(DOWNLOAD) "From Text to Tongue to Tape: Notes on Charles Bernstein's "1-100" (Critical Essay)" by English Studies in Canada " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: From Text to Tongue to Tape: Notes on Charles Bernstein's "1-100" (Critical Essay)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 187 KB
Description
IN NOVEMBER 2009, CONCEPTUAL POET and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith was asked to contribute a playlist to The New York Times "Living With Music" column. Amidst a dozen other selections--including Christian Bbk's cover of Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate and Marie Osmond's rendition of "Karawane," a Hugo Ball sound poem--we find Charles Bernstein's "1-100" and a somewhat understated entry for it: "Dating from 1969, this is the earliest known recording of this now-famous L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet. It is simply a three-minute recitation of the numbers 1 to 100 in that order. Feel the suspense as the piece slowly builds; if you last that long, things get really spicy around 75" (Goldsmith). Listeners who clicked on the link discovered exactly this, and much more than Goldsmith describes, as well. Bernstein begins "1-100" in a normal tone of voice, rattling off the first decad with accelerating speed and force, then moves through the teens in a slightly bored fashion before delivering "twenty-one" with a burst of either anger or enthusiasm (CD track 7). Most of the thirties, forties, and fifties are delivered in a quasi-profound tone (mocking, perhaps, an imagined stereotypical voice prevalent in contemporary poetry readings of the late 1960s, from latter-day coffee house beatniks to pipe-and-tweed university bards), a profundity of tone that gains momentum through the sixties, until the dazzling conclusion, in which the remaining numbers are screamed with animal intensity. While the first numbers of this final phase are delivered somewhat whimsically, their delivery becomes more and more blood-curdling with each passing digit, culminating in a painfully extended, seven-second howl of "ninety-nine," followed by a deadpan "one hundred." This return to a mundane tone, reminiscent of Bernstein's opening "one;" effectively sets up a continuum for listeners, beckoning them to begin again-to return to one, as numbers do themselves-and thus a very irregular performance ends with a recursive glance toward regularity.
 "From Text to Tongue to Tape: Notes on Charles Bernstein's "1-100" (Critical Essay)" by English Studies in Canada " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}