We’re about a week removed from John Cage’s birthday, which had me listening to the John Cage and Jan Steele split LP that Brian Eno put out on his Obscure Records. But it’s hard, as much as I want to, to think about Cage and not think a bit about silence. Mt preoccupation with the space that silence occupies was aided by a fun post at HTML Giant about silence, and a really fantastic Ubuweb podcast about silence. (every episode of this series is excellent, listen to them all) You can listen to it here, at the Poetry Foundation.
You might think listening to a 40 minute show for about silence might be incredibly dull, but this was anything but. They explore the huge varieties of silence and what it does to us, how we listen, what we hear. There is real recorded silence where there is nothing, no room noise, no static, just emptiness. Then there is the silence of John Cage’s 4′33″ (video after the break). This silence is all about room noise. What’s happening around the objects that should be making noise. Feet shuffling, stomachs gurggling, the flourescent lights buzzing, people coughing, the sound of a trains dull rumble coming through the walls. This is silence and not silence all together. In a way it reveals that everything and nothing are silence. If this is silence, how can recording silence actually be silence. It appears to be nothing, an absence more than a presence. Then there is a forced anti-silence silence. Things like a blank cassette that hisses and pops, but is ostensibly silence, with all it’s imperfections. It is an absence of recording noise, but it creates another set of sound all its own. There is even a bit of visual silence that can be gleaned from art (this isn’t on the podcast), but with something like the Merce Cunningham videos that were on display at the top of Guggenheim all summer you get visual silence. He sits still, filmed from a variety of angles, (I believe the installation is on six screens) all performed to 4′33″. The projectors and screens are blocking pathways so people have to cross the stream of light and block out the image in order to move about the exhibit. It creates a real sense of silence, that you are disturbing the visual silence somehow and must move carefully through this area. It creates a still. And I’m sure many people just passed it by and weren’t that interested, but that heavy silence in the air made me have to watch it all. I had to see every angle. It was the visual silence conjured up through doing the video to 4′33″, and the way visual silence is like aural silence in that it isn’t an absence necessarily but a presence of stillness. A refocusing of attention to minutiae.
Brad Liening:
I’ve been reading Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin; and re-reading the still-totally awesome Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem when I can’t stand to read a labyrinthine Gothic romance about the dark heart of blasphemy that haunts all humans; and an old, yellowing copy of The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940 (Mark Strand, ed.) I found in a used bookstore for 80 cents, which I read when I don’t want to read either of those other two books.
Issue 12 of the Ravi Shankar affiliated journal Drunken Boat just came out. It has contributions from TC Boyle, Tim O’Brien, Daniel Tobin, and Erica Wright.
As mentioned yesterday, issue 100 of Bookslut is out now.
Diagram 10.4 just came out and has contributions from Nate Pritts, Emily Petit, Andrew Davis and others.
I can’t remember if this issue actually just came out or if I just started reading it. Either way I’m reading Paper Darts right now and there are some contributions I’m enjoying from a lot of wonderful MN lit folk like Darci Schummer and Michael K. Gause, and then lots of non-MNers too like Howie Good and Truman Danz (who I don’t know at all, but had a poem I enjoyed). The design at this site is very beautiful as well. Look at it.
Sink Review has a new issue (and I’m reading them for the first time, and it’s very good). The new issue includes work from Elisa Gabbert, Matt Hart, Nate Pritts, Dorothea Lasky, and others. It’s edited by former InDigest contributer Steven Karl. Read this. It’s high quality.
In case you were recovering from a three day weekend of sloth and happened to miss all the award nominations announced over the past couple of weeks, here is a round up of what is going on at the moment.
The Man Booker Prize announced the 2010 shortlist. The nominees include Tom McCarthy’s highly anticipated* C, Emma Donoghue’s Room, Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song. A few surprises there, especially the exclusion of David Mitchell, who was considered a front-runner. Ok, start reading.
The Guardian’s annual Not the Booker Prize has some sort of controversy I can’t understand and they held a second round of voting and are now deciding which short list they should go with. I’m very much at a loss, but I’m rolling with it, passing on links, and forgetting about my confusion. The first shortlist included Grant Gillespie (The Cuckoo Boy), Matthew Yorke (Pictures of Lily), Matthew Hooton (Deloume Road), Lee Rourke (The Canal), and Justine Kilkerr (Strays). Somehow the second list is completely different: Tom Fletcher (The Leaping), China Miéville (The Kraken), John McGregor (Even the Dogs), David Mitchell (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), and Gerard Woodward (Nourishment). Update: I missed this in all the excitement (this is clearly my own fault) but they are going with the first list.
Speaking of the Guardian, they have also announced the long list for their Guardian First Book Award. The short list will be out at the end of October and they announce the winner at the beginning of December. It’s actually an interesting set-up for an award as fiction, non-fiction, and poetry are all lumped into the same group. I like that. There is only one collection of poetry but it’s inclusion at all is surprising enough that I’ll ignore that they are pretty much ignoring poetry. One of the nominated books, Being Wrong, is of particular interest to me. I’ve been meaning to lay hands on it, but have failed so far (this is also no one’s fault but mine).
I had wanted to get this up right away, but things happen, the days are getting shorter, I’ve been reading Pale Fire, I finally saw the finale of Lost, I’ve twice thought about taking my air conditioner out of the living room window, I didn’t work on Monday, the new issue of Film Comment just arrived, and I’ve moved a sleeping bag downstairs by the mailboxes in our building hoping that my copy of Tom McCarthy’s C is going to arrive soon. It’s been a trying week. So, let’s get to business and make up for lost time. First on my list of Things You Should Know today is that Bookslut just put out their 100th issue. It’s larger than normal and quite wonderful. Things you should read in this issue: The Amazing True Life Origins of Bookslut, 100 Issues: A Correspondence Between Michael Schaub and Jessa Crispin, An Interview with Lee Rourke, An Interview with Dorothea Lasky, and The Problem with American Poetry by Josh Cook. There are, of course, other great interviews, articles, and criticism, but those are some highlights.
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InDigest founding editor David Doody is now blogging, writing, and editing over at the Utne Reader. Read his writing.
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Lookwell is a sitcom that didn’t get past pilot, but it should have. It’s produced by Lorne Michaels, stars Adam West, and was written by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel.
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If you decide to train lions, you should not pick the MGM Grand where the trainers just hang out in the cage with the lions. They might get mad at you, and there isn’t much you can do about that.
In our busy times, the briefest pause to express a little interest in the natural world is praiseworthy. Most of us spend our time thinking about other people, and scarcely any time thinking about other creatures. I recently co-edited an anthology of poems about birds, and we looked through lots of books and magazines, but here is a fine poem we missed, by Tara Bray, who lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Once
I climbed the roll of hay to watch the heron
in the pond. He waded a few steps out,
then back, thrusting his beak under water,
pulling it up empty, but only once. Read More »
Earlier today we posted a mixtape of ten tracks that were 4 minutes and 33 seconds long in honor of John Cage’s birthday. I thought it was probably appropriate to post a little supplement of other wonderful John Cage things I’ve seen today. The one that really got me listening to Cage today was the UbuWeb posting of the entire recording of a 1976 split LP with compositions by John Cage and Jan Steele titled Voices & Instruments [Obscure Records, release #5]. Seems somewhat apt that this is the Cage we’re posting as both composers have tracks with lyrics taken from literature, including lines from James Joyce and ee cummings. The album was the fifth album Brian Eno put out on his Obscure Records label, which only released ten albums total, many of them have been rereleased. This only exists in the original vinyl release.
