Reading Report: Aaron Vidaver & Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

(belated) Reading Notes: Aaron Vidaver & Dorothy Trujillo Lusk @ SPT 17 April 2010

(mishearings/mistranscriptions left intact)

AVid: "Primary Evaluations (1975-95)" — text from twenty years worth of reports from AV's time in the Canadian educational system. Ideologies of institutional & bureaucratic discourses — of the individual, trained in/thru language. A/poetics of the ideological state apparatus.

"Aaron has made good progress this year in reading"

"Aaron's own writings are fluent"

"I would like to see him become a more independent worker"

— 'confessional' in an uncanny, discomforting way — class on display, as framed from 'outside' (the 'individual') & 'inside' (the 'system'). Thinking here too of Dana Teen Lomax's _Disclosure_

"try not to include too many monsters, Aaron"

"When he expresses this information on paper..."

— increasing discomfort, like looking through someone else's personal files. But that's exactly what we're doing? Listening to such? Made yet more discomforting given the subject's reading them to us? (Still — we can keep at bat w/ 'oh, cute, what a precocious child!' - the pre-writer, the not-yet-Vidaver...)

"If you want to enjoy the next level, you'll want to put out more effort"

— effort, what is effort? what is a life? but the accretion of 'effort'? as determined by...?

—Who keeps this data? Where? (esp. pre-digital) (AV as archivist) (what states keep, what families keep)

"capable but erratic"

"failure's likely, unless a radical turnaround in effort"

— so many of these phrases also can be read/heard as commentaries on the text itself, self-reflections or meta-commentary

— and now onto 'post-secondary', here culled from teachers' margin notes on AV's writing:

"I think you get the point"

"Aaron, I *loved* reading your journal"

"Your throwaway remarks about Hegel and Marx..."

— as a teacher, impressed by extent of feedback — so intimate, anonymous (here, now, for/to us), at times seemingly rote/assembly line, yet still — addressed to *me*, when/where does such interpellation spill over into tenderness?

"I learn so much every time I read your journal"

— the archival impulse — q. of what a *self* is, over time, accumulated in language & documents — the 'complete works', autobiography (by other means?) of a writer/intellectual — the coming of age (non-fiction) novel — avoiding easy critique of nationalist educational systems, since foregrounded is the way in which one makes sense of oneself in response to such 'feedback' — & how the feedback develops over time, into what? a reputation? a sense of who/what-one-is? a guage of one's 'effort' (in relation to what norms, what expectations?). State-us updates.

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DTL:

The dense, thick, politicized language, at-times-neutered *you* & *my*, soft (?) anger...

"since I'm a whiner, only in person..."

quick — but not spitting — *intensities* — i.e. intimacies are not in and of themselves *positive*/good — abjection w/o cyncism or self-pity

(where my nipples touch yr nipples the political is personal)

"Why do I have a phony English accent?"

— canadian & class identities

"former sonnets all for the plunder"
"froth management"
"collected glut"

— *where* is 'Culture?" she asks — where/how/when does culture live/act?

"I want you all to get up for art"

"But how did I *get* here?"

— then some multi-lingual work — Chinook, Italian, Eastern European, French — purposively clunky prosodies pressing up against the glitch-play -> translations that retain DTL's stuttering pushing-pulsing pressing up against sense/nonsense sense-making/marking, as well as chafing some formalisms of 'pure' language v. tone/sound – 'old english' — "I dreamt as a dog"

"England — bunch of ships"
"Spain — bunch of ships"

("anti-tumblehome / for fallen comrades")

"Is that a penis in your pocket or are you just going to shoot me?"

— Such events as 'bringing the news' — from elsewhere, not just the 'reading' but the context, contrasts, talk, drinks, histories, counter-histories, jokes, gossip, torqued cynicisms, trans-local book-trade, cross-border interrogatives, all that & more ---

— David Buuck