hi Stephen,

thanks for the interest! i can't offer 14 pages on witness, appropriation & 
documentary evidence and its use in modernist art, but will 5 do?
http://jacketmagazine.com/30/hardy-reznik.html

it's the essay on Reznikoff & grass I was puzzling about here a fortnight 
ago, now finished.

Isn't pornography always a political form, because it aims at pure affect, 
though a very narrow one? And it is successfully critiqued as a politics.

There are no lines to be drawn - & it must be a struggle - and the 
arrangement of historical evidence will carry an affect, particularly if one 
thinks of left-wing perception as being from the outside inwards, trying to 
see in from the furthest imaginable perimeter, to see & be concerned about 
as many people as possible

but when does it become a kind of pornography? in excerpting from oral 
histories (in the last three snaps)  i want enough context for these never 
to be outside history, to float free as entriely numbing image. what does 
the historical image do? the archivist & the editor probably hope at best it 
creates momentarily a becoming-affinity-towards-everybody

less stimulating; more stimulating - i just pick up on a _feeling_ whether a 
particular project is going one way or the other - Reznikoff, Rukeyser's 
Book of the D, and Dos Passos USA, going one way; some war photography and 
war-obsessions going the other

My question is: What use is an archive if it's static? It ought to shuffle 
around, the archivists should be speeding around the stacks, going mad, 
going down with a fever. The first lesson of my anthropology days was: the 
ethnographic record is always fusing & recombining and sparking. But then 
you find that it never quite does so outside anthropology & not enough 
inside.

Here are further sections from the same source:

                    < Miss Marzee, she wuz Marse Spence en Miss Betsey's 
daughter. >

                    < She wuz playin' on de pianny when de Yankee sojers 
come down de road. >

                    < Two sojers cum in de house en ax her fer ter play er 
tune dat dey liked. >

                   < I fergits de name er dey tune. >

                    < Miss Marzee gits up fum de pianny en she low dat she 
ain' gwine play no tune for' no Yankee mens. >

                    < Den de sojers takes her out en set her up on top er de 
high gate post in front er de big house, en mek her set dar twel de whole 
regiment pass by. >

                    < She set dar en cry, but she sho' ain' nebber played no 
tune for dem Yankee mens! >


*


                    < De Yankee sojers tuk all de blankets offen de beds. >

                    < Dey stole all de meat dey want fum de smokehouse. >

                    < Dey bash in de top er de syrup barrels en den turn de 
barrels upside down. >

                    < Marse Spence gave me ter Miss Marzee fer ter be her 
own maid, but slav'ry time ended fo' I wuz big 'nough ter be much good ter 
'er. >