Room 60


I want to talk here directly about Alan Sondheim whose work I have seen now for some years. I am in fact building a sub file of his works. He has worked in many media including film and performance - lives in NY and is engaged on a huge project which is a 'Meditation on the Internet' (in one sense one could see it as huge poem.) He moves through all "disciplines". But he is not "disciplined". He is not so much a poet as a person who is interested in - well just about everything (Computer science and philosophy of Cybernetics, philosophy, science, nature, literature, film, music, and many many other things) - there is a lot of philosophy as well as "art" in his work.

His texts will be best seen at the URLS I will provide shortly but I will be writing a lot more about Alan who is a writer/philosopher/artist./filmaker/etextualiser?/performer/textualiser
/theorist?/ of great ability...he has done thousands of files in making his enormous Internet Text.

This is a challenging and sometimes disturbing "text" but it is also full of joy as well as darkness! But it also has techinical brilliance...Alan knows his media - his main concentration has been on the Internet but he uses music and other media and has been an art teacher, critic (he 'subverted' - for good reasons, not by malice - the art world - when he was a critic!) and other things - he was associated with the Language poets briefly, but his work makes even the most prolific of them look like pathetic doodlers writing on muddy sand!

[[Of course this is a bit unfair - as Alan is very very different kind of 'writer'/or textualiser (say than Ron Silliman whose work I also admire very much) - whatever you will.]]


His main work is actually called: Philosophy and Psychology of the Internet.



In fact his great work is unclassifiable. Or it is creating it's own classification.

He has a List called Wryting...more info as I get it...

I am talking about a man (an "artist"?) of immense energy creativity and originality.

For me if I focus on his writing: I am always amazed at the enormous range and diversity of how he works and his ability to 'do' any kind of writing (his constant formal experimentation and subversion) - some of his stuff is elegaic - almost as if he is outdoing Ashbery outdoing Matthew Arnold others. But then he writes like someone - someone one cannot name..

Much of Alan's work - as writing per se - rivals that of any poet I have ever read....

(BUT he is not a poet! he is an"ideas man!" A thinker - a philosopher...)

...and his other works are like a lectures on philosophy (there is a great range) - now there is a lot of ideas attached to his work so I will for now just give links so that anyone coming here ( and or My Space when I get over there and put some links up - I will do the same) can look at what he has been doing.

This is a short interjection as I have only just recontacted Alan.