Emmett Williams's's "My Life in Flux and Vice Versa"

review of

Emmett Williams's's "My Life in Flux and Vice Versa"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2320. "review of Emmett Williams's "My Life in Flux and Vice Versa""

- credited to: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- written April 12 - April 17, 2025

- complete version uploaded to my Critic website April 17, 2025

- http://idioideopleintekst.nl/CriticWilliams.html

review of

Emmett Williams's "My Life in Flux and Vice Versa"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 12- April 17, 2025

The complete review is here:

http://idioideopleintekst.nl/CriticWilliams.html

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7496002708

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126923384-my-life-in-flux--and-vice-versa-by-emmett-williams

I reckon it's accurate to say that I love all people & things FLUXUS. In my life I've had the good fortune to meet, usually briefly, such FLUXUS people as Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Alison Knowles, Davi Det Hompson, John Cage, Ken Friedman, Stan VanDerBeek, & Carolee Schnemann. Emmett Williams has always been of particular interest to me b/c he was the editor of "An Anthology of Concrete Poetry" (Something Else Press, 1967), probably the most important poetry collection in my personal experience of such things. I've read one other Williams bk, after that anthology & before this one to be reviewed, called "Schemes & Variations" (Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1982) wch is absolutely fantastic & wch I had the good fortune to acquire in what appeared to be mostly a FLUXUS bkstore in Berlin in 1994. I suspect that that store no longer exists so I feel doubly fortunate to have visited it & come away w/ a sample of their wares.

Having been heavily involved w/ international mvmts other than FLUXUS & having observed the way they've started & grown it was interesting for me to read Williams's acct of FLUXUS's birth & growth. Sure, there was a zeitgeist. Yes, there were people who worked w/ each other in a 'fellow traveller' sort of way under the FLUXUS umbrella. Yes, George Maciunas, FLUXUS's primer mover & shaker, prime impressario, who organized things in such a way that there appeared to be a mvmt w/ a common cause.. but reading this bk made it clearer to me that FLUXUS was somewhat fragile & that it barely existed - despite how many events & publications occurred in its name.

It's possible that the same thing cd be sd about NEOISM, one of the main Cultural Conspiracies I've been involved w/. NEOISM's George Maciunas, Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor), has dedicated a similar amt of fervent energy as Maciunas did in creating the appearance of a mvmt called "NEOISM", something that he recruits for tirelessly, bringing in new participants under its umbrella, participants who often don't last more than a few yrs at most before they move on to something else.

Hence, Williams's bk is ostensibly about "his life in flux"(us) but is more about his life as a poet/performance-artist whose association is w/ FLUXUS but whose work just as often, if not more often, seems to've just appeared in less specific art contexts.

"I wrote an essay about Fluxus for the programme although Genesis was never a part of Fluxus repertoire unless you believe, with so many of my old colleagues that everything a Fluxus artist does is Fluxus. This attitude has certainly made it more difficult to understand what Fluxus was or is, and for many people Genesis is regarded as 'typical Fluxus.' Let it be." - p 348

In the beginning he provides this dedication:

"in tribute

to the legendary Sylvester Schaffer,

an almost forgotten precursor of Fluxus,

whose one-man vaudeville show

at the 44th Street Theater in New York

in 1914

included sharopshooting,

a tumbling turn with five dogs,

Japanese juggling,

trained horses,

card tricks and coin palming,

magic acts,

sketching in oil paints,

heavyweight juggling,

a violin solo

and other performance pieces

all in 80 minutes

(including costume changes)" - p 7

That got me interested in Schaffer so I searched for footage of him online & found "16mm Film - Fahrendes Volk - Teil 1 - D 1934" ( https://youtu.be/eWI9Yqm-0f8?si=SzGntEXUNph68eTC ) & "16mm Film - Fahrendes Volk - Teil 2 - D 1934" ( https://youtu.be/gm2gZWvjyi4?si=d2_lRJZFXkPJ74Fr ). "Fahrendes Volk" translates to "nomadic people" or "traveling people" in English - for me a rather strange choice of words given that what distinguishes the people presented is their fantastic athletic ability more than their travelling - wch, obviously, many people w/o the skills shown also do. These films include what is, to me, very impressive acrobatics, juggling, trapese artistry, & horse training, amongst other things. One trapese artist flies thru the air w/ a burlap sack over his head!

Williams recounts his experiences as a child performer:

"Popeye? Popeye is something I must have picked up at the movies, probably at the Warwick Theatre, where I used to sing on the stage at the Kiddy Klub every Saturday morning before the picture-show started. I can almost hear myself now in some of my best numbers, such as "Palsy-walsy, my little sugar cup, if you get much sweeter, I'm gonna eatchew up" and another song that I really threw myself into, "I Faw Down and Go Boom." (This vast repertory of Lieder comes back to me occasionally, afert sufficient wine; and I recreated twenty-six of such childhood renditions at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg, several years ago.)" - p 16

My own experience as a child performer was much more humble: I played single piano pieces in group recitals & recited satirical poetry about my sister in costume behind my house. Nonetheless, I've sometimes thought about recreating a least one of the piano tunes in performance as an adult.

"I'm Popeye the Sailor Man

"finishing off with an improvised dance, the flexing of my nonexistent muscles, lots of "Ahoy there, mates!" and "Avast, ye landlubbers" with a "Toot! Toot" here and a "Toot! Toot!" there plus ad libs thrown out to anyone in the audience that I recognized. I did it at American Legion dinners, Elks Club banquets, Women's Benefit Association brunches, Women's Club soirées, and Holy Name Society breakfasts, at the Colony Inn, the Tidewater Hotel, Hotel Warwick, the Chamberlain, the Acheson-Dietrich Seafood Restaurant, and a Chinese restaurant on Washington Avenue, not to forget Radio Station WGH, the voice of "the World's Greates Harbour." And, at Christmastime, for the disabled veterans of World War One of course we didn't call it One in those days because no one knew there would be a Two at the Old Soldiers' Home." - p 17

!!!!! Is that quantity of fantastic venues just due to growing up in NYC (as opposed to Baltimore) or were the times less paranoid about child abuse or What?! Whatever the case, to me, that's an astounding list of places for a child to perform.

One of the earliest participants in FLUXUS was Ben Patterson, originally from Pittsburgh. I live in Pittsburgh & perk up as response to such history. Williams was friends & collaborators w/ Patterson.

"Here, then, is the text of this tongue-in-cheek, sometimes foot-in-mouth, interview, the world's first reportage that called Fluxus Fluxus." - p 22

"Get one thing straight at the beginning. This isn't "new music. "New Music" is old hat to these people. This is very new music. In fact, some of it is anti-music, according to American impresario George Maciunas, who will take the Fluxus festival lock, stock, barrel, plastic butterflies, stomach pump, etc., etc., to Paris in December, then to Holland, Luxembourg, Italy, Austria, East Europe, Japan,and eventually the United States." - p 23

""Are there scores for this sort of music, Mr,Patterson?"

""Certainly. I myself use texts which explain the action in detail, how to produce such and such an effect, and so forth. Others use ticker tape, string, telephone books, the imperfections in cheap paper, photographs of ants, things that look more or less like traditional scores, the footprints of wild beasts . . .""

[..]

""You seem to be concentrating on 'odd' things. If that's the task you want to employ, then there are some 'odd' things, from your point of view, of course. You might mention John Cage's 31'57.9864 for piano, or La Monte Young's Poems for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc., or Toshi Ichiyanagi's Music for Electric Metronome and IBM Music, or Richard Maxfield's Cough Music, or Emmett Williams' Four Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices, or Terry Riley'sEar Piece for Audience, or Yogi Kuri's Human Zoo, or Dieter Schnebel's Visible Music for One Conductor and One Pianist, or George Brecht's Candle Piece for Radios."" - p 24

&, indeed, FLUXUS seen/heard as a musical mvmt was very new &, for me, still ahead of even new music of today. Hence, my love.

& who or what was FLUXUS? As of the 1990 Venice Biennial?

"In fact, there were more "Fluxus artists" than some of us clannish oldtimers had ever dreamed existed. I eremember a tender moment, when Wolf Vostell and I were examining the giant poster. He put his arm around my shoulder, and said, "Emmett, do you remember in Weisbaden in 1962 there were only seven of us? Now there are one hundred and twenty."" - p 28

On Wikipedia, there're 72 listed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus ). I wonder how the "clannish oldtimers" wd react to all the "Fluxus" records put out by retired German senior police detective Kommissar Hjuler?

On p 31, there's a chart w/ a heading explaining the 4 categories of Fluxus people:

"Within Fluxus group there are 4 categories indicated:"

[..]

"4) individuals active within fluxus since the formation of fluxus but having since then detached themselves on following motivations:

a) anticollective attitude, excessive individualism, desire for personal glory, prima dona complex

(Mac Low, Schmit, Williams, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Kosugi)," - p 31

The chart is by George Maciunas. Those "excessive individualists" are some of the ones I feel closest to. I've made a movie of me reading Mac Low's "Asymmetries 1-260" (3 versions: "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading Jackson Mac Low's "Asymmetries 1-260"" - 10:08:00 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/0Zn9rl8PBqc ; "Susie reads to Neoists - attn expandex version" - 10:25:59 - on my onesownthoughts YouYube channel here: https://youtu.be/Ug4ajUv4rqk ; "Susie reads to Neoists - shorter version" - 4:54:46 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/mTJEn9OCkrA ). I've made a movie of etta cetera realizing a Schmit piece ("typewriter poem - tomas schmit - march 63" - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XprYK4V5ZhQ ). I've read Williams's bks, seen a fantastic installation by Paik at the Wood Street Gallery, heard Dick Higgins read his work, & witnessed Takehisa Kosugi perform music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

"George Brecht's "events" present a good example of some of these performance problems. These "events", born in an American setting, were for him "very private, like little enlightenments I wantsd to communicate to my friends, who would know what to do with them", and he had never thought of them as elaborate public performances. Well, in the European Fluxus festivals the[y] became exactly that, much to George's surprise, public realizations of simple events that he wanted to ntoice naturally in real life.

"Sometimes there were more performers than spectators at these "public performances." And sometimes, when the audience outnumbered the performers, the spectators took advantage of the situation. One night, students climbed up onto the stage, harried the performers, and tried to set fire to the score of my Opera. And once, during a performance in Amsterdam, a girl tried to set Dick Higgins on fire." - p 32

To 'performers' such as myself, Williams's recounting of misattributions, non-paying gigs, & other manifestations of stupidity & unfriendliness are reassurances that even 'top dogs' get treated like 'low-lifes', something that's happened to me all too often.

"I am seated at my desk, opening a package that the postman had just delivered, DM 2,30 postage due. Inside the package is a book. A brand new anthology of Fluxus performance pieces. Naturally, I flip through the book to the W section, to see how well I am represented. Ah, not bad. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight pieces!

"My joy is short-lived. Three of these eight pieces, Expedition (1964), Supper (1965), and Concerto for Paik No. 2 (1965) I have never heard of before in my life. If there exists a Concerto for Paik No. 2 (1965), then there ought to be a Concerto for Paik No. 1, but even if there is, it certainly wasn't written by me." - p 45

George Brecht's "On-Off" is misattributed to Williams. I imagine that these days most people interested in Fluxus wd recognize such a mistake immediately.

"But wait! Does the historian have any proof that I am, after all, the composer of On-Off? I hope not. For I have no proof that I did not write it.

"Will the real composer of On-Off please stand up?" - p 46

People interested in a filmed performance of this piece cd do worse than to witness Florian Cramer's realization now ensconced in my super-8 feature entitled "Satanic Liposcution, Neoasm?!, and YOU!!" here: https://youtu.be/PpyNO5UHmr0?si=7ywyn25xjeJyQleQ&t=3153 .

But what about:

"Voice Piece for La Monte Youg (1962)

"Ask if La Monte Young is in the audience, then exit. If the performance is televised or broadcast, ask if La Monte Young is watching or listening to the program." - p 48

It's exactly this flair for the unexpected that makes FLUXUS work so great, it's so simple &, yet, so utterly different from performances that present the usual full frontal.

"The Gift of Tongues (1962)

"Sing meaningfully in a language made up on the spot." - p 52

"The Alphabet Symphony

"This is a symphony in which you can spell "love" by smoking a cigar, blowing a silent dog whistle, eating a chocolate éclair off the floor on all fours doggy-fashion, and tooting a little ditty on the flute. That's the way it was spelled during the first performance in London in 1962.

"In Paris, the same year, I acted it out by blowing a toy horn, gazing at the audience through the hole of a cored apple, ripping a piece of cloth, and eating a hard-boiled egg extracted from the womb of a medical school model of a pregnant woman.

"A symphony? Well, that is what Daniel Spoerri advertised that I would perform an Alphabet Symphony at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Since there was none, I got to work and composed one." - p 58

There're posters throughout the bk that give an idea of who was performing what at the FLUXUS festivals. Here's an example of hat was presented on December 3, 1962 at Fluxus Festorum III:

"Concert No. 1, Musique Evénenementelle. Raoul Hausman: Poesie Phonetique / Joesph Byrd: Piece for R. Maxfield / Jackson Mac Low: Thanks II /Robert Watts: News & Two Inches / Emmett Williams: Alphabet Symphony /G.Brecht: Drip Music & Direction / George Maciunas: In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti / Dick Higgins: Constellation No.7 & 4 / Benjamin Patterson:Septet from"Lemons" and Solo for Dancer / La Monte Young: Composition 1961 Number 29 / Nam June Paik: One for Violin Solo & Serenade for Alison / Wolf Vostell:Décollage Musique"Kleenex" / Alison Knowles: Proposition / Terry Riley: Earpiece / G.Brecht: Word Event." - p 67

I was 9 at the time. Imagine having parents who wd take you to such a thing. My mom might've been playing "South Pacific" on the turntable.

I met Alison Knowles at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in 2016 (or thereabouts). She had transformed a Hall of Architecture by putting a grid of red tape on the floor into wch red objects were placed. I was wearing red pants & a red fake fur. I gave Alison a red "Frame of Reference" shape cut out of fabric. Someone from the museum photographed us together & I got a copy of the photo that I put in one of my bks. Alison had lost her short-term memory so when I walked away for a few minutes & came back she didn't remember me. However, she knew about her memory problem so she sd something like: 'We probably just talked with each other a few minutes ago, didn't we?' This show at the CMoA was possibly the only show there that's ever interested me.

"Alison Knowles starred in the New York première of the Alphabet Symphony, the composer in absentia somewhere in Paris. She was assisted by Ben Patterson, Shieko Shiomi (now known as Mieko Shiomi, for astrological reasons), and Joe Jones. The occasion was the presentation of an evening of my work during the Monday Night Letter series at the Café au Gogo.

"Alison felt very much at home with the piece. She had witnessed the London première as well as several other performances at Fluxus festivals in Paris, Copenhagen and Düsseldorf. Her actions included one that I would never have dreamed up, jumping rope disguised as Adolf Hitler." - p 80

Remember the days when avant-garde work by the likes of John Cage, Frank Zappa, & Yoko Ono & John Lennon was presented on mainstream TV? Is there anything equivalent to that today?!

"The first line of each couplet is the male voice, the second the female. Although written in 1964, I read it for the first time for John Giorno's Dial-a-Poem service in 1969. When Merv Griffin decided to feature Dial-A-Poem on his television show, he selected Duet, and it was read magnificently well by Garry Moore and a beuatiful lady guest, and telecast to family audiences from coast to coast which made me wonder whether the erotic imagery came across as well as I once thought it did." - p 98

Once a person is associated w/ a mvmt everything they've done tends to become associated w/ that mvmt regardless of how appropriate or inappropriate that is. Williams gives a history that begins before FLUXUS existed. E.G.: he provides a photo w/ the caption: "Darmstadt 1960: Performing An Opera for the first time, in pre-Fluxus days." (p 100)

Not getting pd. How many people realize that even 'famous' people don't necessarily get pd - even by prestigious monied institutions. When I was on the phone w/ a Manhattan MoMA employee about my attending a screening of my work the person at the other end started to offer me plane fare but was cut off by someone who had her switch mid-word to bus fare. That's one of many examples of how things really work.

"1962 Simultaneous Operas for One-eyed Poet and Millionaire

Amsterdam, Singel Canal bridge

Moving Theater No. 1

Performed October 2

"It was first performed as a street piece during an afternoon and evening of events arranged by Wolf Vostell. Since Robert [Filliou] was unable to make the journey from Paris you didn't get paid for doing things like this in those days" - p 123

"It wasn't until the following year that Robert and I performed the Simultaneous Operas together, under the auspices of the Domaine Poétique, along with works by William Burroughs. François Dufrene, Brion Gysin, Bernard Heidsieck, Jean-Clarence Lambert, and Gherasim Luca. The mise-en-scène was managed by Jean-Loup Philippe, the best known of us all in those days: Ingrid Bergman, wearing a black bra, had seduced him, night after night, on the stage of the Théatre de Paris, in Robert Anderson's smash hit Tea and Sympathy." - p 124

Who's Who is in the mind of the beholder. For me, Burroughs, Dufrene, Gysin, Heidsieck, & Bergman are people of note while the rest are unknowns. As such, it's interesting to read that Philippe was famous at the time. Who's Who comes & goes.

"1965 Co-Invention No. 3

The Pink Spaghetti Handshake

Paris

Centre Américain des Artistes

Deuxième Festival de la Libre Expression

Introduced May 20

"With the inpired creation of The Pink Spaghetti Handshake the co-inventions entered the realm of les beaux-arts. It developed logically from our fist two co-inventions, The Spaghetti Sandwich and The Pink Earplug. The concept of spaghetti was there already, as well as the colour pink. We combined the two, and shook hands through an intervening piece of paper. The results were coloured impressions of our hands, some with strands of pink spaghetti adhering to the surface, on both sides of the paper. These distinct sheets of paper were inserted into the programs of the second of Jean-Jacques Lebel's Festival of Free Expression." - p 136

Ha ha! Williams's recountings are full of affection for friends (in this case, Robert Filliou) & an embracing of spontaneity & absurdity. What's not to like?! The following 2pp are color images of a handshake paper (both sides).

One of my favorite composers (see my relevant website: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100Composers.html ) is Earle Brown. Everytime I run across mention of him I'm further impressed.

"Through one of the crossed-out lines I can barely make out the words "earle transmits." The "earle" is the American composer Earle Brown, who was living in Paris, very much the man-of-the-hour, a star of the Domaine Musicale series. He was also a close friend of the co-inventors.

"Extra-Sensory Misperception shared the bill with one of Earle's compositions, in which Earle, Robert and I co-starred. It may surprise many of Earle's disciples and admirers that he is the composer of an uncharacteristic piece called Lecture-Demonstration in Composing Music by Chance (for Jean-Jacques Lebel). It is subtitled "Technical and philosophical exposition of statistical, random chance procedures in the Art of music today. Followed by the first performance of the composed work." And it was wild! Earle is a very funny man, and this piece showed him at his funniest. The audience roared with laughter except for one spectator. He was a famous Op artist (whose name I have forgotten) and he attacked the three of us for making fun of chance composition nd other brave new forms in art. The man never spoke to me again." - p 141

Victor Vasarely lived in Paris in 1965.

Maciunas & Williams end up at odds w/ each other b/c Eric Anderson wrote a letter to Maciunas pretending to be Williams. A subsequent letter exchange amplified this. But in 1963, before this prank appened, Williams received a letter that 'set the stage' for political disagreement between him & 'the Boss'.

""Emmett, I must know how you feel about involving Fluxus pollitically (sic) with the party (you know which one).

""He's serious, this fellow," says Robert. "Is this what Fluxus is really all about?"

""It's certainly not my idea of Fluxus."

"Our activities loose (sic) all significance if divorced from socio-political struggle going on now. We must coordinate our activities or we shall become another "new wave", another dada club, comming (sic) and going. There is resistance from Brechy, Watts, La Monte and Mac Low, who are either a-political or naive anarchists, or becomming (sic) sort of indistinct pseudo-sociallists (sic) all this is just crap." - p 168

Williams comes out in support of straight-facing. I mostly agree.. but I must report that my own experience as someone whose facial expressions rarely show that I'm joking that it can be a problematic basis for confusion for those on the receiving end.

"It's fun. But it isn't funny when the performers start laughing at themselves. Fluxus performers and good actors and performers of any persuasion understand this. But I have spent days of rehearsals trying to still the giggles of student Fluxus enthusiasts, and of artist-friends who don't understand the art of dead-panning." - p 182

"Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine - and here comes thirty! Is Fluxus really that old? It doesn't feel like it. Until you start looking at these old photographs and realize that the reunions of the original Fluxus troupers will be getting smaller and smaller. No george Maciunas, no Addi Køpcke, no Robert Filliou, no Bob Watts, no Joseph Beuys. Soon, all too soon, there will be only the old pictures to look at. Who'll be looking at them? And will they have any idea of what Fluxus performances were really like? Just old photos. Dead documents. Histories. Hypotheses and evaluations. Dissertations on the aesthetic principia of a non-movement that had none." - p 196

Well.. for what it's worth, I'm one of the people who will be looking at them, one of the people who listens to the recordings & reads the bks, one of the people w/ personal memories of the Flux-folk & I know others like me. Alas, we, too, are getting old & will die soon - but that's the nature of everything, eh?! It's possible that Neoism is the 1st Cultural Conspiracy that's heavily documented on video & films - as well as in audio recordings & bks. Those types of documents might help prolong a more realistic &/or informed memory of Neoism. Perhaps. & what'll come after us? Will there be holograms (finally)? Clones?

"Yes, it really was a happy birthday after all, and not the exhumation that some of us had anticipated. The performers were twenty years older, and we looked it. But Fluxus, the ever undefinable, ever inexplicable Fluxus, hadn't added a single wrinkle. Too much promiscuity over the years, perhaps, and too many progeny, but still no signs of growing old." - p 198

I'm in the midst of compiling a 5 volume work on Neoism. It's hard to believe that I'll ever finish it, it's too huge of a project. I've made a note to myself to use the following quote in one of the volumes:

"Whatever Fluxus is, or was, or may become, a Fluxus performance is inconceivable without Fluxus people. Fluxus is a plural concept. Which is one good reason why Fluxus people tend to Flux together. At least when they choose to Flux at all." - p 198

Why did I choose that quote & how wd it fit into the context of bks about Neoism? Perhaps, like this: 'Whatever Neoism is, or was, or may become, a Neoist performance is inconceivable without Neoist people.' Yes, it takes a certain, perhaps undefinable, type of person to be a Neoist. People that think that by imitating the style of a Neoist is being Neoistic itself are failing to live up to an unstated standard of daring & originality.

When I think about FLUXUS I don't think of it as something that was well-documented in motion pictures - &, yet, Stan Vanderbeek & Nam June Paik & Jonas Mekas & Jud Yalkut all created work that at least touched on the fringes of FLUXUS if not swam in the thick of its currents.

"1967 Utica, New York

Utica College

May (date uncertain)

"In May 1967, Carol Bergé, Jackson Mac ow, Jerome Rothenberg, Jud Yalcutt, and I, billing ourselves as the Jacjurismetics, a word compounded from syllables in our respective names, travelled to the Utica College of Syracuse University, to present a varied program of our works. The date is uncertain. But Jackson wrote recently that it had to be after May 7, because we performed his Bluebird Asymmetries, which we finished on that date.

"In any case, the performers of the Cellar Song Carol, Jackson, Jud, and myself got only a quarter of the way through the permutations, accompanied by the jeers and Bronx cheers of students who were not as enlightened as we were. before we broke down, and gave up." - p 220

People who wd expect students to be somehow enlightened or open-minded can find many examples to the contrary. A performance by John Cage of his "Empty Words (Part III)" on December 7, 1977 - released on Cramps Records - reveals an intense degree of audience hostility, mostly or entirely by college student age Italian 'leftists'. Cage perseveres w/ astonishing quiet strength. My bk entitled "footnotes" has a section in it called "Reactionary Muddle America" in wch the hatred for a performance of mine is presented in great detail. The students in the audience for that were so viciously close-minded that it's hard to tell them apart from a lynch mob. They were middle-class suburban Americans.

"The Last French-fried Potato" - p 230

"The occasion was the exhibitionL'Aujourd'hui de Demain, and the poem was intended to coexist with sculpture, paintings, and objects of Pol Bury, Lygia Clark, Lucio Fontana, Victor Vasarely, Jesus Rafael Soto, and other kineticists, vibrationists, and Op artists."

[..]

"Two performers are seated at a table, facing the audience. (They move about on the stage after the performance gets under way.) In front of them is a plate heaped with French fries. The first performer eats one French fry, then improvises a line beginning with "No more . . ." ("No more holes in my shoes," for example, or "No more bad reviews" no more of the persons, places, things, and details of living that he will never experience again now that the world is coming to an end.

"Then the second performer improvises a line in French (he does not translate, he improvises) beginnig with "plus de . . ." "plus de sémantique générale" for example, or "plus de dépassement de la problématique de l'art"." - p 231

This wd be a nice poem to have performed by everyone in a fast food restaurant that has French fries in front of them - even if they're being called "Freedom Fries" at the time.

A substantial color section follows page 240. On what I call "page 240H" there's a picture of presumed Vaudevillians at a place called "Sammy's Bowery Follies". The caption under it reads:

"New York in the Sixties: For George Maciunas, Fluxus was "a fusion of Spike Jones, vaudeville, gag, children's games and Duchamp." George is gone, Spike Jones is gone, Duchamp is gone. So is Sammy's Bowery Follies, where Ann Noël and I spent many an evening mingling with old vaudevillians, unwitting precursors of Fluxus."

& what was FLUXUS an unwitting precursor of? What am I an unwitting prescursor of? Hopefully, something inspired & friendly.

& on pp 240N&O there're 2 pictures centered around Sarenco as a filmmaker. Sarenco was the curator of an exhibit & 2 volume catalog therefrom called "Poesia Totale" that I was included in. I knew nothing about him & here he is presented as a guy making films in Verona & Kenya. Now I'll have to look for copies of them online. [No luck..]

Williams's adult 'career' was mainly centered in Europe even tho he was American. He did go back to the US & perform.

"1966 New York

St. Mark's in the Bowery

Performed February 24

"Thursday evening came. Would anybody come, anybody except Jerome Rothenberg, who had arranged the event, my first Performance with a capital P in America? I had invited a new friend, Philip Corner, a composer, and an old one, Tom Wasmuth, a painter, to help me with improvisations on the text of The Ultimate Poem. They came, And they improvised. And so did Paul Blackburn, Al Hansen, Ray Johnson, Marta Minujin, Max Newhouse, Nam June Paik, Jerry Rothenberg, and Carolee Schneemann, friends old and new. It was a welcome to New York for a bird-of-the-same-feather from Europe, an evening I wouldn't forget." - p 246

In retrospect, that seems like an amazing group of people - but in 1966 who wd've known who most or all of them were? On May 27, 1985, I performed at St. Mark's Poetry Project. When it came time to project my super-8 film from the yr before, "Neoist Guide Dog" (a mere 2:30), some members of the audience tried to stop the projectionist from screening it saying that I was 'taking advantage of the poor blind girl'. The film is of me w/ a dog mask on walking on all fours & leading around my legally blind girlfriend. This was our idea of having fun w/ her blindness. Apparently, these outraged audience members thought the 'poor blind girl' was too stupid to know how idiotic this looked. It's too bad the above-mentioned people weren't in the audience instead of the half-wits who tried to stop my show.

In 1968, Williams was an artist-in-residence at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. I've never heard of the place.

"The faculty for the seminar also includes the Japanese artist Ay-O, my best friend in America; Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland from Canada; Marta Minujin (an old friend from Paris days) and Alcides Lanza, both from Argentina, and Allan Kaprow, John Giorno, Nancy Graves and Max Neuhaus." - p 256

Note that he spells Neuhaus's name correctly this time.

ANYWAY, what an amazing faculty. It's like a Black Mountain College incarnated in New Jersey. It seems almost too good to survive - &, yet, it's still here: https://www.fdu.edu/ . No doubt, it's very different than it was in 1968 but I'm glad it's survived.

Further down p 256 Williams writes:

"Mike Snow is going to start shooting a new film next week, and I'll be making my debut as a film actor, a professor type who spends most of his time askign questions with yes or no answers. Mike has rigged the camera to move in predetermined arcs throughout the film. I don't understand the language of cinematography, quite, but the film looks fascinating to me on paper." - p 256

The film is called "<->" (aka "Back & Forth") & it was finished in 1969. I've seen it, it's not one of my favorites of Snow's work but he never did anything that isn't of interest to me.

"Appearing in the film are: Allan Kaprow, Emmett Williams, Max Neuhaus, Terri Marsala, Donna Aughey, Joyce Wieland, Luis Camnitzer, George Murphy, Susan, Ay-O, Dr. Gordon, Liba Bayrak, Annie Scotty, Mary, Mac, students from the H.E.P. Program and others. Nearby were Nancy Graves, Richard Serra, John Giorno, Paul Ide, Alison Knowles, Jud Yalkut and many others" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_and_Forth

Given the above cast & people-present, I suppose I shd add Snow to my list of FLUXUS filmmakers.

In 1969, Williams was artist-in-residence again, this time at the University of Kentucky. He was explained by Dan Gossett, Arts editor of The Kentuckey Kernel.

"Emmett Williams is a concrete poet. Being a concrete poet merely infers that one writes concrete poetry. Concrete poetry is the term that the unversed is hard pressd to define. Quoting Williams in his An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, published by Something Else Press, Inc, 'The visual element in their poetry tends to be structural, a consequence of the poem, a picture of the lines of force of the work itself, and not merely textural.'

"In other words, the concrete poem attempts to make a graphic representation with the words of his poem. Not limited to the confines of linear, word-after-word representation, the poet is free to use any combination of words and symbols in any design that he sees fit." - p 260

I like Emmett Williams's poetry, if it's had much influence among poets I haven't noticed it. I detest Charles Bukowski's poetry, it's had plenty of influence on poets that I've noticed - esp by enabling a plethora of abusive drunks who have little formal imagination.

"A young poet named Richard Boulware arranged this performance in Venice [CA]. He also introduced me to the world's most complicated man, Charles Bukowski. I remember all too well the day I invited him to read for my class. On the way to the institute he insisted that we stop by a liquor store to buy a bottle of scotch. He made himself at home with it in the front seat. When we reached the classroom, full of students awaiting the arrival of one of their cultural heros, he took his place, put books and manuscripts on the table, and then announced that he wasn't going to read a fuckin' word until he received his money. I rushed over to the finance office, explained my plight, and returned with a check. As I entered the room, Bukowski was drinking from the bottle to whet his vocal chords, which were somewhat overtaxed by a tirade against me and concrete poetry in general, which he regarded as so much crap, only in more concrete terms. I handed him the check, he examined it, put it in his pocket, took another swig, and started his reading. A great performance. A pretty good poet." - p 264

Now there are at least 3 places in this bk where Williams manages to tactfully avoid criticizing people who criticized him. That takes self-restraint. Earlier he avoids naming Vasarely, saying he didn't remember his name. Later, he claimes to've not been able to read the signature of an insulting letter writer - the signature of poet bill bissett. Here, he maintains an emotional distance. If I'd been in his situation I might've done the same. After all, Bukowski wd be leaving soon & it wd be over. I have a VHS tape of Bukowski reading at Bellevue Community College in 1970. He regales his student audience w/ a tale of him pimping out a drunk woman who was w/ him, an utterly debasing story. The students laugh. Really? Is this the kind of thing that entertains them? Personally, I think humans are debased entirely too much as it is - & it's not funny. I don't find Bukowski "complicated", just stupid & incosiderate.

Williams managed to move from one supportive academic & cultural enviroment to another. At Harvard University in 1977:

"This lecture-performance, caled Piling It On, began as a serious slide-lecture, reviewing my work through the years. Five minutes along in my life story, the projector broke down. In an effort to get the machine to work, the slide trays were knocked off the table, scattering the story of My Life in Art all over the floor. Confusion reigned, as the inventor of clichés has said so aptly, and so often." - p 275

Williams switched to another performance. He was quick to adapt. What wd you do? In 1987, in Montréal, I was set to perform my "GENERIC AS-BEENISM", a complex piece that involved simultaneous projections of VHS, super-8, & slides. Unbeknownst to me, a woman who was an assistant in the festival had taken my slides & thrown them in the trash - justifying this by criticizing me as a 'pornographer disguising himself as an artist'. My NOT calling myself an "artist" hadn't penetrated her imbecilic brain. Fortunately, another woman had seen this destructive act & led me to the trash-can to retrieve the slides. Thank you.

Now, I, too, have been an A/V technician/projectionist & I can confess to having had my bad moments. One time, at a museum where I worked, Crispin Glover had come to show a fantastic movie he'd directed, Glover was an incredibly nice person. I'd forgotten that something had happened to the projection rm controls that made it so that when everything else turned on the mid-range amplifier didn't - even though it shd have. Someone other than me had created this problem. The solution was for me to crawl undeneath a table & manually switch the amp on. I forgot to do this & the sound was horrible for the entire film w/o my knowing it. I didn't find out until the film was over. Glover didn't complain, he's a saint as far as I'm concerned. Still, I've felt bad about it ever since.

In 1979, he was at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. That was when bissett wrote his poison pen letter:

"he typed it his impassioned ode on '2.13.79.' The poet's scrawl of a signature is illegible, and he included no return address. I quote it here to show that I am not everybody's favourite poet. (See 1990 entry for The Boy and the Bird in Halifax.)"

[..]

"have you ever gotten your arse out

of fuckin cambridge

and visited glouster, is it too much to ask

and assume you might have stayed and studied.

"you stupid american poetasskisser academian

in the most reductive way." - p 276

Wow, bissett comes across, to me, as yet-another bitter bigoted ignorant drunk.

On the following page, it's 1981 & Williams is at the Gemeente Museum in The Hague.

"The performance took place at the vernissage of a retrospective exhibition of my work, Schemes and Variations." p 277

I mentioned the bk of the same name earlier. Highly recommended.

On to Stuttgart in 1987:

"Well, Charlemagne walked in, in what they call a huff, and attempted to lure me away from my hosts and fans, explaining to me and to the assmbled guests and to the waiters and to the cooks and to the bottle washers and to the rafters that my hosts were filthy fascist pigs and worse and that I had better watch my step and stop keeping company with such debased creatures. But Charlemagne, I love you." - p 284

More of Williams the diplomat. The "Charlemagne" being Charlemagne Palestine.

& then there's Gertrude Stein:

"The public is invited to join in, or listen to, the marathon reading of Gertrude Stein's masterpiece, The Making of Americans, presented by the Language Happenings class of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

"The reading will take place on the 4th floor, 1961 Hollis Street, commencing at 10:00 a.m. Friday, November 2, and will continue throughout the day and night and as long as it will take to read the 925 pages of this seldom read revolutionary and influential classic written almost 70 years ago."

[..]

"At times there were thiry or forty of us. At four in the morning e were down to two. Daylight brought more readers. And even more came, to be in on the kill. It was all over forty-eight hours after it started." - p 288

I think "The Making of Americans" is one of the worst things ever written. It's seldom read b/c most or all of the people who promote it find it more than enuf to just read a few pages before (or after) they laud its 'genius'. If it's "revolutionary" then it's 'revolutionary' for a privileged rich woman to drone on aiming for the world's record for boorishness. I read the entire thing & reviewed it. My review begins:

"I finished it. The entire thing. As I was saying, it is finished. As I was saying I read all of Gertrude Stein's truly mind-bogglingly tediously self-indulgent & largely contentless "The Making of Americans". As I was saying, all 925 pages of it + the 29 pages of the Foreword & the Introduction. I AM THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD TO EVER DO THIS. I don't believe the author of the Foreword, William H. Gass, has read all of it. As I was saying, I don't believe the author of the Introduction, Steven Meyer, has done this thing. As I was saying, I don't think the editor(s) of the Dalkey Archive have done this thing. As I was saying, I don't believe it. Maybe Alice B. Toklas did it, maybe. It is claimed that Alice B. Toklas typed all this for Stein."

Eventually, Williams makes it to Japan:

"A Chauffeur arrived to drive the Ay-Os and Williamses to a Welcoming Dinner Party hosted by the mayor. There was a lavish meal, with many speeches. Even Garry and I stood up and spoke. Then Akiko Saito, the master's mother, told the assembled officials how wonderfully Garry sang, and asked him to perform Tit Willow again.

"(From Ann Noël 1987 diary)" - p 297

"1976"

[..]

"Performed August 24"

"There is a myth that has made the rounds of the English-speaking world: everybody in Japan speaks English. To facilitate the democratization of Nippon after the great war, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur decreed that all Japanese would learn English, and voila! or sora!, as we say over there it was "English spoken here" everywhere and ever after." - p 299

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima was on August 6, 1945. I'm not sure I'd want to even perform in Japan in the same mnth as its anniversary.

"Nam June Paik's Zen for Head, which I performed, took them all by surprise. It was certainly dramatic to do it in a Museum of Graphic Arts where calligraphy is taught, and to use my own head of hair, dipped into traditional black ink, as a brush. After the performance, a collector of calligraphy asked me if he could have the scroll for his collection." - p 310

You can imagine.

"Imagine, if you will: You are a performing guest at the annual conference of the National Institute for Creative Aquatics.

"The author of Fundamentals of Synchronized Swimming delivers an address on aquatic creativity, its background, and its place in our culture, followed by a pay-as-you-go wine and cheese bar.

"Outstanding aquatic choreographers discuss, analyze and illustrate How They Did It in the pool gallery." - p 315

Now imagine my having access to an Olympic size swimming pool at Chatham College:

""Yr of Sundays" K7 Release Party"

- main footage shot at the Chatham College Swimming Pool in the (former) Mellon Mansion, Pittsburgh, us@ on Sunday, March 29th, 1998, 8 to 9:30PM

- incorporating footage from the Volunteers Collective feature that was projected as part of the above

- edit finished September 6, 2019E.V.

254. Volunteers Collective "A Year of Sundays" Release Party @ the Chatham College Swimming Pool

- Chatham College Swimming Pool in the (former) Mellon Mansion, Pittsburgh, us@

- Sunday, March 29th, 1998, 8 to 9:30PM

- The Volunteers Collective is a project started in '89 (see entries 125, 127, 181, 242, 243, 245, 247, 250, & 251) that's gone thru various phases since then - the phase most recently preceding this event being 2 monthly series. A series on the1st Tuesday of every month @ the Red Room @ Normal's Store/Performance-Space started in January of 1997 & a series on the last Sunday of every month (in theory) @ various sites in Pennsylvania started in March of 1997. This was the release party for the Widémouth cassette (#18) entitled "A Year of Sundays" from this latter. It was intended to be a climax to the series since I've somewhat decided to not work within the Volunteers Collective context anymore. This decision was made largely to disassociate myself from the Baltimore VC which doesn't seem to have a conceptual orientation along the lines of what I'm currently most interested in. My preference is for what I'm provisionally calling "CircumSubstantial Playing" - meaning playing in which the whole circumstances under which the playing occurs is created/found & concentrated on as the primary stimulus for substance to be improvised out of. Such an approach factors in social & physical elements as being of high importance & isn't necessarily concerned with "music". "Music"-production seeming to be the main point of the Baltimore VC series. I advertised this event with the following e-mail notice:

Sunday, March 29th, 1998, at 8PM, in the Chatham College Swimming Pool located in the lower depths of what was the Mellon Mansion, people who think they might have fun doing such a thing (or something or another) will gather in the pool with street clothes on (no bathing suits PLEASE) to make sound while a smoke machine fogs up the area. I'm asking people to bring metal salad mixing bowls to float with candles in them - to also be used as percussion instruments. It's also suggested that waterproof sound makers be brought. As if that's not enough, the pool lights will be off so at various times & in various combinations the lighting will consist of the candles, a strobe light, & a (hopeful) video projection of (a so-far unedited) edit/compilation of the (presumably) complete Volunteers Collective footage - which is quite alot. This vaudeo will be projected onto the smoke, at least, & (dubiously) onto a screen planted above or in the pool as well - resulting in a perplexity of reflections. I'll probably bring masks to be worn by those not afraid to have their perceptions further confused. This is not advised for people inclined towards DROWNING under oddball sports conditions!

I did manage to complete the vaudeo edit - with sound from 23 sessions & visuals from 19. The selections used were highly fragmented & usually short & structured with substantial black space around the actual shot & separating sections so that they would project onto different parts of the screen, so that they would intrude suddenly, & so that they wouldn't play long enough to completely muddy the reverberant acoustic environment. The screen was made from white nylon Spandex & was approximately 10 feet high by 15 feet wide & was stretched perpendicular to the dividing line between the shallow & deep ends of the pool. Anything projected on it could be seen from both sides clearly. Wanting to have this be a potentially participatory experience for whoever might attend, this wasn't restricted to 'veteran' players to the exclusion of 'amateurs/students'. As such, a mix of the crude & the subtle was to be expected. Given that I started @ precisely 8PM & that most people wandered in after that, entering the room must've been disorienting. The strobe back-lit the screen & the video projection front-lit it. In the foggy dark, it was hard to see where you were walking & there were power cords & other objects around to be careful of. People danced in the strobe & the projection, played in the pool & wandered around the perimeter. There were big plastic water jugs as percussion & flotation devices + kickboards floating in the pool. I'd provided various small instruments, masks, & siamese twin outfits (which weren't used) & etta cetera & I provided 10 squeaky toys usually sold for dogs to play with. These were variously shaped, such as as a human foot, a chicken leg, etc.. Rachel Matthews & Sharyn Lee Frederick brought metal salad mixing bowls to float - one of which had a lit candle in it. Michael Pestel had arranged for the school to provide the fog machine, the Spandex, the strobe, the vaudeo projector, the pool, the VCR, & the sound system. We, unfortunately, had to pay a 'lifeguard' to be there who did next to nothing (including even be there all the time) & who was the only person present to be paid. The darkness & the chaos contributed to what I suspect was a conglomerate of quasi-autistic experiences for the attendees. I spent most of my time doing the lifeguard's job & making sure no-one drowned, tripped over wires, or otherwise hurt themselves, - as well as managing the technical end, etc.. Meanwhile, Carol danced, wearing a tutu, creating shadows - often in what I thought of as a 'dream-like' isolation from others @ the relatively uncluttered perimeter of the deep end. etta cetera slid across the floor on the leg-ends of a black velvet pants suit her mother had given her. I wore my "Hir Suit" (mechanic's coveralls with wigs attached) with a plastic "gorilla" chest bared & a large red sombrero. People wandered in & out - some mainly in there in the dark & possibly never even seeing who else was around them squeaking & screaming & throwing the water jugs at the walls. At least 23 people participated ranging in age from, perhaps, 13 to 46. These included those mentioned above + Ailecia Ruscin + Lowell + Margaret (?) & her son + Greg Pierce + Mark Tierney + Edgar Bucholtz + Terry + Ava Collins + many others whose names I don't know. My main criticisms might be that the live sound didn't always interest me & that the lighting wasn't disorienting enough. Nonetheless, given the dangers of the pool environment, I'm happy that we could push it as far as we did without anyone getting hurt.

***************************************************************************

Ok, I 'cdn't' resist the tangent.

"I fired the pistol, and the girls dived into the pool. The first sound, a crying baby, blared out. Nothing much happened. Then the second. No reaction.

"'Do something!"', I shouted.

"'But what do you want us to do?' came a voice from the pool.

"Do anything you want to do, I told them.

"What kind of things, and do we do it all together?

"Whatever you want to do. And no, I don't want you to all do the same thing, and not together."

[..]

"The burden of the rehearsals was to unburden them of the fear of letting themselves go. Their natural inclinations, through training, were to develop teamwork, to be responsible members of society, to act grown up, and here I was inviting them to an anarchic free-for-all, and to make fools of themselves in front of their parents and brothers and sisters and teachers and classmates." - p 326

Williams covers plenty of ground, including a play of alphabetically progressive unlikely alliterative insults:

"FALSE-HEARTED FANNY: You skewbald skittle of a skivvy slater.

THE BYRONIC BYZANTINE: You sleuth-hound sliver of a slob slump.

FALSE-HEARTED FANNY: You smirch snaffle of a snafu snivel.

THE BYRONIC BYZANTINE: You soak sock of a sock solecism.

FALSE-HEARTED FANNY: You sometime sorghum of a soroptimist soundtrack. (Removes one leg of piano, starts sawing a second.)" - p 340

For many readers in search of free thinking observations critical of propaganda, William S. Burroughs has been an important writer potentially cutting thru the bullshit w/ an acerbic wit. Emmett Williams's having a connection to him came as somewhat of a surprise to me.

"This manuscript was a little essay that I had written for the backside of William Burroughs' first record, Call Me Burroughs, published by Gait Frogé's English Bookshop in Paris in 1965." - p 363

In 1989, 27 yrs after the 1st Flux festival, there was one in Bad Godesberg in Bonn wch Williams says "what must have been the greatest Fluxus extravaganza of all time." (p 365). "The Cast" were:

Mary Bauermeister

Bazon Brock

Henning Chrisiansen

Al Hansen

Dick Higgins

Alison Knowles

Joe Jones

Maurizio Kagel

Milan Knizak

Alison Knowles

Allan Kaprow

György Ligeti

Nam June Paik

Benjamin Patterson

Tasako Saito

Ben Vautier

and

Emmett Williams" - p 365

&, yes, Knowles is listed twice in the quoted passage. Perhaps the 1st time was to put her w/ her husband & the 2nd was to have her in alphabetical order. What an absolutely amazing line-up of brilliance. I wd've been 35 at the time & cd've, therefore, potentially attended. Of course, I was both poor & busy w/ other things but I still look back on the time & wish that I'd been there.

The people of interest to me continue to pile on:

"1984 Bremen

Sendesaal Radio Bremen

Performed May 12

"The occasion for this performance of musica was the annual Pro Musica Nova series in Bremen. But you won't find musica listed on the program. I called my contribution When the Music Stops. In this disguise it fit nicely between Frederic Rzewski's A Machine for Two Pianists and Morton Feldman's Poems and Voices II.

"When the Music Stops set out to be a homage to the famous donkey, dog, cat, and rooster quartet immortalized in Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten of the Brothers Grimm."

[..]

"Instead, I resurrected an old piece called musica, in Italian, that appeared in Vito Hannibal Acconci's magazine O to 9 in 1968." - p 170

1991, Copenhagem, Royal Academy of Art:

"Eberhard Blum shared the bill with me, performing John Cage's Thirty-one Mesostics for Merce Cunningham and Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. As I have remarked several time, Eberhard is a hard act to follow. It was the first time that I performed the Swahili variations, which added an air of incantatory dazzlement." - 390

Yet-another gig to not-be-missed, that I missed. I DO have recordings of Blum, on the Hat Art label, if I remember correctly. I'll have to relisten to those. As the dates, progress & the locations vary it keeps striking me that there were many opportunites for me to experience Williams's work 1st-hand that were missed by me. As it was, even Williams wasn't necessarily able to be on hand when work of his was premiered - such as the steam poems in Cambridge, Boston, in 1981. It was only a few yrs later that I passed thru the area at least twice - but too late for Williams's work.

"There is a passage in The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead that has stuck with me since I first read the book going on forty years ago. (I wonder: do the young and curious still read Whitehead? For that matter, does anyone still read him? The copy of the Dialogues that I own was withdrawn from circulation by the British Council Library in Berlin after slumbering unread in the stacks fro twenty-six years, and put on sale for one mark.)" - p 401

& that's what the fate of my bks & scores & recordings in the collection of my local library will be at best.

1981, Cambridge, John F. Kennedy Park:

"Steamshufflists? Yes, a steamshuffle is an art system that interacts with pedestrians . . . As people walked past eight upright glass panels in Kennedy Park, they intercepted a photo-cell beam and triggered a spray of steamaimed at the glass. As the steam condensed, poetry by Emmett Williams stencilled in clear acrylic appeared. Synthesized sounds and words added more dimensions. It was all a bit like the Wizard of Oz a thorough delight to the kids who ran past the beams and made the steam spray.

"Evenings, the photo-cells also triggered a strobe light. The poems appeared 'as if traced by a finger on a misty window,' and the strobe lights 'froze the steam and poetry against the dark sky.'

"What a spectacular opportunity the Steamshuffle offered a poet to get poetry off the page and into the environment." - p 402

Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I'm reminded of Stan Vanderbeek's experiments of a few yrs earlier in wch he ran a pipe w/ holes in it on the UMBC campus from wch steam issued to be projected onto.

Steamshuffle even made it to PGH:

"1986 Pittsburgh

Oliver Plaza

The Mattress Factory Series

February 25 March 2"

Crossing paths w/ Williams's work? Close, but no cigar. I didn't move to PGH until a decade later, I didn't do anything at the Mattress Factory until 5 yrs later than that. Too bad.

"The letter was postmarked Lodz, the polluted industrail city in the center of Polska where Roman Polanski learned his craft, and which the Poles pronounce WOODGE." - p 409

WOODGE?! I can add that to Siobhan & Worcestershire.

Williams is invited to become the "Dyrektor-Prezydent" of an Artists Museum in Soviet Poland. WTF?!

""Do you really think the government would permit such a meeting? Especially our kind of artists?"

""Let's ask them."

""Yes, we ask them," said Mitan. And he assured me that martial law or no martial law, Poland is Poland and Poles are Poles, and you can do anything you want in Poland if you ask the right people.

"There was some truth in what he said. Hadn't he, only the day before, after I discovered that my visa had expired, taken my passport to a friend at some ministry or other, got me an extension, and even signed my name forged might be a better word on the application form? Viva Polska!" - p 411

Hence, ETC, an International Seminar of the Arts in Warsaw was born in 1987. & who shd be a part of it? The usual community of interesting folks PLUS, on May 25, 26, & 27, a "Lecture on "Feminist Art" by Faith Wilding", a ""Panel Discussion on "Feminist Art" led by Faith Wilding", & a continuation of the latter with Faith Wilding & others. Why do I mention Faith Wilding 3 times? B/c I modeled for her art class at CMU & one of my oldest friends & collaborators in PGH, Hyla Willis, was a member of Faith Wilding's group subRosa. SO, the small world gets smaller.

On page 426, a chart for Williams's New Ways appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of Septembe 19, 1964. Its leftmost column lists sound effects to appear simultaneous w/ phrases & descriptions of projections.

"alison knowles' nivea cream piece for o.w.

applause

automobile starter

baby

breathing"

"So: in Darmstadt, by candle light, the project got under way. With compound words. Stress patterns no longer interested me. I took compound words, split them up, and turned the freed second halves into verbs. The poetic result was fascinating. Dormant metaphors, and meanings that lay hidden in the compound words, suddenly sprang to life, creating new poetic situations mostly absurd, always interesting. A bittleneck, for instance. It is, literally , the neck of a bottle, and, figuratively, something that slows down traffic or holds down the flow of production. By splitting the word, and changing neck into a verb, the prosaic bottle starts making love. And the cork screws, the eye lashes, the fox trots, the pussy willows and the joy sticks."

[..]

"The split compounds are only a part of the piece. To bring the 'new ways' to life in performance, I added fifty projections and fifty sounds, so that following fast upon the reading of 'the new way the horse flies' (for example) or 'the hew way the curtain calls' come a picture and a sound." - p 428

In 1971, at the California State College in Long Beach, students enetered the picture, wch included:

"Stefan Weisser's the mountain looked at the mountain looked at the mountain looked at the mountain looked at the mountain looked at the mountain" - p 430

Williams may've never known that Weisser bloomed into Z'EV, probably the most original percussionist I ever had the pleasure to witness perform, once in Baltimore, once in Pittsburgh.

On p "439" (actually p 438 - mislabelled so there're 2 adjacent pp "439"),

"I remember exploring the cemeteries of Halifax and pausing at St. Paul's Burial Ground before the gravestone of General Ross, who captured Washington in 1814 and burned down the White House."

Now, that's a bit of juicy history I hadn't known.

"The Burning of Washington, also known as the Capture of Washington, was a successful British amphibious attack conducted by Rear Admiral George Cockburn during Admiral John Warren's Chesapeake campaign. It was the only time since the American Revolutionary War that a foreign power had captured and occupied a United States capital. Following the defeat of American forces at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814, a British army led by Major-General Robert Ross marched on Washington, D.C. That evening, British soldiers and sailors set fire to multiple public buildings, including the Presidential Mansion, United States Capitol, and Washington Navy Yard.

"The attack was in part a retaliation for prior American actions in British-held Upper Canada, in which U.S. forces had burned and looted York the previous year and had then burned large portions of Port Dover. Less than four days after the attack began, a heavy thunderstorm, possibly a hurricane and a tornado, extinguished the fires and caused further destruction. The British occupation of Washington, D.C. lasted for roughly 26 hours." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

A tribute to Dieter Roth:

"From the early 1950s onward he almost single-handedly created the genre of artworks that has come to be called, rather clumsily, Artists' Books and Books by Artists. Meaning: bookworks produced by artists, by artists in control of the means of production, without the support and intervention of galleries and established publishers." - p 445

Bookmaking being a subject of particular interest to me. I have a website that lists most of the bks that I've made, contributed to, or, at a very minimum, been mentioned in:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Books.html

The following quote is esp important to me:

"After my friend Eberhard Blum bought a copy of the book I didn't give him one, the deluxe edition was too expensive, and I was desperately poor in those days he suggested that we bring it to life and perform it together. I had heard his extraordinary rendering of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, and jumped at the opportunity of making music with him." - p 460

I, too, have been unable to give copies of some of my bks to friends who deserve them b/c of the expense. In the case of the 2 volume "Wrjtjng spelled w/ a "q"" I cdn't even manage to get a copy for myself for something like 3 mnths:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2024WrjtjngV1.html

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2024WrjtjngV2.html

It's reassuring to know that I'm not the only person who's been in that situation.

"Although I wrote The Red Chair in English, it appeared first in German, in 1960, in an abbreviated translation by Daniel Spoerri. This translation was published in the famous Limes Verlag anthology, movens: Dokumente and Analysen zur Dichtung, bildenden Kunst, Musik, Architektur, edited by Franz Mon in collaboration with Walter Höllerer and Manfred de la Motte.

"It was this German anthology, incidentally, that helped put me in touch with American artists in the early Sixties. To an ensuing exchange of letters with La Monte Young, who had discovered the book in New York, I owe my first contact with George Maciunas and other composers, poets, performers, and artists across the ocean who would one day become Fluxus.

"It also led to a correspondence with Thomas Merton, who published the abbreviated version, for the first time in English, in Monk's Pond, at the Abbey of Gethsemane, in 1968." - p 468

For me, that's fascinating.. I don't know how many other people wd be interested but the quality of this edition of this bk seems to indicate that there's a substantial readership expected. There's a Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh that's centered around political activism & wch hosted an early incarnation of the anarchist bks-to-prisoners program called Book 'Em.

2 samples of the score are as follows:

"I: help

II: here

III: I'll" - p 472

"I: that

II: them

III: them?" - p 472

4 letter words in alphabetical order. Note that the apostrophe in "I'll" is counted as a letter but that the question mark in "them?" isn't.

Ok, I think this is a great bk. Great as FLUXUS documentation, great as a history of one person's poetry & performance art, great even as a sampling of OuLiPo by someone who apparently was never associated w/ that group.

Might I also recommend my own "A Mere Outline for One Aspect of a Book on Mystery Catalysts, Guerrilla Playfare, neoism, booed usic, Mad Scientist Didactions, Acts of As-Beenism, So-Called Whatevers, Psychopathfinding, Uncerts, Air Dressing, Practicing Promotextuality, Imp Activism, CircumSubstantial Playing, etc..": http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutlineIndex.html ? People who like this bk of Williams' might like this website listing & describing (etc) my Mad Scientist Didactions at least as much.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

idioideo at gmail dot com

to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Anti-Neoism page

to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Audiography page

to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Bibliography page

to my "Blaster" Al Ackerman index

to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Books page

to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE BYOC page

to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Censored or Rejected page

to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Collaborations page

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