Exploding 

the Film Text

Q&A with Abigail Child, writer and director 

of Unbound: The Life of Mary Shelley 

Mary Shelley's Dream -- Still from Unbound

The following comments were made by avant-garde film maker and writer Abigail Child, following the New York premiere of her 2013 film, Unbound: The Life of Mary Shelley.  They are based on a recording of the Q&A with audience members that followed the film’s screening at the East Village’s Anthology Film Archives on May 31.  These comments have been amplified, added to and edited by Child, in collaboration with myself, over the last few days following the premiere.

The result are answers to audience questions that reveal the challenges as well as the beauty of filming/designing an experimental feature film abroad with few financial resources, in which the resources become the architectural sites of Rome, the ancient city and the sea, and a supportive local community of the arts.  Child’s answers here also reveal the creative potentiality in an imaginative and experimental use of digital film media and its editing software.  In a supplemental question posed by email, Child also responds by talking more deeply about the use of the “explosion” process in this film – and technological “error” – in which time, history, and story are transformed beyond audience expectations, in which “the machine” makes the human more real. – LH

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Q:  How was the script for the film composed?

A:  I’m using Mary Shelley’s diary and [her step-sister] Claire Clairmont’s diary, combining them into one voice. I’m drawing from [Percy B.] Shelley’s poetry as well, which I am “mashing” –in that he wrote long poems from which I have selected lines.  I would love some of his poetry, and then back off the extended rhymed verses. There’s also some parts of the voiceover that I wrote myself.

Claire is more open in her diary than Mary, more free with her feelings for Percy and for Mary. Additionally, I kept some of the pieces of the recording by the actress, when she makes mistakes or errors… it’s part of the way we tell a story, remembering and circling back.

Q:  Where was the film shot, and how was it financed?

P.B. Shelley with racket -- Still from Unbound

A:  It was filmed in Rome -- all in Rome, or just about.  I rented a boat in Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber 20 minutes west of the City for the closure.

I really had no money at all.  I worked with Academic Fellows, who were at the American Academy in Rome as academic scholars where I was a Fellow in the Visual Arts. The scholars would give me only mornings or afternoons. Often we would film in the mornings, and then [the fellows/actors] would go back to their own research and writing in the afternoon. So, when I saw the carousel on the Tiber one evening, I said, “Let’s do it.” We organized the cast and shot during one sunny afternoon that next week.

The Academy was incredibly open with its spaces, allowing me to film in all of them. The villa standing in for Diodati [Byron’s residence in Switzerland] is the Villa Aurelia, one of the Academy’s properties. The gold room on the second floor was the stage for a lot of live classical and operatic music, fantastic in that venue. And famously, or infamously, this is where Tom Cruise had his engagement party.  [Audience laughter.] What was great is they let me have it for the day.  I had looked at Joseph Losey’s film on Mozart, which was photographed in a villa north of Rome, to figure out how you fill up a few thousand square feet of space with five people!  It was challenging. I brought the characters and furnishings up close to the camera. Then, I opened doors throughout the rooms so the vista was long behind them.

The film was shot all over Rome –in the Borghese Park for the boat scene, by the Castillo for the carousel, at the Baths of Caracalla, in the Museo Palacio and at the Academy itself, which had a lot of different available spaces and buildings. For example, the scene of Claire’s nightmare was filmed in a hallway of the main Academy building that was three-feet wide and 100-feet long– the most insane hallway, like something out of Kubrick movie.  I said, “I have to film here.”   So it was that kind of finding, throughout my 11 months in Rome, in which I would see something and think, “This would be great for a set.”  At the Villa Aurelia—another instance— there were these lights on the trees at night that they put on for parties.  I asked Academy staff if they would turn the lights on one evening so I could film my Frankenstein character lurking in the woods, and they did.

It was a fantastically communal and improvisatory way to deal with shooting and locations. I felt this film was the most improvisatory piece I’ve ever done.   I wasn’t at home in Rome—didn’t have film colleagues, equipment, labs, assistants around,  so I had to go with whatever was available.

Q:  Can you talk about the relationship between sound and image?  In your work, I know that musicians have often performed live to the film, but in this one the sound was composed. How are you putting those together?

I shot silent footage with my Beaulieu, a silent l6mm camera. I knew later that there would be voice-over and music, plus sound.   I contacted Zeena Parkins when I returned to New York —with whom I
have worked previously (on Mayhem, 1987, and Surface Noise, 2001) —and she began to give me themes with which we would work.  At one point I would tell her to dirty them up, or give me some synthetic sound to make it more discordant.

Mirrored Lord Byrons -- Still from Unbound

As one person who watched the film said: there’s an anachronism in every shot.   It never stays in one historical time zone, one solo period. So we would play with that in sound, as well….adding the engine of a motorcycle or car, sirens going off -- that kind of anachronistic play to undermine the fictional space of the story.

In terms of the music, I cut up some of Zeena’s themes and layered them. At one point, in Final Cut, because of technical issues, the sound slipped further, something like in Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia  where the voiceover is on the wrong photograph. Here the sound was suddenly stretched and the disjunction began to accelerate.

The way that one thinks about memory and storytelling and truth -- the slippage seemed an authentic part of the process, of going through time, in time.  Somebody said at one point, which I felt was true, that going through the machine made the time more humane.  Suddenly, with slippages, there was repetition and there was re-membering. There were these "mistakes."  You can almost see the film as a series of mistakes, as “off” the synchronous, off the logic of continuity.


Q:
What is your concept of "exploding" or an "exploded film"? Can you say more on your use of this term, and the technical as well as conceptual ideas behind it?

This is technically complex. At one point the film was single screen. I was moved to make it double screen —conceptually so the screens read as a book, to mime the Claire/Mary dichotomy/obstruction, and to suggest as well the Mary/Monster split and identification. This doubling is the significant gesture. Suddenly I had l6mm film, dvcam [the small amount of black and white registering mainly the casting of the film], stills, plus "quicktimes" of sections of edited film  -- which I had made in order to go to the double screen in the first place —and these 4 originals each had different originating sizes. This meant that the numbers to fill in were all different when they were set to size in double screens. I believe we had 8 sets of numbers that were carefully recorded to get the two-screen version to work.

Originally, there had been an issue with the Italian transfer. They had made every frame of film into a tiff that was then brought back into a film sequence in Quicktime. I was given wrong information here and brought the film back at 29.97 (frames per second/fps: this is the video format). This meant it was actually going too fast. It should have been 23.97 to keep it compatible with the way it was shot at 24 fps (the film format). I didn’t realize this until I had made the two-screen version which was accepted into the Rotterdam Film Festival for 2012.

I thought I could press a button and get the 23.97 version. I couldn’t. This is when I began to paste the fine cut into different sequences with different time signatures——not sure how else to describe this as it has never been done before. The result was strange, what I am calling exploded: I was watching the computer search among my fim rolls for material that would match numerically but it was impossible…. I was forcing the computer to match up a piece that was suddenly 20% longer (24fps vs 30 fps). There were all kinds of lovely coincidences and excisions and surprises. I knew then that the mismatched result—the exploded film— was a “gate” or opening to edit the film. I didn’t have time to work more fully on this then as the film was due for Rotterdam within a week. Also it was very unstable technically; it would crash the machine or freeze.

Q:  So the sound in this version is “exploded”?

Yes, it’s exploded.  In the sense that the sound was brought onto the editing timeline in new places [as described above], and that I layered the tracks again with anachronistic sound and with additional synthesizer sound. Cage would call it “reading through the text” and here it was reading through the film source materials—both visual and aural. It fragmented this material, cutting it off at unexpected places, re-realizing the film score if you will. Everything was recognizable but not exactly where it had been previously.

At one point more recently I asked Zeena if she could perform the film live. She commented on how hard it would be to recreate this new version. I should add however that the “carousel” sequence and “silent letter in English” sequence were taken from the two-screen version (A Shape of Error ) and inserted into Unbound as is.

Q:  You’re working a lot with a dual image, a mirror screen.  Can you comment on this?

A: At one point, as I said earlier, I felt I needed to move away from one screen:  for visual reasons relating to the “pages of a book,” and conceptually, relating to Mary’s projection onto Claire and onto the Monster, and all the doubling in her Frankenstein.  (The wife of Dr. Frankenstein is Elizabeth which is the name of Shelley’s favorite sister; the child who is killed is called William, which is the name of Mary’s child;  and both Byron and Shelley were writing poems based on the Prometheus myth). It is the very fact that there are two screens that allowed the “explosion” or "derangement" to happen.  As I noted, there are four, five, six sources in the film each with different ratios of sizing. That confused the computer. It was those variables that provoked the machine, you could say. I had always wanted it to have more rhythm and playfulness, so that’s how I arrived at the double screens.

I should add that I was attracted to this story because of the sex and politics. The sadness of the reality—of the Shelleys’ flight and the multiple deaths that surrounded them— was somewhat a surprise. I suspect it is because the film uses the home movie theme that these domestic realities began to surface and surface again. Also, there were many children at the Academy when I was there and this sense that children were in Mary's and Percy’s life constantly was overpowering. It explained a lot, potentially Shelley’s interest in other women for one thing.

Regarding the mirroring effect, I had used this in other films (first in The Future is Beyond You, 2004, and then in Mirror World, 2006). Here it is most often used within the landscape, because the mirroring made the landscape feel grand, wide, large – more the way the landscape actually felt, in "real life," which a single screen couldn’t capture.  And, of course, it also becomes ominous a bit, that ominous suggestive quality.

Q:  Yes, there’s mirroring towards the end when you get to the scene of Shelley’s sailboat out on the sea…

A:  It’s as if there is death at the center, but there’s this breathing movement happening, which I really appreciated: this sense of stillness on the ocean, the water moving the sail only slightly, everything quiet then, breath-taking, propelling us into the final exhalation -- which the sail itself mimes in its subtle movement.

I shot at Cinecitta at one point [the commercial film lot of Rome where Fellini movies were shot, among many other Italian classics]. Somehow they let me film.   There was another group of professionals, maybe 5 people, trying to shoot, and they forbade them. I was with my little Beaulieu camera and I guess it doesn’t look real, so they just let me keep shooting.  The images at the end were sound blankets waving in the wind hiding the rough construction behind. This image of the black “sails” and constructive artifice behind them, this sense of illusion and artifice out of the simplest reality, is what interested me in filming memory and biography, in examining storytelling.

What I aimed for was the Shelley party's idea of hallucination and dream. They were living in that place, exploring their own dreams, their illusions, they were pushing themselves.  They were living with the sense that whatever happened was part of their novelistic fiction.   They were living their lives under that rubric.

Unbound is the first part of my trilogy – on women and failed ideologies.  This film is a meditation on 19th-century Romanticism and Mary Shelley. I’m hoping to do one on Emma Goldman and 20th-century utopianism, and then a 21st-century film on women and science.  The Emma Goldman film will be shot in New York. I want to shoot the 21st-century film in Tokyo.  I don’t have a woman for that third film, but I’m actually thinking "she" should be anime – that "she" should be a virtual heroine.  I’m looking at the Hikikomori, the Japanese kids that stay at home all the time living on their computer. Tokyo would be my Alphaville of the 21st century.   Perhaps I should say Betaville to reference the computer? That’s the dream.

Photo stills courtesy Abigail Child.

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Abigail Child is a filmmaker, poet, and writer who has been active in experimental writing and media since the 1970's.  She is the creator of more than 30 film / video works and installations, most recently Unbound (discussed here): A Shape Of Error (2011 – also a feature film on Mary and Percy Shelley); and The Suburban Trilogy (2011).  She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Award in Film, as well as the 2009 Rome Prize.  She is also the author of 6 poetry books. 

Child is the author of a Mermaid Tenement Press chapbook, which can be ordered by clicking this link and scrolling to title CounterClock. 

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Laura Hinton is the main writer and editor of this blog.

Overflowing Theories / 

Poetry’s Possibilities  

A Review of Fortino Samano (The Overflowing of the Poem) 
Virginie Lalucq and Jean Luc Nancy
Translated by Syllvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue

By Belle Gironda with Nicole Peyrafitte
Guest reviewers

For a poet who loves philosophy but who would always rather read poetry, one of the many pleasures of Fortino Samano (The Overflowing of the Poem) is how despite “the overflowing” of the poem — which appears twice in the book, first with the translation on facing pages and once again with “the Overflowing” below it — it is “the poem” that dictates the conversation.

Like Diego Velásquez’s painting, Las Meninas, Fortino Samano is the rare work of art that manages to be both an aesthetic and intellectual object.  It also is a meta-conversation about itself and other objects like it — a theorization of its own conditions of possibility. Thankfully, this theorization is not some external apparatus added by Nancy’s contribution, but rather originates in Lalucq’s poem and spills over into a continuing conversation.  While in sheer number of words, the overflowing exceeds the poem, it cascades only into the spaces the poem allows—and follows its lead in tone and diction and conforms to its preoccupations. As Nancy writes, “I believed that she was asking me about my way of doing things. But she herself answered in my place.”

The speaker in Lalucq’s poem appears sometimes to be Fortino Samano (described in the translator’s forward as “a Zapatista lieutenant and counterfeiter” photographed while smoking the proverbial last cigarette, just before his death by firing squad); sometimes Lalucq, the writer; and perhaps also sometimes the Mexican photographer Augustin Victor Casasola, whose exhibition of photos of the Mexican Revolution inspired Lalucq’s poem. This conflation of authorial point of view also invokes a bit of a Las Meninas convergence and triangulation of image, image-maker and viewer of the image (the poet to be).  Near the beginning of the overflowing, Nancy picks up and extends Lalucq’s play—noting a possible conflation of “charming executioners” (the unseen of the photograph) with “charming readers," the outside of the text.  And further on, meaning executes itself in the action of the poetic line as Nancy informs us, “The poem is always, at each moment, the last word with no conclusion.”

The history of writing’s relation to photography, from the moment of the invention, is fraught with anxiety about the medium’s immediacy and its representational relation to the world. This theme haunts Lalucq’s poem and is perhaps echoed in what also haunts translation and even reading. The work holds itself in abeyance before the moment that remains uncaptured—dwelling in and on a set of questions about what is the relation of medium to moment and of medium to medium, genre to genre, language to language, human to text, human to human.

Lalucq acknowledges her debt to Nancy’s book, Au fond des images, and invites him in for no small cameo. This turns out to be just one of many intertextual tributaries flowing into the poem, starting with the epigraph from Jacques Roubaud’s book, Some Thing Black, that was written after — and in contemplation of — the death of his wife, the photographer Alix Cleo. To add an additional layer, that book takes its title from a portfolio of Cleo’s images that she called, “If something black.” While the edition I have, a translation by Rosemary Waldrop (Dalkey Archive Press), includes Cleo’s photographs, the original, from Éditions Gallimard in 1986, did not.  Some Thing Black is a meditation on absence, fraught also with the author’s frustrations regarding the limitations of language and poetry.  The epigraph Lalucq chose from Roubaud’s poem, “Aphasia,” contains an image of the poets “dismantling their house, floor by floor,” from the top down. Nancy points to the parallel reflexivity of the epigraph, noting that it is “by another poet speaking of verse.”  And he sounds coy (as the author of Au fond des images), when he wonders if “the philosopher” knows about “the ground of anything, about grounds, in general.”

This moment, at the inception of the overflowing, leads to questions about the translation—which is, it should be said — an admirable work that must have entailed a formidable process. While the poem, rather than Nancy’s meta-critical response, gets to dictate the terms of the book's conversation, it appears that the "the overflowing" guides many of the decisions made in the translation. We see this in action sometimes, as when Laluqc’s “du léger liséré de sang” deftly becomes, “a light brim of blood” in order to preserve Nancy’s remarks about the alliteration in the original. The choice is understandable, but loses the recurring “stitching” and “pricking” needlepoint layers embroidered by Lalucq’s punctilious choice of words. The blood-red captions she stitches on the borders of language are sometimes washed away by the translation, and it’s hard not to miss that layer of the text’s fabric.

As Nancy first enters the conversation and responds to Lalucq’s choice of epigraph, he obliquely invokes his own theorization of images in Au fonds des images:  “I think Virginie wants to lead me to the ground of verse.”  Is this why, then, that “fond” will be translated as “the ground” (as it is, in the English translations of Nancy’s work) and not as “the bottom,” which would be the more colloquial and direct translation of the French expression, “le fond des choses”?

What are the implications, then, in going to the ground and not to the bottom? Nancy says that  "‘versification’ remains and with it the oldest rule, the most archaic floor (a basement, a cave, a foundation?).” Just as these three are very different things—so are le fond and les fondements quite different from each other—and, as Nancy notes—the latter is the traditional territory of philosophy—while the former is perhaps not. Throughout the overflowing he guides us along verse’s “most archaic floor,” among les fondements—in the territory of image and sound—where poetry originates. But, in the end, he send us back to poem itself— suggesting it should be spoken aloud, a summoning of the duende, from le fond.

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Belle Gironda (PHOTO CENTER BELOW) is a poet, critic and teacher. Her most recent book is Double | Vigil (Stockport Flats Press, 2013), a collaboration with poet Lori Anderson Moseman that uses poetry, photographs, email excerpts, news, reports and Facebook postings to explore the experience of vigil, from inside and outside of the Egyptian popular uprising of 2011.  Gironda taught writing at the American University in Cairo from 2008-2012.  She now lives on a hill outside of Asheville, NC.

Nicole Peyrafitte (PHOTO RIGHT ABOVE) is a French Pyrenean-born poet and performance artist, whose videos, paintings, writings, singing and cooking are often integrated into multi-media stagings.  Her work has been presented and/or performed in such venues as The Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and at The University of Bordeaux in France.  Her latest projects include a documentary film, Basil King: Mirage (producer and co- director, with Miles Joris-Peyrafitte), as well as Bi-Valve, a performance project that includes text, painting, and videos.  She lives in New York City.

 The Open Conversation 

of the Internet

-- the Tragedy of Aaron Swartz

For days now, I have been haunted by the story behind the suicide of Aaron Swartz, who killed himself a week ago Friday in his Brooklyn apartment, pushed to the wall by a savage attack on his character, not to mention his finances and a possible long-term future in jail, by the U.S. Attorney’s office for downloading documents at MIT’s research library.   I think his life – and tragic young death  – has something to do with innovative thinking in this culture.  And it therefore has something to do with the cutting-edge arts that is a topic of this blog. 

And it has to do with the future of our internet, which should also be a topic of this blog.  

Software innovator, multi-disciplinary genius, maverick thinker and American activist, Aaron Swartz was one of those rare human beings who had a life calling apparently before he was even a man – as a young teen.  I won’t rehearse his technological accomplishments; they are well reviewed and known.  But his principle interest in life – from all I have read and watched on an internet whose freedom he helped to save when our corporation-hugging Congress nearly passed the so-called “anti-piracy” act that would have killed much of our internet freedom – has been, was, to help humanity from its own savage thickets. 

His main focus in life was to keep us talking freely – to keep the sharing of real information and interactive technology alive.  

I have read and listened to the stories and accounts of his deeds and supposed “crimes.”  And it seems this beautiful young man who died at 26 only wanted us all – he was thinking globally -- to read as widely as possible,  to be free to ask questions and to think thoughts as large as Swartz’s own mind.

I write this caged in a French apartment in the beautiful but politically conservative southern region of the Alpes Maritimes, where one would think full or partial nudity on its beaches in the summer time is an indication of a freer version of civil rights.  It is not.  I am “caged,” by choice -- because it is pouring droves of rain from the mountains to the coastlines as far as the Goggle Maps can see.  There is no driving out of this torrent in an ancient Renault car so old it itself leaks inside in the rain.  So we wait indoors for the usual golden-azure suns to come back to this winter Mediterranean climate. 

But I only wish the politics here were as golden as its usual sun.  Petty, corrupt – the politicians are driven by local mafias and the filling of the coffers of local politicians.  But don’t they have newspapers, you might say?  Don’t they report the corruption from time to time?  Frankly, no.  The local papers especially only exist to support the tourist industry, like a squad of money-cheerleaders.  I’ve even seen them change bad weather reports at the height of the beach season.   Don’t they have the internet, you might ask?  Again, if you are lucky enough to get a good signal – the national company France Orange is not noted for its wifi consistency – the French at least in this part of the world are about 10 years behind in the intelligent use of the ULR. 

Is there any relationship between the availability of discussion and information and the elements of political conservatism and the racism I have noted outside my dripping rainy door? 

I think there is.  I think societies with open discussion -- one facilitated by a healthy internet -- have to progress to the next step.  They have to progress to allow “otherness” to wane in favor of an expanded notion of subjectivity in the context of collectivity.   Racism here -- in one major example of an anti-progressive social impetus in this region in and around the city of Nice -- is pretty much the norm among the white French, obviously with many exceptions.  The white French live side by side with more recent Arab and/or African immigrant populations from formerly French colonies.  Yet African-French typically live in their own districts – I’ve even seen them on separatist beaches in the summer time, reminiscent of American’s Jim Crow period.  This separatism is not “legal” or “official” as it once was in the American south but is in fact enforced by social and political ostracism and isolation by the power structure in this region.  The southern white French are actually ridding some of their neighborhoods of the local Arabs through various means, some legal, some not.  (American cities do this through gentrification.)  This racism seems intensified to me in recent years, or at least as I have observed it.

So here among usually ravenously beautiful skies and open seacoasts and villages that go back to Roman and Greek (and Lugurian) cultures, contemporary money and power -- as usual -- writes history.  And "history" as a setting, along with an unusual scenic beauty that is nature's gift to the south of France, is used for the attraction of money, which comes from the more affluent (and usually white) tourists.    No one who profits from this tourist-driven economy here wants to confront ideas.  People might start to think.  

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Watching Amy Goodman’s "Democracy Now" on the Aaron Swartz story – a link sent to me by poet James Sherry – and today watching the memorial service for Aaron at historic Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York leaves me wondering at the efficacy of either historical settings or our global privileges.  Even those of us who "get around," and who make contact with multiple and various cultures, find blocks that prevent us from opening ourselves to others.  Aaron seemed at root to be a young man wishing to destroy those blocks.  He seemed to wish that we of the global economy have open conversations.  Did he know how dangerous those open conversations can be, and who gains by keeping the conversations closed?

Did this idealistic person know who and what he was up against?   

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Swartz was most concerned about our ability to open ourselves to ourselves -- and saw the internet as a great opportunity for human sharing, of ideas and knowledge.   He was concerned,  as I have heard and read,  for the rural woman in India and her future ability to use new software to grow a small business that will lead her family out of poverty.   Technology in the global world is not a luxury but a necessity.  He recognized that fact.  And he was concerned about the ability of millions around the world who cannot pay Jstor’s hefty “use” fees, who do not have access to academic libraries to read or review articles written by the academic intellectual powerhouses of the now globally connected world.  These are articles today largely written by people like my friends and colleagues – and myself – people who have jobs as university professors at research institutions.  We write and publish, as well as teach.  We publish normally without any kind of authorial payment for these "academic" works.

We write from a love of knowledge and discovery that eventually, over time, produces them.  We write, also, because it is our university job to do so.  It is hard work, I can say from experience, to create even one academically sound article.  It can take years, actually -- and a lot of midnight oil.  Our time for this is partially, sometimes, not always, modestly compensated for by our higher-education institutions that give us salaries in the form of, say, a course release from teaching one semester.  Research funding varies.  Some researchers are not helped or compensated at all.  Research in the Humanities, these days, is considered a privilege to do -- we are rarely if ever adequately compensated for our effort and time. 

The connecting link to my weaving of these issues and stories:  intellectual thought -- and access, access, access.

Openness.  To others.   The sharing of information and ideas in a global community that must do this -- or perish.

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I have heard that Jstor, which is the on-line storage for academic articles, is non-profit.  Then – why the usage fees by Jstor to libraries around the world?  These fees are not nothing.  They are not affordable for most regular folks.  And most of us cannot afford to purchase  a single article on line, say,  at $35 a pop.  Why such fees when academic authors never charge for their labor?  How much did it cost the academic journal in the first place to publish the article -- say, if it was originally a paper journal?   Journals, too, are usually funded by academic institutions, many if not most of which are in turn funded by the public.  How can Jstor continue to "pass on" such expense that, in fact, was largely publically funded to begin with?   They are certainly not paying writer costs (or royalties).  These do not exist for academic articles, at least in the Humanities.  As an academic as well as a poet, I do not understand how my intellectual articles can be “locked up” – or “caged” – by corporate profit-making deals when I myself never received an ounce of payment for them.   (Nor did I ask for payment.  That was never the goal or the point.)

What comes from the public should return to the public.  This is how Aaron Swartz viewed this situation.  As he argued in his activist speeches and in writing, research now hidden in academic libraries and unavailable to general readers without academic paid-for privileges inherently belongs to the public -- and the world.  So how in the world – how in our world– did Jstor or any university (like MIT)  “get possession” of our collective work and keep it captive?

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, my husband used to like to say when telling the story of how he acquired the lease on his New York apartment.   That story goes like this:   he was running a restaurant in the 1970’s in our current apartment building, on the ground floor.  A man died upstairs.  He and his partner “broke in” and “took possession.”  Eventually, he got a lease.   

So what does it mean to "take possession" of someone’s intellectual property?  Did someone break in?Or did someone simply steal it?  This hypothetical person was not Aaron Swartz.  This is property that, in fact, was concocted and brewed -- most often at taxpayer’s and an author's own expense so that the public world and culture itself could prosper.  It’s a beautiful thing – that we still have this academic work out there.  Unfortunately it’s being restricted now in a different (but perhaps related) way:  because in a few years -- since so many universities like my own, CUNY,  are scarcely hiring full-time professors -- we probably won’t have very much of this research and writing in scholarly journals any more.  Certainly not in the Humanities, if this trend continues.   Adjuncts teaching most of our university classes as part-time faculty -- who have 4,5,6, 7 classes to teach every week at extremely low wages – do not have the time to write, to think, to publish what might be important cutting-edge and labor-intensive work.  Yes, there is a lot of junk out there spewed by the academic journals and presses.  But if there is one gem in every 10, or even 20 or 30 articles published, that gem is worth it.  That "gem" just might revolutionize our thinking about ourselves, our sciences, our art forms.  Doesn’t that make the entire enterprise of academic publishing and access to such work worth thinking about and protecting? 

Is there any connection to the restriction of intellectual materials through lack of access in the current times and the failure to replenish shrinking university faculties?  I think there is.  (I’ll bet Aaron would have gotten that connection, too.)

Back to the specific tragedy of Aaron's death  – and the tragedy his suicide outlines in horrific relief:  who gets to read what intellectuals and scientists write and research?  Who has the access not only to that “information,” but ideas crucial to our intellectual-cultural survival?  What happened to the idea Ben Franklin posited of “the public library”?  Why are we moving the other way?  And why is it that the corporate structure has taken over yet another arm and leg of our social infrastructure:  our very capacity to read, learn and think -- and exchange ideas?

Swartz was trying to change what has been happening to knowledge and information – and perhaps intellectual life itself -- in the corporate-driven age.  The internet was both his vehicle and metaphor.

His fundamental “crime”,  to rehearse again this part of the tragic story, was to download a huge number of Jstor files at MIT and leave his computer doing this in a utility closet.  From the stories I’ve listened to and read, especially a chief witness who was about to testify at his scheduled April federal criminal trial and featured on "Democracy Now,"  Swartz did nothing wrong.   MIT’s system was so open – a historical policy of access, I’ve heard? –  that Swartz did not have to lie or steal or do any thing actually illegal.  And yet MIT allowed the U.S. Attorney in its Massachusetts district throw the book at Swartz when he downloaded an excessive number of articles (a number that was never restricted officially by MIT to begin with), and try to convict him as an illegal hacker and felon.  Because he would not sign off to 6 months in jail and acknowledge himself for the rest of his still-young life as such a criminal felon – because maybe he actually wasn’t one, he was a young idealist, for heaven's sake -- the U.S. Attorney used all its considerable (tax-payer supported) apparatus to hound this young man – literally to death.

***
Shouldn’t young Aaron, the activist, have taken his hits and just ridden along with the mud-slinging going on through the trial?  Of course one wishes he had done so.  Yet,  anyone who’s been through even the smallest legal matter – in my case,  a tiny little federal Civil Rights lawsuit for gender discrimination at my publically owned institution, eventually settled in my favor after a lot of melodrama and upset  – can testify what it is like to be the David against the Goliath.  And slingshots don’t work when you’re the little one against, say, an institution that gets free legal services from New York State or any public agency.  Those folks representing state or federal legal offices need have little accountability.  They spend the resources; the tax coffers are forced to refill them.  One has to see these offices in action to believe how this works.  There is no consequence -- like running out of money -- to encourage the dropping of a shaky case.  The system has become counter-intuitive.  

These legal Goliaths become monsters that have no incentive to play the game fairly, to be reasonable, balanced,  humane.   One could only wish -- again -- that Aaron’s case could have gotten much wider publicity before he chose to take his life in desperation and despair.  Perhaps MIT would have requested that the Attorney General drop all charges.

What did provoke the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts to go after Aaron Swartz like the serial felon he was not, or would never be?   And why didn't MIT refuse to press charges when Swartz returned his downloaded documents – gained by seemingly legal means -- at Jstor’s request?  Jstor refused to press charges, to its considerable credit. 

One legal-technology expert likened Swartz’s so-called “crime” to inconsiderately borrowing too many books.  I know that inconsiderate type.  Been one myself.  One simply pays the library fine. 

I think Swartz having his hand slapped would have been “fine” enough.  Not the threat of most of his youth in prison!

***

I did not know him.  But I wish I had.  I weep for his parents, his siblings, his partner, his incredibly idealistic and brilliant friends who’ve been on and over our internet waves these last several days articulating this story and the serious issues it raises for all of our intellectual lives and the future of culture in the internet age – all the while much of the mainstream media ignores or underplays what is essentially a tale of betrayal and complicity.  How hard must we make it for our young and most brilliant – to me, he was still a boy, younger than my own -- to simply be who they must be:  the best of us  -- as human beings?

-- LH

When Bruce 

Met Sally

Part 2

Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers continue to speak in an Interview about their early years developing a Movement/Writing Performance Team

A lot of us in the early Language movement days were interested in getting down to the raw materials.  We wanted to see if we could explode them. 

                                   — Bruce Andrews 

BA:  In the beginning, the early days of Sally's dance work, I wasn't supplying texts for her concerts.  She was reading her own poetry texts, at the start of a performance. 

Then, I think, after about a year and a half, and after


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she started doing this kind of multi-media performance, I got involved doing the music for her.   I was her musical director for 25 years.  The only place I did the text for her performances early on was for a performance group we started called BARKING.  Originally, that group was just the two of us — a theatrical project.

Q:  Funny title!  Where did the name for BARKING come from?

SS:  I think we just thought it was a good name.  It had something to do with what we thought theater was... barking about — mostly political things.

BA:  So we started and became, actually, a trio, with Tom Cora joining the group.  Tom is the great improvisational cellist.  He was a central part of the downtown improv scene, which included others like John Zorn.  We did our trio performances.  Tom did some movement.  I did, too.

SS:  Everybody had to read, to move, to play music.

BA:  I wrote the text.  And Sally did the choreography.

SS:  And I had them both move!

BA:  We were dancers — so called. 

Q:  That fascinates me... to think of you dancing, too, Bruce!

BA: [to Sally] What was that blender piece?

SS:  I played the blender and the radio.  We did several performances like that in clubs, little galleries, St. Marks Poetry Project.

BA:  And then we did a couple of mid-sized pieces, ones that involved several people. We performed one at Roulette — we had about 10 people in that piece, including celloist Tom Cora and composer/musician John Zorn — and we performed another piece in San Francisco. 

And then we did two giant pieces, one in 1983 and another in 1985.  They had casts of about 45 and then 60.  We staged them both at P.S. 122.  Sally was pretty involved with P.S. 122 from the beginning....

SS:  ... before it became a curated space. 

BA:  The first one from 1983 was called Eagles Ate my Estrogen, which was our Kabuki-based piece on "gender damage." 

SS:  We decided to layer Kabuki moves and attitudes on and into a piece about feminism and gender. 

BA:  We were going to the Wooster Group — we were pretty close to Richard Foreman (this is still about '83).   We added live instructional materials to our performances — people demonstrating how to do Japanese costume stuff or makeup stuff.  And we had live documenters doing paintings and drawings on stage.  By that time, I had already been putting music together for Sally, and she was the first person to use in free-improvising musicians in her concerts in conjunction with choreographed dance.

The next piece was larger and involved several trained actors.  I was writing scripts for characters.  The topic was the story of William Walker, the mid-19th century American mercenary who conquered Nicaragua and set himself up as a dictator and was finally overthrown. 

SS:  This piece was performed right when we were involved in the Nicaraguan war...

Q:  ... during the Reagan Era, again, and we were in the situation with the Contras....

BA:  Right.  So that was our historical piece on this theme. 

SS:  It was called, Don't Tread on Me While We Tread on You. 

BA:  And for that piece we had a gigantic cast.

SS:  It was like a big happening, really.  Some people were given instructions just at the moment, and they had to work them out on stage.  I'd probably just had a concert, so I put that choreography somewhere in the space, as well.  I improvised, and I had other improvisers coming in to that scene — we had a play going on, in the performance.

BA:  It was then that I think Sally stopped presenting any of her texts, in relation to her dances.  I wasn't doing any text for her yet.  I was just playing music in improvising groups — and helping Sally to write the scores.

Q:  I had no idea you were doing all this work with music, Bruce!

BA:  I've been thrilled to have  been asked, maybe upon 10 occasions, to perform as a musician.  But basically, I was just doing this work in music for Sally.  I had enough things going on.  I knew I wasn't going to be ambitious in the music world.  The reason I was kind of tolerated by our musicians — who were our friends — is because I wasn't competition.  I wasn't trying to get gigs or anything.  I wasn't going to have a life in the experimental theater or in music.

But I think it was in the 1990's when we started to do more with my text in Sally's concerts.   I started to integrate some text into some of her choreographed sections.  I started to do something on stage that I had been doing at home:  this process of live-editing.  I would come in with piles of cards, sort of sorted. 

I started with this strategy in BARKING. And then there were these live-editing situations in which I was working with Sally's improvising movement.  Much later, by the late '90's, we started to put some of text into some of her big concerts.   By that time I'd had some residencies where I had processed some of my text in studios — so I had some new kind of work, and I could play those tapes.

One of the people I worked with in residency was Michael Schumacher, who has since become a dear friend and collaborator.  I not only had the chance to do text live but to work with text I had recorded and processed and treated — and then collage that all into the sound score.

PHOTO:  Sally Silvers (middle), Bruce Andrews (right of Sally), crew and cast members for weekend performance of "Bonobo Milkshake" at Brooklyn's Roulettte:  Composer/musician Michael Schumacher (far left); lighting designer Kathy Kaufmann (left of Sally);  actor/performer David Greenspan.  
Photo by Laura Hinton--  taken after the Nov. 29th performance at Roulette across the street in Hank's Bar.

Q:   I'm sure this is the academic in me, but I'm trying to locate where this kind of performance experiment is / was coming from — its roots.  I know you are both investigating the body — the social body — in your work alone and in your movement-text collaborations.  I'm thinking that some of this may originate or be inspired by the jazz music you both love — certainly the improv work of performance.

BA:  Maybe I don't make those kinds of distinctions.  I think everything is internalized, so that any kind of social urgency or social claims are all inside us.  We don't have to react to specific events or schools of aesthetics.  We're all from avant-garde mavens from different fields.  And that's the thing, too, about the late '70's.  When I met Sally, I was already enmeshed in a couple of communities of people doing stuff that was fairly similar, aesthetically — the downtown experimental film world; and poets, just barely; experimental theater.  That gave us lots of impetus to bounce off of other forms of radical disjunction — the post-human, non-autobiographically-centered focus, featuring the use of an exotic, wide-range of materials and also cross-fertilizing media. 

Q:  I'm impressed by your absorption — just being in a scene that was so alive with post-modern art of all sorts — and then taking in that scene and re-using its materials.

SS:  I think we had hopes that the different media we were involved in would all feed in together and become something bigger.  But people in the arts separated out.

BA:  The problem with New York is that artists are extremely ambitious, and people are operating at the top of their fields.  And the fields are so complicated, that these people end up being focused on their own.   A small number of people from the film world or the theater world were going to poetry readings, and vice versa.  This was an era before everyone was getting information on line.  It was hard to keep everything sustained. 

The poetry scene I was involved with had only about a half dozen people — in New York anyway — a handful of us:  Hannah Weiner, Jackson Mac Low, Abby Child, Michael Gottlieb, James Sherry, Alan Davies, Charles [Bernstein], Ray DiPalma — almost all men at the time.  There weren't that many people then involved in our aesthetic.

Q:  What about Anne Waldman, Alice Notley...?

BA: Different aesthetics — completely.

Q: Describe that.

BA: It's just a different commitment.

SS:  ... and perhaps different roots.  Those poets were coming out of the tradition of the Beats, at least many of them.  Or out of the New York School.

BA:  There's a shelf of books now on why the Language movement was distinctive. 

Q:   I would like to hear Bruce Andrews delineate that distinctiveness.

BA:  In New York City, we were the modest Left Wing part of the downtown scene.

Q:  So you circulated with the Poetry Project folks?

BA:  Yes, we socialized.  But the Poetry Project people were a little more neighborhood-ly.  I was married at the time, and living on the Upper West Side. I was a college professor in the Bronx. 

Q:  Tell me more about your personal life in that era.

I was married when I moved to town in '75, a marriage that ended in '78.  I lucked into meeting Sally on the rebound.  I had a much more mainstream-looking life, however, than the St. Marks group had.  They were much more committed to a lifestyle.  But some of the work, like Bernadette Mayer's early stuff, for example, Memory, Studying Hunger, was very influential to those of us writing from the Language aesthetic.

SS:  And those writers around St. Marks had more of an actual devotion to a lifestyle — that created or helped to mold a different aesthetic.

BA:  In the mid-'70's, the Language writers called ourselves "Language-centered writers."  In other words, we were interested in investigating language, not centered on ideas about self, identity, community, contexts, thematics, etc.

Q:  One argument I've been reading — I'm a fan of Mayer and Notley, and this idea might hold for their work — is that work playing with the "I" is not necessarily just autobiographical.  It's a performance poetry — a performance that stages multiple versions of selves before an also moveable audience.  I would also argue that such work also does work with language, although perhaps not in the same way you do, for example, through parataxis and the ruptured fragmented line.

BA:  Well, I'm not an English professor.  So I don't have to study the history of post-war American poetry.   We didn't have much dogmatic prescription, and people in town were doing quite drastically different things.  But we were lumped together.  We had a unity of rejectionism, perhaps — and the so-called Language writers kept our distance from parts of the New American Poetry.  We just didn't find it interesting enough to get us juiced up.

Q:  What is it that gets you juiced up?  Is it what's inside words, and that investigation into their inner layers and structural interiors?  Or is it more the way in which words can be put together, to construe or construct social meaning?

BA:  It's both.  There's the materiality, which we're completely focused on exploring.  And then there's meaning.  Which is what we were quite interested in exploring, too.  We have been taking on semantics — and that has been partly political.  Then there's that social interest in the rhetoric, the bombardment of language coming through the public sphere.  We also took some distance from the romanticism of the New American Poets, a romanticism held by the Beats, Olson,  the New York School. 

Q:  Yes, there's kind of a neo-Romanticism to a lot of that poetry — I agree.  It's also American, that romantic focus on the self — the way that the American psyche is grooved toward the individual. 

BA:  I'm not going to argue that.  You can.  A lot of us in the early Language movement days were interested in getting down to the raw materials.  We wanted to see if we could explode them.  And that also has to do with the reader.  

***

Bruce and I concluded our dialogue this week by email --  as he considered the question of how Sally's movement work has influenced his poetry practice...

Q:  Bruce, earlier Sally talked about the importance of meeting you in the late '70's -- not just from the perspective of the romantic partnership you would share for so many years but also because of the profound influence your poetic work had on her development as a choreographer-dancer.  I'm wondering if meeting Sally influenced your own work as a poet, as well?  And if so, how?

BA:  Influence is always tricky to attribute. But what’s intriguing is a shift I can see in my work in the late 1970s/early ‘80s coinciding with the huge changes in my personal life that put Sally at the center.

But this is also a couple years into my college teaching career, into my time as a new arrival to New York City, starting to give public readings & performances, launching L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine with Charles Bernstein, connecting with the energy circuits of a big volatile urban environment & its multi-arts scenes, & within a very different post-Watergate/post-Vietnam political world. But the changes in my writing aren’t unique in the broader national network of so-called ‘Language Poetry’. Tim Woods in the conclusion (“Reading Language Writing”) to his book, The Poetics of the Limit, talks about two ‘phases’ in this project — early on, focusing on single units, more ‘micro’, “the word against the sentence and the syllable against the word” & later, moving toward the exploration of the operations of ideology & ‘social sense’ via larger (more ‘macro’) units of form, grammar & presentational mode. So, it looks to get beyond what Ron Silliman dubbed the experimental poetry prior to so-called Language Poetry (a “non-referential formalism”) but not, even within a political urgency, to fall back on assumptions of transparent representationalism (words directly evoking or pointing to cliché or slogan). This involved a desire to organize the semantic/social ‘afterglow’ of the language materials — as an intervention, making use of some direct (even ‘objectivist’) treatment of language’s prefabricated ‘sense’ yet also with lots of the materialist pleasures of language not subordinated to conventional reference & idiom.

That focus — for myself & others, in the very late 1970s & early 1980s — fit amazingly well with an emphasis on performance, site specificity, musicality, & the body. And that’s what became extra alive being with Sally: constantly going to dance & performance events, then with her starting to choreograph (a.k.a. ‘doing her own work’) in 1980 — her first piece tellingly titled Politics of the Body Microscope of Conduct — then in the next few years dancing in her first group piece & in a few ‘politicized’ movement duets, then becoming a musician (doing live mixing of recordings of my instrumental playing, within ensembles of ‘free [non-idiomatic] improvisers’) to get to work with her more directly & eventually becoming the Music Director of Sally Silvers & Dancers while starting ‘Barking’ as a performance project with her in the early ‘80s.

All that reinforced this tilt in my writing. The body in performance inherently goes beyond any pure abstraction or non-referential formalism.  And — as in Sally’s distinctive work — once it frees itself from devotion to established ‘idiom’, it is ready to explore a social & contextual semantics. This has been a continuing influence on my gathering of raw material, on my editing, on my situating poetry in performance. The show goes on!

-- Interview by L.H

***

This Friday November 2, from 6:00 - 9:00 pm

A BRUCE ANDREWS SYMPOSIUM

at Fordham-Lincoln Center

113 W. 60th Street (at Columbus)

South Lounge ('Plaza' level, off the cafeteria)  

EVENT FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

WITH:

Charles Bernstein

Michael Golston

Laura Hinton

Bob Perelman

Paul Stephens

Elisabeth Frost, Curator

A web site about the symposium and a gathering works by and about Bruce Andrews can be found at:

www.fordhamenglish.com/bruce-andrews