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Sorry Roger, re-reading my note is seemed intemperate! I'd agree with everything you say here. The note on nostalgia was really in direct response to Zoe. I wonder sometimes if all experience isn't nostalgia, as if we constantly yearn for the preconditions to events. Now is never enough. Best as C > From: Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> > Reply-To: Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> > Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 09:58:00 +0100 > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: Modernism > > On 5/7/06, Chris Hamilton-Emery <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> Hi Roger, >> >> I think those seminal moments are still happening, for example in black and >> Asian writing and in the writing of indigenous peoples. There are just >> explosive levels of hybridisation as the Web reveals ourselves to ourselves, >> and digital poetics is still a virgin territory. The difficulty lies in >> narrating and historicising these events. > > I'd argue that they're not the same as Pounds moment (see also > Duchamp). You can only repeat his first moment; in different cultures, > perhaps. The "seminal moments" that you speak of are further > complicated with the tug of war between European modernism and > indigenous arts. Borges career is interesting in this context, with > his tight-rope act between gaucho literature (itself a reaction > against a perceived loss of indigenous culture) and European modernism > (see this weeks LRB). The European moment for modernism was the first; > all others are actions initiated from the first. > >> I think there is profound nostalgia for the singularity and transparency of >> early modernism. When there were fewer people, less information, more >> control on the historicising of events. Hard to narrate a history of >> modernism now, when we have massive cultural simultaneity, and that >> synchronous practice lacks any shared context. > > I think there's a lot missing from our view of the early moments of > modernism. We only share the post-constructs. The closer we look, the > more detail, the muddier the picture. > >> The democratisation of the arts via the Web has simply made us aware of the >> breadth and diversity of contemporary practice. Forty million poets >> innovating from Jawa Barat to Katsina? > > There's a democritisation of the web? I don't think ICANN would agree on that. > >> I think the nostalgia, which I certainly would argue exists, is for these >> old "colonial" narratives, where some writers and writing mattered more than >> others. > > I wasn't talking about "the" nostalgia. I was talking about the > nostalgia for modernism, the nostalgia that this exhibition exuded. > >> >> >>> That last phrase was bad. Of course, you can break the pentameter >>> again and again. You cannot repeat Pounds seminal action. Maybe it's >>> yearning for moments like that, when your action is primal, new, and >>> you know it may have large consequnces. >>> >>> Roger >> > > > -- > http://www.badstep.net/ > http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/ > >