July 02, 2004
Peking University, 26 June
...was utterly excruciating. I read from a paper, alternating paragraphs with my translator Michelle Yeh. At that pace and stagger, the tenebrous connections between idea and idea (the more fragile the connnections, the more "dense" the argument, as I have learned from respondents) shatter like frozen sugar-water, and each concept drops like an icicle into snow.
But then we all read poems; among my favorites were the comically mythographic musings of the phlegmatic Xi Chuan (click for large version):
Xi Chuan also asked some incisive questions about the poetics/urbanism paper, questions which gathered in the relation of the urban grid to democracy, and wondered about speed and the difference between passing through and inhabiting as appearing in possible formalisms. But the best question was asked by a woman who left before I could ask her name; she appears in the back of this image, to the left of Zang Di:
Her question concerned the relation of the modern grid to the orthogonality of cinematic apparatus, and the relationship between Soviet avant-garde cinema and experimental poetics. It is exactly the kind if question that one waits years for, and answers in two minutes out of embarassment, having spoken furiously about factory sounds, "Dziga Vertov," Malevich, poetry's learning of abstraction from a form that moves in time, Eisenstein's aspect ratio, and...all the things you would speak of all the time, if this were a perfect world.
Posted by jane at July 2, 2004 04:55 AM | TrackBack