Hi Atar,

one person's useless tosh is another's mine of valuable information. You
obviously have certain kinds of conversations that interest you. So -
converse.

Lists have on and off patches of energies. The translation issues and those
of syntactic architextures aren't so far removed from one another along
axes of communication and context. Unfortunately more interesting
reflections on the Leicester gathering got blown away in the ensuing spats.
'We've' just been through a wind tunnel. That's not unwelcome. Someone
steps onto the stage and turns the lights onto themselves, or has the
lights turned onto them by others sat around them. They do their dance and
bask in the resounding silence (hmmm).

The gems come along by and by. It's difficult to appreciate the gaps
between the clouds without there being clouds.

So, Atar  -  what would you like to talk about?

I was taken by the 'dark textual corridors of Romana's:

>The
>"envisioning" of models that pre-empt desensitizations such as those that
>arise when living in spaces that become transparent because functional may
>find kindred projects in the work of certain kinds of language-oriented
>poems, but what I see happening in performance work in this country seems
>newly exciting to me because it doesn't re-organize, meta-linguistically,
>textual operations so much as it investigates the way we do, now, occupy
>space and make space -- not how we might, or how we should.

Romana (if you're receiving this  -  or anyone) are we talking about poetic
performance? I take it that we are and wonder if you'd care to elaborate
just a little more on those investigations. I also wonder how such
wonderings might intersect with turn of the century shifts between
positions exemplified by say Peggy Phelan and Phillip Auslander, where
Victor Turner (on ritual / the carnivalesque) and Marilyn Strathern (on
kinship formations and the gift  -  out of Maus) enter such frays and how
the presentations of poetry shape up inside such debates? I ask because I
wonder whether poetry doesn't demand a paradigm shift in terms of how
'performance' is viewed as integral to its processes of making and
dsitributions of meaning. It seems to me that models of reader / writer
have been brought to contextual enquiry more successfully in terms of say
sound and installation works over the past decade than might be currently
known about in respect of poetry  -  although the models and the practices
are there, just not widely enough engaged with. What, for another example,
is going on in poetry and performance that begins to address the spectator
/ consumer / maker interrelations that still seem to prevail at poetry
readings? How might we fit these experiences into projections such as
'social space'? Such engagements and conversations are what i sense lie
behind your musing here? Want to say a little more?

love and love
cris