Thanks to the wonderful people at ANMLY mag who have an awesome hybrid creative blog, “The Markings of Music.” The editor, Olivia Muenz, was kind enough to publish excerpts from the HIST soundtrack, “Canoe Chase on the Horican,” and “Narra-mattah,” my audio/visual collaborations with Matthew Klane. Our recordings are accompanied with an interview diving in to the process behind the book and the reasoning behind a soundtrack for it. There are so many wonderful things on the blog so check them all out!
sound culture
Audio: Ronald Johnson’s “ARK 38, Ariel’s Songs to Prospero” /
I’m very excited to see access to the audio file of Ronald Johnson’s ARK 38 “Ariel’s Songs to Prospero” available (thanks Peter!). I was looking for this during my dissertation chapter on Ronald’s cookbooks! This is a wonderful addition to the recent reissue of Ark by Flood Editions.
Ronald Johnson's papers are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Collection at the University of Kansas Libraries. His books are published in the U.S. by Flood Editions. Send all inquiries to peter [at] luxhominem [dot] com.
Below is a link to the recording of “ARK 38, Ariel’s Songs to Prospero,” for Dorothy Neal, recorded with Roger Gans at KQED in San Francisco in the early 1980s. It is “constructed out of recordings of songs of the birds of eastern United States,” according to Johnson.
Post ALA Panel Notes: Ronald Johnson's Formal, Transgeneric, and Multimedia Innovations /
For the American Literature Association’s 2019 conference, Mark Scroggins organized a panel of wonderful papers that explored Johnson’s monumentalizing urge, gastrophilosophy, and sound art. It was a privilege presenting with…
Sally Connolly: “Formal Innovation and Ergodic Invitation in Ronald Johnson’s ‘Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid: In Memoriam AIDS’.”
Devin King: “The Invisible Spire: Ronald Johnson’s ARK 38 and Bay Area Radio Drama.”
The excellent panel presentations helped me decide to start the book I’ve been toying with, a study of Ronald Johnson’s gastrophilosophy. My panel paper explored taste at the bookends of his publishing career, from his first book of poetry, A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees (1967) to his most comprehensive cookbook, The American Table: More Than 400 Recipes That Make Accessible for the First Time the Full Richness of American Regional Cooking. There is so much more, however, mixed throughout his oeuvre. His monument at the beginning of ARK to the Native staple “Bison Bison Bison,” his comparison of the brain to an orange, a critique of Columbus’s misunderstanding of the variegation of Native Corn, a taste of Thoreau’s “Wild Apples,” and a taste of William Bartram’s bitter orange salad dressings. I’ll explore all of these and more. I’ll let you know when the book is out!
L to R: James, Nathan, Devin, Mark. Disclaimer: The Bukowski Bar choice was not based on the quality of his poetry but of the beer list.
Birds Wheeling Flick Audibility /
For me, lines of bird flight are always audible. Birds wheeling flick the quick wisps of the conductor's baton tip into the blue, they curve shimmering notes up over the top staff line, or they bend like a light arc flickering through a lens pointed into the sun. But even more than resonating with other phenomenon, bird murmurs draw me into that moment of alien self-organization where I am confronted with confluences completely outside myself. Jane Bennett calls minor experiences like this enchanting and argues that they can remind us how wonder reorients our perception toward less habituated modes of experience. What I enjoy in enchantment is that although I associate the organized kinesis of the bird's swooping with musical expressiveness, the fact that birds understand what constitutes music differently than we do means that this expression is not reducible to a culturally legible melody or form. In short, bird murmurs remind me that there is always a pressure on the cultural conditioning my hearing and vision emerge through. I find this pleasure enchanting.
Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.