A great time reading with Ruth Danon at the Green Kill Performance Space on 2.13.20. Using Touchviz, I improvised video and read from an ongoing project titled With Walden. You can see other stills of the project here. I return to Green Kill on 2.27.20 to perform an except from a new sound poem called Idiopathic. Hopefully I’ll see you there!
Photo Courtesy of Bill Lessard
Photo Courtesy of Bill Lessard
Photo Courtesy of Bill Lessard
Photo Courtesy of Bill Lessard
I’m very excited to see access to the audio file of Ronald Johnson’s ARK 38 “Ariel’s Songs to Prospero” available (thanks Peter!). I was looking for this during my dissertation chapter on Ronald’s cookbooks! This is a wonderful addition to the recent reissue of Ark by Flood Editions.
Ronald Johnson's papers are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Collection at the University of Kansas Libraries. His books are published in the U.S. by Flood Editions. Send all inquiries to peter [at] luxhominem [dot] com.
Below is a link to the recording of “ARK 38, Ariel’s Songs to Prospero,” for Dorothy Neal, recorded with Roger Gans at KQED in San Francisco in the early 1980s. It is “constructed out of recordings of songs of the birds of eastern United States,” according to Johnson.
A great find today on Ubu Web: “Toward a Sound Ecstatic Electronica: The Rationale Behind Tellus Issues “Power Electronics” and “Media Myth” by Joseph Nechvatal. Though Nechvatal originally wrote the essay for Tellus #13 in the 80s Power Electronics heyday, he revised it again in 2000. I’m impressed with how apt its notion of sound as an ecstatic critique of reductive social constructions is for today’s noise music progenitors. There is a wonderful listening list also. Check it out!
Finishing design on a Bunny Brains image gallery for Fence Digital this week. Drawn by Bunny front man Dan Seward, this will be an irreverent collection of images Dan’s been drawing and collaging digitally. I’m excited to see it out there. I think you’ll love it! Keep an eye out!
My new film poem is in great company in the new alumni issue of Barzakh Magazine! With Walden employs improvised video, field recordings, drawings, and poetry to grapple with the claustrophobic vigor of love in the first months of fatherhood.
For the American Literature Association’s 2019 conference, Mark Scroggins organized a panel of wonderful papers that explored Johnson’s monumentalizing urge, gastrophilosophy, and sound art. It was a privilege presenting with…
Sally Connolly: “Formal Innovation and Ergodic Invitation in Ronald Johnson’s ‘Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid: In Memoriam AIDS’.”
Devin King: “The Invisible Spire: Ronald Johnson’s ARK 38 and Bay Area Radio Drama.”
The excellent panel presentations helped me decide to start the book I’ve been toying with, a study of Ronald Johnson’s gastrophilosophy. My panel paper explored taste at the bookends of his publishing career, from his first book of poetry, A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees (1967) to his most comprehensive cookbook, The American Table: More Than 400 Recipes That Make Accessible for the First Time the Full Richness of American Regional Cooking. There is so much more, however, mixed throughout his oeuvre. His monument at the beginning of ARK to the Native staple “Bison Bison Bison,” his comparison of the brain to an orange, a critique of Columbus’s misunderstanding of the variegation of Native Corn, a taste of Thoreau’s “Wild Apples,” and a taste of William Bartram’s bitter orange salad dressings. I’ll explore all of these and more. I’ll let you know when the book is out!
L to R: James, Nathan, Devin, Mark. Disclaimer: The Bukowski Bar choice was not based on the quality of his poetry but of the beer list.
The Egg and Corning Tower
The Egg and Corning Tower
Agency Building 3
Cultural Education Center
Left to right: Corning Tower, Cultural Education Center, and 2 of the 4 Agency buildings
Left to right: Justice Building, The Egg, Corning Tower, Cultural Education Center, 4 Agency buildings, and the Legislative Office Building
A great time reading with great readers. Thanks to our host Joe Hall and Buffalo Street Books! Thanks to Kina Viola and J. Michael Martinez.
Audio of my performance of a new work for text and electronics titled Techniques for the Oddity.
