asemic net: 2020

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Monday, December 28, 2020

anguish and over exercise with gutturals and mutterings by John M. Bennett and Jeff Crouch / EZE, 2020

Sunday, December 27, 2020

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Poetry Makes Things Happen by Jim Leftwich

For Jim Leftwich, the boundary between poetry and criticism, or more accurately, between poetry and writing about poetry, is extremely porous. This book should make that very clear; in fact, here it is sometimes hard to tell whether a text is “original poetry” or his writing “about poetry”. Which suggests that the distinction may not be all that important. (Another such book is one he wrote focused on my own work, or using my work as a springboard, Containers Projecting Multitudes: Expositions on the Poetry of John M. Bennett, 2019.) This is perhaps an outgrowth of his practice of making “hacks” of others' poetry and texts, which is in itself a means of entering into, and remaking aspects of, another's work, using a wide variety of processes ranging from the arbitrary and deliberate, to the improvisational and purely intuitive. What this does is to turn the process of writing about poetry on its head. Instead of applying a preordained critical method or theory to a text, Leftwich presents, as it were in “real time”, an account of what it was like, of what happened, when he read the text. We thus have a narration of a real experience of reading. For me, and for many of us in this new literary avant garde, this is vastly more interesting and useful than the use of a text to support or illustrate a particular literary (or other) ideology. Leftwich's work in this regard is unique, exciting, and represents real progress in the “problem” of “how to read poetry”, and of how to write it as well. -¬ John M. Bennett

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Asemics in Popular Culture: SNL on the Aesthetics of Meaning ... / EZE, 2020

Art can be a protest against convention, but art also defines its own conventions just as it is defined by convention. Does art escape convention? Asemics, as art, certainly has its own conventions. But what happens when asemics operates as a means to unground a convention? Does the ensuing criticism move into the circuit of State and Nomad as defined by Deleuze and Guattari?

Nomadology

Deleuze

The "XXL Rap Roundtable" skit from Saturday Night Live (December 12, 2020) makes a point of posing an asemic performance in a genre against the genre itself. How does asemics operate socially, politically, culturally, and artistically? Asemics here can be taken to be non-sense, i.e. words, utterances, songs, ... without [apparent or shared] meaning. [Note that semantics can be, but need not be, invoked here.]

And is the point at which performance within a genre establishes itself as contrary to convention, i.e. as not [presently] defined by that genre, a type of asemics as it disrupts the mode of meaning offered by the genre? Or do we need another term other than asemic performance for this use of non-sense?

SNL's XXL Rap Roundtable: Pop Culture Asemics

To what end is asemics as non-sense, as an empty placeholder of the formal, as disruption a method?

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Xu Bing: Mixing Media on the Way to Making Asemics: Xu Bing / EZE, 2020

Consider asemics as a form of mixed media. Consider the work of Xu Bing.

Xu Bing

Sunday, December 6, 2020

styrofoam word / EZE, 2020

Monday, November 30, 2020

Post-Asemic Press: Shapes by Tim Gaze is available now at Bandcamp! A...

Post-Asemic Press: Shapes by Tim Gaze is available now at Bandcamp! A...: The legendary asemic writing artist and publisher Tim Gaze has a new album out of sound poetry from Post-Asemic Press. It is titled ʂ ɦ ɑ...

Saturday, November 28, 2020

crazy train / EZE, 2020

Monday, November 23, 2020

viv / EZE, 2020

lin ack / EZE, 2020

Sunday, November 15, 2020

reading across convention by Jim Leftwich and Jeff Crouch / EZE, 2020

square pulse / EZE, 2020

Saturday, November 14, 2020

find input, surmise output, try to relate by Jim Leftwich and Jeff Crouch / EZE, 2020

Thursday, November 12, 2020

wReN by Jim Leftwich and Jeff Crouch / EZE, 2020

che che

wratch

che che

wratch wratch

che

che che

were wren

churr chatter

che che

churr

September

che

churr churr

churr

movies by

churr

che che

gobbling

pish pish

gobble

churr

gatch

furrowed

furious

churr

che che

wratch wratch

che che

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

toad orchestra with calligraphy by Jim Leftwich and Jeff Crouch / EZE, 2020

so it goes

so goes

the toes

of the toad

to and fro

and then the so

is the toe

until

you say

I told you

so just don't

croak

just don't

keep writing like crazy

exchanging

changes

so it goes

so goes

the toes

of the toad

to and fro

the woodwinds and the brass

are

amazing

Sunday, November 8, 2020

myopia, the alphabet soup of the well-defined suddenly un (with Cece Chapman) / EZE, 2020

from Cece Chapman: "out those maps too...especially interesting because of the myopic artists that are never mentioned...but i read a long time ago that monks became monks because of their myopia. that priestesses also in ancient egypt and greece, the most nearsighted the more inbred, the more valuable because they could barely see. their prophecies were valued more as they were less influenced by who was before them asking questions because they couldn't see them. and blind priests and priestesses more valuable...also i had heard the same that the very young being trained by renaissance artists drew detail (like maps and bibles ordered by the rich) to train but as they grew older lost the ability to stay focused and draw detail but was probably their eyes changing. maybe you know what a rapidograph pen is with various points some very tiny used in graphic design. but when i was in school at 16-18 the artist kids used to draw psychedelic designs, and very small details, but later admitted at mid twenties they just couldn't do it anymore."