I just found this interactive map of St. Petersburg Russia that reminded me of Carpenter’s online projects. It is not on the same level of complexity I think, but I do think that considering it is on a “normal” website (meaning it is a high traffic, mainstream consumption locale) what we see is a move from the average web user towards being capable of navigating through what was cutting edge in Carpenter’s first forays into use of webspace and media.

Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburgh

Patterns:

Stanzas organized by following the main areas of the figure/map describing wave activity around the island

Starting outwards and working inwards –

wave crest traveled ->reflected -> refracted -> island

Lines are sequenced by alphabetizing second word following the initial “I’ll” of each line (these always begin with ‘w’

wade, walk, want, wash, waste, water, weave, weep (breaks the pattern), weaken, weather, west, whine, whisk, whisper, whoop, win, wink, withdraw, witness, worry, wound, write, wrong

The “Refracted” stanza breaks these patterns by beginning its initial two line without “I’ll” at the start and disrupting the alphabetical order (going between weather and west). They look like this:

[‘weird’]. [‘welcome’]. [‘watch’].

[ what will you do ]

They work much as the island does to break the pattern of incoming waves and their reflection, carrying on part of the incoming wave forward in a limping re-vectored at new angles.

The poem repeats the speaker self reference in almost every line with “I’ll” and collapses the speaker and reader as the reader becomes the speaker when the reader thinks or recites aloud “I’ll” that originally referred to the speaker now is internalized as the I of the reader and yet still in isolation…I am an island and my reactions to stimuli or incoming waves as I perform the actions of wading, walking, wanting, washing, wasting, watering, weaving, weeping, weakening, weathering, westing, whining, whisking, whispering, whooping, winning, winking, withdrawing, witnessing, worrying, wounding, writing, wronging pass on the redirected momentums of the stimuli as refracted waves onward in the vast ocean or web of intersubjective relations…no island is an island as it sits in the same sea as other islands and the waves modified by one island impact the others in altered ways as a result

1) Are the changing paragraphs anchored to the same island related? How? Not? Then why placed together?

2) What are the sources for these paragraphs?  How are they connected (besides cartography obviously)?

3) Is this fiction or non-fiction? How can you tell?

4) What is the thematic message of meditating on the metaphor established between islands and paragraphs?

5) Are there any literary or philosophical antecedents to this projects?

6) How does the PhD dissertation abstract for Carpenter relate to this project?

1) What forms of narrative does The Cape emulate or take elements from?

2) What tools does The Cape use to establish authenticity?

3) What navigation or reading practices does The Cape expect in the reader/viewer/audience?

4) How are these tools for authenticity and practices undermined?

5) What is the subject of the narrative? (Cape Cod through its presence or the grandmother through her conspicuous absence?)

Compare Vicuna’s lines:

“both from south america
one of them
is a contemporary myth
one that accounts for the origin of
people
who write
and people
who sing
 

and in this myth
the gods have created
the indigenous people of south america and
they have created them with great memory so
only through sound
they can remember the history
of the whole
people
 

so
instead
the gods created some people
who have no memory so because they have not
this gift of memory
they were created with a little notebook in their hands
 

and these people are the europeans”

With Plato’s Phaedrus (wherein Socrates recounts for us a “myth” from Egypt):

“At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

These “myths” share a comparison of orality and script that finds the print detrimental to the exercising of memory despite the promises of writing as aid to remembrance.  In both accounts, writing works against memory as the print culture no longer needs to remember as it relies on the recorded texts, but these tend to be erased in the sense that they are covered over or deluged by the ever new printing of subsequent texts so that they are lost sight of within the seas of literacy (think Borges’ library of Babel or the unfathomable depths of millions of voices screaming simultaneously within the web with no one aware of their existences).  The new news of today eclipses the facts of yesterday and every other day prior, and the weakened memory of literate society forgets it as soon as it is no longer before one’s nose. The memory of the oral societies are not merely capable of remembering their grand narratives and consequently retaining their cultural identities and norms throughout time, but they empower their members with the capacity of retaining personal and familial and communal histories as well (something like the Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude- though it is a novelistic representation of this oral culture’s phenomenon).

Thus the technology of print (and its descendents web, computer, tv, etc) consumes the native peoples like the BPIII’schtako of the second myth…it is the HUM of computers and flat screens and ebooks that consume the orality of the native culture, the HUM of the machine replacing the noise/sound of the once oral retellings of cultural memory, digesting and incorporating the native into the western or european mindset thereby creating the cities of mestizos or mixed peoples native-european, native biologically, european culturally, adopting the path of print, a culture of the lost and forgetful.  Their native culture is consumed and the mixed mestizo by product is excreted by the BPIII’schtako.  The two myths are one in fact.  A before and after.

FORM:

Considering there are no quotation marks or commas or periods, how does Antin make it so clear when he speaking to the audience, when he’s speaking to a person in one of his anecdotes, and when that person is speaking back to him? In other words, how does he alert the audience to shifts in voice?

Similarly, how does he manage shifts in context, focus, and framing point of view? For example, how do we know when he’s explaining concepts and when he’s describing an anecdote? Or when he’s speaking “now” and when he’s “remembering”?

CONTENT:

What does Antin mean by framing?

What do pop art, traffic issues, sound/silence, and mathematically obsessed guys have to do with framing? (feel free to tackle this question one at a time)

FORM AND CONTENT:

Is there a relationship between Antin’s mode of delivery and the question of framing? If so, what is the nature of this relationship?

“what am i doing here?” as a question serves as a metaphorical bridge between two other questions – “what is a poet?” becomes linked with the existential concern of one’s purpose and the issue of agency and no capitalization or consistent punctuation tends to string along the statements into a continuous stream of words much like the inner monologue of private thought but externalized into a soliloquizing logorrhea of performativity before an other and it is before this other that one must ask “what makes a poet?” since this other the audience has presumably arrived for the purposes of hearing poets and this audience includes the live listening audience of 1973 as well as the reading audience of everyone else afterwards including you and me so that “what makes a poet?” becomes problematic for Antin as he refuses to participate in what the mainstream considers a poet as he rejects Frost and Lowell and not simply because he refuses to take up the first name of Robert but because he’d rather share company with Socrates that is as an extemporaneous interlocutor a spontaneous diologizer there is a dynamic transcendentally immanent element to orality lost in the deadness of composing written text so that your literary creation is an aborted child before the ink has dried on the page or you have saved on the screen the poets of yore whether epic like Homer or allegorical like the Nazarene or dialectical like Socrates take facial cues and ambiance to synthesize with a verbal conceptual thread an organic tapestry of human experience as personal communal narrative enmeshed within a temporal Heraclitean flux Antin considers what he does talking but not just talking and can understand that because there is oral composition in what he does that it might fall into the category of poetry simply because it falls nowhere else but can poetry be a catch all? poetry began with the lyric and the epic and the epic tried to record the myth and myth also means in greek to talk so to talk is to mythologize is to poetize but in an older way than has been recently construed or mythologized and yet Aristotelian concepts of poetry allege that they hold more truth than history since they hold universal truths that is we talk to tell stories that convey our truths truths as mythologized events taken to crystalize the who behind our lives and elevate the arbitrary to the profound but this is personal talk extemporaneous poetizing as opposed to what Antin calls totalitarian use of language that is the conformity produced through the rigors of education to systematize what we talk, how we talk, and who can talk grades are not rewards for truth and new insight but rather chains for enslavement for λόγος in ancient greek meant speech word study reason ground but it also meant expectation and plea so all of the ology (s) we study then expect and plea for us to play by their pre-established rules not so much to talk but to recite not to compose but to regurgitate not to fertilize with new thoughts but to circle jerk the old ones not to dialogue but to chorus and no the irony is not lost on me that i myself am guilty of precisely this totalitarian use of language as I appropriate Antin when i emulate his style of poetizing in order to complete this assignment so that I too am part of the circle jerk so again the question comes back to “what am i doing here?” but more importantly “what are you doing here?”