Anomalous Parlance (2000)

Introductions and incomplete bibliography written for the Anomalous Parlance series I organized at the Kootenay School of Writing in 2000.

sprawled here pondering / law and order

– Phyllis Webb

> Melissa Wolsak, Pen Chants & An Heuristic Prolusion (February 27, 2000).

Welcome to Anomalous Parlance at the Kootenay School of Writing. I’m Aaron Vidaver, member of the KSW collective & curator for the series. This afternoon Melissa Wolsak will read Pen Chants, we’ll take a 20 minute break, then return for An Heuristic Prolusion. First, a remark on the series as a whole. If ontology is the luxury of the landed, what is the necessity of the nomadic? In one of Warren Tallman’s letters to Robin Blaser he suggested that the New American Poets each demanded a cult of readers, because each poetry proposed a world requiring domestic inhabitation. The 6, 7, or 8 poetries in this series permit squatting only: perfect hide-outs from the authorities. They’re anomalous not in the sense of being abnormal (a psychological notion), but in their uncomfortability to common orders. They’re lawless, but not uniformly so. The word “parlance”, however, strikes me more deeply than ‘anomalous’ – it points to a conference to discuss terms, a conference that I hope will arise. Let’s defer the problem of specifying this writing as a poetics of _______, to prevent vaccination against the work itself. What seduced me in The Garcia Family Co-Mercy was the vocabulary, the rescue of diction – as a rescue of lost words & their rendition in song. It’s this vigilance that carries on through Pen Chants, even as the phrase comes to dominate &, by the end, even the sentence. Movement, but not at any cost: no violence. You see, the invisible is fragile, but resilient.

> Catriona Strang & Nancy Shaw, Busted (March 26, 2000).

Last month I spoke of the writing in this series as unlivable because of its refusal to “propose worlds” for inhabitation by readers. At this juncture I’d like to reaffirm that proposal, but deny the chief consequence I drew from it then – that these writings permit squatting. Squatting is, naturally, a type of inhabitation, usually temporary because almost always a violation of law. This trope of the reader as nomadic, as one of you pointed out, easily transmogrifies into a trope of the reader as tourist. So let’s not go there. Instead, let’s read Busted. This manuscript, as you’ll hear, consists of a series of unusual bulletins on various topics – unusual not because of their topicality, but because of the proliferation of interrogatives over imperatives – a series of bulletins embedded in a sequence which our press release describes as “counter-lyrics, irruptive shuffles, logos-liquidating flags & polyespistemic assays” – a phrase the Vancouver Sun translated as “spoken word”, with typical violence. So, not busted in the sense of unfortunately broken & in need of fixing up, but busted in the sense of caught in the act, arrested and taken prisoner. Not the politics of reform, but the politics of reference.

> Lisa Robertson, The Weather & “What’s Didactic?” (April 29/30, 2000).

(a) Welcome again to Anomalous Parlance. I’d planned to preamble tonight’s writing, The Weather, by Lisa Robertson, with a brief discussion of the place of the pronoun “we” in it. But since I’ll be introducing Lisa’s talk tomorrow, I think I’ll save “we” for then – perhaps some of you can help with out with this later tonight. So, by way of introduction I offer two quotations. The first is from a statement by Lisa published last year in a special issue of the journal boundary2 called 99 Poets 1999 An International Poetics Symposium. The second is from Ernst Bloch, in conversation with Theodor W. Adorno:

I believe writing is utopian, as curiosity is utopian, as plural pronouns and cities are utopian, even though the singular world is not and I believe equally that utopia is a discipline. It is going along. It is the interval of “if” attended and extended into material choice. For me the poem can only ever be this timely ambivalence, this artificial now, gesture given. Given.

There is no such thing as utopia without multiple goals. In a non-teleological world there is no such thing. Mechanical materialism can have no utopia. Everything is present in it, mechanical present. Thus, the fact that there is such a sensitivity about an ‘it-should-be’ demonstrates that there is also utopia in this area where it has the most difficulty, and I believe, Teddy, that we are certainly in agreement here: the essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present. If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers.

The Weather.

(b) Welcome to the Kootenay School of Writing & Charles Watts Memorial Library. I’m Aaron Vidaver, curator of this series called Anomalous Parlance, for those of you who I haven’t met yet. Today’s talk is not on the ideology of weather as the first of my press releases claimed. It’s entitled “What’s Didactic? Autonomies of Description, or, an Oblique Gloss on the Weather”. Since I was forbidden from previewing the essay, there’s not much I can say about it directly, so I thought a bit about the words in the title, wondering which ones are the most inflammatory. Naturally, it’s the prepositions – “of” and “on” – which specify relations. But reading more carefully it was the word “description” that seemed and seems to be the heaviest and most unlikely of words to appear in the title, almost shocking, since the hostility towards description in poetry has been a commonplace in Vancouver writing for the past 40 years. So, it’s curious & I suspect we’re going to hear some kind of a recuperation or rescue of description as a technique in the service of a project of refurbishing our politic of language. I’ve selected another quotation, for emphasis. It’s the concluding paragraph from a review of Peter Culley’s The Climax Forest, written by Lisa for American Book Review in 1998:

The cozy identity tropes of federalist nationalism, the skewed economy of the North American “Free Trade” myth, the conflicting aesthetics of tiny avant garde cultural practices within the mass market of entertainment: What is the relation of periphery to centre? A Canadian writes at the uncertain margins of huge American machinations, at the far end of Britain’s long project, at the blurring of Asian and western, at the crumbling of the lesser dollar – and the position is both defensive and complicit, in the sense that the persona is implicated, enfolded, in a political context that rankles even as it enables. Each margin needs, so produces, its own image of the center, of power. The most acutely disruptive poetics yearn for, as they demote, the comfort and tenure of the broad audience. Sullen mavericks cherish their trophies. With mineral phonemes, Culley’s poems show importantly that this cultural decadence, this precarious balancing, this tender hybridity “of near bile lodged in what humour” is in fact the middle, and is description.

> Susan Clark, Bad Infinity & as lit x (May 28, 2000).

Hi. Welcome back to Anomalous Parlance. Today, as I’m sure you’re aware, Susan Clark will be reading a selection from Bad Infinity & presenting a talk called as lit x. Bad Infinity is the most recent in a series of projects started some time before 1985 but which may not exist. These include The Round, an encyclopedia project (Book 1 appeared in 1989 as Believing in the World: a reference work), Suck Glow, which was almost published with the first article of Theatre of the New World of the Time, “The Topics of Mental Life”, in the mid-90s, and the sequence Mutability Lyrics, read at KSW but also unpublished. I don’t mean to suggest that these projects are non-existent because most of these manuscripts are not in print. I mean to say that they may not exist because they are made impossible by the writing that arises out of each of them. And if they are impossible, they surely cannot exist. To introduce Tied to a Post, the section from Bad Infinity that Susan is reading today, I hope, I have a paragraph from an e-mail correspondence with her earlier in the year. It’s helpful.

I want to make myself a language that will produce a kind of (liberatory) hysteria at the level of the individual reader. A kind of insoluble but seductive fusion generated solely by syntax (staircases to nowhere and maximum slippage at every level); and find a way to use this both to reconsider the sublime/transcendent which is not going away and to illustrate and cogitate on the possible place of the person in the overload – the ‘paper blizzards’ and counter-intuitive procedures and logics – of global politics and macroeconomics. And of course try to understand gendering in all of this and terrorism in the nomad/state binary and the role of the inherent abjection-reflex which seems to me a part of the Deleuze/Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus guess that we at some level wish to be enslaved.

To be tied to a post, then, our bodies, sure, but moreso our being to an afterwards. To serve regulated time and be constituted, thus to exist, post-.

> Christine Stewart, “Taxonomy & Etc.” (June 25, 2000).
Hello everyone. Welcome to Anomalous Parlance: the final reading & talk in this series at KSW. This afternoon Christine Stewart shall read Taxonomy and present a talk on the three previous talks in the series: An Heuristic Prolusion by Melissa Wolsak, “What’s Didactic?” by Lisa Robertson, and as lit x by Susan Clark. Each should take 20 minutes. It strikes me, from the extremely brief segments I’ve read, that Taxonomy may be fruitfully studied (once it’s published) beside Susan Clark’s Believing in the World and Lisa Robertson’s The Apothecary. While Believing in the World proceeds semi-topically to build a counter-encyclopedia and The Apothecary drifts through a dictionary-structure en route, it its lyrical dispensations, Stewart’s Taxonomy illustrates a set of concepts—animal, vegetable, mineral, space, time, species, and phylum—first by a visual instantiation, then by a declarative sentence embodying a proposition of the for x is y (or at least appearing to embody this type of proposition), then by elaboration & comparison with the other concepts in the set. I recommend listening closely for the absence of general laws. Taxonomy.

...

Anomalous Parlance: An Enumerative Bibliography (incomplete)

>> Susan Clark

Believing in the World: a reference work. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1989.

“from Believing in the World.” Writing 16 (October 1986): 30-32. [pp. 13-19 draft]

“from Believing in the World.” Malahat Review 73 (January 1986).

“dear Ccc & cie, / Re: the psychogeography known as RADDLE MOON.” Sulphur 44 (1999): 189-193.

Excess Flesh. [artist’s book]. 1993.

“Gether – from ‘the Agglomerative,’ a classifying section of Bad Infinity.” The Gig 3 (1999): 30-37.

“hyster.pom.” West Coast Line 24 (Spring/Summer 1998): 15-17.

“’I want someone to say what you say.’…” [with Lisa Robertson & Catriona Strang]. Chain 1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 29.

Impossibility - Exhilirates - Who tastes it: syntactic and epistemological aporia as radical poetic apparatus in Emily Dickinson's poetry. Burnaby: Simon Fraser University (M.A. Thesis), 1995.

Melancholie. [artist’s book]. 1995.

Mid-Ocean. [installation, Fondation Royaumont, France]. 1995.

“from ‘Not not’.” West Coast Line 24:1 (Spring 1990): 76-81.

Suck Glow (forthcoming)

“from Suck Glow.” Motel 3 (Summer 1990): 8-14.

Theatre of the New World of the Time (forthcoming)

“The Topics of Mental Life” and “Topic or Character or Situation” 1-6. Avec 7 (1994): 94-99.

“Topic or Character or Situation” 7; 10-11. Exact Change Yearbook. Boston and Manchester: Exact Change and Carcanet, 1995: 112-115.

Tied to a Post: an essay in abstraction (forthcoming)

“from Tied to a Post.” Raddle Moon 17: 148-150.

“six excerpts from Tied to a Post: an essay in abstraction.” Matrix 50 (1997): 55-56.

“To see, or Theory.” Raddle Moon 13: 34-43.

“To Wound, To Wind.” Chain 1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 275-277; reprinted in Subtext (1996).

Editor, Raddle Moon 1-18 (1983-present).

Editor, Sprang Texts 1-6 (1992-1994).

Editor, with Lisa Robertson & Christine Stewart, Giantess: the organ of the New Abjectionists (1995).

>> Lisa Robertson

“Another Drink for Modernism.” [on Susan Howe, Peirce Arrow & Barbara Guest] Stand Magazine (Winter 2000).

The Apothecary. Vancouver:Tsunami Editions, 1991.

“from Parts,” Raddle Moon 8 (1989): 61-69. [pp. 8-16]

“from The Apothecary,” Writing 25 (1990): 60-63. [pp.17-22 draft]

“from The Apothecary,” Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology. Ed. Andrew Klobucar and Michael Barnholden. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999: 104-107. [pp.1-7]

The Badge. Hamilton: The Berkeley Horse/MindWare, 1994; reprinted in Tessera 19 (Winter 1995): 82-83.

“Portrait of Vivian Westwood.” Barscheit 3 (1992): 3.

“Barscheit Nation.” [with Christine Stewart & Catriona Strang]. Barscheit 4 (1993); reprinted in Mirage#4/Period(ical) 14 (March 1993); Writing from the New Coast: Technique. Providence: O·blēk editions, 1993: 185; and Semiotext(e) Canadas. New York: Semiotext(e), 1994: 90.

“Benched Art: Negotiating the Rhetorics of Taste.” Parallelogramme (1995).

“Beneath The Pavilions.” Mix: April 1997-January 1999.

“Loose Edges: Marketing Artist-Run Chic.” (Spring 1997): 58-60.

“Good Grooming: Safde’s VPL.” (Summer 1997): 39-41.

“Modern Western.” (Fall 1997): 39-41.

“Dry Rot: Modernism’s new eco-rhetoric.” (Winter 1997/1998): 35-37.

“Bachelor Machine (autoironic).” (Spring 1998): 33-35.

“Visitations: City of Ziggurats.” (Summer 1998): 33-35.

“Pure Surface: Remembering the Suburb.” (Fall 1998): 33-34.

“Board Story.” (Winter 1998/1999): 25-27.

“Canadian Emergency” interview with Shelagh Rogers. [with Jeff Derksen, Catriona Strang & Nancy Shaw]. The Arts Tonight. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 24, 1994.

“Coasting.” [with Jeff Derksen, Catriona Strang & Nancy Shaw]. A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevellet, Pam Rehm. Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994: 301-303; reprinted in Open Letter 9:3 (1995): 74-77.

“A Conversation: Sunday May 18, East Pender, with Maxine Gadd and Rhoda Rosenfeld.” [with Catriona Strang]. Front magazine 3:6 (July/August 1992): 8-11.

“A Convivial Soil : The Arts and Crafts in Burnaby.” Collapse (forthcoming)

Debbie: an epic. Vancouver and London: New Star Books and Reality Street Editions, 1997.

“Battle Scene: from Debbie.” Critical Quarterly 38:3 (1996): 64-65. [lines 509-581 draft]

“Debbie’s Folly” and “How to Judge.” Parataxis 8/9 (1994).

The Descent: a light comedy in three parts including Three Decorative Inscriptions & a Toast. Buffalo, NY: Meow Press, 1996. [lines 197-256 draft; screens; “Warning to the Reader”]

“Earth Monies.” (broadside, lounge, 1995). [lines 257-303; 725-739 draft]

“Exordium” and “A Small Toast.” The Capilano Review 2:17-18 (Winter/Spring 1996): 148-151. [lines 61-107; 384 nt.]

“Her Virgil (Fragments Towards an Entertainment),” “How to Judge,” and “Debbie’s Folly.” Exact Change Yearbook. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Boston and London: Exact Change and Carcanet, 1995: 129-132. [lines 154-196 draft; appendix; stanzas from XEclogue rev. ed.]

“Exordium” and “How to Judge,” Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK. London: Reality Street Editions, 1996: 174-181. [lines 61-107; 154-196]

“Party Scene: From Debbie.” A Brief Description of the Whole World 2 (1997).

“(the sad parts).” The Alterran Poetry Assemblage 2 (June 1997). . [lines 371-481; 497-508 draft]

“Screens: From Debbie.” Proliferation 4 (1997).

“two excerpts from Debbie: an epic.” Matrix 50 (1997): 44-46. [lines 257-279; 655-685 draft]

“The Device.” Hole 6 (1996): 1-5; reprinted in The East Village Poetry Web 4 (1998). .

“Essay on Place, etc.” Sulfur 44 (Spring 1999).

“Flesh Thefts: Poaching in Popular Culture.” Parallelogramme 18:4 (1993): 32-39.

“A Flock of What Resonates: Peter Culley’s Climax Forest.” American Book Review 19: 2 (January/February 1998).

“from the office for Soft Architecture.” Front magazine (December 1999/January 2000/February 2000/March-April 2000).

“’I want someone to say what you say.’…” [with Susan Clark & Catriona Strang]. Chain 1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 29.

“If We.” 99 Poets 1999: An International Poetics Symposium. Ed. Charles Bernstein. Duke University Press, 1999.

“Gary Hill Performance Review.” Subtext (1997): .

“The Glove: an Essay on Interruption.” Vancouver: University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, 1991.

“Index A: Lyric or Prohibitive.” Chain 3 (1996).

“Island to City: A BC Landscape.” The Stranger (Seattle) September 4, 1998.

“Lucy Hogg: Painting.” [catalogue essay]. Campbell River: Campbell River Art Gallery, 2000.

“Lurch.” [review of Kelly Wood exhibition]. C Magazine 30 (1991): 49-51.

Manifeste pour une Architecture Douce / Soft Architecture: A Manifesto. Vancouver and Montréal: Artspeak Gallery and Dazibao, centre de photographies actuelles, 1999.

“My Eighteenth Century.” Assembling Alternatives. Ed. Romana Huk. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

“Peace in Earth.” [on Eben Ezer]. Nest: a magazine of interiors (Fall 1999).

“Phatic.” Giantess 1 (1995); reprinted in Parallel 2 (1995): .

“Pink Cotton: A Novel (Voice over for Kathy Slade’s video: Enamouration).” The British Columbia Monthly 42 (August 1990): 1-2.

“Pleasure Components.” Stand 1:1 New Series (March 1999): 107-108.

“Porchverse.” Raddle Moon 17 (1998): 100-104.

“Primitivera Perturb.” [with Christine Stewart]. Big Allis 8 (1998): 77-83.

“Private Addresses.” [broadside]. Vancouver: Association for Noncommercial Culture, 1991; reprinted with french translation by Yolande Villemaire in Estuaire (1995).

“Pure Surface.” West Coast Line 29 (Fall 1999): 45-48.

“Rousseau at Burnaby.” [exhibition catalogue for Interventions: Anne Ramsden and Renee Van Helm]. Burnaby: Burnaby Art Gallery, 1996.

“School of Fish.” [review of Eileen Myles]. The Stranger (Seattle): December 11, 1997.

“Sexy Girls: Susan Edelstein, Yoko Takashima, Mina Totino, Jonathon Wellman, Judy Radul.” [catalogue essay]. Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 2000.

Skinflick and Secret Origins. [exhibition catalogue for Clare Gomez Edington & Patrick Mahon]. Vancouver: Or Gallery, 1992.

“A Sunday Drive.” [with Nancy Shaw]. Beneath the Paving Stones. Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1993: 5-16.

Their Senses Transported. [exhibition catalogue for Sara Leydon, Conviction]. Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1990.

“from The Weather: Wednesday.” W 1 (Spring 2000): 13-23.

XEclogue. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1993; revised edition, Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999.

“Commentary.” The Capilano Review 2:11 (Summer 1993): 95-98.

“Eclogue One: Honour.” The Capilano Review 2:11 (Summer 1993): 99-106; reprinted in Writing Class, 110-116.

“Eclogues IV & V.” Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women. Ed. Mary Margaret Sloane. Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House, 1998.

“Eclogues III & IV.” The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry 1993- 1994. Ed. Douglas Messerli. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995.

“from Xeclogue.” Front magazine (July/August 1991): 14-15.

“How Pastoral: A Manifesto.” The Capilano Review 2:11 (Summer 1993): 93-94; reprinted in A Poetics of Criticism, 277-280 and Writing Class, 108-109.

Xeclogue: II-V. Vancouver: Sprang Texts, 1993.

“XEclogue III-V.” Raddle Moon 12: 62-69.

“XEclogue VIII & IX.” West Coast Line 27:2 (Fall 1993): 20-25.

Co-editor, Raddle Moon (1994-1998).

Editor, with Christine Stewart & Catriona Strang, Barscheit 1-4 (1990-1993).

Editor, with Susan Clark & Christine Stewart, Giantess: the organ of the New Abjectionists (1995).

Guest editor, with Miriam Nichols & Larry Bremner, West Coast Line 24:1 (Spring 1990). “The New Vancouver Writing Issue.”

Poetry editor, Front magazine (1990-1993).

>> Nancy Shaw

Affordable Tedium. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1987.

“Beautiful Skin.” [on Corrine Carlson & Erin O’Brien]. Vanguard 18:1 (February/March 1989): 36.

“Between Times.” Pam Hall: The Coil. St. Johns: Memorial University Art Gallery, 1993.

“Blind to the Part.” East of Main. Ed. Calvin Wharton & Tom Wayman. Vancouver: Pulp, 1991: 139-143.

Busted. [with Catriona Strang]. Toronto: ECW Press, 2000. (forthcoming)

“Bulletin 1: History,” “Bulletin 2: Government,” “Bulletin 3: Culture.” Matrix 50 (1997): 47-48.

“from Busted.” Raddle Moon 17 (1998): 44-60.

“Canadian Emergency” interview with Shelagh Rogers. [with Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson & Catriona Strang]. The Arts Tonight. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 24, 1994.

“Coasting.” [with Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson & Catriona Strang]. A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevellet, Pam Rehm. Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994: 301-303; reprinted in Open Letter 9:3 (1995): 74-77.

“Cold Storage.” [on Mina Totino]. Parachute 55 (July/August/September 1989): 50-51.

“Cornelia Wyngaarden.” Fuse 5/6 (Summer 1993): 53-54.

“Cultural Democracy and Institutionalized Difference: Early Video in Vancouver.” Mirror Machines: Video and Identity. Ed. Janine Marchessault. Toronto and Montréal: YYZ and Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions, 1995.

“D.” [with Catriona Strang]. Avec 10 (1995): 107-114.

“Dear M.” Barscheit 4 (1993).

“The Delicate Double.” [on Christine Davis]. Vanguard 18:2 (April/May 1989): 38.

“Expanded Consciousness and Company Types: Artist Writer Collaborations in Vancouver Since Intermedia and the N.E. Thing Company.” The Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art. Ed. Stan Douglas. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991: 85-103; reprinted in Parallelogramme (Winter 1992).

“Flags.” Open Letter 10: 1 (Winter 1998): passim.

“Four Poems.” [with Catriona Strang]. Rhizome 1 (1997).

“Fragile Electrons: Twenty Years of Collecting Video Art at the National Gallery of Canada.” Parachute (December/January/February 1998).

“Fraught Bodies or Love in the Lurch: the Photomontage of Kelly Wood.” Lurch. Vancouver: Western Front, 1991.

“Hair in Knot: Mina Totino’s Riddling Logic.” Cover, Girls. Calgary: Truck Gallery, 1991.

Hard to Read. [with Stan Denniston]. North Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 1988.

“The Idea File of Contingency.” [with Catriona Strang]. Open Letter 10: 1 (Winter 1998): 34-36.

The Institute Songbook: Choral Works for Voice and Torch Songs. [with Catriona Strang & Monika Kin Gagnon]. Vancouver: The Institute, 1995.

“Interviewing Interviewing.” [with Catriona Strang]. Interview by Dean Irvine & Ian Samuels. Filling Station 5: 8-12.

“Inventing the Virtual Museum: Art and Interactivity.” Parachute 84 (October-December 1996): 30-35.

“Kootenay School of Writing: A School in Exile.” The Peak (Simon Fraser University). September 20, 1984: 14-15.

“Lending, Borrowing and Renewing: The Library and New Information Spaces.” Cultural Institutions / Instituting Culture. Montréal: McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, 1995.

“A Letter to Lady M.” RX: Let’s Play Doctor. Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1993.

“The Lull Before the Storm.” [on Sarah Diamond]. Parachute 62 (March, April, May 1991): 44-45.

“Luxury.” [on Mark Lewis]. C Magazine 19 (Fall 1988): 38-39.

“Marshall McLuhan, New Media and Artistic Practice.” New Readings of McLuhan in Critical, Cultural and Postmodern Theories. Ed. Paul Grosswiler. Chicago: Chicago University Press (forthcoming).

“Melo-Anthem,” “Anthem House,” “Anthem Nation,” Post-Anthem,” and “I Don’t Feel at Liberty.” Exact Change Yearbook 1. Boston and Manchester: Exact Change and Carcanet, 1995: 105-107.

Modern Art, Media Pedagogy, and Cultural Citizenship: The Museum of Modern Arts Television Project, 1952-1955. Montréal: McGill University (PhD Dissertation), 2000.

“The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver, 1938-1963 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.” Parachute 88 (October/November/December 1997): 58-59.

“On a Trumped-Up Charge: Two Video-Films.” [on Stuart Marshall & John Greyson]. Vanguard 18:3 (Summer 1989): 20-25.

“Poetic Conduct: Mount Royal’s Moral Order.” Cultures of the City: Essays in the History, Space and Identity of Montréal. Eds. Nancy Shaw and Aurora Wallace. Montréal: Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions, 1998.

“Poetic Statement.” [letter to Kevin Killian]. Writing From the New Coast: Technique. Providence: O·blēk editions, 1993: 88-91.

“Prairie Cityscapes.” Urban History Review 24:1(October 1995): 53-54.

“Recent Writing about Marshall McLuhan.” Canadian Journal of Communication 24:4 (Winter 1999).

Scoptocratic. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992.

“Close to Naked.” [with Gerald Creede]. Writing 23/24 (1989) 18-22; reprinted in Gerald Creede, Ambit (Tsunami Editions, 1993): 53-59. [pp. 70-76]

“Hair in a Knot,” “In Doubt a Rose is Grotesque Thing” & “The Illusion Did Not Last.” Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology. Ed. Andrew Klobucar and Michael Barnholden. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999: 163-174. [pp. 38-49]

“The Illusion Did Not Last” & “Dear M.” The Last Word: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Ed. Michael Holmes. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1995: 54-56. [pp. 14, 48-49]

“from Scoptocratic.” West Coast Line 24:1 (Spring 1990): 36-44. [pp. 44-47 draft]

“from Scoptocratic.” Motel 2 (Spring 1990): 8-12. [pp. 44-47 draft]

“from Scoptocratic.” Avec 7 (Fall 1991): [nb: not #7!]

“from Scoptocratic.” Writing 26 (1991): 25-37. [pp. 78-90 draft]

“Stills for Scoptocratic.” West Coast Line 24:3 (Winter 1990): 38-43.

“Site, Stake, Struggle: Stan Douglas’s Win , Place or Show.” [with Sianne Ngai]. Stan Douglas / Douglas Gordon. New York: DIA Art Foundation, 1999.

“Siting the Banal: The Expanded Landscapes of the N.E. Thing Company.” You Are Now in the Middle of an N.E. Thing Co. Landscape. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, 1993.

“Six Poems.” Open Letter 10:5 (Spring 1999): 30-32.

“A Sunday Drive.” [with Lisa Robertson]. Beneath the Paving Stones. Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1993: 5-16.

“Time Codes: Recent Takes in Feminist Video.” The Contested Space of Alternative Video: Video In 1973-1994. Vancouver: Video In, 1998.

“Ubliquitous as Grass: The Lawn and Suburb in The American Century.” Mix (Fall 1998): 35-39.

“from Urban Ledge.” Big Allis (Fall 1999).

“Virtual Nation: Jacques Greber’s National Capital Plan.” Driving the Ceremonial Landscape. Ottawa: Gallery 101, 1997.

West Coast Style: Western Homes and Lifestyles in Canada, 1945-95. Montréal: McGill University (M.A. Thesis), 1995.

Editor, with Jeff Derksen, Writing (1986-1993).

>> Christine Stewart

“Agora.” Front magazine (Summer 1990): 30.

“Au Coeur du Litige.” [notes for audio disc Au Coeur du Litige by François Houle. Spool, 2000.

The Barscheit Horse. [with Lisa Robertson & Catriona Strang]. The Berkeley Horse 49 (December 1993); reprinted in Exact Change Yearbook. Boston and Manchester: Exact Change and Carcanet, 1995: 123.

“Barscheit Nation.” [with Lisa Robertson & Catriona Strang]. Barscheit 4 (1993); reprinted in Mirage#4/Period(ical) 14 (March 1993); Writing from the New Coast: Technique. Providence: O·blēk editions, 1993: 185; and Semiotext(e) Canadas. New York: Semiotext(e), 1994: 90.

“Clamorous.” The Alterran Poetry Assemblage 1(December 1996).

; reprinted in Raddle Moon 17 (1998): 5-9.

“Jack.” Raddle Moon 18 (2000).

Nightwood: Nightwood. Vancouver: University of British Columbia (M.A. Thesis), 1996.

“Primitivera Perturb.” [with Lisa Robertson]. Big Allis 8 (1998): 77-83.

“two excerpts from St. Augustine.” Matrix 50 (1997): 52-53.

Taxonomy (forthcoming)

“from Taxonomy.” Raddle Moon 13 (1993); reprinted in Exact Change Yearbook. Boston and Manchester: Exact Change and Carcanet, 1995: 127-128; and Gertrude Stein Awards In Innovative American Poetry 1994-1995. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996: 74-76.

“Biographia.” The Alterran Poetry Assemblage 1 (December 1996). ; reprinted in Raddle Moon 17 (1998): 10-16.

“A Travel Narrative.” Barscheit 3 (January 1992): 13-17; reprinted in The Berkeley Horse 53 (June 1994).

“Virtualis.” [with David Dowker]. The Alterran Poetry Assemblage 2 (June 1997) .

Editor, with Catriona Strang & Lisa Robertson, Barscheit 1-4 (1990-1993).

Editor, with Lisa Robertson & Susan Clark, Giantess: the organ of the New Abjectionists (1995).

>> Catriona Strang

“And Spear Impunge.” [text for violin, clarinet and voice composition And Spear Impunge by Jacqueline Leggatt]. Vancouver, March 1999.

“Any Terrain Tumultuous.” [notes for audio disc Any Terrain Tumultuous by François Houle & Marilyn Crispell]. Montréal: Red Toucan, 1995.

The Barscheit Horse. [with Lisa Robertson & Christine Stewart]. The Berkeley Horse 49 (December 1993); reprinted in Exact Change Yearbook. Boston and Manchester: Exact Change and Carcanet, 1995: 123.

“Barscheit Nation.” [with Lisa Robertson & Christine Stewart]. Barscheit 4 (1993); reprinted in Mirage#4/Period(ical) 14 (March 1993); Writing from the New Coast: Technique. Providence: O·blēk editions, 1993: 185; and Semiotext(e) Canadas. New York: Semiotext(e), 1994: 90.

“Broil” and “Rag.” [with François Houle]. Subtext (1996). .

Busted. [with Nancy Shaw]. Toronto: ECW Press, 2000. (forthcoming)

“Bulletin 1: History,” “Bulletin 2: Government,” “Bulletin 3: Culture.” Matrix 50 (1997): 47-48.

“from Busted.” Raddle Moon 17 (1998): 44-60.

“Canadian Emergency” interview with Shelagh Rogers. [with Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson & Nancy Shaw]. The Arts Tonight. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 24, 1994.

Circular Body (L’s Songs). Toronto: PUSHYbroadsides, 1994.

The Clamourous Alphabet. [with François Houle]. Seattle: Periplum, 1999. [audio disc]

“from The Clamourous Alphabet.” Sulfur 44 (Spring 1999).

“R & B for Robin Blaser.” The Capliano Review 2:17/18 (Winter/Spring 1996): 172-181.

“Coasting.” [with Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson & Nancy Shaw]. A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevellet, Pam Rehm. Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994: 301-303; reprinted in Open Letter 9:3 (1995): 74-77.

“A Conversation: Sunday May 18, East Pender, with Maxine Gadd and Rhoda Rosenfeld.” [with Catriona Strang]. Front magazine 3:6 (July/August 1992): 8-11.

“D.” [with Nancy Shaw]. Avec 10 (1995): 107-114.

“Dance.” [text for Les Pas Perdus by Frozen Eye Dance Company]. Vancouver, October 1995.

“Ender.” Filling Station 5: 13-15.

“Four Poems.” [with Nancy Shaw]. Rhizome 1 (1997).

“Gap.” Giantess 1 (1995).

“Gender City.” Filling Station 5: 16.

“Held.” Writing 27 (1991): 79-82.

“’I want someone to say what you say.’…” [with Susan Clark & Lisa Robertson]. Chain 1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 29.

“Ice.” [text for electroacoustic work Au Coeur du Litige by François Houle]. Montréal: Radio Canada, 1999.

“The Idea File of Contingency.” [with Nancy Shaw]. Open Letter 10: 1 (Winter 1998): 34-36.

The Institute Songbook: Choral Works for Voice and Torch Songs. [with Nancy Shaw & Monika Kin Gagnon]. Vancouver: The Institute, 1995.

Interview & peformance. [with François Houle & Veryan Weston]. Impressions. British Broadcasting Corporation, July 1996.

“Interviewing Interviewing.” [with Nancy Shaw]. Interview by Dean Irvine & Ian Samuels. Filling Station 5: 8-12.

“Kitling.” The Gig 3 (July 1999): 25-26.

“Liner Notes.” [notes for audio disc Hacienda by François Houle & Et Cetera]. Vancouver: Songlines, 1992.

“Live.” [notes for audio disc Live @ Banlieues Bleues by François Houle, Joëlle Léandre & Georg Graewe]. Montréal: Red Toucan, 1996.

Low Fancy. With scores by François Houle. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993.

“from a Translation of the Carmina Burana.” West Coast Line 24:1 (Spring 1990): 30-31. [pp. 9, 11-13 draft]

“from Carmina Burana.” Raddle Moon 10 (1991): 72-75. [pp. 16-18; 20 draft]

“from Low Fancy.” Writing from the New Coast: Presentation. Providence: O·blēk editions, 1993: 286-288. [pp. 27, 34-35 draft]

“from Low Fancy.” The Last Word: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Ed. Michael Holmes. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1995: 60-61. [pp. 8, 10, 34-35]

“from Low Fancy.” Big Allis 6 (1993).

“from Low Fancy.” Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK. London: Reality Street Editions, 1996: 100-106. [pp. 39-40, 46-48, 63]

“’Low Fancy’ from the Carmina Burana.” lyric& 1 (1992).

“Notes for the Expedition.” Raddle Moon 10 (1991): 70-71.

“Nudge a Turn.” [with François Houle]. Barscheit 3 (1993).

“Scene From an Opera.” Mirage #4/Period(ical) 7 (October 1992).

“Solo Requium.” (broadside, 1994).

“Split.” [notes for audio disc Schizosphere by François Houle trio]. Montréal: Red Toucan, 1994.

Steep: A Performance Notebook. With scores by François Houle. Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 1997.

“Swindle.” The British Columbia Monthly 42 (August 1990): 2.

TEM: in 14 plates. Vancouver: Barscheit, 1992.

“Two Plates from TEM.” Front magazine (Summer 1990): 24-25.

“Unsettling.” [notes for audio disc Letting the Blue Note Settle by François Houle & Andreas Kahr]. Vancouver: Tatterdemalion, 1993.

“Untitled.” [notes for audio disc Nancali by François Houle & Benoît Delbecq]. Vancouver: Songlines, 1997.

“from Wat, an Opera,” “Dame Ninny’s Ditties,” and “Dame Ninny’s Elegant Refusal.” Exact Change Yearbook . Boston: Exact Change, 1995: 124-126

“Wicked Songs.” Barscheit 4 (1993); reprinted in Active in Airtime 3 (Spring 1994).

Editor, with Lisa Robertson & Christine Stewart, Barscheit 1-4 (1990-1993).

Co-editor, Tsunami Editions (1992-1993).

Co-editor, Raddle Moon (1993-1996).

>> Melissa Wolsak

“Figmental.” (broadside). Prince George: Gorse Press, 1996; reprinted in Matrix 50 (1997): 54.

“Fistnotes.” (broadside). Vancouver: lounge,1995.

The Garcia Family Co-Mercy. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1994.

“The Garcia Family Co-Mercy,” Writing 28 (1992): 73-80. [pages 1-14]

“The Garcia Family Co-Mercy,” Raddle Moon 14 (1994): 4-17; reprinted in Subtext (1995) . [pages 32-45]

“The Garcia Family Co-Mercy,” Boo 2 (Summer 1994). [pages 51-57]

An Heuristic Prolusion. Vancouver: Documents in Poetics, 2000.

“An Heuristic Prolusion.” Raddle Moon 18 (2000).

“An Heuristic Prolusion.” The Alterran Poetry Assemblage 4 (December 1998) .

“Noyade.” Front magazine (Summer 1990): 31.

“Orchard Sutra,” Barscheit (Winter 1991): 22.

Pen Chants (forthcoming)

from “Pen Chants.” The Alterran Poetry Assemblage 3 (March 1998) .

from “Pen Chants.” The East Village Poetry Web 4 (1998)

from “Pen Chants.” The East Village Poetry Web 8 (1999)

from “Pen Chants.” The Gig 2 (March 1999): 17-20.

from “Pen Chants.” Mirage #4/Period(ical) 81 (December 1998).

…

AN ‘ECSTASIS’ THAT HOOKED YOU / TO THE NEXT TIME

– Maxine Gadd

[Note: I have digitized and uploaded the Canadian Emergency interview.]

Studies in Pratical Negation (2001-2002)

Studies in Practical Negation was a seminar I organized at Kootenay School of Writing in 2001 that grew out of a series of reading groups on poetics, philosophy and politics (held between 1998 and 2001) that marked a radical shift in the pedagogy of the organization (since reverted). SPN was then turned into a series of free public talks presented in conjunction with the Mayworks Festival in 2002. A package of P. Inman’s collected prose was prepared for SPNII and is availabe in electronic form at the Electronic Poetry Center while the talks by Sharla Sava and Diana George/Nic Veroli were published in issue seven of the KSW magazine W. Roger Farr’s talk has been expanded into the forthcoming book Protest Genres and the Language of Dissent. I also include a reply to criticism that the seminar was too theoretical. (Minutes from the sessions are contained in Filler.)

…

Studies in Practical Negation (2001)

I-The Parable of the Shit-Eater (July 29).

Discussion of the anti-libidinal non-pluralistic grammar proposed by Sianne Ngai in “Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust.”

II-Elements of Semantic Refusal (September 30).

>Begin “with” reading “of” P. Inman’s Uneven Development & at. least.

>Roger Farr pres. “Strategies of Concealment, or, Intelligibility, Recuperation, & the Hyperlexicalized Text”

>Aaron Vidaver pres. “Negative & Insubordinate”.

>Assess desirability of an Inman concordance (proposed by Friedlander) & “concocting a taxonomy for the vocabulary and rules for the grammar.”

>Evaluate the argument (advanced by Jeff Derksen in Culture Above the Nation) that semantic uselessness, anti-representationalism and materiality make Uneven Development “unrecoupable into the culture-ideology of globalization.”

> End before dusk w/answers to Dan Farrell’s query: “What’s the difference between what Inman writes as stopped attention, on a social scale and stabilization of meaning, on a social scale, necessary for social cohesion?”

III-What Isn’t To Be Undone? (October 27/29)

Part (a): “Liberalism equals the gulag”: negation & equivalency in Bruce Andrews’ I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). A talk by Louis Cabri with discussion to follow. On a Greimasian grid of ‘late capitalism’, Andrews’ “social romanticism” projects the negative counterpart, and domestic equivalent, of Soviet socialist realism. High modernist precedents? Forget it! The order-word of order-words – change! – ever since the consolidation of the bourgeoisie, here is obstructed in every detail. This is a state novel for America.

Part (b): Whiteness & Critique of the Totality. Open discussion. An assessment of the scope of criticality in the writing of Bruce Andrews with attention to Juliana Spahr’s thesis that Confidence Trick (1981) disrupts naturalized whiteness through “continual mocking exposure of dominant identities” (Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy).

IV- Panel on Recent Events: Sianne Ngai, Kevin Davies, Deirdre Kovac, Dan Farrell (November 25)

…

Studies in Practical Negation: Four Talks on Culture & Dissent (2002)

Treachery and Betrayal
Sunday May 5 at 2pm
Sharla Sava
A review of Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle, making reference to his indebtedness to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. What I would like to stress, in particular, however, is the role that “the image” plays in Debord’s theory. In order to make this argument it will be necessary to consider not only Debord’s Marxist roots but also the subtle and complex way that he employs “the image”. I am supposing that Debord’s reference to the spectacle was intended not only to identify the pre-eminent role played by the image in consumer society, but also to investigate whether the image could be recovered and employed as a tool for revolutionary dissent.

Sabotage for Idiots
Sunday May 12 at 2pm
Aaron Vidaver
Everyone appreciates the satisfaction to be found in a job well undone. Whether it’s slackening up to interfere with the quantity of capitalist production, or botching your skill to interfere with the quality, or giving piss-poor service, the withdrawal of efficiency is an ever-popular means of striking back at the profit of the owning class. The talk will address the tried-and-true techniques, from “ca canny” to “détournement”, with a prickling of anecdotes from the history of industrial and cultural sabotage.

Instruments of Uselessness
Sunday May 19 at 2pm
Diana George & Nic Veroli
We’re interested in uselessness and desertion as affirmative, joyful practices. We start by raising some questions about the primacy of negation, and the dead ends into which it has led thought (practice). With desertion, what we want to desert above all is self-sacrifice: the striker who sacrifices herself for the future. Deferred gratification is the contamination of time by the negative; working (or striking) becomes waiting, boredom, death. Desertion without privation, desertion without sacrifice, these are the only desertions worthy of the name.

Protest Genres and the Pragmatics of Dissent
Sunday May 26 at 2pm
Roger Farr
Like all speech-acts, protest and opposition often fall into recognizable genres: the leaflet, the march, the strike, the sit-in, the blockade, etc. As interlocutors in these speech-acts, the authorities rely heavily on anticipation and predictability in order to understand, describe, control, and diffuse our actions. Therefore, we need to anticipate this anticipation; we need to identify the predictable conventions of the protest genres, and re-introduce elements of shock, surprise, and misrecognition. We need to make dissent unreadable.

Recommended Reading:
T.J. Clark, Foreword to Anselm Jappe: Guy Debord (1998)
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Guy Debord & Gil Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement” (1956)
Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (1867)
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage (1916)
Ozimandias Collective, Sabotage Handbook (n.d.)
Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Empire (2000)
C.L.R. James, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity” (1947)
Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Der unterschätzte Mensch (2001)
Alice Becker-Ho, “The Language of Those in the Know” (1995)
Harry Cleaver, “Computer-linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to Capitalism” (1999)
Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (1971)

...

Reply to Criticism (13 July 2001)

Subject: Theoretical Activities at the Kootenay School of Writing

Dear H,

Thanks for your note on the seminars. Arguments about pedagogy at the Kootenay School of Writing have been dominating our discussions over the past months and these seminars are the preliminary results of an agreement to try out a programme of unremunerated and free public discussion groups in a formal setting this fall. We’ve had one informal group going for about two years, starting with a reading of Jack Spicer and moving increasingly into more theoretical work, through Avital Ronell & Sianne Ngai on stupidity, Derrida on drugs, Levinas and Stein and the impossibile, then, this year, Denise Riley’s Words of Selves, Althusser on ideology, and Judith Butler on subjection.

I myself haven’t yet had any experience in graduate university literary studies outside of auditing a course with Peter Quartermain at the University of British Columbia in 1997—a course where only two students enrolled! There wasn’t much “theorizing” in that, as Peter’s approach was very much to begin and end with “close reading” and considerations about possible contexts in which a poem might gain intelligibility (we were reading Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened by Bruce Andrews). My official graduate work was in archival studies, where the theoretical basis for the practice and methodology tends to be left militantly unthought, especially in the United States, where year after year we get anti-intellectual articles like John Roberts’ “Much Ado About Shelving” that insist that there’s nothing for anyone think about except getting on with the job.

Reg Johanson is putting together the Standard English group. I read his blurb as a smattering of questions, pointed, for sure, but largely open-ended in the sense that Reg doesn’t have pre-made answers based on a particular set of theoretical concepts. I respect the way he has put this together and am pleased the KSW collective has thought it a good idea. He wants to convene with people who are working on the front lines, something he’s been doing with ESL teaching in other parts of the world and with English department-initiated composition courses at community collages in the Vancouver suburbs for ten years. It’s from a discussion amongst dissatisfied or suspicious practitioners that he’s hoping to come to a better understanding of what’s going on in these institutions. I hope they arrive at some theories!

The second seminar, Studies in Practical Negation, seems to be the one that you’re more concerned about. Since it was my proposal, I’m the one who you think has swallowed the totality. It’s a strong accusation and I think a wrongheaded one, since it relies upon misgrafting specific university and professional functions onto KSW. Although theoretical work, whether “Theoryspeak” or a “good kind of theorizing”, may have the kinds of practical functions or effects within the universities and literary-critical professions that you mention, I’m not convinced these functions exist within an organization like the Kootenay School since we do not offer degree programmes, accreditation, competitive grading or evaluations, teaching assistantships, research awards, or professional employment, and have no academic or financial prerequistes for participation, no standards to measure progress through curricula, nor a bureaucracy to enforce regularory compliance. Surely we have other forms of power swarming through our micro-points, but nothing to confer and slight resources to fight over after a third of our $20,000 annual budget is handed over to the landlord.

What, then, is the role of theoretical work at KSW? If there are no professional or academic benefits to be obtained from using theoretical concepts, well or poorly, why use them? The most recent self-description of KSW as “a not-for-profit writer-run centre founded in 1984 to carry out counter-hegemonic writing practices in trans-national, de-institutionalized, anti-professional and collaborative contexts” is a deliberate provocation and historically inaccurate, but intended to draw attention to the politics of the current writers’ collective, however tenuous. We engage in theoretical work in order to oppose nationalist, institutionalized, professional, and individualist writing. If we’re not permitted to use theoretical concepts, we have no way of reflecting upon and criticizing the contemporary culture and economy that we hate. We may use these concepts in a dislodged or uncritical way and thus unwittingly assist in the proliferation and legitimation of what we’re supposed to be fighting. It’s a danger. But it shouldn’t force us to withdraw from theoretical activity altogether, in favour of ... in favour of what?

Your other point, about the supposed exclusivity of theoretical work, is a longstanding problem in most social and political movements, isn’t it? I don’t have anything new to add to that debate. My position is that there should be a space for critical reflection in and around these movements, even if it is disruptive. When Canada enters into civil war I may change my mind.

The seminar I’ve put together is intended to involve people from overlapping communities of interest in Vancouver, though I’m not reaching for an imaginary or “potential” audience, a practice KSW disengaged from after the City of Vancouver pulled our annual operating grant in 1997. In particular I’d like to hear conversations between writers and activists associated with the numerous anti-capitalist affinity groups that sprung up after the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in November 1999. I’m especially keen to hear how activists are working linguistically with opposition and to seek connections between these activities and the work of the writers discussed in Sianne Ngai’s “Raw Matter” essay (in Open Letter) and the work of P. Inman, to begin with. It’s political oppositionality that seems to be the bridge, hence the phrase “practical negation”. The blurb itself is weighted in favour of writing practices rather than activist ones because KSW is the home-base for the seminar, rather than, say, the Independent Media Centre, Tao Communications, Mobilization for Global Justice, or Spartacus Books, just down the street. This may not succeed: activists may not want to read the poetry of Deanna Ferguson, Kevin Davies, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Bruce Andrews or Peter Inman or listen to what Jeff Derksen, Juliana Spahr or Sianne Ngai have to say about their writing, just as many writers prefer not to.

There are, no doubt, a series of exclusions that occur at the Kootenay School—as an organization, as a physical location, as a juridical entity, as an artist-run centre, as a writers’ collective, as a cluster of poetics or heap of writing, published, unpublished and unpublishable. I’m not in a position to identify these tonight, but I doubt if they are connected very closely with the use of theoretical language. I’d argue that the presence of critical theoretical concepts since February 2000—when we moved to a new space to house the Charles Watts Memorial Library, resource centre, discussion group meetings, reading series, and W magazine—has actually attracted a mix of newcomers who know they will gain nothing financially nor make themselves a career in writing though their involvement. Why, then, are these people attracted to the extra helping of theory with their writing? I suggest that it is because theoretical concepts are necessary for criticizing the social reality we’re supposed to be seemlessly reproducing and that these concepts aren’t up for discussion in many other places outside of courses taught by “mavericks” in the unversities, colleges, and institutes. I don’t mean to suggest that any concepts, as long as they are theoretical, will assist in this new bout of negativity. I have a few special ones to consider. But I’m curious to know which of the words in my blurb you find the most offensive.

Yrs, Aaron Vidaver

Billy Little (1943-2009)

Billy Little (14 October 1943 - 1 January 2009)

From Jamie Reid, by email:

"Our dear comrade and brother poet, Billy Little, slipped away from this life at about 5 AM on New Years Day. It almost seems to me as if he were imitating one of his idols, dada hero Tristan Tzara, who died on Christmas Day in 1963. For several days he had been telling his friends that each day might be his last, but he hung on and continued to breathe one day after another for several days, until finally he lost the ability to speak and passed away. Billy spent his last days on his beloved Hornby Island, surrounded by his friends.

He had been resigned to this final result since hearing from his doctors last January that the abdominal cancer through which he had endured several rounds of chemotherapy and surgery would finally take his life in a matter of months rather than years. He lived the months that were left to him with great courage and good humour, sometimes in tears, he told me once, that he should have to leave the world, the life and the people that he loved with such passion and devotion. The people at his bedside near the end, his son Matt Little, Gordon Payne and his caregiver, Colleen Work, confirmed that through his last hours, though he could not speak, he was clearly smiling.

Billy's son, Matt, will be inviting friends to the Hornby Island ball park on Sunday, January 4. In commemoration of Billy's life-long devoted attachment to books and ideas, Matt will be handing out items from Billy's book collection.

Further notice of an expanded memorial event will be posted later.

Typically, Billy left his life with a jest, a protest, leaving behind his own obituary:

obituary

after decades of passion, dedication to world peace and justice, powerful frindships, recognition, being loved undeservedly by extraordinary women, a close and powerful relationship with a strong, handsome, capable, thoughtful son Matt, a never ending stream of amusing ideas, affections shared with a wide range of creative men and women, a long residence in the paradisical landscape of hornby island, sucess after sucess in the book trade, fabulous meals, unmeasurable inebriation, dancing beyond exhaustion, satori after satori, billy little regrets he's unable to schmooze today. in lieu of flowers please send a humongous donation to the war resisters league.

I'd like my tombstone to read:

billy little
poet
hydro is too expensive

but I'd like my mortal remains to be set adrift on a flaming raft off chrome island

[see also: St. Ink: Selected Poems and "The Day Bill Told Off His Boss"]

PILLS Statement for N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921

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”.

Martin Sikes (1968-2007)

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]