Format Issues

How can Whitman’s quote, “The artist carries the least cultural baggage” be true (Funcke 8)? Well, I do not see it as true simply because if the author’s work seems to be far from culturally normal, then it’s still influenced by it—it’s just different from it. Also, it would have to carry baggage from some culture. Even “early in his career Whitman had pondered the issue of ‘the blurring of art and life’” (Funcke 10) which is a paradox to his quote. Life can’t be avoided in art and vice versa; the two are indistinguishable in this type of format. I feel that if the artist’s work does not reflect the artist’s immediate culture, then it must reflect another, separate culture. (My mom’s a wood/stone/other hard things carver/artist, so I have some background with this topic.)

Why does Burroughs’ piece contain so many grammatical errors and ones dealing with punctuation? Does it serve a purpose, or is it a mistake related to the document being online and having fewer mandatory editors?

My final question is about Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” I don’t understand quite a few things about the document. It reads sort of like a play but in a different format, like a self-interpreted performance piece. Why are sections of the piece word for word repeated within it? This is a nuisance to me because I feel as if I am a great listener/reader since I pay attention the first time I listen or read a piece—I don’t like to feel as though I’m backtracking. Is the author trying to recreate a real life feel with this method?

Differences Between Hearing and Listening & Television and Voice

What does Gitelman mean when she states, “it was to the sheets of tinfoil that the language of print culture adhered most freely” (165)? I don’t understand how print culture can resemble the sounds on the tinfoil. Does a sound resemble another sound that is similar to it on the tinfoil? Is the answer merely that each sound has a certain look just as they conformed the alphabetical letters to match each other in print culture? Maybe I missed something from both readings, but we had writing long before this. So, what does Gitelman mean by this statement—I can’t wrap my mind around it, unless she’s speaking figuratively? Also, the term “adhered most freely” sounds paradoxical.

Sterne does not make it clear to me what the difference is between hearing and listening—since I thought the difference was what he said it was not exactly, “hearing as passive and listening as active” (98).

Also, last night while I heard a man’s voice emitted from a television from the guy’s apartment upstairs, I wondered how I could tell that it was not a real person’s voice. It’s pretty obvious from the older instruments since there could be static or it just sounds old and extra creepy (like the Lord Tennyson on wax cylinders), but how do we tell with the current technologies? Perhaps I missed something from The Audible Past or haven’t gotten there yet. Does it have anything to do with using the human ear (cadavers—really interesting) as a model? The newer technology just isn’t perfect yet since our ears hear the difference between the two.

"Are you talking to yourself?" *Mouths to self* "Weird."

It seems accepted that there is a “dominance of eye over ear in mainstream Western poetics” (Tedlock 195) since the main focus of poetry is on the page and not in the performance. Is this due to society trying to break away from the perception that more primitive cultures focus on oral traditions? There is this focus on the individual within our own capitalistic society, which is indeed reflected by this focus on the written word and the ideas that “The spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups” whereas “Writing and print isolate” (Ong 73). Curling up on the couch by the fire and reading the words is quite different from sitting Indian style around a story teller, perhaps with several others around you, interpreting the orator’s body language and listening.

Often, while riding in the car, I’ll catch my pops mumbling to himself, sometimes even moving his hands a bit while they’re on the steering wheel. When I ask what he’s doing, he says he’s having an intellectual conversation with himself (I’ve been slightly insulted by this response but to my credit, it’s often said while I’m reading). Even though I obviously know and love him, I perceive it as quite odd that he talks to himself but would not see it as odd if he were writing in a journal. Why is that?

Ong states that “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (70); I suppose this makes sense to a certain degree, but it also depends on the relation of the sounds. You could say the same of anything living: a dog lives but is nearing death more and more every moment.

Ong also believes that “You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound” but that “There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight” (71). Are we not always immersed in both of these (unless the person is of course deaf and/or blind) already? Previous readings discussed the completely silent room where the person inside of it only hears his/her own body. Therefore, we’re always immersed in sound just as we’re always immersed in sight. However, sight cannot be louder (but could be more visually stimulating or more eye-catching, sight’s equivalent to loud sounds) just as some sounds are more ear-catching.

Ong says that primary oral culture does not focus on preserving skills (43), in which case, it makes me wonder how these people would pass along the skills they had learned without writing or telling. Were these oral tradition people better problem solvers or just better at mimicking what they’d seen once out of necessity?

I would be lost without a dictionary and the CMS (Chicago Manual of Style for the non PWE people) because I love the rules just as I love to look them up (and because my major depends on these rules). But even in primary oral cultures, there must be rules—they’re just not able to be looked up in writing but looked up, so to speak, in the minds of many or agreed upon.

Wouldn't It be Funny If My Blog for Today was Blank?

A blank blog would certainly be appropriate and brilliant.

Was Henry Flynt trying to merely promote creativity by including the following on his Fluxus score: “The instructions for this piece are on the other side of this sheet” with the other side being blank (Dworkin 1)? Was it purposely a very open prompt just to get people thinking deeply (even though I’m not sure how inspired I’d be after an obvious lack of direction)? This is my only possible explanation at this point; what else could it be? It couldn't possibly be that he thought he was being creative, could it? The instructions seem similar to some of the answers I sometimes have given my students when they ask me how long a document should be (“however long you think it should be” often being my answer). I wonder if they’re as frustrated with me as I would be with Flynt had he left me the blank instructions.

I don’t understand how Cage’s publisher could have possibly sued Mike Batt for copyright infringement (Dworkin 3) “One Minute Of Silence” because, after watching both of them, I could not see any resemblance (other than a general lack of noise even though the pictures were different). Even if there were, if Mike Batt was just poking fun of Cage’s 4’33”, then that’s permitted because Batt was sort of parodying (allowed under Intellectual Property Law) Cage’s (which is allowed: think of Weird Al Yankovich’s work—he’s allowed to do what he does/did). How could Cage’s publisher sue Batt for using a bit of Cage’s SILENT piece in his own parody; how could the publisher even tell that it was in fact Cage’s?

The Language Removal Excerpts sound creepy and often sexual. The “60 Second Anthology of American Poetry” nearly made me gag from all of the repulsive licking of lips. Gross!

White Space as Noise

Similar to many questions asked last week, here is my first question (but, don't worry, I'll try to answer it): Is there a distinction to be made between whether a performance is good or bad and whether or not someone likes it? Similarly, is there a sort of rubric to a reading (that the expert reading audience members may adhere to) where audience members can somewhat objectively gauge a reading?

Concerning my first question, I believe that whether one thinks that a reading is good or not is, as Tony said, subjective. I mean, Quartermain believes that a very theatrical reading is awful, but, from what he said, I thought it sounded much more engaging than some of the older recorded readings we listened to last week (perhaps one reason is because I enjoy theatre and used to do it in high school) (219). Then again, I didn’t witness the reading, so I could also see how that type of performance has the potential to be annoying. But also, it could be widely accepted that one reading is good if the majority of the elitist reading attendees think it’s good, akin to the literature canon, right?

Also, going back to last week, we discussed noise and sound. I agree that noise is more of a “ruckus” as Dr. Baldwin stated. Just like how too much white space in a document can be distracting (or the opposite with not enough white space), it seems that the same goes for readings: too much of a pause could be considered a problem due to a lack of noise (I’m using the word noise because it would be considered annoying), or, again, too much going on can also be distracting just like how I imagine that Mac Low’s “The Young Turtle Assymetries” would distract me because there are so many voices going on at once, like at a party (if you knew me or had me as an instructor, you’d know that I am easily distracted anyway). This ties into the seeming subjectivity as to whether a performance is good or bad because, as I believe someone mentioned in class last week, noise (ruckus) to one person could be just sounds to another person (while some of the performances we listened to for tomorrow’s class may be considered noise to some and mere appealing sounds to another). I hope that this serves as a partial answer to the first question I asked today.