J. H. Prynne
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- 100 god damn pages butchering sontag cooking with propane corpsey why are you so thick deaths from bromo-dragonfly enjoy your journey enjoy! everyone! gravity bong happy to help! jamaican voodoo gang from predator 2 lads vs. dudes martin anus shaun from delaware stoned modernism teat. the albert ayler of the recorder the bee is the messiah the path clears by the use it gets thick as fuck to pollen traitor cow-juice west coast dudes
luka
Well-known member
all of them. you have to read all of them.
luka
Well-known member
exasperated email i sent to Edmund a couple of years ago
f I look again at note on metal I immediately ask
What is quality? It's a word with many possible applications and definitions so right at the start I'm mired in ambiguity.
Then, the theory of quality as essential? What is this theory? What does essential mean in this context?
Yes, mettalurgy, fine, identifying, isolating, extracting, intensifying particular qualities from within substance, seperating them from their mixed condition as also wheat from chaff etc with agriculture linked to metal technologies. That I can follow I think.
Now weight? This seems more speculative but also, ok, the Obelisk megalithic culture with its humping around of menhirs and stacking them in dolmens etc. Would anything be lost if we substitute durability for weight here? Or what about surface area?
What might the inherence of power mean?
Power dwelling in the stone itself? The object as opposed to the person exercising control over the object?
What does it mean to say weight is a mixed condition? Mixed with what? Granted weight may be measured by the force required to lift it but in what sense does that make it mixed? I don't follow.
Again I can see that mettalurgy involves extracting relatively pure substance from within mingled substance and also conversely melding purities to create alloys (possible analogy with breeding better crops and animals and with eugenics?) But not sure how this relates to weight per se.
Then there's more ambiguity. We find the word 'condition' and it seems to be used
in a way which would make it interchangeable with property or quality.
So- brightness, hardness, ductility.
Are these words being used interchangeably or do they have specific uses?
So when 'property' appears in italics does it mean the same thing as condition used above or is it something else? What is the nature of the distinction between formal and substantive?
Then when we encounter quality again, what does it mean now? "Was sharp and killed" so the quality contains those things and is not identical with them. Is quality here the nature of the substance in all its potentialities? I don't know. That with the introduction of metal we gain greater control over the environment, can apply greater force over greater distances so that our field of action is enlarged, fine.
What is the new quality of spiritual transfer? Is this quality in the same sense or has its meaning shifted? I don't know the answer? What is being transferred? The 'inherent' power of the object to the user of the object? What is new here? What does it mean to for the history of substance to shift into the theory of power?
f I look again at note on metal I immediately ask
What is quality? It's a word with many possible applications and definitions so right at the start I'm mired in ambiguity.
Then, the theory of quality as essential? What is this theory? What does essential mean in this context?
Yes, mettalurgy, fine, identifying, isolating, extracting, intensifying particular qualities from within substance, seperating them from their mixed condition as also wheat from chaff etc with agriculture linked to metal technologies. That I can follow I think.
Now weight? This seems more speculative but also, ok, the Obelisk megalithic culture with its humping around of menhirs and stacking them in dolmens etc. Would anything be lost if we substitute durability for weight here? Or what about surface area?
What might the inherence of power mean?
Power dwelling in the stone itself? The object as opposed to the person exercising control over the object?
What does it mean to say weight is a mixed condition? Mixed with what? Granted weight may be measured by the force required to lift it but in what sense does that make it mixed? I don't follow.
Again I can see that mettalurgy involves extracting relatively pure substance from within mingled substance and also conversely melding purities to create alloys (possible analogy with breeding better crops and animals and with eugenics?) But not sure how this relates to weight per se.
Then there's more ambiguity. We find the word 'condition' and it seems to be used
in a way which would make it interchangeable with property or quality.
So- brightness, hardness, ductility.
Are these words being used interchangeably or do they have specific uses?
So when 'property' appears in italics does it mean the same thing as condition used above or is it something else? What is the nature of the distinction between formal and substantive?
Then when we encounter quality again, what does it mean now? "Was sharp and killed" so the quality contains those things and is not identical with them. Is quality here the nature of the substance in all its potentialities? I don't know. That with the introduction of metal we gain greater control over the environment, can apply greater force over greater distances so that our field of action is enlarged, fine.
What is the new quality of spiritual transfer? Is this quality in the same sense or has its meaning shifted? I don't know the answer? What is being transferred? The 'inherent' power of the object to the user of the object? What is new here? What does it mean to for the history of substance to shift into the theory of power?
Here's one I have bookmarked - probably via Luka,
luka
Well-known member
that's very much 'the deep end' that one.
luka
Well-known member
this is an early one and a lot more approachable.
genius.com
Come up to it, as you stand there
that the wind is quite warm on the sides
of the face. That is so, felt
as a matter of practice, or
not to agree. And the span,
to walk over the rough grass-all of this
is that we do, quite within acceptance
and not to press
the warm alarm
but a light
surface, a day
lifted from high
thich roots, upwards
Where we go is a loved side of the temple,
a place for repose, a concrete path.
There's no mystic movement involved: just
that we are
is how, each
severally we're
carried into
J.H. Prynne – The Holy City
Come up to it, as you stand there / that the wind is quite warm on the sides / of the face. That is so, felt / as a matter of practice, or / not to agree. And the span, / to walk
genius.com
Come up to it, as you stand there
that the wind is quite warm on the sides
of the face. That is so, felt
as a matter of practice, or
not to agree. And the span,
to walk over the rough grass-all of this
is that we do, quite within acceptance
and not to press
the warm alarm
but a light
surface, a day
lifted from high
thich roots, upwards
Where we go is a loved side of the temple,
a place for repose, a concrete path.
There's no mystic movement involved: just
that we are
is how, each
severally we're
carried into
did he respond?
luka
Well-known member
LOOK AT THIS!
luka
Well-known member
He gets really irritable with me when i'm using that tone of voice. most people do.
luka
Well-known member
A further mystery is this word 'limit'
What might it mean for the condition to be limit? (Bearing in mind the word condition ia itself ambiguous in the extreme)
Then we have metallurgy as part of this wider shift from nomadic hunter gatherer to settled pastoralist agriculturalist and the start of place as "chief local fact" which I suppose is ok.
But What is "the mixed relativism of substance" and why does it lead so predictably and inexorably to "value as a specialised function" and what exactly does value as a specialised function mean? Value as apart from use-value perhaps? I don't know. I suppose this would help explain why it is dependent on the rate of exchange.
Coin representing the iconic displacement of substance I can just about grasp.
The item form becoming iconised makes me think of written language.
I also have no idea at all of what presence might indicate, as in "the chief assertion of presence" or "presence as weight"
Any ideas?
What might it mean for the condition to be limit? (Bearing in mind the word condition ia itself ambiguous in the extreme)
Then we have metallurgy as part of this wider shift from nomadic hunter gatherer to settled pastoralist agriculturalist and the start of place as "chief local fact" which I suppose is ok.
But What is "the mixed relativism of substance" and why does it lead so predictably and inexorably to "value as a specialised function" and what exactly does value as a specialised function mean? Value as apart from use-value perhaps? I don't know. I suppose this would help explain why it is dependent on the rate of exchange.
Coin representing the iconic displacement of substance I can just about grasp.
The item form becoming iconised makes me think of written language.
I also have no idea at all of what presence might indicate, as in "the chief assertion of presence" or "presence as weight"
Any ideas?
luka
Well-known member
one for Limburger http://jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan.html
"The Kirghiz Disasters dramatises this process of silencing at some length by re-enacting a particular process, the historical destruction of the Kirghizian language not once but twice. A disaster is ‘star damage’ but no longer ‘at home’, since the life-world of the C20th has become the world proposed by Heraclitus as its opposite, the anticthonic ‘counter earth’. These images are displayed earlier in the book, but with the concrete example of the Kirghiz people, the destruction of earth resides precisely in that loss of collective narrative which can explain what ‘native soil’ actually means. Thus the poem proceeds as a mangled bulletin, intercutting ‘news from the Tarim Basin’ with domestic trivia from the home front.
The epic tales (Albert Lord’s ‘return songs’) of the Kirghizians now survive in only mangled form, the rubble of medieval and later Soviet purgations and enforced migrations. In the wasteland aftermath of Thomas Pynchon’s post-war reconstruction zone, the ‘Kirghiz light’ is an emblem of visionary absence, everything that cannot any longer be viewed or comprehended within the constraints of contemporary political domination, as the landscape is cleared for its reconstituted inheritors, IG Farben and ICI. Here Prynne’s contrast with Pynchon is especially striking. Both Gravity’s Rainbow and Brass make intermittent use of the angelology of Rilke as an ulterior guideline through the wastes, though Prynne’s text, counterposing revelation with millennium in ways that Pynchon merely confuses, takes on a wider range of spirit-doubles and his moments of self-parody are freed of the whimsical topicality of the novel. And just as ‘the darker fields’ of Into the Day, deliberately summon the last cadences of Lycidas in order to banish them, the mock-apocalypse at the close of Brass deliberately leaves open the question of how any purely ‘visionary’ process can wage itself against the evasions diagnosed by The Ideal Star Fighter. Are these swerves all part of the same psychic economy, two faces of the same coin flipped by Melville’s disappearing trickster at the close of his Confidence Man."
"The Kirghiz Disasters dramatises this process of silencing at some length by re-enacting a particular process, the historical destruction of the Kirghizian language not once but twice. A disaster is ‘star damage’ but no longer ‘at home’, since the life-world of the C20th has become the world proposed by Heraclitus as its opposite, the anticthonic ‘counter earth’. These images are displayed earlier in the book, but with the concrete example of the Kirghiz people, the destruction of earth resides precisely in that loss of collective narrative which can explain what ‘native soil’ actually means. Thus the poem proceeds as a mangled bulletin, intercutting ‘news from the Tarim Basin’ with domestic trivia from the home front.
The epic tales (Albert Lord’s ‘return songs’) of the Kirghizians now survive in only mangled form, the rubble of medieval and later Soviet purgations and enforced migrations. In the wasteland aftermath of Thomas Pynchon’s post-war reconstruction zone, the ‘Kirghiz light’ is an emblem of visionary absence, everything that cannot any longer be viewed or comprehended within the constraints of contemporary political domination, as the landscape is cleared for its reconstituted inheritors, IG Farben and ICI. Here Prynne’s contrast with Pynchon is especially striking. Both Gravity’s Rainbow and Brass make intermittent use of the angelology of Rilke as an ulterior guideline through the wastes, though Prynne’s text, counterposing revelation with millennium in ways that Pynchon merely confuses, takes on a wider range of spirit-doubles and his moments of self-parody are freed of the whimsical topicality of the novel. And just as ‘the darker fields’ of Into the Day, deliberately summon the last cadences of Lycidas in order to banish them, the mock-apocalypse at the close of Brass deliberately leaves open the question of how any purely ‘visionary’ process can wage itself against the evasions diagnosed by The Ideal Star Fighter. Are these swerves all part of the same psychic economy, two faces of the same coin flipped by Melville’s disappearing trickster at the close of his Confidence Man."
woops
is not like other people
i start to feel like i'm in a very hard exam set by someone belligerent - that barrage of questions - at least youve stopped doing it on here quite as much
luka
Well-known member
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