Looks as if the full text of Jerome Rothenberg’s Writing Through: Translations and Variations is online. Nice. Also to be read sometime: Nicanor Parra on Neruda.
I’m sitting in a conference room at an Atlanta hotel, watching a roomful of high-school students from around the country write, record and edit radio stories about Atlanta. This is the fruit of a freelance gig I’ve been doing for the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, and it’s been a fun and interesting experience, especially since I’ve never done anything quite like it. I’ve basically been handling all the logistics of this, making sure nothing blows up (and nothing has, though two laptops unexpectedly shut down, causing some data to be lost) and that the trains run on time. Also drinking a lot of coffee, noodling around on the Internet and feeling my sinus cavities become as parched as the Sinai from sitting in a hotel all day. Ah, conferences. I haven’t been to one since I stopped working for Current full-time last spring.
I do like conferences, though, getting to meet new people, see old friends and generally stay out too late, drink too much beer/liquor and be tired the next day. Wed. night I was quite happy that I didn’t have to set up our equipment, which I thought I was going to have to do that night, and I went out to the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta to see Stephen Malkmus. He rocked. Malkmus has gotten a lot jammier since his days in Pavement, which on album doesn’t always tickle my fancy, but in concert it came off much better. “Real Emotional Trash” became an extended jam which appeared to disintegrate time, as good jams ought to do. One thing I noticed at the Playhouse and that I’ve noticed elsewhere in Atlanta is a surprising showing of decent beer selections, even at run-of-the-mill food-court restaurants. Since the South isn’t generally known as a haven for good beer, it’s been a pleasant surprise. I like finding the reliably refreshing Sweetwater 420 Pale Ale on tap most places.
These kids are supposed to be finishing up their stories in, say, five minutes. Odds of hitting that goal: slim. That’s fine. I just want to get it all done so I can get this gear to FedEx by 7 and pack it up, then preferably eat before passing out from hunger, which is how I felt last night. That’s because we took a tour of CNN’s headquarters, which was pretty impressive. The main newsroom is a sea of computer and TV screens sitting under a massive overhead network of lights and wiring. I felt as if I was in the middle of some odd hive embodying the culmination of human communications technologies, a space in which information almost takes shape in the air, as a honeycomb. It was somehow a little frightening. Nothing against CNN, but what if we developed spaces of this kind with an artistic, rather than journalistic, grounding? I guess I’m not sure what this would be, exactly, but I suppose I mean that the outcome of this enterprise would not be geared toward an interpretation of the world grounded in capitalism, but an appreciation of the world grounded in the ineffable. I’ll have to spend more time sometime shaping up this idea and going deeper into a critique of our news-driven culture at the same time.
Posted by nedlog at March 29, 2008 3:50 AM | TrackBackI should comment on this. sidenote: Pablo Neruda took his last name from Jan Neruda, a Czech poet / writer. There is a street in Prague called Nerudova, upon which lived our sad Czech poet and revolutionary. Interestingly, Neruda (the South American one) had never even visited Czechloslavakia before he took the name, and did not visit till well after his career was established.
Posted by: Douglas on April 2, 2008 12:38 PM