Selected writings of Charles Olson (Olson and Creeley)

quoting William Carlos Williams:

“I share your [Olson’s] excitement, it is as if the whole area lifted.  It’s the sort of thing we are after and must have … Everything in it leans on action, on the verb: one thing leads to another which is thereby activated.”

the activation takes place between, in the verb, in the doing, in the leading and being so led … this is consistent with Victor Zuckerkandl’s (Sound and Symbol) notion that we are not in one tone then another, but that we hear between them, that tones, in fact, lean toward, they have what he calls a “will to completion…”

tones, as such, are verb.  of course, Baraka was all in this conversation when he wrote about Swing going “from verb to noun,” from the moving, movement to some such stilled, listless, lifeless graspable thing (unblackened, if you will); and Nate Mackey writes in the opposite direction, after all these figures, about the movement “from noun to  verb”:

“‘From verb to noun’ means, on the aesthetic level, a less dynamic, less improvisatory, less blues-inflected music and, on the political level, a containment of black mobility, a containment of the economic and social advances that might accrue to black artistic innovation.  The domain of action and the ability to act suggest by verb is closed off by the hypostatis, paralysis, and arrest suggested by noun, the confinement to a predetermined status…” (Discrepant Engagement 266)

a bridge.  between.  syncopation.  

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Schmidt)

“Religious ways of knowing that emphasize the aliveness of sounds, the power of scriptures to speak, the capacity of music to heal or to inspire ecstasy, the voices out there that become doubled voices within, and the sympathetic vibrations that connect one body to another are immersed in inescapable relationships of exchange.  Such animated forms of hearing are not mere vestiges or survivals, are not ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive,’ but reveal still crucial elements of the tangled reciprocities of modern perception and signification…Religious affirmations of presence, whether in hearing and being heard or in seeing and being seen, need to be taken seriously on their own terms, but, at the same time, the acknowledgment of that intersubjective framing is not intended to free such experiences from the contextual densities of culture and power.  A poetics does not exclude a politics, and vice versa” (35).

there’s nothing else to say other than: dammmmn, that’s hot…!

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Schmidt)

“It would be wrong to turn this visualizing impulse simply into further evidence for the singular power of vision - that the ear was made intelligible only on the eye’s terms.  Visualizing sound was indicative also of the sensorial play of natural philosophers, the concern with the movement between and among the sense.  For example, since sound vibrations could be felt as well as seen, tactility was crucial to acoustic study” (24-5)

YES!  (or, this is really useful)…

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Schmidt)

“The second concerns the dwindling of hearing as a spiritual sense and the lost presence of divine speech - that is, the peculiar acoustics of modern forms of alienation, disillusionment, and secularism.  Recognizing how the sense of hearing has been framed within the metanarratives of modernity is a prerequisite for a more intricate historical narrative.  It allows for acknowledgment of the universalized philosophical and religious inscriptions with which modern ears have been marked” (15)

quick note on othorgraphy and accent

if i type organise, one would assume, based on the spelling, the visual marker of worded speech, a  particular spatial, topographic, geographic position: the UK, some coloni(s)ed area by the British, etc…

if i type organize, many of the same assumptions would be brought to bear, laid bare (i just like homophones, honestly); but similarly, the orthographic structure is bound up with the geographic, with the topographic.

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African American English speakers and their participation in local sound changes : a comparative study (Thomas & Yaeger-Dror)

“Today, the local varieties of French spoken in ethnically Creole and Cajun communities are in decline, as younger generations have acquired English as their mother tongue.  Still, the French language remains a salient component of local Cajun and Creole identities…One older African American man’s description of his linguistic repertoire as a ‘mixtury,’ including ‘a little of the French, a little of the Creole, and a little of the English’…conveys a sense of the region’s sociolinguistic situation quite effectively.”

Lying up a nation : race and Black music (Radano)

“[B]lack music could never have attained the same level of significance had it not developed within an interracial matrix to specify ideologies of racial difference” (42).

this just seems…wrong.

“Sentiment Song Sound Symbol: Blackness and the Networked Social”

if i were to hypothetically write a dissertation today, this is something of what it would be … 

My dissertation project, tentatively titled “Sentiment Song Sound Symbol: Blackness and the Networked Social,” attempts to theorize the relation of geography and mapping, sound and race.  The project conceptually frames the movement and sedimentation of sentiment, song, sound and symbol in various locations, both topologic and virtual, using the Underground Railroad – the secretive, symbolic, insurrectionist, fugitive, varied routes of escape from enslavement during the antebellum period – as one particular “site” of inquiry. 

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