Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001
Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%]
Dear Patrick,
Thank you for your lovely,
Bourdievian numbers. (Your on-List silence had been noticeable.
I heard you hurt your shin. Condolences. And I was worried that maybe
your silence meant you were cooking up some sort of mischievous heteronym!
:) I'm relieved to see you're putting your time to good use.) Something
seems muddled with your statistics for advertisements, though: 7.5 doesn't
seem to correspond to 65, numerically, and you might've done better
to stick it out for an additional count of 62 (= 214 - 149), I think,
especially with randomness, as comparison between samples of unequal
size involve chi-factors or r or something . . . but otherwise, I find
these numbers neo-Pythagorean in their sense of "beauty is truth,
truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know,"
and charming.
I felt tempted to do the
same myself --- but upping nutritional supplements of Vitamin Shoppe
1500 MG Amino Complex to 10 tabs a day seems to have moderated my counting
mania --- and I was more interested in plotting who responds
to whose posts and threads, for more of an analysis of power
and follow-the-leader.
I also find the number
of advertisements distressing. It's like being on one of those servers
with pop-up ads that keep cluttering the screen. One waste of time there,
for me, is that poetry-dvertisers do not as a rule mark their subject
header with their location,--- so I waste clicks opening ads for interesting
poets' readings that are then disappointingly unreachable in far-away
States I can't attend (given the impounding of my private jet), not
that I ever leave the house anyway. So, (#1) I think it wld. at least
be thoughtful of advertisers to mark location in subject header, . .
. although I can understand that reputation accumulates through the
redundancy of name, and why anyone wld. be motivated just to infiltrate
Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at every loophole,
"fame"-building.
I've wondered if Christopher
W. Alexander or Prof. Bernstein couldn't somehow "cordon
off" or segregate ads from poetics discussion. In print, ads are
generally separated to the margins and not interspersed with "articles."
--- Pedagogically, insofar as the List is State U. educational outreach,
it's like mixing in Save Fifty Cents coupons with class notes. --- Electronically,
segregation might be effort, though (develop a co-site/cache), . . .
but maybe not all that much effort: even free servers like Yahoo provide
instantaneous group resources that poetry-advertisers cld. be given
a one-time "warning" to post to, for those interested to consult,
and then otherwise summarily blocked/deleted (as exploitative, mercenary,
whatever). I've even considered as public "penance" taking
it upon myself to maintain an on-line Poetry Calendar such items could
be re-directed to and plotted more helpfully, systematically, the way
Sharon Matling (name?) single-handedly started the NYC Poetry
Calendar as a 2-sided broadsheet that became a company.
I do strongly agree that
it wld. improve readering for ads to be segregated somehow.
There's something terribly American in this anti-social Buy This/Go
There panhandling that's done on-List, by poets (communicators!) who
have total impunity abt. addressing a community only to try to change
peers into audience. Very lively, daily discussion (although abt. work
of a different "taste" than the Buff' List's) goes on at PoetryEtc,
for example, which is predominately UK and AU/NZ sign-ons, who don't
seem as thoroughly permeated by mercantilism as Americans.
I'm very easily manipulated
by advertisements (which is why I don't watch television or go to the
movies, and have trouble with newspapers and magazines), --- psychology
finds that some types are objectively more "hypnotizable"
by ads/promos! --- and it's distressing to find my relation to poetry
being bent into docile consumerism: I spend, easily, between a hundred
and two hundred a month on poetry, average, much of it via SPD or checks
to on-List book/journal advertisers. That's okay but, once upon a time,
my naive attachment to poetry was because an endlessly re-readable enigma
masterpiece and nothing but paper and pen/typewriter was a refuge
from consumerism.
But it isn't only the alienation
that poets are dousing colleagues with here that bothers me (I find
it tacky if the automatic footer at the bottom of a poet's discussion
post leads to a book of theirs and a price for where to send for it,
too): it's the lack of creativity, or imagination, or even---
guile! in how matter-of-factly and mass media-like they style their
"Satisfy Me" commands. Utopian, I think it's holding back
a potential new poetry of inventive free market gamesmanship,
a "litvertizing," as it were, where poetry would grow into
being ironically/ambiguously conjoined with the zeitgeist of advertisement-seduction.
What were all those names of friends doing in New York School poetry,
if not a collective stategy of shared advertising and name-redundancy?
(How could Bill Berkson be advertised on-List this week
if, in the golden age of genuine inspired "litvertizing,"
Frank O'Hara hadn't paved a reptutation for him by dint of including
his name in O'Hara immortality?) Forgive me if it seems vain of me to
use myself as an example, but it took much more than an hour to put
together and post my shoddy little
http://www.geocities.com/jeffreyjullich/EUNOIAN.LITTLE.LEXICON.htm
with no self-interest in
Christian Bok's reputation other than I genuinely find him to
be among the two or three most remarkable. It was advertising, though,
disinterested advertising, labor-intensive advertising. And I was lead
to doing that, and to ordering Bok's book and to hearing him on the
Cabinet CD as a result of Brian Kim Stefans posting a
micro-review that brought out the nature of Eunoia in a way I'd
previously missed, and as a result of Christopher W. Alexander bringing
out points about glossolalia that mentioned Cabinet.
Already here, it shows,
I'm more concerned about/focussed on the on-List advertisements,
whereas you're more irked by the absence of discussion (the latest Fence
takes uniquely unprecedented and admirable candor in presenting
their distributors' actual print-outs--- with sales figures! Congratulations,
Rebecca Woolf/Rebecca-informants while Rebecca is on her doubtlessly
tiring but envigorating Manderley road show. The charts should
be framed, it's so good. --- Tragic, hopefully not, that their optimism
was fueled by the "irrational exuberance" [Greenspan]
of the now antediluvian lost "New Economy," and that recession
nihilism may well show Fence's charts' upward curve to have been
sub-sets of a larger upward slope mania that's been broken by three
airplanes and thousands and thousands of deaths, "jinxed").
Maybe that's because I
see advertising as an unstoppable semiotic that's really a major vehicle
for graphic artists, designers, actors, models, epigrammatists, etc.,
and quite "avant-garde" in its ingenuities. And I'm mainly
disappointed by how anemically we pursue marketing and how uncreative
and ascii ads are, on-List.
[mar-/mar-]:
I don't think we're marginalized;
I think we're bad at marketing.
But thanks for your own
statistical avant-gardisme, --- the future is Neo-Pythagorean! --- which
I read as a Herron poetic artefact in and of itself. Bar charts
would've been nice (Ron Silliman did Rae Armantrout pie
charts in A Wild Salience).
P.S. The "BICKERING"
and fighting that you condone as the spice of discussion also greatly
contributes, I suspect, to the drop-off in discussion: you have a thicker
hide for and propensity toward it than many. Poets are sensitive plants,
and people of substance aren't going to risk their vulnerability where
at any moment their "lessers" are given full clearance to
pounce and lash out over imaginary slights. (But I'm debilitatingly
conflict-avoidant {meek!}.)
Professional academics
tend to participate less seriously in on-List discussion, too. Perhaps
they see it as "work," or their interlocutors as being unqualified;
they're more "careful," though. On-List participation sometimes
parallels how long a batch/klatsch enjoys grad student status
together. They clam up once they've gotten tenure-track
appointments.
P.P.S. I rented Being
John Malkovich the other night to see the Emily Dickinson
puppet, and the puppeteer's employer, Lester Inc., reminded me of your
coincidentally named marionette Lester.
=======================================================
"One in the sun. Two in the sun. Three in the sun.
One not in the sun. . . . Four benches used four
benches separately."
--- Gertrude Stein, Four
Saints in Three Acts, 1927
=======================================================
--- Patrick Herron <patrick@PROXIMATE.ORG>
wrote:
> Discussion Statistics, UBPoetics E-mail List
> November 2001 vs. November 1998
>
>
> November 1998
> number of e-mails: 984
> number of threads*: 174
> average length of thread, adjusted to remove
> outliers: 3.6 e-mails
> discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 67
> percent of list posts that were advertisements,
> announcements, job postings,
> or responses to such postings: 7.5 (based on random
> sample of 211 e-mails),
>
>
> November 2001
> number of e-mails: 404
> number of threads*: 38
> average length of thread, adjusted to remove
> outliers: 2.5 e-mails
> discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 29
> number of advertisements, announcements, job
> postings, or responses to such
> postings: 65 (based on a random sample of 149
> e-mails)
>
> *-threads with more than one e-mail