Technology

Translation, Film, and the ESL Student

A new language is a bully. Learning a new language is not really learning a new way to communicate, but a new way to think.

Tagged as: Dziga Vertov, ESL, ESL students, Horace, languages, Man with a Movie Camera, Marshall McLuhan, Odes, Translations

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More Construction Notes

by Poetry Blog Editors Technology

Just a few things to notice about the site redesign.

Tagged as: Bulldog Technology Solutions, Comments, Facebook, Open ID, Stewart Lundy, Twitter, Yahoo

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LOLcatspeak, pt. 2? The Internet of Babel

by Micah Towery Language

I tend to believe that we don’t realize that technology is (always already?) an assumption about the world (as one philosopher called it “an account of the good”), not only a tool. Ironically, this writer is lamenting the disappearance of languages via the internet, which has become battering ram of English domination. The more I read and learn, the more I think that questions of technology and how man relates to nature are primary questions (not economics, race, sexuality, etc.—in many ways, the controversies over these can be directly traced to questions of technology).

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More about McLuhan and the Poetic Line

by Micah Towery Poetry and Poetics

When McLuhan described linearity (I think he actually used the term lineality…not sure if there’s a difference? Spell check doesn’t recognize the latter, if that means anything!), I couldn’t help but think about the poetic line and the way it is changing. As print culture (and hence the divorce made by the phonetic alphabet) ends, we move from the line, back to the field, back to non-linear, acoustic space.

Tagged as: Baudelaire, high modernism, Marshall McLuhan, Phoenecian alphabet, poetic line, symbolism

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The Baffler

by Evan Hansen Poetry and Poetics

When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I was at Rich’s Cigar Shop in Portland, Oregon, which had the best magazine selection in the city in those days, and I picked up a copy of a magazine called Adbusters. The magazine had a hole in it, and a card insert with just a black spot on it, both of which were part of that particular issue’s design. I liked it. The subtitle was: “A Journal of the Mental Environment,” or something similarly boldly rhetorically Structuralist. I was surprised. I was excited. The articles were different, advocated for political agency in a way different than any I’d experienced. I felt that naïve vitality that, at 31, seems more and more difficult to kindle.

Tagged as: Adbusters, Baffler, Culture Jamming, Detroit, Devin Johnston, feral houses, finance, Internet, Jack Spicer, Journal of Mental Environment, magazine, naive vitality, Naomi Klein, No Logo, Obama with a clown nose, OR, Politics, Portland, rae armantrout, rhetorically Structuralist, Rich's Cigar Shop, social networking, Thomas Sayers Ellis, upper middle class political stuff

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Do Movie Critics Matter?

by Micah Towery Aesthetics

Journalistic standards have changed so drastically that, when I took the podium at the film circle’s dinner and quoted Pauline Kael’s 1974 alarm, “Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising,” the gala’s audience responded with an audible hush—not applause.

Tagged as: Andrew Sarris, Armond White, blogosphere, cinephilia, Film Criticism, Molly Haskell, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert

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Blogging through Grossman, Part 3: Poetic Promiscuity.

by Micah Towery Art

We recent poets have two great tools at our disposal: freedom of poetic license, and freedom of publishing. Generally, we can say whatever we want, and get a significant number of people to hear what we have to say. The question is whether this freedom has led to better poetry or degeneration. Perhaps that’s not the best way to put it. The question should be, even if somebody is doing something amazing and new in poetry, would we even see it? Will we travel all this way to find that we really did need the gatekeepers of poetry??

Tagged as: A. R. Ammons, Allen Ginsberg, Allen Grossman, Armond White, Chris Robinson, Chronicle of Higher Education, Confessionalists, Ezra Pound, Film and TV, Hart Crane, John Ashbery, Oxnian Review, Persons, Poetry and Poetics, Post-modernism, Publishing, Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, The Sighted Singer, W. B. Yeats

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Google Uses Wittgenstein

by Micah Towery Art

Canada, it’s spring-break time. We’ve already got trees budding. Actually, many schools have gotten the whole Winter Olympics off for two or three weeks of extended spring break drunkenness. I’ve been glued to CTV for the last week or so, watching my new favorite sport: curling. No joke, this game is intense.

Tagged as: American Idiom, Artificial Intelligence, Audrey Fino, Canada, ESL, Google, Knowledge Workers, Line Breaks, Lineation, Poetry and Poetics, The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams, Wittgenstein

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Technology

Translation, Film, and the ESL Student

More Construction Notes

LOLcatspeak, pt. 2? The Internet of Babel

More about McLuhan and the Poetic Line

Do Movie Critics Matter?

Blogging through Grossman, Part 3: Poetic Promiscuity.

Google Uses Wittgenstein

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