[New-Poetry] "Ode to Academics"

[Anny Ballardini]

I wanted to read this long Ode later, but since you were so nice to break up 
my lines, I dedicated a couple of minutes to your work. If I agree with all 
what you say, on the other hand I feel that this is what we want. Would I 
like to go back to an en/closed matriarchal or patriarchal system? Would I 
like to go back to the little shop that sells me copies of Dante's Divine 
Comedy over and over again? Don't I like to be so _constipated_ by things to 
read, to look at, to watch

on the other hand,
wouldn't I like to build that farm and live like the Amish
don't I dream it every night when I go to sleep
and forget about it in the morning when I get up that I have to rush out
out and out
into the eternal out


From: "James Cervantes" <cervantes.james at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 6:40 PM


> Ode to Academics
>
>
> Wasted time, wasted space, wasted life.
> Waste is what is both refused and dumped,
> repudiated and thrown away.
> Think about the ways in which waste is "managed",
> how and where refused things and ideas are placed away.
>
> How much do we really know about nineteenth-century
> Britain and America? Do the cultures of the age
> still conjure up the same old vague impressions
> about gentlemanly conservatism, moral hypocrisy,
> oppressive domesticity, sexual repression, oversea
> expansion, fin-de-siècle ennui?
>
> Consciousness of the body was heightened
> when it was constantly brought into new
> stimulating environments and put under scrutiny
> from various perspectives. Texts were produced
> not just to record the experiences but to participate
> in these changes of perceptions.
>
> Freedom is far from free. Network and hardware
> access bears often ignored costs. 'Free and open'
> at times means 'closed and expensive'. Freedom
> can be conceptualised to fit innumerable agendas.
> There is no solace in the liberty of being employed
> but poor, surveilled and uninsured.
>
> The central hacker ethos indicates that 'information
> wants to be free'. Free Culture and Free Software
> mark the tension between proprietary and open source
> domains. The flood of civic, participatory technologies
> such as the blog contributes to a larger number
> of voices being heard. Online, commons-based
> peer production creates novel, economic realities
> that no venture capitalist can kill.
>
> These alternative economies are not fads but real facts.
> The freedom to remix, to mash up, to reconceptualise,
> recontextualise, hybridise, breathes in free cultural formations.
> Citizens worldwide are armchair passengers on the nightly
> news train or watch reality TV shows such as 'Big Brother'.
> Benjamin Franklin reminds us that 'they that can give up essential liberty
> to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.'
> Bertolt Brecht associated a blue sky with freedom.
>
> Increasingly, companies give away things for free.
> Enticing 'free gifts' must be paid back in the long run
> to the Googles and Ebays. We buy into the hierarchies
> of sharing and exchange. Can we live with the cruel lie
> that to preserve freedom, one must strike pre-emptively?
>
> Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, lounge music,
> tiki culture, burlesque, roadside attractions, "Oriental" kitsch,
> cowboys and Indians, and/or space-age futurism,with consideration
> of the racial/gendered/queer elements which mark the mid-century
> American fascination with the Other. No conference
> on the documentary tradition would be complete
> without  a panel about the Direct Cinema movement.
> Contributions on the representation of the Asian male
> body in Japanese, Korean  and British cinemas
> and on the representation of the male body in Spanish
> and  British cinemas have been already commissioned.
>
> How is visual autofiction influenced by the media in which it takes shape?
> Does autofiction as new genre call for renewed usage of visual media?
> Does autofiction in visual arts specifically entail the breakdown
> of different media. What is the relation between visualization
> and performance in these types of artworks? What is the artistic
> status of autofiction in various media? TRUE NORTH: A line
>
> from any point on the earth's surface to the north pole.
> All lines of longitude are true north lines. True north
> is usually represented by a star. To express direction
> as a unit of angular measure, there must be a starting point
> or zero measure and a point of reference. As a theatre scholar,
> what are your baselines?  How do you determine them?
>
> The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
> and that which is done  is that which shall be done:
> and there is no new thing under the sun.
>
> The evolution of 'evolutions' has taken us from the Bible
> to Mao, from eugenics to rock music.  Never before
> has fashion played such a pivotal role in the cultural,
> social, and private lives of so many. Yet the spaces and places
> which allow all this to take place remain obscured
> functioning simply as backdrops when in fact they
> are pivotal to the creation of meaning and the very notion
> and function of display. Attention has been paid to the
> surface/flesh/fabric of fashion and architecture, and little
> to the depth/interior/insides of these places and spaces.
>
> Difficulty both privileges and excludes.  We revel in it
> and we strive to master it.  At crucial times, we  even resist it.
> Explore the value and the duplicity of difficulty as the word
> is received and interpreted, explore the dynamic
> between the complex and the simplified, and consider
> the labor of  knowledge production alongside the wonder
> of the virtuoso performance. Is the most "difficult"
> the most revered? Does difficulty create or confine
> one's  sense of belonging? ?  Is there a use-value
> to this concept?  Is there pleasure in it?
>
>
>
> -- Jim
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Homepages: http://home.earthlink.net/~jvcervantes/
> http://www.poetserv.net/jvchome/index.html
> Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org