I began the week listening closely to the Lisa Gitelman and Craig Dworkin lectures and dialogue that I recorded last year while both were at Concordia.

Between Blankness & Illegibility:

The dialogue brings together Gitelman, a scholar noted for her work on media history, and Dworkin, a critic, editor and writer of late 20th century innovative poetry and poetics. Before this meeting, both Dworkin and Gitelman have focused on the materiality of their subjects: Gitelman on media technologies, the machines that inscribe all kinds of cultural perspectives into their production of communications; Dworkin on the materiality of language itself (as written, as typed, as printed), the materials upon which this language is printed, and the cultures through which that material is disseminated.

For this convergence, both focus on The Blank: blank space, fillable space, the empty sheet upon which and/or with which one communicates. Gitelman’s talk opens up the field of literary studies to the wider culture of print. “Books are for lots of things,” Gitelman states at the start of her lecture. The blank that one fills with writing is a kind or genre of book that exists in so many variations: lesson and exercise books for schoolchildren, personal diaries, calendars, ledgers, daybooks, order and invoice books, scrapbooks, and blank books of all kinds to facilitate the work done in various occupations from tailors to geographers, plumbers to trappers. Gitelman makes an important differentiation between the blank books and other printed works, ones, say, that are the usual object of study in an English department: “They [the blank books] are designed, printed and used, not authored, published or read.” In this talk, Gitelman provokes us to look at the publics active in the culture of print (one outside the limited frame of specifically literary production), and also to consider how we might analyze the layers and intentions of cultural inscription involved in the production and circulation of blank/fillable books.

Dworkin’s talk is full of pataphysical trickery and Derridean wordplay. To develop his concepts on the blank page, he begins with a discussion of a blank book. Yet this blank book does not exist outside of being a prop for a film: it is the fictional blank book written by the fictional poet Jacques Cégeste in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée. Here is the clip from Orphée that Dworkin discusses:

There are many directions to go in with the Dworkin talk: it’s a great piece, and I hope this recording will be of use for the growing number of people working critically at the juncture of conceptual poetics and media theory. In this space, I’d like to focus on his statement: “Blank books typically are not blank.” This is a distinction held in common by both him and Gitelman. There is ink on the cover or pages. In Gitelman’s example, this ink is used to frame or coerce specific operations, designated acts of labor, certain kinds of writing. In Dworkin’s example, this ink is used to trigger what he calls “mechanisms of social and moral reflex in the best avant-garde tradition of trying to piss off the bourgeois.” Cégeste’s book, Nudisme, might lure the “prudish bourgeois reader” by announcing some possibly bawdy subject within its pages, only to make a fool of that same reader by offering him nothing: no text, no salacious story, not even a picture. This same trick on the bourgeois reader is also a trick on the poet reader: expecting, perhaps, a book of unadorned, plain-spoken language still functioning in a lyric mode, Cégeste again refuses to satisfy the reader’s expectations in a proto-conceptualist gesture of assembling a book that offers itself to a thinkership – as opposed to a readership – to surmise why this book is stripped of any signifying language and what the absence itself might signify.

In other projects, I sent a few of my recordings – of Lisa Robertson, Charles Bernstein, and Juliana Spahr – to be included in the PennSound archive. As I begin my doctoral research – which will be a social history of the EPC, UbuWeb, and PennSound, focusing specifically on the contemporary exploration of phonopoetics and what Danny Snelson has aptly termed “the little database” – I hope to produce and curate more and more recordings and transcripts. In these last years, as both a critical and creative practice, I have come to regard the audio recording and the transcript as my favourite mode of composition. In the following weeks, here in these notes, I hope to get into this more, examining specifically the social aspects of this kind of composition, the multivocality it presumes, the spatial aspects that are important to scrutinize, and the close listening practice of how to address both what is and isn’t audible in that space.

Following from this, as part of my final directed study with Kay Dickinson and in preparation for my comprehensive field examinations, I have been reading and thinking about the soundscape: this week reading, again, in Attali’s Noise; several pieces in Aural Cultures, edited by Jim Dobnick; a number of pieces in Music, Sound, and Technology in America; and beginning to read in Veit Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance. As I go through my notes here, perhaps I will post some excerpts of interest on this page. At this moment, one thing that has resonated with me out of this past week’s reading is the reminder to always consider the tactile aspects of sounds. Andra McCartney, in her contribution to Aural Cultures, brings up a story of going to a school for deaf children and witnessing a dance in which the children take of their shoes so that they can feel the vibrations of the amplified music through their feet, and respond to it in dance through this sensation. The vibrational, tactile aspect of sound will be important for the three writings I am working out during this summer: one on the human microphone, one on Jackson Mac Low’s 1971 performance in Montreal, and a paper on the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).