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charles olson on learning

[D]ig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it./And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you’re in, forever…

the shudder of recognition, is it, in fact that we are not only not alone, but perhaps even indistinct in our experience? try as i might to say that i am not another, i cannot tell myself from them when i see them at their most desperate. this farce, all this being and all these selves. they scatter like breeze-blown ashes so readily.

the same and the different

to close the eye
closes the distance
all is at the fingertip
reached out into a dark room

all is what is hard to the touch,
soft/warm/cold/empty

touch every third thing

touch every 3rd thing
and drag your fingers across it
making
mapping slow days
it is not

put every 10th
to your tongue
and wait

confirm:
the space between ___ and
___ is thin and unimportant

what is more important:
how the space is formed.

you can only see the sky

11/23/10

These floorboards
have rotted through
and the sky shows
in the ceiling.

The last glass pane.

You say,
this is an epoch
this soft mold that eats the staircase.

You don’t say it like that
I don’t remember how you do.
It doesn’t matter.
The house collapses
and we are somewhere else
and haven’t spoken in years

not so difficult
that you can make

performing
always, in acting

production
is the constant,

divergence
is the still

faint light
reflecting back

the stars against the eyelid
pressed tight with fingers

everything you do falls apart eventually

Kinect drawing in 3d. As you draw, at random intervals everything spins away from you, crashes into itself or walls around you, and shatters.

means of expression

The difficulty is in having no confidence in the forms that present themselves to you, in the means of expression that your time prizes. To be not so inclined robs you of the ability to speak and to listen, to, in a word, converse, to make discourse. My faith in the means of discourse of our time is limited and the flaws I see with it as an an avenue of expression and understanding are at best deeply flawed, leaving massive chasms of incoherence and abandoning swaths of what it means to be human.

blindspots

from christopher hawthorne

“…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces results that give a skewed view of the way architecture — and more important, the way we think and write about it — has evolved in recent years.

Among critics and architects alike, there has been a rising understanding that architecture is not just about stand-alone icons but is tied inextricably to urban planning, real-estate speculation, capital flows, ecology and various kinds of networks — and similarly that architecture criticism means more than simply writing about impressive new landmarks, green or not, produced by the world’s best-known firms.

Maybe, in other words, the most important achievement in green architecture over the last 10 or 30 years is not a single building at all. Maybe it’s a collection of schools or linked parks or the group of advisors brought together by a young mayor somewhere. Maybe it’s a new kind of solar panel, a tax credit or a zoning change. Maybe it’s tough to hang a plaque on — or photograph for a magazine spread.”