ground. i like that you create work that might be stepped on by people who just happen to be walking across a particular field. perhaps we need the microscopic and the telescopic: how does that blade of grass look to a bug? how does that lawn look from the edge of the ozone layer? some further questions occurred to me in the middle of the night friday night (headache like an ice pick seeing bloody claws at redcat where i absolutely love to see film but generally do not love to see music, as the utter stillness and good-girl-sitting-in-seat atmosphere makes me squirm in the context of most music) after i sent you my first responsive missive: given the state of the world (and here i could be more specific, but i’m thinking of structural underlying foundational challenges that institutionalize inequity and attitudes of submission and lack of agency and lack of space for invention and joy in so many lives—rather than one particular issue)— given the state of the world, why this? why this now? i’ve asked these questions before, in other contexts. i think of them as questions that keep asking, whose answers are further questions. i like to ask them a lot, and listen to many different answers. what are yours? why do what we do? how do these sorts of films, these sorts of texts, molecularly or texturally or in other ways shift the terms of the world as we know it, so we can know (and experience) the world differently? 218 |
what kinds of speech acts and acts of analysis and criticality are meaningful? and to whom? what languages do we speak in our work, and what do those languages make possible? i don’t know if this constitutes “completion of the piece” but i did use a quote from the film total power: dead dead dead as one of the epigraphs to one of the texts in my latest book, one, which i’ll give you when you get here. i have no idea where my reader is, but i am trying to instigate spaces for poetic (i.e. critical and radical and non-conformist) thinking outside the confines of what we might call “the poetry world” (though that world can sometimes be a wondrous space to inhabit and find truly superb conversation and company—without that world i probably wouldn’t know you, for instance). here’s the insert (attached) i stick into the front cover of one when i send it out, along with a stamped envelope self-addressed on my grandmother’s olivetti lettera 22 typewriter. i just googled “stephanie barber jen hofer total power” to see if i might have published a version of that poem online (i haven’t)—was going to send you a link—but that search did turn up an article titled: Knowledge of Stimulus Repetition Affects the Magnitude and Spatial Distribution of Low-Frequency EventRelated Brain Potentials that seems apt to both of our work!