Alan Ramón Clinton – Technology and spirituality formed uncanny alliances in countless manifestations of automatism. From Victorian mediums, the psychiatrists who studied them, Fordist assembly line, Hollywood studios to Surrealism, Futurism and Vorticism

Alan Ramon Clinton, Mechanical Occult, Peter Lang Publishing, 2004.



„In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technology and spirituality formed uncanny alliances in countless manifestations of automatism. From Victorian mediums to the psychiatrists who studied them, from the Fordist assembly line to the Hollywood studios that adopted its practices, from Surrealism on the left to Futurism and Vorticism on the right, the unpredictable paths of automatic practice and ideology present a means by which to explore both the utopian and dystopian possibilities of technological and cultural innovation. Focusing on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, Alan Ramon Clinton argues that, given the wide-reaching influence of automatism, as much can be learned from these writers' means of production as from their finished products. At a time when criticism has grown polarized between political and aesthetic approaches to high modernism, this book provocatively develops its own automatic procedures to explore the works of these writers as fields rich in potential choices, some more spectral than others.“

Read it at Google Books

Alan Ramón Clinton, Necropsy In E Minor: A Novel, Kindle Edition, 2011.


„Shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize, Necropsy in E Minor is the tale of a young college professor who sits down to write what he calls a “memoir,” but which really only records the past six months of his life (with numerous digressions), and ends, with the last line, after a richly devastating encounter, at the moment of writing.
Who is this person? That is kept a secret, despite the fact that he is writing for no audience other than himself. His name does not appear, but those of others do, necessary to ensure the accuracy of the anagrams and puns that have helped map his universe since he found “The Note.” Given his disposal to interpret this anonymous confessional/fantasy story, an endeavor undertaken with the firm belief that it was written for him, by someone he knows, and purposefully left for him to find.
Having abandoned the scholarly methodologies and subjects that would actually allow him to attain tenure, our professor on the lam performs all manner of linguistic analyses of the note, drives around the rim of Florida (the pilgrimage method, fittingly circular), desperately uses inkblots, the I Ching, and tarot cards for practical advice, adopts a cat named Sanity, becomes an amateur ornithologist, develops a theory of “instantaneous architecture,” endures a shamanic experience, and eggs himself on with the hope that, no matter what happens, his “memoir” might one day be found by archaeologists and thereby provide a key to human life at the close of the twentieth century.“

Alan Ramón Clinton, Curtain Call: A Metaphorical Memoir, Kindle Edition, 2010.

"Stalking academia, re-ordering double prints and rewriting the autobiography of Buster Keaton, Clinton's hapless and sophomoric intellectual narrator offers his poignant and very, very funny insights on modern-day culture in a series of slapstick misadventures.“

Excerpt

Alan Ramón Clinton, Horatio Alger's Keys, BlazeVOX

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Not Sure Where I’m Buried (excerpt)


1.
Greek gods, which ones, watch over
the mill workers in the floor.
My grandmother gave them to me
before everything started getting stolen.
A paper city watches over me.
Not sure where I’m buried.
Or if the trains can get there.
Someone else’s Fedex exploding in my living room
Francis Bacon automatism—Contributors
We’ve invented a lot of different ways to poison ourselves.
The owl and Thoth made friends with Wellbutryn, with Paul Muldoon.
I saw Miranda again, those are pearls that were her lips.
Sprung from jail, Baudrillard chose spaghetti.
Such large mirrors for sensory deprivation
the holes in the wall that are the wall.
A familiar spirit lives in each one.
Only Bacchus is well taken care of these days
but he still calls in the middle of the night
refused at intake, to barter with despair.
My health insurance is sculpted (e.g. Maze),
everyone’s preoccupied with Daedalus.
I’m preoccupied with depositions,
the disintegration of letters
alluding to the layers of drowning.
Practical Joker under the pressure of phenomenology
gluon card one of the last additions
his pietà now the palace of tribulation.
Rustication that bends inwards, stone drapery rising
from concave spectacles, frame the U.S. scene.
Burden on the roof of a Volkswagen
vertical melancholy
graver in contact with Boltraffio
his mystic industrialism.
Subdued fragments of Unit I.
Specialized in scenes of the underworld.
A prisoner of war. A distinguished children’s book.
Eighteen pieces of lava. Rhymed.
Hunting scenes. Huge tomb of advice
representing the head.
I do want the moths to come inside.

4.
Le Corbusier was a leach, fucked mass
(slight of hand), the city in 1919.
He was nearing abstraction.
His discoveries of working man.
He was a professor.
Smoked glass you can’t see through.
You’re not allowed to tap on it.
Not the best choice for a mental health clinic.
Shocked by his nurse he committed suicide.
Label realism.
His house is now a museum.
Probably born in early hesitation
necessitated setting up a workshop.
This grew larger and control diminished,
as did his name.
He was where he painted and rain destroyed the Revolution.
It is difficult to distinguish between them.
Peasants in their surroundings.
Back his rocks, more important than anything else,
his credit is known.
Under the light, until the Fall, only a prostitute
spoke to me, only a beggar touched me.
You’re here, while I’m waiting, to peddle
psychiatric wonders.
I just wanted to go fast, while the blade
was in my hand.
Not sure where I’m buried and some say
I am risen.
A man that thinks well will live well.
All my friends are suicidal.
Make the doors apologize.
Stopping the radios.
Autobiography in the form of a blank image.
The tempest again so practical, it’s all good
as a military engineer, the scientific rendering of depth,
of optical universities.
Tell the exquisite corpse to piss off.



Clinton as as guest editor for a volume of 2nd Ave Poetry entitled New Poetics of Magic