Poor Grammar

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April 29, 2012

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golan:

Henri 2, Paw de Deux

(Source: youtube.com)

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April 25, 2012

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Denim Day is a campaign to raise awareness and educate the public about rape and sexual assault. This movement arose from the outrage that followed an Italian Supreme Court decision in 1998 to overturn a rape conviction because the victim wore tight jeans. It was argued that she must have necessarily have had to help her attacker remove her jeans, thus making the act consensual. The Italian Supreme Court stated in its decision “it is a fact of common experience that it is nearly impossible to slip off tight jeans even partly without the active collaboration of the person who is wearing them.”

This ruling sparked widespread protest. The day after the decision, women in the Italian legislature protested by wearing jeans and holding placards that read “Jeans: An Alibi for Rape.” Wearing jeans has become an international symbol of protest against erroneous and destructive attitudes about sexual assault. As of 2011 at least 20 U.S. states officially recognize Denim Day.

Tags: april 25 denim day sexual assault awareness italy supreme court

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March 23, 2012

Sums up my life… (Taken with Instagram at My Bed)

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March 19, 2012

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Sometimes you just need to read about archives and drink beer…with a little Derrida in back.

Tags: anjali arondekar for the record archive beer

Link

March 16, 2012

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Watch Fiona Perform a New Song, 'Anything We Want'

(Source: fuckyeahfionaapple, via skimly)

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March 06, 2012

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lowendtheory:

Sylvia Wynter, circa 1972.

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February 26, 2012

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nerdboyfriend:

Nerd Boyfriend Guest Blogs on The Daily Details

Tags: bruce boss dapper springsteen

Text

February 26, 2012

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Bob Kaufman_Thinking Out Loud

This past summer I was asked to join a panel on “Radical Materiality” for the 2012 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) conference in San Diego. The four other members of the panel, all brilliant and at this thing much longer than I, have been incredibly supportive as venture down this mysterious, possibly dead end road.

As I wrote last month, the late-poet Bob Kaufman has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Unfortunately, when it comes to Kaufman, there is a definite shortage of available secondary material on his life. This lack, in the absence of a more succinct phrasing, has become my object of inquiry (grad school talk for the thing I am going to write about). I have included my proposal for the conference below:

Radical Disappearances and Sonic Materiality: Remembering Bob Kaufman

Editor Raymond Foye recounts in his Introduction to Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-78, “Alone together, his pronouncements were extreme and final. ‘I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvement, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.’” By the time of his arrival in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1958, Kaufman found himself known to many writers in an already established Beat scene in San Francisco’s North Beach. However, as a poet Kaufman remains mostly forgotten except to writers and a handful of academics. This paper examines Kaufman’s legacy as generative of a radical aesthetic break from his contemporaries, and a rereading of the relationship between space, voice, and poetics. Finally, it is my hope that by exploring the varied iterations and considerations of poetics in Kaufman’s work, this project will revisit Kaufman’s uninvolvement as a radical revaluation of the sonic materiality and performative socialities made possible by his poetry.

Moving forward, this uninvolvement or dearth of information about Kaufman creates a difficulty as I try to move between the poet, the poetry, and the literary movement he seems to vanish from every time he gains a place within it, I am forced to rely on interviews and ethnography. On the one hand, I am okay with it because it means I get to go hang out in San Francisco for a few weeks and bullshit. On the other hand, it means that the source or the trace of Kaufman’s life and work is slowly receding back up Grant Avenue in North Beach, and giving way to tourist traps and condo conversions. In other words, my archive, the community and its members are losing footing. While City Lights, Cafe Trieste, and so many other spots remain, the temporal progression persistently alters the spatial reality of North Beach. This is a problem.

Now, I know that I have a few friends out there that deal with poetry, and a few more that deal with performance. That is to say, I would love to hear from some friends on this one. Do these things ever pop up for you in work? Or folks that do not this type of work, is there a way you specifically think about change when it comes to your home or neighborhood? This might seem like a banal question, but it is a huge impediment to me at the moment, and what good is this blog if I cannot use it to ask for help?

Some Kaufman for the road:

(The manifesto from his poetry journal)

Tags: Bob Kaufman poetry san francisco sonic CSA

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February 26, 2012

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Bob Kaufman’s San Francisco (Repost)

I once worked at one of San Francisco’s most famous historical sites: City Lights Books. Having grown up in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, City Lights was more of a church to me that the catholic school I attended several blocks away on the other side of Washington Square Park. When I returned to the city in 2008 after a nine year absence, I was offered a position in the mail room of the store’s publishing division. My year at City Lights was one of the most enriching spaces I had the fortune of experiencing during my time in the city. Aside from meeting some of the most brilliant artists in the San Francisco Bay Area (see D. Scot Miller’s blog AfroSurreal Generation: http://dscotmiller.blogspot.com/), I also was introduced to an entire archive of poets, writers, and artists that I had remained entirely unaware of despite my self-proclaimed literary knowledge.

Amongst these many discoveries was the poet Bob Kaufman (far right in above photograph). Kaufman, whose autobiographical context remained hidden or unavailable much in the same way Ondaatje writes the life of Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter, remains prominent in my mind several years removed from San Francisco. Called by some, the “original beat,” Kaufman’s relationship to that entire generation of writers and artists remains somewhat difficult to articulate. The aesthetic differentiation of Kaufman’s poetics from the likes of Ginsberg is the sense of movement that seems to animate a form that is not entirely different, at least at first glance, from his contemporaries.

I dedicate this post to Kaufman largely because I am trying to get down on paper what may or may not someday materialize into a completed project. The work of Kaufman and its place(s) within and across multiple genres intrigues me as someone whose interests—among many—are post-WWII cultural production in the San Francisco Bay Area and the intersections of radical politics and literary forms.

The brief research I have conducted on Kaufman leads me to ask a few questions/thoughts I would like to keep in mind as I move on this project:

1. Kaufman, someone who was seemingly not interested in leaving the sort of archive his contemporaries had the good fortune to have collected for them, challenges our conception of the poet/artist/performer. As someone who was interested in getting “involved in uninvolvement,” Kaufman the figure evades us. What does it mean to be a poet who relies on the sonic deliverance of his poetry to ensure its capacity for (re)production? (Kaufman did not start writing down his poems until the late 50’s when he moved to San Francisco.)

2. Kaufman took a vow of silence to protest the Vietnam War. What does his silence do to the sonic dimensions of his poetry? Do they have to be considered the same? Or does Kaufman’s “uninvolvement” make us reconsider the sets of relations we may or may not consider inherent between the poet and poetry?

3. An oft unrecognized figure in a predominately white, male literary movement, I am curious about the emerging radicality (and its various forms) in the area and if there might be any connection between Kaufman and these emergent political forms. In particular, does this relationship, real or imaginary, have anything to do with the shared spaces or origins of their performance?

From James Baldwin’s film Take This Hammer

I realize that these thoughts are somewhat scattered and probably only make sense to myself. However, this will be the project that occupies the majority of my time for at least the next year, so I wanted to try and lay a some kind of foundation for things to come. More on Kaufman soon.

Link to Baldwin’s Film: https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/187041