Phonographies

Woohoo! Aleksander Kolkowski’s phonographies project is now live.

You can listen to all kinds of artists and performers recorded onto wax cylinders. Suitably spooky sounds for the season.

My Kippered (Edison) Herring recreates a struggle to be heard – between Edison inventor of the phonograph, and Charles Cros who sorta got there first but was distracted by other interests such as alien contact.

I recommend listening especially to the electronic music section of the archive, where purely electronic come across like the scratchings and pipings of things with physical bodies. I would love somebody to draw these creatures.

The archive will be broadcast on Resonance on Wednesday nights at 7:30pm beginning on November 2nd  2011.

Collective Brightness

My poem ‘Singing in Tongues’ is now published in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality.

It’s a sonnet describing the experience, aged around 13 years, of being in an enormous church when all the worshippers (except for me) were moved by the Holy Spirit. I wrote this after a workshop at New Writing Worlds in Norwich 2006.

There will be a UK launch for the anthology at the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green, on Friday 21 October at 7.30pm – everyone is welcome! All the UK poets in the anthology will be reading and the editor Kevin Simmonds will be there.

Triggered : photos

 

Luke Kennard’s ‘Wolf Shibboleth’

I saw Luke Kennard perform his ‘Wolf Shibboleth‘ (no 11 in the chapbook) at the London Word Festival where he shared the bill with Christian Bok. The wolf poem I think is a perfect jumble of entertainment and experiment.

Bok did his mind-bending DNA poem, and a bit of lego patent transformed into a passage of Democritus. Stunning conceptually, but what worked best in performance were his Hugo Ball renditions.

Triggered

Coming up on Monday 13th June at King’s Place in London: ‘Triggered‘ – a dance and digital music performance featuring glyph paintings by Katy Price and Andrew Nightingale, activated by Richard Hoadley.

We are working on the glyphs right now – photos to follow after the performance.

Oramics machine

Meet the machine – Daphne Oram’s unique and astounding system for creating sound from drawings, developed in the 1960s.

The Science Museum are getting ready to explore the Oramics machine in collaboration with different groups who have stories to tell about electronic sound.

Kippered (Edison) Herring

My reading of the Edison / Cros text was recorded on a cylinder phonograph by Aleks Kolkowski this week. We did 2 versions, one with Cros underneath and Edison on top, then the other way round.

After a recording, the phonograph is covered in webs of swarf – the material cut away by making the groove.

Swarf on the Edison phonograph

When doing the second layer, you can hear the first one echoing back at you through the recording horn. This affects the performance – Edison became more hesitant, and Cros more fragmented.

The files will be digitised in a few weeks, and later made available on Aleks’ phonograph archive website. He played me some other examples from the collection – I won’t spoil the surprise, so let’s just say there are many treats in store…

Charles Cros / Thomas Edison

Texts to be recorded on a cylinder phonograph by Aleks Kolkowski – one cut on top of the other (will add link when the recording is available).

The first (in three parts) is loosely based on the Wikipedia entry for Charles Cros, incorporating two verses of his nonsense poem ‘Le Hareng Saur’. The second uses words and phrases from Thomas Edison’s diary, put into the form of Cros’s poem.

CROS

I.

Are you there?

I know it can work. We must capture the intensity of sound.

Voice now accedes to voices of the past, passé.
Vibrate; a diaphragm – engrave – diaphragm; listen.
I’ll tell you how it works.

Dia–dia–dia F-F-F. Just write it down. I must hurry, there are already too many connections. Here is the letter – my seal – they will record my name.

II.

Dearest, can you see the pricks of light? Just there – there. Allow me.

It’s not your fault, my darling the equipment lags behind. Why, if we could only pay them a visit – how much brighter their cities, more breathtaking the view -
but we shall, or our children shall.

Yes. That’s what I said.

III.

Il laisse aller le marteau – qui tombe, qui tombe, qui tombe,
Attache au clou la ficelle – longue, longue, longue,
Et, au bout, le hareng saur – sec, sec, sec.

Il redescend de l’echelle – haute, haute, haute,
L’emporte avec le marteau – lourd, lourd, lourd,
Et puis, il s’en va ailleurs, – loin, loin, loin.

EDISON

Dip into oblivion: sleep, sleep, sleep,
Sunbeams embarrass my eyes: awake, awake awake,
Mental kaleidoscope: deep, deep, deep.

Smoking too much makes me nervous: curl, curl, curl,
Satan’s principal agent: hell, hell, hell,
Dandruff is excreta of the mind, mind, mind.

Perpetual coroners of London: grave, grave, grave,
Rose Hawthorne a big live lobster: bite, bite, bite,
Freckles are mudholes of beauty: skin, skin, skin.

Good day for an angels’ picnic: smell, smell, smell,
Soul of Plato ‘stride a butterfly, fly, fly,
Pollen freight via beeline: laugh, laugh, laugh.

Dinner: ruins of a chicken: rice, rice, rice,
10 acres of raspberries: red, red, red,
Church a heavenly fire escape: hear[t], hear[t], hear[t].

Played a little on the piano keys, keys, keys,
Don’t like Dickens don’t know why: works, works, works,
Speak of realism in painting: dung, dung, dung.

Sardines the principal attraction: ate, ate, ate,
Labyrinth of my stomach: attack, attack, attack,
Stroke of vivid memory: ring, ring, ring.

degrees ‘r’ us

Stefan Collini on the Browne report in the LRB:

he wants to see a system in which the universities are providers of services, students are the (rational) consumers of those services, and the state plays the role of the regulator. His premise is that ‘students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.’

Browne appears to believe that the only relevant measure of teaching quality is ‘student satisfaction’. [...] I would hope the students I teach come away with certain kinds of dissatisfaction (including with themselves: a ‘satisfied’ student is nigh-on ineducable), and it matters more that they carry on wondering about the source of that dissatisfaction than whether they ‘liked’ the course or not.

It may be that the most appropriate way to decide whether the atmosphere in the student bar is right is by what students say when asked in a questionnaire whether they ‘like’ it or not. But this is obviously not the best way to decide whether a philosophy degree should have a compulsory course on Kant. The philosophy department might hope that, some time after graduation, most of its former students would come to see the wisdom of this requirement, but ‘student satisfaction’ is not what is at issue here. That this recognition is retrospective tells us something important about education: individuals often need to be told by someone who knows that a particular line of study is worth pursuing whether at the time they want to or not.

Overwhelmingly, the general statements announce, with startling confidence, the real point of higher education: ‘Higher education matters because it drives innovation and economic transformation. Higher education helps to produce economic growth, which in turn contributes to national prosperity.’ [...]  On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to the next.’ This report displays no real interest in universities as places of education; they are conceived of simply as engines of economic prosperity and as agencies for equipping future employees to earn higher salaries.

The truth is, of course, that universities are not businesses and they do not operate in a market (which is not to say that they do not need to be financially well run and to make good use of their, at present largely public, resources).

Ladyfest

Upcoming gig: as part of the London Ladyfest, 12-14 November.

Where: Horatia, 100 Holloway Road N7

When: Sunday 14 November, 1.30-3pm

With: this is part of a poetry showcase featuring also Alex Pryce, Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg & Sophie Mayer.

What: I’m hoping to do bookmachine again, plus a few poems of a dark and twisted nature and hopefully something new & cheerful contrived for the ladyfest.

Tickets: well, it looks as though you have to buy a Sunday pass for 12.50, but I am asking for some clarification on this and will update.