Silliman's Blog: 3/7/10

Sunday, March 07, 2010

Ruth Kligman

1930 – 2010

Saturday, March 06, 2010

At more than 8 hours & over 60 musicians, Anthony Braxton’s Sonic Genome Project is my kind of song. Its world performance premiere came in Vancouver on January 28^th – the slightly less than half an hour that these three clips capture give just a hint of the entire event. All of the links in this paragraph are worth reading (&/or hearing / viewing) to deepen the experience. I wish I could have been there.

Labels: Anthony Braxton, Jazz

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Friday, March 05, 2010

The story as best I understand it is this: Blogger in its something-less-than-infinite wisdom has been worrying about its latency rate, the amount of time it takes for individual pages to load, throughout the entire Blogspot system. The problem, Blogger concluded, was that some pages offer TMI. So it decided that it should limit how much data can go onto a single page throughout the entire system. But it didn’t warn users properly and it still doesn’t offer any mechanism for knowing how much is too much. Obviously my blogroll and my standard links list are issues. So is some of my use of graphics – no more grids of ten book covers at the top of a Recently Received list.

I’ve moved the blogroll onto its own page, at least for the time being. There is a link in red in the left hand column. We¹ will continue to update it monthly (or thereabouts). And I will try to run links lists more often so that they will be shorter. I may go to a format like the one my nephew Dan uses – yes, we trade links all the time – but I want to be cautious about this, since I pay a lot of attention to order & to the verbal framing that goes into the link itself. If I can get this straightened out, I hope to bring the blogroll back here.

I’ve also re-configured my archives from monthly to weekly, which has the counter-intuitive consequence of making my archives list more than four times the length it used to be. But the material under each archive link is now limited to seven days, not as many as 31. That helps for some weeks, but I want to check it out for as many as possible. If need be, I may delete some of the older links lists, or even use the links page for them and move the blogroll back here.

I’ve tested Wordpress and there’s no question I could make it work going forward. Incorporating seven years of older blogs is another matter. It puts in aribtrary hard breaks (like after the first word) into what were once standard prose paragraphs. What it does to the formatting of poems I couldn’t even begin to guess, but I suspect it’s not pretty. I would spend a year or more just reformatting the archives if I did that. Still, if I continue to experience Blogger issues, I may move while retaining the older archives here. A million words is a lot to move.

And, as I’ve been asked this a dozen times, yes, I have complete archives offline – or will once I do February’s. One project for the future is to edit a series of small books around specific subjects, but I’m some ways away from that as yet.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience!

¹ Lynn Behrendt, who does the heavy lifting of staying current with which blogs have gone dark & is continually adding new ones, and myself, doing a little bit of formatting at the end of the process.

Labels: blogging, Personal

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Thursday, March 04, 2010

National Map of March 4^th actions

Stand up for Schools

Defend California Public Education

California Federation of Teachers
March 4^th Action page

Labels: Education, Politics

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Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Barry Hannah

1942 – 2010

Labels: passing

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Tuesday, March 02, 2010

An image of Keats

Marjorie Perloff on Rae Armantrout

Michael Davidson:
“Missing Larry:
The Poetics of Disability
in Larry Eigner”

Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan
on the Autré

Is this article on appropriation
The NY Times’ first mention of
flarf?

Nostalgia & Robert Grenier

Barbara Henning:
Thinking about Tucson,
talking with
Charles Alexander & Tenney Nathanson

Martine Bellen on Barbara Henning

Emily Dickinson’s “wild nights”

Lives Like Loaded Guns:
Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds

“a seething Peyton Place of adultery”

Emily D & the Three Sopranos

Publishing: the revolution is upon us

Abstracts for next week’s
Ashbery in Paris conference

A portfolio of responses
to Ashbery from Rain Taxi

David Alpaugh
is the latest to look at
poetry’s numbers & freak

Alpaugh
singing the same song
7 years ago in the Houston Review

John Gallaher responds

As does Josh Corey

“Graduate school in the humanities is a trap.
It is designed that way.”

Grad students vote with their feet
& their tuition

Celebrating kari edwards

Erín Moure reading

& talking with Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein talking on his own behalf

A new, more detailed bio note for
Charles Bernstein

Sensible Swoons

March 4^th:
One-day strike & day of action
to defend public education
in California

Joseph Ceravolo’s great
“Ho Ho Ho Caribou”

Using Ceravolo as a measure
to read some recent poetry

In March in Stockholm:
Temperature(!) in Language & Cognition

6,500 authors opt out
of the Google book deal

Do you really need editors?

Publishing’s secret agents

Will e-books create a reading elite?

In Japan,
publishers band together
to fight off Kindle

ASL as a medium for poetry

The first alphabet

Herwart von Hohenburg’s Egyptology

Innovation & the individual talent

What’s new?

The avant-garde is dead

No dust jackets required

Gilbert Sorrentino’s
last novel

March 6^th in Tucson,
remembering Gustaf Sobin

2 books by Sawako Nakayasu

Julio Cortázar’s Unexpected Writings

Bonnie McCandless’
Chinese Poetry

Coming to University Press Books in Berkeley:
Bob Hass on Walt Whitman
& a reading by Leslie Scalapino

“Kevin Killian’s sex is unpretty”

Branding the iPad

Performance poetry at the Olympics

David Antin:
“Rethinking Freud –
Taking Freud out of Psychoanalysis”

Louis Menand:
Can psychiatry be a science?

“Språkgrotesk
in Henri Michaux & Gunnar Ekelök”
(part 1) (part 2)

Trobar fu

This June,
James Joyce in Prague

Hugh Kenner’s impact

Was the first rightwing talk-show host
Ezra Pound?

Michael McClure in Seattle
March 12 & 13

Gung Hay Fat Choy,
Larry Ferlinghetti

More books from Robert Creeley’s library

Better-than-perfect-bound books

Brian Kim Stefans
at the iotaCenter

With Oni Buchanan
@ the Walker Art Center
for Rain Taxi

& @ Macramé
in Mexico City
(in Spanish & English)

Winterson’s grief

Notes from the
David Foster Wallace conference

The Christian Bök trading card

2 poems by Juliet Cook

Juliet Cook’s brain:
before & after

A note on how she’s doing

The poetry of Mohan Rana
in both Hindi & English

Bertolt Brecht: “Burn me!”

Jack Foley:
Reconfiguring romanticism

4 new poems from Clayton Eshleman

Hoa Nguyen in Buffalo

Annotating Tan Lin’s Heath

Your face as a typeface

Next January in Quintana Roo –
the Third Annual
US Poets in Mexico symposium

In the OC,
another indie bookshop at risk

In London,
the UK’s only LGBT bookshop
is struggling

& Watkins Books
off Charing Cross Road
has closed
after 113 years

In Miami,
La Moderna Poesia
has closed

What passes for a bookstore
in Vegas

The joy of browsing

B&N moving rapidly into e-sales

More amazing libraries

“This book is overdue!”

Publishers win judgment against RapidShare

In Seattle,
Fête du Flâneur
@ $45 a head

Flâneur’s plan

Itoh Hiromi’s Killing Kanoko

3 poems by Claire Donato

Five Dials no. 11
includes an excerpt from
Roberto Bolaño’s last interview
& a list of unused book titles
from Raymond Chandler, including
Uncle Watson Wants to Think

Check out the archive

Titles to avoid

Talking with Heather Christle & Alison Bundy

Talking with Mark Doty
(& part 2)

Super Mario, meet Mark Twain

No video games for Kerouac?

But a big birthday bash
for his 88^th in Lowell

Identifty this
literary mystery spot

Reading in March & April
@ Seattle’s Open Books

Electric Literature’s
latest flicker of an idea:
Twitter fiction

Salman Rushdie’s
memoir of hiding
may be forthcoming

Dot Devota’s “Insurgency”