Alaric,
the point for me is that of a complex network of thick descriptions based
on personal takes be put out here for all to read. The more accounts, the
more differneces, the greater the cumulative sense not of one version but
many many histories - well, the better. So, please give us your take. I'm
not setting out to write 'the history' but to ellicit various personal
stories.
We are talking about and hopefully pointing up issues of memory,
necessarily very diferent from 'official' record. Memory works largely by
foregrounding what one ants or needs to remember. No doubt the spectacles
become tinted through time. No doubt differing angles of conversation will
cast other, sometimes surprising hopefully, angles of light onto even
seemingly cemented personal riffs. We can all tell the same story umpteen
times and inflect it differently each time.
Work that gets reviewed at any time, or commented uppn, gets that
priveledge (if we go with Marilyn Monroe's contention that all publicity if
good publicity) through a miasma of influencing factors. Some of these are
along the lines of karma - making one's own luck whatever - some are down
to spheres of influence, some are 'owe-you- ones', some are brown-nosing of
the getting you-to-we-me-one order, some are culturally necessitated ( a
work being attacked and arguably worth defending). And so on.
My agenda is I have said already a proliferation of thick description. Sure
I have my own skew, I would think that might also be transparent, but
perhaps not so. My sense of what's going on right now is obviously
differing from others here to boot. Thank discourse networks for that!
My agenda is indeed present and hopefully also fairly transparent in my
teaching - as you will be aware from the pieces that you have described.
But it is an agenda which wishes for and hoipefully has the energy and
nouse to encourage proliferation of forms, of versions, of practices. An
agenda that lusts after rigorous challenging of those boundaries by which
Literature / Writing and Poetics are dominantly defined and the monolithic
blocks to which they are shackled. It is equally to challenge what might be
meant by and understood by performance. Definitions of writing and of
performance, real writing / proper writing etc, are all too often guarded
and narrow.
btw I'm not aware of having mentioned dance/music 'things', other than in
the context of talking about communities of friends and allies. However
there were important aspects of critique and contextualisation and
narratives of articulation to Musics Magazine, New Dance, Readings,
Camerawork.
What's curious about such sources and resources is that the work mentioned
in them is not that which was most interesting. it is that which got
written about, for various reasons as above, but sometimes simply because
it was easier to write about, easier to absorb quickly blah. These sources
act as distorting mirrors. So, the only is to proliferate the views. Please
Alaric, give us the benefit of your own distortions! In full rude detail.
Glenda George strikes me as an extraordinarily underrated presence, for her
swathe of translations in Curtains if not for her own writing. Yes I'd go
with Themerson, even if only for 'Taffy Was A Welshman', absolutely to dsh.
Lobby Press Newsletter contained much relevant, and scurrilous, discursive
material that could see the light of day now. We need the reprints, many of
them. But that doesn't mean, to respond to Robert, that less is happening
now. My sense is of a tremendous amount that has yet to come out, some of
which is difficult to put out because of its formats, or its size. That
work is barely barely started.
love and love
cris
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