"the poet must not close his eyes"

[version]

Do you watch any television?​

I do, I watch the news from different sources. Sometimes I see things that are completely against my cultural nature. I was raised with Latin and Ancient Greek and poetry from Greek antiquity, but sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch “WrestleMania.”​

​

An unexpected choice.​

You have to know what a good amount of the population is watching. Do not underestimate the Kardashians. As vulgar as they may be, it doesn’t matter that much, but you have to find some sort of orientation. As I always say, the poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them.​

​

So you’ve been watching “Keeping Up With the Kardashians?”​

I’m starting to discover it. I’m curious; that’s my guiding principle.​

@sus with the Henry Miller pull - artist as antenna - and @Corpsey and his 2024 thing's brought this Herzog interview to the fore once again.

Is he right? How closely in tune with your time and place are you? Are you averting your eyes?

 

[luka]

"I for my own part have a positive addiction to the meanest trash and to unmitigated urban pollution; but uncontrolled, self-replicating triviality is genteel and necrotic, a true language-cancer and well able to invade across the mind / brain barrier." prynne

 

[Corpsey]

this is why i watch stepdaughter porn

 

[version]

It's impossible to live completely outside of your time and place, but there are those who retreat from it to varying degrees. An extreme example being the people who do up their house like it's still the 1950s and essentially live their life in fancy dress, acting out another period.

I'm hoping to avoid anyone slipping into moaning about getting older or any of that shit here. I'd very much like the thread to be about willfully engaging with the present, where you feel you do that and what the effects are.

A fragment of McLuhan's 'Notes on Burroughs' is worth dredging up here once again:

Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time.​

​

The line Burroughs walked was a crucial one to my mind, critiquing the present without venerating the past.

 

[sus]

I'm furiously editing my 200 page Avatar: Way of Water manifesto so can't linger for long but,

That's why I'm doing it

 

[Murphy]

this is why i watch stepdaughter porn

 

[version]

I was very averse to reading on a screen for a long time then something clicked and I realised how stupid it was to be blowing money on every book I wanted to read when I probably wouldn't read most of them again anyway and I could grab them online. The web's loaded with shadow libraries and I was pissing away twenty quid on some out of print second hand thing on eBay.

 

[version]

I'm furiously editing my 200 page Avatar: Way of Water manifesto so can't linger for long but,

That's why I'm doing it

This feels like taking it too far. I don't think every piece of American pop culture needs its own fevered exegesis. I'm thinking more along the lines of keeping oneself within the current loops: music, film, writing, tech, politics, sport, etc.

 

[Murphy]

The poet has more to see and report back on than ever. How can the poet look away from infinite PDF’s of infinite human attempts to record the unrecordable?

Is the internet dissolving that which is never to be born and supplanting stepdaughter porn freeze frames in the minds of young people? How does the poetic young mind look away from infinite potential?

 

[version]

There's a balancing act between keeping a foot in the past and a foot in the present. I'm not convinced you want to become completely unmoored and given over entirely to the present, but you definitely don't want to be one of those people stuck in the past.

 

[Murphy]

I enjoy the word play of Coil, shifting sand lyrics but to see someone so distressed leaning into and looking further into their own distress is troubling with hindsight

*“most accidents occur at home”, “ambulance died in his arms”, “whose to tell”, picks up on all manner of at times self-indulgent (paint me as a dead soul) dross to *prescient see above, like the future itself peaking through

 

[Murphy]

Ah the 28 Years Later poem is everywhere how can you look away when it’s fnording so hard

Jocko Voice: good

 

[wg-]

There is a new reboot of "You Bet!" that started last week

 

[sus]

This feels like taking it too far. I don't think every piece of American pop culture needs its own fevered exegesis. I'm thinking more along the lines of keeping oneself within the current loops: music, film, writing, tech, politics, etc.

Not every piece but the important ones. Otherwise all the tacit information it carries is lost to time.

 

[sus]

I don't think following pop culture is equivalent to keeping your eyes open though

Pop culture is our shared fantasy life. It tells us our dreams but not how we actually live.

 

[sus]

I think understanding the way we really live is hard because it's like water. It's the opposite of what cat hes your attention, of what is interesting—which is the unusual.

3/30/18

I see a lot of Are.na channels chronicling 2017 and 2018, chronicling the 2010s, chronicling the present moment. Usually these channels collect the strange absurdities of the modern world, reflecting a shared unconscious thesis that the future is accelerating into weirdness.

These channels are interesting as archives of oddities, but they won't actually tell future readers much of use about 2017 or 2018 or the 2010s. The actual dominant, controlling aesthetics and norms of the present moment are so saturated and familiarized that we have ceased to see them as interesting. To see them as worthy of documentation. The most banal clothing today will be most emblematic of the zeitgeist in retrospect. What feels fundamentally normal in 2018 is more likely to be representative of the age than what felt strange.

 

[luka]

 

[wg-]

Who is the rizzler

 

[version]

I don't think following pop culture is equivalent to keeping your eyes open though

Pop culture is our shared fantasy life. It tells us our dreams but not how we actually live.

I'm not saying it's equivalent, I'm saying it's one of many things to keep your eyes open to.

 

[wg-]

I think the question is more are you routed in reality or are you in some kind of dickhead bubble of your own making