Experimental Film 3 — Max Planck subset

This film is also part of a series of poem-films I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. As mentioned in the prior posting, these films are subsections of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, AI, animal rights, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'. 

This 'section' arose out of living near the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (oh, the irony!), and investigating the vivisection that ultimately underpins so much Max Planck laboratory research (by varying degrees of separation, or not). Via The German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) website, see. 

Recently, I wrote to one prominent university neuroscientist to object to his inserting electrodes into crows' brains to 'show conscious processes in bird brains'. And though there's been a relatively recent shift in the use/abuse of primates by the Max Planck research facilities (I wrote protest-intervention poems about this horrendous abuse when I was in Tübingen in 2016), the disregard for non-human life goes deep (always 'justified' as being for the ultimate benefit of 'humankind', while disclaiming the suffering of the animals themselves through deploying hierarchical and abusive/demeaning speciesist arguments). For a deeply disturbing article regarding the lengths vivisectors will go to to keep their death programmes functioning, see this. 

There's also a figurative (and literal via the observatory dome which is almost the omphalos of the institute) astronomical subtext... when I was a child, I wanted to be an astronomer... as the power plant in the 'background' spews waste. The underlying 'soundtrack' or 'voice-under' is Emily Brontë's poem 'No Coward Soul is Mine'.

    John Kinsella

Rental Crisis — an experimental short film

This film is part of a series of poem-films that I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. Each film is a subsection of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'. This 'section' arose out of being unhomed by machinations within the Tübingen 'rental market' and needing to find shelter elsewhere. But the shadow over one's own life is nothing in the context of global war, rapacity and the displacement of so many (including those whose homes are pounded into blood and fragments, and for whom all 'choice' has been erased).

See here re the ongoing textual, visual, sculptural and aural project, and here. Below is the poem-text used in the film: Rental Crisis (poem for a film) Bone breaker fall makers in the underwriting. Power climb leaf collation to vibrate walls and drive us out of the mouldy crypt. Rental crisis is the annihilation of residence and our discomfort is not a modicum of comparison but a shadow in the shadows, the markers of time we edit into places. Towers to look into, out of reach, grey stone bleeds and retracts its roots. Sea is remembered inland is remembered a heat flare and infrastructural blur, vertigo and buffeting of pump and tracer, skin-shape sculpture of meta or failed divine push out against forest sheltered under eaves and now cut into bog and sediments and conglomerates of old sandstones red texture of silence. Hear the waters rising, hear the dryness, hear the sentinel twisting eyebeams to reach the oscillating shores of Patmos — refuge for some, rebarbative for others. Generosity is the paths of water and reaching shelter. So we left the Neckar for the Mizen, teardrop imploding and lighthouse pulsing out of the picture. Which country would you place us in, standing room only on local trains, steps that retract. John Kinsella

Podcast about The Queen's Apprenticeship, my new historical novel

 By Tracy

Good Reading is currently featuring an 18-minute podcast here on my new historical novel, The Queen's Apprenticeship, which entwines the story of the real-life Marguerite de Navarre with that of a fictional character, Jehane/Josse, who wants to work as a printer.

Here's their description:

"In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Tracy Ryan about the challenges facing women in Renaissance France, how inventing a fictional character to complement the real Queen of Navarre opened up storytelling possibilities, and how poetry, journal entries and Queen Marguerite’s own writing have enriched the social and political fabric of this story."

Many thanks to Gregory Dobbs and Good Reading.