Next Meeting: Thursday 13 January

On Thursday 13 January, join the Next Objectivists for our first meeting of 2011. We will meet to discuss another topic in our "Requested Investigations" series. This week's session is presented by Radu. Here's the framework:

1. Arguably, space is 'where' everything takes 'place,' and, as such, its topic could certainly be too large for both an evening of talk and one's entire life worth of work. Although mostly through visual material, either as historical or contemporary research on existing artifacts or even creative work (linear/reversed perspective in painting, historical maps, homogeneous/axiological cosmology/cosmogony, landscape architecture, etc.), my interest has also focused on textual space, in some of its varied forms and understandings (travel descriptions, poems, films).

I do regard it as an incipient work in English (1), and text (2), though.

2. I believe my endeavor in the NO to have been an undeserved and almost uncannily revealing travel in the workings of English language and its poetry... As such, I would tremendously enjoy your thoughts on how space operates in the written (English) word of poetry (and even beyond, if you such desire) as a difference, referential, location/place, potential/act, identity, coercion, extension, permission, allowance, existential axis, etc. Please feel free to bring any texts that would represent any angles you'd consider interesting.

3. Some questions I'd endeavor into posing you could be:

• What, if anything, makes space a particular playground for poetry, in ways no other feature of thought can? How did you play with it? What does it give you? For instance, have you ever felt that you need a spacial metaphor to say something that no other device would allow you to say? Please make space personal.

• How does space differ from time as another possible extension where 'things are'? Multi-dimensionality? Symmetry (as opposed to one-directional flow)? How does this work in poems specifically? Form and content are both suitable excuses to take on this.

• Is the social space of being together while writing present in the materials coming out of the NO events? Though touched upon in various occasions, I'd like us to pause upon the ways in which this social space could be traced back into spacial metaphors present in specific writings. Please bring any examples you can find in and of such texts.

• Let's also write with these thoughts in mind. Although suggesting to be open to wherever we'll be after talking about all this, I preliminarily propose to try to enact three different operations in which space unfolds and acts in writing. For instance - chromatic spectrum as a device for flexing subjective states of mind. Or: space of page as mess-procedure to fudge with the exigencies of proper writing.