The Ultraist: Technocratic Poetics

Washington Mutual to Morgan: Take Me, Please!

2008-09-26T04:31:00.000-07:00

Ah, the poetry of the Banks... WaMU was taken during the night...

Lysander:
Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But either it was different in blood—

Hermia:
O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low.

Lysander:
Or else misgraffèd in respect of years—

Hermia:
O spite! too old to be engag'd to young.

Lysander:
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends—

Hermia:
O hell! to choose love by another's eyes.

(A Midsummer Night's Dream)

Rauschenberg gone, Ultraist Artist

2008-05-13T08:18:00.000-07:00

It seems Robert Rauschenberg has died... the Robert Rauschenberg Obituary states,

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

Hoffman what, where?

2008-04-30T01:33:00.000-07:00

As seen on the web: Albert Hoffman has died:

"On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror.

"I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly."

Revisit Jackson Mac Low

2007-08-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to re-review a technology poet (along the line of Kurzweil but without the AI) I remember reading about in an old journal, Jackson Mac Low, and although scientists often suffer from being pop-larized as inartistical, enjoyed in particular one of his: Insect Assassins.

Along these lines it Go-ethe:

Injects no survive. Efforts control the
Animal survive. Survive. Animal survive. Survive. Injects no survive.

In nasty spitting eye cost. This
Assassin spitting spitting assassin spitting spitting in nasty spitting

Insectivorous nutriment species encounter Charles to
Are species species are species species insectivorous nutriment species

... the rest is avaiable at poets.org.

William S Burroughs: Interzone Science Fiction Poetry Prose

2007-02-22T13:03:00.000-08:00

Ive written before about William S Burroughs and his relation to poetics, mostly in terms of his formalist cut-ups, but I havent really examined how this might map onto his imagery and its history. For example, in Nova Express and Naked Lunch, how does the imagery, outside of its fractured formalist dystopia, reflect his negotiated relationships to his perceived technocratic apocalypse? A heavy reliance on the bugs and the typewriter and the strange dripping bug-drug juice and the interzone... how does this organic dementia relate to the cut-up? outside of a power relation analysis, of course.. anyway. Going to re-read these two books.

The Confessor: Dystopia and Fracture in Science Fiction Prose

2007-02-18T12:34:00.000-08:00

In line with the Ultraist neo-plasticity of the poetic form, I came across a book that made me think about the way in which modern comic books and graphic novels have fed their formalist breaking of the textual walls back into normalized literature and prose. The Confessor, written sometime in the late 1980s, has more in kin with Thomas Pynchon or William S Burroughs cut-ups, in which a kind of textual arcology combines with economic genre fiction to create a symbolist, science fiction dystopia. I have read some texts close to this kind of New Weird, but new weird is more often than not formulaic dreamscapes with some quasi-moralist backdrop. The virtual world in all its glories, but the same old story. Like Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message... something poets know more than authors, more often than not. Like Burroughs The Electronic Revolution, and the dense variety and hyper-structures of Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow, texts like The Confessor break up language into a physical technology. Comic books and Graphic Novels, since they have become somewhat of an economic genre of their own, have only helped to show how broken text has become since the early days when Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo de Torre, Juan Larrea, Gerardo Diego and Vicente Huidobro first took on the assault of modernist technology with the weaponry of poetic form.

Charles Bukowski: Ultraist 16-bit Intel 8088 chip

2007-02-12T15:13:00.000-08:00

decided to re-read some of Bukowski thru the Ultraist lens. Borges had detailed some specifics about Ultraist formalism in 1922:

Reduction of the lyric element to its primordial element, metaphor
Deletion of useless middle sentences, linking particles and adjectives.
Avoidance of ornamental artifacts, confessionalism, circumstantiation, preaching and farfetched nebulosity.
Synthesis of two or more images into one, thus widening its suggestiveness.

While it seems to have much in common with early Chinese poetry in terms of its metaphorical mapping of the legalist quandries and bureaucracy of man onto natural processes, Bukowski has updated these down to a manifestation in actual technology and branding:

16-bit Intel 8088 chip

with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Looks like a pretty good match for ultraist goals. I wonder what they would make of the quasi-ectopic negative sentimentality of Bukowski versus their symbolist excitement and perception of threat from early technocratic science fiction movements.

Technocratic Economic Genre Nature Poetry Roundup

2007-02-07T13:02:00.000-08:00

What exactly is Technocratic Economic Genre Nature Poetry? A tentative list I am working on runs from Early Chuang Tzu Chinese poetry to William S Burroughs weird man-as-nature prose to Charles Bukowski's modernist beast trapped in economic trope-ic structures. Chuang Tzu is best known for his, or some aggregative historical persona, writings, mostly for his famous "Am I a Man or A Butterfly Dream" thing. But he had a very complex view of organic and natural structures in the flow of life contrasting with the rigorous technology of mans designed creations, and what it is like to embed the human in these creations. William S Burroughs, of course, is known for his dystopic and apocalyptic science fiction prose poetry, in which strange hostile alien creatures populate the bodies, or socially created personas, of those around us. And of course Bukowski, especially in some of his more perceptive moments, sees the vast ectopian economy as a technology of its own, a kind of parasitic host to the body of man. Of course, Bukowski loved being the host to the parasitic body he lived inside, and the literalness of his identification with the needs of a parasite is one of the great points of his poetry. But most modern economic genre fiction often avoids dealing with the reality of its webs, abstract statistical cages we build every day. And its interesting how each of these authors bring out the strengths of the natural to combat the rigorous technocratic structures they envisioned. Ultraist poetry might not have gone so far as these authors or the contemporary movement amongst technocratic poets like Karen Solie and Ache Outre.

Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets

2007-01-19T14:57:00.000-08:00

Apparently, Borges, under Juan Perón, was promoted to the position mentioned above, although he resigned before he could inspect a single rabbit for the cause of Government though mention of whether he inspected any for personal consumption is lacking. But it brings up an interesting point regarding the end result of attempts to create a new life in the sorry atmospheres many literary minds have to suffer through. In the face the power of the mundane, how could symbolist based ultraist modern technology questioning movements ever survive? Mankind is a genetic rocketship headed towards the moon with no reverse thrusters.