Wednesday, March 07, 2007

L'hyperréalité est morte, vive l'hyperréalité

Before I read Deleuze, or Derrida, or Foucault or any of the other world-rending New Philosophers, there was Baudrillard, a good introduction into so-called "theory" for kids like me whose life-philosophies were partly based on readings of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance and lyrics from Funkadelic songs [insert picture of me with dreadlocks here, 1993] and who didn't know enough about Marx or Hegel or Nietschze or Kant or Heidegger to understand much of what was going on. So, you know, I owe a great deal to Baudrillard's hilarious, poignant, gadfly's-eye view of the world in Simulacra and Simulation, a book that I've come to read as an attempt to extend Debord's Society of the Spectacle, as well as an example of the giddy fatalism that threatens all those on the left who dare to look capitalism in its big, ugly face for decade after decade while "doing" philosophy: Zizek avant la "z". His account of Los Angeles is still, basically, correct, even if its broad swaths miss the visible, irrisible marks of the real that are everywhere off the yuppie yoga-trail. The LA of Starsdown owes much to him. Embarrassingly, S and S is the only book of his I know, along with excerpts from the Gulf War book. But The Mirror of Production and Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign are things I look forward to reading soon. I like this quote of his from Le Monde, too: La lâcheté intellectuelle est devenue la véritable discipline olympique de notre temp.

I've always loved the restaurant scene in Brazil--1985 to Baudrillard's books 1981--below. This is how the simulacral looked then: already nostalgiac. Skip forward to minute 3:00.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

"And the other of them, they lost their job a few weeks after the buildings fell, began writing a computer program that they would never finish. They made a program that took all the discussion on the internet that the other of them was looking at all day long in order to build their charts and scrambled it. The program then made a fake page of information where none of the connections, the analysis, the numbers made any sense. The program took hours to make and they would get up in the morning and turn on the computer and start before breakfast. Then they would go and make coffee and return to the computer. This would go on all day and when it started to get dark they would turn on a small lamp which didn’t extend much light beyond the desk and they would continue in the light of the small lamp and the light from the monitor of the computer which spread out over the light of the small lamp and filled the room with a certain, specific bluish glow. Their shoulders kept getting tighter and tighter as they worked harder and harder to scramble the information that kept being called out by the other in the room below. Because they barely moved from the computer, they often grew stiff from not moving all of their limbs. They were possessed by a special feeling, a feeling that the only escape, the only way out from all the endlessly bad information that came over the television and the internet was to keep scrambling it. And they saw this scrambling as an endless chore, as each day large amounts of new information was produced and this producing of new information continued into the night as they slept."

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Green and Gray

I can't really think of any books--recent books, that is--that are doing what Geoffrey G. O'Brien's Green and Gray, is doing. (One of my favorite poems is here, others are here and here). Perhaps the thematics and thought-structure recalls the Frencher side of meditiative-speculative poetry in the last twenty years--Rosmarie Waldrop, Michael Palmer and Norma Cole. He might be a tonalist.

But there's such a relentless refusal of particulars, of the soft law of detail and concretion ("show don't tell" in workshop-ese) in Geoffrey's book, a refusal enabled, I think, by the fact that the poems insist on remaining lyrics written in something that hovers close, often, to blank verse. They insist on--and consist of, and insist in--the line as a kind of untransgressable boundary, strengthened the more that they push up against it with puns and rhymes and syntactical prestidigitation. Line as a mobius strip that enforces a forgetting of its own past, a smudged present part not-yet and part already.


I have forgotten what
would travel from the north
as a series seen from above
or from below, and the followers,
the flowers, I tore them up
the next summer, or rather
before or immediately after
and thought no more about it. ("Three Seasons")

I'm already screwing up the end of the poem
with a hopeful form of forgetfulness.
Let me confess to you that I plan a perfect poem,
one written during the historical period.
Now this was a period I don't remember
and now another is coming to meet it.
This may fuck up the perfect poem
I admit I'd already planned a kind of mass for. ("The Nature of Encounters")

Each kick-turn, then, involves both a (necessary, involuntary) forgetting of its origin and an attempt to ward off an ever-imminent ending, here the period to the couplets that keeps dislocating the poem (pushing it forward or back) and keeping it from being equal to itself.

Over the course of the book, if you read it in one or two sittings, the adventure of the line-as-phenomenon/line-as-subject leaves in the mind an image of what form is and what it can be--a way of resisting the dislocations of time. I keep thinking of Marcel Broodthaers rewriting of Mallarme's "Un Coup de Dés" as a utter visuality, as form whose content is form.










It is tempting, I suppose, to read form-as-content in Geoffrey's book, its intense abstraction ("remorse of the senses") as a critique of the increasing homogeneity and contentlessness of American life, where opposition is, in fact, turned to a curious kind of affirmation, activism become passivism; where dissent is neutralized into some pale form of civility, and the cherished freedom and choicefulness of the U.S. middle-class has no relationship to matter. This is a correct reading of the book, and a helpful one. But I wouldn't want to miss the work's deep positivity, its participation in the experimental project I mention in the last post. It is not only a critique of life-made-abstract, of sameness, but an attempt to use these things as methods that can prevail against them as lived. In reading recently for a working-group meeting on Marx and Darwin, I was pointed to these sentences from the first preface to Capital:


Nevertheless the human mind has sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it, while on the other hand there has been at least anapproximation to a successful analysis of forms which are much richer in content and more complex. Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells. Moreover, in the analyiss of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both.But for the bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labor, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form.


I think this is a fantastic account of the power of abstraction to work against abstraction, to find forms of concretion and difference and particularity that are not false or chimerical. Just as for Deleuze, whose empiricism is similar to Marx's, repetition of the same, repetition as a stutter, demonstrates the baseline difference that cannot be submitted to claims of identity--"differnece without concept"--in Green and Gray, Geoffey dresses his poems in a camouflage of non-particulars, somnambulance and hypno-melancholy, submits the poems to line's repetition-without-concept to reveal the sub-perceptible differences and particulars to which we might attend:

The experience of leaving
one category for another,
of smooth being colder
than rough and of
that December I suffer
as the experience of leaving
one category for another,
using a life that way
that opens and stops
moving, done,
furtively waving
as with one month
that opens and stops
among the others. . . ("Mixed Mode")

This isn't really the abstraction of, say, Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man," described recently by an interlocutor as " the individual subject purging itself of material determinations." The purge happened long ago. Instead, Geoffrey works to drive abstraction to its breaking point. Coming a few poems away from the end of the book, the repetition above, the little stutter, could be read as a kind of pivot, the book having hit a kind of zero-degree of abstraction-contra-abstraction, and finally giving way to the new, refreshed particularity I'm suggesting is its end. The penultimate poem, "Hysteron Proteron," allows itself the enormous conceit of containing "examples of all that has happened" and goes on to index various events political, personal and literary. The first time I read the book, I objected to this poem as the book's end; after a run of poems which so steadfastly refuse proper names and the like, to come across "Paris" and "911 is a joke" truly threw me. Now, though, I guess I'm pretty convinced that this is the point. Though I'm still not sure that the close of the book completely succeeds at what I'm reading it as attempting (a turn to particularity after the suicide of identity, the suicide of the same) I'm also not sure what such a success would look like in this instance. Only Beckett, it seems now, has pulled this off, if anybody has. And in any case, if the exit arc comes too little and too late, then perhaps what it does is point us to the next book.

For those who are skimming, the point is that you should get this book. I look forward to hearing what people have to say about it, and about my reading of it.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Terms of Agreement

While I was away reading lots of Milton and Jacques Lacan and Ezra Pound and other things that footnotes are for and that require a certain rare mineral found in the bonedust of zombie scholars, a few blog-versations caught my eye.

It's true, I think, that the terminology for contemporary poetry we have now is inadequate, and that many are forced to rely on school-names (NYS, Language) and loaded binarizations (x vs. y) or binarizations with a mediating third term (the post-avant, the fence) for things that have evolved and proliferated in excess of these terms, and that were perhaps always less clearly marked (inside and outside poems) than people might be led to believe. I find all of these schemes inadequate, and no doubt there's always going to be some remainder in any attempt to map what people are doing. Good that.

But I also don't think it's exactly helpful to forego generalizing distincitions altogether; because what we're left with then is individuals or small groups of poets existing in a vacuum, social relations turned to objects, objects turned to -jects pro- and sub- and ab- and -e. The usefulness of generalizations--despite the violence they do, all categories are violent--is that they continually remind us of the social ground of poetry, at the same time manifesting important difference in the kinds of things that are getting written, and that get obscured by accounts interested in making all of the branches of the barred American tree root arboresce into the yes/no switch of ye olde blog. Good criticism can do this with or without a catchphrase, but not everybody will be able to produce good criticism on the spot (more on this later perhaps). So I think we need TERMS, MaSTERless and MiSTERless, MySTERious terms. What I want is something that is more descriptive than evaluative, that carries the grain and hue of a good, infrequently encountered or repurposedadjective, that don't aim to brick a wall right through the middle of poetry. I'd like clusters of terms like this, shots fired into the crowd, constellations or distillations or exhalations, clusters of terms that, in their proliferates, escape the vicissitudes of mirror-games (2), triangulization (3), gridlock (4), overkill (5) [see Kasey for an excellent discussion of these problems]. Josh's use of "neo-baroque," for instance, and related musings on "strategies of excess" seems likely to be productive--even if there is, or perhaps because there is, strong disagreement about what or who or why and wherefor this means.

Obviously, the more these terms seek to be total rather than to manifest a few neglected features, the more useless and confining and irritating they will be. The totals are elsewhere, like life.

I've said before why I think the term "avant-garde" implies certain notions of futurity, of forwardness, of being ahead-of-one's-time, that don't really match with my reading of the contemporary poetry that gets labeled this way. It also carries, alongside its military origins, connotations of intellectual collectivity, collective means of production and distribution. To be avant-garde, I think, requires existing within a cultural dominant that despises, ignores and continually misunderstands what you do, and that requires, as such, alternative means of making and distributing. That's to say, the term bears on the way poetry is published, read, shared, critiqued, the goals it sets for itself. By these two standards, there are many writers and collections of writers today where this term probably fits, to some degree. But there are many that are not. Get to work: you're falling behind the average person on the Bergdorf alienation scale; you're not pissing enough people off. Even you, Behrle©.

I would be less reluctant to use it in this manner if other people used it this way too. But they don't; it means the same thing that "indie rock" does in music, or "independent film." Very little. So I just can't recommend it as a productive term for contemporary poetry. It's still fine for the most of the stuff it gets applied to historically.

I do, however, really like Lyn Hejinian's very specific definition of experiment and experimental in the first of her "Two Stein Talks" and pretty much throughout her collection The Language of Inquiry, the title of which shows her commitment to epistemological and phenomenological poetic practice. I like the term because it reads literary history and the literary present against the grain, which is pretty much what I want criticism to do, and why I think "avant-garde" is basically a dried shell. By looking at Stein's relationship to scientific method, her early work in experimental science (fascinatingly available here, thanks to Tony Tost, in the new Fascicle), American pragmatist philosophy, and the fiction of Flaubert, Zola and James, Lyn is extraordinarily persuasive about the important links between realism and experimentation in early modernism, where art sets itself to be "simultaneously an analytical tool and a source of perception and to make the real--usually construed as the ordinary--its focus." In Stein and in Lyn's work, this emphasis on a "real" obscured by habitual and commonplace ways of thinking and looking forces an intense phenomenological refashioning of descriptive language by way of the resources of poetry. There is a dialectic at work in her account of Stein--the increasing dominance of science pressures poetry and literature to recast itself, to prove its value as knowledge, just as the advent of the photograph--nature's pencil, an eye without a brain--and of a certain documentary realism, provokes the long joyride from late Courbet/Manet into the splashless colorfield: Cezanne as a realer realism, the real of seeing (Merleau-Ponty's "palpation with the look"), not the real of the seen.*

But the best thing about this term as Lyn uses it is that it would be impossible to make it mean "all of the poetry that is good," impossible for experimental realism to find itself anything but uncomfortably abutted by friends and neighbors who perform all of the thing it's not: idealism, lyricism, expressivism, constructivism. Indeed, the experimental and non-experimental often coexist in the work of a single poet, and the term cleaves certain certain coteries and schools of poetry in interesting ways. The following is subject to rethinking:

Williams is experimental but Ezra Pound isn't really. Niedecker and Reznikoff are experimental but Oppen isn't really; Zukofsky is sometimes experimental. Jack Spicer is not experimental. Mina Loy is not experimental. Wallace Stevens is experimental, Eliot not, Crane not, Moore is. ("Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination"). Laura Riding was experimental when she stopped writing poems. Everybody who is dead is experimental. Sex is experimental. Disease, pain, mortality, loss of friends, family, and my slack-jawed incapacity to respond to such things: not experimental. Parenting is experimental. Bernadette Mayer is experimental. Ashbery, O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch, Guest: not. Clark Coolidge is experimental but Tom Raworth not (or only sometimes). Charles Bernstein is not really experimental; Ron is sometimes; Bob Perelman not, Barrett Watten not. Susan Howe is experimental on one half of the page; Michael Palmer is not experimental. Archie Ammons is experimental in "Sphere" and in many other works. The labors of the negative in this chapbook by Alyssa Wolf are not experimental, but they may be a reverse hope. Vallejo is totally experimental. Hocquard is experimental. Berryman is not. Is Alice Notley experimental? Am I? Are you?

What happens, I think, is that the term as Lyn employs makes you realize that work that is often termed experimental involves not an experimental disposition toward reality, but an expressive attitude toward self that needs to be distinguished between from confession (self-performance, self as something that is made in the uttering of self, self-transformation, self as the expression of the things in the vicinity of the self) or a constructive or procedural attitude toward social, historical materials.

I realize, though, that the term necessitates serious philosophical and historical thought; we have to make decisions about the philosophical frames possible for poetry, about the nature of the real or reality, and about how and where language mediates what we can say. I don't, for instance, for myself, accept much of the pragmatist and phenomenological underpinnings of Lyn's useful use of the term, how poetry indexes and represents the world. And that's another thing I like about the term, is is forces us to consider the philosophical foundations of the term from the very get-go. This is to say, it's an open question for me what it means to be experimental if one is writing from within a postmarxist, poststructural frame. Lisa Robertson does this, but by way of other kinds of traditions and media--Epicurus and friends, romanticism, architecture, art.

I should acknowledge, as I sign off, that many of these thoughts come from reading not only Lyn's book but James' Agee's and Walker Evans unrelenting, seething experimental realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, (why aren't there more books like this?), and thinking about the relationship, by way of Joanna Picciotto's class and scholarship, between Milton's poetry and the experimental, protestant communities (ranters, levellers, diggers, etc.) during the English Civil War. (Note: If you want to see that article and can't get access, e-mail me).

Next time: formalism.

*Bill Berkson (letter to B. Mayer in What's Your Idea of a Good Time pg. 199):

What is realism? I asked my Art Institute students and we didn't get much out of it except looking at a lot of terrific pictures with people and things in them. I remember Lyn Hejinian asking a lot of people, poets, that question a few years ago, and now she gives lectures on the topic but I never have found out what use she found for the term which seemed pretty shady to me. I tried to discourage Lyn about using it; "real,"however, being a very useful word when applied to both poems and poets, horrifying as it seems a poem can be real without being true (isn't that what unhinged Laura Riding at some point?)

Friday, February 02, 2007

I'm taking a short break from blogging. I should be back in a couple of weeks.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

2nd Ave is really terrific. I'm still not quite sure what it is exactly, but it's good.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Once you finish with all of the good reading recently uploaded (Coconut 7, Dusie 5, Octopus 8),
do check out these two poems (and--yikes!--embarrassing video) from Stars-Down here, over at Boyd Spahr's nomadic and protean journal Aiden Starr. No guarantee that these links will do what they are supposed to. But for now: great work by Laura Solomon, Jon Leon, Kristen Kaschock, Karla Kelsey, and Jenny Boully.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

He do the borderguards in Flash

Did everybody catch this (also above), which cher Heriberto Yepez posted to the International Exchange earlier this month? . Do check it out. We all need a nudge now and then from the didactic dead.

I hear tell that he has a book coming out soon from Factory School. That's great news. I loved his poems in Copper Canyon Press's Anthology Reversible Monuments, and last semester at UCB he gave a lovely (er, terrific)reading from the poems he's been writing in English.

(Update: hey look, it's already here).

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Extreme Contemporary Conference, Part II

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “A University Without Intellectuals—What Exactly Is Coming to an End and Why?” [*Note: this is sort of run-through as the same end-of-history arguments most of you will have, no doubt, heard before]

1) The contemporary is a new chronotope. There have been no new paradigms for the last 25 years. Death of the master thinkers--is there anybody of his generation of the stature of Foucault/Derrida/Habermas? A revisionist period, in which one would expect great erudition and scholarship, but no, there's a diminishing amount of time.

2) If this is a new chronotope, what was the old one (episteme classique)? The birth of history with Darwin, Hegel/ evolution/ dialectic. The birth of the second-order observer (the birth, then, of the present as mediation between past and future, a short moment of transition. The future appears as an open horizon of possibility.

3) How did it break down? Death of the grand narrative (Lyotard); end of metahistory (Hayden White). We no longer believe in the openness of history.
[I still can't figure out why this means there are no longer any intellectuals]

Svetlana Boym, “Off-Modern Ruins: Contemporary Reflections on the Avant-garde”

1) The off-modern as part ruin, part construction site.
2) A new diagnosis of the modern, a new symptom: ruinophilia, which goes beyond postmodern quotation marks or the neo-baroque (following Benjamin's notions of ruin as an allegory of thinking.
3)Etymology of nostalgia a meta-nostalgia--its neologic invention from gr. nostos (home), is itself nostalgiac.
4) Off-modern nostalgia as an utopian wishing directed sideways. Tatlin Tower as example (monument to 3rd Internationale)--as emerging from the space in between torndown statue to the Tsar and a not-yet-built monument to the party . For Tatlin and others, artistic revolution precedes political revolution. Their goal was to match with imagination did with reason, to confront technology with technique.
5) Seeks, precisely, to discomfit: equation of confort and conformity.
6) As an effort to preserve these energies, she wrote the Off-Modern Manifesto, originally as a joke. Her claim is that error has an aura/order. Interested in what the failures of technology reveal (you can read more here).

Joshua Clover, “Stock Footage, or the Representability of World Systems”

1)Would like to attend to some of the cultural fields which Jameson overleaps, despite his claims to a Poetics of Social Form, by focussing on two artworks, which like poetry do the work of providing the "cognitive maps" for which Jameson's postmodernism calls, that exist somewhere between the longue duree and the momentariness of fireworks. Postmodern not as unknowable but as unrepresentable, a representation of unrepresentability, then, is what's at stake.

2) Collapse of the historical and the cultural into each other. The groundlessness/baselessness of late capitalism--infrstructure having exchanged itself for immanence. History becomes untethered from the real, and what results is information, networks.

3) Lombardi and the Black-Shoals Planetarium come from the field of information art, which includes "process art" and "event art." Involves the display and manipulation (re-constellation)of real information.

4)Mark Lombardi, conspiracy theory art, sociograms, charts the global networks of money influence involved in real events. Extraodinarily large drawings. Our "mania for information flow" --up close it works as to demystify--and attach names to (Kissinger, etc.) --what normally appears as abstracted, reified social relations involved in , but stepping back a kind of reverse Chuck Close effect (Charlie Distant), allows and everything is flattened, made abstract and unreal.

5) Earliest point in time of Lombardi's art is 1973--the peak of accumulation, collapse of the Bretton Woods, and also the beginning of the derivatives market (futures, options) which were enabled, in part, by the Black-Scholes equations, allowing in effect the pricing of the future in real time. (Black and Scholes found a company that collapses in 1998 and has to be bailed out by Greenspan to avoid economic catastrophe).

5)Autogena and Portways Black-Shoals Planetarium uses these equations to visualize--as stars--all of the transactions of the world's markets, a sphere in which all people who have a retirement fund or own stocks are involved. Ongoing process happenign at every moment, a degree of abstraction so great that it becomes representation.

6) A representation of capital that has become free, become the subject of history, self-valorizing, autonomous. Not exactly Jameson's "waning of affect" but the affect of missing affect, of becoming or being made abstract. The planetarium as a kind of sublime negative knowledge.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

The Fully Enlightened Earth

I've been wanting to put this information up for a while, but it's difficult to get over the resistance that even contemplating the catastrophe (this one, merely one among many) facing us engenders in me, not to mention the resistance I have to stating things the obvious. But perhaps these figures will be helpful. I finally got around to reading/skimming the devastating but not entire hopeless opinion of the U.K.'s Stern report on global warming (here). Of course, the Stern report imagines a world economy that continues to grow, rather than one that suffers a economic catastrophe (which could help in reducing emissions by killing consumers and producers).

Cost of stabilizing the planet's greenhouse gas emisions (expressed as %1 of world GDP, estimates run from below %1 to 5%): $ 403 Billion

Cost of Iraq war to date: $660 Billion.

Does stabilizing mean that the seas won't rise? That weather won't be even worse than it is? That crops won't fail? Your thingies fall off? Most scientists say no; these things are almost certain. Buy that designer survival kit now!

Should we just accept the end and leave the lights on all day long? No, no, no.

As nauseating as any calculations involving human life and suffering are, there's a difference between one foot of sea level rise and ten feet. Between ten Katrinas and one hundred Katrinas. The difference is entire cities and towns.

Should the whole world go on strike on my birthday or the birthday of anybody living this year? Yes, yes, yes.

Is there any hope? Yes, a sliver. A very sharp sliver.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Notes from the Extreme Contemporary Conference, Part I.

Here are my notes from the excellent conference at Stanford's Center for the Study of the Novel. Much here that is relevant to ongoing discussion about poetry, I think.

Conference: The Extreme Contemporary

Event Date: January 12, 2007

Speakers: Svetlana Boym, Joshua Clover, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Alan Liu, Bill Luoma, Katie Salen
Discussants: Celeste Langan, Tyrus Miller, Sianne Ngai, Anne Wagner
Location: Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Overview (Note: this conference didn't really have much to do with novels)
Samuel Richardson famously called the novel "writing to the moment"; to what degree can this claim make sense of our present set of moments? How does the novel, long considered a pioneering form of modernity, engage the conditions that shape literature and art being produced and consumed today, Jan. 12, 2007, and into the future? What relationship might narrative practices have to a contemporary moment whose extremity is often located around visual regimes and instantaneity, organized by new technology and global communications? Are new media and digital technologies more prepared to find adequate forms for current conditions; does—and should—writing to this moment remain as a possibility?

10 am -11:30 am
Alan Liu, “Burning the Book: ‘Agrippa: A Book of the Dead’ in the Age of Networked Reproduction”

(Italics indicate my thinking and not spoken remarks)

Agrippa, William Gibson's collaborative project (with?).
--An "alien bildung," the bildung of new media. Included a poem on a diskette at the back of the artist's book, a poem which self-deleted after one reading: Agrippa as the metamorphosis of new media, the poem as the fragile, short-lived butterfly, and the disk a husk or chrysalis.
--Liu sets up The Agrippa Files to reconstruct the book and diskette; the tension between 1992-2005, web 1.0 and web 2.0. Book features a genetic sequence (I wish I knew about this before starting my genome project) that the printer had trouble printing--transcription problems everywhere, problem with the materiality of information. Agrippa becomes cult object of new media studies. What's the relationship between the handmade (high-end fine-art book) and technological?
-Agrippa and The Agrippa Files allows for an understanding of the digital event (or non-event). A circuit between new media studies, media archaeology, digital-textual scholarship. Allow us to see the problematic of seeing event as discrete moment--rather a process, a happening, that is in a continual state of redefintition and becoming. Just as it is problematic to see web 2.0 as a thing, as a one. Not network but networking. The fetish or cult object of Agrippa creates a self-sustaining or self-referencing circuit, a hype cycle, but also something that continually exceeds it.

My conclusion: Liu wants to question the thinking of new media and internet events as objects and discrete occurrences. The book becomes in a sense a redherring, the material husk of an underlying informational and social process which always exceeds our ability to think it--as as a one, or as an event, or object.

J. on break: remarks on nostalgia effect: we like capitalism from 20 yrs ago, just not today's capitalism. What is that?

Bill Luoma, “Electronic Arts: Problems with the Peace Server and Other Technologies”

--No thesis, he says. Only a question: are we there yet? Describes the peace server, uses google inputs to collage together content, links, images. "Feed unravels the web." Claims that while occasional moments of aesthetic interest, the result is not overall readable, like tedious Making of Americans (This strikes me as an apt comparison given the emphasis on person and making, back to bildung).
--Describes Jared Carter's indignation at a collage of his name. Flarflist response. Name as property? Describes his intent in setting up the peace server immediately after Sept. 11 by reading a passage about him from Spahr's forthcoming memoir--"to scramble the disinformation, to make sense of it all." Describes flarflist as "a healthy breeding ground for ass-vaginas"
--Dan Hoy's critique of flarf, and by extension the peace server, as "corporate algorithm." Likes phrase: play on notion of corporeal, but also agglomeration.
--Biographical information: Luoma grew up in Santa Clara valley, worked at Lockheed, parents worked at Lockheed. Chemical lab assistant : "mostly I was responsible for contamination." Reads collaborative poetry bus poem describing toxic sites in the Santa Clara valley.
--A short lesson in how computers talk to each other. Works directly on transmission control protocol and internet protocol. Sends Jclo an email. His point is that "ambiguity constrains protocols." Clarity as a value at the level of machine language. Indeed, he says, it's now thought that it is impossible to write a compiler that can handle ambiguity.
--His conclusion is that Flarf and the Peace Server are fundamentally constrained by this base-level attention to clarity and the corporate efficiency rationality that they index. What if ambiguity were written in? Poor John Keats. Describes the work of Jim Campbell who builds his own circuits and writes his own language as an example of a artist who writes ambiguity in.

Conclusion: Luoma's talk is a more attentive and sympathetic version of Hoy's critique, but one that is more compelling in demonstrating the regulatory forces at work in search-engine assisted art. I don't think it's a critique of search-engin Flarf as much as indication that such art forms need an awareness of these foundational clarities. In this he seems to echo Language poets' accounts of their own work as disrupting the efficiency and clarity and obviousness of ideological discourse (Bernstein and Watten and Perelman).

_____________________-

Discussion:

Somebody brings up the role of comfort and discomfort in Katie Salen's project. Complicity/oppositionality--somebody mentions J. Drucker's book and Bourriaud. Is comfort compensatory? Does it supply something that is lacking, "shorthand for a process of socialization,"museums of socialization , museums of play in a world where play is disappearing. Anne Wagner speaks up for a combination between relational aesthetics and strategies of estrangement. Somebody: "Often on playgrounds you'll see children spend more time discussing the rules than actually playing." Jclo suggests we distinguish between inner rules and outer rules.

Moretti asks if the contemporary can really be identified with a medium. Medium as zeitgeist, medium as philosophy. Have we gone from a situation of the world to medium as definition of contemporary--therefore, end of history, etc. Liu mentions the singularizing of the word media and the way that "medium" drops out of discourse in the 60s. Information as allegory for capitalism, and as allegory for history. Spahr resists this equation of contemporary and internet. Why not resistance to globalization?

More to follow.

Friday, January 12, 2007

MARY Magazine is an online journal of fiction, literary nonfiction,poetry, and digital art released by Saint Mary's College of California.We're looking for dynamic work that demonstrates attention to language,craft, and cutting edge digital productions. Nonfiction submissions areparticularly encouraged -- personal essay, memoir, reportage, lyricalessay.MARY pays $50 per acceptance, and submissions will be accepted untilFebruary 1. We look forward to receiving your work.Guidelines*All submissions must be sent via e-mail as Microsoft Word or Rich Textdocuments to writers@stmarys-ca.edu.*Include your name, address, phone number, and e-address in your message.*Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if your work isaccepted elsewhere. *Indicate the genre of your submission in the subjectline of the e-mail to read FICTION, NONFICTION, or POETRY. Do not submitmultiple works in different genres in a single e-mail; for example, do notlabel your e-mail POETRY and attach poems, essays, and short stories toone e-mail.To find out more about us, please visit www.maryjournal.org.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

John Barr

Reginald posted this poem by John Barr—anti-barbarian poetry defender guy, President of the Poetry Foundation, memorably described by Steve Evans—on his website. I don’t know if Reginald really thinks this is lovely or interesting, or if he’s just being nice. But I had a strong allergy to it. I was going to post this to his comments box but I’ll just do it here. (I should say: Reginald is my friend. It’s probably OK to mention now that he was the only creative writing professor—literature profs. Roger Gilbert and Debby Fried were great too—at Cornell who gave a damn about poetry, mine or anyone else’s, or who had anything relevant to say about it. The others were nice people, but. He’s taught me a great deal as a poet and a critic. Other than Reginald it was Karl Parker and Gabe and Gina who taught me the most. Josh and Karen Anderson and Theo and the whole, now-vibrant scene in Ithaca didn’t arrive until much later.)

But anyway, I couldn’t not say something about this poem.

Restoration (from Poetry Daily)

I love to recover the quality
of things in decline.
To scour stone, scale paint from brick,
to compel, with wire brush,
the flourish wrought by iron.
To refinish wood, solving for
forgotten grain.
To give, by weeding, our stone wall
back its dignity.
To left and right the borders of our lot,
to square the corners of our keep.

I have even dreamed: pushing a pushcart,
I stop anywhere and start
doing what needs to be done.The first building takes time:
replacing windows, curing the roof.
I know compromises must be made
and make none, a floor at a time.*

I work along an interstate
a century after Johnny Appleseed.
A modest people makes me chief.
(They, too, enjoy the hazy shine
of finished work by last light.)
Storm drains relieved, brick walks relaid,
a heritage of dust and wrappers
is renounced. The square square,
trim trim, the town for once
is like an artist's conception of the town.



I don't know, Reginald. It's a fine enough poem if you don’t read it too carefully, no worse than many a mild turn of phrase you could find in any magazine, on any side of rhetorical divide(s). But could anyone come up with a better statement of the ethics of conservatism, of nostalgiac preservation of values that never really existed anywhere anyway? What's this ironwork he's polishing? And these modest people who appointed him chief? Seen next to the kinds of things he says in his addresses to the Lillys of the Field, and it's impossible not to, the poem makes me a bit queasy. I take your point about the wrongmindedness of equating political and aesthetic conservatism--no doubt, avantgarde or modernist poetics do not necessarily an anti-capitalism or a liberalism or even a Hillary Rodham Clinton make. Modernist experimentation is fissured by, and probably even constituted by, all sorts of political violence. But all of the pieces of a nostalgiac, sentimental and, yes, reactionary attachment to a narrow notion of "people" and the connection of this to a traditional stance--and these are the philosophical and aesthetic undercurrents of political fascism--are here. I'm not making the facile comparison between form and politics; he is. No doubt, when coupled to an erudite classicism and an admission of the necessity for change, and a recognition of the fact that modernism and modernity exist, like it or not, you get Pound, who I can't really avoid. This, though, strikes me as a pale imitation of Frost's “Mending Wall”, without the menacing ambiguity. Good fences, yeah, but no neighbors.

*These are the best lines in the poem. Bush’s new motto anyone? How better to say “change the course” and mean “stay the course”? I’m going to remember this rhetorical move—a sort of intra-sentence non-sequitur--the next time I need to change the subject.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

water releases a chemical that is good for you and. . .it's called MILKSHAKE

About Frank Seidel (a poet new to me, and mentioned recently by Jordan and Simon De Deo), I find myself liking his Going Fast despite myself. All those descriptive cul-de-sacs and rhymes so many-century emptied they've become good again. None of this brand name with a preposition garbage! And I thought Norman Mailer had turned into Dave Eggers and the proprietary blend of winky cuteness and sigh-rony, but no, here's this nearly unbearably obnoxious and overbearing bundle of tuxedoed glands and drives, with his octaves and grace notes and sumptuary taxes writ as stanzas, his anachronistic midcentury nihilism and misogyny, not quite hip with the subtle ways of the new economy of aerosolize and conquer. The new aristocrats are wearing bad suits or flipflops, man! Or in a church! And of course that's the interest, all those uppereastside markers of privilege that do not mean anymore, and all that formal resourcefulness, those lexicons and Baedekers of excess--this restaurant, that locale, yadda yadda yen euro peso etc.--become a burden, become so many plaques and neurofibrillary tangles and angioplasty bills, not liquid enough, pal, not techno-log-ical, attached to old fetishes like handmade Italian shoes and other such meaninglessness. It was a blast in 1929. The image that stays with me is the man wandering through the debris from a Concorde crash still belted into his firstclass (or I suppose that's the only class there is--uh, was--on a Concorde) seat. I'd like to see Jeff Wall do that one. Or the matronly repository of family fortune poisoned by her son until she becomes a shut-in, cognizant but unable to respond. Impossible to resist this as an image of the birth of the Kantian aesthetic, at least in Lukacs' ungenerous reading of Kant, the world become a picture, become scenery, precisely because the subject is isolated from it as matter, as "the" matter. An excellent rewriting of Merrill's more excellent rewriting of Moore's most excellent "An Octopus." But here we're all so totally over modernism; immanence is a joke (ditto its near-homonyms). Whisk Merrrill from his Greek island and deposit him in a Bunuel set-piece and you'd have a good mock-up of a Seidel. We should get Alli Warren to revive White Male Poet and give him a syndication spot.

Thankfully, no one is asking for pity here. You hate the persona. The persona hates you and all the other emasculated vegetarian downtown types and feministes. He hates himself or his self hates him, which amounts to the same thing. And he's smart enough to follow the descriptive breadcrumbs to where the siren song --yes, it's a mixed mythophor--of this and this and this is anagrammatized, presto, to shit and shit and shit:

. . . The well-dressed man,
The vein of gold that seems inexhaustible,
Is a sunstream of urine on its way to the toilet bowl. ("A Gallop to Farewell")

I do also like that thing he does following long participial nounphrases with a copula, a kind of faux German that excellently mimes the prose of philosophers and politicians and first-year composition students and other people who cannot or will not yet think a thing. Mr. Gauche, meet Mr. Louche:

The without blinds or curtains and incapable of being opened
That let the light in after dawn to mop the blood up into day
Are lighted up tonight because people are working late. ("Das Kapital")

But in the end if you're going to marry the declarative sentence to the thumprabbit of th'iambic I'd prefer it if you gave your misery and ecstasy the fifteen minute smoke break required, for the time being, by labor law (may not be applicable in some states), or at least decided to, every now and then, walk through one of those walls you keep pretending we see too. I won't tell.

I'll check out the bevy of books he's released since.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

le meme: some names


1. When they were married, my distinctly un-Japanese parents owned a fish and then fish-and-sushi restaurant together in Malibu from 1978 until 1982 named, unironically, I think (you'd have to know my parents): Something's Fishy Here. The restaurant stayed, owned by the original sushi chefs and their family, having grown into a chain of four or five such Something's Fishy's, until last year, when it was demolished along with all of the other restaurants and stores across the Pacific Coast Highway from Topanga Beach, once, after two decades of litigation, the Los Angeles Athletic club finally managed to evict all of the smugglers, beachbums, offgrid hippies, drugdealers, and artists real and imagined from the floodprone bamboo wilds--called, for obvious reasons, the Snake Pit--at the delta of Topanga Creek.

2. My sister's name is Jax. My niece's name is Ocean. My nephew: Asa.

3. My parents almost named me Cosmos. We had two dogs named Bimbo and Bozo who are, sadly, no longer alive. I am.

4. I almost joined the circus once when, in a post-romantic or pre-Raphaelite frenzy, I worked a weekend at a rennaissance fair in Ashtabula, OH selling clay runes, crystal-encrusted wands and other assorted magical flimflam. I was hitchhiking from Belfast, ME to Chenault, OR and had gotten a ride near Buffalo from a crystal salesman who had the same birthday as me. This seemed signifcant but I can't remember why.

5. Cities where my mother spent the majority of her childhood: Baghdad, Tehran, Kampala, Kabul, Beirut. My grandfather worked for U.S. AID. He was in the OSS in WWII. An entomologist by training, he worked for Bird's Eye Foods in Walla Walla, WA for a few years after his military service: the first company to market frozen food. These are all names for the cold war: AKA "The Jolly Green Giant."


Can anybody get me information about the reprint of The Hotel Wentley Poems (Joy Street, 2006), mentioned here? Appreciation in advance. E-mail to the right.

Monday, January 08, 2007

20,000 more what?

MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

Can I please go lay siege to the goddamn Federal Building now? Or at least disrupt traffic? Or something. Yell, maybe.

Oh, wait. I forgot that only well-meaning lawyers trained in the fine arts of apology and compromise are allowed opinions on politics. I just read the news; I don't make it or anything: sorry.

After reading these and these, I'm imagining a 21st-century riposte to Documents (Eds. O. Hunt, Lara Glenum and Anne Boyer). (Note to self: write an essay about the healthy refusal of all poetic licensing apparatuses or rationalized pre- and re-processing mechanisms in such poets while being brave enough to distinguish it from the milquetoast domesticated versions of surrealisme which are no more of an affront to the pieties and pietymakers of the day than, say, going around town with one black and one gray sock. When was it, anyway, that quirks replaced perversities? Blame Woody Allen. And Punky Brewster. Get over the people who will no doubt dislike you for saying so or who will, even worse, pay no attention whatsoever. That includes you too, Self).

Benjamin to Bataille underground: "You are working for fascism." Bataille to Benjamin underground: "Who said anything about work?"

And then Noah's contribution: "dog mouse wash" and "a whole fast airplane release pillow puncher."

Back to work.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Reginald Shepherd has a blog. And a book coming out soon, I think. He's sure to bring a great deal to the table, wherever or whatever that table may be.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

The Fall 2.0

I'm glad to have read this article by Geert Lovink (via Jordan). Despite the occasionally incoherent and transitionless paragraphs with attitude-heavy asides (meant no doubt to imitate the form of blog posts), it does head in the direction of the kind of thinking about blogs and new technology that I want. But Lovink seems unwilling or unable to acknowledge the massive variety of types of blogs and the purposes they're put to--assumes that The Fratboy Chronicles, Diary of a Neocon Pimp, the person writing by battery power on a laptop while rockets fall on Beirut, and the poetry people and the philosophy people are all doing the same thing. I'm sure there are remarkable similiarities. But I don't buy the McLuhan idea that the software is the message, that we're just excrescences from Blogger's HTML templates, or at least it's not the only message. I'm sure there are deep and probably insuperable structural forces determining (limiting, bounding) and regulating the things we can do here. As I've mentioned before, there's something strange--meaning something I'm not sure I understand--that occurs with notions of public and private space, where the distinction between the two types of space is almost completely annulled; whatever public there is a weak one; it comes after, in the wake of, everything else, all of the publicly-attuned faces of (non)privacy. Because of the time-lag between a posting and comments or a response, what occurs here is neither conversation nor discourse exactly. But, getting back to my point, if Lovink is right that "the truth is unlinkable,"not to mention unlikeable, and I agree that it is, it's probably not to be found in the code; it's not a subsystem, it's just completely offline.

In the end, what I'd like to read (or perhaps even write, although I'm far from knowledgeable enough to do in the near future) is something that's both critical of and attentive to the democratic and pseudo-democratic at work in Web 2.0, something that doesn't simply see claims for the decentering of news or poetic distribution as simply false or true, good or bad. And although Lovink acknowledges that discourse is not the primary purpose of blogs, that they are "primarily used as a tool to manage the self," he's not very convincing or satisfying in describing how this self-management, self-fashioning and self-regulating actually occurs, and he's far too dismissive of this as simply cynical narcissism. He's pretty much stuck in thinking about blogs as a relation between news- organs and political bloggers. No doubt, there's a good deal of reality TV, confession and showmanship and whispery quipsmithing (which is a fun occupation, I must admit), going in po-blog world and elsewhere. But I don't know, I'm tempted to think of this self-management and self-fashioning --"to clear up the mess, to master the immense flows of information"-- as also addressing substantial needs in a world that is often either overwhelming or empty or overwhelmingly empty. If the opportunity to have a self weren't so hard to come by in the administered orbits in which most people are forced to exist, people wouldn't be coming here for one. So, no surprise if the story is that workers and work in standardized cubicles or standardized genres like criticism and journalism has almost completely subsidized a majority of the content on the web.

But Lovink's argument that cynical news-bloggers only end up reinforcing or strengthening the conventional news organs they criticize, is worth thinking about for poetry. Does making fun of [Name Redacted] strenghthen or weaken his ability to shape discourse? If I mention the Poetry Foundation here, am I sending readers their way? I do think that there's a constructive component to the work that's being done here; that this is not simply a cynical reinforcement of the institutions that are being circumvented; one would have to be blind not to be able to point to a 100 examples of new technology allowing for alternative networks for the distribution of poetry, not to mention an alternative poetics that takes these models into account. But they are fragile. They won't last. They will turn to so much paper. And I'm sure everybody can think of their own example of the freedom of the internet turning out, in the end, to have been a bunch of people unwittingly generating value for free for the benefit of some corporation or other. Indeed, Creative Nihilism is probably the best description yet for about seventy percent of Williamsburg and the Mission.

Google will call in its loans. And we'll either realize too late there are no streets nor places to put them, nor jobs Arctic ice nor social services nor ways to help or be helped; or we'll have figured out how to translate all of these fragile connections and the wish for a different, even better world that they often represent into something more sustainable.

I'm interested in what other people think about this article.

Friday, December 29, 2006

Sperm Counts























Children of Men is bloody tremendous. Julianne Moore doesn't cry once, sadly, but she does positively glow with mournfulness. She has a small stud in her nose, which means she's a revolutionary. Most of the revolutionaries are either non-white or have facial piercings or dreadlocks or smoke joints and listen to The Beatles, which is useful for disinguishing them from the compliant and herdlike Britons inured to the even more herdlike refugees in cages lining the tracks where the train cars pass, themselves cages. Bare life, yes. And something is happening to the animals which isn't explained really well, horses burn stifflegged in jumbles in the otherwise familiar English countryside.

If you see this movie in the theater, I advise sitting as far back from the screen as possible. The handheld shots in the beginning of the movie palpate in seasickmaking unease (a prolepsis of the final shot, which I won't disclose); the camera rocks and rattles, and as far I can remember almost everything is out of focus except a thin band in the midground which usually includes the talented Clive Owen and the incredible structure of the bones of his face (see above). Lots of action in corners of the screen, which are always open, unprotected. But, as the content of the film becomes more horrifying in itself, the form itself ceases to do the work of suffering and making suffer.

Because of, perhaps, the incredible improbability of this film's combination of Christian messianism, new age bubbleheadedness, and your standard revolutionaries with guns (it is, yes, an X-mas film, stress on The Cross, folks), this film is a perfect negative of the world we now live in. A town on the English coast becomes the West Bank . London is Baghdad with carbombs. Guantanamo everywhere. And as is always the case in good sci-fi, the future can only be future by quoting the past--hence the revolutionary hopes circle around music from The Summer of Love, although there is, like, three-seconds of Aphex Twin somewhere; hence three-wheeled motorcycle taxis belching smoke; hence the wormhole of the holocaust threading the movie's set and costume design. The kinds of empty and fear-soaked domination, the animalizing of people, the racist imagos that drift in the air like the Pink Floyd pig featured in one particularly memorable scene, all of this has left me rattled because, well, I know that this is where I live and that I'm a part of it, that I have no way to resist it. In nearly all respects this is the movie that V for Vendetta might have been had it not gotten sucked into the pop-psychology of The Painful and Personal Past. This is featured here, too, but avoided for the most part. Neither banished nor allowed to dominate.

The central premise of the film, that humans have ceased to be able to reproduce, will, I am sure, be much and helpfully discussed in the future. For now, I would suggest that we take it allegorically-- I would suggest that this is about what is happening in the developed world with the higher and higher number of hours members of the middle-class spend interfacing with some kind of technology, the alienation from our aching and poorly-postured or gym-disciplined bodies. But it is also, isn't it, an awareness of the incredible pointlessness of capitalism after some unspecifiable point in the twentieth-century, the failure of those swarms of liquid capital to find something productive to sink their teeth into--a factory, say, or soybeans. Well, the needs of the world's poor don't really produce the kinds of profits that companies want, and, in the end, aside from enough money for healthcare and childcare, clothes, decent food and a place to live (none of this pays), I don't really need any more shit. It's just gadgetry: IPod's designed to break after two years, flat panel televisions, etc., etc. There's nothing to produce. So, investors become increasingly speculative and cannibalistic. Hype and real estate. But war pays, and war opens markets. That 15% rise in the Dow this year? It's all tanks, the Mills of China, and Viagra Falls. Onward, ho.

And so, what then? Well, in this film, this is how chances stand: a stoned old hippy (who has my name) and his copy of the I Ching , a former "activist" who is now surviving as a quiet and apolitical member of the middle class, a white woman who is leader of the revolutionaries, and a number of revolutionaries of South Asian or African or Arab descent who turn out to be bloodthirsty traitors. Oh, and I almost forgot, the great hope in the form of the radiant Afro-British pregnant woman (who the white people help to safety). As a model for social change under tyrannny, sound familiar? Also Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior. You'll see what I mean.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Feverish Laziness














I.

"A puppet, a pauper, a poet, a pawn and a king."
----R.I.P The Hardest Working Man in Show Business


What do you think, what percentage of the music you listened to in the last week would have been impossible without him? For me, at least %70, maybe more. Maybe not Charles Ives, but Clipse and The Velvet Underground, Blonde Redhead, that Diplo mash-up and all of the other stuff, yep.
II.

Time, plenty of time, but also an absence of things to say, or perhaps only an absence of saying.

Quitting smoking (too many -ings) for the first time in, oh, since the hospital month twenty years ago [that will end the things you don't know about me broadcast]. And so "I" disobeys "me"--an em-dash separates 'em-- more than usual.
III.

Lots of excellent reading, though. So perhaps, after a few months of hearing myself talk too frequently, the intake/outtake valves are just switched. About a hundred pages into Against the Day, and so far nothing but everything, too many names, theme webs and the torch of narration passed from character to character. Anarcho-syndicalists (distinctly far from any poetics) and the Archduke Ferdinand. Secrets about secrets about nothing. I've been thinking that what I love, or one of the things I love, about Pynchon is one of the things I love about Notley--that digging around the interred structures of the left-behind (preterite is Pynchon's word) of history and worldsystems, the lumpens and enthusiasts and ghosts come too early or too soon or both or not at all. And a willingness to keep tossing out language until something catches--the zinger somehow shifting the magnetic orientation of all of the merely ecumenical language, the cliches, the schtick. Go in fear of nothing written, they say.

Read Inger Christensen's Alphabet (recom'd/mentioned by Johannes, who has been, despite our disagreements, an excellent source of recommendations). I love the furious horizontality of it, its refusal of spurious nature/culture borderlines, and the way that the language of absolute north turns both utopian and apocalyptic. Images of natural harmony and the total absence of life whipped into a kind of emulsion. For what is more harmonious than nothing, really? The whiteness of the summer sky: a wintersummer. I remember thinking a great deal about what the particularities of summer light-- corrosive, diffuse, blindwhite--could do in Bergman's B&W films, and how far it is from any of the valences that light takes on in American films post-noir. Sort of a similar thing here.

Also another recommendation by way of Johannes:--Monica de La Torre's translation of Gerardo Deniz's poems. [It's worth mentioning that the two Lost Roads books I have--this one, and Kamau Brathwaite's Trench Town Rock--are beautifully, lusciously produced, advocates of the plain style chap be damned. And yet, still relatively cheap. How do they do it?] As for the poems--baroque, decrepit, concupiscent, one side of the mouth talking to the other side about how best to address the snorkelists in the audience. Echoes of Vallejo, too, to my ear: the latinate, scientific diction, the rhetorical podium-effects. Insistence on the body, on the base and material. Pathos of the classifier, the lepidopterist, trying to de-shambles nature in the middle of a war, Shambhala it, alakazam! When I came across this passage, with the wonderful phrase "feverish laziness," in Michel Foucault's lectures "Society Must Be Defended," I couldn't help but think of Deniz:

After all, the fact that the work I described to you looked both fragmented, repetitive, and discontinuous was quite in keeping with what might be called a "feverish laziness." It's a characteristic trait of people who love libraries, documents, references, dusty manuscripts, texts that have never been read, books which, no sooner printed, were closed and then slept on the shelves and were only taken down centuries later. All this quite suits the busy inertia of those who profes useless knowledge, a sort of sumptuary knowledge, the wealth of a parvenu--and, as you well know, its external signs are found at the foot of the page. It should appeal to all those who feel sympathetic to one of those secret societies, no doubt the oldest and the most characteristic in the West, one of those strangely indestructible secret societies that were, I think, unknown in the early Christian era, probably at the time of the first monasteries, on the fringes of invasions, fires, and forests. I am talking abou the great, tender and warm freemasonry of useless erudition. (4-5)
This is also, of course, a quote about Pynchon.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Fresh Cuts




How weirdly and unsettling quiet (gasp!) the poems in Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale are. Rather than emphasizing the fissures and seams between phrases and the various places and discourses they come from, the poems throw everything into making their material, and their speaking subjects, as coherent and as unified as possible: line breaks fall on grammatical grooves, the vocabulary-field of each poem is fairly small as compared to other Flarflist productions, punctuation is normative rather than disruptive, lines per stanza (check). I imagine her (and of course this is my made-up narrative about the writing of the book) as less attracted to the shiniest or weirdest types of vernacular that comes up in her searches than to the ways that bits of everyday or ordinary language can fit together; in this, the poems tell us a great deal about the kind of work that certain discourses, and certain syntactical and rhetorical structures, do in and of themselves, apart from content, apart from who's speaking. Of course, the poems are often hilarious, and by comparison with other books of poetry, filled with all sorts of discomfiting chance meetings of skunk cabbage and "twitch products" in a Holiday Inn. But there are fewer proper nouns and super-specific idioms here than in recent examples of the genre. And this seems important, this pursuit of an impossible coherence in a set of poems about, in my reading, the way that psychiatric questions (not to mention internet search strings) impact the kind of things we can or do say before we even begin say them. There is (as I have been thinking lately) an affective intensity that comes from speed and from noise and excess. A great deal of the poetry I most value is of this sort. But then there is also an intensity that comes from a stilling, from refusing to shout. The intensity, perhaps, of Warhol's _Screen Tests_, where a blink of an eye or a muscular twitch in the cheek can have all the impact of an alarm. Dissonance by other means.

Yesterday, while I was still squinting into the strange light of the comment that "globalization is so passé" I encountered, in the comments cave of Ron's blog, an escapee from The Valve, who thought that all poems made from cut-up bits of other language have the same meaning: ie, that we here readers are very confused and sad solipsistic citationeers and pasters. There are numerous problems with this argument, not least of which is assuming that poetry is about the construction of meaning and the transmission of authorial inten-yawn!-tions. It's also true that if the anonym (well, he practices what he preaches, huh?) whose redaction of the scholarship of Walter Benn Michaels is right there's only about five things we can say to each other (one of them clearly the following evasive action taken by students who are afraid of literature: but, then, can't you just say anything about it? What did Sophocles really mean?) The answer is no: there are an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1, but 4 isn't one of them. But, more importantly, what my remarks on Degentesh's book show is how collage is not simply, not only, a negative process: "cut-up" in this sense is misleading, for if cutting only were what a Dada poem, or a Berrigan poem, were about, it would not be a poem, but the instructions: cut up this thing (in which case there is still "meaning" in the "this thing". Even "cut up everything" has meaning, as long as everything does). Poetry of this sort is also constructive, as much a "cut-up" as a "put-together." And the forms of putting-together are nearly infinite. If the sign-o-phobic want to call this "intention," that's fine by me; if they choose to think of it as the indication of a wider field of expression and experience, even better. In any case, Degentesh says it better than I can:


As a Youngster I Was Suspended from School One or More Times for Cutting Up

Everyone knows about Dallas
and its acts of terrifying gorgeousness

a chef in a tall hat piping meringue
discussing the "brain drain"

dropped a slab of concrete on his left foot
before being lured to the guitar

doesn't recall details of cutting up friend
to create fake masterpiece

when Dorrington came home unexpectedly and found
flight atendants ready to undergo radical surgery

I've been cutting up Vipers more and longer than anyone I know
the severed sea bream head washed down the river on a chopping board

The class batted it around in a bloodless little battle of the sexes
and I just started branching out to dogs and cats.

The boar is cut up and the hounds are fleshed.
So far we've concentrated on the whole hog
a popular euphemism for saying that someone doesn't like
our size and age differences

Like cutting up and depositing the body of a camel
in the drawing of a dinosaur head
and sewing it to other stuff like duck or squab
or radioactively contaminated tools and equipment

I sat on the back of our sofa listening eagerly
constantly at my dad's side fishing
going to the local coin shop with my dad
in small-bore slow-fire events

paths only modern-day Cowboys or Indians would travel

Slice off both sides close to the seed to create two halves of
The Moon, which rises while the men are cutting up the whale carcass.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Mike Davis' Planet of Slums

Of all the many, many devastating statistics and descriptions in Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums" (the article from New Left Review, available here, not the book of the same name)--for instance, that "[t]he labour-power of a billion people has been expelled from the world system [into the informal economy]" or that [the Gini coefficient of .067] was mathematically equivalent to a situation where the poorest two-thirds of the world receive zero income; and the top third everything"--it's this one (which conveys, somehow, both the real desperation of urban poverty in Africa and the limits of empirical knowledge) that I couldn't stop thinking about today:

With even formal-sector urban wages in Africa so low that economists can't figure out how workers survive (the so-called 'wage puzzle'), the informal tertiary sector has become an arena of extreme Darwinian competition amongst the poor.


Obviously, he's excellent at showing how all of this is the result of IMF and World Bank policies in the 80s and 90s. But there's also an excellent comparison of the situation in Asia, Africa and Latin America now with urban poverty in the late 19th century, as well as a provocative account of Pentecostalism (which started in Los Angeles)in Latin America. Now I look forward to reading the book, which should be out in paperback soon, if it isn't already.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Reading Notes

Having read a great deal of less-than-thrilling criticism on O'Hara in the last month, I wanted to put a good word in for Lytle Shaw's recent monograph, FO'H: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa, 2006), not only because I think it's valuable, but also because it speaks to some recent and not-so-recent blogification about that dread term community. In all honesty, I expected to dislike this book, expected a biography with lots of extra words, if you will.

Part of the success of the book is its definition of coterie as both a concept within the poems and a milieu where the poems are written--a mosaic of proper names (and places, and vanished or vanishing particulars) as well as the friends and contempories with which these names never quite match. Shaw is particularly good on the way that O'Hara's sidelong, spatial notions of poetic influence (and his eccentric choices of predecessors) uncouples him from the family romance of "Tradition and the Individual Talent."Needless to say, it's a useful counter to the genealogical post-its over at Dad's place. Obviously, it's difficult not to read the genealogical model as hetero- and the coterie one as homo-, but Shaw doesn't overstate this point, and he's careful to show how Auden, for instance, buys into the heritage model late in life. The following citation is nicely representative:

He recodes alliances by replacing the organic and fixed social model of the
family with a contingent and shifting association of friends. He recodes
filiation not merely by refusing to produce offspring but also by refusing to be
one. O'Hara's attempt to exit the filiative model of the Great Tradition is
coincident both with his cultivation of obscure, often campy, genealogical
precedents and with his frequently heretical readings of canonical authors. (29)

Which, of course, begs the question, which Shaw doesn't really address, of why O'Hara becomes the founder, then, of a new tradition (or anti-tradition). Why, then, the New York School (if you believe this exists, as I tend to believe)? Why does this particular writerly mode have such legs? The answer, I suppose, is that in refusing to be an heir to a particular tradition, he refuses to let you be one either--no Oedipal complex because: no parents. The house is ours. Don't listen to me.

But then, of course, there's the dark side of coterie--here exemplified by Pound's circle at St. Elizabeth's. I do wonder, though, if this doesn't understate the way in which the celebrity of the outsider tends to follow these kinds of networks whether one wants it to or not.

The best chapter in the book (and strangely, the one I'm most uncomfortable with) is his reading of O'Hara's art writing alongside "Ode to Willem de Kooning." He's quite convincing in showing how O'Hara's writerly performances of active, proximate engagement and identification with painting debunks some of Greenberg's and Michael Fried's claims about the immediacy and self-enclosure of AbEx painting, as well as preparing the way for the neo-figurative paintings of his closer friends, as well as early proto- pop art like Rauschenberg's. I'd always thought that the relationship was between O'Hara and painting was sort of overstated, but Shaw convinces me here. But what doesn't work in this chapter, despite everything that does, is what doesn't work in almost every other piece of O'Hara criticism I've seen: that is, a unwillingness to be critical. In the end, almost everyone except for Roland Barthes (ventriloquized by Bob Perelman) makes Frank into a hero. So, when Shaw starts to claim O'Hara distances himself from the macho primitivism, and the search for wildness, of AbEx painting, I'm less than fully convinced. Thank god O'Hara could read those French poets, I say. Somebody needed to. But all of that exoticizing of blackness, the valences of "Africa" in his poems? I think it's important to call that out--ambiguous and perhaps well-intentioned as it often is-- especially seeing that so many of today's poets (in the search for some kind of functional negativity) are looking to reinhabit (recolonize/decolonize?) "the wilds" with a bit more political consciousness. There are great examples of this and, well, some not so great ones. And no doubt, some regrettable but unavoidable part of modernism starts with a encounter with the racial other. All I'm saying: I never fail to cringe when I read the lines "There are several Puerto Ricans on the Avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm." And so it is with a certain amount of satisfaction that I read Barthes (a.k.a. Perelman) responding to this particular moment: "Ah, Mr. American Imperial Artist, you were so happy, in your walks, in your world." It is a poetry that admits its own fallibility, no? We could give it that.

Monday, December 11, 2006

I hope to be posting here a bit more in the next month or so now that I've finished my two-years of French in six months gauntlet. Write to me in French! I need the practice.

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As for the incredible volume of spam that manages to get through UC Berkeley's e-mail filters, while at the same time mining my subconscious/clickstream for consumption patterns (Viagra, Xanax, Poker, Software, Guns, etc.), it now seems likely that a disgruntled member of the Societé des Flarfeurs, banned during the first round of purges in the early months of our new dispensation, is now living in Dubai in a floating, 1:10,000 scale model of 1960s San Francisco where she is feeding the entire Sun & Moon backlist to a network of 75,000 Commodore 64s named either Paris, Texas or Parataxis. Or Bill Luoma. She estimates we'll meet maximum bandwith in five to seven days.


Fair subspecializes homely cashbook / Daisi cares happy plagiarism
Staley dictates sore grant / Davina demises moaning lamb
Katee plasters young experimenter / Fair strives stormy promptness
Gutenberg chains grotesque garrote /Walden morsels thoughtless opus

She's working on early Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. The Faerie Queen is next.


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Graffiti of the Month: U.S. Out of Elevator

Last month: what you be is what you are [Wittgenstein: What makes my image of him into an image of him? Not its looking like him!]

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Some of my poems are here, thanks to Danielle DeProfundis and her co-editor Jeff. Mostly strict radio silence here, as I stage a Frank O’Hara T. Kant W. Hegel Adorno deathmatch in the contested borderlands between my French dictionary and Troilus and Cressida.

Noah says: “But I don’t have enough energy to go to sleep.”

It’s really hard to find even five minutes for a thing like a blog, and I never said how much fun I had reading for Jordan’s Million Poems Show, and how grateful I am to the magnanimous and always underslept Gina for keeping it real and bringing me to read with the sly, riddling Karen Anderson and the anti-aphorisms of my best friend ever Karl Parker (whose chapbook, Harmstorm, you must buy over at Gina Myer’s Lame House Press) and the exultant scatologies of Gabe Gudding and the archaelogical excavations of Franklin Bruno (whose feverbird songwriting also never ceases to amaze, and who’s touring, I think, right now with The Mountain Goats, yes right now!, in the Southeast, you should see him).

Also amazing is the nomination for a National Book Award of the boomingly deserving book Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner, who has become a friend and co-conspirator since I moved here to the Bay Area. There is a kind of shivering, darkly luminous clarity to the poems in Ben’s book, so unlike the resistant, densely textured surfaces where I am often happily reading. Because clear, because unafraid of the old-fashioned kind of denotative meaning, and because preferring the subtlest, usually syntactical or contiguity-based devices, the poems can work and unwork themselves at the level of the paragraph or stanza, in the interstices between lines and phrases and sentences, in ways that other poems can’t or don't or won't That is, the trouble in/with language is all the more troubling when it finally comes on stage, because are you still here? The form of a horror movie perhaps? And Ben, too, is oh so gloriously unafraid of the public voice, able to stand at the rhetorical podium without becoming homilizing, didactic or showy. He knows about fools, about what they get to say to the congregation. Bob Perelman might be closest to what he’s doing—outside of the obvious influences of The Arcades Project and Minima Moralia. W.H. Auden, too, surprisingly, but thankfully all of your kind work, dear boys and girls, to disabuse the poet of self-seriousness keeps Ben from becoming that statue of regret and stiff-lipped abysmal inwardness into which Auden sometimes ossifies. Phew!

A very remote correspondent sends me this message:

So, you’ve heard about the Poetry Bus, right? Well, now there is the Poetry Sub! Are you tired of all this talk about poetic community and the embarrassing hagiographic or I’m-a-little-commodity love-me-now endgame chatter of the comments box? Are you feeling nostalgiac for the good old days of anomie and alcoholism in crumbling apartments, marginalization and coterie infighting? Then the Poetry Sub is for you! We’ll cruise the international waters of the poetic hors-d’oeuvre, living on spirulina and protein bars and sleeping three-to-a-bunk. All you have to do is promise to not write for one year. Just one year of non-duty: No books, no chapbooks, no poems, no sticky notes on the refrigerator, no marginalia. No mouth, no ears. Everything is true.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Your guillotine, entre guillemets

Overheard at Caffe Strada

"Oh, I just loved it. You have to see it! I mean, Marie Antoinette, she was a really COMPLICATED person. People can be so BLACK and WHITE, y'know! They don't really stop to imagine what it's like from the other side. She was so young! And so beautiful. You have to see it. The costumes are amazing. And the OPULENCE. And she has the most beautiful children. These BLONDE, BLUE-EYED children."

Saturday, October 21, 2006

My friend and mentor Deborah Tall passed away Thursday night. She was far too young. I hope to write something about her writing and her life here at a later date, but I have mostly silence to say right now.

This is from her memoir/lyric essay _A Family of Strangers_, just out from Graywolf:

We race after spray trucks during mosquito season, see who can be ghosted in the white mist of DDT.

We follow around my father as he spritzes the scrawny rose bushes to protect them from the beautifully iridescent Japanese beetles.

A nearby chemical plant makes us gag when the wind blows our direction.

From every angle, we are hemmed in by identical pale gray rooftops.

Walt Whitman is the name of a seven-lane bridge across the Delaware.