In which are explored the matrices of text, textile, and exile through metaphor, networks, poetics, etymologies, etc., with an occasional subplot relating these elements to Iggy and the Stooges.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Intertextile, Text in Exile: Shmata Mashup...


... is the title of a performance piece/long essay-poem (poessay?) that Adeena Karasick and I have been working on, starting last February. I've been collecting and generating texts and textile pieces for my Text, Textile, Exile project for a few years now, and when I went to New York a year ago (Feb. 2010) I met with Adeena and learned that she too had been working along parallel lines. While reading the entirety of a book we both had essays in (Radical Poetics and Jewish Secular Culture), she had discovered a marvelous pun: shmata (Yiddish, "rag") and shma'atta (Hebrew, "the text at hand") and we were off and running.

We had worked together before, having presented a collaborative closing lecture, "“Simultaneous Jewissance: Performing Critical-Creative Mutual Influence,” for a conference sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Department of Theatre Arts and Dance in 2006, and it had been a gratifying experience, well-received as well as enjoyable, so we had a precedent for working together. We feverishly generated text and then at the end of February debuted our piece as it then was to In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, a conference at Alberta's Banff Centre for the Arts where, a year later, we are both residents in a program by the same name, in which we hope to further our collaboration. We also gave the presentation in slightly altered form at the Post_moot Convocation of Poetry and Performance in April 2010, at Miami University, Ohio.

Now we're back here at Banff; I'm working on this blog and also on our piece (x-stitching the letters Aleph, Mem, and Shin (the three mothers); Adeena is working on a video and also on our collaboration.

The photo represents the MEM under construction; i'm adding a gold metallic luster-crust to it to make it a little more interesting.

6 comments:

  1. Fooey just screwed up a reply re: reading Chris Salter's Entanglement on mixed-media reality, listened to Susskind's Quantum Entanglement course at Stanford, worked the word for my own avatar / real problematics, it comes up in string theory's added dimensions and here we are back at the roots with it, thinking maybe jomon pottery for example, or the hand-wound (woven?) strings on the qin... - Wonderful! Alan

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  2. i love how fast and furious the associations fly in your post, alan, screwed up or not. what are the hand-wound strings wound with? xo md

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  3. On the qin, they're silk. I think Alpine Zither strings might have been hand-wound as well, not sure. ...

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