Bangs, for Bucks, Poetry and Steel Reserve: re Don Share's comment re Harriet Blog

Jenny Holzer--"Projections"

"Dark at End" Ch. Bernstein

Guantanamo

"Exceptions to this non-ist non-ism are those "Making a Name for themselves" as the 'original Founders' who promote heavily the Hottest Item on the market--the obeisance to a disciplined practice of non-originality, non-individuality, non-authorship and non-authority as the conditions for creating what is "Authorized" as A New Avant Formalism of Conformity."



“Bean bag chairs are becoming more and more widespread in the world of business as research companies have declared them conducive to a more productive environment than regular chairs.”


Instead of the "troublesome" writers of previous eras, Conceptual Poetry offers an efficient, impersonal service worker, a copyist who unlike Bartleby will not "prefer not to," but "stay on the job" and simply do as is told via the directives and "Avant-Garde,"'Innovative" Conceptions of Conceptual Poets hired as Consultants.

--db Chirot, from
>Appendix B: Conceptual Poetry and the Work Place: the Death of the Author and the Birth of the Drone, A Science Fiction Poetics of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers

presented in full below--



http://donshare.blogspot.com/2008/12/flarf-gives-you-more-bang-for-your-buck.html

This link arrived in the email today, sent by Kent Johnson, without comment.

"More bang for your buck . . . "

Was I perhaps being alerted to some new form of Poetic Malt Liquour like the "Liquid Crack" of Steel Reserve 2/11, popularly known among the hard core cognescenti as the "can that delivers more bang for your buck?"



. . . it's hands down the best bang for your drinking dollar... but you'll probably get arrested if you drink more than a forty ouncer. So be careful! I have hallucinated and time travelled under the influence of steel reserve.

Purchasing Steel Reserve is often an act of desperation by would-be drinkers in times of economic hardship.



Aside from drinking cleaning solvents, Steel Reserve is perhaps the cheapest possible way to exit this reality. Its combination of astonishingly low price and extraordinarily high alcohol content has made it popular among both bums and young people.



Although notably foul tasting, this is a drink that will take you where you want to go (quickly and cheaply). At $.99 a tallboy . . .



The Steel Reserve logo is a stylized number 211, which aside from being an ancient symbol for steel, is also the penal code # for armed robbery. It’s likely that steel reserve has been the inspiration for many a convenience store jacking. Poor judgment and personal injury are notoriously correlated with the consumption of Steel Reserve.


As it turned out, I was being directed to the blog of Don Share, for which I am thankful as I did not know of it before.

Here's an excerpt from Don Share's blog--

Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Conceptual poetry gives you more bang for your buck
... according to Kenny Goldsmith! Click on the funny money, or here,
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/12/flarf_vs_conceptual_writing_1.html

to find out more. Or less, given what a dollar's worth these days... which goes to show you that American poetry is on the verge of bankruptcy. And also that mere mention of "flarf" inflates web traffic (present company excluded). Speaking of funny business and silly language hijinx... "Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled."




In this particular post, Don Share is alluding to a Harriet Blog post which shows two ways of folding a dollar bill to create new "words" and "statements" or "jokes," much in the manner of the fold-ins inside the back covers of Mad Magazine.

Anyone interested in or even marginally familiar with the hordes of hoary lore and contemporary Urban Legends surrounding the symbols, conspiracies and secret society messages (historically dominated by attributions to the Free Masons) on American bills and coins will find these two "poetry" examples pretty lame in comparison.

But then, as the Italian proverb says, "Who walks with the lame will begin to limp."


Of much more interest in these "New McCarthyism" times (so dubbed by the great French "rag" Le Monde is Mr. Shares' (what a poetically fittingly "market economy" name for this topic!)presenting the lists of words being deep sixed and those which are their replacements among the living.

The two poetries named in the Harriet Blog bear an interesting relationship with George Orwell's 1984's Appendices regarding the creation and effects of "Newspeak."



One of these forms of poetry stresses non-individuality and non-originality as though pushing a non-alcoholic cocktail of Buddhism and Nihilism in the Boring non-Nirvana non-approach to one's non-poetic poetry of non-career careerism. Exceptions to this non-ist non-ism are those "Making a Name for themselves" as the "original Founders" who promote heavily the Hottest Item on the market--the obeisance to a disciplined practice of non-originality, non-individuality, non-authorship and non-authority as the conditions for creating what is "Authorized" as A New Avant Formalism of Conformity.

The other form of poetry cited often bears a resemblance to the daily "Two Minutes of Hate," which the workers in 1984 participate in via their rabid near seizures induced by an outpouring of outrage and obscenities that they mouth as the prefabricated Pavlovian responses to the televised figure leading them through their daily traces.

On the one hand, the obediant and self effacing drone, and on the other, the snarling, rabid member of a like-minded mob.

Fusing the two, one perceives the "institutionalization" of poets and poetries with in the array of Institutions providing "entry level white collar labor" for the vast assortment of Bureaucracies doing the "busy work" of the Military-Corporate-Acedemic State.

Together, the two poetries produce a Yin-Yang of self effacement merging into the acceptance of the functions of one's employment and career as a poet, coupled with the release of rage at being trapped in a career which impedes the pace of one's career of being a poet.

This Yin-Yang Good Cop Bad Cop combination is a form of "disciplining" poets within their disciplines . . . as careers . . . and out to make the most bang for the bucks they have invested--

as well as the most bucks for the bang--





El Colonel smiles. Going to the wide open window he gazes through aviator sunglasses at the bright birds, the luminosity of the landscape and "reflects on the irony that reflective glasses shield one's reflections from observing eyes by their mirrored reflections of a thwarted inquiry."

Here, culled from the Urban Legends and Ancient Masonic Lores of the Bucks at their Biggest Bang Straight from the Buck's Mouth so to speak of recent times--









Concerning "Conceptual Poetry and more bang for the buck"--

from:

"Conceptual Poetry and its Others"---Haunting Questions Found Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite (Essay) & RubBEings Statements & 30 Visual Poetry Works
for the Symposium "Conceptual Poetry and its Others

Poetry Center of the University of Arizona
29-31 May 2008
http://poetrycenter.arizona.edu/conceptualpoetry/cp_index.shtml

and also:
davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/search?q=conceptual+poetry+and+its+others">

Appendix B: Conceptual Poetry and the Work Place: the Death of the Author and the Birth of the Drone, A Science Fiction Poetics of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers


The Concept of Conceptual Poetry one finds among some Conceptual Poets is one that resembles a form of training for the embrace of working in bureaucratic and corporate settings as an "impersonal" manipulator and mover of masses of material in the form of words. Conceptual Poetry becomes a "discipline" for the production of "well adjusted functionaries" carrying out the "boring" tasks of filing, copying, sorting and arranging word-data. The "unoriginality," "impersonality" and boredom raised to the level of "Conceptual Poetry" is perhaps a way to aestheticize the dystopian existences of millions of "lower level" workers in globalized corporations and bureaucratic State apparati.

Perhaps finding in this manner a Poetry in the Conceptions of themselves as bored, unoriginal, impersonal data copiers and processors, employees will become "happier" about their jobs and less questioning of their exploiters and exploitation. To be rid of all of the baggage of "the personal," the yearning to prove oneself "original," and to accept a lifetime of boredom, without wondering about "the meaning of all this," and "what is it doing for ME!"

The Conceptual Poet may in this manner be able to have their services be much in demand, and so "to make a name for oneself," by emphasizing the impersonality of others, and training them to "disappear" into the services they provide as handlers of all the unwanted, uninteresting masses of material that need somehow to be sorted, copied and stored.

Conceptual Poets becoming the creators of the glamorization of non-creation serve as "beacons" lighting this boring, dull, impersonal industriousness by which it may be seen "in a better light" by the industrialists and the Conceptual Poet consultants with their own cliques of admirers in the Management and Socio- Cultural spheres.

It is not "wage slavery" and "drones" one is providing the world with, but instead an exciting, "avant-garde" Conceptual Poetry taught in all the best universities! And so Conceptual Poetry becomes a new method of Consulting for firms interested in innovations in "employee relations."

Conceptual Poetry examined in this light may be seen as a form of preventing the kinds of breakdowns among lower level employees in the bureaucratic and corporate fields one finds in the writings that depict and explore the effects of the rapidly industrializing and mass data producing machines of "progress" of the 19th Century. These "breakdowns" appear in the forms of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," with his "I would prefer not to," and among the bottom level clerks and copyists in the works of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Dickens, several of which point to the works of Kafka, himself an employee in an immense bureaucracy.

Instead of the "troublesome" writers of previous eras, Conceptual Poetry offers an efficient, impersonal service worker, a copyist who unlike Bartleby will not "prefer not to," but "stay on the job" and simply do as is told via the directives and "Avant-Garde,"'Innovative" Conceptions of Conceptual Poets hired as Consultants.
Conceptual Poetry becomes the non plus ultra form of aestheticizing drones for their Conceptual management as Poetry for the analyses and admirations of their Bosses and Trainers, their Managers and Owners, their CEOs and Instructors, for all those at the top and their elite consultants, Conceptual Poets and the academies which train them.
"No more Kafkas!! No more Gogols!! No more Bartlebys!!"

The "death of the author" is the birth of the drone, a transformation that occurs when persons are asleep, as the pods from Outer Space give birth to the impersonal copies of the once human beings in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."