A carabiner is a metal clip used in mountaineering to connect climbers to their lifeline. This site connects my disparate interests and represents the lifeline of my academic, personal, and creative endeavors.
My name is Jon Hoffman and I am a graduate student in rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. If you want to know more, email me: poetics [at] gmail.com
Connections and relationships are always important areas at which to look more closely, so the carabiner is an especially apt manifestion for my ideas. As I see it, "poetics" is the synthesis of rhetoric and art, so it is a constant theme in my works here. Besides my obvious interest in rhetoric, I believe strongly in art, broadly defined. The Carabiner Network is my art. Kurt Kobain said it well, so I quote his journal at length:
I consider music art and when I say “that song is art” I don’t mean in comparison to a painting because I feel the visual arts are not nearly as sacred as the transcribed or audio communications. But it is art and I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is, art is expression. In expression you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. FUCK, the word fuck has as many connotations as does the word art and I’m far beyond the point of sitting down and casually complaining about this problem to the right wing control freaks who are the main offender in destroying art. I won’t calmly and literally complain to you! I’m going to fucking kill! I’m going to fucking destroy your macho, sadistic, sick, right wing, religiously abusive opinions on how we as a whole should operate according to your conditions....
I guess what I’m saying is that art is sacred
punk rock is freedom
expression and right to express is vital
anyone can be artistic
