.... And I wanted to add, around the time Miriam and I were busy with our
ah - textiles - Drew Milne did that 'How Peace Came' project someone
mentioned, so in Cambridge this [poem] was held up as a serious
product-specific example of 'synaesthetic collaboration'. The poem has
references to arts & crafts William Morris (its title), vorticism, (Blast
typography) and the Paul Klee/Walter Benjamin connection: but this seems
to me a perfunctory academic authorisation of the together play. The poem
is also heavy on that 'knowing' kind of irony, the geddit discourse.
And as for Andrea's 'self-irony' caveat, well none of that in 'How Peace
Came', which is what made it very funny. O pass me the Mary Shelley. Real
issue: the Dr and his friend under academic conditions produce latexy
dolls and accompanying 'set' texts that berate "hot air" and noise. But
this is dissembling fury: can't seem to put breath in the humanoids...
"O Zeus! Why have you established in the sunlit world this counterfeit
coin, woman, to curse the human race? ... A better plan would be for men
to come to your temples and put down a price in bronze, or iron, or weight
of gold, and by their sons in embryo, for a sum befitting each man's
wealth".
This is not an attack, by the way, just saying that neither the laughs nor
the seriousness in 'How Peace Came' are where the text indicates it is:
Andrew James's humanoid forms should be set against it.
happy doll-playing, then,
Karlien
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