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Ballet Mecanique: A Spread-Spectrum Ecstasy

Presented by University of Notre Dame Creative Writing Program at University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Center Auditorium

September 8, 2010

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John Matthias will be performing his poem-drama,  "Ballet Mecanique," with the voices of Joyelle McSweeney and Stephen Fredman, and image and sound by Chris Jara, on September 8, 2010, in Notre Dame's Hesburgh Center Auditorium at 5 p.m. Matthias' poem is inspired by the collaboration between Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil. Lamarr, a famous screen siren of the Golden Age at MGM, and Antheil, an avant-garde composer, designed a radio-directed torpedo according to the principals that we now call spread-spectrum technology. They got the scheme patented, and this patent is actually the prototype of designs used for cell phones, wireless Internet, and today’s so called smart weapons. Matthias considered their patent one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century, and upon reading Lamarr’s obituary in Nov. 2000, wrote a poem in the context of many other things happening in the lives both of the two principal characters and the lives around them. The poem was originally published online and eventually in Matthias’ book, Working Progress/Working Title. It will now be performed with the aid of McSweeney, Fredman and Jara. Professor John Matthias has published twenty books of poetry, translation, criticism and scholarship. His most recent titles include Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems (1995), Beltane at Aphelion: Longer Poems (1995), and Pages: New Poems and Cuttings (2000), Kedging, (2007), and Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years (2009). Essays on Matthias's work appear in Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias, edited by Robert Archambeau. Matthias has been awarded numerous grants and prizes including those from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, the Columbia University Translation Center and the Swedish Institute. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and Lilly Endowment fellow. His poetry has been translated into some ten languages. Professor Stephen Fredman specializes in twentieth century American poetry, and has been awarded NEH, ACLS and Lilly fellowships. His recent work, Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art, was published by Stanford University Press, 2010. Associate Professor Joyelle McSweeney is the author of two hybrid-genre novels: Flet, a sci-fi (Fence, 2008) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007), a baroque-noir. She is also the author of two volumes of poetry, The Commandrine and Other Poems (Fence, 2004) and The Red Bird. With Johannes Göransson, she publishes Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly dedicated to international writing and hybrid forms. Her play, “The Warm Mouth,” was published in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin, 2010).