THE HYDRA

I’ve just begun flipping through the pages of Megan Prelinger’s gorgeous book, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962, and I’m already hooked. The huge book traces the history of the post-war technological boom, a time when space represented both a spirit of endless possibility and the sprawling potential of human knowledge. It’s quite different from other books on the space race. Prelinger fastidiously researched the scientific imaginaire of the era as illustrated in the graphic art and texts of popular culture: pulp comics, advertisements, novels, movie posters, photos and corporate propaganda. What Prelinger reveals is a dreamy fiction constructed and realized not just by scientists and scholars but people from all walks of the earth.

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This weekend the Los Angeles Getty Museum will host a theater performance of one of the towering Mexican poems of the 20th century “Piedra De Sol”, a work by the renowned and Nobel prize winning poet Octavio Paz. The multimedia performance is the commission of director Maria Morrett and is in connection to the sculpture exhibition “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire,”. It is a rare occurence that poetry gets an opportunity to pierce the popular consciouness in 2010, much less get a budget to stage a complete theater production around its creation. “Piedra Del Sol” is a poem that deserves such a treatment, it is a magnum opus of seismic dimensions with a lyrical exploration of eros, history, Mesoamerican/Hindu/and Greek symbols, along with a structure that was formed around the architectonics of the Aztec calendar. In many ways Octavio Paz’s poetry and literary ethos represents the manifold and intersecting interests exhibited here at Hydra. It is the pursuit of pluralistic dialogue with a keen curiosity in how cultures respond and affect each other through the arts and letters, with a view to forge and enhance artistic and cultural connections via the logos. [Read More]

Two intriguing books have recently been published with similar interests in the connected histories of both modern music and technology. Steve Goodman (a.k.a. dubstep progenitor Kode9) just published an ambitious academic work on MIT Press, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, illustrating sonic technology’s potential for either a politics of control or artistic creativity. And Dave Tomkins finished a book on the vocoder after ten years of accumulated research, How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Stop Smiling pub.), named after how the vocoder, a portmanteau of voice and coder, misreads the phrase, “how to recognize speech.” Tompkin’s thoroughly funkified book traces the history of the vocoder from its military origins as designed in response to Nazi wiretapping all the way to robotic electro jams and today’s Auto-tune synthesized, pop anthems championed by T-Pain.

It’s quite strange that so much sonic technology is so tightly tied to military inventions and purposes, and even more fascinating how much music has been able to appropriate the initial intentionality of that weaponry towards its own creative-minded purposes.
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Ego contra: erasures of the one — totality in the texture — time without trial and transformation. Ego pro: humility of erasure — texture as personality — time within trial and transformation. Lyn Hejinian’s newest book of poems sprawls such parts across a sea, building a bildung to stretch the expanse of, as she puts it in an earlier work (Oxota: A Short Russian Novel), the single instant of ignorance . . . [what] might correspond to what you have called paradise. [Read More]

Better known for his novels, Roberto Bolaño shirked from the nomen of NOVELIST. . . until a hungry first child forced him to think about making some money–ergo the novels. But it seems that even then he liked to think of his business as POETRY (himself, a detective of poetry)–with or without much white space on the page. But what is so entrancing about the protean referent ‘poetry’ that it might lead a writer to forensically seek poetry beyond the mediocre logic of literary terminology?– into and through the silence of the universe when we call out the name, POEM? Bolaño’s first collection of poems translated to English, The Romantic Dogs, generates a response (if a response can be offered in aether) by cleaving the high reactivity of volatile friends, lovers and poets, to a solvent flow of poetry in its unconstrained-because-uncontained sense: the silence of the universe when we . . . [Read More]

The best story in Nam Le’s eponymous collection The Boat is a harrowing “40 pages of entirely unpostmodern realism about boat people suffering as they try to escape the new Communist state.”

The experience of boat people is not exclusively Vietnamese.  There are the boat people of Cuba, of Northern Africa; of Eastern Europe; of Indonesia — and of course, Haiti.

Here in Miami, American immigration authorities have been detaining Haitian refugees who did no more than cram onto planes in order to flee the death and destruction wrought by the recent earthquake. The pregnant and ailing were told to get on board so they could be transported to receive medical care; they woke up in crowded cells shared with hundreds of detainees hailing from all parts of the world. A Babel of a boat.
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The creation of necessitousness (not need! but the feeling of being necessary) in poetry bathes the inevitability of the poetic line in the moonshine of desire– of passionately feeling that some thing must be this way (or that). Creating this requires that the poet put down the words in such a way that the elixir sinks into them. But what does the relationship of inevitability to intoxication tell us about the strength and weakness, power and vulnerability, of desire? Frank Bidart has distilled a treasure-tub of responses to this question, over a near-half-century career, unpacking the question with technique, reformulating it in the structure of the poetic line, asking careful readers to ask ourselves: what is this poetry we create when we succumb to the need to need? [Read More]

Celebrated Chilean filmmaker of the occult, Alejandro Jodorowsky–known primarily for his twisted vision of mystic enchantment in El Topo and The Holy Mountain–seems to have more cards up his sleeve. For the past 60 years Jodorowsky has reportedly studied practices of divination and self-transformation through the therapeutic art of tarot. He has focused his study specifically on an elaborate exegesis of the Marseilles Tarot, a possible source deck dated to the early medieval period, from which the more prominent decks have derived their symbolic systems. Destiny Books just published a 500-page translation of Marianne Costa’s and Jodorowsky’s co-written work, The Way of Tarot, a heavy tome detailing at least some intriguing methods of hermetic thinking if not rigorous historical research on the subject.

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