SHARE THIS COURSE & THEN SHARE THIS BOOK

Share This Course.

Hi folks, I’m currently collaborating with a small but growing group of web critters led by Mark Pesce, but he's not the leader really, we are a unique decentralized community, which will lead, good willing to the manifestation of a book! scheduled for completion in 2010 and loosly based around the emerging hyperintelligence and 'hyperpeople' as defined by Mark Pesce and approximated as sharing.

As sharing is the core of – share this course & share this book – the group have recently alerted me by example to a slight change in direction to just posting at the blog, that has encouraged me here to start sharing some of our work so far, and spreading the new sharing meme, now, in early December 2009.

My position so far, inspired by the cooking and ingredients analogy with the group-course blog space, is like that of a particular individual ingredient scattered around the kitchen area, or up on a shelf somewhere waiting to be combined, or grated a little, boiled, skinned, fried, charbroiled, roasted, toasted and finally with a bit of luck, served-up with a huge healthy spread of exotic delicacies and shared wisdom, enough to feed all humanity.

I’ve been sharing my vision of a new investigation into the historical figures that I think have influenced sharing and the technology of sharing that produced great contributions to all-around-the-world-Humanity, and as a nod to the MLA and the smart tribe of critters that createdits own collective hyper-intelligence, if you like. I choose to focus on the twelve individuals introduced to us by Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, as the characters who helped shape the - decentralized sharing age -, or simply the 21st century. We can learn from the past efforts to share, and from them create a new historical framework of sharing, one reaching 420 years back to Giordano Bruno and pulling us right up to Marshall McLuhan.

These characters present a great challenge to anybody who has read one or two books or articles by them, no doubt, BOB aspired to keep us busy for the next 50 years with the fields of research and study he wet our mind-lips with. These ideas are pretty complex ideas and come from complex individuals of explicit genius, difficult to approach and shrouded in mystery, this maybe especially true to somebody who has relatively little experience in academic circles, like myself, where much of the solid foundations of this new historical - hyperintelligent tribe – lie, please don't mistake my intellectual pursuits of 'The Tale of the Tribe' as representative of what I think - Share this book - should be about. Not at all. I view this angle of approach as more concerned with - share this course - or the creation of a hyperintelligence, unbounded and access-able and - sharable - by anyone who can access the WWW.

With the power of Internet and the rise of hypersharing culture (hyperdistribution, hyperconnectivity, hyperbolic Geometry) and with the aid of new tools, many minds can congregate together and work quickly, efficiently and humanely, and my ego-drive hope is that others may soon join us in this collective adventure of sharing - sharing - and maybe a few critters will find enough time to follow my historical investigation into the people and ideas that helped to shape intelligent internet and create another alternative guide to sharing - free as the air you breath, and for all-around-the-world-humanity, or as close to the model correlated by Dr. Wilson, a life-long intellectual pursuit but one which I hope will add some spice and sugar to some of the more practical data due to be shared on the course and eventually in the book.

At the blog you'll discover different sharing activity and feedback defining sharing, and you’ll probably find items more to your own fancy, whoever you are. And, if you don’t find anything interesting at the blog then maybe search youtube for Mark Pesce and listen to his hyperflow motion languaging.

The following text was prepared by an intelligence calling itself gregorym(tm), over at the blog, I think it helps define the course and a little about what's happening over there, and - how to get involved. Thanks Greg, and Mark, and all the other posters who are providing the high quality content over at the blog.

As a group, we believe that sharing is going to dominate our future as content creators (and as users of the Internet, we are ALL content creators) and that recent innovations like Google Wave and co-presence are going to create an unprecedented era of sharing. What does all this sharing mean for us, right now, individually and collectively?

...The way this works is this – go to the URL. There’s a number of blo posts (maybe thirty) dating back to the start of the project on November the 18th. Click around. Read a little. Post a bit. Share. And when you’re done sharing, click the box that says you want to be informed by email of new comments to what you’ve posted and let’s begin a dialogue about all this stuff.

If you like what you’re seeing – Share This Invite. Just pass it right along, or write your own invite about what Sharing means to you. Here are just a few of the articles that have posted so far:

What is a Book? by Mark Pesce.
Mark Pesce on SHARING in 2009

The Tale of the Tribe and the question of history

Simply put in a quote, I feel these questions help define text from - the book - and the voice of the narrator from that of the narrator him (or her) self'.

“Thus, all three extensive epics make extensive use of direct quotations from the actual records left by the past. As was noted earlier, this practice helps to establish the poet’s authority as a trustworthy historian, and serves to deflect our tendency to treat his discourse as a purely subjective creation. But Walter Benjamin saw another and more subtle purpose in this technique, one I think Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and also instinctively utilized. In Benjamin’s eye’s, the judicious use of quotations offers one of the most effective means of overcoming the historiography of pure power and political dominance. As Irving Wohlfart notes, for Benjamin, “the function of quotation is to break up the unified, totalitarian blocks that comformist historiography passes out as history,” it “isolated the elective affinities between the present and specific moments of the past. To grasp such correspondences is to seize the chance of the moment” (on Benjamin’s last reflections, “Glyph 3, 1978. P. 181). – Micheal Bernstein, Conclusion, The Tale of the Tribe, p. 274.

G is for GODISTURBER. (CHU & FLY)

One purpose of this web site is to build up a database of work from both CHU and FLY that approximates a guide to new audio technologies through the lens of our different artistic goggles.

SUN RA Interviews & Essays. Editor: John Sinclair

SUN RA
Interviews & Essays

Editor: John Sinclair
Availability:
Not Yet Available

Format: Paperback
Size: 216mm x 139mm
Page Count: 256
ISBN-13: 9781900486729
Weight (g): 300
Genre: Music
RRP:

Available exclusively from headpress.com in December 2009. If you would like to be notified of its release, click here to send us an email. Write "Sun Ra" as the subject header and we will get back to you.

Composer, bandleader, pianist, poet and philosopher, Sun Ra is one of the most colourful and enduring of musical legacies, transcending time, place and cultural genres.

From the mid 1950s until his death in 1993, Sun Ra led "The Arkestra", an ensemble with an ever-changing line-up and name which sometimes numbered as many as thirty musicians living and playing together under the despotic tutelage of Sun Ra himself. Their music touched upon the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing, bebop to free jazz,while the band also pioneered the use of new forms, including electronic music, space music and free improvisation. But Sun Ra’s legendary status was earned as much for his eccentricities as for his unique artistic vision. Claiming to be from Saturn, he developed and propagated a mystifying sci-fi mythology which he weaved into both the music and Dadaist performances of The Arkestra (performances which inspired artists as diverse as George Clinton and MC5). His ideas are still the cause of much debate and controversy, the poetry and prose Sun Ra left behind only deepening the ambiguities around his work and ideas.

This book collects together for the first time interviews with Sun Ra, the people that knew him, and his contemporaries, alongside illuminating essays and conversational pieces regarding his prolific musical output, mystique, philosophy, fans and much more.

Contents:

1. By way of an Introduction by Peter Dennett
2. Sun Ra by Amiri Baraka
3. Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth by John Sinclair
4. It Knocks on Everybody’s Door by John Sinclair: Interview with Sun Ra, Detroit Sun, 1966
5. Cosmic Catalyst by David Henderson: Sun Ra in New York City, Oakland & Philadelphia
6. Word from Sun Ra by Amiri Baraka
7. Their Space Was My Place by Ben Edmonds: Sun Ra & the MC-5 at the Grande Ballroom, Detroit, 2009
8. Life Is Splendid by John Sinclair: Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, 1972
9. Interview with Amiri Baraka by Lazaro Vega, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1999
10. I Know Everything You Need to Know About Music by John Sinclair: A Conversation with Michael Ray
11. Arkestra in Residence by Rick Steiger: Sun Ra & His Arkestra at the Detroit Jazz Center, 1980
12. Sun Ra Memories by John Sinclair
13. Twenty-first Century Music by Pete Gershon: The Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen
14. The Great and Wondrous Sun Ra by John Sinclair: In Conversation with Wayne Kramer, London, June 2008
15. My Night as a Tone Scientist by Wayne Kramer
16. Cosmic Engineering: Jerry Dammers & the Spatial aka Orchestra / Part 1: Interview with Jerry Dammers by John Sinclair & Dylan Harding, London, 2009 / Part 2: Concert reviews by Paul Bradshaw, John Mulvey, Ian Harrison & Jack Massarik
17. Schwartzegeist by Sadiq Bey: Live from Berlin: The Sun Ra Tribute Project
18. Sun Ra: Myth, Magic & Music by Steve Fly Agaric 23
19. The Mystical Estate / Part 1: Standing in the Shadow of Sun Ra by Dylan Harding / Part 2: Interview with Haf-fa Rool by David Kerekes & Caleb Selah, London, 2002
20. Sun Ra on Film by John Sinclair & David Kerekes: The Cry of Jazz & Space is the Place
21. Sun Ra Obituary by John Sinclair: New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1993
22. Photos & Comics / Part 1: Sonny’s Last Song by Mat Colegate & Dan White / Part 2: Scrapbook
23. Contributor notes
24. About this book


EDITOR BIO: In 1969, the poet-provocateur, MC5 manager and White Panther John Sinclair found himself the victim of that decade’s draconian American drug laws, and facing a twenty-year jail sentence for the possession of two joints. The counterculture Sinclair helped create came to his rescue, however, when John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and others performed at a successful benefit gig to petition for his release. Since that epochal moment, Sinclair (whom Ben Edmonds calls the “hardest working poet in showbiz”) has travelled the globe with his beat verses and inimitable growl, performing with some of the world’s finest musicians. He interviewed Sun Ra in 1966.

F is For Fourier Transfers

I find it hard to describe what I've learnt this week, but I'll share something I started to learn about just today, after reading Mark's 'Hyperpeople' where he writes "MP3 recording uses a mathematical technique known as Fourier Transforms to break an audio signal into its constituent sound waves. It’s like a chord played on a guitar: you can think of a chord as a set of individual strings being played simultaneously."

This quote caused me, among other things, to think of Claude Shannon, and led me, via a quick wiki search to some of his fascinating contributions to the --digital age--to my mind today, I kind of learnt that good poetry has a resonance with the Fourier Transform, like music, by way of the sweet chord-analogy made by Mark Pesce. I'm not sure I have fully processed and learn't about Fourier transforms, but I have found a new field of interest I feel worthy of deeper investigation and sharing here as an example. I also learnt a little about Giordano Bruno, Nietzsche, Giambattista Vico, James Joyce, McLuhan and Claude Shannon and what they have in common with my own warped interpretation of some parts of 'Hyperpeople'.

Furthermore, I feel that, although Internet may have no historical precedent, certain individuals have a strong resonance with the world wide web. Today I learn't why Nietzsche and Shannon, in particular, are important historical figures, kick-started by thoughts inspired while reading 'hyperpeople' if... we were to fiddle with historical events, contrasted with the current refreshing focus on the present 2009 - scenario-universe.
I shd/ come clean here though, friends, and confess that I'm not an academic, a Phd, or a University student, but I'm probably best classed in the realm of the drop-out I guess.