Nice to see Dan Tessitore trying to wrap his thoughts around a passage by Leslie Scalapino. I don’t have the specific book he’s working with. It’s back at the library, but I have several others—

Some quick thoughts—

Writing not to display knowledge but rather as an act of discovery, and the movement as such from one word to another, with hesitations even as under observation and comments occurring to that effect, simultaneity, theoretical, occurring at once as poetic, journalistic, academic (ie formal), mixed with fiction(s), and memory (I must be neglecting something here) is phenomenalistic while unwinding on the page or computer screen as words, or even reduced half steps, evidence of passage, as an examination of the world and where one (writing), hers happens to be within this world amongst others while mostly public, like at the beach or on a sidewalk,

this in order to transform how we perceive as working to more FINE TUNE OUR ATTENTION.

Under the current circumstances (military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan), Scalapino’s The Front Matter, Dead Souls accrues even more significance than the considerable significance it already possessed prior to this mess, “written for publication in a newspaper” and submitted as such to news venues during the 1st Gulf War. I want to look more closely at this.

The specific piece I quoted on Wed Jun 18 (here my precision linking inability in evidence, unfortunately) was from that 1st essay in Public World/Syntactically Impermanence (now back in the library), and I dropped the parenthetical reference to Philip Whalen’s work since I was focusing on Jerome Rothenberg at the time in order to examine his expansive contribution (as I see it) to a way in which we might consider tradition as something quite broad.

But that’s it, no more time...