Re: essay critical of google/poetry

[phanero]

It's Lanny, but you can call me Larry if ya want or Clod-biscuit.   >There is a current field of research about the mental pleasure human >brains receive from rejecting information, especially in political >concepts, instead of networking out in fuzzy assimilables. here's the link from the NYT:  A Note on Certain Political Forms of Neuropoesis from the NYT... A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24find.html?_r=1&oref=login&pagewanted=print Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive. Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected. "Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study, to be presented Saturday at meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif. The results are the latest from brain imaging studies that provide a neural explanation for internal states, like infatuation or ambivalence, and a graphic trace of the brain's activity. In 2004, the researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.   ==   I meant to say reducing Kasey's poetry to mere "google sculpting" does it a grave injustice. or something like that. I'm not a poetics expert by any stretch, but there is a great deal of hardcore poetics theory behind the work, although when i hear it, i don't always like it, but I like the work. That dissonance between the work and theory behind it, just fascinates me to no end. I just can't imagine these poetry guys, so hung up in that goofy vernacular theory. Alan to me is the shining light beyond that kind of approach. He is the omnivorous paradigm. That's why I call flarf, crack. because their theory is non-holarchic, its inbred, the way i see it.  Their ideas of "good" and "bad" "poetry" just make me want to vomit, mostly, like Silliman, sometimes, the bombast of it is ridiculous. Seemingly, Art deconstructed all that bullshit decades ago, but that being said, these folks produce appealing cha-cha.. So sense I said "good" I guess I am confused as well.  And Art theory is all good and bad determinations as well.. There is a delicate cha-cha between theory and _expression_, which is so confusing to the animal brain. This stuff is repugnant to my Semiotics/Grotesque inflected self. So I guess I'll just have to fall back on the old Cramps song.. Gorehound. I don't about Art but I know what I like, I'll be a surfin in your blood on Saturday Night. or this classic:      God Monster hide the virgins say your prayers here come trouble from the cosmic sea gouts of blood! kill all the squares1 it's the aztec mummy vs. murderous me! i'm the god monster from the end of the world i'm the hothead intruder i'm the phantom on fire switchblade enforcer of the astral swirl god monsterman god damn atomic vampire god monster for your doomsday destination god monster for your damaged life god monster for your ruined hallucination god monster spider in your beehive i'm the spaceprobe from venus to the screaming unknown top eliminator on a mission for kicks boss action guy a psychedeliccyclone a big hunk of love with a bag full of tricks god monster for the end of the world.....   you see why i like flarf.. its really not much different from psychabilly.. but you won't hear KSM say that, but I'm just some brain damaged technician whose huffed semiconductor-grade acetone for 10 years you pretty it all up and make it historically responsible.. I'm done with that shit.. I live, I give to the good causes, that's enough.   i also made the link to the using the dictionary or even one's "own" vocabulary, but somehow no one wants to address that stuff. these are some prissy ass people.. i hang with people like Duc Nguyen.. a hyper-patriotic ex-lawyer from Viet Nam who is so addicted to buying fancy flash-lights. he hangs in Flash-light discussion forums. He has around $3600 worth of flashlights! All I know are obsessed whackos, Real-estate nuts, Guitar freaks, It's human nature gone crazy with wild fetishism, wild love, AMOUR FOU, for that THING! Even criticism itself is like sniffing shoes.! I'm serious.. Its dilirious! crazy man., My sense is that google sculpting does kasey's poetry a disservice, if you read the work, there are things in it, which are patently not simple google thefts.. I've tried to argue this on the lucipo list where a number of folks have been dissing flarf. the critics (or dissers) seem all to assume that the flarf gang are simply plugging in a pair of search terms with no thought about it and then chopping out the urls and such, lining it and presto: poem. but so far every poem i have seen (not that many really) suggests to me that there is a LOT of working over the material and by the admission of several of the folks they also write in much of their own, take lines from other sources etc. i also made the link to the using the dictionary or even one's "own" vocabulary, but somehow no one wants to address that stuff. jo lo