illegible

The Illegible Bachelor
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Reading the Illegible (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)
$29.95
In this exquisitely legible foray into the poetics of illegibility, Dworkin
takes on such forms of confusion.text, and effacement.text, and complex.text
as overwritten poetry, overprinted poetry, lined-out passages in poem, and
entirely censored poem by Man Ray, and then moving into land art by Smithson
and others in order to finally explore the poetics of illegibility more
broadly. Dworkin is unflaggingly obsessed with the avant-garde, and in talking about such only marginally
comprehensible texts, Dworkin summons his full tool box of
critical.linguistic.textual.analytic tools to do the job. Each lengthly
passage of analysis signifies new ways to read easily dismissable texts. He
has no one reductive argument, no simple insistence that "this stuff represents
our postmodern, muddled lives" or anything so cheap as that. Instead,
Dworkin moves through the various texts he looks at finding them variably meaningful, as
clearly their mechanics are quite different. In the middle of the book lives
what I suspect is one of Dworkin's favorite forms, the diastic poetry of
Cage and Jackson Mac Low. In those poems, the poets "write through" the
cantos of Pound (and others) to produce mechanistic, rule-governed
renderings of the larger text. I say that I think Dworkin likes this
strategy more than others because it works with the available, the flood of
existing text (Humumanent works this way too, of course, as Hayles has
discussed) while doing so within rule-governed methods for creation. He
likes it too, because of the Wakean jingles that result, the random playful
bits of language that result.

This is a book, then, about how to read graffiti on passing trains, about
how to read half-effaced ancient signage, about reading overwritten graffiti
and notes and all of the text that hangs on the bulletin boards of our
lives. It is a text, too, about not overlooking the illegible, the opaque,
the odd and apparently unsignifying. By employing poetics, what does not
clearly produce semantic meaning suddenly does, as the activity of social
and political artists (see the later discussion of Smithson, for instance)
is the activity of such opaque and hard to parse texts. This is poetry as
social, political, engaged, and pushing the envelop of meaning. In a
constellation of relation, there is Drucker, Pound, Joyce, Cage, Smithson,
all the other overwriting and illegible.fetishizing poets, and then there is
Dworkin pulling it all together, keeping it all separate, and ultimately
currating a fiasco of textual innovation.

This
is a map of the innovative, the poetic, the academic, and the original. So,
this is the map.

Illegible Bachelor (Intro)
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Newswire Photo (XL): Portrait bust, name illegible
$427.00
This is a museum-quality, reproduction print on premium, acid-free, semi gloss paper with archival/UV resistant inks.Date: n/aTopics: HISTORY OF THE OLD AMERICANA PHOTOSThis image comes from the George Grantham Bain Collection which represents one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection richly documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, political activities including the woman suffrage campaign, conventions and public celebrations. The photographs Bain produced and gathered for distribution through his news service were worldwide in their coverage, but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s. (Library of Congress)