Hello cris happy friday.  Want again to take (a bit of) issue:

In your response to Paul you say, with implicitly some reference to the
texts you had earlier excerpted, the following --

" I might not be alone however in
paying close attention to how a line ends and pivots into another or the
next, how as Bunting said (and why so many have taken to his work) one
takes a 'chisel to write', how one word placed next to another enacts a
delicate balance between continuities and discontinuities to the point of
toying with the possibility that there is no conscious assemblage or that
there is as Robert Sheppard puts it a 'linking of the unlinkable'
occurring."

The word I want to ask you about here is the word "how".  And particularly
in your third clause, "how one word placed next to another..."  You have
emphasized that -how words act- is what you are interested in.  There is a
suggestion that this interest, expressed in this way, is different to the
more traditional interest of literary critics practicing 'practical
criticism' or various kinds of 'close' reading (made explicit by your
further suggestion that "that there is [or might be] no conscious
assemblage..."  If this is a new way of reading texts, which you and
others find useful in illuminating the values and purposes of "how"
e.g. Bruce Andrews' words act (I would disagree with the use of that
verb, but anyhow -- you have 'enacts', slightly different), please can you
show us what you mean by describing how these words in particular -- and
not as a representative sample of any tendency or attitude -- are
enactive?  And what do they enact, specifically?  You have done this a bit
with "manic typo motherfucker", but I would say that your description of
these words doesn't show how they enact anything, but rather that they
represent conveniently an attitude; to point out their stress pattern is
in this case to do no more than that.  Anyhow, here they are again (we
should perhaps post ordering details for the book at the foot of the
page):   


'Manic typo motherfucker. Lack spores stint lent hunch box sinny qua
IQUID, IF BISH-WHIRLIGIGS-dyspeep the throbbing butane.
Atropine clambake arresively bobbed, torah-borealis-Sex: M / F /
Other-grungey so UMB breasting bedlam betters ambulant bomskull.'           


As a starting contention, I would say: isn't it quite a compelling
thought, that maybe these words are treated in exactly the opposite way to
that you describe, i.e. that they are given little or no attention
whatsoever and that the effect of this for anyone who glances over them
(no matter how many times) is simply to feel coerced into recognizing an
ego whose self-representation represses any chance of linguistic
'enactment'?  If so, this is implicitly a degradation -- and a very
unironic one -- of ACTS per se.  That would be a pretty dubious
implication for any socialist (or even Marxist) or indeed anyone with a
an interest in the world's politics, to propagate.

Back atcha, K 




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