In Which Earthquakes Give New Reason For Blog Posts

An earthquake shakes Molly's keys loose...

a SONATA for p/rep/ared KEYBOARD

BY molly LAMBERT

i AM not TRYING to MAKE this P/URP/OSELY look likE a RANSOM note OR because I’m A STR8 GANGSTA now. my COMP/TUR is BROKEN. I am TAKING this BETCH to THE glendale galleria GENIUS bar right AWAY.

i couldn’t STOP/ myself FROM trying TO blog AND it GOT me THINKING that JOHN cage WOULD be reallY into P/REP/ARED comp/uter KEYBOARDS and THE IDEA of BLOGUEING concrète. i’m SURE there ARe P/OETS who HAVe THOUGHT of THIS vis A vis THE internet. THERE was A dep/artment FOR it AT my SCHOOL. thE HYPERTEXT field IS wide BUT shallow. They HAVE yet TO imp/rove ON p/roject XANADU.

The ON the ROAD typ/ewriter scroll

RIGHT now MOSTLY the CAP/S lock IS turning ON and OFF at WILL and SOMETIMES things COME out AS sp/aces INSTEAD of CHARACTERS. It’s P/RETTY imp/ossible TO tolerate. IMAGINE how FRUSTRATING it WOULD be IF comp/utERS were MORE like HARP/S or ORGANS. LIKE if YOU had TO hold DOWN a SHIFT key NOT just TO cap/italize BUT to WRITE vowels OR YOU HAD to TAP/ some KEYS TWICE and OTHERS three TIMES.

WE think OF typ/ing AS being INTUITIVE AND close TO thinking, LIKE kerouac TYP/ING out the MANUSCRIP/T for ON the ROAD as A scroll, but LANGUAGES are ONLY intuitive ONCE you’ve LEARNED them AND thEY become INTERNALIZED. I remember looking At BILLBOARDS BEFORE I knew HOW to READ. Staring INTO THE incomp/rehensible ICONS known AS letters, willing them TO reveal THEIR meanings TO me.

The SCROLL of KUBLA khan by SAMUEL taylor coleridge

unfamiliar LANGUAGES can BE clunky AND HARD to USE. html IS a LANGUAGE but if I ever started THINKING in IT while NOT BLOGGING I’d want YOU to murk ME.

I was TERRIBLE at LANGUAGES in HIGH school. I took FRENCH instead OF the INFINITELY more USEFUL sp/anish p/arce QUE je SUIS un ABRUTI.

but EVER sincE i learned HOW TO P/LAy GUITAR off ABOUT.COM i AM sup/er COCKy THAT i CAN learn ANYTHING from THE internet. (EXCEP/T how TO fix A comp/uter KEYBOARD ap/p/arently).

John CAGE saddle shoes BY RAY johnson

my CELL p/hone IS broken in A way WHERE i CAN’T read MAYBE a FIFTH of THE screen AND i JUST work AROUND IT. Sometimes I get TEXTS where THE key WORDS are BLACKED (or actually, P/URP/LED) out like “HEY MOLLY i WANT to [........] YOU LATER.”

I AM still WAITING for THEM to INVENT a MACHINE that WILL directly RECORD MY thoughts.

THIS recording DIDN’T invent DIGITAL p/oetry WE just P/ERFECTED it. blogs ARE mostly ASSEMBLAGE anyway.

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE: faggy GOTH kid

Kerouac wrote ON the ROAD IN an AMP/HETAMINE induced SP/RINT. DID Jack GET the IDEA for A CREATIVITY enhancing drug BINGE from SAM coleridge, WHO wrote KUBLA KHAN and THE rime OF the ANCIENT mariner IN an OP/IUM hazeP?

aaron SORKIN was COOKING his own CRACK when HE wrote THE american P/RESIDENT. I WONDER IF he WATCHES the WIRE. if DICK wolf RAN the WIRE there’D be AN amy WINEHOUSE ep/isode THIS season. I’M only on SEASon ONE so far MYSELF. don’t SNITCH.

John CAGE cooks

The VOYNICH manuscrip/t IS a mysterious illustrated book with incomprehensible contents written between approximately 1450 and 1520 by an unknown author in an unidentified script and language.

BOB coover AND his Electronic LITERATURE Organization would ap/p/rove. i LOVE ELO!!!!!!!!

John CAGE with P/IANO

TIMELINE of HYP/ERTEXT technology

great WORKS by TR’s P/ATRON saint JOHN cage

Indeterminacy ONLINE

UBU web IS the HOME of CONCRETE p/oetry ON THE web.

OUTGRAP/O

OULIP/O

ALL the covers OF p/ublished editions OF OTR

P?aul HARTAL

Haptic Poetry

John CAGE comp/osed IN america

Hyp/ertext

HYP/ERCOMICS

Memex

EMERGENCE

OFFICE of The FUTURE

WORLD brain

Symbiotic INTELLIGENCE

situationa/l awareness

Cybernetics

My Life Bits

Life LOG

Dymaxion Chronofile

ATOP/ aN ap/p/le MACBOOK,

yourS truly,

m LAMBERT

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls it all right here.

"First Interlude" - John Cage (mp3)

"Sonata X" - John Cage (mp3)

"Sonata VI" - John Cage (mp3)

"Sonata II" - John Cage (mp3)

"Second Interlude" - John Cage (mp3)

"Sonata IV" - John Cage (mp3)

JOHN CAGE READS THIS RECORDING IN HEAVEN

In Which The Sounding of Many Meaningless Things At Once Makes An Objective World Less Terrifying

She Moved, She Had Moved

by WILL HUBBARD

One of the most beautiful sounding words I’ve ever had the repeated instance to speak is “anechoic”, meaning ‘void of the electromagnetic wave analogy of echoes.’

The anechoic chamber, a room of no great size used primarily for acoustic experiments, interested John Cage a great deal–the myth goes that upon stepping into an anechoic chamber at Harvard in 1948, Cage realized that even in perfect external silence, the sounds of his circulatory and nervous system were still perceptible, making total silence impossible for any living mammalian being.

Like Cage, Serge Gainsbourg was a conceptual music-artist. In 1971, he gave us the Jean-Claude Vannier produced Histoire de Melody Nelson, a strange, operatic narrative-album based loosely upon his romance with This Recording Darling Superiore, Jane Birkin.

Around this time, John Cage was codifying his own quasi-theatrical brand of Happening in several performances of Musicircus, in which disparate musical ‘arrangements’ were performed simultaneously according to chance governance by the I Ching.

The great American rock-musical, Hair, ran for 1,750 shows from 1968 until 1972 at the Biltmore Theater at 261 W. 47th Street in New York.

Jane Birkin’s mother was a London stage-actress whose brown hair won her the affections and patronage of the great Noel Coward. Birkin’s daughter Charlotte has that slightly flawed look I find irresistible.

When someone has a perfectly formed mother and suave genius father it’s difficult not to give them literally every introverted female role in existence. When I close my eyes and cup my hands over my ears I cannot summon the image of any person’s face in the darkness, let alone a woman, let alone Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Thanks to artists Robert Kocik and Daria Fain, I got the chance to spend fifteen minutes in an anechoic chamber. As part of an ongoing project to design (an eventually build) a structure called the PROSODIC BODY, Kocik and Fain fabricated a completely lightless and mostly soundless room in the defunct underground vaults of the old JP Morgan Building at 14 Wall St. in Manhattan.

I say ‘mostly soundless’ because when the subway ran beneath the building the vibrations created what I perceived to be--because of the otherwise ’silence’–-a great deal of noise. Another project of Kocik’s (or is it the same project?) is to create a free-standing structure devoted solely to the creation and practice of poetry. He believes that no such structure has ever existed in the world, that poets have always been interlopers in the buildings they use. Some ancient bardic traditions required that its practitioners spend periodic spans of time in cave-like, solitary places called abatons, meaning “place where no step falls.”

Sometime I would like to spend an hour or more in an anechoic chamber and think--or more precisely, try to not-think. I’m bringing a huge pad of cheap brown paper and a crayon will attempt to write a book of aqueous poems in the darkness and silence.

Kocik is also deeply intrigued by the possibility of the simultaneous vocalizing of all known phonemes (elementary meaningful units of speech) including all the permutations such as exhaustion, resorption, forced, unforced, vocalic, consonantal, unstruck, etc.

“Lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll….” for example, might be your part in this. In an e-mail, Kocik quoted Rudolf Steiner and paraphrased nondual Kashmiri linguistics, respectively: "The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end", "phonemes are energies, awarenesses, atoms, that give rise to the objective world."

The English language alone has 40 identified phonemes, and so if we can get 40 people together we can probably give rise to at least the city of London and probably large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Bring your grandparents, class, or patients!

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. He lives in Brooklyn.

"Broken Love Song" - Peter Doherty (mp3)

"Arcady" - Peter Doherty (mp3)

"New Love Grows On Trees" - Peter Doherty (mp3)

"A Little Death Around The Eyes" - Peter Doherty (mp3)