CUNY Academic Commons

de Certeau’s essay also relates to McGann’s description of “deformance” for me. Building off my post below – de Certeau argues that “the principle characteristic of an ‘art’ is the transformation of one state into another one.” By considering our everyday activities – of “dwelling, walking, spelling, reading, shopping, and cooking” – as the…[Read more]

re: the McGann idea of interpretation + performance = “deformance.” The making of new art out of other art (how does this relate to bricolage?) In his project “Volumetric Cinema,” Kevin Ferguson (who co-taught the DH Praxis with Matt Gold last semester) digitally manipulates film clips to show that cinema should be seen as, “neither a window no…[Read more]

I intend to look at the methodology in this essay by Anna Gibbs, which both demonstrates and meditates on what she calls “fictocriticism.” First, she stages a collaboration between two texts: Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, and four texts written under the name of “Colette,” which takes the form of ten “cut-up” vignettes. In an “Afterward” to these texts,…[Read more]

This feels much creepier as an upload after the Carroll cipher, but I think its interesting to think about “teaching children to write poetry” in terms of pedagogical writing practice. And, going back to that word “creepy” – how poets have fetishized “childish” creativity – myself included, since I do think some of these poems are just really…[Read more]

While thinking about what words can do, as signs and signifiers, why not also think about letters – in this case, of the English alphabet? Attached is a attached is an alphabet cipher by Lewis Carroll, which he apparently wrote in a magazine supplement explaining cryptography to children in 1868. Creepy.

But basically, I’m thinking of the s…[Read more]

It was hard to choose which of these “nuggets” to upload – better would perhaps be a collection, since my point in this “pointing” is more to the “form” of the thing (writers writing about their writing, which is a type of performance in itself) – than any one particular thing. In any case, Tamayo’s book has caught my eye, and tho I haven’t rea…[Read more]

In this essay, Adrienne Rich interrogates the myth of the universal, objective, (male), abstract, disembodied, and authoritative pronoun “WE.” Her arguments are personal – as she abides by the notion that the “personal is political” – but also nuanced and probing, constantly in revision of themselves: as she puts it in a different piece: “writin…[Read more]

This short piece feels very important to any discussion of the creative act, the act of writing as discovery, or creative-critical mash up. “Invisible Architecture” lives – – – on the Poetry Foundation website.

I’ve been looking for cross-genre or performance work by Ronaldo Wilson (also a GC graduate) and came across this image-text piece in a journal called BOUNDARY 2. I’m interested in how the linguistic and visual gestures do or don’t work together – mostly in thinking about how a piece of writing or art comes into being at all. I see some conne…[Read more]