95 :: relate, translate, remix, undo? (redux)
[This is a reprint of a post I published elsewhere in spring 2007, relevant to Thursday's discussion.]
“The aftermath of a car bomb explosion today in a popular market in Amil district in Baghdad.” (NYT)
G-Unit: rap emptied-out, having its new emptiness revealed. Wrong things in wrong places, or random things in right places; uncanny symmetries.
03 :: in fans
Infant
[a. OF. enfant, -aunt (F. enfant, Pr. enfan, Sp., Pg., It. infante) child:
L. inf
ns, infnt-em child, n. use of infns unable to speak, f. in- (IN-3) +fns, pres. pple. of f-r
to speak. Aphetized FAUNT.]
There is much to say on many topics! But right now I am working on your Lacan podcast. In the meantime, keep the comments and questions coming, to help center our conversation and so that I can respond in class tomorrow.
I just want to take a moment to post some relevant NYT articles that have been mentioned by myself and others this week and last. Take a look at them; they are all quick reads:
95 :: Rotten Sounds–M.I.A. and Jay-Z
As I mentioned in class the other day, it is important to extend “rotten English” so that, conceptually, the term not only speaks to language, but also to how the transformations and modifications that are made possible through language-use might also impact cultural production on the level of form–to “rotten form.”
Further, considering “rotten form” might help us comment on how in a larger sense cultural production is also potentially transformed by, or perhaps merely subject to, the same social and political forces that have so heavily impacted language. The possibilities inherent in form might also be subject to the same losses and gains that we normally associate with a population’s “access” to a “global” language, English.
Rottenness, expansion, is in the various ways M. Nourbese Philip puts her poems on the page: “English is a foreign l/anguish,” and it is also in mashups (here is a favorite of mine), in pop art movements, in films made by cell phone, and so on. It is not only about the spread of language, but also the spread and proliferation of technological access, which I am sure I will have more to say about in another post! But I will say now that there are some compelling questions on the path that gets us from African American vernacular to hip-hop, word to sampling, and then from American hip-hop to artists Continue reading this entry »
66 :: Some good connections
I would have loved to have seen it, but even I think this is too big for a last-minute trip! It’s a performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Here’s a story at the NYT. This article mainly focuses on the play’s director, Paul Chan, and also offers us some interesting feed for our class, particularly vis-a-vis art as activism, a la Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy.“
Some of you might also be interested in this play as a way of understanding the notion of site specificity, which I have talked to several of you about in office hours.
Also, Prof. Drabinski sent me this link for us to check out. It’s to a slideshow at CNN.com, which highlights a group’s efforts to add panels for African Americans to the national AIDS quilt. The group is called “Call My Name.”
Finally, thanks to Joe for this article, which, as he points out on one of the class blogs, speaks to several of the themes that are culminating for us at the end of the semester.
66 :: Reading thru a lens
Hello!
Please do not forget your blogging assignment for Tuesday. The idea is to choose a single approach to your reading of Adrienne Kennedy, to read though a lens. All of these approaches begin in rather simple and baseline ways, but the purpose of the exercise is to push the approach into telling you something deeper about the play in general, to consider the relationship between mechanism and meaning.
(It is fine if you have already started or are already done: this is just to spur those of you who have not yet begun!)
Here are some suggestions: Continue reading this entry »
