Scattered notes from an afternoon with Lyn Hejinian

This is all going to take some time to settle, but the timing of Lyn Hejinian's visit this afternoon could not have been better as I am currently collaboratively writing about the rhetoric of experiment, about late capital, and the university. I doubt I will be writing much about this project on the blog, but I do want to share some of the notes I scribbled while in conversation with her and others this afternoon, for whatever their worth. We were so lucky to have her here.

I hope to post more about the Hejinian lecture and visit tomorrow, as well as snippets from video I recorded, but I've got a stack of papers that need more attention, and also have an abstract to submit by tomorrow afternoon. So. You understand.

Notes:

Response to Samuels’ essay that L.H.’s work is “happy” – who wants to be happy? – to be happy is to have failed in a political sense – who can object to happy?

To write without commodification or reification – this is the quandary: Good PoMo is closely tied to bad PoMo’s commodification and reification.

On the material world: “It behooves us to believe this is real because then we can have proper ethics to encounter it and react."

Benjamin’s Arcades project – enamored of the things of that world as that world

nostalgia / personal biography / self differentially

“the address to materiality is an address to transmutability…whereas reification blocks mutability”

on time: read Michael O’Malley’s Keeping Watch

“At some point I started to think about ideas way more seriously.”

Much of contemporary poetry comes down to: “You all saw the moon / but I felt it.”

“I've often wanted to teach a class in 'slow reading.'”

The classroom is a sufficient social space for this discourse

Claude McKay as poet of action

Adorno on Beethoven’s late style ---> Said’s On Late Style ---> a good way to read also in terms of late capital. “We an imagine the possibility of meaning but without needing to know what it looks like.”