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Hey friends, it's my birthday today, I'm having a party. E-mail me if you're in the New York area and didn't get an invite, I'll invite ya (if I know ya!).
[Kasey Mohammad recently wrote a longish essay in response to my essay called "When Lilacs Last in the Door," which appears on Steve Evan's Third Factory website. Ron Silliman has posted a response to Kasey's essay on his blog (David Hess did also, though I haven't read it), and in turn, because I have this bad habit of responding to "assignments," I have constructed a few hastily written thoughts which I am sending off to Kasey and Ron in an email, I guess with the hope that it will be posted on their blogs.]
Hi Ron and Kasey,
I try not to respond to writing about my writing to avoid the “echo chamber” effect and also to curtail any elevated sense of self-consideration about what I am doing, since, after all, like everyone else I probably think a bit too much about what I am doing, what people think I am doing, etc. Better to pretend it's not happening, like in that Roy Lichtenstein painting of that woman drowning, and the thought bubble saying “This is not happening.”
But nonetheless, here are a few quick notes to clarify and hopefully further confuse the situation.
I should mention, first, that I have translated the essay into synthetic Scots and that it appears in Fashionable Noise: on digital poetics, forthcoming from Atelos. The poems are also translated into Scots, though in what I hope is an absurdly literal fashion, illustrating what I elsewhere describe in the book as the vulnerability of digitized text to algorithmic processes, but also the possibility of “teleactive” literary activity in web culture -- the ability to participate and influence the distribution of ideas and even the management of “cultural capital” in real-time from great distances (it seems Silliman's Blog confirms the efficacy of this formulation). So, I am trying to make Kevin Davies known as the great Scottish poet, as he damn well should be.
Also, the essay was a direct response not only to the substance of Steven Burt's “Ellipticist” essay but to the style. I wanted to explore a rhetoric that I hadn't previously used, or at least signed my name to, and also to test whether such an absurd term as the “Creeps” would ever actually be adopted in the critical world -- all of this is stated in the essay.
On lists: I am generally against lists as a critical strategy, whether they be the lists at the end of Harold Bloom's books (The Western Canon, most obviously) or, yes, the ones prefacing In The American Tree and The Art of Practice. The reason for this is that it is much more easy to include a writer whose work one has not read or even ever enjoyed on a list than it is to write insightful comments about this writer's work -- a list takes easy advantage of the Adamic power of “naming” without doing the heavier, more threatening work of going out on a limb in support of the project of another writer. It puts one who has not been named in the position of waiting to be “named,” whereas many of us choose -- by instinct -- to avoid responding to such scholastic perspectives.
But also, the kind of writing such a list engenders in response is almost always of the “why is so and so in, why another out” variety, which I find not productive (this goes as well for anthologies). Ezra Pound's list of Imagists was in fact quite short, and very imperfect, but his dogma -- I like dogma better, believe it or not, though lie as often in my dogmatic statements as I do in my lists -- seems to me to have had a more lasting, usefully provocative effect. There is a mistaken assumption that the list of names is more democratic -- has closer ties to some concept of "freedom" -- than a more didactic, overdetermined prose, but I feel that the latter method, when used well, creates more opportunities for useful proliferation of ideas -- it is engendering.
That said, lists are fun, and I do believe all of the poets (or rather, the books) belong on that list. I think of the list as a rebus, and leave it up to the reader to figure exactly how the individual element belongs within the parameters being described in the body of the essay. And all of the books were published since 1996 or so (I don’t remember what I wrote), and I’ve enjoyed reading them much more than I enjoy a similar list of books published around, say, 1991 -- the “New Coast” time, which, for me, was a rather diffuse time for poetry in the United States. I'd rather hear useful, engaging rhetoric that is nonetheless incorrect (think of Rimbaud's Lettre du Voyant) than anything that could be mistaken for indifferent, even "even-handed," prose. (That said, I'm actually quite a nice guy in person.)
This is going on too long... I'll just hit some points, in defense I suppose.
I'm always amused by people who tend to see Jennifer Moxley's work as some sort of “return” to emotion, affect, sentiment, and how few people really think that there is an underlying humor, even irony, to her use of archaic tropes, etc. One can look at the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads to see that the motion of JM's writing is neither backward nor forward but both: maybe a "smart" (as in "smart bomb") pinpointing of that one cataclysmic moment when the Enlightenment and the "cult of reason" turned into Romanticism (and its attendant cults).
People seem to think that Jennifer’s work singled that it was ok to be “honest” and “candid” again, when it strikes me that -- compared to, say, the later poems of Williams, like “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” which I feel much of The Sense Record responds to -- the apparent emotional complexity of her work is actually more attributable to the drama, in the reader’s mind, of trying to determine how exactly she feels toward the language she is using. Most of the salient features of her poems can be attributed to her reading of books, even dictionaries (like Mullen’s Muse & Drudge language coming from Clarence Major’s Dictionary) and how she feels, as a woman who identifies with the working class, utilizing these words. (A similar drama is at play in Pamela Lu's novel, I think.)
If that's what you mean by epistemological issues, then I guess you have a point, but I guess my point is that the flavor of Moxley's writing is a far cry from that of Burt's essay -- which, again, is partly what this is a response to -- in that her project is conceptually cleaner (she is not knocked off her pedestal with every opportunity for a pregnant white space or a curious paradox) and she follows through with the premises of her poems (the Apollinaire riff, for example, or any metrical base note that she decides to declare in the first ten or so lines) that is absent from the more free-wheeling style of the "elliptical writers." There isn't any "magical realism" in Moxley's work much as there might be in, say, Michael Palmer's, and there is always a sense of pushing toward something "candid" in JM that attempts to critique the very artifice being employed while -- in the fashion of "emotional exhibitionism" as I write elsewhere of JM -- giving herself very much over to it.
It's also a form of "camp" -- John Wilkinson links her writing to John Wieners in this fashion -- that, were I to have thought of it, might have been a useful term to employ in the essay (though I don't think Darren Wershler-Henry, for instance, is writing in any sort of drag).
Ok, I'm getting tired... I wish Kasey would post his essay online somewhere so I can cut and paste a few things from it. The phrase "spectacularly unusable" seems a useful one, for example, and the "trope of getting it wrong" is also provocative -- he (you, Kasey) accurately, for me, described how the essay was both bosh at heart but useful to describe, which is I suppose something I try to achieve in my "writings on poetics".
As for community: my sense is that I am involved in an international community of writers and artists, and that, in fact, I am much closer in spirit, and even friendship, to some writers in Toronto (in terms of the digital stuff) and the U.K. (at least when Miles Champion was there) than I am to many of the writers here in New York (but, of course, there are hundreds of those, many of them close friends). Nonetheless -- and the project of Circulars has brought this to the fore, to me -- we've all been "in touch" with each other, even if talking past each other, since the internet took off, and that, in "moments of scandal" (as I write in the essay), there is a sort of contraction that occurs among these poets no matter how geographically and even aesthetically diverse they are.
I am on the verge of believing that, in politics, one can point to the presence of virtual countries -- not just communities -- that are already operating in a fashion directly contradicting the legal fashions as laid out by the government-entertainment complex (file swapping being the most salient feature, but also indy media sites that are more read than, say, the NYTimes site), and that these people will be able to behave in unison, in a coordinated fashion, regardless of how the governments of the members of these virtual "countries" are constructed. This may seem like science fiction for now, but my sense is that there is a hot lava working under the hardened bedrock of governments and any sort of institutional structure that accepted as legal, productive, useful, etc. and that it can behave as an organism in times of crisis to terrible effect. (Pardon the awkward metaphors.)
What this has to do with the "Creeps"? I guess I'm just pointing to how one can be "invisible" and "flea-like" and yet not feel so terribly small, since after all our lateral acknowledgement of each other across the horizon of today is far vaster than can be understood within the paradigm of looking for the "break with the past", pointing to singular phenomenon like "New American Poetry." I'm more interested in Caroline Bergvall, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard right now than I am in New Americans, but also in Dagmar's Chili Pitas, Aurelia Harvey and Ivan Brunetti, silly as that sounds. (This weekend, I am being interviewed by Giselle Bieugleman, a Brazilian digital artist, about my "hacktivism," as another example.) To break out of one's community has nothing to do with becoming part of a "mainstream" so much as becoming a node in larger cultural structures that are not given air-time in anything that could be considered a reputable media venue.
I don't think this is so pathetic as you make it sound, nor do I think that there is any sense among my peers that we don't know what we're doing here (but I love the fact that you know the song, which isn't in fact very good). My sense is that, were one to collect all of the various statements about what Language poetry was supposed to be "about," as a gesture, a coherent aesthetic moment, one would see more holes -- more porousness -- than unity, making one wonder whether the dictatorship of a Breton (which, after all, spawned Guy Debord, another useful aesthetic dictator), was more seminal in the long run than the all-inclusive good vibrations, but ultimately contradictory and even, to some, substanceless, project of Language writing -- at least Breton was a moving target, a "body" of thought that, if only coherent within itself, was something to throw bricks at and hear a clang. There was an endgame in Surrealism and Situationism that doesn't exist in Language writing, since it seems, finally, that the point of Language writing was to make books and live forever in the minds of mankind, much like most writers do. How argue with that?
But I'm not the first one to suggest this; I'm only pointing to the fact that replies are coming in, but in terms that move "below the radar" (another Creeps term). One must be an achieved cultural polyglot to have any sense of "what's coming next."
[Looking back at your blog post, this line -- "Sure sounds like Sartre’s vision of serialization & capitalist atomization to me, a series of infinitely substitutable parts that can be popped out of a box or anthology – like a chess set composed entirely of pawns – and dropped into any theory one wants." -- is particularly vulnerable to critique specifically because you have had a tendency to make lists, create theories for them, then make lists that operate nearly as disclaimers to your theory -- an equally good list could be created for such and such a theory is practically a trope in your writing. Isn't a singular, no-holds-barred theory better than one that gives away before it's gotten off the ground? But I don't believe Sartre's description is very accurate anyway, or that this hasty comparison is particularly persuasive.]
Oh, this is way too long...
Lastly, let me just note that, ridiculous as the Creeps essay was, some phenomena that followed long after it was written fit right in. First there are the books: Lytle Shaw's book The Lobe could have been a member of the list, as could Toscano's more recent work, Kim Rosenfield's Good Morning Midnight, the font work of Paul Chan (whom I didn't know at the time), etc. "Flarf," the school of poetry invented by Gary Sullivan that is currently all the rage in the Left Bank, seems quite Creep oriented to me, as does the phenomenon of Blogs (Jordan Davis's blog is full of solipsism, haranguing to invisible congresses, etc.) and metablogs, like the "Mainstream Poetry Blog" -- "arpeggiated squeals of Moog fanfare without justification or apology" to use another of Kasey's phrases.
That "moments of scandal" are like the torches that light the bats in the cave seems also accurate to me -- I noticed that more people read Tranter's Jacket when something controversial, even mean, appears there, as more people probably read your blog for the same reason (viz. the Canadian controversy a few months back). This suggests not a porousness and a replacibility so much as an unwillingness to show one's cards unless forced to, and with any luck the present war crisis will bring more and more poets into searching for ways to harangue -- the public, the congress -- while reserving the right to retreat into "rugged individualism," the comfort zone of sitting behind a PC, in touch but, yes, not. To be invisible is a useful property in times when one might be targeted by the government -- or critics! (But alas, I am a critic too, and without apologies... just strong reservations.)
Ok, too long... knowing me, there'll be a postscript forthcoming. Thanks for the notes, etc.
best,
Brian
[Just another stupid reflection on blogs, created for the Buffalo Poetics List which seems to be having a big toho bohu about blogs (again).]
I too, dislike them: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading them, however, with a perfect contempt for them,
one discovers that there is in
them after all, a place for the maudlin.
Minds that can't grasp an imaginary turd, findings
that make the eyes dilate, hair
on neglected parts of the body, these things
are important not because a
blogger's high sounding "interpretation" can be put upon them,
but because they are
free. When they become so mundane as to become ad hominem
well, the same thing may be said for
-- well, some of us, that we
"do not criticize what we
don't understand": the bat held upside down in quest of
some balls, the balls
eating elephants, elephants putsching, a wild horse taking a
tireless wolf under a tree (now that's
unusual, yet the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that takes a flea under a tree is a base-
ball fan, a statistician -- oops, I think I was blogging...
again)
-- nor is it valid to discriminate against
"business documents and
school-books": all these "phenomena" are important (if secondary).
One must make
a distinction: when dragged into prominence by half-bloggers,
the result is not blogging, but "writing" -- nor till
the bloggers among us, "hyperventilators of
criticism," above insolence and triviality and
a loyal fan base, can
present for public indigestion, revolutionary values with
real poets in them, shall we have
um, them. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of blogs in all their obtuse, necrophiliac,
pretentious
grace, and that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in blogging.
I suggest you try www.blogspot.com.
[I posted this to alienated.net over a year ago and thought I'd repost it here. It's in an appendix of my book Fashionable Noise -- I just sent the final proofs back, it should be off to the printer in a few weeks. It's a spoof on something David Larsen posted to the Buffalo Poetics list in favor of self-published art books, which of course I support, but not as an absolute.]
2001 has seen th exaustion of everything. Most importnt: th exaustion of creativity.
We hav gotn too clevr. It's time to dum down a bit, relax and let th riting on th wal speak for US.
Th previus jenrations hav had ther chance to turn windo-dresng (th spectacl, th social) into revlatry moments, but hav faild. Th cause: th persnl signatur.
Th signatur has lead/led to th lording of specialized nolej ---- about politics, about filosofy, about poetic form ---- over th readr. This has stonewalled th posbility of a new readrship for poetry, and so must stop.
Today, a tecnlojicl storm is rajing, th result of wich wil be th ultmat democratization of poetry.
Therfor, we advocate/advocat th foloing radicl actions in th creation of poems...
1.1 Authr and publishr shal be th same persn, but wil not expend any cost in printng or distribution. Rathr, publishr shal oprate as parasite, and poems shal be created with a mind to extant forms of publishng that hav activ distribution processes in place ---- th internet, th bookstor, th mail ordr catlog. Specialty markets shal be avoidd, as wel as th negativ econmy of th poet/publisher.
2.2 As a corolry to principl 1.1, al poems shal be ritn with a mind to internet publication (even if they not apear ther), since it is th one cost-fre method of distribution availbl, and it is social. "Involvd" poems, not to mention "life works," ar unacceptbl. Al poems must take advantaj of th moment, and ar not constructd for posterity or th used book trade. Th plug may be puld any day on cultur; th poem must be prepared.
3.3 No text in a poem shal be "orijnl"; only th use of FOUND TEXTS shal be permitd. These texts can be editd ---- collaged, erased, reversd ---- but nothing stemng from th inr sanctm of th author's memry and sentmnts is acceptbl.
4.4 As a corolry to principl 3.3, only FOUND IMAGES shal be permitd. As for wethr orijnl imajs by th author's hand ---- childhood drawngs, doodls skechd out during half-concius moments at th ofice ---- qualify as "found" is a matr of particulr instnce. Certnly no drawngs intendd specificly for th work shal be permitd; only intentionl manipulations ((digitizations, filtrs, juxtapositions)).
5.5 In dijitl works, we disuade th use of "sound" unless it is directly linkd to th action of th poem. Loops ar to be avoidd at al costs, as ar clipngs from classicl symfnis and anything that detracts from concentration on th intrface. Of corse, only FOUND SOUND is permitd ---- ripd from CDs, mp3s, and th city streets ---- no orijnl "scors." (In print works, we disuade th use of special papers, special bindngs, and champion only those typs of materials that reflect th specificity of th production jenre ---- se next point.)
6.6 Litry jenres ---- th fable, th lyric, th epic ---- shal be replaced by th jenres of infrmation distribution ---- th newspaper, th e-comerce site, th chat room ---- or games ---- th puzl, th arcade game, role-playng games.
7.7 No abstractions ar permitd ---- "no ideas but in things," but also no incoate conceptul paradigms, no constructivist formalisms, no scolastic digressions or hairsplitting over termnolojy. Al words shal be in color.
8.8 As a corolry to principl 7.7 NO WORKS ABOUT "WRITING" and NO WORKS ABOUT DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY ar permitd. These typs of ritings ar realy translations, undr th gise of disclosur, of th ego into new forms. Th "esthetics of infrmation" is just a slik atemt to translate th sublimity of th cathedral to th computer screen; distnce between vewr and object must be abolishd.
9.9 [Put yr own dogma here. But use it, watevr it is. That's wy this is fun.]
10.10 Th author's name shal not apear on th work. Therfor, we advocate/advocat th use of made up names, especialy those that resembl corprations (such as "YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES"), anmls ("Panda Ber"), or caractrs from works of sience fiction ("Roy Batty").
Th supreme goal is to force th truth out of my words and imajs ---- wich is to say, th INTERFACE. We swer to do so by al th means availbl and at th cost of any good taste and any esthetic considrations.
Synd,
"Curius" Jorj Wunsch
Dorothy Aschenback "Imagiste"
Jean "Democracy Bulevard" Hancoque
Oy... so I made the valuable mistake of checking the other blogs to see if there was any commentary on my grouching about blogs a few postings ago. I got caught in the labyrinth -- what a weird echo-chamber, interesting experience to see what you have written recounted back to you (Song Against Sex, Jordan?) -- hee hee. I editorialize so rarely that I never realized what a component this is of blogs -- addressing not your "readers" but your assessors, directly.
Anyway, Kasey and I had a small email back-and-forth about the Poets Against War venture and his posting Acknowledged Legislators: A Rant, concerning a Washington Post article that I didn't read prior to writing him. Kasey said that he was going to post some of this on his site but hasn't yet, and so I will step forward and put a little bit on my site, not out of impatience but in an effort to procrastinate yet further, and because my assessors seem interested in this topic. (BTW, please check out Carol Mirakove's latest bit on Circulars, it's a hot one.
My hope is that my position on this is not seen as settling old scores, as being for or against some particular aesthetic, etc., but merely questioning whether it is accurate to say that replacing the terms "poets" with "birdhouse makers" (I used the term "bakers", becaues of Jim Baker) settles the idea of what it means to operate as a collective will against this war (to be). The fact that "poets," as a group, have managed to co-opt some mainstream media space is great, but isn't the game, still, to be writers and articulate, be articulate, in a way not open to writers of petitions, or to movie stars, etc?
Ok, well, here's the back-and-forth. I've taken out all of the hellos and goodbyes but we were very decorous, promise! I hope nonetheless that my tone didn't put Kasey off, or that my ratherless humorless, leaden prose puts you off -- but I'm writing all of this garbage from work:
[bks to ksm]
I think you get it all wrong though, on some level. The idea, for me, is not that poets are just trying to avert this war -- it would be quite remarkable if the Bush administration pulled back from this war, decided to mend relations with the entire European community, went in on various international treaties on the environment, sent AIDS drugs to Africa, took a stance on Palestinian rights, etc. not to mention decided not to bomb North Korea and continue to taunt Iran, etc.
I think that's where the criticism of Hamill lies -- that there is some idea that poets are merely against this war because they're against war in general, but are otherwise not mindful of the larger political universe and are not going to make more significant changes in how they view poetry andor poetics -- it's all subsumed under a humanistic/pacifistic viewpoint that stops once the drama ends.
This is certainly not an argument in favor of what you accurately portray as a sometimes curmudgeonly and ineffective old avant-garde stance, but my sense is that a new sort of running commentary has to be created, a new aesthetics for this, etc. and that it might be worth discussing once we figure out a little more how this is done (the art would have to come first, as usual).
I think the blog andor web phenom might play some part of this -- Heriberto seems most on this case. I'm not against the Hamill project myself, but I do see how it barely imagines how the poetry community will behave once this issue of "the war" has passed -- that's why I don't use the term "the war" in the subtitle to Circulars, it's really going to get much worse, much more intense, almost regardless of what happens.
[ksm to bks]
Naturally I agree with everything you say about the problem extending far beyond the present "drama" with Iraq. And granted, the Hamill project, even if it should prove wildly, miraculously effective in contributing to increased public outrage against war plans, will most likely do little in and of itself to change either the politico-economic base that is the fundamental problem, or the aesthetico-poetic status quo of the mainstream cultural scene. I am treating this from a pragmatic perspective, with two chief considerations in mind:
1) Any social action that might possibly help to prevent the mass bombing of Iraqi civilians is justified and necessary regardless of whatever political or artistic compromises have to be made in the process and regardless of its extended efficacy in any larger context.
2) If such a social action should succeed, it will confer greater popular credibility on the mass of its participants overall, whatever their individual disagreements and inadequacies. This may be cynical, but really, Joe and Doris Blow don't know the difference between an Iowa Confessional Poet and a Radical Oulipian and don't care; if they get up one morning, however, and read in their newspaper "POETS HELP AVERT GENOCIDE," it might increase their interest and somewhere down the line lead to the possibility of more public forums in which poetry can sort out its intestine issues. Sure, it's a trickle-down theory of poetics, fine. But point one is the really important one.
I'm just not sure it's true that, as you say, the art will have to come first. I don't know if life works that way. I'm completely in favor of any "running commentary" or "new aesthetics" that might emerge (and web culture does seem like the arena in which it could happen), but neverthess these things feel much less important to me right now than local solutions to present problems via broad public strokes. If this is short-sighted and naive, I don't see any more reasonable alternative.
[bks to ksm]
I still think the "poets as blunt tool" argument is not a very good one since it detracts from what the true force of being a "poet" is -- not that one is part of a cultural phenomenon that has been there for ages called "poetry," and which, as a unified force, is going up against the war, but because one, as a poet, has found a unique way to argue against this anticipated war, a way that has not been found among writers who are engaged in other practices but which is needed.
In other words, were we merely to be a "blunt tool" we could very well suffer the same sort of fate that that blunt tool of the Vietnam Era, Hanoi Jane Fonda, did when she took a seat in that anti-aircraft gun turret -- just simply get booed off the stage, labelled some effete know-nothing, but worse, never have been listened to anyway.
I've seen this happen around the Lincoln Center event, people using the very idea of "poetry" against the "voice" of the poets because, after all, we are the flourish, the icing on the cake, mostly quite useless to society but a testament to how open things really are -- Rupert Murdoch telling us that Noelle Kocot can say anything she wants and we should be thankful (so long as she doesn't own any newspapers).
So in terms of point one -- sure, anything is justified if it's done correctly, but it a little unclear to me whether that is the case. I have no better solutions myself except to hang back and wait (or start a website!).
If we persist under the rubrik of "poets" as the term has been understood in American society for the past several generations then we are pretty hopeless since we've rarely been turned to to speak on anything of grave importance that does not have to do with the arts. It's too easy to paint what "we" mean in journalism because of this, so, sure, if the folks at Poets Against the War play the media game well enough then there's always the chance of effectiveness -- but if not, then that one gesture of defiance is lost.
We should have the poetry to follow up should the idea of "poets" not do whatever magic it's supposed to perform. Otherwise, we might as well be "Bakers Against the War." (Nothing against bakers, of course.)
I don't quite understand all of point two -- "greater popular credibility on the mass of its participants overall" -- do you mean people will trust poets more? But, yes, of course, I don't expect anyone to care about our little tiffs, I never have (though I think some of them are at least as important as whether Picasso painted a better geranium than Matisse). "Poets Help Avert Genocide" -- this applies much more to Africa to me than to Iraq, which, realistically, will not be a "genocide."
[Here's an interesting interactive piece by French artist Frederic Durieu (the image below is just a screenshot). Reminds me a bit of the Tony Oursler pieces where he projected film loops of blinking eyes -- some with infections, some crying, but mostly deadpan -- onto white globes of different sizes suspended from the ceiling -- one of my great New York art experiences.]
www.lecielestbleu.com/media/oeilcomplexframe.htm
More of his stuff can be found here. I highly recommend the Autoportrait -- better than the Mattisse and Picasso self-portraits you've been seeing splattered on subway cars all over New York.
It's pretty bizarre to me that Ivan Brunetti, creator of Schizo, one of the most thoroughly (as in "philosophically enriched") depressing (or suicidal, if it's possible for that not to be depressing) comix ever, has his own webpage and is now a relatively mild mannered cartoonist with a soft spot for Charles Schulz.
I'm amazed he's alive at all -- the first two installments of Schizo came out in 1995/6, the third, half the length of the first one, came out in 1998, and then nothing, though a brief note in the copyright notes of the third one announces that he's started taking two purple pills every day -- good for him, but probably the end of the edge for Schizo.
Not a lot of Schizo on the site itself but a few back covers, but worth taking a look at.
I think something inside of me is reacting negatively to the blog phenomenon... I can understand Heriberto's view that blogs -- like websites in general -- have the ability to shift cultural capital around regardless of what's happening in the cultural capitals -- New York, Mexico City, etc. -- themselves, but I'm not sure that's what "American bloggers" are trying to do.
The idea of a "lateral community" is intriguing but at the same time might be a fancy way of justifying people talking past each other, not to mention putting a fancy sheen on vanity publishing and rushing things to print. But alas, some people derive great comfort from the sound of many voices chattering (except, of course, that blogs are largely silent, literally).
I unreservedly think it's great that poets are getting into the web and learning how to utilize it effectively, not to mention developing some really interesting prose styles, and using the web to create drafts of what will, someday, be more refined work.
But it seems that, rather than creating cooperating "communities," there is very little actual collaboration going on -- it's like slipping notes under the doors of the twelve people you think might want to read you and waiting for a response (another note slipped under the door).
Blogs are acquiring status symbol value, like front lawns -- one brags of one's "autonomy" by filling it up with pink flamingoes, because, alas, one has the right to. But if the only people who see these flamingoes are those on your block, then how does this rearrange or redirect cultural capital, or help to circulate new ideas?
I've abused my net privileges more than anyone -- in fact, I revel in doing things that nobody has asked me to do, in not waiting to be asked -- so the shame shame is geared at myself as well. But... having posted this -- do I now check other blogs for the next several days to see if there is a response. How is that better than a listserv?
Are we satisfied that our audience is largely composed of insomniacs -- other bloggers?
I used to have a blanket called my "smelly blanket" when I was a kid. Maybe I need a smelly blog. I can't quite explain what I mean by that but it's the most autobiographically revealing thing I've put up here, so we'll let it stand. Please don't mind me, I'm in a bad mood.
[I just sent this off to Kasey Mohammad regarding his recent post Acknowledged Legislators: A Rant. I'm only including it here because I haven't had any new content for this blog in ages.]
Hi Kasey,
Just read your recent blog post and would like to post it on Circulars -- sound ok? It'll link back to you.
I think you get it all wrong though, on some level. The idea, for me, is not that poets are just trying to avert this war -- it would be quite remarkable if the Bush administration pulled back from this war, decided to mend relations with the entire European community, went in on various international treaties on the environment, sent AIDS drugs to Africa, took a stance on Palestinian rights, etc. not to mention decided not to bomb North Korea and continue to taunt Iran, etc.
I think that's where the criticism of Hamill lies -- that there is some idea that poets are merely against this war because they're against war in general, but are otherwise not mindful of the larger political universe and are not going to make more significant changes in how they view poetry andor poetics -- it's all subsumed under a humanistic/pacifistic viewpoint that stops once the drama ends.
This is certainly not an argument in favor of what you accurately portray as a sometimes curmudgeonly and ineffective old avant-garde stance, but my sense is that a new sort of running commentary has to be created, a new aesthetics for this, etc. and that it might be worth discussing once we figure out a little more how this is done (the art would have to come first, as usual).
I think the blog andor web phenom might play some part of this -- Heriberto seems most on this case. I'm not against the Hamill project myself, but I do see how it barely imagines how the poetry community will behave once this issue of "the war" has passed -- that's why I don't use the term "the war" in the subtitle to Circulars, it's really going to get much worse, much more intense, almost regardless of what happens. [Think MEDIA STRANGLEHOLD -- ed.]
Anyway, but I appreciated your post...
Cheers
Brian
[Hey dudes... I'm in this. To the six of you that visit here regularly, sorry again for not blogging. Long weekend, much work on Circulars, now there is no heat in my apartment, etc.
I gave these guys the first 20 of my revised Proverbs of Hell, which will be in Fashionable Noise whenever that comes out. Check it out (and don't bring it back)!]
Volume One of infLect: a journal of multimedia writing is now launched at www.ce.canberra.edu.au/inflect. infLect is based at the University of Canberra Centre for Writing. The journal showcases creative work which brings together text, visual images and sound into a reciprocal relationship, and also writing which combines critical and creative content. Volume One contains new work by Jim Andrews, geniwate, komninos, Ana Marie Uribe, Jason Nelson, Thomas Swiss, Motomichi Nakamura and Robot Friend, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, and Brian Kim Stefans.
[Hey FSC shoppers... sorry not have been blogging. I've been spending more time at Circulars, the blog I set up for poets and artists to speak out against the war. But I did come across this, which seems a bit unsuitable for Circulars because basically quite useless, but amusing.
War Blogging: Announcing the "Index of Evil"
Announcing the "Index of Evil"
The time has come for a new metric of how this nation is faring. We have plenty of financial metrics -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for instance, or the Standard & Poor 500. Politically and militarily, however, we have few ways of measuring the health of our nation without polling. And so it's with great pleasure that the people behind War Blogging bring you the Index of Evil -- a measure of how much people are thinking about those truly Evil Ones who infest our world.
The Index of Evil is arrived at by measuring the number of times certain people's names are mentioned on weblogs in a given day. The total number of mentions for those people is that day's Index of Evil. The Index of Evil has four components -- the Ashcroft Index, the bin-Laden Index, the Hussein Index and the Poindexter Index (the Omar Index was replaced with the Poindexter Index on December 5, 2002).
[Here's some sample craziness from the weirdest blog I've come across, Dagmar Chili Pitas.]
Dagmar_chili: Tthe color of the terrorist threat.
Where to sit, in case you have shit
{}oe|e|ep[]
Browse the encyclopedia. Volumes to the left. They are free for your use. They may contain pornographic images made by people who want to kill you
Ernest, ruptured patriotic by Huskies piping flageolets (Gustique, Muctot, etc.) is approached in a roach prison, by elementary Ulrike at work.
"I didn't know they had any dwarves here also," says Ernest.
"Sure, and," said she, "there's tons of them!"
"Well why didn't Gargantua's mother, who ate a deacon's assload of tripes, say so?" asks Ernest.
"Because, well, you know, there's a lot of corruption floating around and so forth."
"I noticed that too! Isn't it really something else?"
"Yeah, I found that odd as well. Here, have some of Mr. Richardon's regurgitation. You drink this (it is in fact the regurgitated Ms Mariah Johanson) and it's like fairy powder or angel dust, you'll be able to fly! Here: I'll have some too!"
She feeds him Mr Richardson's crucid regurgiation, and she has some as well, I have fleas, and they fly away. The Huskies go richmond red.
{}oe|e|ep[]
Found made Word the Vat begot:
Cog engraver Ernest
(Title on his hat: "his Box")
Successful mannered mental flame
was whiff in bulk of nerves
Offends that evil Reasoned Federation,
his mission plagues gold plains
(Iron rich pods; buds; and cereal)
Position found, in a sour way
Was slipped, in the platepillow, nod soup
of Vinoking Ivar Echens
onset of mist
lie bonedead and dice the fix
and such a fine green nod of ale or tea
for ace weeds the exit
curse of peace inert toweled
by scripts within an Urn
burn finned rival
tree closet is fire, and fiery eating
Let men patrol
whose manly nostrils encase infected burrs
{}oe|e|ep[]
On every occasion, people post to dagmar_chili, but the price of speeding is unreal.
1 comment
I only post to dagmar_chili because I like to read the pyramid.
posted by Toadex Hobogrammathon at 5pm to 7pm EST, on channel Futch Ist, the only one of them making any money these days.
"Criticism's first duty is to follow and stress the complexities and only after this is done to say, if necessary, genius is simplicity."
This line is from a letter by Veronica Forrest-Thomson now appearing on John Tranter's Jacket website as part of a Cambridge Poetry feature. Other contents in the Forrest-Thomson section include my own short essay from several years ago and the following eclectic mix:
J.H. Prynne: Veronica Forrest-Thomson: A Personal Memoir (1976)
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: five poems
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Swinburne as Poet: a reconsideration (an unpublished essay); Swinburne Chronology — 1837 to 1909
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: A letter to G.S. Fraser
George Fraser: poem: A Napkin with Veronica’s Face, not Christ’s
James Keery: ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and the Levels of Artifice: Veronica Forrest-Thomson on J.H. Prynne — a fifty-page analysis of VF-T’s analysis of J.H. Prynne’s poem ‘Of Sanguine Fire’
Peter Robinson reviews Veronica Forrest-Thomson: On the Periphery (from Perfect Bound magazine, Cambridge, Number 1, 1976.)
Robert Sheppard: poem: Parody and Pastoral
Suzanne Raitt reviews Alison Mark, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry
John Tranter: poem: Address to the Reader
[Here's the show I'm most looking forward to in NYC in the coming months... and only $8! Devendra Banhart and The Animal Collective have been of my favorite eccentric listens lately. Google them to find out more...]
Sun, Feb. 16
$8
@Tonic, 107 Norfolk Street
Devendra Banhart: Devendra's Young God Records debut is already getting raves everywhere from Mojo to the NY Observer. "Devendra Barnhart is only 21, but his eerie, wavery voice and stream-of-consciousness songs -- ''the spirit is near, all the trees are dancing, ready to burn'' goes one lyric -- reach back to the childlike surrealism of some of psychedelia's most beloved oddballs, like Marc Bolan and Syd Barrett."--NY Times
Young People: L.A. folk-prog-noise band in the great tradition of Ghost, Orthrelm, Deerhoof, Hella, etc.
Guy Blakeslee/Entrance: Communing with roads, rotating onto stages nationwide, Guy and Devendra bring their youth and transience to bear in this unique double/ equal billing. A rotating orb of scarves and stars, dropping through the ozone of Skip James/ Vashti Bunyan/ Marc Bolan to arrive and cheer the roots through and through! Special Guests in each city will vary and delight all comers, guaranteed.
Animal Collective: Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist & Deaken: Mystical shimmering sounds of the forest, organic electronics and synthetic sounds of nature.
situation standby
as the sump moans
i’ve got
myself
in my pocket
though hit “resend”
4573 times
just to get settled
just to get convinced
(having
one
of those "café bustello moments"
that solidifies opinions
that tests piss)
largely occluded
visions of lake scenery
matters of personal import, such as
shoulder blades
hanging there like a calder
(we relax
into blue eyes, into
learning
leaning into the wheel
when national motivation is winnowing, as
oprah’s
geiger
counter
clicks, as the cat…)
the latex concoctions of “the stylist”
as he ribbons by
the wharves
the fraught air of the controversialist
blooming in seven boroughs
toss up palpable, if impressionist, digits
in time,
the dust of satisfactory explosions
statements and responses by poets and literary critics
concerning u.s. foreign policy
I'd like to announce the "soft launch" of a new multi-authored blog, CIRCULARS. I'll refrain from laying out the specific intentions of the site except to point to my original "mission statement" later in this email, and to list the three purposes that I see the site serving:
1. To be a central message board for poets concerning significant actions or events that pertain to progressive politics -- an "action center."
2. A storehouse of statements by poets, artists, etc., concerning US war policy, etc., including updates on activities ("Debunker" mentality, reading groups, etc.) -- the "conscience of the community."
3. A place to practice and investigate a form of writing I call the "circular," which is that type of brief, quasi-manifesto (or humorous, or polemic) statement that can be zinged around the internet (and also be printed out) that contributes to the general pool of rhetorical strategies (tones, tropes, emphases) that can be employed in making passionate, relevant critiques of war policy, etc. -- a "workshop"
At this point I am the only editor for the site but I'm putting together materials and will invite people to have author privileges to the site as time goes by. I don't want to just open the site up to everybody since my fear is that it will quickly lose focus and become a glorified links site rather than the workshop/activist site I envision. I'm still working out this structure; also, the design of the site, including sidebar, graphics, etc., is rudimentary at the moment. Other features will include guest edited "sub-sites" that target more activist, or theoretical, issues.
PLEASE NOTE: because I'm presently the only editor, please don't send me a flood of emails making special requests -- a nice note is always welcome, a little feedback, yes, but for now I'd rather not spend too much time answering emails as I'm quite busy putting together training materials, designing the site, etc.
My hope is not to receive too many submissions until I have the editorial structure in place. If you do come across, or write, something you think belongs here then, yes, send it on, but I have no intention of collecting everything written by a poet that expresses anti-war sentiment -- there's just too much. Please read the statement below and look the site over first before submitting -- this is not a literary journal.
THE BEST THING YOU CAN DO is to put your email address in the notification list box on the upper righthand corner of the screen. If you are receiving this email it is either because you are in my private address book or on some listserv that I'm a member of. But I don't want to use my address book to send out CIRCULARS announcements -- SO PLEASE LEAVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS IN THE CUTE LITTLE BOX. (pwetty pwease?)
Take care,
Brian Kim Stefans
---
Contents so far:
mnftiu.cc: Get Your War On
Paul Chan: Statement for a Certain National Press Club in Washington DC (Draft V.2)
Alan Gilbert: The Present Versus (the) Now
Situationist International: Détournement as Negation and Prelude
Eliot Weinberger: Statement for "Poetry is News" conference
Alan Gilbert: "Startling and Effective": Writing Art and Politics after 9/11
AP: White House Cancels Poetry Symposium
---
[Below is the original set of ideas I put together the insomniac night when this website took shape in my mind. I hope to revise it and include it in a sidebar to give the site some specific identity distinct from other art/politics website -- a sense that this site investigates a form as much as operates in the chain of activist sites -- but for now, I'll let it be provisional.]
CIRCULARS: MISSION STATEMENT (v. 1)
CIRCULARS intends to focus some of the disparate energy by poets and literary critics to enunciate a response to U.S. foreign policy, most significantly the move to war with Iraq.
CIRCULARS intends to critique and/or augment some conventional modes of expressing political views that are either entirely analytical, ironic or humanistic. These are all valuable approaches, of course, and not unwelcome on CIRCULARS, but our hope is to create a dynamic, persuasive idiom that can work in a public sphere, mingling elements of rhetoric and stylistics associated with the aforementioned modes -- analytical, ironic or humanistic.
CIRCULARS is, in this sense, a workshop -- a place to explore strategies.
CIRCULARS was not created in the spirit of believing that all poets should be "political" or even "social" in nature. While such arguments are free to be made on the website, and poems related to the themes of the site are (selectively) welcome, the focus is on articulating statements that are unique to the poetry community while not speaking for "poetry."
CIRCULARS holds no party line, nor is it particularly adherent to notions of the "avant-garde." All perspectives are welcome provided they are articulated intelligently or (in some cases) amusingly, and that they do not articulate perspectives or advocate actions that are, in the editors' judgment, of an entirely unethical nature.
CIRCULARS understands that, in the world of the internet, the link can be as powerful as word of mouth, and is itself the prize of an effective rhetorical strategy. These are "circulars" because they are circulated.
What we want:
Original writing -- book reviews, manifestos, modest proposals, etc. -- is, of course, most welcome, but also writing from listservs that are otherwise not public, as well as statements originally appearing on other websites, blogs or in print. (The content of CIRCULARS can appear elsewhere, but if you do reproduce the text please include a link to the original page.)
Multimedia submissions are welcome. This would include pages that work within the design structure of CIRCULARS involving visual, sound, animated and interactive components. However, we don't plan on doing more than installing a piece that the contributor has already completed, since we don't anticipate having much time to collaborate on pieces.
Though the site's primary focus will be on opinion, announcements and reports about activities related to the themes of this site -- performances, readings, actions -- are welcome. Links to other sites, articles, scandals, and events are also encouraged. Some poetry will appear here, but at the discretion of the editors.
Structure:
Entries will be categorized and archives according to themes or, in some cases, according to author. This system, however imperfect, will allow visitors to the site to catch up on threads of dialogue with some ease. Entries will also be archived according to month, as is standard with weblogs.
There will be an unmoderated comments section, but the editors reserve the right to cancel entries that are deemed offensive. This would include personal attacks on individuals associated with the site, and comments of a racist, sexist or otherwise demeaning nature.
Contributors are invited to utilize this space for open forums, with the understanding that other material will intermingle with their own as it arrives, and that this material might contradict the main focus of such forums. In this case, a special archive category can be created linking entries related to the forum.
Note on design:
The present design is just one of the standard templates of movabletype.org -- we hope to make it a little more distinctive soon! Other elements, such as a blogroll, links, etc., will be added over time. Any feedback concerning the design of this site -- readability, functionality -- is welcome.
Document 1
Is this what it’s like to sleep
in a pile of corpses?
(Poetry is an afterthought.)
I woke up because my dentures were dirty
and all the thinking was like 1975.
She was there. So was she.
And she was there. We called her Gullible Madness.
The pose of the “pulse in Soho”
makes my hair follicles breathe
but that’s before I was disabused
of the inevitability
(houses made of Saran Wrap)
of the inevitability of death.
I can’t say I feel much better now.
When they had that hinge joint installed in the putter
I was the star of a TV series
that took place in Cleveland, but was secretly filmed
in Toronto – why’d they do that?
As the days grow longer, I become an emphatic 7.
Bohemian Birdsong
A little melancholy, a little tragedy, a little Zoloft
adds to a man’s character.
Here are the poems of Frank Lima
rewritten for you, since I can’t afford his book, Inventory (selected poems).
A little heart cutting strings
means that your cosmopolitan tourette’s hasn’t entirely alienated you
from those who might love
you. It’s like a famous rapper’s style
that’s somehow mellowed in the plastic wrap, but is good snuggling music.
I just cooked three different dishes of the “white trash”
variety, like Mom used to make.
I’ll bring them to work, I’ll mix them all up, I’ll be richly contented.
[My fascination with tasteless political humor is pretty endless, and this site, whitehouse.org, which I feel I should have known about through one of my Canadian connections but, alas, I got it from a Brazilian, lays it on thick. It has a lot of great posters on it that you buy, or just big images to download. The entire poster collection can be found here.]
[I know that I've already informed readers of this blog about /ubu, but now it's fer real. Below is the official announcement from the Ubuweb Secretarial Pool. I'm posting it here in all its raw, email _italics_ and dead <links> glory for the sake of authenticity -- you can still smell the lingering aroma of fingers typing the letters out. For pictures of the book covers, look no further than here or here.]
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
UbuWeb is pleased to announce the launch of our new E-Book series, /ubu Editions (pronounced "slash ubu"). The Winter 2003 series, featuring 13 titles, is edited by Brian Kim Stefans and features a mix of reprints and new material presented in book-length PDF files. Each title is beautifully designed and features images from the UbuWeb site.
/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Winter 2003 Titles
--------------------------------------
Kevin Davies _ Pause Button _
Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in cyclotronic motion with his rapier's wit and caffeinated melancholy, making him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies, who now lives in New York, published his second book, _Comp._, in 2000 to much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary _Pause Button_, first published in 1992 by Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not in the vicinity of Canada's choice used bookstores.
Deanna Ferguson _The Relative Minor_
Ferguson's first book of poems is at once frenetically impatient with anything that could be called a lyrical subjectivity yet speaks, through the sliced rubrics of its many "postmodern" poses, from a perspective singularly angry, disaffected, vulnerable, eloquent, political and brash. The Relative Minor takes the project of the Language poets to the next level of public address, the scale tipping from (though not forgetting) the lexicons of theory and falling toward the pure, dystopic clamor of punk aspiration. Ferguson, who lives and works in Vancouver, has not published a book since this 1993 volume, one of the major contributions by the poets associated with the Kootenay School of Writing.
Richard Foreman _Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!_
For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark's Ontological Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky's postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his "reverberation machines" into a pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play's New York run, the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman's high style are alive and flinching in _Now That Communism is Dead_.
Madeline Gins _What the President Will Say and Do!!_
Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing _Mechanism of Meaning_, an illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a radical philosophy of architecture in which one "refuses to die." _What the President_ is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant twenty years after its initial publication.
Jessica Grim _Vexed_
Grim's style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the "New American" vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a "post-Language" sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim's poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.
Peter Manson _Adjunct: An Undigest_
Adjunct _forms a teetering, overloaded bridge between practitioners of subjectively-deodorized "conceptual literature" such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin and writers working in a "new sentence" vein such as Language poets Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, all with a nod to novelist David Markson's _Reader's Block_. But _Adjunct _is far from an organized literary venture; rather, it is a sprawling, subconsciously assembled stockpile of casual phrases, trivial ideas, worthless statistics, obituary notices, self-reflexive misgivings, and numberless, numbing et ceteras that make it an electric anthem to cultural (and personal) entropy.
Michael Scharf _Verite_
Scharf's poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of "otherness" are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The roving eye of _Verite_ takes in quantities of data that would sink writers with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism, sonnets, "lieder" and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling, multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.
Ron Sillman _2197_
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and _Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "2197" is the second half of the book, and anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows, rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in the age of the internet.
Ron Sillman _Sunset Debris_
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and _Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "Sunset Debris" is, structurally, a collection of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method and, by extension, time and memory.
Juliana Spahr _Response_
Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when selfhood -- one's sense of uniqueness and of the _permanence _of one's personality -- has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take center stage, floodlit by possiblity. _Response_, Spahr's first book (_Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You_ appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of participation in the social world.
Hannah Weiner _Little Books / Indians_
Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic ability -- she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations -- to create her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing naïve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious, sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language poetry. Weiner's oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the imagined "other," and _Little Books/Indians_, long out of print, is both a visual treat and an engaging read.
Mac Wellman _The Lesser Magoo_
The final of the four plays of Wellman's Crowtet, Magoo follows the adventures of Curran and Candle -- an expert on "Crowe's Dark Space" -- and their motley assemblage of peers, some of them categorically "unusualist," in the parallel, decidedly unsettled, universe that is distinctly Wellman's. Magoo is chockfull of alternative histories, comprehensive pseudo-sciences, eerily relevant, off-the-map absurdist politics and soft-spoken contacts between humans all vying for attention in the seemingly self-propelled linguistics of Wellman's versification, which at turns recalls Beckett, at others the polymath Pynchon or the more childlike landscapes of Ashbery (in Girls on the Run). The music for The Lesser Magoo, scored for voices, toy piano, ukulele, and violin, was composed by Michael Roth, for both the Los Angeles and the New York productions.
Darren Wershler-Henry _ The Tapeworm Foundry _
Toronto-based Wershler-Henry's last book of poems, _Nicholodeon_, was a seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. _The Tapeworm Foundry_ is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, "andor."
--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Winter 2003 Titles
-----------------------------------
/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
Here's a sneak preview of my new multi-authored blog. I'll keep the longview to myself for the moment; for now, you can read the "Mission Statement" on the site, along with the little bits of material I've collected.
[This is from artist Paul Chan's National Philistine -- Combat edition, where you can read the complete set of posts he sent while in Iraq, along with a series of photographs.]
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you--the press--with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, "if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight." I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
Thank you.
[Ok, I'm not sure where this kind of sloganeering is going except... as a critique of sloganeering? It's the first in a long time that I've seen "risque" sex practices associated with un-Puritanical French culture (or berets for that matter)... reminds me of the old -- new? -- days of the pro-choice marches in Washington, circa 1988.]
Masturbate for Peace: Using Masturbation to End War
Hey... for those of you following Gary and my discussion re: Renee French, here's her website. It looks out of date, and mostly has the milder stuff of hers, but how could you turn down Cornelia Does The Ice Fishing Thing.
[Alan Gilbert reminded me that there was a special issue of the online e-zine Pores devoted to questions concerning art practice and politics after 9/11. I've never been able to compose statements of this nature without sounding like a chest-thumping progenitor of humanist and/or Situationist clichés but nonetheless, trying to keep it simple and sticking to the questions, I did manage to commit a few things to words that would have been indifferent mental fluff (or neglected pineal furniture) otherwise. So with all humility it is here... I would recommend returning to the Pores site and looking at Alan's statement, among a few others. I am not sure if I agree with most of what I write below anymore, especially regarding street theater -- I had a naive belief, perhaps influenced by the apparent tension of the incidents described below in NYC, that people were paying attention. I've been disabused.]
What is your understanding of the cultural and political moment you find yourself in?
My sense is that we're kind of hanging in-between, waiting for that world “to be born” that, from this vantage, doesn't look very good though I have this feeling that, once it's here, we'll all know what to do.
I think there was some momentum created with the anti-globalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, and some of the radicalism that had been diluted by a too-theorized position-making in the 90s has been slowly leaking back into our notions of the arts in the world.
All of this seems to have been curtailed by 9/11.
Now:
* shucking off the worn ironies of an age of relative “prosperity” and experimenting with new artistic rhetorics and range of affects
* recovering from the aesthetic hangover after the optimism spawned by the innocuous successes of digital technologies (think The Matrix) and putting these technologies to work on a grassroots level (think Dogma 95)
* punching out of the total media-control that an indifferent mainstream (myself included) has permitted to occur
* preparing for a period in which the media will be questioned by everyone (not just by those trained to write about it or disaffected enough to not care) hopefully to the degree to make conversation about alternative responses to the world situation more possible, even imperative — for timid folks, like myself, but also among the politicians and other public speakers.
Also, waiting for the Bush administration to make its next ugly, decisive move. I'm surprised, given the media coverage of the range of war plans that have been appearing daily in the New York Times for the past several weeks (8/7/02), that there hasn't been more anti-war activism in the US, as if none of us can believe that they are planning on mobilizing a quarter-million troops against Iraq sometime within the next year. And asking Europe not to look.
I think a whole page of the Times should be dedicated each day to the exploits of the oil industry — I wanted to start a scrapbook myself, but realized that their stories on the oil industry's impact around the world only appeared very infrequently.
I don't know what to make of all of this in terms of aesthetics but I do get a sense that we are in a transition period. New languages will have to be used eventually that will be totally dissimilar to what we have now, and we will grow increasingly impatient with anything resembling academic hand-wringing.
(These statements seem to me very fragmentary, jumping all over the place, but perhaps the very static between the paragraphs is what I'm feeling.)
What necessities have emerged for you as a writer/artist/scholar after "September 11" and the events that have followed? How have these affected, if at all, your commitment as a practitioner?
No particular necessities – I don't think my life has changed all that much.
The only large difference might involve my turn away from internet art and an attempt to move more into performance/theater and, most recently, photography, possibly because I think these skills will be more useful in a period of civil unrest (such as I anticipate, in a way), but also because they have something to do with witness and spectacle which the web never really dealt with adequately or interestingly. Maybe as a form of cyborg navel-gazing, but not much more.
I'm probably just exaggerating (for you) but I do have this sense that I want to get out of my room (where I am chained to Flash and such things when working on the web) and into the daylight.
I feel some need to get back “in touch” with the world on a basic epistemological level, since it was that world in which I was dumped when the planes struck on 9/11. Process-oriented stuff has become less interesting to me since, though it leads to effects one could never have accessed in linear, improvisatory modes of writing, these effects are still bracketed by the procedure, by the idea of an algorithm, and exist in that culture which appreciates the elegant solution to aesthetic problems (a 'pataphysical culture, one which I still respect and respond to) regardless of more humanistic concerns.
I'm still very much an artist. In fact, I would never advise a writer to take up “topical” material if it threatened a certain integrity and excitement in the work – the example of poetic integrity is a political act in itself, and a poem that draws your attention out of the fabricated whole to the unanticipated completeness of piece of language achieves a sort of magic, a sort of clarity, that is its own form of activism.
Being boring melts the glaciers.
What forms of politics concern you? In what directions do they take you in terms of a need for actions or resources? How do they affect the practices available to you?
I don't think I'm a very effective “political thinker” if I am any brand of this at all, so anything I write about it will be pretty provisional and useless to anyone not myself.
But I will say that I have a sense for the need of some sort of public theater – some spectacle, with a touch of the bizarre, the gala, violence, community, song & dance, etc. – that can somehow get a handle on the media indifference to opinions that run up against the status quo, and form, if only temporarily, provisional communities against the ones constructed for us on television.
I think, in the handful of demonstrations that I have attended since 9/11, that there has been few bold, creative opportunities taken of the fact that a huge representation of the world's media is present – i.e. there are cameras everywhere, even on occasion important public figures (I saw Mike Bloomberg at a stand-off in Manhattan once) – but no one could create a gesture that would make the moment stick.
Something funny, but beautiful, etc. – the puppets are good, but I think we need bodies out there.
Not that I prize symbolism all that much – America is drenched with bad symbols, and when we run out we call in u2 – but I'd like a few symbols to be created spontaneously, from the passions of the people not being paid to create them.
My sense is that effective street theater of the sort I'm imagining would be the most immediate, far-ranging way to dispel the indifference that so many feel right now – I don't think any particular “point” will be put across, but it will turn our heads away from what is being seen on TV and in the paper and get us imagining what can be done now, in a group and as a culture, on the streets we live.
Spontaneous creativity, Situationist-style.
Obviously, this is not much of a political idea, if one is looking for an agenda, but it's something I've been thinking about. It's a more exciting idea than e-mail petitions, small press anthologies or even radical web-sites, though of course all of these things are important phenomena.
I haven't had time to post to this blog nor to read the others. Blog culture isn't quite doing it for me these days, though I'm working on a anti-war, multi-authored blog that should be up and running soon -- more on this as it develops.
But I did spend a good deal of the morning -- I woke up at 5:30 with my cat whiskers at full-mast, if that doesn't sound obscene -- reading through some of the comix that Gary Sullivan has so graciously lent to me. Lots of stuff to report, were I to be the reporting type, but let me tell you that Marbles in My Underpants, by Renée French, is one of the more disturbing things I've come across.
I'm not sure if it's the old humanist in me that wishes there were some socially redeeming value to this material -- there probably is, but it crosses over into the icky beyond what my significantly debased sensibility generally finds comfortable. These effects were mostly felt long after I had put the book down -- regardless, I highly recommend this unreadable read.
Let's just say there are a lot of surgical body probes, dreamy pre-teen girls morphing into hairless, one-eyed potato mammals, a fair amount of group masturbation among the parentals, severed body parts that become embryos for other sorts of narcotically-enhanced creatures -- all tinged with a note of innocence (cute talking bunny rabbits, Rimbaudien feelings of purple prose abandonment, a genuinely decent mom calling you in for din-din while you're out in the back yard accidentally stepping on the head of a mole, your only friend) that makes that bridge to the subconscious all that much dangerous... what was I saying?
Ok, must stop musing...
