meek Centre, 1700 Mathers Avenue, West Vancouver. No flowers please, but donations to Engineers Without Borders will be gratefully received.”

“The Market Prefers”

[from Parser: New Poetry & Poetics 1 (2007): 55-69; ed. Roger Farr]

“As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.”

— Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Volume I, Book IV: Of Systems of Political Economy, Chapter II: “Of Restraints Upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of Such Goods as Can Be Produced at Home,” General eds., R.H. Campbell & A.S. Skinner, Textual ed., W.B. Todd. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976): 456 [1776].

Fine, so long as they arrive the market prefers the golden colour with a single centre that will store all winter.

Because the market prefers pear-shaped fruit, female plants are normally removed from production soon with orange blush.

The time of harvest can be chosen according to which appearance the market prefers. The February appearance seems most desirable.

However, abstraction is generally considered to be a Western monopoly. And the market prefers to see Chinese works that look like they come from China.

The market prefers other options—wood.

Over the years, stock analysts have suggested that the market prefers Republicans in the White House.

An editor of the Financial Times reported on CNN’s In the Money that the market prefers a divided Presidency and Senate.

The market prefers the existing home sales report, which has a sample data pool.

But according to Phillips Infotech, more than eighty percent of the market prefers dedicated in-building systems for on-premises use.

The conclusion seems self-evident: the market prefers peat to substitutes, so-called.

Traditional cellular phones are permitting the trypanosusceptible zebu genotypes, which the market prefers (Jabbar et al., 1997, 1999), to colonise these areas.

Remember to describe the product in terms of the features the market prefers.

The market prefers a Bush presidency.

While the market prefers certainty, predicting and forecasting are inherently uncertain and prone.

However, a large percentage of the market prefers the annuity-style structure used by insurance companies to match their liability.

The government determines the currency’s value. As long as the market prefers other currencies, Dr. C— said, Canada’s currency will continue to deteriorate.

The “hub” airline continually jams the arrival and departure times that the market prefers, competition is non-existent, and cost is dictated by the dominant.

Buying low may have worked in the past, but this time around, the market prefers to be safe rather than sorry. This can all be attributed to the fact that the high-end segment of the market prefers Diners.

Scrip closed yesterday at $2.00 seller—the last sale was $2.08—which suggests that the market prefers to view the stock from a post-abnormal perspective.

Lets you build a catalog of items the market prefers.

No action: monopoly profits gained because the market prefers Microsoft’s products; break up: removing potential for anticompetitive behaviors.

In other words, it pays to produce roots that look wild. The market prefers old roots.

Part of the market prefers to develop its own signals and timing to achieve specific results.

Are geared for the manufacture of large luxury cars and the market prefers smaller economy cars production costs are likely to be relatively large, revenues.

The optimal selection of technology for period h+1 when the market prefers scenario m and t represents the currently installed process technology in period h.

The market prefers large- to small-scale investments.

The market prefers short- to long-term returns.

Rather than look to such numbers and earnings per share, the market prefers increasingly to judge a company’s performance on its cash flow.

Sure, they are big. But nobody wants the meat or the hide. The market prefers the standard meat breeds. There is no market for the skins.

But it seems the market prefers to wait for the goodies to be actually given before bidding.

So its preference for identity preservation does not necessarily mean the market prefers that solution.

Whether the market prefers a large 17" or 19" CRT as opposed to a 14" or 15" LCD.

Today are unlikely to weigh on Woodside’s share price, as the market prefers to focus on the company’s growth.

Surprisingly, this work was passed at $1,800,000, perhaps an indication that the market prefers a colorful splash.

And we can reduce costs by acquiring body mass. In any case, the market prefers bigger organisations—and they are also just much easier to run.

Fund to the back of the pack before, particularly when the market prefers growth stocks over the utility, financial and tobacco issues Dreman prefers.

Harding which combine sufficient earliness with the dry matter content that the market prefers.

The market prefers those created starting from 1960 because the previous ones, being performed on raw.

Most ISPs offer flat rate plans because the market prefers them and it avoids customer resentment.

Age is another factor that influences value. Generally, the market prefers something new to something old. However, the impact of age on value declines.

How each subsegment of the market prefers to buy and be ubiquitous. The market prefers little or no change to drastic government initiatives and having a split government would keep both parties from doing anything jarring.

The market prefers the convenience and re-sealability of the 500ml Virgin bottle.

That’s a perfect illustration of how the market prefers the certainty of an increase to the possibility of an increase.

Often the market prefers a blocky shape.

But the market prefers Californian Wines.

Nebraska is gifted with the resources and expertise necessary to produce corn with quality traits that the market prefers.

Many companies have recently found that the market prefers products which are produced as environmentally consistent as possible.

We know a significant segment of the market prefers to make this important buying decision in the language of the grunt work for you by trying to determine exactly what the market prefers at the moment, and what the bears are leaving alone. This sort of information.

The market prefers fish weighing more than two kilos. “And the larger we get them, the more we get paid,” says J—.

Our growing chipset support demonstrates that the market prefers evolutionary, open standard memories to proprietary, non-standard memories.

Despite its high-tech interests in designing electronic defence systems, the market prefers to view the group as little more than a metal basher.

Smaller DSL providers, the author of the article states that: “The market prefers companies that offer a broad array of services, such as super-speedy data.” A rice production and processing system may not need to produce premium grade rice if the market prefers another type.

This is the only mass produced model, since the market prefers to produce bicycles, an important business in the period preceding the war.

The BL-250 portfolio shows that, except at certain times, the market prefers growth to value stocks.

In the absence of any drivers, the market prefers to adopt a wait-and-watch attitude.

The market prefers Bush.

The market prefers dark green straight and long cucumber fruit.

The more popular types. Won’t they? Merge, or take on strategic partners, that is.

Clearly, the market prefers the former, rather than the latter. There was plenty evidence of that.

Yellow Finn, however, is an exception. The market prefers smaller sized tubers.

A sizeable segment of the market prefers the convenience a gel can provide in pain relief therapy.

The market prefers shallots with dark green straight leaves.

The market prefers harmonisation to fragmentation. This stimulates competition for high volume markets and downwards price pressures.

You may very well know within a few minutes whether the market prefers the orange and purple striped roses or the pink and green striped ones.

Who provide COTS products (such as Microsoft and Intel) know that the market prefers features over trustworthiness.

If the skies remain blue and unless the market prefers some alternative the openly-evolving MACK might well graduate into the mainstream.

While not too far north, the market prefers hardwood floors and carpeting.

The market prefers to wait for indications of how the situation in the Middle East will develop before deciding whether prices should rise or fall.

A market-oriented economy, the city’s blind folk have fallen on hard times, as the market prefers high-quality products made with advanced technology.

Not any “ol’ goat” is acceptable, neither is any “ol’ feed.” The market prefers Boer, Kiko and Tennessee Fainting Goats and requires “prime” and “choice” grades of the Nebraska Corn Board.

Pear-shaped fruit comes from a hermaphrodite plant. In sheet form. That reduces the costs substantially—by more than 30 percent. It also gives us lots of flexibility in size and the market prefers size.

“Overall, the market prefers decision and we haven’t got that yet,” he said.

If a large portion of the market prefers to obtain all voice services as a package—and there is general consensus that this is the case.

One can ask, why the market prefers to invest money for RES projects in the Islands.

The answer is simple. These gems generally are more expensive than their untreated, greener counterparts. As it is known for reasons of scale. Because most blue aquamarines are heated and the market prefers blue.

Maybe the right answer is a hybrid between the two, but how we charge for it is going to be a function of what the market prefers.

Able to write his or her own treatment is total bullshit. Yes, the market prefers known names and those with track records to outsiders—show me the market.

SIA’s choice is above all motivated by customer demands: the market prefers the Boeing 777, its cabin is bigger, and for our European routes.

Presently, the market prefers some trimming of the tops. Just sell them.

Efficient marketing entails knowing what the market prefers, and then meeting that demand.

This course resulted from the fact that “the market prefers focused companies,” H— said.

“This fixes the cost of their debt for several years,” F— said. “The market prefers to see a permanent rate that they can count on.” The bulb onions grown in Ohio are the long day storage varieties. But it will be interesting to see which approach the market prefers.

Often the largest downgrading defect for structural and appearance timber—the market prefers clearwood.

The market prefers seeds that are well matured with a good yellow color. Size and number of knots can be alleviated.

The market prefers products and services that reduce consumables and are energy efficient, durable.

The market prefers local pigs as the taste of pigs suitable for stall-feeding is considered. In particular swine & cattle inside the two cities.

Generally the market prefers people with expertise in a particular line of business: people who have qualified as Chartered Accountants and have some years of experience.

The market prefers transactions that are expansionary, boost market share, enhance geographical sales.

Bombay and New Delhi pointed out that WA desi chickpea varieties Sona and Heera were of superior quality and the market prefers such varieties.

The market prefers measures by Level of Service.

For traditional R22 systems and those driving to reduce size and weight the market prefers R407C over R134A.

Export of whole unsplit carcasses to France because that is what the market prefers for cutting in that country.

That is exactly the kind of measure which fruit is complimentary to Australian fruit due to opposite seasons. The market prefers US fruit due to quality consistency.

Know how each sub-segment of the market prefers to buy and be ubiquitous.

It is simply untrue that the market prefers wild golden seal and in fact cultivated material commands a higher price.

The most commonly grown sweet potatoes are the orange-fleshed types. The market prefers those that have deep orange moist flesh & smooth thin copper.

When as little as twenty-five percent of the market prefers non-biotech, then losses to consumers may outweigh gains.

It is the clean, dry grain that the market prefers.

Most Americans are not much for reading, and the market prefers dubbing. I thought so too but I heard (on NPR where else?) that this isn’t really true.

Seabait also exports to the Mediterranean where the market prefers one-to-two inch worms as bait for the very small seafish commonly caught.

Land experience varying degrees of constraints to development, this is why the market prefers a greenfield site.

In portions of the United States, the market prefers to own a potential building site.

This is partly due to tradition, and partly due to the valid perception.

As the guru of “one price,” R— states that thirty percent of the market prefers to negotiate the price of a car.

HFC no longer offers inflation-indexed mortgages because the market prefers conventional mortgages and the company no longer has access to indexed funds.

Obviously the market prefers to see the sunny side.

In this example, the market prefers higher profitability (ROA) and greater safety (stronger capital adequacy).

“The market prefers cheaper brands,” Hart said.

The market prefers Internet firms making B2B announcements.

The market prefers algorithms whose sources have been published and that are trusted and to make everything fit into a desktop box that the market prefers.

Folks who are left of center don’t like to hear this, but the market prefers Bush to Gore because of Gore’s proclivity to micromanage the economy.

Earnings even before the merger announcement, it is hardly surprising that the market prefers not to focus on how the merged one will justify price-earnings.

Companies managed by funds outperform ones with dispersed ownership and the market prefers funds which are trying to influence the companies.

There are of course exceptions but generally 80% of the market prefers Japanese language sites.

Yellow Finn, however, is an exception. The market prefers smaller sized tubers.

New investment projects depend on where the money comes from? If the market prefers high dividends yields, firms may be hesitant to take new investment.

The market prefers to the maintaining by China. Other implications are obvious.

Demand is high today. Coffee beans were our trade. But the market prefers cocaine.

Maybe the market prefers ventures that are more upstream, structures with less debt.

Is a tradable upswing followed by meltdown again. It looks like the market prefers the first way. AMAT, INTC all bounced back from their resistance levels.

To exist as a privately provided currency, denominated in whatever unit of account that the market prefers.

The market prefers cocaine.

Find support for the view that the market prefers the election of a Republican president.

For example, Niederhoffer, Gibbs are significantly positive when parent-firm insiders leave the spinoff’s board indicating that the market prefers complete independence for spinoff firms.

Been using aglime, the increased pH and calcium content of our soils has enabled us to grow the higher yielding Virginia peanuts which the market prefers.

However we believe management has understood that the market prefers to be positively surprised than the contrary.

The last harvest the range had increased 300g to 750g. Since the market prefers fish of more uniform size, a means of grading the fish prior to harvest.

The airline buys a small number of large jet aircraft when the market prefers a higher frequency of smaller flights.

A stable matching (mu F or mu W ) that is optimal for that side in the sense that no agent on that side of the market prefers any other stable matching.

The market prefers focus strategies. Another wrong signal from Suez.

This segment of the program should help cow/calf producers to better understand the types of calves the market prefers and why they get the higher prices.

Enforced by order of magnitude cheaper digital cash backed by whatever the market prefers.

Or as B— is so fond of inferring, the market prefers to do business with partners who are able to supply answers and deliver goods or services accurately and on time.

The market prefers thick-walled, blocky fruit with four lobes. In Scandinavia, the market prefers the shorter fruited types.

Superlights chains move slowly because the market prefers big look.

Many companies have recently found that the market prefers products, which are as environmentally compatible as possible.

The domestic production for the sports footwear has been decreasing as the market prefers brand name imported footwear.

In practice, if the market prefers to import gas from Norway, it should be able to do so, rather than being constrained. But further market research is warranted to evaluate this conclusion.

The market prefers grade ‘A’ and in particular grade ‘AA’ beef overall.

Secondly, the market prefers the decentralized, closed-access proprietary network environments in accounting.

The market prefers cash deals.

Apart from the new technologies, the market prefers large-cap, blue-chip offerings.

I guess this is what they figure the market prefers.

What market research has been undertaken to suggest that the market prefers us to be IMCA (Association) as opposed to IMC.

Work here that an aggregation of small changes is unlikely to offset. If the market prefers branded drinks companies to food companies, that is.

Government package, which includes tax reductions, was not totally negative, the market prefers to see the conditions clearly.

Interviewees said that the market prefers a skin-off carcass ranging from 22-32 kilograms.

However, because the market prefers maintenance-free equipment now construction using a tempered worm wheel and believing that a final resolution is close.

It would seem the market prefers Bush, but we suspect the main fear has been a serious constitutional crisis.

Meat is sold in all States and the market is relatively stable. Supply usually exceeds demand. Competition can be intense and the market prefers fresh meat.
To a third of wheat harvested in WA has quality below what the market prefers.

PP can be obtained using either bubble or flat head extrusion technology. The market prefers cast PP, while bioriented PP is used to get thinner sheets.

However, there is little evidence that the market prefers pooling of interests to purchase accounting, either from the reaction to merger.

For companies, the market prefers using connections through ISDN lines, which allow data transmission until 128KB per.

Informal or de facto standards arise when the market prefers one technology or design from a particular manufacturer or group over competing designs.

With broccoli there is a strong tendency for the denser. The market prefers smaller heads.

Second, the evidence mounts that the market prefers the decentralized, many-tomany World Wide Web for electronic commerce than the centralized.

“And Viacom,” said T—, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “They are small, and the market prefers the big players like Yahoo and America Online.” Second, as Malone (1995) has argued, the market prefers the decentralized, manyto- many Web for electronic commerce.

Because it would make obvious the fact that the market prefers not to use Microsoft’s web browser and related “technologies.” Merely that.

“Switched over to white wheat, and now they basically control a good deal of the Asian market for wheat because the market prefers the white wheat,’’ M— said.

To this list, it is evident that the market prefers the first series. I will expose it.

The market prefers the two largest, Infogrames and Ubi Soft.

The market prefers earnings visibility now, but Maelor’s shares offer a potential longer.

How can we determine if the market prefers the products and services? A concept test can be critical to verify.

But the market prefers cocaine.

Grown from seeds or cuttings, depending on variety and what cultivar or type the market prefers.

Secondly, I think most would agree that companies the market prefers a liberal gov’t rather than Beazley. I don’t think Labour’s current.

Cruise Lengths: The younger segment of the market prefers shorter and more frequent vacations. Retirees and empty nesters want to stay.

The share rise shows the market prefers tomorrow’s profits.

The market prefers mergers of comparable businesses, like HP/Compaq.

“An unstable situation was created, because the market prefers my brother and I as the leaders,” G— said.

The market prefers low cost quality local products to imported ones.

Some of the US mills do gain market share, but you have to remember that in structural lumber the market prefers Canadian spruce, pine, fir.

Yes, I know, that’s not what the market prefers.


6 iii 2002 - 10 vi 2005


[Thanks to Jo for the repost].

A Letter from Margaret Avison (99/08/02)

Dear Aaron Vidaver,

Since your April Minutes of the Charles Olson Society (about the 1963 lectures and readings at ubc), there has been a precipitate in my mind that I would like to report before I reread the Minutes.

To clear the chance things first; your pages vividly restored two of the social evenings. One was towards the end of my time there, a party evening for everybody in a ubc hospitality mansion near the entrance. I wandered outside and was leaning on a wall overlooking a cliff and the night water of the bay away down down there, and Ginsberg, whom I knew only from his poems, wandered out too and joined me. He knew that to me Spirit meant the Spirit of Jesus—after my night on stage, everybody knew. And he gently acknowledged that, responding too to the quiet, and mentioning his own Buddhist sense of a spiritual life.

The second encounter was when Olson astonished me with an invitation to have dinner before my evening presentation. When I said I’d be too nervous, he guaranteed he knew how to attend to that and I would see it would work out best. It was strange to think of the person we had all been crowding into classrooms to hear lecture, who electrified us every time, whose reading of his own poems keeps resonating to this day, a scholar, an explorer among ideas and structures—that such a one would not make me more rather than less nervous. The dinner conversation I do not remember. I think it was in a university dining-room. I know he did put me at ease in no time, eliciting a few facts about my life, and then letting exchanges or silences be as they would. His only pressure was a gentle insistence that I have brandy with the after-dinner coffee. He had timed things precisely, ushered me the short distance to the auditorium, and left me to it. What courtesy!

There were ubc distractions. Above all, the rumour which Layton had reported beforehand, repeated to me out there, that Warren Tallman had been opposed in this project by Roy Daniells. Professor Daniells was the person at ubc I had most looked forward to meeting again. He had taught me Renaissance Literature in my first and his only year at the U. of T. (he was then kidnapped by the University of Manitoba). Because I so appreciated Tallman, to my shame I avoided seeing Daniells, [ ] probably the person who suggested my name to him. He did not put in an appearance so far as I know, and the only time I ran into him, he and his wife were walking their dog and we passed with a brief friendly salute. Gouging to the spirit, now that I know it was all untrue, and he has died.

The setting. Since early childhood I had not been in Vancouver, and all I remembered from then was English Bay, paddling there, and poking about a yard with a couple of hens in ferny, golden sunlight, while my parents visited with an elderly aunt. It was a homey place. This time Vancouver was the campus, the cliff and slithering down it for a swim. The busy schedule closed off the hours. There must have been a trip from and to the airport, but I do not remember it.

Enough of my memories. Impressions of the Conference? There was an odd sense of being out of sync in such a dominantly us context, humanly speaking. There were West Coast poets in attendance. I had read and still read some of them, but we did not meet (perhaps because my father’s death snatched me home early). Of course the whole project was to introduce “these new voices” from south of the border. Would that Roethke had been included too! Naturally the visiting teachers and discussion leaders had met and talked ideas together often before. I remember one pre-class occasion in somebody’s house, Tallman’s I think, where I was delighted to see Denise Levertov, but she and Duncan were absorbed in continuing an earlier conversation. Everybody had to get put together for their evening duties. It gave me a strange observer/outsider sense. As your Minutes say, “... it may come down to one Canadian as a concession to whatever national pride?” (8). O you Americans!

This interpolation leads me into the “influences” part of your topic. Canadian poets are regionally separated, published in small periodicals only accessible by subscription or through large libraries. As a result there have been “groups”. Maritimers do their own thing. Two publications grew up in Montreal. Toronto poets may be grouped around Raymond Souster’s Contact Reading Series, although that included some poets from other parts of Canada. Before 1963 we had already had readings by Olson, twice, by Levertov, Corman, Leroi Jones, Zukofsky, Enslin, Creeley, and Leonard Cohen who has become international. You will understand that these prior contacts make it difficult to disentangle the specific influences of the Conference.

In Canada the “hippie” era changed everything. Before the sixties academia would hardly have allowed fourth year English students to choose their topic for a final seminar. In the second and last year that I taught, my seminar proposed the focus “What is a poem?” For a full two semesters they met, one proposing his idea, the others eagerly producing a poem that did not quite fit. They built one on another, and at the final class defined a poem as: “An art form in words which requires the same energy from the reader as from the writer.” Isn’t this like something that might have come out of the Conference? But the students had barely entered high school in 1963.

As for myself: the Conference discussions widened the scope of means for arriving at a text, ie. doing as Sir Philip Sidney counselled, “ ‘Fool!’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in your heart and write’.” And Olson’s Homeric Hymns lost me in academic vistas awhile—a Homer thesis, fortunately abandoned. I leared a lot from Creeley’s clenched-teeth diction, the way Duncan’s thought was expressed in terms of feeling, and Levertov’s return to the English Romantic voice, perhaps her convalescence from Vietnam. I write by ear too.

Margaret Avison.

[Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 30 (1999) in pdf]

Thanks to Fred Wah for his suggestion, last week, during my consultation with him as SFU writer-in-residence, to rethink Filler as an aggregate of events (instead of a manuscript) and to pick up the compositional problems from the standpoint of production. “Maybe it won’t end,” he said. But on the non-Filler front I have four more digitized publications to present: Giantesses (1992)—the special issue of Front with pieces by Rhoda Rosenfeld, Maxine Gadd, Trudi Rubenfeld, Jam Ismail, Judith Copithorne and Renee Rodin (edited by Lisa Robertson and including an excerpt from a conversation with Rosenfeld and Gadd conducted by Robertson and Catriona Strang)—Air Two (1971) featuring Maxine Gadd, Affordable Tedium (1987) by Nancy Shaw and Oral Tragedy (1988) by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. Let’s see. What else? A set of Unsquatted Houses (07/04/28) and drawings by Robert Scott McMillan of two assemblages I made at Black Point (1995). And some pictures of my mother, Josephine Vidaver, who should have turned eighty today. I would have presented her with a book on the history of epidemic disease (one of her favourite subjects) and a tote bag (though I will never be able to top the limited edition LBO “Give Martha’s Cell To Cheney” bag I gave her two years ago). Hey, fuck off, Death.

I’ve fallen behind again. But I have completed the questionnaire for the Hillside Secondary School “Class of 1987” reunion committee (and look forward to reading dissertations by Heather Cameron and Fiona Jeffries after they’re renovated into reviewable books). Here are more scans of collages (1996 and 1998), photographs from “My Last Summer in South Park Royal” (with a second appendix in progess) and my recent visit to California, a “Poetry Project” (1983) and some berserk writing (1996) for the not-yet die-hards and some dust jackets from volumes that will form part of “Deaccessioning My Library”. Distractions or core to the gesamtkunstwerk? Both. In addition to answering those questions about justifying this form of address (contained inside Metafiller) I also need to reply to a question asked by a student (Trevor M’s mother) during my visits to UBC Humanities 101 in March (thanks to Margot Leigh Butler for the invitation): “What were the funniest and most tragic stories from the Woodwards Squat?” I need to scan the pertinent documents first.

An unexpurgated draft of Filler §1995 has been sitting around since last summer. I won’t be able to issue it until I go through the volume word-by-word with five people who appear in the writing not just via the inclusion of their correspondence but as addressees often enough in the “diary proper” that they cannot be readily dislodged or anonymized. I may have more luck with §1996 where the juridical boundaries between these relations are reinstated and the writing regains a more “solo” effect. I’ve extracted my course notes to add to Bowering’s Teaching and hope other ex-students or auditors of his will contribute (his pedagogy is an aspect of his work that has been overlooked in the critical literature: someone should edit an issue of Open Letter on the topic). I made several hundred collages in 1995 and these became passing objects for discussion of aesthetics, politics, philosophy and technique (“the problem of adhesives”) in much of Filler that year. I’ve posted reproductions (contact scans) of A Thousand Reassuring Studies (sampling), Rubbings and Foresti Sequence (final edit, missing one lost piece) with the earlier Snickers (1994) & various remainders (1989-1992). When the draft of Filler §1995 arrives it will make more sense to have already seen the pictures. I add all of this by way of delaying, again, the questions I’m supposed to attend to. Not much non-Filler this week outside of a note on the appearance of the word “trawled” in Canadian coverage of IDAPB (07/03/15) but please join me in counting down to the end of Filler.