E-poetry 2011 - Special Event: Celebrating Millie

Monday, May 23 2011 @ 12:22 PM EDT

Thanks for inviting me to speak about Millie, her work, and our work together. Clearly, she is one of my favorite subjects.


Slide 1: Millie’s Workspace

I was truly startled when I found a series of images, including this one, on Millie’s photo memory card. The date indicates she took the photo 2 days before she went into respiratory arrest.

Already sick – was she saying good-bye?

No – She was clearing the decks.

Millie and I presented at the AndNow Conference here in Buffalo October 2009.

Our first day back home, Millie posted on the Sporkworld tumblr blog:

(Spork was Millie’s alter ego, a character that had resided in our family and on the net since the mid 1990s.)

Home at Last!
http://sporkworld.tumblr.com/post/217263007/home-at-last

The Sporks were very pleased with the &Now Conference itself and quite satisfied with their own presentation, but it is a relief to be home, even if we were only eight miles away…

Unfortunately, there is no rest for the weary.. It is barely noon on Monday (and the Sporks are not Morning People!) and Mama Spork has already spent hours on the phone dealing with Spork’s medical and bureaucratic problems (7 doctors’ offices and 20 phone calls) . . .

—Spork-the-Younger

Unfortunately, Millie was not exaggerating.

Here is what she wrote about AndNow and her plans for our presentation there:

We did it!
http://sporkworld.tumblr.com/post/215380819/we-did-it!

The Sporks, aka Millie Niss and Martha Deed, gave their presentation “From News from Erewhon to Erewhon 2.0” at the 2009 Buffalo &Now Conference.

For Young Spork, this is the first time since 2006 that she has even tried to do any work for publication or presentation involving deadlines. In 2006 Spork organized an international collaboration involving video and language. . . .

She was an inpatient in four different hospitals in the last two months of the project, in addition to numerous ER visits and scheduled outpatient doctors’ visits. Needless to say, Spork did not complete her part of the work. The project was canceled. Spork’s co-authors all did everything they were supposed to do, and they were deprived of a publication by Spork’s sudden illness.

As a result, Spork vowed never to repeat this experience until and unless she recovers from her illness, at least to the point that symptoms could be predicted in advance. But when the call for &Now came to her inbox, Spork was too tempted to resist: For one thing, the conference is in Buffalo (a few miles from the Spork Residence) even though it draws participants (inter)nationally.

Spork tried to devise a Fail-Safe plan to avoid public failure should she become too sick to work:

* Spork’s conference proposal was to present a previously published work, News from Erewhon, so that Spork would be able to fulfill her proposal even if she did no new work between applying for the conference and the conference itself.
* The work and the conference presentation were joint projects with Martha Deed, aka Spork Minor, and the Sporks agreed that Spork Mama would do the presentation on her own should Spork be incapacitated.


Slide 2: Erewhon Network and Map of Tasks

As the conference approached, everything that could possibly go awry did so . . . Yet something inside of Spork made it possible for her to work productively for the first time in years. In addition to creating new projects (with new bugs), she was able to finish several sub-projects that had been in an unusable state for years. Thus Erewhon 2.0 rather than a belated public presentation of the original News from Erewhon.

Millie launched the Erewhon 2.0 on October 22, 2009

And then – Disaster

Millie had Behcets Disease – an autoimmune disease which causes inflammation of the blood vessels anywhere in the body. Thus the many medical crises Millie mentioned.

Treating the disease leaves a person open to lethal infection.

Both of us came down with Swine Flu immediately after AndNow. Millie went into respiratory distress and then respiratory failure on November 1, 2009.

Normally, we would have gone to Rochester where her doctors practiced, but she would not have survived the ride even in an ambulance.

Millie survived Swine Flu, but succumbed to a hospital-acquired infection which was survivable, –even by Millie – had it been properly diagnosed and treated.

The New York State Department of Health has cited the hospital for serious lapses in Millie’s care and has undertaken a second investigation, which is now in progress.

Thus, Millie spent the last month of her life in the ICU. While on a ventilator, she wrote dozens of e-mails, documented everything that she could, published at least one piece, and left notebooks containing her end of all of her conversations with staff and visitors – since she could not speak.

Repeatedly, she demanded that everything be documented, that what was happening to her be used to help others.

She died November 29, 2009 at the age of 36.


Slide 3: Raghost
http://arteonline.arq.br/netbooks/

Archiving

Millie was already in the midst of working with Regina Pinto on an interactive extension of Erewhon 2.0 in the ICU. Regina’s “Raghost” launched in May 2010 and exhibited at the Avant conference at Ohio State, August 2010.

Millie left a body of work that cried out for preservation. As an independent artist, there was no institutional arrangement for preserving her website. Because of her illness, she had made certain that I could keep it going during episodes of illness, but she was the techie.

Fortunately, she was very organized and I am a trained researcher. As soon as I could, I went through her accounts and discovered things like domain registry. . . Otherwise, sporkworld.org might well have disappeared within 6 months of her death, only to re-emerge shortly thereafter as a pornography site or a place to gamble.

Although I have truncated the site somewhat so that I can keep it more or less secure, sporkworld.org is alive and well – until I, too, age out. Then what?


Slide 4: City Bird badge
http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/city-bird-selected-poems-1991-2009-by-millie-niss-edited-by-martha-deed-192/

I am on firmer ground with collecting and curating printed texts. Geoffrey Gatza had invited Millie to submit a collection of her work to BlazeVox. She couldn’t do it, but I could.
The first poem in City Bird is “Outline of a Novel by the Storyteller Laureate of Hazlahan,” initially published in Talan Memmott’s Beehive. A take-down of po-biz, academia, and small press life, it remains a favorite, but is too long to read here.

Politics also gripped her. And George W offered many opportunities both for web work and poems.

One of my favorites --included in City Bird -- is Millie's

Slightly Fictionalized Version Of Bush’s Speech
At the Site of the Minneapolis Bridge Disaster

Whaddya know? This bridge is broken. This bridge was necessary for crossing the river. You can’t cross the river now on this bridge. You can’t get to the other side! That is because this bridge has fallen in the water. This is not good. As your president, I am very proud of our highway infrastructure, and it is a sad day when I see exit ramps and traffic cones crushed into rubble. But don’t worry. My good friend Mary will fix this bridge. That’s Mary Peters, my Secretary of Transportation. She has a good heart. She is joining me in praying for the bridges of America, to ask God to protect them from any future harm.

People need bridges to get to work. People need to go to work to feed their children and to promote the national economy. If this bridge does not get rebuilt, China might some day beat us economically and become a dangerous military superpower. The Chinese do not share our values. They have no respect for the American way of life. They imprison Christian pastors who dare to put God above their godless state. But do not worry. This broken bridge has been a wake-up call for America. We can no longer ignore the yellowy red menace lurking in the East.

I am proposing a new piece of legislation, the Minneapolis Bridge Disaster Relief Act of 2007, which will provide twelve billion dollars in new military and Homeland Security spending to protect us against China and Chinese-influenced sleeper cells in American cities. This bill will provide American-made weapons to Taiwan and India, put surveillance cameras in Chinese restaurants, and add everyone with the last name of Lee or Wong to the national no-fly list.

Once this bill is enacted, and I am counting on my friends in the Democrat Party to join me in getting this essential national security measure passed before Congress adjourns for its summer recess tomorrow afternoon, America will be even safer from Red Chinese terror attacks than it was before the bridge broke. You can count on me, as your commander-in-chief, to keep you and your loved ones safe from the crafty Chinese. So why don’t you pick up the phone and give your Senator or Representative a call asking him to support my bill. You can tell him the President told you to call. Or you could use that Internet thing my friend Al invented.

I just want to remind you before I get back in my helicopter: Our safety as a nation is not a political issue, it is a national issue. In the fight against global terror, there should be no party politics, no business-as-usual in Washington. I have a message to the Congress: “The people of Minneapolis are counting on you. Do not put special interests above the needs of the bridges of our Heartland.”

God Bless America and God Bless the City of Minneapolis!


Published by New Verse News, August 6, 2007

In the interest of archiving, all of News of Erewhon is included in City Bird.

A full analysis of Millie’s and my collaboration, including a list of our collaborations, came out in Poemeleon, Spring 2010 . http://www.poemeleon.org/martha-deed-on-collaboration/

And – I have collected some of Millie’s favorite graphics into a “This is visual poetry” chapbook by Millie with a companion piece by me, also “This is visual poetry” which is a series of collages using objects from her life to create a cultural biography.

Millie faced her life with both its gifts and struggles with amazing clarity. She was clear as well about what she wanted to happen if her life ended before its time. She was deeply concerned about the plight of chronically-ill people – not just herself – along with their families in the current US healthcare environment.

Thus, a work in progress: The Last Collaboration. It is a mix of poems and rants and essays and collages and other people’s stories as well as our own, contains Millie’s writing along with mine, a work that – I hope – will stretch the concept of “book” into something quite different. . .

I will be putting this talk up on the sporkworld.org website along with links to all of the documents mentioned in this talk and also further links to Millie’s work that she liked best as well as to critiques of Millie’s work by others.

If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to approach me at any time during the conference.

Thank you.


Late Works that Millie Liked (with Millie’s Introductions):

Videos:

Pillophilia (2004, 2005)
http://www.sporkworld.org/pills/
Lyrics by Millie Niss, Vocal by Michael Szpakowski

Note:

This video is not meant as a blanket denunciation of psychiatric medication. Rather, it warns against the excessive use of psychotropic medications, which can lead to serious physical and mental problems.


Hecatomb in Cheektowaga (with Martha Deed, 2005)
http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/goosebig.mov

"A Hecatomb in Cheektowaga" is a 2:38 video, in the style of a public service announcement or political ad, featuring recent (Summer 2005) events in the town of Cheektowaga, New York, USA.

Many people do not see the point of looking at the scenery if they do not have a digital device which allows them to record and transform it. Moreover, when one looks at nature through a digital device, what one sees is influenced by the act of making the recording. This “digital stance” towards wild nature changes how we conceive wildness. Because we can manipulate the images of nature that we record on our devices, we begin to think that we can manipulate nature itself to suit our aesthetic and recreational goals.

This view of nature was played out in a recent event in Cheektowaga, New York (USA): Stiglmeier Park, a large park, is located next to a nature reserve. Recently, the town decided that the deer were unsightly and needed to be removed because they interfered with the activities of humans. Seventy-eight deer were slaughtered in a single month. With the deer gone, the park became overrun by geese. Geese, with their droppings, feathers, honking, and hostility, did not suit the aesthetic sense town planners had of their “residents’ park.” In June 2005, 106 geese were captured and killed, leaving only 17 survivors.

The extermination in Cheektowaga may not stop with deer and geese. Rats, too, are a perceived problem in a working class neighborhood called Cedargrove Heights. According to the town authorities, the rats are unsightly. Therefore, the Town Supervisor, Dennis Gabyrszak, and others in the town government have cooperated with a developer who wants to raze the entire neighborhood and replace it with a new development, called Renaissance Village. When we visited Cedargrove Heights, we found a neighborhood full of children playing in the ample green spaces, and houses that people had lived in for their entire lives and had improved over the years. There were also large numbers of protest signs put up by residents who did not want to lose their homes.


Commercial Spots (2006)
http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/bigspots.mov

"Commercial Spots " is a 1:06 video that poetically reflects on spots, commercial things, and commercial spots. It was filmed in the public atrium of the Sony Building in New York's hglitzy Madison Avenue.


Urban Eden (2006)
http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/eden3.mov

This movie takes place in the "Urban Eden" of the IBM Building's Public Atrium & Sculpture Gallery. The soundtrack consists of quotes involving the words, "apple" and "Eden." Ironic, isn't it, that the IBM Building is decorated with sculpted Apples as if they were promoting a rival company's products...


Impolite Monologue (2006)
http://www.sporkworld.org/monologue/


Brodo (2007)
http://www.sporkworld.org/video/brodo/brodo_full_size_small.mov

A small video of length 1:45 (no sound) inspired by a visit to a trendy "Italian" "bistro" in Snyder, New York, where I ate potato and red pepper soup, followed by a puff pastry stuffed with brie garnished with fresh apples, walnuts and a raspberry coulisse, both of which were very tasty. At the close of the meal, I betook myself to the unisex toilet, where I was inspired to begin taking pictures. The result is this video, replete with allusions to Great Art, yet not without a certain tastelessness which is, alas, my usual schtick.

Interactive Collaborations:

Unscenic Postcards from England and France
with texts by a selection of writers
http://www.sporkworld.org/postcards/

Reframing Cheektowaga (2005)
http://www.sporkworld.org/cedarzoom/big.html

News from Erewhon (with Martha Deed, 2005, 2009, 2010)
http://www.sporkworld.org/news/
Iowa Review Web, 2005
http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/TIRW_Archive/oct05/oct05_txt.html

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