a  homophonic translation of Leevi Lehto’s “Sanat Tulevat Yolla”

Bernstein explains before his reading of this poem at the Ear Inn, with Leslie Scalapino, April 2, 1994, that a homophonic translation involves him taking poems in another language that he does NOT know and taking the sounds of these words in another language to equate them with words that sound like them in English: (original in red, literal translation in blue, Bernstein’s hearing and version in black)

Sanat tulevat yöllä

Sane as Tugged Vat, Your Love

Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa.

O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.

I’ve brought this up many times already. 

Talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo.
Talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.

There’s a light in every can of the house. 

Sillat virtaavat itään.
Silly virtual item.

Bridges flow east. 

Sanat tulevat yöllä koputtamatta.

Sane as tugged vat, your love, kaput.

Words come at night without knocking.

Tämä tapahtui kaukaisessa maassa tässä lähellä.
Tamed tapestry’s caressed master’s tasseled luaus.

This happened in a distant country near here. 

Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa.
O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.

I’ve brought this up many times already. 

Talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo.
Talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.

There’s a light in every can of the house. 

Sillat virtaavat itään.
Silly virtual item.

Bridges flow east. 
Maaseudulla puut eivät vielä olleet lähteneet juoksuun.
Medusa pouts as vat’s veil’s oldest lament jokes.

Tämä tapahtui kaukaisessa maassa tässä lähellä.
Tamed tapestry’s caressed master’s tasseled luaus.

Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa.
O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.

Talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo.
Talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.

Presidentti itse oli täysin lamaantunut.
President — he itsy, oily, tainted, laminated.

The President herself was completely paralyzed. 

Maaseudulla puut eivät vielä olleet lähteneet juoksuun.
Medusa pouts as vat’s veil’s oldest lament jokes.

In the countryside the trees hadn’t broken into a run yet.

Tämä tapahtui kaukaisessa maassa tässä lähellä.
Tamed tapestry’s caressed master’s tasseled luaus.

This happened in a distant country near here. 

Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa:
O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.

I‘ve brought this up many times already:
talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo,
talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.

there’s a light in every can of the house,

sillat virtaavat itään ja
silly virtual item, yah!

bridges flow east and

sanat tulevat yöllä koputtamatta.
sane as tugged vat, your love, kaput.

If this is a translation of someone else’s poem, it may benefit us to look at what that poet says about both translation and poetry-
The poet of the original is Leevi Lehto who has stated the following:

on translation:

“in our present world, there is rather too much of ”communication”, of ”understanding each others”, and pretended communality – between persons as well as between classes and cultures. This is the reason for our contradictions; to attain harmony and concord, we need more misunderstandings and more power to bear up with them.”

on poetry:

“becoming a subordinated part of the media industry itself. To counter this, we only have the dissolution and fragmentation of all kinds of resistance… will there be any room left for an optimism of the will, especially after having limited its conditions of possibility in the extreme way I did above…I am convinced that there will be room – and that poetry can regain its “vision and urgency” precisely by tapping into its special relation with stupidity and barbarism that I spoke of in the beginning: in general, by emphasizing, ever more radically, its own insignificance, and ceaselessly renewing its relation with its own incomprehensibility.”

As the poet comically reminds us in another section of this same essay, English can sometimes be considered both stupid and barbaric (for a number of reasons like the fact that it is a perpetual bastardization of all the languages it comes across, and American culture’s irrational expectation for everyone else to speak English, thereby predisposing most English speakers to being monolingual) yet instead of ascribing to the hypocrisy where we act like we all understand one another “we need more misunderstanding” and “power” to “bear” them.  Perhaps Bernstein is humorously attempting all of these ideas quoted above in one fell swoop: composing a poem that embraces the stupid and barbaric American ignorance of other languages and the incomprehensibility of one language’s speaker to another language’s audience in order to “rupture” the process of translation by conflating it with “unsuccessful” transcription of a foreign language as form of resistance through humor as we sit around watching critics trying to make sense of the resulting gibberish….NICE TRY SHERWOOD in asking us for a close reading of nonsense

Short’s IF “brings” to life the character Galatea from the Greek myth where she is a statue or work of art that comes to life.  Talk about metatextual experience.  Besides the differential process of taking an oral myth transcribed to written text adapted to painted rendition encoded to interactive fiction, what is Short doing here? To what extent are our questions as an audience/critic character to Galatea reflective of our own attitudes and sentiments to art in general? What is revealed about us in the way the narrative unfolds? How does the fact that our primary interface with Galatea is through interrogation reflect on the critic’s/audience’s over all approach to art?  Given that the Muses in Greek mythology were all female and we have kept them as such since, what role does Galatea’s femininity play in our gaze and subsequently in our database of possible scenarios? What roles is Galatea capable of playing out for us and what does that reflect about Short or her agenda?  Besides critic, what role are “we” playing? Why does Short have the artist commit suicide after rejecting her? How does Freud’s uncanny valley fit in to this? Is it more than that? How does art reflect its creator? And if the art can simulate life and consciousness, then what does that mean about the human creator behind it? Why is this a source of despair? How does it play into Dionysus’ as god of illusion and masks and anarchy and insanity? Why does this god lurk below Apollo’s deification of insight, wisdom, vision, prophecy? (HINT: Some of this is answered more clearly by using the cheat sheet for “Wizard of Oz” and even more in depth- try “Curiosity”)

Recommended reading: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

“a priori” is most famously a term used by Immanuel Kant to signify knowledge that exists in the mind before sense experience…the poem however is based on a series of conditionals that are very much conditioned by experience…war based violent experience and yet is often fed by biases established a priori before experiencing the people living on other side…maybe these a prior synthetic judgements are the problem?

“if the sabbath is a form of constraint“

the shabbat or sabbath is the holy day of rest for the hebrew people; the orthodox hebrew go so far as to restrict or constrain its followers from working, traveling beyond so many miles, using electronics or technology or automobiles; it falls from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday in our calendars.

“if jihad is the first word learned“

in islam, jihad means holy war, but mohammed referred primarily to the holy war one wages against one’s own sins

jihad tends to be the first word Westerners learn about islam, and often out mis-contextualized by western media to misrepresent islam as fanatical terrorists

“if Elie Wiesel is the holocaust”

his book Night is the most common book taught in public and private schools across the western culture as an example of the memoir of the jewish holocaust of wwii; Wiesel has become so rich and famous, he is effectively the poster child of holocaust survival, often silencing other witness testimony; he has also used his vast wealth and connections to start foundations designed to never let the world forget the jewish holocaust (perhaps to the exclusion of other historical genocides?) and he also has connections to the war hawks in israeli politics behind the aggression against palestinian settlements

“if one must expropriate gently”

a pun on exfoliating gently or scrubbing excess skin often off the face for clear skin; here expropriating means to hand over to an aggressor in mild resignation to avoid further violence, but can one still save face?

“if messianism licks at the edges of thought”

messianism in christianity is jewish or hebrew in origin and does not refer only to jesus of nazareth. messiah or christos in greek means literally anointed one and refers to the king of the hebrews as selected by god through his prophets and designated by an anointing of precious oils. the first such messiah was Saul, succeeded by David, then Solomon, eventually reaching Herod, then Jesus for the christians, but the hebrews who still follow the torah and the kabbal still await their new king or messiah much as certain sects were searching at the time of the nazarene.  some argue it will bring in a new golden age for the jews, others say it signals the end times.

“if the truth does not lie in silence”

a double entendre or double meaning- can truth lie or be found in silence? or can truth lie or tell falsehood by remaining silent?

“if naf is self and brother”

short for naphtali in hebrew means wrestling or cunning and is the name of one of the 12 tribes of israel named after one of the sons of Jacob who later changed his name to israel or he who wrestles with god.  Naphtali and his nine brothers beat and sold their younger brother joseph into slavery out of jealousy of their father’s preference

“if the space between two words can be bridged”

visually the gap between words, phonetically the silence (momentary as it is) between words spoken, or perhaps the abyss that lies between languages that neither comprehend one another nor care to…BUT if it can be bridged, then?

“if moderate physical pressure is acceptable”

could mean anything- the pressure of resettlement of Palestinians despite former treaties, the pressure on US foreign policy from israeli “allies”, the pressure of stones to lead to gunfire….

“if the primary target is the witness”

target of assassination so no witnesses? or target audience to achieve mass movement?

“if epistemological mastery is an unclosable wound”

in western philosophy, epistemology has always struggled at closing the wound or gap between the exterior objective reality (Kant’s noumena or thing in itself) and the interior subjective experience of perception (Kant’s phenomena or thing to us) which seem to be incommensurable

“if bittahon was trust in god now military security”

in rabbinic judaism, bittahon or bitachon refers to the trust in god’s deliverance of the hebrew people- it is this trust that enabled them to be freed from Egyptian slavery without raising a sword, it also enabled the 12 tribes to defeat their enemies in the promised land as long as their faith and practices were pure…now that trust seems placed on American financing of nuclear capabilities and military weapons development

“if there is horror at the heart of divinity”

YHWH was always struck hard, fast, and without mercy: 10th plague wiping out the first born of Egypt to liberate the hebrew slaves, ordering the death of 1/12th of the hebrews themselves for their faithless actions at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the demands to kill every man, woman, and child in the enemy tribes of the Hebrews when reclaiming the promised land, etc.  Allah has fared no better historically. Nor Jesus through the acts of his followers.

“if the body goes off near the sbarro pizzeria”

suicide bombing near the pizzeria in Jerusalem 2001- 15 killed, 130 wounded

“if the apocalyptic sting is gone from hebrew”

apocalypse means literally revelation and refers to god’s revealing of his plan for man…whether in the form of the last book of the christian new testament or in the form of code deciphered through kabbal of the torah…but if the sting is gone, then it implies the plan might not be so bad for us

“if the first stage is not knowing at all”

then it asks for a leap of faith

“if this state is the golden calf”

the golden calf was the idolatrous statue blasphemously worshipped by some of the hebrews after being saved from egypt while awaiting moses at the foot of mt sinai…so worshipping a false god in the form of patriotism to a state- but what state? israel? the US? palestine? all of them?

“if ingathering means expulsion”

refers to the feast of the harvest at the end of the year…the feast of the tabernacles…but by reaping what we sow, perhaps we create the conditions for our own diaspora, exodus, exile?

“if catastrophe becomes a passion”

the passion refers to christ’s last hours of persecution that culminate in his crucifixion…the catastrophes of israel and palestine in the forms of suicide bombing, military aggression, air strikes, endless cyclical bloodshed may be a mutual persecution of the innocent for the sins of the guilty

“if we shoot and weep”

as both sides kill even as they mourn their own dead in that cycle

“if israel is not in israel”

what if the promised land of abraham is a state of mind and not a geographic location

“if the treasure house of well worn terms is laden with explosives”

language is heavy with the danger of provoking further violence and/or the dome of the mount the second holiest mosque in all of islam sits on the old location of the temple of solomon…both houses of gods and treasures to their peoples, therefore an explosive place of contention

“If ha’apalah was catastrophic breakthrough now illegal immigration”

refers to the “illegal immigration” of countless jews during wwii into british controlled palestine as there simply was no where else to go

“If the bodies of the exploding martyrs smell of musk”

suicide bombers sweat profusely in fear and anxiety as they are human beings who fear dying too

“If every breath of fresh air is a border”

could be any step away from the cities requires passing security checks OR as long as you’re breathing freely you must continue in that ambiguous state of uncertainty

“If the state no longer decides who lives or dies”

could be god decides people’s fates OR could be rogue agencies and terror cells both of which are answerable to no one

“If some are eternally innocent and good”

some- israelis, palestinians, americans,,,many if the people are simply victims

“If a key is an archival artifact”

the key of solomon was not in fact a key but a text encrypted with secrets

“If the planes return safely”

free from highjacking or suicide attacks

“If they are all enthusiasm”

the enthusiasm of life, the fanaticism of religion, the blindness of patriotism?

“If you are Hamas”

Hamas the terror/liberation group fighting for Palestine

“If one is Israel”

is israel within each hebrew citizen? is it a state of mind?

“If cruel history repeats itself as its own cure”

cyclical violence will eternally recur until there is no one left (the cure)

“If it happens inside the Sbarro pizzeria”

more than 15 will die

“If there is invasion of the order of the border”

at what point will borders become obsolete? in israel-palestine, they are ever shifting like sand dunes along the hurricane swept Florida coasts

“If the animal is discomforted during slaughter”

is there such a thing as mercy killing or humane execution?

“If the band of the blind plays and refreshments served”

???????

“If the third stage is but what can be done”

how can it end? what options do we have?

“If shahīd is martyr and witness”

murdered in 2010, a human rights activist and lawyer who defended muslims arrested under the prevention of terrorism act of 2002

“If preventative is energetic liquidation”

kill the other side to prevent their killing you and also refers to POTA prevention of terror act which aggressively arrested countless muslims in order to “prevent” terror

“If some are a community of fate”

according to brown university’s watson institute for international and public affairs: “Communities of Fate are the catalysts that can turn a loose affiliation into a powerful union, translate a leader’s zeal into a political movement, and spur an individual to act against her own self-interest for the sake of another’s welfare.”

“If we will and it is a fairy tale”

all strategies (like the communities of fate…or POTA) are a pipe dream as there can be no winning, but we’ll never know until we try…and learn

“If Sbarro”

no place is safe- can’t even go eat pizza

The isbn number and the registration paperwork at the top for her body as a recognized text is authentic as proven by an isbn search of Amazon (though interestingly enough, Barnes and Noble does NOT carry her):

Banner on Amazon

The human body as text? As commodified product? Yes to the first, no to the second (it seems). She is not a commodity in that she costs £0 (itself a pun on weight and the pressures on female bodies through media?) and therefore is not for sale, though she is copyrighted and catalogued/classified.  The body as text implies that she is composed of language in some way. Her lines and curves as visual symbols of an alphabet; her facial and body and oral gestures and noises communicate expressions of thoughts and emotions or states of being.  Like any good text, her body contains a narrative expressed through age, scars, medical history, etc.  2009 is not her body’s birthdate as she was already a grown woman obviously, but it is her date of publication as it is the year the text was registered.  She has registered herself as a hardback, presumably because of her vertebrae or could be because in the worlds of art and literature you need a thick skin.  Subject matter is listed as “self publishing” since she is the author of her body and its narrative and no publishing company could edit or revise her body (though also perhaps none would accept her body as a publication they would put their name on).  Although not every body is licensed by copyright, every single body is a text.

The intro blurb in Against Expression for Fiona Banner’s The Nam states, “The Nam (London: Frith Street Books, 1997), which she wrote as she watched several fictional films about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, and The Deer Hunter. Banner was literally writing through (to use John Cage’s term) pop culture and media. The text makes no distinction between films or scenes, instead creating an epic, nonstop onslaught of language.”  Published book version of The Nam looks like this:

Part of her gallery installation piece on this text includes wall sized installations with manuscript renditions of the same text (as seen below):

Close up:

Then, in Trance, she makes audio books of the same text The Nam by recording her own oral reading of the text:

http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/trance/index.htm?i03

Oral-reading-of-the-novel-Trance-at-a-quickened-pace-induces-a-trance-of-its-own-on-the-listener,much-as-the-written-word-induces-its-own-trance-for-the-reader.But-the-trances-are-not-the-same.The-outer-world’s-silence-as-the-reader-gazes-on-the-page’s-words-is-undermined-by-the-internalized-voice-in-the-reader’s-mind-as-it-reads-the-narrator’s-words-conflating-the-two-voices-into-one,rendering-for-a-time-the-two-selves(the-biologically-real-reader-and-the-fictionally-unreal-narrator)into-one-identity-in-such-a-way-that-the-reader’s-mindscreen-hazes-over-in-a-trance-even-as-it-continues-to-register-the-words-on-the-page-coming-in-through-the-eyes-even-as-the-mind’s-screen-begins-to-project-the-inner-motion-picture-of-the-narrator’s-own-experience.The-trance-here-is-based-on-the-written-word-and-takes-the-reader-visually-to-another-place.The narrator-sees-it-as-the-reader-sees-it-because-the-reader-sees-it-through-the-narrator’s-eyes-so-to-speak.The-trance-of-an-oral-reading,however,retains-its-externality-as-it-remains-the-voice-of-another-whom-you-hear-from-the-outside-and-separate,but-a-trance-is-induced-much-as-that-induced-by-certain-types-of-music-or-litanies,creating-sonic-rhythms-that-synchopathically-control-the-listener’s-breathing,heart-rate,and-thoughts-in-such-a-way-that-one-hears-as-if-one-were-there-in-that-place-described-much-more-prominently,whereas-in-reading-silently-the-visual-experience-of-elsewhere-was-the-more-pronounced.Language,oral-and-written,induces-trance;it-seduces-and-shapes-consciousness,thereby-shaping-worlds.And-yet-the-standing-before-the-wall-sized-manuscript-versions-of-the-text-creates-a-trance-of-a-third-type:the-visually-hypnotic-trance-of-the-optical-illusion-with-its-wavy-lines-swirling-the-gaze-like-rolling-fields-of-swaying-grass-on-a-meadowed-hill-stretching-before-the-eyes.

To illustrate the idea – we could have the class read the paragraph silently first, take a moment, then stare at the wall installation piece, then listen to the mp3 to see if there’s anything to this.

The rapid fire reading mimics the rapid fire machine gun shooting and the quickness of a firefight and the split second actions-reactions that call for the difference between life and death.

For pedagogical approaches, this guy even has a 4 minute tutorial on how to make your own “interactive” videos at:

Brathwaite explains his attempt to create a Genesis for the Caribbean islands, one for his own people.  All children who live near water take pebbles from the beach or shore and skip it along the water’s surface, a universal act common to all of human experience within that environment (?).  If God had created the Caribbean islands, that same chain of islands, that same curve, he would have done it by skitting a pebble along the water, and wherever the stone had skidded on the water, there an island would have sprung from the depths of the ocean. This was his conception, the narrative kernel at the center of his Genesis.  But as he points out, Keats and Wordsworth had not composed this work yet. So how to enflesh or incarnate this idea into a poem that would not buy into the European models of poetry relying on the tha-tum rhythm of the iambic pentameter, but something springing from the very soil and sky and blood of the Caribbean.  The most authentic and ancient resource lie in the folks songs of his people, that is the Calypso has the syncopation, the sound, the song that God’s skidding stone would have used to create those Caribbean islands.

Scribal culture’s equivalent on the page is read and said- sterile and lethargically:

The stone had skidded arced in to bloom into islands

Cuba and San Domingo

Jamaica and Puerto Rico

Grenada and Guadalupe – Bon Air

But inventing his own origin myth and singing it in Calypso, liberate Brathwaite to attain what “he is become” and frees him to become authentic to the total Caribbean experience, what Glissant calls free or natural poetics.

The word choice of become connotes a process or ongoing flux like the eternally moving waves of the Caribbean sea as it washes ashore, ever new, ever moving, ever becoming, something quite different from the static frozen conceptualized fragmented Parmenides’ being of the the European or British literary tradition.  Brathwaite’s effort here to establish a literary tradition true to the nature and culture of his geography and people is reminiscent of Emerson’s call in the 1830s for American poets to develop their own artistic identity independent of emulations of the European traditions.  Both poets characterize the English language as infinite in potential but imprisoning in practice, what Glissant refers to as forced or coerced poetics.

Language then is by its very nature political, even in the “useless”  realm of art or poetry, as it either participates in or breaks free from the use of force.  The poems in Middle Passage (besides the very title of the collection, that is) that most easily illustrate the political to me are “Letter Sycorax” and “The Stone”.  These (as do all good poems) require context: the first playing off the colonialism lurking within Shakespeare’s Tempest and the latter involving the stoning murder of fellow Caribbean poet Mikey Smith from Jamaica by rival political party members.

1) Most obvious question about Place’s Statement of Facts: to what extent does her project here get undermined in that rather than promoting awareness and horror for the purpose of mobilizing people to get involved in stopping this (e.g. letters to congress, testifying in court, interfering with witnessed events, etc) she instead might end up turning on and encouraging people online who anonymously read her work as “literary child porn”?

2) Is it a conflict of interest for her to use her position as a lawyer to draw material from other people’s misery and has she gotten any consent from any involved parties?  I recognize this is all under the freedom of information act. so the question preceding this statement of an ethical one not a legal one.  Or do art and the law transcend morality? And if so, what implications might that open up for the future?  Can I legally murder in war then turn the scene into my art?  Do photojournalists have to get consent to publish and get paid for  photos of people’s suffering? Should they?  To what extent do our faces, miseries, identities belong to us legally or ethically?

PS Do any of your answers change when you find out that she’s “reproducing some of her appellate briefs [as…] a lawyer who represents sex offenders, the book is basically a reframing of victims’ narratives used as evidence in sex crimes cases”? Should your answers change because of these facts?

In his other work titled Soliloquy, Goldsmith writes:

“And what’s radio? Radio is nothing but language you know? Yeah but that’s a fallacy that’s a fallacy. With my work, you never had to do that. But people never understood that, of course and it’s still, a 600 page book you cannot read this thing cover front to back. But that but that was that was my whole project forever has been to turn that convention on it’s ear you know it really has been. My work has been unlike any other text art it’s always been really accessible it’s always been easy to come and go because I agree with you on that level, I mean, this book man, I had to read this thing through twice start to finish to proofread it… it’s unreadable! It’s you know it’s the kind of book that you might leave your on the back of your toilet and when you’re taking a shit you pick it up, catch something so that you’ll never find that again because there’s so much goddamned language in there. It’s not meant to be read linearly… none of my work is.”

I’m hoping that he is referencing his work Traffic here (or something like it).  Daily traffic reports on the radio broadcast by sending out radio signals that will circulate through the earth’s atmosphere and the universe for the rest of time, so that the words or language surround us forever despite our inability to re-access it.  We are also surrounded by new versions of these “up to the minute” language reports as multiple stations from every city and town in the world continue to broadcast these oral constructions, perpetually bombarding us with language.  This barrage of words we access in snippets by chance as we turn the dial, “Well, we could spend an hour talking about the Hudson River right now,” or by choice as we seek bits of data on traffic statuses as we navigate through rush hour, “Holland Tunnel can be up to a half an hour in either direction, it’s repairs and only one lane available.”  As such, we do not listen to it from beginning to end like conventional oral or written traditions of literature.  This is why this work is “unreadable [and …] not meant to be read linearly” as it will yield random nuggets of linguistic momentary meaning at odd moments (like on the john) that will be irretrievable and irreproducible.  Just like the temporal irretrievability of the original traffic reports themselves when broadcast.  We are constantly surrounded by the words of media through radio reports and ads in the car and mass transit between places, tvs on walls in stores and restaurants, the net at home and work; sneaking in a “And a happy holiday to you,” which translates as -conform to our calendars and buy more stuff – Orwell’s ever present telescreens and radio propaganda numb us via the logorrhea of state and corporate data and programming.

Worse still, we talk to one another about countless personally meaningful and publically meaningless topics just as the narrator in the diner of Soliloquy does, as do the other patrons we don’t hear.  “Look at what we’re doing now, we’re talking. You know how much language is being slung around this room right now?” There is talking all around us at all times: in the house, at the stores, in the car, in the train, at the restaurant, on the streets, and so on ad nauseum.  Like traffic itself or the ocean waves rhythmically washing over us audibly, steadily, stealthily, uninterruptedly, until we are no longer conscious of their presence, until we can no longer tolerate the silence without it, we swim in a sea of language from before birth until death, unaware of the fear of drowning in it, most of the time mindlessly treading it precariously, sometimes even surfing it with panache.   It is so ingrained into our very being that thought is language and we cannot shut it out without extreme austerity, like someone trying to escape from gridlocked traffic on Broadway and Wall streets at 715 on a Friday night.

1) Does this piece remind you of any other works from this course? How so? What differences do you notice? What do these differences achieve? How is one of these “superficial” differences ironic?

2) On a surface level, what is this piece about in terms of content? What is unique in its form?  What does Goldsmith’s writing style force the reader to do? How does this “increase” or get amplified as the work progresses?

3) On page 14, it states, “Look at what we’re doing now, we’re talking. You know how much language is being slung around this room right now?” How does this point to what Goldsmith is doing with Soliloquy?

4) Besides publishing it in books form, he also set up the space installation seen below.  How does that further develop the idea behind the quote above?  (Warning: Before you answer this question, be aware that it also states on page 14, “And that’s the other part that really pissed me off about the art world because they just saw text and it was dismissed as if it was a 1971 Joseph Kosuth piece. So they’re reading it interpreting it visually. “)

Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy, 1997, Installation View, printed paper 30″ x 23″