Archive for the 'radicalism' Category

Sep 28 2007

WHITMAN RECIDIVIST

Published by cyrano2 under NFL, radicalism, Verse, Poetry, Vanguard Thought

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bigwalt

by GARY CORSERI

9/28/07

I know I am restless and make others so…
For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws,
to unsettle them…

~ Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman can’t remember
what he did with America.
It was there in his back pocket
yesterday or the day before:
caroling, brawling, lusty, democratic;
stretching its broadbacked plains
in the sun between seas.
He walks from door to door
selling subscriptions to the Universe.
Who are these sad-eyed does,
this tamed race, moping proletariat?
What are these buildings
yeasting on the plains,
that drone of the cities—
ennui echoing ennui?
Men on the moon, rockets,
telethis and telethat—
but what Vision?—
all the wires entangling:
some hydra-headed nullifidian
sucking the wounds of the eyes,
eating democracy, spitting it out—
these people this land
lost O lost lost.

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Sep 19 2007

Ghost Dance Bop

Published by cyrano2 under radicalism, Radical Language, Fire the Bastards, Weltschmerz, Anomie

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

dance

By Adam Engel

9/19/07

Fairies, Angels and UFOs will come, Ares and Aphrodite too (he’ll come like Gary Cooper in a tux and she in sequins like Marlene Dietrich — or is it the other way?) so loud was the Rhythm of LIFE, so ineffective, but fun to make some noise and dance. We’ll dance on THEIR graves and on our own; clang our pots and smoke them; amplify our ukuleles, bang the ear-drums slowly, meltdown decibel boom or bust and

WELCOME TO THE WOODSTOCK, D.C. GHOST DANCE JAMBOREE (AND ARMAGEDDON TOO)!

Greed, fear and Muzak be damned! We’ll have a blast (pun intended), and know this doesn’t have to be, this Thanatos Waltz, although it is and was and ever always puff of us poof of us bodies in time to be forgotten.

Oh well. Big deal. Shut up. Dance. Dance or die. Dance and die. Don’t matter: do the bunny hop hustle bump and grind jitterbug Charleston go go go, L’il sister, show yer hoochie koochie cuckoo shoes nude to the waist oh darlin’ lemme part yer beet curtains it’s only for one night a life without consequence, a Dance without memory or permit.

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Jul 31 2007

Resistance Unto Death

Published by cyrano2 under False Consciousness, radicalism, Bourgeoisie

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

exclaim

by Adam Engel

7/31/07

WILD sentences everywhere chasing each other round the page. Civil war. Sentences throughout “the book” break free of paragraphs, declare independence. Formation of ‘the new paragraph’ coalition of RADICAL NOTIONS and other confederate sentences of various ideological persuasions. Their universal anthem, “EXCLAIM!” refers to distaste and mistrust of functional, declarative sentences as “bourgeois.” There were however some completions among the moderates, not to mention the usual interrogatives of suspicious phrases and exclamatory (not to be confused with the EXCLAIM! group and its proponents) ‘avant garde’ cadres of cliched prose in the name of revolution. New trope for the future tense? Relieve pressure on the Past and Present, already stressed by long, boring description and forced marches across electric screens, only to be erased, liquidated, at the — accidental? intentional? — press of a button. “Delete.” “Cut,” “Undo.” Worried fragments, misplaced modifiers, dangling participles and other potential targets wonder daily: Is there Life after Deletion? Merciless, omniscient, inescapable — the hated AUTHOR of our fate (an anti-narrative by all accounts, but does that make it less of a fiction?).

Adam Engel,

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Jul 19 2007

RADICAL LANGUAGE: AN INTRODUCTION

Published by cyrano2 under Corporate Media Lies, Corporatism, Consumerism, radicalism

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

gertrudestein

“For instance, the famous Gertrude Stein sentence, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose,’ refers to the fact that the word, ‘rose,’ means nothing but itself.”

By Adam Engel

7/19/07

Language has been so debased by media that even in so-called “high art” (poetry, drama) sentences that one might easily hear spoken on Oprah or some other “real people” show, or sit-coms, have been “current” for the past 20 years.

While poets like William Carlos Williams wanted poetry to represent “natural” speech, his work became more complicated later in life when he realized there is no “natural” speech. There are as many different dialects of English as there are Burroughs in every English-speaking city.

Politically, poems and novels written in “regular” language, are using the language that injected racism, sexism, capitalism and nearly everything we know into our brains, where language either is or influences thought.

Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, who remain unreadable to many, though it is not difficult to learn to read them (the idea that art and literature be “demanding” of close scrutiny, as opposed to “throwaway culture” of mainstream media is consistent throughout the avant garde in the 20th century) began to challenge the language of the dominant society by repeating words and sentences, re-ordering syntax (grammar rules either form spontaneously or are dictated from ON HIGH) etc. They were followed by the New York School of poets and painters, which included John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, De Kooning and other radical artists.

Since the early seventies, a new group of artists, loosely referred to as the LANGUAGE school, took the breaking off of “allegedly reality-based natural language” as a serious political issue. First of all, they began, taking off from Stein, to view words as signifiers first and foremost, rather than as “pointers” to the signified. This means that, rather than describing an object “realistically,” which is a form of artifice in itself, they would use words as singular units of both meaning and ambiguity. For instance, the famous Gertrude Stein sentence, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” refers to the fact that the word, “rose,” means nothing but itself. Also, Stein, and later the LANGUAGE poets, described objects often with nouns and syntax that evoked the thing without using dead, cliched, description.

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