Joe Amato

Watch the YouTube tone poem, Big Man Inside Looking Out.

Watch the YouTube preview, Big Man 3: The Search for Steerage Press. (Rated PG-13.)

Watch the YouTube pitch for Big Man with a Shovel.

Watch the YouTube trailer for Big Man with a Shovel.

Also available at Vimeo!

Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of nature which has made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper faith. This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation. It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate present experience. There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievement: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues.

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Nietzsche implores, “Value! Don’t evaluate!” He proposes we conceive of value as a differential vector in the process of creation. Valuing is a form of prearticulation tantamount to the incipient process of movement’s preacceleration taking form. It underscores the force of expression. In language, valuation is how words are culled from the nexus, their enunciation always coupled with their force of expression. Foregrounding valuation within language emphasizes the amodal relays that make words felt. Words: valuations that move between complex relays from gesture to sound, from vision to touch. Valuing the incipient quality of expression is to feel language’s impulse, to express the taking form of thought moving. Valuation is an immanent process that situates expression’s final form in a relational attitude toward the world where language dances thought’s becoming form.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009)

darkacre

dominion granted over darkacre
in perpetuity      measured
from the northeast corner
of the deconsecrated church past
memory      to the ancient
oak somehow immune
from hewing at the northwest
to the limit of the decommissioned
reactor to the southwest
to the ruins of the capitol
of empire lost
to the southeast      and not
from the river (for that changes with rain, with flood)
and not from the coast (for that changes with every tide)
and including airspace
straight up to the heavens
with stars for metes and bounds
and straight down to the heavens’
opposite      to the molten core
dominion granted in perpetuity for as long as
a fertile octogenarian can pass it on

Greg Hewett, Darkacre (2010)

If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence   I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse   I will say good-bye to you.

Lester Bangs, Village Voice, 29 August 1977

Have just learned that Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (out on SUNY Press last September) has been chosen as a finalist in ForeWord Reviews’ 2009 Book of the Year Awards, Autobiography/Memoir category. Honored to be among this year’s nominees. Winners to be announced on 26 May at Book Expo America in NYC.