Don't Explain

Poets, don't explain your poetry in your poetry reading. Just read the damn poems. Nobody cares how or why you wrote them, or when or where. If the poem needs an explanation, you haven't written it well enough. If it needs an anecdote, then put the anecdote in the poem itself. If your explanation is better, more engaging, more interesting, than the poem, then your poem is no good anyway. Toss it.

Today in my reading my plan is to read some translations of Juan Gelman, selections from "The Beaches of Northern California" and "The Thelonious Monk Fake Book," and "After Michael Palmer." I might do "The Complete Sentence Game" too, which is a poem that is improvised and takes a different shape every time.

Gypsy Cante: Deep Song of the Caves

I am a little disappointed by Will Kirkland's collection of Cante Jondo, published by New Directions in 1999. It is a sincere effort and collects some relevant lyrics for a reader with no Spanish. Aside from the limited selection, centered on earlier texts from the 19th century and the "Golden Age" of the 1920s, the translations themselves are not particularly distinguished. If you had to tranlate "porque mis penas nunca van a menos / siempre van a más," would you think the poetic device of parallelism is significant? Look at the stark simplicity of those lines. WK writes: "because these griefs will never get smaller, / will grow with the years." In the same poem he mistranslates the word "hasta." "Hasta l'alma me duele / de tanto llorar." He says "Even my soul feel the pain / of so many tears." What this really means, though, is "I have been crying so hard that hurts all the down to my soul." Converting llorar, a verb, into a noun, "tears," robs the line of its dynamism.

The words "tears" and "years" are obviously there just for the rhyme. This is the opposite of how rhyme works in the original. In other words, the rhyme never weakens the poem or distracts the reader, it is never forced. Machado y Álvarez says the flamenco cante never contains ripio or padding. Also, there is no excuse to not use colloquial English in the translation of these texts. Nobody talks like this: 'How is that for some crazy words /such love is gone."

I'm not even going to start on the introduction and critical apparatus. There is probably no way to present this poetry without the predictable appeal to Romantic Spain.

Snakes Are Not Evil

Surely snakes are evil; in fact, they are the very symbol of evil. Yet when you think about it a moment, it is obvious that snakes or spiders are not ethical agents at all. They are not even evil, in the sense that you can be not even wrong about something. I do not believe that squirrels make ethical judgments about right or wrong, that there are some squirrels that are "better squirrels" than others. Of course, some might have nastier or more gentle temperaments, but they don't form ethical judgments. An ant is not "unselfish" or altruistic just because it works on behalf of the group. A grasshopper is not lazy because it isn't an ant. Nor are cows to be praised because they don't wage war on other herds of cows. Those are just misapplications of categories. I don't even think a leopard is less ethical than the gazelle that it hunts, kills, and eats.

Now with certain animals domesticated during ten thousand years to be companions to humans, it is hard not to think in anthropomorphic terms. Or with close genetic relatives of humans, like the great apes. But these are, in the end, anthropomorphic terms. In other words, we attribute ethics to animals to the extent to which they resemble humans. We also value animals aesthetically to the extent that they appeal to the human eye. Nothing wrong with that, a hippo is not as cute as a koala, as long as we know exactly what we are doing.

What provoked this little rant was this paragraph by Marianne DeKoven, quoted by Perloff in an article I linked to a few days ago::

I think that many have turned away from our own species in dismay at what it has wrought and turned toward other animals as a locus both of the other who calls us to ethics and of many of the things that, in our various modes of ethics, we value: purity of affect, unselfish altruism, absence of genocide and infrequency of random, unmotivated violence, and connection to what is for us a source of powerful spiritual experience.

What is striking about this is how anthropomorphic it is, and how unconscious it is of this quality. A chipmunk never read Levinas, The pretentiousness of the language is also unbearable. A person who writes a phrase like "a locus both of the other who calls us to ethics..." should be reincarnated as a chipmunk 10,000 times, or at least sent back to remedial freshman composition. I can assure you. It is no comfort to me that other animals do not mimic the depredations of humans, the unspeakable horrors of history, because there is no particular merit in this. I won't even say that the animal kingdom is ruthless and cruel, that one fish eats a smaller fish in a brutal competition for survival, because that is just a human projection. Animals are not ethically superior or inferior to humans, because they just aren't ethical in the first place, in any meaningful sense. Negative perceptions about their evil, or positive judgments about their moral purity, have no toe-hold.

(In no way would I approve of cruelty to cats or puppies, or excuse and human failings, whether collective or individual. I am in awe of the biodiversity of the planet, etc... I respect your love for your dogs... That is not what this post is about.)

Ethics and Aesthetics, or, Why Do Good People Like Bad Poetry?

People who like Mary Oliver poems have two problems, one ethical and the other aesthetic. On the ethical front, the problem is that her poems invite the liberal subject to take self-congratulatory positions. The poem in which she buries the one-eyed stillborn kitten, or the one in which she congratulates herself for recognizing the humanity of a janitor in Singapore, are both ethically vile. They theatricalize acts in which the speaker is allowed to demonstrate her "sensitivity." Someone who recognizes that Baudelaire's "Let's Beat Up the Poor" raises ethical issues often has no problem with poems that seem to dramatize the supposedly correct ethical posture, but in a nauseatingly self-serving way.

Aesthetically, the problem is that the poems are poorly written and over-explicit in the attitudes they propose. They have nothing going on aesthetically at all, since the main point is always the superior moral attitude of the speaker.

Mary Oliver is one of the most celebrated and beloved poets in America. She has won prizes galore and has many devoted readers. I don't know how this is even possible.

Bullshit Fields (2)

The second bullshit field I'd like to examine is theology, a field whose main aim is to define the object of its study and sometimes even to prove its very existence. The fact that a whole branch of theology deals with the question of whether God actually exists should give you pause. Theology as a field of study is sheer confirmation bias, inventing its object of study according to an agenda. Of course you can read and explicate texts of other theologians without necessarily making it all up, but any attempt to be an actual theologian is absurd. The object of study is one about which there is no actual knowledge, so it is a little like doing literary criticism without a text, as I've argued before, or judging a figure-skating contest in which there are no actual skaters. I know as much about the object of study as the most accomplished theologian, which is to say, absolutely nothing. Nobody knows a thing. If I am having a theological argument with you, there is no basis on which any claim can be sustained, except what some other text, written by someone who also knew nothing, happened to write.

Nobody Likes an Atheist

The religious ideology in the US is Christian. They call it Judeochristian, but that is just so they can conveniently include the Jews without really doing so. Or include them when it's convenient, and not when it's not. The official line is that everyone should have a religion, but that it doesn't matter which one, as long as you have one (and as long as it's not Islam). If you are not Christian, your religion should resemble Christianity, or be a kind of analogy to it that is readily understood as a "faith." It is curious that "faith" should be a synonym for a religion, because it is, itself, a concept derived from Christianity. It is actually a term of art in theology.

The atheist is hated because he doesn't bet on any horse in the race. The pseudo-relativism that justifies a false religious tolerance sees religious "faiths" as analogous to one another, but the atheists sees that this tolerance does not extend to her refusal to put down a bet. Believers suspect that he doesn't really respect their beliefs, and they may even be right. Logically, they cannot respect the atheist either. "Not betting on any horse is the same as betting on a horse," they tell her. "You have a secret bet that the race itself is not worth running." The atheist sees that the fact that there is not one horse in the race makes the whole race pointless: every bettor is in fact betting against all the horses but one, for completely arbitrary and contingent reasons.

Even atheists hate other atheists, because going too far in opposing the official line seems obnoxious to some, while being too appeasing and respectful is obnoxious to the others. Anyone who tolerates religion a little more or less than I do can become the object of scorn. It's tiresome to have to pay respect to something you just cannot really respect with any sincerity, but it's also tiresome to argue against religion. Very few people want to look like assholes all the time.

Nobody really likes a religious asshole either, but their is a taboo against criticism. Surely the Pope is 10 times the asshole that Richard Dawkins is, but he is the spiritual leader to billions. You wouldn't want to offend them!

Linguistics

I had a graduate student once, in a course on literary theory. In the course I had been explaining some basic background relating to Saussure and structuralism. We covered some Chomsky in this course: his idea of universal grammar. I am not a linguist, but I thought it would be useful to explore some of this background to see where some key concepts of modern literary theory came from. We explored the idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which most people are interested in debating. Almost everyone has an opinion about whether language influences the thoughts we have, or not. This was just basic material I thought every educated literary critic ought to know about. So this student in my office one day says "i hate linguistics." Nothing in the course had been of interest to him so far.

Thanks a lot. It really helped me to know that you were an idiot right from the beginning. Why would you think your emotions about linguistics were interesting to me? Your dislike for the discipline is a fact about you, not a fact about linguistics. It shows you are lacking in intellectual curiosity, for one thing. Some things are going to be more interesting to you than others, but I don't really care. Please keep it to yourself because nobody else is going to really going to take your opinion seriously.

You complained that nobody else cared about the one issue of importance to you. But when you wrote about this issue, you turned in a piece of crap to me. So I guess you didn't care either.

The New Critics developed theories sympathetic to some aspects of literary modernism, but they condescended to Pound, Williams, and Cummings, tolerated Moore, ignored H.D., did a poor job with Stevens, failed to welcome O'Hara and Creeley, Duncan and Ginsberg--the poets who learned from modernism. Modernism, for the New Critics, didn't include European surrealism or the Latin American offspring of the avant-garde.

So modernism turned out to be Yeats, Eliot, and the poetry of the New Critics themselves (Ransom, Tate), along with the academic school branching out from Auden. The anti-modernist turn within modernism.

Tips for a great keynote lecture:

(1) Use powerpoint only for text that you are going to read aloud. Make sure there are no images.

(2) Make sure the quotes you put on powerpoint slides are lengthy. If the quotes are awkward translations that you did yourself, and you have them on the screen for a long time, you will earn bonus points as the audience follows along your monotone reading of those slides and second guesses your translations.

(3) Announce you are going to "summarize" a chapter of a book you are now writing. Nothing is as scintillating as a summary.

(4) Summarize the plots of several novels in a monotone. We all love plot summaries.

(5) Make reference to super-familiar ideas: Benedict Anderson's idea of nations as "imagined communities" or Foucault's notion of power as "capillary." You wouldn't want to excite your audience with an idea they aren't familiar with already.

(6) Don't project any emotion to the audience; never interrupt yourself with off-the-cuff remarks. Don't act too excited. No eye contact with any member of the audience.

(7) Just read the text that you have written. Just read it out loud. Nothing more. That is your job: to read the text that you have brought to read to us and show us fucking power point slides with your bad translations.

THIS EXAMPLE IS PURELY FICTIONAL. ALL RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL KEYNOTE SPEAKERS, LIVING OR DEAD, IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL. FORTUNATELY NOBODY ACTUALLY DOES THIS.

The path to originality is to forget about originality, like Pierre Menard. Originality is tiresome if it is sought after, courted, forced.

Be derivative, like Robert Duncan. Your works should derive from other sources, enrich an ongoing tradition. Would you be disappointed that your favorite writer also had favorite writers?

My own termination policy would be for translators who claim to be using "loose" blank verse when they are really not using any meter at all.

What Context Ain't

The guy you writes the program notes for the St Louis Symphony always has an italicized part where he talks about context, by merely listing historical events that occurred contemporaneously with the composing of the music. Edison recorded sound or Berlin Wall Fell. I'm sorry, but this is not context. Context is not mere historical simultaneity. Contextualizing is not laying down an irrelevant backdrop of historical event, but relating the text to something else relevant to it, and in a meaningful way to boot.

There are always many contexts to choose from. What is the context of Lorca's poetry? European modernism? Spanish poetry? Poetry written in the Spanish language? Spanish modernism. Lorca's own life? Andalusia? All of the above, yes, but in what proportion? Finding and defining the proper contextual frame can be a thing of genius, because we always read in within some frame. Even a formalist criticism defines a context: in this case, the history of genres and their structural development.

I hate biographical criticism more than the next guy, but when my graduate students say that the proper context is everything historical except for the author's life, that seems rather bizarre. It's like they are New Critics only in that small respect (leaving biography to the side), but otherwise, historicize away!

I've never liked that bumper-sticker "If you want peace, work for justice." I'm all for peace and justice, but the idea that you have to eliminate all injustice from the world first, before you can work directly for peace, means, in practice, that you will always have war, just or otherwise. Does this bumper sticker mean that injustice is the root cause of war? Then war seem can very "just," because it is designed to right injustices, right?

An injustice is a lack of balance. Something is out of whack, something is wrong that needs correcting. This attempt at correction can be irenic or bellicose; it can succeed or fail. There is nothing in the idea of justice itself that is pacifist.

If you want justice, work for justice.

If you want peace, work for peace.

Not very catchy slogans. "If you want justice and peace, look for peaceful means to remedy injustice" won't fit on the bumper.

Maybe someone can tell me what this bumper sticker is meant to convey.

"Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough."

--Terry Eagleton

That's a startlingly stupid non-sequitur. It's hard to believe that Eagleton is a respected person in my own discipline. His attempt to demolish Dawkins is full of those false dichotomies, like the inquisition vs. chemical warfare (as though chemical warfare were not a product of the Christian West). If you aren't Christian, you must be some caricature of a 19th century believer in progress. Or you may be a social democrat!

But what interests me here is that Eagleton, like Girard in Violence and the Sacred, sees the way out of violence as receiving violence passively or sublimating it in religious ritual sacrifice. (I remember the Catholic Girard, when I was at Stanford, justifying nuclear war against the communists, by the way, arguing that the Christian West had to be protected.) I'm kind of interested in how Christianity inverts violence, proposing the nobility of receiving it, but then immediately turns around and perpetuates violence once again. So the exaltation of not fighting back, of receiving violence ("turning the other cheek"), and even reveling in martyrdom, doesn't have the practical effect of reducing violence in the real world. In fact, it is just a back-handed way of encouraging violence while seeming to take the high moral ground. By Girard's logic, the sacrificial solution provided by the passion of Christ should have put an end to the scape-goat mechanism, but this didn't actually happen.

When I am feeling extraordinarily receptive, almost everything I turn to ends up saying what is on my own mind. For example, yesterday I wrote a blog entry for Arcade and later turned at random to Ray Davis's blog, where I found the statement that "art-making is certainly more universal than the justifications offered for art-making". This is what I had been trying to say in a more roundabout way in an article I was trying to write. Putting the justification ahead of the thing itself is the wrong end of the object to grab hold of.

We try to justify paying attention to the greatest and most awe-inspiring products of the human intelligence. How can the humanities be justified, gee, I wonder how we can justify something like the study of great art, music, literature, and philosophy? Endless effort to justify something that is simply wonderful on its face. What good are the arts, what good are the humanities?

Sports never have to justify themselves. The appeasement of various deities never has to justify itself. War has to justify itself, but never has much trouble with that. (Even if it can't be justified, it goes on just the same.) But the humanities, what good is all that? Humanists are the worst offenders, of course, because we will worry anything to death, look for its other side.

I made the mistake of reading something by Ortega y Gasset yesterday. I wanted to look again at the essay on Andalusia. The idea about the essential laziness of the Andalusian culture is pretty damn intolerable. Ortega is no hero of mine, and neither is Gasset. (That's a joke.) I'm thinking this whole tradition of Spanish philosophy is pretty hard to take, from Unamuno to Zambrano. I know I should like Zambrano, because she is important to a lot of people in the general vicinity of things that I otherwise admire, but I cannot take her either. Her writing, her ideas.

It's interesting (to me at least) how a lot of things I write about, I'm approaching from the posture of irritation and resistance. I actually don't think good criticism can be entirely appreciative. You've got to hate something about the writer you're dealing with, or something in the existing criticism. Take Valente, about whom I've written practically a whole book, if you add up all my chapters and articles. I think he's very important, and I admire a great part of his work and what he stands for; yet I also find him profoundly irritating.

On the other hand, I couldn't spend my life studying Ortega (or Gasset). You have to have a core respect for the object of study.

This goes beyond teh stupid. Lets look at these criteria for a moment.
To count as Art Music, a work must meet ALL* the following criteria:

It must be written for acoustic instruments and/or unamplified voices (Mechanical and electr(on)ic devices may be employed for textural effect, but not as the main 'instrument'. Technical amplification, for recording purposes or to enhance performances in arenas of poor acoustics, are not part of the composer's effects or intention, and are not counted.)

It must be the original work of a single author (Texts notwithstanding. If a composer dies before finishing a work, its completion by another composer, if based on detailed notes left by the dead composer, may be considered a kind of 'amalgam' art work.)

It must be preserved and transmitted as a score, written in orthodox musical notation, alterable only by the composer (If the composer dies before completion, elaboration of the score may be made by another composer, though only of the dead composer's notes. 'Orthodox' means readily intelligible to professional and proficient amateur musicians.)

It must acknowledge, build on or work from a musical heritage based on structure and tonality and its precursors

It must be conceived for performance according to the instructions and faithful to the intent of the composer (Performers should follow the score precisely, in as much detail as the composer provides; improvisations and ornamentations are permitted where the composer allows or expects, according to practice or tradition.)

It must be musically and intellectually complex, coherent and sophisticated (i.e. display and encode, in various permutations, articulation, originality, discursiveness, subtlety, intricacy, novelty, contrast, suspense, symbolism, logic, humour, passion etc through the use, in various combinations, of advanced harmony, modulation, variation, variance of musical phrase length and metre, periodicity, through-composition, counterpoint, polyphony etc.)

It will therefore:

Require a high level of musicianship (concentration, insight, accomplishment) on the part of performers, who must draw on musical education, personal experience and imagination, knowledge of a work's idiom, and the accumulated body of historical performance practices (even for a merely competent performance)

Require relatively high levels of concentration, understanding and competence from listeners for non-superficial appreciation and comprehension

Be susceptible to detailed musicological (formal) analysis

It must aspire (i.e. be the composer's intention) to provide the listener with emotional and intellectual enjoyment and satisfaction through musical complexity, sophistication and coherence (as above), and thereby communicate exceptional and/or transcendent reflections on the human condition

* For argument's sake, a work not satisfying one of these conditions may also be considered Art Music, especially if a majority of other works by the same composer do. This exception allows the inclusion particularly of pieces of music that would otherwise be excluded primarily on the basis of their shortness.


Let us utterly dismantle the reasoning here:


(1) What is there inherent to acoustic instruments that makes them more artistic? I might prefer that Bob Crenshaw play the acoustic bass when accompanying Sonny Rollins, but he plays an electric one. So what?

(2) Do the notes care how many people wrote them? In other words, what is there about the absence of collaboration that makes music more artistic? What if Mozart and Haydn had collaborated on a piece? Wouldn't you just have to judge the piece on its own merits?

(3) The third criterion has to do with notation. Suppose I go to a concert and enjoy the music. Later, I find out that the scores were not "orthodox." So I ought to revoke my view of the music as artistic? In principle, I can notate music after the fact, such as in a transcription of music not originally written out. The notational status of the music has no necessary bearing on how "artistic" it is.

(4) Most music has some "tonality" and "structure" and "precursors." This criterion is hopeslessly vague. I suppose it is designed to exclude certain kinds of atonality or music based on ambient soundscapes.

(5) Hopelessly vague again. Most music is "conceived for performance" according to certain "instructions" or at least expectations. If the performers don't carry out the intentions of the composer, it might be judged an inadequate performance.

(6) This criterion is a laundry list of things that artistic music might contain to make it complex, ambitious enough, etc... The list seems at once too narrow and too broad, since it is unclear whether these are just examples of things that make a piece of music "artistic" or requisite elements. The footnote basically destroys this criterion anyway, because a classical composer who writes a simpler piece still gets credit for it.

(7) Artistic music will be hard to play. This seems to confuse the intrinsic artistic quality of the music with issues of performance. It's hard to play guitar like Eric Clapton too, so any kind of music involving performance at all will satisfy this criterion, I think.

(8) Hard to listen to? Of course, my appreciation of Clapton's guitar might be every bit as superficial as my appreciation of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach. In either case, I could be a more competent listener and hence achieve a less superficial appreciation. I could have Stan Getz or Mozart on as background music, because either one sounds pleasant, or else devote my full attention to either one.

(9) Ready for the musicologist's scalpel? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? If the musicologist doesn't have the tools to analyze it s/he should acquire them.

(10) I suppose the final question-begging escape clause in the footnote is designed to let in a shorter Schubert song, for example, with the excuse that Schubert wrote other, more complex and longer works with more modulations, more complex structures, etc... So the artistic value of that song would depend on the existence of other works outside of itself? These people don't know how to think.

The purpose of this list presumably is to separate traditional "classical" music in the European tradition from various kinds of pop, jazz, "postclassical" forms of minimalism and chance, electronic music, etc... not to mention entire traditions of music outside the Western world. The mixture of overly broad and overly specific criteria make such a list entirely incoherent. It is clear that it is not based on any underlying idea of "ART" at all, but on a series of characteristics and conventions that this particular variety of Western Art music already possesses. The reasoning is entirely circular, in other words.

Fuck NPR. This is their ombusman's view:

But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security.

One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views... .

No, sorry, they are not due any respect for their despicable views. Since when does the fact that Dick Cheney hold a view make it automatically respectable? Once the debate is framed as a debate between two positions that reasonable people can disagree about, then the Dick Cheney side automatically wins. You can just "teach the controversy." It's the lazy journalistic thinking that there are two sides to every story that must be given equal weight. I'm sure the creationists and holocaust deniers are taking notes. Once a position gets a toehold of respectability then it's basically won.

This is why the Steve Fullers and Alicia Shepards of the world are worse than the Demskis. People who legitimize the illegitimate under the cover of spurious objectivity.

One persistent critique of avant-garde movements is that they are merely repetitions of previous avant-garde movements. It's the question of "didn't Gertrude Stein already do that?" To call a new movement "old hat" in this way is to deny it its vitality.

Yet this critique tends to be profoundly disingenuous, since it seems to imply that there is something better to do than repeat the avant-garde gesture. What would that be, exactly? Usually, it means falling back on some previous institutionalization of another historical avant-garde. For example, when Stanford's English department wanted to hire Marjorie Perloff, Denise Levertov had a cow, leaving a letter in all the mailboxes of the department denouncing Perloff (she had read the paper on postmodern poetry and the return of story, from The Dance of the Intellect, I believe) because Perloff had taken the language poets seriously, I think. I remember it well because I was at Stanford at the time. So for DL, the WCW-derived avant-garde was legitimate, but not the "Gertrude Steinlets" of LP. Another example is the conflict between Octavio Paz and the poets of the Belaño group of infrarrealismo, dramatized in The Savage Detectives. Paz had been a surrealist but basically fell back onto an institutionalized high modernism, with himself as high priest and gate keeper. How dare these young poets emulate the American beat generation! After all, Ginsberg and Kerouac had already done that. (I'm relying here a bit on some papers by Heriberto which he has shared with me, and which I am reading as I read Belaño's novel.) Belaño also makes the connection between the "realismo visceral" of his own group and an earlier Mexican avant-garde movement, estridentismo. It's not like he wasn't aware that there had already been an avant-garde. The problem is that there is not position outside the avant-garde. Il n'y a pas de hors avant-garde. Well, there is, but it tends to be the attitude that we can pretend it never happened and get back to what poetry was supposed to be like before.

I've never liked poets who are valued for their so-called 'humanity." In fact, insofar as I recognize that as a valid category at all, I take it to be more of a negative. When I don't understand why a particular poet is a poet at all, that is, when I don't understand why a poet who for me does not exist poetically is admired by anyone at all, I usually find that it is a case of a poet mostly valued, by others, for "humanity." Often the people reading the poet cannot even read the poet in the language in which he or she wrote. Certain Eastern European poets are big on so-called "humanity."

This might me a failing of mine. Maybe I am not "human" enough?