John Farmer

SHUT UP, KEN My books are better thought about than read. Theyre insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a years worth of weather reports or a transcription of the 1010 WINS traffic reports on the ones (every ten minutes) over the course of a twenty-four-hour period? I dont. But theyre wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf. In fact, I say that I dont have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called conceptual writing. The idea is much more important than the product. KG: My favorite books on my shelf are the ones that I cant read, like Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, Boswells Life of Johnson, or The Arcades Project. I love the idea that these books exist. I love their size and scope; I adore their ambition; I love to pick them up, open them at random, and always be surprised; I love the fact that I will never know them. Theyll never go out of style; theyre timeless; theyre always new to me. I wanted to write books just like these. I think you hit it just right when you spoke of reference books. I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing. I think of them as pataphysical reference books. The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something meaningful, we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which, as you say, could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning. After all, you cant show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion. The world is transformed: suddenly, the newspaper is dtourned into a novel; the stock tables become list poems. KG:Were living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that were working withthe landscape of languageis very different than it was a few decades ago. It seems to call into question the way we write and the environment into which were writing and distributing our works. Not only that, but our entire digital world is made up of alphanumeric language (the 1s and 0s of computing). You know sometimes when you receive a JPEG in an email and it comes in wrong, appearing as garbled text instead of an image? Its a reminder that all of our media now is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldnt find a speck of language lurking below the surface. The interesting thing is that now you can open a JPEG in a text editor, dump in a bunch of language, and reopen it as an image, and youll find that the image has completely been changedall as a result of active language. This is so new, and the implications for writing are so profound and paradigmatic. Suddenly, language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories. Language has many dimensions; were seeing the materiality of words emerge in new and interesting ways. But I dont wish to be prescriptive here. Of course, wonderful stories remain to be told and new ideas to be written. After all, for all my talk of uncreativity and unoriginality, isnt what Im pointing out here in conventional language something new and original? Paradoxes abound. KG: Absolutely. Its a favorite method of encryption: chunking revolutionary documents inside a mess of JPEG or MP3 code and emailing it off as an image or a song. But besides functionality, code also possesses literary value. If we frame that code and read it through the lens of literary criticism, we will find that the past hundred years of modernist

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and postmodernist writing have demonstrated the artistic value of similar seemingly arbitrary arrangements of letters. For example, heres three lines of a JPEG opened in a text editor: Of course, a close reading of the text reveals very little, semantically or narratively. Instead, a conventional glance at the piece reveals a nonsensical collection of letters and symbols, literally a code that might be deciphered into something sensible. Yet what happens when sense is not foregrounded as being of primary importance? Instead, we need to ask other questions of the text. Now, here are three lines from a poem by Charles Bernstein, called Lift Off, written in 1979: The poem is intentionally bereft of literary tropes and conveyances of human emotion, and Bernstein chooses to foreground the workings of a machine, rather than the sentiments of a human. In fact, the piece is what its title says it is: a transcription of everything lifted off a page with a correction tape from a manual typewriter. Bernsteins poem is, in some sense, code posing as a poem. KG: In the 1960s, Sol LeWitt said something like Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good. I think that conceptual writing would agree, at least the best of it would. Like anything else, conceptual writing is looking for that Aha! moment, when something so simple, right under our noses, is revealed as being awe- inspiring, profound, and transcendent. I think that writers often try too hard in the name of expression, when often its just a matter of reframing whats around you or republishing a preexisting text into a new environment that makes for a successful work. Of course this is nothing new: think of John Cages notion of silence or Duchamps urinal. But when it comes to writing, these approaches have rarely been investigated. KG: Nam June Paik said once that the internet is for everybody who doesnt live in New York City. Living herewith its saturated wealth of concerts, readings, and eventscan easily give you the illusion that everywhere is like this, but, sadly, for most people this is nowhere near reality. For instance, on UbuWeb Im often contacted by engaged viewers who live in small towns or who are unable to travel due to economic or social circumstances, who find a place like Ubu to be an absolute cultural and educational lifeline. It would be silly and snobbish of me to claim to prioritize warm, live human interaction over what happens on the web just because I have the ability to go to Anthology Film Archives, Issue Project Room, or the Stone any night of the week. So, in short, I think that the richer and deeper documentation is on the web, the better off we all are. KG: Im going to drop a real secret on you. It used to be that if you wanted to be subversive and radical, youd publish on the web, bypassing all those arcane publishing structures at no cost. Everyone would know about your work at lightning speed; youd be established and garner credibility in a flash, with an adoring worldwide readership. Shh the new radicalism is paper. Right? Publish it on a printed page and no one will ever know about it. Its the perfect vehicle for terrorists, plagiarists, and for subversive thoughts in general. If you dont want it to existand there are many reasons to want to keep things privatekeep it off the web. But if you put it in digital form, expect it to be bootlegged, remixed, manipulated, and endlessly commented upon. Expect spiders to pick it up and use it as adbait on spoof web pages. The moment you put it out there, all bets are off; its way out of your control. KG: I dont think that the world will ever become an unpoliced place, sadly. But I do feel that there is relative freedom on the margins. David Antin beautifully addresses this situation in several of his pieces, such as Talking at the Boundaries. He advocates practices that exist on the edge of culture due to the lack of lightI think he refers to artists as foolishly rushing toward the white hot lightas opposed to enjoying what happens in the shadows, where few people care to be. Cage also addressed this issue when he was attacked for paying his taxes while claiming to be an anarchist. He said something like he would do

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the minimum required, compliance-wise, so that he could keep doing his work in relative peace. He claimed to prefer that to being in a place where he wouldnt be allowed to do it at all, probably referring to censorious or oppressive regimes. KG: I think that the special thing about radio is the off switch. If somethings not pleasing you, turn it off. How different this is than, say, a reading or a concert where youre pretty much stuck in it till the end. As a result, I feel one of radios great freedoms is the ability to take risks. Sadly, commercial radio is not able to do this, but WFMU is. My job as a DJ there is to take as many risks as possible, and know that Im not forcing anyone to sit through it. Yet some people tell me that, say, my reading nine hours of weather reports was one of the most transcendent radio experiences that theyve ever had. I believe in putting it out there and letting folks do with it what they may. KG: Again, such gestures always begin at the margins, where there is freedom. But these strategies quickly move into the center. In a time when the amount of language is rising exponentially, combined with greater access to the tools with which to manage, manipulate, and massage those words, appropriation is bound to become just another tool in the writers toolbox. For example, when recently accused of plagiarism in his latest novel, which was called a work of genius by the newspaper Libration, the best-selling author Michel Houellebecq claimed it as such: If these people really think that [this is plagiarism], they havent got the first notion of what literature isThis is part of my method This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors. I have been influenced especially by [Georges] Perec and [Jorge Luis] Borges I hope that this contributes to the beauty of my books, using this kind of material. When such authors begin speaking like that, you know attitudes are changing. Its a thrilling time. KG:What tamed sampling culture was the fact that people were actually making money by using those samples. How fortunate we are to exist in the moneyless economy of poetry! When you take money out of the equation, anything goes and nobody cares. Its truly free. Anyway, its all ass-backward. One of my favorite quotes comes from Tim OReilly, who wrote that being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement. Most artists want first and foremost to be loved, secondly to make history, and money is a distant third or fourth. KG: In 1959, the writer Brion Gysin claimed that writing was fifty years behind painting. I think that can still be applied to today. What Im doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow its never really been tested on the page. Take appropriation, for example. While there have been numerous examples of pastiche and collage in writingtaking a few lines here, a few words there, and incorporating them into your own workwe havent seen an exploration of wholesale lifting of preexisting texts. Yet suddenly, within the past few years, we have projects like Simon Morriss retyping of On the Road into a blog, one page a day until its finished; or my own Day, which is a transcription of a days copy of the New York Times; or Vanessa Places Statement of Facts, where she republished court transcriptions in their entirety as literature. But why now? I think that the act of transcription in a pre-digital age was so laborious as to be off-putting. Yet now the simple ability to cut and paste, say, the entire works of Shakespeare with a few keystrokes radically changes the way we think about textuality. The power of holding that oeuvre on your clipboard, ready to be repurposed, makes us consider words and writing in really new ways. KG: Your question reminds me of a conversation that John Cage and Morton Feldman had in 1967. Feldman was complaining about being at the beach, annoyed as hell by transistor radios blaring out rock and roll, and Cage responded, You know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment? Very much as the primitive people adjusted to the

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animals which frightened them, and which, probably as you say, were intrusions. They drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now whenever I hear radioseven a single one, not just twelve at a time, as you must have heard on the beach, at least I think, Well, theyre just playing my piece. KG: Automation and technology dont cure behavioral ruts: they just create new instances of them. For instance, I wont let my students write any more poems based on Google searches. Its been done to death, always resulting in the same type of poem. Its an old story. In 1726, Jonathan Swift imagined a writing machine whereby the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. He described a primitive grid-based machine with every word in the English language inscribed upon it. By cranking a few handles, the grid would shift slightly and random groups of half-sensible words would fall into place. Crank it again and the device would spit out another set of non sequiturs. These resulting broken sentences were jotted down by scribes into folios that, like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, were intended to be fit together in an effort to rebuild the English language from scratch, albeit written by machine. The Swiftian punch line, of course, is that the English language was fine as it was and the novelty of reconstructing it by machine wasnt going to make it any better. Its a great warning for us today and a pointed satire of our blinding belief in the transformative potential of technology, even if in most cases its sheer folly. KG: Shockingly, Im much more technologically savvy than most of them are! I admire their ability not to be infatuated by it the way I am. I still cant get over the fact that it even exists, whereas for them its just another way of being in the world. They have this fluidity that I admire, moving easily between oil paint this moment and Photoshop the next; they download MP3s and have huge vinyl collections. But Ive made a move in the Luddite direction recently by trying to remove UbuWeb from Google. I want the site to be more underground, more word-of-mouth. The only way youll be able to find it is if someone links to it or tells you about it, just like music used to be before MTV. But youll still find UbuWeb on all the bad search engines that no one uses: AltaVista, Dogpile, and Yahoo! Again, everyone wants to rush toward the center: they even write books about how to get your Google ranking higher. Were headed in the opposite direction. We want to get off Google. KG: UbuWeb and its ethos are extensions of my writing. There are certain economies which allow us to play with the utopian notion that copyright might not really exist. Its enormousthousands of full-length avant-garde films, music [recordings], and booksand most of it isnt permissioned. Its not a surreptitious RapidShare-like site; instead, its all out in the open, free to all to access without passwords or fees. I wanted to create a warehouse for the avant-garde, proposing the idea that not all economies are the same. This is a very special situation, where almost everything on the site never made money and therefore can be distributed freely. In turn, we refuse to touch money. We wont take donations or grants, all the work is done on a volunteer basis, and our server and bandwidth space are donated without strings attached. If we had to ask permission, we wouldnt exist. KG: Yes, it does happen, but not very often from artists themselves; its mostly estates or galleries who keep Google alerts on names and pounce on them without ever investigating what the circumstances, politics, or economics surrounding it are. But whats happened over time is that by doing things wrong, UbuWeb has become canonical, and we now have artistssometimes shockingly prominent onesoffering us materials, begging to be on the site. What started out as a little outlaw enterprise is still outlaw but has somehow gotten established. Its odd: I always wonder why there arent one hundred UbuWebs, and the answer is that institutions tremble when they hear the word copyright, and as a result err

on the side of extreme caution, not understanding that there is a great deal of gray area and play. For example, MoMAs collection of artifacts far outweighs Ubus, but MoMAs website is nothing more than a glorified catalog, telling you about when theyre open and whats on display. Theres nothing to download! But I understand why: if they were to put up downloadable artists recordings, films, artifacts, poetry, ephemera, and so forth, theyd have to negotiate contracts, royalty agreements, broker deals with galleries and estates, etc. The legal fees and paperwork alone would cost a fortune, and then it would take an eternity to get the works online. And then theyd have long-term archive issues to resolve regarding format and retrieval systems. Ubu, on the other hand, operates on no money, acts instantly, and couldnt give a damn about formatting, archiving, or the future. The result is a wildly robust and plentiful archive, but its extraordinarily unstable, put together with tissue paper and spit, and could vanish at any moment. Ubu is merely a provocation, an invitation for someone to actually come along and do it right. In fact, our own obsolescence would happily render the project successful. KG: Its a good question, and the answer has to do with various economic ecosystems. Let me take an example of my own work. A few years ago, I published a super-boring book that was a radio transcription of a YankeesRed Sox game. I included everything that was on the radio, from the pre-game show to the ads to the broadcast-booth patter. The book opens with the disclaimer that begins all sports broadcasts: This copyrighted broadcast is presented by authority of the New York Yankees and may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form. And the accounts and descriptions in the game may not be disseminated without the express written consent of the New York Yankees. When the book was published, I sent a copy to the Yankees organization. Naturally, I never heard from them. So here I was blatantly flouting the copyright of what is arguably the most lucrative franchise in all of sports, and there was no reaction. I suppose if I was a commercial publisher making the identical gesture, I wouldve been taken to court. But a small press publishing a book of poetry? I imagine that the Steinbrenners scratched their heads and swiftly tossed it into the recycling bin. The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don't even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here's every word I spoke for a week. Here's a year's worth of weather reports...and without ever having to read these things, you understand them. So, in a weird way, if you get the conceptwhich should be put out in front of the book then you get the book, and you don't even have to read it. They're better to talk about than they are to read. It's not about inventing anything new; it's about finding things that exist and reframing them and representing them as original texts. The choice of what you're presenting is more interesting than the thing that you're presenting. You're not evaluated on the writing or what's on the page; you're evaluated on the thought process that comes before 'pen is set to paper,' so to speak. In 1959, Brian Gysin said that writing was 50 years behind painting. And it still is. So if conceptual art happened 50 years ago, we're just beginning to get around to it now. These are ideas that have never been explored in poetry. We've had a little bit of pastiche, a little bit ofyou know, a line from here, a line from there. But we've never had the concept of lifting something that you didn't write and moving it over five inches, saying that it's yours, and claiming that it's a newly authored text.

John Farmer

Goldsmith: Well, Craig Dworkin and I just did this anthology, entitled, Against Expression. I think a real scholarsomeone like Steve McCafferycould actually find Renaissance examples of this. But, of course, I'm not that. And Craig's a real modernist. So we begin with Mallarm. And Mallarm's falsified writings on fashion. He made a whole fashion magazine, all by himself, under nom de plumes of various peoplehow to throw a great dinner party, how to wear fashionable clothes, etc. He wrote Vogue but all under pseudonyms. And it became a really popular magazine. Of course, it was a complete lie; the whole thing was a grand work of identity falsification. Against Expression, the anthology of conceptual writing, is not just people who are fifty years old and younger writing. It really does go back to the beginnings of modernism. And there's a pretty straight path that we plot going through that to the contemporary day. Goldsmith: There are different people working on different things. Let me just say that the most interesting investigations in conceptual writing are taking place in fields outside of poetryso Christian Bk is really almost being a scientist at this point. He's given himself a Ph.D. in Genetics, and he's doing genetic engineering and representing it as poetry. That's something outside of it. Vanessa Place is taking legal briefs that she writes during the day in the law field. And she doesn't do anything to them, she just represents those as poetry. Darren Wershler is a professor in communication studies and is taking ideas of what's going on in the digital worldstuff that is real hardcore geek stuffand bringing that into conceptual poetry. I think the most interesting frontiers of what's happening are coming from outside of the field, and not inside the field. And thereby it's appealing to these other audiences. Christian's work is in Nature magazine. He's more well-known to the scientific community than he is to the poetry community. There's a subversion of poetics, an inversion, and a complete broadening of what we consider to be poetry. It's really amazing. Goldsmith: The touchstones are always the same. You could go backit's actually the same lineage from which all experimentation emerges. Our roots are not that much different than Language poetry. We love Stein, we love Pound, we love Joyce. You know, that lineage. But then it breaks. Because what's more important then is Fluxus, Pop Art, Sound Poetry, Visual and Concrete Poetry; of course sampling and hip hop are all very important tenets behind it; situationism is really big; and Language poetry is a real influence as well. Personally, I come back to Cage and Warhol, who are my two main touchstones. In fact, I just got The Warhol Diaries, a thousand-page tome, on the Kindle. I could never read it outside of home, because it's too big. And now it's on the Kindle, and it's an absolute pleasure. That's really pleasurable to read. Goldsmith: I like limiting things. I think it describes a certain way of workinga certain way that a lot of people are working today. It gives a name to a lot of different gestures. I'd say that Flarf is one methodology within conceptualism. And Flarf is represented in this book [Against Expression].

John Farmer

People are working differently because of the digital environment. You could call it digital poetics, but a lot of it is not actually happening on the screen. A lot of it is happening on the page, and yet it's informed by the fact that you can cut and paste the entire internet. And then what do you do with that? You just take something and claim it as your own, because you can copy it, and you can cut it and paste it. I think it's a useful terma useful umbrella termand it's not really as much of a break as a continuation. There are precedentsin this book, for example, Burroughspre-digital precedents of people who were working digitally before the digital. The book is absolutely full of them. Joyce, some text-based conceptual art, or Cage. Beckett is working with words in a mechanical way, a conceptual way. Clark Coolidge is in here. There's all sorts of stuff... When the digital happens, we begin to think of language very differently. And the idea of conceptualism becomes useful in describing those digital tendencies. Goldsmith: Well, you know, it's universally reviled. From the right and from the left. When I read at the White House, Linh Dinh, on the left, accused me of performing for a mass murderer, Mr. Obama. And on the right, a right-wing talk-show radio host named Michael Savage called my invitation to the White House "the decline of western civilization" and "the emergence of Marxist class warfare," and he said that I was "Abbie Hoffman part two." The White House was a real flash-point for both the left and the right, and it was so shocking to memaybe not so shockingbut curious how close the rhetoric of the extremes were, about the gesture of conceptualism being in a very prominent place like that. Goldsmith: I enjoy them. You don't get those reactions in the art world. Art has long ceased to shock. In the poetry world, it's so conservative, that we can still get people upset. It's kind of great in a way. In the art world, since Duchamp or Jeff Koons crumpled up pieces of paper, or relational aesthetics where people served chicken curry for dinner and that's called "art," everyone goes, "Hey, man, that's cool," and it sells for a lot of money. In the poetry world, you can say, "I'm going to be unoriginal. I'm going to be uncreative," and you can get people very upset by that gesture. It's a very slow-moving, backwards thing, so you can still have a little bit of scandal. It's sort of exciting. I don't court it, but it happens. Goldsmith: It's a long conversation. We have an anthology. We're fifteen years into this. Now everybody's talking about conceptual writing, but it was just a thing that sort of emerged with Darren Wershler, Christian, and myselfjust kind of feeling that there was a change in the air which was being precipitated by digital availability, back in the late nineties. So, suddenly, everybody's talking about this. But you have to realize it's been going on for some time. We just smelled something in the air that was going to change, because of technology. And over the years, various people joined in, and joined on. And now a lot of people are working that way. But the core group is still very much in touch and still very excited. Vanessa [Place]five years ago, we hadn't heard about Vanessa. She just sort of came. We had been having this conversation for ten years before, and suddenly, Vanessa's this huge force. But Caroline, also, has been along for the entire ride. And you've got people like Kim Rosenfield and Nada Gordon and Katie Degentesh. There are just people all over.

John Farmer

The other thing I want to say about conceptual writing is that it's the first poetry movement since concrete poetry that is an international poetry movement. Language writing wasn't international. There were a few participants in England, many in Canada and the U.S., and that was it, even though it was known world-wide. One of the reasons that concrete poetry became an international movement was because you didn't need to know a specific language in order to understand the work. It was primarily visual. So you could get a little key, and you could kind of understand the poems. So you had participants from all over the world. Those were global anthologies. Now, this is a global anthology as well. And the reason being, again, is that you don't really need to read the work. Again, it's not predicated upon knowing a languageit's knowing a concept. And if the concept is put out before you, who cares what happens after that. People are working this way. We've got friends in France, in England, Brazil, Argentina, of course Canada, and all over Scandinavia. Conceptual writing is massive in Scandinavia. So it's the first global poetics movement since concrete poetry, and that's an amazing thing. First of all, galleries are a really bad place to watch video. I never want to watch videos in a gallery. If I walk into a gallery and they are playing a video, I usually never feel like seeing it, even if they have comfortable couches. The exception has been the new Christian Marclay piece, The Clock (2010), on display in New York, which is a 24-hour piece about time. What they have done there is to turn the Paula Cooper gallery into a movie theater, with seats in a black room and couches, and its wonderful. Its the first time Ive seen people in a gallery where they actually want to sit there and watch it because the piece is fascinating and fabulous, and because theyve actually managed to make it comfortable. I think the best way to watch video would be in a comfortable place, on a couch or in bed. You can take your laptop in bed now, and watch video art and avant-garde film, which is what we facilitate on UbuWeb. Video art is durational. I think the laptop is a really beautiful platform for watching videos. And when you put headphones on, I think its even better than watching television in a room. Headphones and a laptop is the closest I can come to a cinematic experience, because your visual field is totally enveloped. I think loss of quality has become normal for people. I remember years ago, in the 80s, The New York Times began running TV screenshots of presidential debates, captured from the television, on their front page. And they started doing that a lot. Didnt they have a photographer at the debate? I assume that they felt the need to acknowledge a certain type of media debate that was beginning to happen, wherein mass media was beginning to challenge and subsume the then-dominant print media. Now, of course, that battle has shifted to the realm of the digital, with hi-def competing with cheap, streaming media. And now, of course, everything is pixelated; everything has bad resolutionand I dont think anyone seems to mind very much. We are used to bad quality; we expect things to be bad quality. Its the new normal. I think we are adjusting to it. Thats why I think those works of Thomas Ruff, those giant pixelated blow-ups of JPEGs, are some of the smartest photos Ive seen. Super smart pieces. That makes us understand the power of the degraded image. And yet, there are many people who are still very upset about the quality of the work on UbuWeb, mostly filmmakers who, of all artists, have suffered the most quality-wise. I mean, if you squint your ears, an MP3 isnt so far from a CD and a PDF is reminiscent of a book but a

John Farmer

John Farmer

film, originally intended for an enormous screen, a great sound system, and a warm-bodied audience, which is now reduced to a lonely pixelated postage stamp, is a very shocking format change. Understandably, most of the people upset with Ubu are celluloid filmmakers. However, its insanely hard to see their work just about anywhere on the globe, so for many people, the lo-res copies on Ubu are the originals; its a very difficult adjustment for a certain generation of artists. However, I feel that without this representation, the works would simply never be seen. And I do love and believe in this work so much that even a shitty version is better than no version at all. In some cases, having stuff on Ubu can reignite a career, leading to works being screened as they were intended to be seen. I actually feel that the issues of distribution on Ubu are what the site is really about. I mean, gathering a bunch of cool stuff is one thing, but keeping it all running for fifteen years is a more fascinating idea; its the meta-ethos of the site. Ubu is an experiment in radical distribution, one that proposes What if copyright didnt exist?. Ubu is a giant project of radical appropriation, one ignores both money and copyright. And somehow, with this uncompromising attitude, it has become an institution of sorts. Id like to see MoMA become more like us. Yes, we dont rip anything ourselves. Rather, we appropriate whats already out there on very private file-sharing groups. In this way Ubu is the Robin Hood of the avant-garde: stealing what has already been stolen and giving it away to everyone, free of charge. It shifts frames of reference, challenging social, economic, philosophical and distributive norms. We adore EAI, VDB, Film and Video Umbrella, and so forth. Theyre doing great work and Ubu wants to support not undermine their efforts to distribute high-quality, highresolution works to institutions. High resolution works that are well-distributed, and which compensate the artists are essential. To prove this point, when UbuWeb was asked to screen videos from our archive at Lincoln Center this summer, we insisted on showing AVIs. They looked horrible on a giant screen, dissolving into nothing more than pixels. It was an awful hour-and-a-half of cinema. But the point was to show how essential proper presentation is. And also, to show that UbuWeb is in no way a threat to traditional distribution. Once highres video becomes possible on the Web, Ubu will step out of the game. Were interested in keeping things crappy, so that those who do things the right way can continue on. Ubu and EAI are partners. Some of their artists are thrilled to be on Ubu, while others are not. Part of our partnership involves removing those artists who dont want to be there and then working closely with those do who wish to be represented. So we have brilliant and important artists like Ryan Trecartin, Leslie Thornton, Cheryl Donegan, Peggy Ahwesh, Mike Smith, and many others, who keep contributing works to Ubu with the blessing of their galleries and EAI. Its a win-win situation for all. I did a show at the Center for Contemporary Art in Montreal and this was an amazing show. It was an archival show featuring the archives of NASA, the Smithsonian, the National Film Board of Canada, and UbuWeb! What does not belong there? And I wanted to do something similar to what I did at the Lincoln Center, where I screened the compressed AVI files in a program of screenings. But they said: We cant do that, because were the CCA in Montreal. Were funded and we have to do everything legally and legitimately. We have to get everything in high definition thats just the way we swing. And I said Just download it. But they couldnt do that. It turned out to be a nice thing, because the show was for free on Ubu. I had Marian Goodman ask me to take Tacita Deans Kodak (2006) off of Ubu, and I understood. The gallery said, Look, its a movie about film. And it really is. Its about marvelous film and I took it down. That piece is about medium specificity and it doesnt

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work on UbuWeb. Well its a sore point for some artists and galleries, but things are changing. In this case, it was Tacita Deans work on film, but what about video? When video first arrived as a medium, it was a way to distribute things and circumvent the gallery system. And you could show it on TV. But video turned out to be just as susceptible to the gallery system as any other ephemeral practice. It turned into another piece in the gallery system, as a limited edition, a priced possession, copy-written. It turned into three-, five-, or a hundred-screen projections, just to make sure that its art and doesnt belong on TV and not distributed on tapes or DVDs. Its a cherished object thats a fallacy. The idea that you would sell a video for $10,000 is really stupid. Somebodys a real sucker. Video is not a unique object. How can you treat video as a unique object like that? The younger video artists understand that. Like Ryan Trecartin, he really understands thatand believe me, Ryans career is not suffering because he is on UbuWeb. Ryan is so interesting because he is on Ubu, but he is also represented by Elisabeth Dee Gallery, he is in museums all over the world, and he takes part in film festivals. You can always get his work. Ryan seems to be doing great. He is thriving and using this model of making everything available. And it doesnt seem to be hurting him. I love that. Jordan Wolfson is someone who does something similar. When he makes a video, he sends the video over right away and says: You got to have this on Ubu. This is fantastic to me. Not getting sued. Staying on. Every day when I wake up I wonder what do I have to take down today or what thread am I going to find in my inbox. Its freaky. Every year that goes by and Ubu is still up is a miracle to me. Ubu is wrong. Its completely fucking wrong. Its wrong on every single level, but nobody else is doing it right. Ubu is all we have, and everybody thinks its the greatest thing, but its not. Its done terribly and the taxonomy is a disaster. The oeuvres of certain artists are really random; the descriptions of the videos are atrocious; the texts are fucking googled and thrown in there. Without knowing if its true or not. Its a mess, but its a provocation for somebody to go and do it better. But nobody is doing it better. This is when I had the dust-up with the Frameworks community. Did you hear about that? Theres a statement on Ubu that I made to the film community called Frameworks. Some people on Frameworks celebrated the fact that Ubu went down, so I went to the thread and wrote: We know that Ubu is not good, the quality is bad, the text is wrong, and yet, if we had to ask for permission we wouldnt exist. The minute you have to ask for permission its a slippery slope. I just want to say that in the end, Ubu is a provocation to your community of filmmakers to go ahead and do it right. To do it better and to render Ubu obsolete. Why should there only be one Ubu web? You have the tools, the art work, the research and the knowledge to do it so much better than I am doing it. Who am I? You should be doing it. I dont know anything about it. I am not the best person to be representing this. I would love for you to step in and make it better. Or better yet; put us out of business by doing it correctly, the way it should have been done in the first place. Ubu is just a provocation. I am a poet. I dont know anything about this. So come on now, lets go MoMA! Lets go EAI! Ubu is a stubborn web 1.0 thing and its form will remain exactly as it is, even fifteen years from now. I dont care. I am upset that Ubu cant be viewed on the iPad because its flashbased, so thats bad. But I have a tech-guy volunteer working on a conversion protocol, so that videos on the fly can be converted to html, so you can actually see them. That will come, but the whole world has bought into flash. On all the android phones you can see Ubu. On all the android tablets you can see Ubu. Microsoft OS, which all the Nokia phones are getting, wont have a problem with flash; only Apple has a problem with flash.

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 Apple and Google are competitors, and the android system seems to be a much more open platform than Apples. I think that Apple is going to lose out on this one ultimately. Android has a much bigger market share than Apple does. Who watches a DVD? The Macbook Airs dont have the drives. I have a billion books with DVDs in them and I forget that they have DVDs in them. They just sit on the shelf. Thats very bad. It seems great at first, but DVDs gets scratched. I dont use DVDs anymore and any writeable, optical type of media is finished. Who cares about it now? I have a bunch of movies here on my laptop, stupid stuff to watch on the plane, and they are all avis that Ive taken from the web. Do you think I carry a stack of DVDs? Marjorie Perloff: In your essay, From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation, you write very interestingly about your discovery of Concrete Poetry, specifically the Noigandres group in Brazil as precursors to internet poetics. Yet pieces like Fidget and Soliloquy have neither the look nor the structural configuration of a Concrete poem: on the contrary, spatiality is replaced by temporal form. Can you try to explain that relationship? Kenneth Goldsmith: One important aspect of concrete poetry was the reconciliation between the flatness of the page and the implied dynamic (and often sequential) movement of the language used. In this way it ran parallel to the Greenbergian non-illusionistic picture plane, as applied to the flatness of the page. Hence, the internet a dynamic, almost cinematic frame-based experience that occurs on a flattened stage (the screen) was the medium concrete poetry was waiting for in order to realize its full potential. Its no coincidence that so many advertisements both static and dynamic seen on the web look so much like concrete poetry. Fidget and Soliloquy texts of every move I made for a day and every word I spoke for a week are, by their nature, temporal pieces. They literally document the linear events over the course of a specified time. As such, the temporality of the web the movement across time, frame by frame so to speak perfectly fit the formal constraints of the analogue, word-based actions which necessitated these texts. You have often talked about the transition from the visual to the verbal arts in your work, specifically from sculpture to writing. At the same time, you often remark that visual art is far ahead of poetry, which has not yet taken advantage of the possibilities of the internet. If the visual (you cite Warhol numerous times) is so far ahead of the verbal, why have you opted for language? The quote to which you are referring was made by Brion Gysin in 1959 when he said that writing was 50 years behind painting. I still believe that this is true today. If we look at how easily the conventions of the art world are bent and apply those to writing, we will see how limited the world of innovative writing has been. Its not really a matter of form, its more a matter of permissions granted by any given community. The art world is very liberal in that way; the avantgarde is the mainstream as opposed to the writing worlds more oppositional situation between the mainstream and the avant-garde. In the art world, ideas

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are readily accepted and the hunger for the new never ends. The downside, of course, is that the voraciousness lends a short shelf life to art works and a seasonal fashion-based mentality sets in; careers often flame out quickly in the art world at a very young age. My long transition from the visual to the verbal (Ill go into detail about this later in the interview) has been an incredibly idiosyncratic and personal journey. I never could have anticipated, some 20 years out of art school, that I would think of myself as a writer. Having said that, Ive grown to enjoy the very drawn out, slow pace of writing and publishing books as compared to the pressure-cooking bi-seasonal one-man shows that are standard fare for the art world. After cramming to finish making your work for a show, the exhibition has exactly one month to impact hard and then the work basically disappears forever either into private collections or is back into the artists studio storage bins. How different this is from the many years it takes to write a book, followed by the tedious process of getting it published and then waiting up to a year or two for the reviews to dribble in. The upside is that books seem to have an eternal shelf life; its hard to get rid of them and they seem to remain in circulation forever, either in new or used condition. Its a pace Im more comfortable with; somehow it manages to weave its process more into your day-to-day life as opposed to the special event extra-heightened rush of doing a gallery show. In your interview with Sergio Bessa (Introduction to 6799), you say, all my work has a brainy finish to it, though just below the surface, its all intuitive, abstract, and poetic. What are the intuitive and poetic aspects of your work? At what point, in other words, are rules broken and method undercut? In the interview with Sergio, I was specifically referring to my gallery work, in which I was intentionally referencing the surface aesthetics of conceptual art but then undercutting that severity with poetic texts, hence creating a tension in the work. To answer your question, it depends on the project. Some pieces are strict to the letter and others allow for more leeway. No. 111, for example was very strict until the last two chapters of the book, both of which break every rule set forth up to that point. Fidget, too, broke all its rules, this time not out of formal necessity, but out of a need to escape the physical demands of the task. I needed to get drunk and once I let that in, it completely changed the parameters of the book. Soliloquy, on the other hand, was followed to the letter. There was no veering from the original exercise. The same thing happened with Day, the book based on the New York Times. A follow-up: When you say, I am a collector of language, what does that really mean? Surely not in fact just any language. What makes certain words and phrases collectible? Conversely, what makes certain language collections boring and dispensable? Well, I used to feel that only certain words were collectible, that certain words were better than others, but Ive come to question that as the years have passed. Let me explain. The precursor to No. 111 was a gallery work called No.

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109, whereby I used the same method of collecting language as I did for No. 111: any word or phrase ending in the sound of r or the schwa was permitted. In preparation for the gallery show, I edited the piece down to only contain what I considered the good words the fun words, the entertaining words, the words that really zinged. I thought the piece was really tight and presented it in a gallery. Unfortunately, the public didnt agree with me and the work received a lukewarm reception. In an introspective moment after the show had ended, I went back and looked at all the words and phrases I had omitted. They seemed to be perfectly good words and leaving them out did not make the piece any more of a popular success. So I incorporated them all into a new work which grew to be No. 111. But even then, many years into the project, I found myself not able to accept just any word or phrase; instead, I took only the phrases that interested me. Thats why No. 111 is such a readable book; it tames the wide world of available language and focuses it through the fine lens of one persons experience. In that sense, its a very organized and sharp collection. But in the end, I decided that that was only one way to go about a collection and it brings me back to your question about method. Instead of focusing on the text itself, I began to focus on the greater method or the concept instead and let the language fall where it may within that specified context. Hence, no words could be wrong or boring if I could justify it being there conceptually. Suddenly, more traditional linguistic concerns of readerliness, rhythm, phrasing, song, etc. were no longer of importance to me and I found that incredibly liberating. After years of counting syllables in a work like No. 111, you might see where a different approach a freer approach to language became necessary. Theres so much great language out there for the taking; if we open our eyes and ears to it, well find it in abundance. This notion comes, of course, from Cage but we now know that, far from opening his eyes and ears to all those sounds out there in nature, Cage took strict control over his forms. What is the process involved in your own work? Its one of my peeves with Cage. If Cage truly was to accept all incidental sound as music, then thats what he should have done. Obviously this was not the case and this is where claims for poethics comes into play. I dont have a problem with an overriding ethical structure guiding an artists work, but in Cages case, an ethical agenda is in conflict with his philosophical structure of accepting all sounds equally. There were a lot of sounds that werent permitted in the Cagean pantheon and a lot of times when the sounds that were permitted happened at inopportune moments, it could ruin a performance. Likewise, Cages feathers were easily ruffled at what he considered to be wrongheaded interpretations of his works by musicians and orchestras. I find that Warhol took Cages ideas much further. And although the results arent as pretty (or ethical), I feel that Warhol truly accepts the quotidian world with all its lumps and bruises (as well as beauty) into his work. He was completely permeable in ways that Cage could only theorize. My own work has tended recently to move more toward the Warholian

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model than to the Cagean. If it doesnt exist on the Internet, it doesnt exist. You say this contra The Book, and your point is well-taken so far as poets who wait years to have their work published and then have no distribution, are concerned. But now that we have a poetry/art glut on the internet, how can Poet X be distinctive? How does one stand out from the crowd or shouldnt one try? Well, just because one is published in a book doesnt make one a good poet; theres a glut of horrible books out there too. I think that the internet mirrors the real world; a good poem is a good poem regardless of the medium its published in. A good artist is going to have make his or her mark regardless of the medium. Give, say, Vito Acconci or Bruce Nauman the web to play with and theyll make it their own. As far as the sorting process goes, Im still surprised by the amount of credibility that the poetry world gives to a book in print. With the distribution technologies available and the relatively small profit structure around the economies of poetry it stuns me that younger poets arent starting up sites that publish full-length volumes of poetry by their peers. So, if one is attracted to a certain group of writers, there would be a cooperative site, so to speak, where you could find full-length works of theirs. In this way, community is localized and specific, working on a more horizontal axis rather than the vertical canon-building that were used to. It reminds me of what often happens in the art world where a group of peers or like-minded artists descend upon an under-utilized gallery and move their program into it, creating their own scene to which people are ultimately drawn. When you say, anyone could write 111 using the rules I set up and it would turn out completely different, do you mean anyone (say, me) could do it and it would be just as effective or just different? Or that the artist is s/he who makes choices that bring out relationships between words that matter? Its Cagean again. Cage said something to the effect that anyone can do his work but the fact is that nobody else has done it. I take this to mean that the artists real work is in setting the parameters and executing a given project. Its about the courage to actualize ideas that transform passing thoughts often trivial into art. Youre referring to Cages famous statement, Of course they could but they dont. Its such an important point! And I like the idea of courage because thats just what it is. And speaking of courage: in Soliloquy, you often flirt dangerously with actual mimesis. Your interlocutors are often identifiable and your assessments of people (myself included) have been held to be cruel, nasty, or just plain embarrassing. How do you answer this charge? Soliloquy is not actual mimesis because it has been framed and presented as art as opposed to a scientific documentation of language or mere sociological research. In this way, Soliloquy does an incredible job with real speech and extends the thrust to incorporate real speech into poetry that has run from

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Whitman to Stein, through Ginsberg and Antin. In comparison to Soliloquy, the speech so often passed off as real seems artificial, composed and stilted. As much as Im a fan of David Antins work, we can never believe that his talk poems are really his talk. Its edited, composed on the page, cleaned up and sanitized. Solioquy presents speech at its most raw, its most brutal and in its most gorgeously disjunctive form. When we look at real speech in Soliloquy, we find that our normative speech patterns are avant-garde! It strikes me odd that what modernism worked so hard to get at for the past 100 years has always been right under our noses! In terms of the social aspects of the piece, its very complicated. I have lost many friends over this work. I do feel bad that their feelings have been hurt but I still cannot apologize for having done the piece. The parameters of the work set out to record every word I spoke during a random week, from the moment I woke up on a Monday morning until I went to bed the following Sunday night. There was to be no editing. As such, I wasnt able to clean up the messiness of the speech or to streamline it. It was to be an examination of language as it was spoken, plain and simple. If I had begun to edit, where would I start? And where would it end? If, in fact, I had edited at all, it would have been a completely different piece. So exactly what was said and how it was said was left untouched. And that included a lot of gossip and slander. The entire activity was humiliating and humbling, seeing how little of value I actually speak over the course of a typical week. How unprofound my life and my mind is; how petty, greedy and nasty I am in my normal speech. Its absolutely horrifying. But I dare any reader to try the same exercise and see how much more value they come up with in their life. I fear that they might discover, too, that their lives are filled with trivial linguistic exchanges with waiters and taxi drivers. Even those relationships we feel are so vital to our lives our family and friends in linguistic terms, are really up for grabs. Yes, it seems to me that Soliloquy has not yet gotten the credit it deserves. It is not verbal play as in 111 but utilizes point of view and various narrative techniques to create a very vivid image of life in New York at the Millennium, in all its craziness and value. Because point of view is so rigidly controlled (after all, youre the one who asks the questions and sets up the conversations), its rather like a Henry James novel and you are quite hard on yourself in the process. Do you want to do more in this vein? I like the James comparison in terms of how complicated and interiorized externalized speech can be and what profound impact those trivialities that we unthinkingly launch off our lips every day can have. The moniker for the work was If every word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard. Its the accumulation of language Im interested in. How much does an actual weeks worth of language weigh? Its about concretization of the ephemeral. Its been six years since Ive done the project and its remarkable already just how much language has changed. In some ways, the book is prescient. Many readers in 2002 can understand the pages and pages of interminable computer talk in the book. In fact, its become common parlance. In other ways, though, so much about the book is completely dated, based on

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restaurants that are gone, businesses that are defunct, careers, friendships, and lovers that no longer exist. Written in the first blush of the dot-com bubble, its incredible to think how the landscape has changed since then. After Soliloquy, I wanted to see if in fact, I couldnt get closer to the sort of mimetic work that you were referring to before. Using mimesis as a framing device, could I legitimize an appropriative practice as a writer? If my speech was so valueless, could I somehow push the envelope and find language that had less value than it? And if so, could I theoretically justify the use of such a technique? The thing that most people dont realize about No. 111 is that while its a gleeful romp through language, to stop there is to miss the point. For me, the crux of the book lies in the inclusion of D.H. Lawrences short story The Rocking Horse Winner. I only chose that story because the last syllable of the last word in the story, winner, ended in an er. Because the story had more syllables than any other entry in the book, it was used as the last chapter. So theoretically, I felt that I could have included any short story or even fulllength novel into 111 and would have been justified in doing so. It was just a matter of nerve or finding the courage to do so. Did you ever sit down and actually read The Rocking Horse Winner? Its such a brilliant story. Or, like Cage vis--vis Finnegans Wake, did you prefer to leave it as it is? You know something? To this day I have never read that story! Ive counted the syllables several times but have never paid attention to it in a conventional way. I trust you when you say its a great story, but for me to treat it as such would be to undermine the structural and appropriative concept that I was trying to get across. I know it sounds prudish or puritanical, but for me to read The Rocking Horse Winner as is within the context of No. 111 it would destroy some crucial conceptual part of my book (by the way: I dont prescribe this for everyone they can do as they choose. Its just my own idiosyncratic point of view that necessitates my actions...). But it was important to keep this line of thought intact because it was this inquiry that led me, about five years later, to write the trilogy of Day, Week and Month during 2000-2001. They are all retyping pieces: Day is a retyping of a days copy of The New York Times, Week is a retyping of an entire issue of Time, and Month is a retyping of the February 2001 issue of Vogue. As process-based works, they are more punishing by far than Soliloquy and Fidget. The object of the work was to create a valueless practice, which I found to be an impossibility since the act of reproducing the texts in and of itself has some sort of intrinsic value. Could 111 and Soliloquy have been written without the computer? I would think not since you used the computer to get it all in, although you did handcount the syllables of 111 ? If the computer is indispensable, what does that tell us about future poetic and fictional projects? None of my works after 73 Poems could have been done without the computer. In 1993, 111 started off in analogue space with me collecting

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information around me with a pad and pencil. I can remember going to see movies and scribbling down words and phrases that ended in R. I was no longer reading magazines for the information they contained but rather to simply hunt down phrases for my book. During this period, I never spoke on the phone without a pad close by. When Id meet a friend for a drink, Id take my notebook and scribble down bits of our conversation, almost as if I was doing an interview. It was in this way that I discovered the quotidian language around me to be concrete and abstract. If I was hunting only for formal ticks in the language, it didnt matter at all what it meant, only how it sounded. My method of language hunting changed in 1994 when I started using the internet. Back then only gopher space or the text-based Lynx browser was available, but suddenly there was reams and reams of raw language available. I didnt even have to type, I just had to cut-and-paste. From that point on, it literally became the book that wrote itself. However, youre right about having to hand-count the syllables in 111. Many people tried to write me programs that would count syllables mostly based on Microsoft Words hyphenation feature but they all failed. The rules determining syllable counts are extremely idiosyncratic and I ultimately found it quicker and more efficient to do it by hand. In my recent projects, Ive tried to have my writing processes imitate the mechanization of the computer. I no longer think of myself as a poet or a writer, but instead as a word-processor, likening my practice to Picabias idea of mechanical drawing; suddenly mechanical writing seems interesting. In my practice, Ive come to believe that language by its nature is fluid and will assume any form its poured into. Hence my production has taken the form of everything from gallery installations to computer programs to couture dresses to CDs and books, all using the same language. Before the computer, language was much less fluid and it was almost impossible to coax it off the page. Reproducing technologies such as xerox just gave you more language glued to the page. Now, once language is digitized, its transportative and morphic tendencies are foregrounded. Great chunks of language have been melted and are free to assume a myriad of forms. In a way, it highlights the formal properties of language more than has ever been realized before. I know weve discussed the problem of work first written in normal ways and then merely transferred to the screen without doing anything with the digital possibilities. What can be done to make e-poetry better, less like advertising copy? Or is poetry, in the normal sense, not the best genre for the net? One of the most unfortunate tendencies in net art is the emphasis on formal possibilities; it so often uses as a criterion of its success questions like is this making the computer do things that its never done before? or is this piece technically expanding the possibilities of the field? While those are valid questions in a scientific sense, I dont think they have anything to do with art. As witnessed by the last two Whitney Biennials, we see a preoccupation with those questions. It has a strong parallel to the early days of video art where many people were staking out the technical possibilities of video as art. Some 30 years later, those experiments have dropped out of sight. Instead, whats survived are the more primitive visions of an artist grabbing the camera and

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doing his or her art with it Vito Acconci biting his arm or Joan Jonas Vertical Roll. They are in no way technically ground-breaking but are the works from the period that we most admire today. We are fortunate to be in a field that is able to adapt itself to technology relatively easily. Poetry naturally takes to the distributive forms of the web (unlike painting which still has to be seen in person to be fully experienced). E-poetry will only be as good as the poets writing the work. Of course, Im most enthusiastic about the web as a distribution system for poetry. The PDF format can deliver beautifully typeset poems as gorgeous as anything thats been done in print and for a fraction of the cost. I just think about the scarcity of adventurous writing materials when I was first getting interested in this stuff in the late 80s and I compare it to the abundance of them available today on the net. I think that my adaptation and embrace of the field would have been much quicker. I recall that the sorts of materials floating around back then were very dated: yellowing mimeographed sheets and dusty books from the 60s and 70s with black and white covers. Theres something about the medium of the web that makes this material feel new again, more vital, shorn of its original context. Were left with the work, naked, and the good work retains its power in the new medium. You have expressed dislike for Oulipo as too often conventional narrative that would be better off revealing its codes. Have you read W and Life A Users Manual by Perec? I would think youd love those. Also Jacques Roubauds Quelque chose noir, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop as Something Black. Yeah, I have a personal bone to pick with Oulipo. I accept the fact that it is truly potential literature but think its best left in its conceptual form. I find the ideas to be much more radical and interesting than the relatively few realizations of it. Even with complex systematic structures, for some reason the writers always tend to wrap their systems in conventional narratives. I always wish theyd leave more of the bare bones showing (I feel the same way about the nouveau roman Robbe-Grillets theoretical writing seems so much more radical than the actual books that he produced). Im a believer in process and realization. Theres something about going through an intense writing process and following it through to the end that opens up the linguistic possibilities of transcending the original notion. For example, I could have easily kept Fidget as potential literature by issuing the instruction Record every move your body makes for a day. But if I hadnt gone through the rigorous process of actualizing it, the writing would have been very different. I certainly could never have invented feeling so fed up with doing the exercise that I couldnt help but get drunk! My peers agree with me in this respect. Christian Bk took seven years to actualize Eunoia, his great book that exhausts the English vocabulary of words only employing specific vowels (he had to read the dictionary several times in order to accomplish this!); Craig Dworkin has been working for several years parsing a grammar book according to its own rules then replacing the parsed text with new verbs, nouns, etc. to create a new narrative based on the structural skeleton of the grammar book; and Darren WershlerHenry out-potentialized the Oulipo by writing The Tapeworm Foundry, a

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book that is nothing but hundreds of art and writing ideas. Every time we think weve thought up a new process, we discover to our dismay that Darren has already thought it up! I was trained as a sculptor and years ago I once took a pottery class with a teacher that made us aware that the inside of the pot is just as important as the outside. If, she said, the inside has had as much care taken with it as the outside, the pot will glow an inner radiance that would have otherwise been lacking. I think she was really talking about the attention of structure breeding integrity into works of art. I agree about process and I dont care for most Oulipo poems but Perecs fictions are quite profound on the semantic level as well as the structural one. But lets shift ground. You have been wonderfully responsive to the memoir Im writing about my high culture Vienna upbringing and the refugee aftermath, to be called The Vienna Paradox. Isnt this, by your lights, an oldfashioned, somewhat conventional project, and if not, why not? One of the things I find so intriguing about your book is the idea that we can come from such different places and yet be equally invested in and devoted to the same kind culture and art. When I read about your classical Bildung education, it makes me reflect on how different my own American upbringing was. Like generations before you, you had to struggle with issues such as: The discrimination of the aesthetic as opposed to its kitschy simulacrum was the sign of Bildung: those with genuine education and culture, could sniff out the kitsch, could tell that it was not the real thing. (Perloff, The Vienna Paradox) This line of questioning was never an option for me. I grew up in the 1970s in a tract home on Long Island in a house that was bereft of any high culture. We didnt visit museums, we had very few books. An occasional popular Broadway play (Grease, Hair, The Wiz, etc.) was the extent of my exposure to art in my family. Instead, we watched an enormous amount of television. In hindsight, so much of what 20th century innovative art was trying to do breaking down the division between high and low, accepting the quotidian as art, demystifying the myth of genius was part and parcel of my upbringing. I knew what pop was long before I knew what Pop Art was. After I studied Warhol, it was a confirmation of what I already had an intimate and implicit knowledge of. When Ginsberg talks about unhinging poetry from its formalist tenets by bringing common speech to play, it strikes me that all I ever knew was common speech. And when Cage famously talked about the merits of boredom, nothing could be more familiar to me than suburban ennui - of course, thats what led me to making art in the first place: art was a great way to kill time. Genius or artistic gifts were never something to grapple with where I came from; there was nothing in my background that ever led me to believe that I was in any way heir to the extraordinary. My grandparents were grubby merchants, not rabbinical scholars. How different, then, this is from your background!

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This is all very interesting! But it raises many questions. Given our different backgrounds, why do you and I like almost exactly the same artworks, poetry, etc.? We laugh at the same things; we dont like pretentious pseudo-lyric poetry and straight narrative, and so on. But why? Surely the kids you went to school with on Long Island dont go to Cage concerts? Do they read Gertrude Stein? And neither do they people I went to Fieldston or Oberlin with. The ones from Fieldston are still going to those same Broadway shows you mention. As for my family, I recall that when I was writing my book about Frank OHara in 1975-76, one day my mother was visiting and happened to look at OHaras Collected Poems. She was shocked and said to me, Well, now I see how different we are! She was referring to all the four-letter words, lines like I think I was made in the image of a sissy truck driver, and so on. Not her thing at all! Your OHara story reminds me of the time I was reading Ashberys Tennis Court Oath and my parents card carrying upper-middle class country clubbers were astonished to find that the book had nothing to do with tennis, that is, as they knew it! Similarly, just a few weeks ago, my father, who has been having insomnia problems, picked up Bruce Andrews Tizzy Boost in the middle of the night and was baffled. The next morning he asked me to explain why this was poetry. I told him the story of how I approached the book when Geoff Young sent me the manuscript to see if I wanted to do the illustrations for it. After trying to understand it in every conventional way, I finally began to ask what it wasnt. And in that way by creating a negative definition of it I was able to define exactly what it was trying to do. It was a big key into understanding Bruces work. But to answer your question, theres a part of the story I havent told that might make more sense as to how I turned out the way I did. My parents, after having sleep-walked through the 60s, woke up in the early 70s and emerged as proto-New Age seekers. My father, who had ambitions to do social work prison reform, specifically was forced by his immigrant parents into the family garment business, hence starting decades of frustration manifesting itself in physical debilitation and deep depression. He and my mother began looking for ways out starting with EST and then moving on over the next two decades into Silva Mind Control, Feldenkreis, Reiki, channeling, Neurolinguistic Programming, primal scream therapy, humiliation therapy, past-life regression, holistic healing, psychotherapy, firewalking, zen retreats, just to name a few. In the 5th grade, my sister and I were taken to a swami and inducted in the ways of transcendental meditation. From then on, our family was required as a group to meditate two times a day, 20 minutes each session. It was really awful making a kid who could barely sit still as it was meditate daily. As soon as I discovered drugs, I quit meditation. My parents, having rejected conventional Judaism, sent us for a secular Jewish education, called Kinder Shul. Kinder Shul grew out of the Workmans Circle labor movement and emphasized Jewish culture over religion; hence we learned Yiddish instead of Hebrew. We were taught by old-fashioned Socialists in the basement of a Quaker Meeting House on Long Island. Coupled with this was the fact that we were sent to a Workmans Circle

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summer camp, appropriately named Camp Walt Whitman, where we sang folk and labor songs, practiced non-competitive sports, met in town meetings, etc. The other oddball factor in my upbringing was my maternal grandfather, Philip Field (to whom No. 111 is dedicated). He was an up-and-coming New York lawyer in the 40s and 50s and one of the signs of good breeding, in his day, was the acquisition of a good library which he started building. Sadly, though, he invested all his money in the Cuban sugar fields and lost everything when Castro took over and ended up a ruined man. He began drinking, lost his practice and ended up as a gun-wielding rent-collector in Hells Kitchen for the rest of his life. However, as desperate as he was, he never sold his library. As a child, I would spend hours amongst these volumes: Aristophanes illustrated by Picasso, Dante illustrated by George Grosz, and so forth. When he died, I inherited all of these books. Before I met you, I had read 73 Poems. I pictured you, judging from that lovely book, as a rather austere Cagean type very quiet, very serious, rather delicate and certainly not Jewish! Those lovely words against the gray ground and the overprint! The Joan La Barbara vocalization! The question then is, how did you get from A (TV culture in Long Island) to B (Cage and Joan La Barbara) and C (a combination of high/low?). After attending a year of liberal arts college, I went to art school and studied sculpture. Upon returning to New York, I began making wooden sculptures of books. They were exquisitely carved plywood sculptures with words on them, which I began showing with great success in galleries. However, I was bothered by the fact that the idea of what to put on the books came in a flash, but then the execution could take up to several months of work to realize. In response, I began to question what I was more interested in the objects themselves or the words on the objects and chose the latter. I stopped making sculpture and began simply putting words on large pieces of paper. About this time, Ruth and Marvin Sackner began purchasing pieces from me. They invited me down to install a piece in their collection, an experience which changed the course of my career. Although by this time-1992 I was a player in the New York art world, Id never heard of Concrete Poetry or Language Poetry and it took a while for me to absorb and integrate this into my art work. The first step was instead of calling my art works text art (text art in the tradition of Kosuth, Weiner or Holzer), I began referring to them as poems, while continuing to show them in the NYC gallery context (which really had little use for poetry). 73 Poems grew out of these concerns and marked my transition from strictly a gallery artist into someone who had feet in both the art and the writing world. It was about this time, too, that I met Geoff Young was to publish No. 111 five years later. Geoff introduced me to Language Poetry and was the first person who saw my gallery work as fitting into the tradition of innovative writing and encouraged my work in that direction. Finally, some time in the early 90s, I came to embrace the works of Cage. I had made a bum real estate investment and had been wiped out financially. Also, I was questioning my role as a successful gallery artist and wondering if

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indeed I wasnt really a writer. Everything was up for grabs. I had looked at Cage in college but at the time, I really wasnt ready to understand it. After life had dealt me some blows, I became devoted to the Cagean idea of giving up control of things in both life and art. His work and philosophy really helped me transition through some hard times, as well as open up vistas unavailable to me in the relatively narrow confines of the New York art world (I recall a dealer telling me how she lost so much money by showing Cages visual works in her gallery in New York...). Much later, I began to see even the limitations in Cages work and had a desire to move beyond his ethos. As you, always at the cutting edge, certainly have! YANG: You set out to capture some of the vast quantities of language that is all around us and present it as art. Your framing device, as you explain in an interview with Marjorie Perloff, is mimesis. A couple of years ago Yang did a mimesis special (2001.1). In the issue, Geert Buelens notes how contemporary postmodern poets tend to overemphasize the constructed nature of their poetry by employing a smart, rich and in a sense quite overtly didactic language. He finds this a limiting practice. Why not, he suggests, explore the as if nature of poetry? This implies that writers actually work with (as opposed to e.g. wittily insert) everyday language - not in order to revert to the old game in which language was presented as a transparent medium but precisely to use it against itself. Can you identify with this? KENNETH GOLDSMITH: I agree with the notion that language is better less treated left raw and reframed in writing rather than "wittily inserted," which strikes me as a modernist strategy of collage that dips its big toe into the stream of "everyday" language without ever really employing it. In the end, there is still too much a trace of authorship, editing, and ego, riddled with choice so as if to say that one piece of language is better than another. I prefer not to make those sorts of distinctions and choices, but rather to simply reframe and quantify the vast amount of language around us. If we examine what is under our noses, we'll find that it's quite rich as is and that no amount of "witty insertion" or manipulation is going to make it any better. I call this a "non-interventionist" strategy of writing. When you recycle language how much does the act of transcribing matter as part of the art work? It is the transcription that makes the writing. How does one, for example, transcribe a radio broadcast? Since spoken language contains no punctuation, what choices go into the transcription of the broadcast? Does one decide to flow the language as a never-ending stream without punctuation or pause, or does one decide to "parse" it according to standard rules of grammar? David Antin, for example, never uses punctuation whilst transcribing; instead he connotes pauses and inflection by using graphical space between words. In my work, I try to use standard grammar and syntax wherever possible. I want my basic unit of writing to be deliberately uninteresting, pre-fabricated, or predetermined so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work. Using a common or ready-made form repeatedly narrows the field of my works and limits the amount of choices that I need to make. In this way, the work writes and constructs itself with less of my authorial intervention.

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Almost all of your projects display a preference for the opposite. As a matter of fact you seem to indulge in turning traditional artistic parameters upside down. You try to push your valueless speech further by trying to find language that has still less value, when you insert D.H. Lawrences story The Rocking Horse Winner in your No. 111 2.7.93 10.20.96 you do so on account of its number of syllables instead of its literary merits, you have been teaching uncreative writing as part of the creative writing program of the University of Pennsylvania and you seem on a perpetual quest for the unboring boring. Why always go for the opposite? What is it you react against? As the first generation of innovative writers after modernism assuming, as I do, that Language Poetry was the last gasp of modernism we are left with a large challenge: how to proceed after the deconstruction and pulverization of language that is the 20th century's legacy. Should we continue to pound language into ever smaller bits or should we take some other approach? I feel that we need to view language again as a whole syntactically and grammatically intact but to acknowledge the cracks in the surface of the reconstructed linguistic vessel. Therefore, in order to proceed, we need to employ a strategy of opposites: defamiliarization and disorientation as opposed to deconstruction. "Unboring boring," "uncreative writing," and "valueless speech" are all methods of disorientation used in order to re-imagine our normative relationship to language. The effect of your uncreativity is often very funnythat is, when one experiences it in small doses since the sheer length of much of your work makes it hard to digest when approached as a whole. Can you comment on the humour in your work? Do you mean to make it weightier by opting for vast quantities? I don't assume that because a work is of extreme length, it is humorous. The length of my works are pre-determined by the content with which I'm working. For example, the only reason Day the book where I retyped an edition of a day's New York Times is 900 pages is that's how long the manuscript turned out to be when retyped start to finish. What is humorous, however, is that when examined, the contents of our daily newspaper is 900 pages long! Every day, a great book is written several times all over the world, only to be discarded and begun again the next day. Or as Marshall McLuhan put it half a century ago: "Any paper today is a collective work of art, a daily 'book' of industrial man, an Arabian Night's entertainment in which a thousand and one astonishing tales are being told by an anonymous narrator to an equally anonymous audience." Youre very much not into that kind of literature in which the ego of the author is holding the reigns but then again, it is striking how personal your work is. Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word you spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996 from the moment you woke up Monday morning to the moment you went to sleep on Sunday night. You actually wore a hidden voice activated tape recorder to accomplish this and describe the result as a humiliating and humbling experience. Similarly, Fidget records every move your body made on June 16, 1997. Wonderful as the results are, both are rather egofocused. And in one of your pending projects you flirt with the idea of being someone else which of course highlights the fact that you are not [Goldsmith is working on an edition of the fan mail intended for his namesake, the saxophone

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player Kenny G, but addressed to Goldsmith as Kenny G the WMFU dj]. Can you comment on this? Actually, it's a common misconception that my works are ego-centric. On the contrary Soliloquy was an ego-effacing project. What was amazing is just how embarrassing, humiliating, and trite my week of speech was (and continues to be). Likewise, Fidget was an ego-eradicating project: it was a record of a body in an undermined space, not my body in my space. I never used the first-person "I" in Fidget nor did I employ any overt subjectivity; instead the book was an exercise in extreme objectivity. After I gave a reading recently, the other reader came up to me and said accusingly, "You didn't write a word you read!" He was correct. Instead, I transcribed, reframed and resituated language, thereby making it my own. We need to do so little today in order to be able to "write." I believe that writing today constitutes the moving of information from one place to another, the way we do on the internet every day. I'm fascinated with the idea of permeable and ever-shifting identity, the way we readily swap our avatars or gender on the web. Today, we are no longer limited to smaller notions of ourselves, rather the most effective writing, I think, occurs when we tap into the collective vast mind that we easily inhabit online. In fact, we never need "write" another new word; instead our job as writers is now information management: organizing and making our way through the huge amount of existing language. This is the new way to write. This new way of writing you propose involves machines doing the writing instead of a traditional author. At the same time, however, you acknowledge machines are in need of an operator. You must agree that wonderful technology is no guarantee for the quality of art. Yes, we need good machine operators! As writers, we are now employed in minding the machines and making sure they perform well. We are in charge of writing the programs which will, eventually, learn to write themselves. Once our machines are in good working order we can leave them to their own devices and find another way to occupy ourselves. But that's still a long way off and there's much minding to do between now and then. Also, when you state you want you work to be a mirror, doesnt this imply a rather traditional moralizing aspect to you work? Well, one can't ever escape morality, can we? Every decision is a moral (or immoral) one. Would you describe your work as political? At your performance in Ghent you read from your work Weather and opted for the Iraq forecasts from during the war. While I have no determined political agenda with my works, somehow they often bump up against the political. Like morality, politics seems an unavoidable condition when engaging in the framing of public language and discourse. Sometimes the political engagement is overt like when in The Weather the forecasts include the weather conditions from the Iraq battlefield or more oblique as in Day, which is often read as a precursor to 9-11 (it, in fact, is). My more recent project, a retyping the day's edition of The New York Times issued on the morning of September 11th, is perhaps the most overtly political work I've ever done. But I didn't really do it to be political, but instead to twist the "boring" or "mundane" nature of my work toward the "exciting", the "emotive",

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the "unboring." Needless to say, though, it's very political. The programme of Language writing seems quite congenial to what you do. They as well felt the need to react against poetry as it was/is taught at universities. Many language writers, however, are currently working at a university (and so are you). Isnt there a contradiction in this? It's a fact that in the United States, the primary reception of innovative literature happens in the university; there really is very little readership outside the academy. This is a condition that preceded my arrival onto the writing scene, fostered by numerous cultural conditions in the States, as well as the warm reception of Language Poetry by the academy. As such, I simply take it as a given that this is where the readership and study of my work occurs. But it's not all bad news. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, we are given free reign to teach in unconventional ways. For example, I teach classes in Uncreative Writing where we encourage the students to plagiarize, appropriate, plunder and sample. They are demerited when they show signs of originality or of conventional thinking. The university supports this agenda, so you see that perhaps the academy is not what it used to be! A conspicuous difference between your project and that of Language writing is the latters overt relating to theory. You rarely do so but still you call for conceptual writing and state that you prefer a thinkership instead of a readership. This seems to suggest you link art to philosophy. Can you comment? I have written that "I look to theory only when I realize that somebody has dedicated their entire life to a question I have only fleetingly considered." Theory follows my work, not leads it. Conceptual writing is a type of writing that doesn't require a readership. You can know my books without ever having read them. For example, there's the book that contains every word I spoke for a week; or the book where I retyped a day's New York Times; or the book where I transcribed a year's worth of weather reports; and so forth. These books are very difficult to read, but anybody can understand them without ever having seen them. Hence, I often have a "thinkership" rather than a "readership." Or, you can read them and have a very different sort of textual experience with them glacial, really. Fast or slow you can choose how to use the books. I'm not so interested in being read, in fact, I believe that I rarely am read. Illegibility, after all, has long been a trope of innovative writing. Craig Dworkin has written a book on illegibility and in his book cites example after example of disrupted texts, disjointed texts, and deconstructed texts. But never does he invoke another type of illegibility that of length and duration. Faced with an unprecedented amount of text today (due largely to digital media), not to invoke textual quantity seems to be a grevious oversight. My works reflect the glut of textuality in which we are submerged today. Apart from Language writing, which artists have had major influence on your work? My inspiration comes from all sorts of disciplines, literature being only one source of influence. It's a long list but some of the bigger names would be John Cage, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, Sri Ramakrishna, Giuseppe Verdi, Frank Zappa, Meredith Monk, John Oswald, Fluxus, Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Neil Young, Morton Feldman, Igor Stravinsky, Merce Cunningham, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Duchamp, Augusto de Campos, Vicki

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Bennett and Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein stands out as a major source of inspiration since you, in a way, dedicate one of your works to her [Goldsmiths chapbook Gertrude Stein on Punctuation]. Can you comment on the huge importance of Stein for so many American writers? We love her primarily because she's so American. She writes in the most American of Englishes; it would be impossible to imagine the simplicity and reduced vocabulary she uses if she was, say, British. She's also a great figure, anticipating our condition of "intermedia" by positioning herself at the nexus of so many fields. We love her because she was a woman; we love her because she was an open lesbian; we love her because she was a pop icon before the idea of popular culture was invented; we love her for the many permissions and freedoms she grants us by the example of her life. For us Americans she really is "the mother of us all." You have said that after Language writing there is nothing that can be called writing, no matter how much it might not look like writing. How important is this look like writing for you? The phrase struck me as seeming to go straight back to one of your first projects which consisted of wooden sculptures of books. How would you say does your training as a sculptor has affected your writing? When referring to a type of writing that it can be called writing "even though it doesn't look like writing", I was thinking of a radical approach to textuality. For example, could a column of map coordinates or stock quotes be identified as "literature"? After Language writing, I think so; as a movement, it really did an enormous amount of work and opened up a lot of new territory. The Gertrude Stein scholar, Ulla Dydo, tells us that visuality was a key way of reading Stein's texts. Often, she says, Stein's pages were never meant to be "read" rather they were meant to be looked at, to be scanned visually. This was a great revelation to me in forming my ideas about Conceptual Writing. It also dovetailed with concerns earlier in my work about the theorized utopian linguistic state of concrete poetry a language that could be read by looking and like Esperanto, understood visually and intellectually without understanding the language it was written in. One of the great advantages I've had as a writer is the fact that I was schooled as a visual artist. When I became a writer, I didn't know the rules of writing, which made it easy for me to pursue my own vision as a writer. I see many of my peers, schooled for many years in the history and techniques of writing, struggling to unfetter themselves from this knowledge in order to be able to purse a more innovative path. In this way, I consider my lack of education to be very fortunate. In a Yang interview with Michael Palmer (1997.3) he testifies that he prefers writing by hand over typing because the former is an, if you like, more intimate physical experience. How do you feel about doing everything by computer? I honestly think Palmer's statement is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. He must be living in a cave. As a public space the Internet is of huge importance to you and UBUWEB of which you are the editor is a worldwide success, with a browsership no magazine format could ever reach. You say you have stopped organizing live happenings because of the fact that these are always (disappointingly so) smaller in scope. Yet still, isnt avant-garde art necessarily an elitist practice?

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We average over 10,000 unique visitors on UBUWEB daily. When confronted with these numbers, suddenly the practice of avant-garde art doesn't seem so elitist. You see poetry on the web as essentially a gift economy, [as] the perfect place to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication consideration, information can literally be free. Isnt it a bit rosy to see the web as the great democratizer? Absolutely not. The web is the great democartizer. Of course there is the digital divide between those with access to technology and those without, but this is quickly crumbling. If that sounds too rosy still, think of the penetration rate of the last great paradigm shift: television. Some ten years after the birth of the television (we are now ten years into the internet), still only the elite and very wealthy had a television. It wasn't until many decades later that television was available even in the poorest nations and homes. Contrast that with the internet where in ten years, far greater numbers have online access than did have television during the same time span. Each year, vast quantities of the global population have web access, first dial-up, then broadband. I feel that as a content-provider of UBUWEB, I must keep five years ahead of the current state of bandwidth. Hence, we serve very large files of audio and video which have led some people to comment that we are catering to the digital elite. To which I respond, yes, we are for the moment, but within a year or two what now appears to be elite will be commonplace. We need to anticipate the future because it's coming at us very very fast. And what about government support for the arts? In the United States, the government long ago pulled "out of the business of funding the arts" on any sort of large scale, particularly when those arts fall outside their idea of what is proper. So, we've had to find ways to keep making art and distributing it without their help. And this has been one of the reasons I've been so "rosy" about the prospect of the internet: It allows us to deliver the sort of art that interests us globally at a minute cost to an international audience without any governmental dependence or interference. Let's hope it stays that way. At the conference On the Sound(s) and Images of Contemporary Poetry, an American Connection [Brussels 11/25/2005] you read your manifesto. One of the things you touched upon was form of which you said it is of little importance since complex forms disrupt the unity of the whole. Can you elaborate on this? I'm interested in ideas for writing that are so simple that they verge on stupidity and absurdity. What could be more silly than transcribing every word one spoke for a week and not editing it? But it occurred to me that nobody to my knowledge had ever done this. And that's an amazing thing to think of since one of the things we are most adept at is talking. There have been many attempts over the past century to try to "incorporate" daily speech into poems that have seemed to me unnecessarily complex, when what they were looking for was being produced literally right under their noses. So, complexity can get in the way. We need to move our ego, our ideas, and our will out of the way in order to be able to experience language in all its untrammelled glory. You also happily work with languages you dont understand. The only foreign languages you seem truly sorry you dont understand are computer languages. Can you comment? I think of both foreign human languages and computer languages in the same

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way: both tools which provide me the opportunity to create new texts, albeit in different ways. For example, I am currently making recordings of me reading the works of Wittgenstein in German, a language I neither read nor understand. I so horribly mispronounce the words that most German speakers who hear my work don't recognize it as German. So what is it, then? It's these sorts of questions that fascinate me. Computer languages are another story. The Canadian poet Christian Bk has predicted that in the future, the poet will have to learn PERL in order to write poetry. It's a good point and brings to mind one of the reasons for the sorry state of electronic poetry. It's hard enough for a poet to write a good poem. Now she must also be a programmer and a designer. These are great demands and I only know of one poet who can write poems, program and design equally well. The financial hurdles of getting design or programming help are insurmountable for most poets, hence the pitiful state of the art today. Finally, can you tell us something about the anthology youre editing? I am co-editing with Craig Dworkin an anthology called Against Expression: An Anthology of Uncreative Writing. It's an extension of the UBUWEB Anthology of Conceptual Writing (ubu.com/concept). The anthology begins with Marcel Duchamp's text for the ready-mades and moves through the 20th century touching on figures such as Gertrude Stein and George Bataille; thorough the sixties with artists like Andy Warhol, Adrian Piper and Hanne Darboven; and into the present with younger writers such as Laura Elrick, Dan Farrell, Christian Bk, Judith Goldman, Claude Closky and Fiona Banner. One large thesis of the book is that much writing that has been, to this point, considered part of the art world needs to be re-examined. Appropriation, datamining, intermedia, mechanical reproduction, and information management concerns of the current generation all have their precedent in artists' writings. These concerns were completely ignored by Language Writing in favor of a straight literary model ranging from Stein to Pound to The Objectivists. Our sense of history is somewhat different and this anthology will make these generational distinctions very clear. ely unoriginal. Among his published works are Fidget, an account of every movement his body made for 13 hours on Bloomsday, 1997, and Soliloquy, a record of everything he said during one week. He is teaching Uncreative Writing to thieving Penn students this fall; he will teach again next year. What are you training your students to do? I'm training them to forget everything they've ever learned about writing: their ego, their sense of narrative, their urge toward the Romantic, the smallness of their own minds and instead tap into something that's much larger than themselves: the world of available language. Our class tools are appropriation, theft, stealing, plundering and sampling cheating, fraud and identity theft are all encouraged. We rewrote the Penn Code of Ethics to become The English 111 Code of Unethics. If the kids are too original, they get penalized. Where and how does this theft take place? We try to do things that don't happen elsewhere in academia. For example, for one threehour class, I just had the students continuously write while watching TV shows and films: an episode of The Osbournes , Andy Warhol's Blow Job (a silent film of a man getting a blow job, but all you see is his face for 35 minutes), an episode of Good Times and a half-hour of Ali G. The languageor lack thereofwas incredibly different in each, as was the students' response to each.

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For another assignment, I gave them the simple instructions to retype five pages of their choice and [they] came in the next week, dreading their response to the most dry, dull assignment I could give them. But much to my surprise, they were charged. Their responses were varied and full of revelations: some found it enlightening to become a machine. Others said that it was the most intense reading experience they ever had, with many actually embodying the characters they were retyping. Out of the class of 18, there was only one girl who didn't have some sort of a transcendental experience with the mundane act of typing. She was a waitress who took it upon herself to retype her restaurant's menu in order to learn it better for work. She ended up hating the task and even hating her job more. . Have you ever had a job you really hated? No. I've loved them all. I've found the tedium to be seductive. Some of the jobs I've held have been: garbage man, chicken delivery man, ski shop attendant, floor sweeper, cocaine dealer, short order cook, bartender, dishwasher, waiter, carpenter, cabinet maker, plaster caster, artists assistant, autoCAD operator, layout editor, web designer, creative director, consultant, lecturer, music critic, radio personality, writer, artist and now university professor. For many years I was a creative director in advertising. If that's creativity, then I don't want to be creative. Are you trying to undo your students' sense of ethics and intellectual property? Art, and by extension the classroom, is a free space into which ethical queries can be conducted in a safe environment. By a consensual agreement, we've entered into a practice that questions conventional notions of ethics. Copyright law only becomes pressing when that which is being transferred has economic value. In our practicethe practice of experimental writingthere is no commercial value to any of it. Hence it supplements perfectly our idea of the classroom as a safe space for ethical transgressions. Wouldn't a copyright lawyer argue that one with you? There's a whole century's worth of aesthetic arguments as to why this is art, ranging from Marcel Duchamp to popular music. Nobody expects Britney Spears to be singing in front of a great live bandor, for that matter, to even be singing at all. Our entire culture is based on mechanical reproduction and sampling. Literature needs to catch up here. What about your own work? I retyped an entire copy of a day's New York Times, from cover to cover. It was published as a 900-page book. I sent a copy of it to The New York Times. They ignored it. You see, my gesture was economically non-threatening to them, hence it was easy for them to ignore. What's wrong with creativity? Creativity as we've come to know it is bankrupt. What passes for creativity in our culture is actually vastly uncreative. Think of the flood of worn-out narratives, passing for originality, be it novels, films or music, and you'll find that what we term creative is nothing more than repetitious formulas, spun over and over. Should something appear that's truly "creative" it doesn't stand a chance of selling and as such, is rendered culturally insignificant and marginalized to the point of invisibility. By opposing creativity as commonly acceptedin a sense by constructing a negative notion of creativityperhaps we can breathe new life into this practice. Hence, my concept of the uncreative. It's hard for a person to rid themselves of heart, creativity, individuality. No matter what we do, we fully express ourselves with every gesture. I want to propose that students do less to imbue a work with their own personality, because it's always going to be there regardless of how hard we try. Every choice is stamped with individuality; we needn't try so hard. Do your students ever find themselves accidentally slipping into a creative mode? How hard is it to let go of conventional notions of artistic individuality?

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The whole class ridicules a student who has fallen into a creative mode. We make sure they don't do that again! It's very easy for the kids to let go of conventional notions of artistic individuality as typically configured by our culture, once they permit themselves to do so. It took a few weeks, but now I feel that the students are finding themselves writing in ways they never knew they would. Each has produced an enormous body of high quality work. And best of all, with uncreative writing, you never have writer's block! Was there a time in your life when you were "creative"? What brought you to pursue uncreativity? I was trained as a visual artist, and in the visual arts, standard notions of creativity were challenged 100 years ago. In most good art schools today, the training doesn't center around technical achievement, but rather on conceptual strengths. I went to school in the wake of punk rock, which said that you don't need talent to be an artist, you need passion; skills and by extension, rote ideas of creativity were anathema. How did you come to writing? For many years I lived in the art world as a conceptual artist, a text-based artist and a sculptor. Slowly and organically, over the course of 20 years, my practice morphed into writing. Today, I only write. I've just published a book of the first collection of interviews with Andy Warhol called I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was fascinating in that he was really the master of uncreativity. Of course I find him and his attitudes very inspiring. As for my own writing, I've published seven volumes of poetry and have two forthcoming, one called Spring, which is a collaboration with the painter James Siena, and the other is called The Weather, which is simply a transcription of a year's worth of one-minute weather reports from the local New York all-news station. I do a weekly radio show on WFMU in New York City called "Anal Magic," which is a freeform experimental show where basically anything goes. I've also been engaged for the past ten years editing UbuWeb (ubu.com), the Internet's largest resource for avant-garde materials. This dovetails with my activities at PennSound here on campus, where I'm a senior editor. PennSound is a an initiative of CPCW, Kelly Writer's House and the Penn Library that aims to archive an enormous amount of poetry readings, sound art, sound poetry, experimental music, radio plays, etc. Do you ever get mistaken for the smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G? On WFMU, my "stage" name is Kenny G. I often receive e-mail intended for him. I have hundreds of these letters. Many of them are hysterically funny. I'm going to publish them one day. Ever lie awake at night with guilt? I do. Every night. I haven't slept in months. What makes writing particularly amenable to "theft"? Well, not all writing is worth the same. Poetrywhich is more or less economically worthlessis easier to "liberate." Nobody seems to mind. After all, we're not taking money out of anybody's pocket. ... Why did it make sense to leave the visual arts? My radical writing ideas are old hat in the art world. They've been appropriating for a century. But writing's another story. Any visions of uncreativity in the performing arts, music, etc.? Sure. Music is all sampled. I've already mentioned Britney Spears, and rap music is nothing but sampled. Every other area of our culture is sampled, from biotechnology to architecture.

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If you look closely, you'll find that just about everything is appropriated, sampled, swiped, borrowed, stolen and liberated. Maybe the real avant-garde is originality! Nadja Romain: To create Ubuweb back in 1996 was visionary. How did it start? Kenneth Goldsmith: Ubuweb started as a site for visual and concrete poetry. I was a collector of that stuff and I began to put up some of it online, just to see what it looked like and to share it with people. It looked amazing. At some point, shortly after we started, we added John Cage, who did sound poems, but sometimes in combination with an orchestra. So it was no longer pure sound poetry, and I began to think of Ubu as an archive for the avant-garde. The archives grew organically; there was no intention behind it. At the time the early 1990sthere was nothing at all like this on the web. You couldnt have access to this kind of material, so by default, Ubu filled this niche, and has become the only place like it on the web. There should be hundreds, but there is only one. NR: Why do you think that is the case? KG: Everyone is frightened of copyright. Ubuweb simply acts like copyright doesnt exist: we just ignore it. Everything on Ubu is free. We dont touch money. The site is run by students and volunteers, and our server space and bandwidth is donated by universities. Ubu has discovered an economic gray zone by hosting out-of-print and hard-to-find items that arent valuable, economically speaking. Its mostly artists ephemera and although it might not be worth a lot of money, intellectually and historically its priceless. The only value of the avant-garde is artistic and political. NR: Whats your definition today of the avant-garde and what is its place on the web? KG: Im not sure what the avant-garde is. On Ubu, our definition of it is always changing. But in the 1980s, you werent allowed to use the term avant-garde due to its patriarchal and modernist connotations. Now, with the advent of the web and the rise of revisionist ideas of what constitutes art (for example, Ubu proposing that modernist ephemera might be more important than the modernists primary works), somehow that funny idea of the avant-garde seems appropriate for today. Likewise, the web is such a new frontier that theres this crazy utopian sense of future again, which is not so different from the original avant-gardists. NR: Who contributes to Ubu, and how is it curated? KG: Ubu doesnt generate any of its own content. Instead, films and sounds are taken from very exclusive file-sharing groups and released to the public. The decision as to what goes on Ubu is made by the sections curator, or by me. There is no committee, no discussion. Whatever we think is good goes on the site. NR: How do you think new digital technology affects how artists create and show their work? KG: If you look at art galleries and art fairs, youd forget that the internet even exists. To me, thats not being contemporary. The market is still the thing that drives the art world, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I feel the art world is falling behind culture. Art used to lead culture if I wanted the latest and most innovative ideas, Id go to a contemporary art museum. Today, Ill go to Apple. Corporate and mainstream culture makes the art world look like an antiques shop. What the art world is missing is the idea that its not the content any more that makes a work radical; instead, it is the way its distributed. A Matthew Barney video is still a Matthew Barney video, just as it was 20 years ago, but how it is distributed across file-sharing networks to far-flung corners of the world, for free and on demandis what makes it radical. For the art world, the primacy of content has long been replaced by market status. The art world doesnt care what artworks are about; they care how much money they are worth.

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NR: How are you perceived by the mainstream art world? KG: The mainstream art world knows nothing of Ubu. Why would they be interested? Ubu is intended for people who dont have access to the centres of urban culture and all the riches they offer. We often receive emails from people living in rural, isolated or suburban areas whose only line to the outside world is a web connection. For them, Ubu is an opensource museum and offers a full education on a type of culture that is unavailable, say, in their local mall or library. The museum world, although claiming to be interested in education, only serves those who can afford to come to them, a privileged class. Ubu is free and embracing of everyone, regardless of their geographic location or income. NR: What are you the proudest of having broadcast on Ubuweb? KG: Theres too much to pick just one thing. But the things Im most proud of are the artworks whose copyright holders have requested we remove, but after some dialogue and conversation, they agree to keep them up on the site. They approach us suspiciously, but after understanding that we love art and artists, and that we dont touch money, they come to want to be a part of Ubu. NR: You have said you dont believe in a democratic approach to art why is that? KG: One of the problems with the web and social media in general is the ethos of everything is good (the like button on Facebook), or everybody has a voice. Everybody might have a voice, but not every voice is worth listening to. You need someone to separate and discern which ones are worth hearing. And thats always been the role of the curator. In the age of the archivistand we are all archivists by default in the digital eracuration has become even more important. With more and more artworks and files, you really need someone to sort it all out for you. Ubu doesnt have an open policy or any social media or community attached to it. Its more like a library where you come to it and take whats there. NR: How do you see the future of Ubuweb? KG: The future of Ubu will be the same as it has been for the past 15 years, just bigger and deeper. Its all hand-coded, written in html 1.0, and thats why it works no gimmicks, no tricks, no Flash, no advertisement, no donation buttons, no mailing lists, no promotion. Nothing but art. NR: By getting bigger, you mean more followers? KG: No, I dont need more followers I dont even know how many I have. It doesnt matter for me if three people watch or 3,000we dont advertise, we dont ask for donations, we dont promote. Were opposed to that and it allows us to do what we want. We dont care about community. But Ubu is generous, available, open to everyone, and it is democratic in this sense. NR: Before we spoke I went on Ubuweb and watched Pilot, a show for made for public TV in Ontario by General Idea. I feel like it is exactly what Ubu offers, this specific, rare thing you cant see anywhere else. KG: We didnt ask General Idea or [its co-founder] AA Bronsonwe just found it and put it out online. So this is it: you benefit from us breaking the law. NR: There is something very political about Ubu. Is it an anti-capitalistic tool? KG: Ubu ignores capital were neutral about it to the point where, like copyright, we just pretend it doesnt exist. We propose a utopia where culture is free and open to anyone, regardless of where theyre from or how much they have in their bank account. Ubu is the kind of world that we dream of living in. Truman Capote famously slammed Jack Kerouacs On the Road, claiming, Thats not

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writing; thats typing. Its an insult that New Yorkbased conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith would take as a compliment. His work, which has been praised by Publishers Weekly for its near-hypnotic pleasures, depends almost exclusively on appropriation, plagiarism and recontextualization. For Day, he retyped every single wordincluding ads and stock tablesfrom the September 1, 2000, edition of The New York Times. His most recent book, 2007s Traffic, is a compilation of N.Y.area radio traffic reports. Like some impossible spawn of Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein and William Gibson, Goldsmith abhors the very idea of traditional imaginative fiction: Do we really need another creative poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table? Guess not. You teach Uncreative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Whats on the syllabus? How to plagiarize, appropriate, steal, lie and cheatthings the students are already good at. Theyre marked down if they show a shred of creativity or originality. They love it. Why do you think other writers are so hung up on originality? I dont know. Its something the music and art worlds dealt with long ago. Nobody wants Britney to really sing. She lip-synchs and everyones happy. Marcel Duchamp put the question of what art is to rest almost 100 years ago. But literature is always 50 years behind painting. Your work Soliloquy is a transcription of every word you said in the span of a week. Arent your books tedious to produce? I find them very pleasurable to produce. Its relaxing to retype and transcribe. I absolutely adore it. Its easy. Ill never have writers block. Do you ever miss more conventional literary pursuits, such as crafting the perfect metaphor? No, but then I wasnt trained as a writer. Thats like asking Matthew Barney, Do you ever miss drawing a beautiful face? What are you working on now? Rewriting Walter Benjamins The Arcades Project. Im transposing the whole thing onto the New York of the 20th century. How long do you think that will take? About 15 years. Acclaimed conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of numerous works of what he calls uncreative writingbooks that in recording quotidian events or transcribing unliterary texts, nonetheless reveal permutations in the language and achieve a kind of sculpted beauty. Works in this vein include Fidget (a transcription of every movement Goldsmiths body made over the course of a single day), Soliloquy (every word he spoke over the course of a week), and Day (a retyping of an issue of the New York Times). Goldsmiths latest work, the American Trilogy of The Weather, Traffic, and Sports (all from Make Now Press), is reviewed in the current print edition of Rain Taxi Review of

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Books. Goldsmith has also edited Ill Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, is the impresario behind the astonishing online archive UbuWeb, and hosts a weekly radio show on WFMU in New York City. The following interview with Goldsmith, conducted by Kareem Estefan on WNYU Radios Ceptuetics show, took place on March 26, 2008, and has been lightly edited for publication. Kareem Estefan: Lets start out by talking about your most recent book, Sports, and the American Trilogy thats now complete. Could you tell us a bit about the project on the whole? Kenneth Goldsmith: Yeah, the project as a whole is, as you said, an American Trilogy, also known as the On the Ones trilogy. Its three books: The Weather, Traffic, and Sports. The first book is a years worth of weather reports, all recorded daily and transcribed from 10/10 WINS here in New York (for those of you who are not from New York, its all news all the timethey give weather, traffic, and sports every ten minutes). The second part of the trilogy is called Traffic, and it is a days worth of traffic reports, recorded ten minutes apart from each other, transcribed for 24 hours. And the final piece is called Sports, and that is a full transcription of the longest nine inning Major League Baseball game in history, and that was August 18, 2006, the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, the second part of a double header at Fenway Park. KE: I cant tell how boring this one will be. [laughter] How long is it? KG: Its as long as the other ones, theyre all about 120 pages. Oddly enough, theyre all identical size. This is a very boring book, because its said that in a typical baseball gamewhich is two, two-and-a-half hourseight minutes of action happens. This, being the longest one, is almost five-and-a-half hours, and only about 14 minutes of action happen. So how do they possibly fill the time for five hours? Its absolutely painful. But it was a great game! KE: It also seems like a good metaphor for your work. Youve often said that your writing is extreme writing and that youd win an Olympics medal for the boredom that you perform; youve also talked about writing in a kind of athletic way, the feat of writing. And this one is very much an American book, as all of your work has been. KG: Its also very New York. Its the traffic in New York, listening to the names of the streets. I read from Traffic in California recently, and all the former New Yorkers came rushing up to me and said, God, hearing that makes me wish I was stuck in traffic on the BQE! Im so nostalgic for New York-style traffic jams. KE: [laughter] Yeah, it is very distinctly New York. I wanted to talk about another book thats coming out soon too, your anthology of conceptual writing, called Against Expression, which is co-edited with Craig Dworkin. This movement seems to be getting a lot of visibility recentlyyoure posting on the Poetry Foundation blog, definitely reaching a lot of poetry fans not normally into some of the more avant-garde strains of poetry, and theres also a conference coming up called Conceptual Poetry and Its Others at the University of Arizona. Just wondering if you wanted to comment on the extent to which conceptual writing is now a movement (or is not), especially maybe in relation to Conceptual Art, which for a long time struggled with the narrowness of this name and struggled to define itself. KG: Well, I often am fond of quoting Brion Gysin that Writing is fifty years behind painting, and that remains true today. So, in terms of Conceptual Art, which was finished about 40 years ago, were just getting to that now in writing. It really is a bit of a lag. There have been strains and gestures toward conceptual writing, but it always seemed like it was wrapped up in a more conventional pose of poetryeven what we consider to be the most avant-garde and innovative poetry of recent times still looked and felt very much like poetry.

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Our last avant-garde in poetry might be equivalent to Abstract Expressionism. And suddenly, in the early 60s in the art world, with ideas of Pop Art, painting became something in quotations, and hence leaping off into gestures of Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, and all the other visual strains of the 1960s. So, in a sense, this is very much a break from what looks and feels like poetry, because most of the stuff really doesnt. And yet its not fiction. It is received within the poetry world, so it has a very direct discourse with poetryhence, I believe, making it poetry, because I cant imagine what else it could possibly be. And the poetry world is very receptive to it, as opposed to the fiction world, which absolutely has no interest, no sense of what to do with this. In fact, poetry was looking for its next move and I think its found it here. KE: Which is interesting also because most of the books of conceptual writing have the heft of novels. They look very different from most poetry books. KG: Well, theres a reason for that, because a lot of this type of writing is reflecting the environment that were living in now, which is an environment rife with multitudes of information. And a lot of that language is being recycled, and being managed, and being shoved and pushed around. So it really is a management of information sort of a movement now. Youre not going to tackle tactics of moving information by putting a few sparse words on a page. Most of this work is being done by pushing a great deal of text into some sort of form. KE: Bruce Andrews was on this show two weeks ago and he was talking about how using a paper cutter really changed his workit made his writing break up into a modular process, and youve talked a lot about cut-and-pasting, OCRing, all the new technologies available with the Internet and networks. It seems like both Language writing and conceptual writing are movements that emphasize the materiality of language. And this is something that has been coming up for a long time in writing, but what seems different to me about conceptual writing is the fluidity that comes with this new idea of language as matter, how everything can drip much more easily. So I was wondering if you saw that difference, or thought that was something that was also technologically rooted? KG: Well, I think every movement is right for its time. Certainly, these types of ideas that are currently being informed by all the technology thats around us couldnt have possibly made any sense 30 years ago, 20 years ago when a type of writing like Language writing was in process. Of course, a paper cutter is what you had to work with then; back then, words were locked onto a page and the only way to get them off was not really to get them off, but you could Xerox them, and you have a new page with words still imprisoned on them. And the difference, I think, is that the language that were working with today is completely fluid; its lifted off the page and therefore able to be poured into so many different forms and take so many different shapes and really be molded and sculpted in a way that wasnt possible before. So it strikes me that the move of conceptual writing is a writing for this moment, and 20 years from now, it too will seem tied to its time, and to its technologies, which of course will be obsolete by then. KE: Which is great because your works do very much concretize a moment; looking at a work like Soliloquy, which was coming at the moment of the Internets arrival, everything there seems so dated and at the same time, youre there in the book saying, 10 years from now, this is going to look so, so primitive. There are a lot of temporal dimensions to your work and a constant negotiation with time and especially how that affects art and movements passings. KG: I think that its sort of great that things get dated, because five years after somethings done it looks terribly dated, but 10 or 15 years later, it looks really cool and nostalgic and very hip. It gains this sort of patina of time. So youre writing in the moment, youre

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recording the moment, but it moves beautifully into the future the moment gets better as we get further away from it. KE: I wanted to bring up one of the aspects that separates conceptual writing from OuLiPo, which proposed many similar ideas based on constraint. And youve said elsewhere that you like the idea of realizing a work and seeing how its transformed by becoming more than simply potential literature. At the same time, though, you say that people dont need to read your books and you offer wrappers instead, which are short summaries of the books concepts. So in that case, why move beyond the wrappers? There seems to be some kind of paradox there, both maintaining that you only need to know the idea of the work, but at the same time wanting to do more than the idea. KG: I think that there is something to making a commitment and actually realizing the piece even if the results are identical from a mere cut-and-paste. Having gone through this, I think, adds almost an invisible dimension of credibility to the work. I once had a pottery teacher in art school and she said, If youre making a sealed jarthats a jar with a lid that will not come off, you know, a decorative thingshe said, you have to make the inside as perfect and as beautiful as the outside even though no one will ever see it, because it will radiate its aura through the outside. You will feel it. So in a sense, these things are very important to be doing. And actually, this is one of the ideas behind a realized text. Also, today because we are in the process of learning how to manage information as a writing practice, we need practice. We actually need to get our hands on massive amounts of this stuff and push it around and really see what it can do. To theorize about it, its an approach. . . I think Rob Fitterman often talks about a postconceptual writing, which I find very interesting, and I think one of the strategies of post-conceptual writing will be a return back to a gesture, a suggestion, no need to realize it, and I look forward to that as well. KE: Thats an interesting idea, and, not to out you here, but I also think its worth mentioning that many times the concepts dont quite get realized. Youve talked often about how Fidget failed in a way, or by its inherent nature could not have succeeded, but also The Weather, for example, is not a transcription of every days weather, there are actually about 200-some if Ive counted correctly. And I wondered if that is something that happened consciously with you, if you kind of savor these moments where the realized book differs from the concept and if thats a worthwhile point of discussion. KG: One typo will change an entire book. . . if theres one typo in it or one purposely misspelled word, it becomes an entirely new text. So the books are filled with errors, absolutelybecause its absolutely impossible to read these things, nobody will sit down and properly proofread these thingstheyre absolutely riddled with human error, which is fine because I am doing these things. So I actually dont have a problem with thatin terms of The Weather, I mean, I travel a lot and how in the world would I have done that back then, and Im not going to not travel, so yes, the wrapper is different than the text. There are a number of surprises in the text and shorthand is shorthandit cant possibly say what a text can say. And people tell me, who have read these things, that in fact theres great satisfaction from actually reading these texts. I wouldnt know. I havent read them. KE: I think I fall on that side of things, actually. Whats interesting is in Paragraphs of Conceptual Writing, which is of course a moment of stealing from Sol LeWitts Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, you and he write that the basic unit should be deliberately uninterestingand this suggests a reading on the conceptual level rather than say, the level of the sentence. But especially with a book like Soliloquy, which I think youve talked about as a kind of transformative work because it made you hear language in a different way, there is the same experience for a reader who sits through it and gets to then afterwards walk around and hear the words that he or she says and experience what it would be like to be

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recording that. And at the same time there are also some really interesting small moments in the book, where you have a line where you couldnt understand the words that you were saying, Im assuming, in transcribing. And the moments they happen are pretty funny sometimesthey seem like a moment youre going to admit something that might be controversial or they seem like a moment where you would be embarrassed to admit what you were saying, and I love this kind of moment where we say, is he holding something back from us? Theres a lot of referring back to your performance of the books. So I was wondering what its like for you to perform a book like Fidget and Soliloquy, what its like during that day of Fidget, during that week of Soliloquy, to know this is going to end up as a book? KG: Well, I would only do a little test for each one. For example, before I did Soliloquy, I would do some tests over maybe the course of a couple of hours and type it out. You see, we dont know what the books are going to look like, because how does one transcribe? This is why its important to realize these books. What decisions are made to make this book look this way? How are you going to punctuate this thing or are you going to punctuate this thing? Will it flow, will it be justified. . . there are thousands of decisions to writing the book outside of the performance. I dont know what the books are going to look like until I sit down and I actually transcribe. In other words, I can theorize the work of literature but until its realized, I have absolutely no idea, and its always a surprise. But I always find a sort of style in the transcription, Ive got a very consistent style of transcription, its my very own way of writing. As a matter of fact, if I gave you the same exact tape to transcribe, say of the Sports game, you would transcribe it extremely differently than I would. So even though this is uncreative writing, often my point is that no matter how hard you try, you cant stop who you are, how you operate, what your tastes are and what your decisions are. Sometimes people in my classes come to me fearful that if I ask them to retype something they are going to become robotsbut in fact, in the typing everybody somehow manages to very much express themselves. KE: Since we brought up the class, how are they going? How are students reacting to the idea of uncreative writing and to doing this kind of work? KG: I think that they are very, very good at this. They are very well-practiced at plagiarism, fraud, identify theft, repurposing papers. . . the question is what happens when you bring those practices out into the open and you say its OK to do that, as a matter of fact you must do that, and lets examine what youre doing and what choices youre making. Suddenly the whole game changes and theres all sorts of accountability that starts to happen for certain gestures that were never considered before, and its the same type of accountability that anybody whos writing anything has to engage with. Certain questions need to be asked and certain questions need to be answered, and you need to be very smart, you cant simply say well, I dont know. You need to know exactly why youre doing it and how youre doing it, so its actually terrific, and I think that once one engages in a considered manner of all of these negativeor what the culture calls negativedialectics, for lack of a better word, they find that their writing and their approach to language is forever changed. KE: Since it really is a very strenuous process to come up with this kind of concept that you can defend from all angles, I was wondering, do you have a lot of work that goes unrealized precisely because you dispose of the idea, thinking this wont come out in a way that Ill be satisfied with. How often are you brainstorming and throwing things away? KG: No, I have very few ideas. I have very few ideas, and I simply commit to doing that idea. You know, this trilogy is five years of my life, writing these three books. It takes a long time to do each one and the thing about books is they just have an incredibly long life that people dont forget. A career builds, one upon another, particularly with books like this that

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A.S. Bessa: I have recently read a book on how Mallarm would rework his prose poems on the occasion of each new printing of them, and one prominent aspect was how he increasingly augmented the quantity of commas in each paragraph, as a way to slow down the reading act. That reminded me of your drawings about punctuation which is an aspect of language that we tend to overlook.

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are very easy to reference with a wrapper. Soliloquy was done, was recorded in 1996, so thats 12 years ago. And yet its still, you know, you talk about it as if it happened fairly recently. In the art world, you dont get this sort of thing. People cant possibly remember what you did three years ago. And so, these very definitive gestures, if Im going to make a gesture, to do a book, Ill have to sort of feel that it was worth all that time, which can be up to 12 years of ones life and possibly much longer. KE: Since were on WNYU, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your shows on WFMU, what youve done on there and how it overlaps with your writing. KG: Well, its my Dionysian side. [laughter] Theres a lot of shows that I do on FMU that are readings of my books: I think I spent two three-hour shows back-to-back reading Traffic, reading The Weather, and theyre also just insane conceptual gestures that happen during the course of the show. And a lot of stuff that comes out of radio ends up sort of becoming the corpus of my own workfor example, singing theoretical texts is something that came up out of a radio practice and now is viewed as part and parcel of what I do. You see, my work is multi-pronged, and one prong of course is writing, another prong is pedagogy, which is the teaching that I do at Penn, which is really the same gesture as the writing, which is really the same gesture as the radio show, which is really the same gesture as UbuWeb, and theyre all one big piece of the pie. As a matter of fact, people have been saying that maybe UbuWeb really is the best work Ive done. I havent framed it as an art work, but Im ready and very happy to accept that as an art work, maybe theyre right. KE: Yeah, it seems kind of like the direction that Lucy Lippard took. She often would exhibit works with many of the same strategies that the conceptual artists did, and at one point in Six Years, she says critics are the original appropriators, which I thought was great. In a lot of ways, the art of UbuWeb is speaking through the things posted on there and in a sense, is a form of exhibition-as-art. KG: Well, its a new approach. Never before has a sort of general rubric or umbrella of the avant-garde been proposed and maintained of this volume. Youve had fragments, youve had collections of things, but never has such an enormous amount of material that is tied together only by a vague idea of avant-garde. . . and by the way, the idea of what is avant garde is always changing. And yet these works are sort of living with each other and dialoguing with each other, often very, very low works and very, very high works all living in the same space dialoguing with each other in a very natural and organic way. So I think, again, its our technology and our time that permits us to create something like UbuWeb. KE: Do you see UbuWeb as a kind of community for people who are talking about some of the same things? Theres a listserv, is it somewhere that youre discussing your work? Is there creative work coming out of it, or uncreative work coming out of it? KG: I dont know. I mean, the usership is worldwide, its so vast. You cant possibly imagine how much bandwidth and traffic this site draws. I really dont know how its being used and I dont foster community around it. It creates its own community, simply because as some sort of an institution on the web, it exists and draws certain like-minded people in large numbers to it. I think that constitutes an ideal community.

Kenneth Goldsmith: The fact that commas slow down the act of reading is very much in keeping with John Cage when he quoted Norman O. Brown as saying that "syntax is the arrangement of the army" and Thoreau's idea that "when he heard a sentence he heard feet marching." Cage felt that the function of syntax was that of a regulatory body-language's policeman-and as an anarchist, was uninterested in those types of order and restraint. The drawings to which you're referring come directly from a Cage piece "Writing Through Finnegans Wake for the Second Time" published in Empty Words (Wesleyan University Press, 1981). In the piece, he creates a typical Cageian mesostic write-through of Finnegans Wake yet he does something that, to my knowledge, he only did once: he scatted the text's syntax all over the page as dictated by chance operations. I was struck by the beauty of that piece and was shocked that neither Cage nor anyone else ever followed the idea to its logical conclusion-or illogical conclusion as the case may be-by removing language altogether and allowing the syntax to play freely. I tend to think of the pieces as syntax on holiday. ASB: Another analogy would be to make a comparison with traffic signs, and in the case of your drawings it's as if the city had disappeared and only the signage persisted. I am also struck by the randomness in them, although I am sure they are very precise. Your work has always had a very brainy finish to them, but at first glance, these drawings seem more abstract and intuitive. KG: All my work has a brainy finish to it, though just below the surface, it's all intuitive, abstract and poetic. The problem is that most people in the art world refuse to go below an object's visual surface and thus never get past an initial impression of what they're seeing. But the dynamic that I'm invoking is completely intentional and functions to turn the paradigm of text art on its ear. By employing text art's conventions-which I'm quite fond o fit's a perfectly rigorous way of subverting them. I figure that I lose over half the gallery audience by working with text. Many people walk into a gallery and just turn around because they "don't read" their art. In addition, most people feel that with text-based work, they have to read the entire thing, start to finish. My work functions differently in that it is impossible to read conventionally start to finish; it works better as browsing, the way we read a newspaper. Who reads a newspaper start to finish in that order? We are already trained to skim-it's how we read today. The difference between one text artist and another should be in the way their work reads, not in the way it looks. An occupational hazard of being a text-based artist is that your work is going to look like everyone else's! It's something that one acknowledges when they devote themselves to working exclusively with text; after all, there are only 26 visual forms your work can take. You consciously accept the medium's limitationit's a radical stance to take in an art world obsessed with individuality and differentiation. And the strange thing is that writers don't seem to have this problem: Open any book to page 50 and it's pretty much going to look the same as page 50 of any other book. Once again, the question writers ask themselves is: How does it read? I think that's a question that more text-based artists need to be asking themselves. Once you enter into this way of thinking, you realize that textbased art is a wonderfully open field. ASB: Audiences want to be visually entertainedthey shy away from anything that will ask more work on their part. Many people will not read works like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake because they think of them as unreadable, thus missing all the wonders of the text.

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KG: Finnegans Wake is certainly beyond the novel. Joyce wrote a book that, in no way, could ever have been mistaken for a novel: It's unnameable, unknowable and uncategorizable. To me, Finnegans Wake is as much an object as it is a book, something to be looked at as much as it is to be read. When I wrote my 600 page No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, I wanted to create an object that couldn't be named, categorized or identified. I looked on my bookshelf and saw that any reference book worth its salt was at least 600 pages. Hence, I stopped writing my book when I hit 600 pages. In the end, No. 111 can never be mistaken for a novel or a book of poetry. To this day, it remains unnameable. In addition, in the spirit of Finnegans Wake, I wanted to write a book so large and complex, that I could open it at any time and be surprised. However, after having spent over four years working on it, I found that I ended up knowing every word in the book. Only recentlyit's been two years since publicationhave I begun not to know it anymore. And now, every once in a while, I can pick up the book and be surprised! ASB: What is striking about No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 is its encyclopedic character, which one associates with Joyce or Pound, but in your case the choices seem more aleatory. The attempt to sum up all books in one is present in Joyce and Pound but their processes were highly selectiveperhaps we can even call them elitistwhereas yours is more democratic (for lack of a better word). Even the title of your book has a more detached tone to it. What your process was like in writing No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96? KG: It was both an aleatory and a highly structured process. I am a collector; as a writer, I am a collector of language. For three and a half years, during the time in which I wrote No. 111, I collected words and phrases that ended in sounds relating to the "schwa": are, ah, air, ear, uh, and so on. I collected these sounds from conversations, the newspaper, television, booksanywhere that there was language. I was constantly scribbling down things or speaking into a tape recorder. At the end of each day I would bring my harvest of language home and dump it into a word processing program, where I would hand-count the number of syllables in each phrase (there are no computer programs that can accurately count syllables). It was in this way that the book became structured: alphabetically and syllabically. ASB: A few years ago I saw a panel discussion led by Jerry Saltz at the Drawing Center in which you participated, and I had this image of you as a person that does not throw anything out. That was the first time I saw your work, and I had the feeling that you were doing a poetic inventory of sorts. The "found poetry" section on UbuWeb is another fascinating example of your collecting drive. Do you agree with Geoffrey Young when he calls you a "taxonomist of the language environment? KG: Yes, but I'm not so much a namer as I am an organizer of language. In Ron Silliman's The New Sentence, he posits the idea of language becoming commodified and privatized when used in "public" places such as road signs or advertisements. In Silliman, there's a sense of regret and loss. While I can sympathize, my generation doesn't see it as a problem thanks to having come of age with ideas such as appropriation and sampling as part of the lingua franca. On the contrary, the more public and commercial language becomes, the more available it is to re-employ and re-purpose with the life that was drained from it.

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There's so much great language out there for the taking; if we open our eyes and ears to it, we'll find it in abundance. I have often worked with concretizing the ephemeral, making the invisible visible, finding out what language weighs. In 1996, I did a piece called Soliloquy where I tape recorded and transcribed every word I spoke for a week from the moment I woke up on Monday morning until the moment I went to sleep Sunday night. The tag line for the piece was " If every word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard." The book was 350 pages long and the language just fell together. Marshall McLuhan talked about the creative process as requiring nothing more than the "brushing" together of two chunks of content; the variety of results can be shocking. I wasn't trained as a writer, yet I am now one. I was trained as a sculptor and as a result, have a strong urge to make language physical. In the past, I did not edit (No. 111 and Soliloquy); I simply accumulated. But my recent project, Fidget-every move my body made on Bloomsday 1997-was heavily edited. The methodology was the same, but the parameters slightly shifted. As a result, editing was part of the process or machine and, for this project, was permitted. In my life I'm also a collector. I'm a DJ on WFMU and have several thousand LPs and CDs. I've also been collecting found and insane poetry off the streets of New York City for the past fifteen years, the best of which is housed on UbuWeb. There's so much language in this city that one could spend their entire life making different sorts of collections of language that is here. ASB: Heidegger wrote on the issue of using language for practical purposes which he was, of course, against. But I do agree with you about the possibilities in commercial language, or language as commodity. It is a matter of trusting the power of language to renew itself, always creating new words and syntax. KG: Yes, over the past decade we've seen language renewing itself at a remarkable rate. For example, compound words forming URLs have become common parlance (my favorite is Modell's: gottagotomos.com: It's something right out of Finnegans Wake). I first noticed this tendency in the early 90s when rappers started slamming words together to create compounds like "funkdoobiest." Around the the same time there was rap movement sometimes known as The Daisy Age (A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers) which incorporated modernist collage and noise into the mixes. It was as if they took classic musique concrte and added beats to it, not to mention radical Burroughs-esque cut-up and John Oswald-like plunderphonic practices. It was an amazing confluence as modernism and pop culture worked together to stretch and twist the parameters of language. ASB: Even the concept of the "book," which we are all so fond of, has been blown up to accommodate new necessities. The fact that you were trained as a sculptor, for example, sets up an entirely new attitude towards the book. KG: Actually, over the years, I've grown less fond of the book and more devoted to the internet. I've come to feeland this is particular to literature and musicthat if it doesn't exist on the Internet, it doesn't exist.

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Now, having said that, I'm convinced of the web's radical powers in those spheres. A few years ago, a French filmmaker said to me "in a time of pluralist practice, the issue is not 'make it new' but the new paradigm concerns methods of distribution." How you distribute it counts as much as how you make it. This has radical implications for those arts which have functioned on what is basically a gift economy. Take poetry, for example: Hardly anybody ever makes money from poetry. When you get poetry books, they've usually been given to you by their authors or you've bought them for a couple of bucks from Small Press Distribution at little profit to the poets. Because most poets are still under the illusion that there is a career to be had from the production of paper books, they unnecessarily saddle themselves with an old distribution system. Also, they are at the mercy of publishers who have no money, but whom nonetheless dangle the prospect of publication in front of the authors. As a result, many friends of mine have literally waited years for a book to appear that will ultimately have no distribution to speak of. On the web, you can publish instantly, in full color and have terrific global distribution at virtually no cost. UbuWeb is proof of this. In 1996, I decided that I would put an obsession of mine up on the web. I had been collecting concrete poetry books ever since I went to visit the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry in Miami in the late 80s. Without permission, I started scanning and posting my collection under the name UbuWeb. Three years later, it has become the definitive collection of this work on the web. Poets find their work on UbuWeb and instead of threatening to sue me for using their work without permission or issuing a "cease and desist" order, they thank me for taking an interest in their work. It's a win-win situation: A dying art form is given new life and artists whose work had been out of circulation are thrilled to see their work "in print" again. It's all thanks to a new system of distribution; again, it's McLuhanesque-it's the medium here that is the real story, not the "content," (the "content" has always been interesting and we need not worry about it-it takes care of itself). In the words of John Perry Barlow, it's not wine in new bottles, it's wine without the bottles. ASB: There are certainly a lot of possibilities to explore on the internet and in this regard, UbuWeb is a model to be followed. What I find most interesting is the fact that it is an open book, so to speak, always under construction. KG: I'm only interested in forms of art that are "open books"; once we know a work, we are finished with it. Take pop music, for example: we quickly learn not only the songs on an album but the order in which they appear. As a result, the experience is completely anticipatory. It's based on memory and, in turn, on nostalgia. It cans the music and pins it to a specific place and time, limiting our experience with it. ASB: Still the "idea of the book" will persist for a long while, even if the internet succeeds in replacing it, exploding it or erasing it. You, for instance, still use the book format even though you acknowledge its limitations. KG: This is a book, right? {{{ sigh }}} Yes. I love the book. Deeply. I love language and in my time, the book has been the vehicle that's delivered language most effectively to me. However, there are now other means of linguistic transport that are making the book format seem very limited. If we look beyond the book, we'll find that language is the most plentiful natural resource we produce/possess. And far from becoming a long-promised/threatened

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predominantly visual culture, we still can't seem to debunk the preeminence of words as a primary transport of ideas. ASB: I wonder whether with new technologies of "linguistic transport," as you say, notions such as "reading," "writing," "looking," etc. will also be transformed, expanded. I'm really taken by the fact that the internet brought about the performative aspect of language to such a physical dimension-we need "pass-words," we click icons, we are transported to "sites" by clicking on sensitive words, etc. At the same time, all aspects of language have been completely transformed such as in "gottagotomos.com," or even in its simplest traces such as http, www, .com, etc. KG: Yes. It seems that with the examples that you've brought up in regards to the internet and technology, we've physicalized language to a new degree. I love the physicality of language and I'm thrilled with a new technology that can make language even more muscular, more opaque. The less transparent language becomes on a regular basis, the more sensitized we become to its formal and physical qualities. We start to pay attention to the concreteness of language, instead of taking it for granted as a commodity, a unique medium for exchange. Through this process, language becomes more curious and valuable in and of itself. I have dealt with these issues over the years by working in languages I don't know. I've worked in Spanish, French, Greek, Polish, to name a few. I found that it was a particularly effective way to could get past my likes and dislikes-my tendency towards transparency, you might say-in using language. When I work in languages that I don't know, I am able to work with the words formally and concretely; I don't have to worry about what they mean, only what they look like and maybe sound like. And the great thing about language is that it will always mean something, but in this instance, it's often not what you intended. It's very liberating. I've have this fantasy of working exclusively in languages I don't know for a long period of time, say, 5 years. Imagine that-5 years of working with something you don't understand a word of! This is one of the reasons I refuse to learn another language: If I learn it, then I have no use for itartistically speakinganymore! ASB: Are you preparing any new projects as we speak (I mean, exchange e-mails)? For several months now I have been trying to organize a major project: a year-long version of Soliloquy. It will be a documentation of every word that I speak for an entire yearunedited. But it will differ from the first version of Soliloquy in that it will take place live over the Internet. I'll be hooked up to a wireless headset, which will cellularly beam my words to a voice recognition system on a computer that will, in turn, automatically churn my words into web pages. In short, anyone anywhere will be able to see what I'm saying at any given moment during the course of a year. Think of it as a text-based Truman Show. But what I really care about is the language itself and, in the end, I will have archived all the text files and turned them into a 52 volume work-one book for each week-with each book about 350 pages long (the length of the printed edition of Soliloquy) giving me a total of approximately 18,000 pages. It'll literally be an encyclopedia, a reference book of what one average person said for an entire year in the early part of the 21st century. It'll not only make

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a great artwork, but every library in the country will have to have a copy, due to its sociological relevance. And best of all, it's a book that will "write" itself. The new version of Soliloquy neatly sums up my attitude toward language: language will flow and mold into whatever form its poured-it's at once ephemeral and permanent, concrete and digital. A.S. Bessa Brooklyn, New York 1999 (0:42) jourden >>> You were born in Freeport, New York in 1961. Can you describe your earliest contacts with art, poetry, and media which may have influenced you and what you do today? (0:54) goldsmith >>> I had absolutely no contact with art or media or poetryI grew up in a suburban wasteland of Long Islandall I knew was the television. I grew up in a house that was bereft of culture entirely, but I did have a grandfather who had a fabulous book collection. He collected rare editions of books, so I was intrigued by his collection early on. And that might have been the little portal to which everything grew out of much later. But as far as home life there was nothing... Listen to the response above. (1:43) jourden >>> Okay, so from there you went on to complete your BFA at RISD. You majored in sculpture then moved to New York... (02:06) goldsmith >>> I got out of school in '84 and moved back to New York in '85. From '85 till '95 I was an artist in the art world with a rather good career as an artist. You know selling, showing, very good reputation, but what began to happen was, I began working with language and the language become far more interesting then the fabricating of certain objects. I would engage the language then it would take a month or two months to construct that thing. Meanwhile this other language was running through my head, so through a very long process which took a very long time, I ultimately left the art world to write poems. And clearly I was not trained as a writer or anything, but the language just took over, so I ended up writing books. I published my first book in '92, and then really my first book of literature in '97. (3:22) jourden >>> The first one was a book of poetry? (3:25) goldsmith >>> The very first book was a book of almost concrete poetry, and this is very interesting because this is where UbuWeb really begins. There is a couple in Florida that run something called the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive for Concrete and Visual Poetry based in Miami Beach. They began collecting Russian Constructivists. And when that market heated up and got too hot, they kind of followed the leads of typography from the Russian avant-garde into mid-century moves that were made in concrete poetry and visual poetry. They began collecting this stuff, really at a time when nobody was interested. And they amassed this enormous collection of perhaps fifty thousand pieces of concrete poetry, visual poetry, sound poetry, and text-based works. As an artist who worked in language, they had bought a piece of mine and invited me down to install it in Miami. This is 1989. I had known about text art in the art world alla Lawrence Wiener, Jenny Holzer, this type of thing, but I had no idea there was this whole other world of poetry that was being used in a visual way. It was called concrete poetry and I knew nothing about it. So going down to meet them in Miami was an absolute eye-opener for me. I was astonished, there was a whole world of visual word-based work I had never known before, and I subsequently became hooked on it. I began trolling used bookstores in New York for little books of concrete poetry of which there were just dozens and dozens. Nobody

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was interested in this stuff at the time, so I just began making a collection of this stuff through local bookstores, and this in turn leads to UbuWeb. That might be another question. (5:38) jourden >>> Yeah definitely. Before we get to Ubu can you talk aboutcan we just kinda of brief describe what concrete poetry is? Because for me I always think of likeis e.e. cummings sort of a precursor of that? (5:58) goldsmith >>> Yeah, very much so. E. E. Cummings you know uses the page, the blank page, the white spaces as a physical space. He doesn't take the page for granted. Most times when we are working on a word processor or writing an email we don't think about the space of the page or of the way the letters sit in it. We don't treat it visually. Now this goes back to the tradition of concrete poetry. Visual poetry goes back to the Middle Ages there are pattern poems, and a long history of liturgical works. Puritan works that create imageries of fire, imageries of dragons, of architecture all made out of words. This is quite a rich and long tradition that really goes back to the Middle Agesilluminated manuscripts often create visual structures based on words. However, this really dies out and with advent of standardization of print with Guttenberg, we move into verse, paragraph, sonnet, and columnar, because [visual structures] become hard to type set, forget about making visual stuff on masse. So you get a standardization of type, as you very well know. So the first person that uses the space is (Stphane) Mallarm with his Coup de ds, and then of course (Guillaume) Apollinaire follows after that with his Calligrammes. And by the time you hit the year 1913 with various futurist movements around the global, it seems like everybody is exploring innovative uses of typography. Many of whom are simply calling that poetry. It really picks up as a movement, as an international movement after the war in the early 50s with a Swiss poet named Eugen Gomringer. He has an advertising background and is a straight poet. And he sees advertising, the way that advertising is using letters and language in a very unique wayusing typography, and begins to have the idea that he can apply it to poetry. At the same time, in Brazil, there is a small group of poets called the Noigandres group, and they are inspired by (Ezra) Pound, (James) Joyce, and (Gertrude) Stein, and they begin working visually as well. So it becomes this kind of worldwide movement of poetry. Listen to the response above. Calligrammes: Poems of War and Peace 1913-1916 by Guillaume Apollinaire The idea behind concrete poetry (and it's a very interesting idea) is that it emerges around the time of tendencies toward world languagesEsperanto say. And there is a utopian idea of concrete poetry, that says, imagine a poetry that transcends language, that is a visual poetry that can be understood with maybe a key of just one or two words, that can be understood by anybody anywhere around the world. Hence creating a truly global poetry movement and that is the kind of utopianmid-century utopian idea behind concrete poetry. And it did in fact, people were able to write very simply and very visually using very few words. Say in Japanese, there would be like at the bottom of a Japanese concrete poem a little key, if they're using two words, like the word for rain and the word for snow, and it would be patterns of rain and snow and this type of thing. The corollary of all of that is sound poetry which has a similar idea, and this is a poem that is not meant to be read, but a poem that is meant to be spoken. And that goes back to (F.T.) Marinetti and the futurists Zang Tumb, (Kurt) Schwittersbut again after the war the technology becomes very important because the tape recorder comes into play, so that language can be bent and manipulated like Musique concrte. Really it's a rich history.

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(11:06) jourden >>> Do you see hip-hop music or spoken word as sort of being part of that, at least the sound poetry portion of that tradition, does it play in that or is it just a completely separate phenomena? (11:16) goldsmith >>> I think it's a completely separate phenomenon. I think it has some parallels but it's unconscious, extremely unconsciousI'm not sure that much hip-hop is too aware of the history of sound poetry. And I think it does very different things. Hip-hop uses language transparently, in other words it's about semantic soundsthere is a message delivered, a meaning delivered, and very rarely is there not. Whereas sound poetry avoids a kind of specific meaning it's much more like a piece of classical music. I think you can make parallels, and you can find in dance music and hip-hop music a lot of sound poetry samples. These guys have plundered some of that and Ubu is actually used as a lot of source material for dance mixes around the world. Very interesting when that happensI love that! (12:39) jourden >>> Can you talk about your Uncreativity as Creative Practice and the role of that in your work? It sounds like this maybe even matriculates into the way Ubu functions. (13:03) goldsmith >>> In my own workIt's little bit complicatedBrion Gysin in 1959, claimed that poetry was fifty years behind painting, and I think that is still somewhat true today. A lot of strategies that have been tested and proven to be good strategies in the art world haven't even been tested in literary circles. I'm thinking specifically in terms of my own workin terms of appropriation which the art world dealt with twenty-five years ago, and claimed it finally to be a legitimate practice. The literary world is still stuck, very much on conventional ideas of creativitythe mainstream literary movements are all still as if modernism really sort of hadn't happened. You know they're very conventional in expressing ones innermost thoughts in a very sort of discursive way, and there is some free verse, which might be mid-century modernism and some disjunctive stuff. But in fact, really what has became known as post-modern strategies in painting and the visual arts have not even been tested in poetry. So basically uncreative writing is a way of going against the tendency toward MFA creative writing programs, which don't really teach you how to be creative at all. They're truly uncreative. They're teaching you how to yet write another short story of the rise of a hero and his even more dramatic downfall. Or a poem that is work shopped to death and that is written by committee. To me if that is creativity then I don't want to be creative. Rather I want to be more Warholian, I want to be mimetic, I want to be machine-like, I want to take text that have already been written and simply rewrite them and transcribe them without changing anythingclaim them as my own simply by the act of retyping say a day's copy of the New York Times. So that becomes my own and simply republishing it as that. Creativity is such a bankrupt concept in our culture and such an over used clich, and yet something held so highly esteemed, still, that in order to truly be creative and truly find a way out of that we need to employ a strategy of oppositeswe need to be uncreative, we need to be boring, we need to be everything that the culture claims creativity isn't. I teach a class called Uncreative Writing at University of Pennsylvania, in which the students are encouraged to steal, plagiarize, appropriate, file share, falsifyyou know things they normally do anyway and they're very good at. And I say, "Well what happens when we take this out into the open, and we use these as legitimate writing strategies. You're allowed to do thisnow what do you do with it and what decisions do you make." It's an amazing thing because they're so adept at these skills, and yet they've had to use them surreptitiouslyso what happens when we bring this out. Hip-hop for example, nobody expects anyone to get up there and make an incredible guitar riff! You take that from there and take this from there you put it together, and you borrow lyrics from somebody else and put whole thing together. And nobody expects anybody to be original.

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When Briteny Spears does a concert nobody expects her to sing. And yet somehow in literature we expect, we demand the authentic voice in literature. The whole world seems to be moving in ways of uncreativity yet somehow in literature we're still really, really hung up on old fashion, I think dead notions of what creativity is. Listen to the response above. (17:52) jourden >>> So in Harpers magazine in February there were a couple of different pieces about plagiarism and appropriation in both art and literatureare you familiar with them? Yeah, okay. So today there is a vigorous argument surrounding the issue of intellectual property, and the line between appropriation and for what the creative act is. Which I think you were eluding to. Your positions seem to have a rigorous insight to these confluencesin terms of these two Harpers articles how do you see intellectual property today together with Ubu and the class you teach? The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem (18:48) goldsmith >>> The Lethem piece was very good. It was absolutely right onI really, really loved that. A very, very good piece, and he spells out a lot of that, however, here's the difference. Lethem and Hollywood are playing with things where there are really great finances at stake, and these are very important issues for people that have great money at stake with what they do. You have to figure these things out. We're privileged enough there is no money at stake with what we do. The avant-garde and particularly the ephemerid of the avant-garde has never made money and never will make money! And so, we're a little bit off the hook. We can play it a little bit looser, we can be a lot more utopian about what we doin what we preach and what we practice, because there is nothing to lose. As a matter of fact, what happens on Ubu most of the time is that people are very happy to find their work there. Much of UbuWeb is permissioned and much of it is not, and very rarely do people seem to care that it's there, as a matter of fact most of the time they are happy. Let me give you an example, last week we launchedwe do an occasional series of electronic books called slash Ubu Editionsfull length books, things that are out of print, things that are a little obscure. We never ask for permission we figure if it's out-of-print its fair game. This is really the overriding policy on Ubu, we will not put up things that are in print because we do not wish to take money out of the pockets, however little money it would be, of the people that are actually putting the stuff out and trying to get it into the world. So nothing on Ubu that is up there without permission that's in print. There are a lot of things that are in print that are up there with permission. Where people say to us, "please put it up, it is only going to help our sales!" This last series of Ubu Editions we launched an old book by Robert Wilsonreally greatit was a handmade, hand-drawn book from the 70sfor an early opera of his called A Letter For Queen Victoria. It's like 1974. I had a copy from when I was collecting, and it was decided to be included into the series. I get a note about a day later from the Robert Wilson Foundation saying, "We saw that you had this up there. We are very pleased to see you have this up there, however, did you ask Mr. Wilson's permission before putting this up?" And I wrote back stating that we assume that since this book has been out of print for thirty-five years that it really wasn't doing anybody any harm if in fact we would put it back into print. UbuWeb doesn't sell anything. We have a strict policy against selling anything, so therefore we're not making any money on it. And it's simply a site for people who are devoted to obscure artifacts of the avant-garde. I mean this is very, very marginal stuff. In fact it's studied, most of the site is mostly used by educational, K-12 up through the graduate levelvery heavily used for mostly educational. And the guy wrote back saying "that we are big fans of UbuWeb, we are pleased to see it up there, and we give you permission to have that book up there. It would've been nice had you asked Robert Wilson." To which I didn't respond but I would say if we had to ask UbuWeb simply wouldn't exist.

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We act first and if somebody doesn't like the fact that it is up there, we take it down, no questions asked. It's not our property, however, our motives are extremely pure, we're not in this for anything other then to get good works back into circulation. And should they ever return to circulation then we take them off the site. And that has happened several times, where things have gone back into print. (24:06) jourden >>> Wow, but then again you have a hall of shame...[laughs] (24:10) goldsmith >>> Well we're not just going to let it pass. That is actually really recent. The filmmakers have had a lot of trouble with Ubu. They really kicked and screamed finding their stuff up on UbuWeb, but of course it's impossible to see their works any other way. And through our networks we have a plentitude of avant-garde films that have been digitized. Many of them just taken from television from Europefans, fan stuff, I mean this is all fan driven stuff. They went kicking and screaming, but once we began to offer the works as streaming as opposed to simply downloadable, they calmed down and began to see the benefit of making the works available. There is nothing that will replace sitting in a dark theater on a huge 35mm screen with a group of warm like-minded bodies enjoying a beautiful film. But unfortunately most of us don't live anywhere near the placethe three places in the world where those things happen to be shown regularly. So this is not meant to be the real thing because it's not the real thingit's a snapshotit's a poor substitution. And we like the idea that the film quality is bad because it's going to make you want to go out and see the thing for real. In the hall of shame, no, we're not going to let it pass. If people are being silly and if they insist then we'll call them on that. But the hall of shame is very small compared to the thousands of artists that are up on UbuWeb. It's tiny. So it's working! It's very specific. This wouldn't work for fiction that sells. This wouldn't work for music that sells. This wouldn't work for films that sellabsolutely not it's a very different economy. It's very important to know that our situation is very unique, so we can take liberties that other people don't take and people are with it. It's very, very interesting to figure that one out. (26:44) jourden >>> In 1966, Dick Higgins wrote a short treatise 'Statement on Intermedia'. Do you see UbuWeb as a facet of this position that was calling to develop new "organizations, criteria, sources of information" in light of our new ways of communicating? (27:12) goldsmith >>> Dick, you know is a patron saint of UbuWeb, and his Something Else Press. Dick was born into a very wealthy family and basically blew his entire inheritance on Something Else Press making beautiful books as he called themwolves in sheep's clothing that were purchased by libraries all around that had no idea of the explosive content that was inside these things. It's historically one of the most important American presses. Yes, Ubu is an intermediary space in a Higgins sort of wayit knows no bounds. We can't distinguish between film, performance, e-books, outsider art, mp3s, and it's very, very rich, there are all sorts of things on there. And the only thing that pulls the whole things together is a very, very loose and purposely-vague definition of what happens to be avant-garde. I'm not even sure what that means, and it sort of keeps changing, so that the site can encompass from [Kurt] Schwitters and high-art to Louis Farrakhan singing Calypso on the 365 Days Projectyou know, some of the outsider stuff that goes on there. To me it doesn't matter. In the 365 Days Project is an mp3 by Nicholas Slonimsky, who was so avant-garde as a conductor he got himself drummed-out of the conducting business. One of the greats, who gave some of the first premieres for Varse and Ives, and yet here he is in this sort of kitsch collection for no other reason then that these categories are just collapsing. It's a collapsible space and it's very beautiful when you begin to make connections between the outside and the inside, the high and the low, and everything just smashes together. And it's all held together by a very purposely-vague notion of what the avant-garde is, but I think it gives it a clear sense of a vision. I think. You know we're not

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going to be didactic about it, and yet somethingsome sort of stew emerges from it that I think is a clear vision of what the avant-garde might be today. (29:59) jourden >>> It's funny that you mention the avant-garde because it totally conjuresyou sing all these... [laughs]... texts! [laughs] The really funny one in context to what you just said is the Rosalind Krauss piece about the avant-garde. So what are those actually aboutare they just fun, witty, or what? (30:34) goldsmith >>> For many years I've been doing a radio show in New York, a wonderful little free-form station called WFMU. Very well known station... (30:45) jourden >>> It's the best radio station in New York... (30:46) goldsmith >>> ...best radio station perhaps in the country! They let you do anything there. And I had been doing a show for twelve years and was getting rather bored with all the freedom that I had for all those years. And so I began singing on my shows. I first began doing karaoke, and I just sing for three hours on mic. Of course as you hear I have a lousy voice... Kenneth Goldsmith (31:14) jourden >>> It's not that bad [laughs] (31:19) goldsmith >>> Believe me for three hours you wouldn't want to listen to it. [laughs] So at some point that morphedoh I know, the last kind of karaoke thing I did I found the whole set of Tommy by The Who as karaoke dot-KR files, and I spent an entire hour and half singing Tommy from beginning to end. [laughs] And then I began reciting textsLao Tzu texts, the Art of War, I read the entire thingthe background to Carmine sort of sang it for three hours. And that kind of then morphed into theory because it's so absolutely impenetrableI don't know, I'm not sure if there is a whole lot to say about it other then I've spent an enormous amount of time on the air singing theory. And now people tell me that they enjoythey actually teach those pieces when they're going to teach Fredric Jameson. They'll actually play me singing it, they say it's great because suddenly the students are actually listening to (me sing) Barthes or Jameson for the first time. (32:56) jourden >>> When did you first start to create the idea that lead to UbuWeb? How did you first get it started? (33:15) goldsmith >>> Concrete poetry was modernist in a Greenbergian sense. It embraced all of (Clement) Greenberg's ideas. The flatness of the picture plane. There was never an illusionistic space in concrete poetries. Hardcore modernist! And it's extremely graphic. The first time I saw Netscape in January of '95, the first thing that really caught me was the interlaced gifs. And I don't know if you remember that. But at the time on a very slow modem you could actually watch them interlace come in and fill themselves in. And that is a very similar tactic to what was used in concrete poetry. Concrete poetry often employed the sequential ideas of the flipbook, so that over a succession of pages, like a flipbook you'd actually see a poem grow. This sort of primitive animation that a flipbook gives you was suddenly becoming very visible on the Web. What I was seeing animation of a gif, but of course the next step was making a gif animated in a series of frames, and with that I thought this is really exactly what concrete poetry was like. So I took some of my old concrete poetry books (when of course the Web was visual, this was '96) and I just scanned a couple of things, cleaned them up, and put them upand backlit on a flat screen it was as if concrete poetry had found its medium that it had really been searching for. And particularly with the idea of animation, I thought my god this is what concrete poetry had been waiting for, for fifty years is this medium. So that is the real genesis of [UbuWeb]putting up a few scans. Then when real audio came in I ripped a few sound poetry files, and began putting up thoseon and on. As broadband got bigger and media got richer we've tried to keep at pace with that. To the point when I saw YouTube, I thought this is it man, this is the future,

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streaming flash files are the future, we've got to move the avant-garde films (of which we have about five-hundred of now) into this format, because this is where it's at now. I worked in the dot-com business, it was my job for many years, I know how to program, I know how to design, so to actually make the whole thing happen is and remains second nature to me even though I'm not in that business anymore. Listen to the response above. (36:25) jourden >>> Was that a supplement to you being an artist? (36:29) goldsmith >>> Yeah. I was making the transition from making sculptures into being a poet. Transitioning from having a good living as an artist to making no living as a poet. So I worked in dot-com from 1993 to maybe 2002, so almost ten years in that industry. So this is all very second nature to me. (37:03) jourden >>> The name UbuWeb where does it come from, and what is it have to do with Alfred Jarry? (37:18) goldsmith >>> Yeah, it came from Jarry. When I was an art student I had a little business to support myself in school doing mold-making and things like that, and I called it Ubu. I think it was Ubu Industries or something like that. I loved Jarry as an art student. I subsequently moved, that is, what I did prior to dot-com in New York, I was a fabricator, so Ubu became the name of the fabrication business I had in New York! And when I got out of that and kind of got into dot-com, I was waiting aroundit's a very, very funny story. woodcut prints by Alfred Jarry for Ubu Roi Ubu.com wasn't available then, and ubu web was the only thing I could get, so I called it UbuWeb. Later, a friend of mine who I worked with in the dot-com years, she said, "I got a friend and he owns Ubu.com, he's been cybersquatting, he bought a bunch of these." A guy named Carl Steadman who started Suck Magazine years ago. He had been squatting on it and my friend Vivian was dating him. I said, "Well Vivian you've got to get him to give me the name!" And so she did. I think he sold it to me for a hundred bucks, and I promised him as a result of that, I would always keep it for art and poetry and keep it free. And over the years many people have tried and offered me enormous sums of money to purchase that for their siteyou know three letter symmetrical domain name, 'U-B-U dot com.' I can't tell how many offers I've had, but I always promised that I'd keep it for poetry. It's wonderful to reject offers of several thousands of dollars for that name, and say, "I'm sorry but this name will always be dedicated to poetry." [laughs] Listen to the response above. (39:21) jourden >>> By bringing this archive to the web you have really, for many of us, made it new. Could you explain the mission of Ubu in light of this allusion to this statement by Ezra Pound? (39:51) goldsmith >>> I still believe what the Web does best is what it does originally, and that is just a way of getting things out and disturbing things. That is what's new about the Web. Programming, you know making computers jump through hoops isn't really very interesting to me. UbuWeb is a flat HTML 1.0 site. There is no programming behind it, absolutely everything is written in BBedit by hand. You know I want to keep the site very basic, because what really is new is this radical sense of distribution. We are in the business of radical distribution, and by that I meanI get emails from people like one from a girl in Texas, who said "Thank you for what you put up on UbuWeb. And the type of materials you offer there certainly are not available to a girl living in a small town in Texas." You know, to me that is what it's about. That is what it's about! It really is about free and unfettered access for people to materials that were relegated to museums or relegated to specialist. And now are available to everybody free of charge. I mean there is a whole education to be had there. I think it's true. I think it takes a lot of this old stuff that had been forgotten about and

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I think in a sense it makes it new again. There has been so much revisionism in art history, so this is yet another sense of revisionism. You can look at this material and say "I never really thought about Jean Dubuffet as a musician before." And yet we have several files of Dubuffet. We know his art! Every museum has his art! But nobody knows he's a musician. It's very, very interestingvery beautiful. So yeah, I think it isit does make it new. Very important, the other thing that is important to us, very much like your site [Archinect] is that it's a beautiful place to be. That it's a clean and beautiful environment for the stuff to live in. There are some other sites on the Web that offer some similar stuff, a wonderful site called light and dust... Jean Dubuffet with instruments and Jardin d'hiver 1969-70 (42:22) jourden >>> Hmmm I've never seen it... (42:25) goldsmith >>> You wouldn't see it. It's a mess. It's really sort of the equivalent of an ugly, jumbled small press publishing, yet they offer really good materials, if you can possibly find your way through it. It's a nightmare and it's ugly. You don't want to be there very long. You know, a green page with red type on it; I don't know what they're thinking. The idea is to take these somewhat dusty old materials and kind of put them into a clean, well-lit environment so that they can really shine and be treated in a way that's serious, beautiful, and clean. Without all the clutter and grit that generally is attached to these things. I think that is a very interesting thingsuddenly it makes the avant-garde sexy in a way. Much of the materials that we are dealing with have been purposely against that. But when stripped of their original context and original packaging you simply have an mp3 file presented in a very beautiful place, I think it helps us to see them a little bit more objectively. Though a lot of the romanticism is lost I think that's okay. I think it objectifies the work. (43:55) jourden >>> How do the different facets of the project come together, are each of the editors working independently of you the publisher or do you all collaborate on all the different portions? (44:04) goldsmith >>> No, this is why we were unable to do a discussion like that. It's very disperse and people I trustthese editors Jerome Rothenberg, you know, invented ethonopoetics. Grey Lodge dot-org are a partner site with UbuWeb, are the film curators and their eye is absolutely impeccable. The access to the material they have is astonishing! And so forth, Otis Fodder with the 365 Days. So in fact, yeah, people want to shareUbu has become the default source for a lot of stuff. People want to really share, and I have a good story about thisdo we have time? (44:52) jourden >>> Oh yeah we've got an hour. I mean but that is up to you thoughhow long do you want to stay? (45:00) goldsmith >>> Well this is an amazing story. Have you seen Aspen Magazine on UbuWeb? original Aspen Magazine Boxes (45:15) jourden >>> Yes! It's awesome. (45:08) goldsmith >>> Well I get an email submitted to Ubu anonymously it says, "Here is a site you might like to look at. It's called Understanding Duchamp dot-com." Anything that is sent I look at, although most things don't get on the site. I'm hit very hard with submissions, but I look at everythingeverything is viewed or listened to. And this is a nice little site about Marcel Duchamp done well in flash. I wrote him a little note back and say, "Hey man thanks that's cool. Good luck thanks for doing that." He sends me another note that says, "Well if you like that you might like this." And he gives me the URL to Aspen Magazine that is online and password protected. And I look at it and go, "Oh my god!" I write him back and say, "What is up with this? This is absolutely incredible!" He said, "Well, I spent years digitizing the entire contents of the Aspen Magazine boxes and put them online. But what happened when I put Understanding Duchamp online I got a legal threat

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from the estate of Duchamp. Who evidently have a copyright on his name, and used Duchamp in the URL, and they really wanted to shut me down. I figured if that was the problem I had with Duchamp imagine the problem I'm going to have with six hundred other artists when I put them up on the Web." And I said to him, "Look you know what, why don't you give it to me. I'll take the risk, no problem, I know how to deal with cease and desists. You know I deal with them all the time." I explained the mission, "It's usually okay." Whatever, whatever, whatever... So he gives me the whole thing and it's absolutely incredible. And on Aspen Magazine there are fucking files by John Lennon and Yoko Ono! We have never heard from Lennon and Ono's people. And those realyou know who has morebut again this is the avant-garde, it's John Lennon's radio play, it's him twittering a dial and Yoko singing. Then the New York Times wrote up Aspen Magazine and they said to Merce Cunningham, who has an mp3 interview on there from one of the old records; "So Merce Cunningham, how do you feel about the fact that you were not asked permission but your work is up on UbuWeb?" And Merce said, "The educational value of having my words up on UbuWeb far outweighs any financial remuneration. I am thrilled that it's there." So that is the attitude, that's the attitude. That is basically what Robert Wilson was saying as well. Now of course we have people like that coming to us that want their works up there. The Robert Wilson guy said, "Hey you know we'd like to talk to you about putting more stuff up." And after this letter. [laughs] They understand the value of this site. images from The 1965 International Design Conference from Aspen Magazine (48:57) jourden >>> Ahhh I kind of want to go in this direction, to talk about commodity, the avant-garde, and the direction art is moving. Fredric Jameson, whom you've sung [laughs] has recorded that postmoderntythe condition of globalization, is a situation where "culture and the economic are folded back into one another" basically to a point where "culture becomes the economic and the economic becomes cultural." In this context does UbuWeb function as an alternative force or is it merely a site to muse over as a relictoreum [sic]? (49:36) goldsmith >>> I think Jameson is talking about a specific type of culture. And I think the other type of culture he's talking about the Madonna, Spielberg, that other type of culture. I really don't think he's referring to gift economies. Gift economies function outside of that type of economic theory. I believe it's an alternative certainly, but we didn't invent it, much of the Web functions on a gift economy. We just happen to be above ground with it. You know there are millions of file-sharing sites that are members only, that are password protected, that are anonymous, and I say look we're going to come above ground with this stuff. We're actually going to put it out into the light of day. We're not going to be bashful. Again I believe that we're not really part of Jameson's theory. I think he is talking about another model of economy and not ours. (50:55) jourden >>> Right, but don't you think art in today's context, art becomes more of a commodity then it did in the past? In the sense that like you know, everything is a production, and everything is marketed like any other product. And even the resale value and this whole hype about... (51:12) goldsmith >>> Poetry is immune to that. (51:14) jourden >>> That's my other question [laughs] (51:16) goldsmith >>> [laughs] It's definitely immune to it. I mean yessomething else art yeah! You know Jeff Koons and the big show. This type of thing, but poetry for better or worseand you could say it's detrimental or whatever it is, we are absolutely immune to that. As really is much of the avant-garde. John Cage is immune to that. John Cage is wonderful, but there is never going to be much of an issue of John Cage being a big deal.

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Ten years after his death he remains, as a somewhat obscure and legendary, but certainly marginalized as ever. It's unassimilable... John Cage photographed by William Gedney 1967-68 (52:01) jourden >>> But still iconic, yeah? (52:04) goldsmith >>> Extremely iconic and an extreme intellectual power, and great cred as they say, but there is no money there. It's going to be hard to fill a hall with music devoted to John Cage. The avant-garde, this is why it is so interesting because at a time of a complete commodification of art and a folding in of every type of art form even to the point where certain sacred rock songs are used on bank commercials, the avant-garde is un coupable. If it doesn't have a beat and it sounds like noise, it ain't going be on a car commercial anytime soon. And that's beautiful. It's still resistant. Dissident twentieth century music, a lot of this stuff is quite unassimilable, however, the avant-garde in painting, a Mondrian which is equivalentno imagery, difficult for people, then sells for millions of dollars? That one I can't really understand. It's tough stuff. [Jackson] Pollock? It's not easy. (53:20) jourden >>> But it becomes a commodity because of the name of the artist, and not so much the content. (53:24) goldsmith >>> But also because it's based on the laws of scarcitythere's only one of them. Where as our model is based on the law of plenitudethe more a book sells and the more copies there are the better the book does. It is a different type of model, the art world is scarcity. (53:45) jourden >>> That's funny you really got right to the point here because I was going to lead in this, but is poetry the last bastion of art? Is it the only medium, which is completely resistant to becoming a commodity? (54:04) goldsmith >>> Listen I think art still goes on and they make wonderful things. It's just mutating in terms of the economic, but that doesn't mean the art itself is bad. I mean [Takashi] Murakami or Koons, these mega-artists are making beautiful things, making beautiful productions in a different cultural climate, but it doesn't mean they're a sell-out! They're working with the system to create a new paradigm for art. This is something poetry will never have the chance to do. But I don't want to say that because... (54:47) jourden >>> I wouldn't so much as call them a sell-out, but it's just that now the system caters to the super artist, so that it ultimately excludes...it likes thejust like architecture it likes the starchitects. It likes Frank Gehry, but it doesn't like the smaller people, and when those smaller people come it uses them up, then they disappear. (55:09) goldsmith >>> Why is that different then mid-century Philip Johnson? There were four starchitects in 1950 and there are four starchitects today, and everybody else got eaten up. I think it's very much the same. I don't see it being any different! You think smaller architects got a shot back in the '40s?! Probably even less of a shot then they have today. Or artists even. I think because of the global expansion of the art world and the art market that everybody seems to get a shot. There are a lot more artists and they may not be stars, but they're making a livingthey're showing and traveling, and they have fairly good careers as a result of this global boom. They're sort of trailing in the tail of the big guys, but it's good for everybody I think, it's really, really healthy. I think it's a great moment. My only regret though is that there aren't fifteen or twenty UbuWebs. I'm sorry we are the only ones doing what we are doing. But yeah it bothers me. Museums can't do it, because they've got to get permission. They've gotta get through hoops. They've gotta pay. They've gotta do contracts. They've got to do everything, and we don't have to do any of that shit! I haven't written a contract in my life for anything on UbuWeb. It doesn't exist! And by the way, the plug could get pulled tomorrow and the whole thing could vanish. We've come close...

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(56:47) jourden >>> In terms of lawsuits or? (56:50) goldsmith >>> Yeah, yeah or losing servers. We function on the good graces of donated bandwidth that are connected to universities. Once in awhile those plugs get pulled and we have to scramble for something else. I tell you the whole thing could just vanish tomorrow really. It's very unstable. We can't afford to pay the bandwidth costs. There are about 20,000 unique computers accessing that site daily. Downloading gigabytes worth of bandwidth, there is no way we could ever afford to keep this thing going if our university support dries up. And sometimes it does and we scramble to get another one. Fortunately, we are in a relatively stable state right now, but I don't know how long that will last. And really it could vanish, so download as much as you can because it could be gone tomorrow. Listen to the response above. [laughs] (57:51) jourden >>> In your manifesto you talk about poetry as "the perfect space to practice utopian politics." Does UbuWeb dwell in the fabric of desire to create utopia on the Web? found on UbuWeb films: Le Cirque de Calder 1961 by Carlos Vilardeb (58:52) goldsmith >>> It does. And it doesn't just speak it. It is it. There is no advertising. There is no money. There is no membership. There is no donate button. There is no mail list. We refuse to advertise, absolutely refuse to advertise, there is no nothing! And it's always been that way. And as long as I'm in charge it's always going to be that way. It's very important that it's an absolutely clean space with no ulterior motives. Because look if we start getting ulterior motives then we have to change everything we do. We have to start doing contracts. We have to start paying royalties. We have to start asking for permission. We have to have a staff. The only thing that we are real official with is that we are a nonprofit. We actually went nonprofit, but we never did anything with it. We have a board, but we've never done any fundraising. I'm afraid to do fundraising. I'm afraid if money enters it, say we get a grant for $50,000 [big sigh] then you have to start managing the money. Then you have to start, I don't know what I'd do with itI don't even want to think about it. [Ubu] thrives because it's based on love and passion. It has nothing to do with money. It's absolutely clean as hell, and that is just the way we intend to keep it. It's got all its arrows pointed in the same direction, and that is very important to us not only to preach it, but to be completely utopian. found on UbuWeb films: The Girls of Kamare 1974 by Rene Vienet (1:01:20) jourden >>> Is there a space for avant-garde architectural work on UbuWeb, and have you entertained any ideas for that? (1:01:25) goldsmith >>> No. I don't know enough about it. But if somebody wants to do it, I say by all means. I'd love to see dance there. I'd love to see architecture there. I'd love to see theatre there. I don't know anything about these fields, but I welcome that. I think it would be absolutely fabulous to have somebody do that. And it's a completely scalable thing, it would take nothing to create a section for architecture, or dance, or theatre. As I understand it there are not spaces like this for theatre or dance, and perhaps, I don't know are there spaces like this for architecture? (1:02:02) jourden >>> Ahhh...They're usually attached to institutions, but they don't put the stuff online as much. MoMA has some things that you can look at drawings and what not, but there is no text-based stuff. That's all for purchase usually. There are plenty of books that are out-of-print and in order to buy them they're $7000 or something. (1:02:26) goldsmith >>> I think it would be fantastic. I mean why not? It would strike me that most avant-garde architecture is as much a gift economy as poetry is. I would assume, also that architectural drawings are as worthless as poetry, generally. A beautiful sketch by

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John Farmer

Frank Gehry might go for some money, but I can imagine a blueprint for one of his buildings is worthless. Yeah, I think that would be fantastic. If anybody you know is interested in taking that on, I'd be thrilled. We have unlimited bandwidth and unlimited server space. (1:03:24) jourden >>> For now... (1:03:26) goldsmith >>> For now, yeah by the way, you know it could always collapse tomorrow. (1:03:32) jourden >>> In context to all of this where do see something like say Google scanning the whole New York Public Library. It seems like that is the next thing, right? Where these corporations end up sponsoring these types of thingsmaybe Google ends up with Google Obo or something? (1:03:57) goldsmith >>> Well there is a great scene in 24 Hour Party People, did you see it? (1:04:04) jourden >>> Yeah I've seen it. (1:04:05) goldsmith >>> Okay at the end where EMI comes in to buy Factory Records, and everybody is excitedthe EMI guys say, "We want to buy you for one million pounds." And everybody is like, "yeah, yeah!" So the EMI guys go, "Tony just give us the contracts." And everybody starts laughing. "What contracts?" Then the EMI guys start laughing because they know they are getting the entire thing for free. You know and that was it. We couldn't be bought. Google could never buy UbuWeb. It's the same story. Well show us the contracts. There's no contracts. So there is no danger of us ever being bought... (1:05:48) jourden >>> They could make a competitor site? (1:05:53) goldsmith >>> Oh fuck, let them, let them! Oh geez let them who cares! We have nothing to lose. I mean who cares. Like I said there should be many more of those. Who gives a shit! None of it matters. It's like punk rock. It's like punk rock. Who gives a shit, we'll burn tomorrow. We're not in it forthere is no future plan for it other then for it just to grow and become much better. Now somebody could just come in and say, "I want to take the site and have my staff go through and permission everything. We'll contact people. We'll pay people. We'll permission. We'll do the whole thing. Come on board we'll get the whole thing legit. We'll give you a salary and you'll keep directing it." At that point I don't know. But as that stands now it's a little bit of a joke. Google scanning books? There's ulterior motives there man. It's sort of cool, but it's sort of not. I mean they're not doing it to benefit humanity. They're not practicing utopian politics. And I think the publishers have every right to be suspicious. You know, this is a huge corporation; they've got something else in mind. And again it's that other scale of economy that doesn't have anything to do with us really. And believe they ain't going to be scanning books that were produced in editions of one hundred that make absolutely no senseguarantee! They ain't going to be scanning little books of Lyn Hejinian language poetryI guarantee it. The audio files for this interview are selected to offer the clearest moments of interaction between the participants. Since the interview was conducted in a public place, the moments of interference and pause have been omitted so as not to interrupt the flow or content of the interview. Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet. He is founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PENNsound. He hosts a weekly radio show at WFMU and has published nine books of poetry. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. MERZ!

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