My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

318 NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Language Association meetings in Buffalo, on April 3, 1992. In charting traditionshere
and in "Frame Lock"-that can be multiply traced to Montaigne; to Wilde's essayin-dialogue,
"The Critic as Artist"; to Emerson's essays, Thoreau's Walden, and Dickinson's
"letters"; to Stein's How to Write, Lectures in America, and "An Elucidation"; or to
Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Zettel, and Philosophical Investigations, a number of studies prove
useful, of which let me single out three: Morris Croll's essential work on the anti-Ciceronian
English prose of the 16th and 17th centuries, Viktor Shklovski's Theory of Prose,
and Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero and Barthes par lui-meme. More recently, consider
Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay's The Emergence of Prose, Ron Silliman's title essay in
The New Sentence, and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres's and Elizabeth Mittman's, editors, The
Politics of the Essay (particularly the essays by Joeres). There is also a Significant new anthology
of innovative prose by women: Lou Robinson's and Camille Norton's Resurgent,
and, related to this, a feature section on "WomenlWritingffheory" in Raddle Moon,
no. 11 (1992) and no. 13 (1994). Finally, let me just mention Evan S. Connell's
diary/essay/poem Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel. "What's Art Got to Do
with It" has been collected in American Literary History Reader, edited by Gordon Hutner
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Beauty and the Critic, Aesthetics in an Age
of Cultural Studies, edited by James Soderholm (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1997). It was initially published in American Literary History 5, no. 4 (1993).
A Test of Poetry. This poem is based on a letter from Ziquing Zhang, who translated
poems from Rough Trades and The Sophist for Selected Language Poems (Chengdu, China:
Sichuan literature and Art Publishing House, 1993); quotations from the poems are
italicized. I thank Ziquing Zhang for his early and continuing interest and support
and his extraordinary commitment to cultural exchange. Situation 4 (1993).
The Book as Architecture. InJune 1986, Alan Davies asked me this question: "When
you select and balance a gathering of works to make a book, of what does that balancing
(and imbalancing?) consist? What factors of the works, as you look at them,
seem to recommend them to particular places within what is finally made to be 'this
book'?" The discussion of architecture is indebted to a correspondence with the Detroit
artist Cay Bahnmiller. Harvard Review, no. 1 (1992).
"Dear Mr. Fanelli". Notus 11 (1993).
An Interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke. Conducted bye-mail in February 1994.
Amerikastudien/American Studies, vol. 40 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995).
I Don't Take Voice Mail: The Object of Art in the Age of Electronic Technology.
Presented (with slides) at a symposium, sponsored by the Parsons School of Design
and organized by Lenore Malen, on "The Art Object in the Age of Electronic Technology",
at the New School for Social Research, in New York, on April 16, 1994. I have
resisted the tendency to revise this essay in the light of the often oppressively (or possibly
exhilaratingly) fast changes in computer technology and the fonnats for using it.
For example, the essay was written before the World Wide Web had become generally
available in its current fonn. The essay is an extension of "Play It Again, Pac-Man" in A
Poetics, and relies on some of the concepts developed there. MlE/AlNIIIN/G 16 (1994).
Weak Links. Preface to Hannah Weiner's Weeks (Madison: Xexoxial Editions, 1990).