damn the caesars

WORKING NOTES: ABGRUND (AGROUND)

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:24:00 +0000

(Rockwell Kent's Father Mapple, 1930 Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick)

Choir answers choir. In her notes on Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens in the spring number of Chicago Review, Susan Howe comments on the contemporary critical attitudes toward Edwards that reduce him to a proselytizing mouth-foaming Father Mapple of the 1951 John Houston variety. This reduction comes with consequences, generates blind spots: "In 2008 we see through speculative knowledge and are unwilling to embrace the imaginative and aesthetic crossing he makes between our material world — the world of types — and the spiritual world as it actively flows from revelation into human history."

The order of march (from the spiritual into human history) is possibly an order of idealism difficult to reconcile, but I get the sense the material world for Howe, at least here, precisely here, is a world of, as she says, types — categories, forms, typologies, a priori subject positions, language. The flipside — the spiritual world — then might be a sort of terra firma or void beyond the horizon of these types, not a utopian space as such but a sort of ground zero or point of departure that might allow one to act on a human history legislated by types.

Like Howe's Jonathan Edwards, Amiri Baraka too is often dismissed as a pathological pulpit-climbing evangelical. And I come back again and again not to his blown up America or his Dutchman but the figure of his daughter praying in "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note," a poem so well known I find it difficult to engage. In the poem he hears his daughter speaking but on peeking into her room sees she speaks to no one. He finds she is praying, her prayer an utterance thrown out perhaps toward the void. But before he encounters his daughter, and testifies to a very particular recognition of his daughter praying, he is swallowed Jonah-like. The poem begins with a ground that opens up and envelops him (or "the broad edged silly music in the wind").

__________________

Looking again at Žižek's first essay in The Monstrosity of Christ, he points toward a brilliant but easily ignored material example of the ideological distance between the US and Europe:

There is a detail which, perhaps, tells a lot about the difference between Europe and the USA: in Europe, the ground floor in a building is counted as 0, so that the floor above it is the “first floor,” while in the USA the “first floor” is at street level. In short, Americans start to count with 1, while Europeans know that 1 is already a stand- in for 0. Or, to put it in more historical terms: Europeans are aware that, before we start counting, there has to be a “ground” of tradition, a ground which is always- already given and, as such, cannot be counted; while the USA, a land with no premodern historical tradition proper, lacks such a “ground”—things begin there directly with self-legislated freedom, the past is erased (transposed onto Europe).

Thinking about Badiou's refusal of one, Žižek then asks which of these is in fact the case, the European model or the American. Not surprisingly he insists neither is the case and points toward Poland (a state incidentally located in a historically nebulous border region) where buildings have no first floor, where there is only ground level (0) and above that the 2nd floor (viz, the opposite of multiplicity is zero, the void, and not one, communion). What Žižek fails to consider here in this distinction between the US and the European is the internal cultural differentiation in the US that allows a poet like Baraka, a black poet on his way to Black Nationalism and then Leninism-Marxism, to not only take account of the ground as void but surrender himself to it. And it is through his later commitments to Black Nationalism and Marxist political philosophy that Baraka maintains an on-the-way-ness toward the conditions of possibility within the ground (the space of a radical negativity) that swallows him in this early poem. This preface to suicide is the opening salvo in an ongoing and fundamentally spiritual series of disavowals that refuse what we are and move toward a deeper and long abandoned we projected into an unimagined but nonetheless possible future.

__________________

A couple weeks ago I managed to snag Robert Bertholf's copy of Baraka's 1964 collection The Dead Lecturer at a used bookshop here in Buffalo. One of the herd thinned before Bertholf bounced to Austin. A couple of lines from Baraka's "The politics of rich painters" leap out at me:


                     You know the pity
of democracy, that we must sit here
and listen to how he made his money.

In "Expressive Language" — written around the same time the poems in The Dead Lecturer were composed, gathered and prepared for publication — Baraka writes:

As if Brooks Adams were right. Money does not mean the same thing to me it must mean to a rich man. I cannot, right now, think of one meaning to name. This is not so simple to understand. Even as a simple term if the English language, money does not posses the same meanings for the rich man as it does for me, a lower-middle-class American, albeit of laughably "aristocratic" pretensions. What possibly can "money" mean to a poor man? And I am not talking now about those courageous products of our permissive society who walk knowledgeably into "poverty" as they would into a public toilet. I mean, The Poor.

Front end differential. Back end standard. The poor have always known how to be poor and money means something different to an otherwise comfortable "middle class" family fresh out of sheckles than it does to a poor family that never had any in the first place.

An economist interviewed on NPR a day or two ago claimed the US economy would have to grow at 2.5% over the next year to accommodate new bodies preparing to enter the workforce for the first time. An unlikely rate of growth that suggests unemployment will rise over the coming years.

__________________

In "The Expanded Object of the Poetic Field; Or, W hat is a Poet/Critic?" Barrett Watten writes:

What I often find lacking, I will say, in much poetry of the present—not that it is not worthwhile in other terms, no—is a connection to the conditions of its own production. If that sounds like a prescription for what counts as aesthetic experience, again I’m s orry. By ‘conditions’ I mean motivating factors, not surface effects that can never locate them, that dissolve in the bitstreams of channel switching or the identity profiling of data pools. The act of ‘erasure’ only gets us so far; I want to see the larger logic or motivation that makes such acts of abstraction and recombination necessary and productive, on other terms than simply as a placeholder for producers of like objects seen as a ‘community’ (maybe ‘community’ itself is one such logic; in which case let’s hope for an engaged one). But even more I am struck with the pervasive inability to read or comprehend the information one is given. We need high-level interpretants, and poetry can produce them.

A poetry turned inward not toward the ground of its being but the conditions of its production. If the figure of embedded liberalism is outward, the figure of neoliberalism is inward — a hermeneutic no measure of reason can penetrate. But reason is not force and the legibility of the illegible is just another form of wish fulfillment.

Love turns inward (I looked up at the moon and saw pictures of me). Torque = the moment of force. "Moment" is a synonym for torque. Un momento. Torque is not force as such but the moment of force — a moment in time. This moment always involves leverage and relies on three quantities: 1. the amount of force applied; 2. the length of a lever's arm connecting the source of force to that against which this force is exercised; 3. the angle between the source of force and the object upon which it acts. The length of the lever is especially crucial. The length of some levers extend across centuries, even millennia. Love is a lever crimped at the fulcrum under neoliberalism. Ideology too is a lever.

__________________

As if Brooks Adams were right. In 1967, under Olson's direction, Harvey Brown — courageous product of our permissive society — published Brooks Adams' New Empire through Frontier Press. In 1969 Brown brought out The Book of Daniel Drew, Bouck White's fictional autobiography of the financier and founder of Drew Theological Seminary (Drew University). Commenting on Drew's rise to power in an introductory note on par with Slinger, Ed Dorn writes:

It isn't done like this anymore. Not now. Now the thing, the pass, the action is made another way, shudders behind very hard shades. Perhaps reflects where you stand in your "world," the eagle flies across the convex mirror lens — dig — in the sky it's a bird, no! and while you were looking somebody nailed your big toe to the floor.

We encounter a bitterly jaded Dorn in this passage, a Dorn fresh on the ugly side of '68 and suspicious perhaps of The Book of Daniel Drew's continued relevance. Undoubtedly, as Dorn insists, the action is made another way these days and nothing registers this more masterfully than Slinger. But the collisions seem remarkably similar to trainwrecks during the rise of big industry. Point of fact: most of the work published by Bouck White, "Pastor of the Church of Social Revolution," can be viewed through Google Books (monopoly pharmakon of a chimney sweep variety; I can look up and read thousands of radical texts for free, but only as my big toe is nailed to the floor and thousands of Chinese miners die working to fuel an economy expected to expand over the next year at a rate of 8%).

In any case, I'm stunned by White's desire for an economic history of Christ's life in The Call of the Carpenter (1912):

We here address ourselves to view Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth, from the viewpoint of economics. Concededly a different viewpoint from that usually held. But we shall be rigorously historical. The present is not a work of the imagination. It affirms to be a piece of cool, scientific history.

Too much a socialist for the Congregationalists (he graduated from Union Theological Seminary) and too much a Christian for the socialists, White founded the Church of Social Revolution in NYC and later did a stint in prison for flag burning before the outbreak of WWI. Like Hugh MacDiarmid's contradictory nationalist and socialist tendencies, White's twin commitments to Christianity and socialism were synthesized in writings that infused biblical exegesis with a social and economic history from below informed by Engels. (I'm reminded here of Saint Cecilia or Don Arcangelo Tadini, founder of the Worker's Mutual Aid Association in southern Italy and beatified (effectively neutralized) by Pope Rottweiler earlier this year; Tadini died the year Call of the Carpenter was published.

Critiques of the theological tendencies that shape orthodox Marxism are old hat. Ditto for investigations of the socialist tendencies in scripture. But my interest in White has something to do with the possibilities contained in locating the retroactive seed of a sort of piss-and-vinegar Liberation Theology in the global north — at least the usefulness of pointing toward a Christianity in America not the Bible Belt — or a reminder to myself that it ain't always been profiteering evangelical ministers, God-fearing woman-hating war-mongering congregations and abusive priests. It helps to remember other Berrigan's as important as Ted, Anselm and Edmund — Daniel and Philip.

But I want to come back to Žižek's Monstrosity — the figure of Christ read through Job not as the representative of God on earth but as the crest-fallen material trace of a God thrown in a moment of abandon into his own creation, a God that does not sacrifice his son but forsakes himself through a transfiguring gesture that fully disavows his power. If I read the work correctly — which I fear I don't — Žižek goes the long way around, through Hegel, to come eventually to Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstructionist position on Christianity:

Apropos of Christianity and its overcoming, Jean-Luc Nancy proposed two guidelines: (1) “Only a Christianity which envisages the present possibility of its negation can be relevant today.” (2) “Only an atheism which envisages the reality of its Christian provenance can be relevant today.”

And Žižek agrees here "with some reservations." His reservation lies in Nancy's inability to recognize the split parallactic view that frames the Crucifixion not as an event succeeded by Resurrection, but each as one and the same, a single event viewed from two different vantage points:

This is why Hegel is the Christian philosopher: the supreme example of the dialectical reversal is that of Crucifixion and Resurrection, which should be perceived not as two consecutive events, but as a purely formal parallax shift on one and the same event: Crucifixion is Resurrection—to see this, one has only to include oneself in the picture. When the believers gather, mourning Christ’s death, their shared spirit is the resurrected Christ.

For Žižek the issue extends far beyond the need for Christians to imagine the negation of Christianity or the need for an effective atheism to locate the material traces its Christian provenance. For Žižek the figure of God is fundamentally a space of relation, the space of a "shared spirit" that retroactively bodies forth an eternal and everlasting body beyond the material world and prior to man. And for Žižek the same is the case for revolution, the moment of reconciliation is located in the moment of conflict itself, in the space of relation that doesn't change reality but generates a parallactic shift in our recognition of it. It is here that I have difficulty. At its worst this logic frames effective political change as a shared (single / one) point of view, reducing an idea of revolution to a shift in consciousness and allowing one to come in through the backdoor and again subsume multiplicity. At bottom it's this notion of God not as an immanent whole within which the multiplicity of all particulars is contained but God as the willfully activated space of relation I take as a potentially useful saving grace.

Another name for the shared spirit Žižek addresses is belief — or faith.

__________________

In Bertholf's edition of Baraka's Dead Lecturer I see a note in the margins of the poem "Duncan Spoke of A Process." Bertholf, who wrote his diss on Wallace Stevens and served as executor of the Duncan estate for many years, comments in the top left corner of the page, "Stevens / here perhaps." Toward the end of the poem Baraka confesses: "I see what I love most and will not / leave what futile lies / I have. I am where there

is nothing, save myself. And go out to
what is most beautiful.

Baraka is where there is nothing except himself. But he is also — perhaps — where there is a nothing that has the potential to save him, a nothing that is the site of a ground where he can be saved and removed to what is most beautiful, what Adorno would call the non-identical. Duncan spoke of a process, an on-the-way-ness that finds the shape of its aggressive force in the form of a surrender to the ground that envelops. Here torque is a moment, the moment of force, the moment of a shared spirit that recognizes crucifixion as resurrection.

It's appropriate here to give Howe the last word. After commenting on Steven's "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" in her notes we find:

Poetry has no proof nor plan nor evidence by decree or in any other way. From somewhere in the twilight realm of sound a spirit of belief flares up at the point where meaning stops and the unreality of what seems most real floods over us. It's a sense of self-identification and trust, or the granting of grace in an ordinary room, in a secular time.

WORKING NOTES: INTELLIGIBILITY OF CONFLICT

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:03:00 +0000

At the Steak-A-Licious sub shop on Main Street in Buffalo the irony is twofold. The door entering into the shop is flanked on either side by large storefront windows. On the window to the left we encounter a hand-painted steak sandwich with the word "Steak-A-Licious" above it and "Buffalo's Best" below. To the right is a portrait of Obama with a view of the Capital Building over his right shoulder. The words below Obama read, "STEAKS / 2 for $8.00." Further to the right we see Obama's campaign catchphrase: "YES WE CAN!"

Two cheese steaks for eight dollars is a surprisingly good deal, but the newsprint pasted behind the image of Obama and his catchphrase quickly transforms this "can" into an especially painful "can't." The shop's location — literally on Main Street — further intensifies the ironic intelligibility of the phrase. Next to this even the most outrageous détournement strategies are kid stuff.

The fifth rigorously revised and exponentially enlarged edition of The Oxbridge Complainion to Hummerican Anglisc posits that economic contexts for the fricative /r/ reside in springwells of power. Cowboys /r/ hard. But the dialectically inverted sliding tax scale insists Lyndon Johnson's Texarkkkana /r/ is structurally coeval with the /r/ discovered by linguistic anthropologists in the shit-stained shanties inhabited by Roscoe Holcomb in Hazard, Kentucky and Hazel Adkins in Boone County, West Virginia. Even more troubling, the Complainion fails to account for the silent but nonetheless savory /r/ in the cramped urban Po' Boy (a gRindeRRR) or the spacious iveyleague luxury sedan referred to by yokels as Ha'va'd, Massacheussetts.

Bluntly: this ain't no joke. Or, Why Marx? Since the rise of Marxism coincides with the ascendancy of the oil industry perhaps it should be scrapped in a gradual and whimpering manner as dependency on oil slowly gives way to other forms of energy production. Unfortunately, a shift in commodity (energy) production already fails to promise a commensurate shift in class difference — i.e. market-driven commitments to solar power rhyme ideologically with passive zen-like imperatives to just be happy (viz, bright sunny smiles in fields of swaying wheat invite us to calm down, take a step back, love one another and purchase products manufactured by solar energy). Put differently, single mothers exchanging WIC tickets for grape soda on the way home from a double at the slop barrel really should feel badly for Richard Cory. Like Jon Gosselin, he had everything and still he hung himself.

When not reduced to a quaintly charming but otherwise disposable "interpretive lens" for reading culture, invoking Marxism speaks to capital with an impressive measure of stubborn clarity. It insists (quixoticity notwithstanding): This really is a pitchfork.

Althusser and Jameson each offer useful and curiously compatible working definitions of a Marxism that provide ample wiggle room for climbing out of orthodox commitments to economic determinism, the base/superstructure model, the teleology rabbit hole and other troubling stumbling blocks that have allowed critics to toss baby and bucket out with the bathwater.

Althusser: ... Marxism should not be simply a political doctrine, a 'method' of analysis and action, but also, over and above the rest, the theoretical domain of a fundamental investigation, indispensable not only to the development of society and of the various 'human sciences', but also to that of the natural sciences and philosophy (For Marx 26).

Jameson: — I would prefer to grasp Marxism as something rather different than a philosophical system (incomplete or not). I believe that it shares, uniquely with psychoanalysis in our time, the character of an as yet unnamed conceptual species one can only call a 'unity of theory and practice', which by its very nature and structure stubbornly resists assimilation to the older philosophical 'system' as such (foreword to the second vol. of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason xiii).

In their brevity and vagueness both definitions leave a crawlspace for contingency and invite expanding the field of investigation. Weirdly, however, each allows the elephant in the room to go unnamed. But if there's any confusion make no mistake: for both Althusser and Jameson the name of the enemy is clear.

Claude Lévi-Strauss died today. A related passage from Structural Anthropology:

... as soon as the various aspects of social life — economic, linguistic, etc. — are expressed as relationships, anthropology [&c &c &c] will become a general theory of relationships. Then it will be possible to analyze societies in terms of the differential features characteristic of the systems of relationships that define them.

Structures of kinship. Relatedness. Any relationship can be imagined as a blood tie.

My daughter sleeps best when we drive. When she fusses and seems sleepy but resists sleep we drive. We drive all over Buffalo and when I need a smoke while she snoozes I pull over, step out and spark up, looking in on her while I quickly suck down a cigarette. The disjunctive leap from the opulent stone mansions we drive by along the Lincoln Parkway, near the Albright-Knox, to the dilapidated hovels west of Grant Street or on the East Side of the city persistently astound me. However boring, intellectually unsophisticated or simply mundane calling attention to the disparity might be, radical economic differentiation from one neighborhood to another is nonetheless palpable and lived. According to a 2007 Census Bureau report, Buffalo is the second poorest large city in the US.

She hasn't gotten a handle on consonants yet, but the range of wildly inflected vowel sounds my daughter utters daily is something to behold. At four and a half months she is still without language. Unlike her mother and I, she is also without or prior to linguistic difference. She has no /r/ yet. What is at stake is the almost undetectable difference between an oil mogul's gritty Texarkana /r/ and the comparably hard /r/ located in a forty-a-month Kentucky shack or the similarly callous but distant /r/ in a Paterson project complex. Clearly the line in the sand ain't reducible to this alone but certainly a determinate pea in the pod of Hummerican Anglisc.

In the appendices to the "second volume" of Sartre's Critique there's what appears to have been a hastily sketched note on his theory of totalization (a concept a little too complex to parse here). In the note Sartre addresses mass culture, focusing on radio and television, insisting — like Gramsci, Laclau, Jameson, Zizek &c &c &c have with markedly different conceptual tools — that mass culture is ideologically bourgeois in character:

That means the dominant class finds a new means of diffusing its own ideology (i.e. the practical justification of its praxis) ... The part provokes the contradiction by posing as the whole (universal culture). This is called 'integrating one's working class'. But this integration is false, because it gives a culture of the advantaged to men [and women?] who remain disadvantaged. It gives the enjoyment of luxury by sight, rather than by lived reality. There is a working-class and peasant culture that is prevented from emerging or developing. Hence, a contradiction between the universal and the class divide. The latter being deeper and more definitive. However, even as the universal veils the struggle, this is a superficial unification which brings out more clearly the reality of the contradiction (bourgeois culture is exposed, as soon as the workers go back to work).

Admittedly this passage is just par for the course. Sartre's more fundamental contributions reside in his theorizations of scarcity, totality and, according to Jameson, the via media he navigates between idealism and materialism. But the passage calls my attention to two restaurants, one just around the corner on Forrest Ave going east and the other on Forrest Ave going west. Both were within walking distance. One was a small coffee shop admirably stripped bare of all the feel-good hypersentimental-but-youthfully-edgy illusion-of-fair-trade fluff. The other was the first fried chicken joint not KFC in the neighborhood. Both closed within two months of opening and I imagine both disasters were built on small business loans. Vacations are permitted before returning to work but they must be paid for. And I'm not so sure bourgeois culture is adequately exposed when the workers punch the clock. They might be bitter, they might have difficulty coping with the impossibility of being-your-own-boss and extending the vacation indefinitely, but it seems gratuitous or naive to insist any fundamental contradiction becomes patently clear in the return to work. A worker might assign accountability for a failed business scheme to the local economy, the neighborhood, poor business practices, or simply their own inability to "dig deep" for the pluck and determination essential to success — anything but the fundamental structure of the market.

Working people often hate themselves. Measured against the success of working families in mass culture, they know in advance they were never worthy. Even Rosanne's Dan managed to get a bike repair shop off the ground.

There's an /r/ in there somewhere and no one /r/ is ever quite like any other. South of the mesa there's a rolling leaf-blower /r/ hitherto undocumented and markedly different from Felipe Calderón's tumbling /r/. The absence of an /r/ of any stripe is baby talk. The adults are speaking.

O Fatthe' I gitten cowd
I kin sca'ce tawk

And ain't it a fucking riot when working people struggle to will away the busted texture of their devalued downhome speech in the company of highly ain'tchumacated professionals. The gesture is a reliable measuring rod that tells us there will be no riot. The practice proceeds as follows: 1. the voice is lowered; 2. speech is ground down to a snail's pace; 3. inflected tell-tale vowels are carefully reined in; 4. painstaking consonantal annunciation negates the calm dignity of a raised head and unswerving eyes, giving the perpetually shifting home-team advantage to whichever physician, loan officer, educator, officer of the law, gubernatorial candidate, bank teller, telemarketer, retail associate, or high sheriff of shit blood and filth the peasant encounters. At such moments the /r/ is dropped, acquired or hammered out with a flattening iron as needed.

Eliza Doolittle's a good girl. Her Cockney's no less London than Surrey. And she's no Liza Jane.

Today I feel the usefulness of subsemantic utterance while my daughter lives its potential — a brief moment before forms of cultural and economic belonging are inscribed on her vocal chords. The /r/ I offer her through repetitive exposure is in part a determinate one. In cahoots with other factors on a complex field of play this /r/ assumes a decidedly partisan position. One thing to be aware of this. Another to pass the exhaust fumes billowing from your linguistic torch downwind to your child.

Any away-game disadvantage can be recast as an against-the-odds salt-of-the-earth badge of honor. Mass culture, bourgeois in character, in fact encourages this. Such pride guarantees the beautiful losers a very specific relation to power. Remember the backside of the Alamo. Or Daniel Defoe on the Northumbrian /r/ in his 1764 Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain:

... the natives of this country ... are distinguished by a shibboleth upon their tongues, namely, a difficulty in pronouncing the letter r, which they cannot deliver from their tongues without a hollow jarring in the throat, by which they are plainly known ... and the natives value themselves upon that imperfection, because, forsooth, it shews the antiquity of their blood.

Difficulty. But the trouble rolls far beyond the beaten-to-death debates around Received Pronunciation and Standard English and in the Anglophone wo'ld rhoticity cuts across vertical social relations. Again and again, Po' Boys don't go to Ha'va'd.

Whurled or trilled (never in Ourmerican Hinglish), rolled or run through, /r/ can never be framed as a single shooter (i.e. the monophthongization — retraction of dipthongs — occurring before /r/ in labial environs, as in Northern England and isolated perts of the US). And like a shape-shifting comic book character /r/ transforms itself across time as the flesh of our throats moves through the world, from one location to another, one party to another, from home to job to street. A slippery character that discloses its masked identity and betrays the throat that spits it out when we least expect it, the /r/ economically embedded in us lays itself bare to the world in moments of reckless abandon, when we are most ourselves.

Sartre: "Stress the existence of the interiorized Other in everyone."

Small businesses, they say, are the backbone of Harmerica: the industrially-processed chemically-saturated chicken soup that feeds the sole. Shitheel. Be hardpressed to find a working slob that don't want to be their own boss. Elizabeth I'm coming home. When the workers return to work. Liza is a diminutive of Elizabeth. Not Donald Trump as such but a Donald Trump writ small. Archie Bunker eventually had his own place. Fred Sanford was forever the king of his own castle. Earl Hickey doesn't work at all. My Name Is Earl. There's clearly an /r/ in this title. Fortunately my daughter's name is not Elizabeth. There's no /r/ in Elizabeth. Nor is there an /r/ in my daughter's name. But the /r/ in praxis is unmistakably present. The pitchfork component of praxis is indispensable.

THE GANG EXPLOIT THE MORTGAGE CRISIS

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:48:00 +0000

Cheers laid bare: in a bold and au courant gesture delayed only by the merciless determinations of seasonally-driven programming schedules, the fall premier of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia takes the ongoing US mortgage crisis as the principle point of entry into the fold of its misery. Synopsis: Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito) ropes the gang into helping him flip a house purchased at a foreclosure auction. A study released earlier today by the Brennan Center for Justice (NYU School of Law) claims:

Over 1 million homes entered foreclosure in 2007. In 2008, over three million foreclosures were filed — an increase of more than 225 percent from 2006 — and one in 54 homes received at least one foreclosure filing during that year. Foreclosures were up 18 percent this August from the same month in 2008. At the current rate, nearly 2,900 families lose their home each day. The crisis shows no signs of abating. In the next four years, continuing foreclosures could mean the loss of 8.1 million homes. Although there was initial optimism that foreclosures would taper off in 2009, according to Jay Brinkman, Chief Economist of the Mortgage Brokers’ Association, “the effects of job losses and general economic deterioration make the 2009 outlook worse…”

Cheers is always already Cheers laid bare. It's a lie that never fails to disclose itself as such. It's Always Sunny on the other hand is something markedly different. In this case we find a narrative that masterfully disguises and reproduces the lie it pretends to critique by way of its own "edgy" speaking-truth-to-stupidity exterior. But It's Always Sunny can never not be Cheers. It's Always Sunny will always be Cheers. It can be nothing else:

Under monopoly conditions the more life forces anyone who wishes to survive into deceit, trickery and insinuation and the less the individual can depend any longer upon a stable profession for his living, upon the continuity of labour, then all the greater becomes the might of sport in mass culture and the outside world in general. Mass culture is a kind of training for life when things have gone wrong (Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture").

Recall the opening line to the theme for Cheers: "Making your way in the world today takes everything you got." We do not make things. We make ways (Heidegger would agree) and these ways are the intangible (but no less material) products of a labor with no conceivable end. Of course there are breaks to be taken, breaks granted, and time spent at the bar is time given to break. The bar in Cheers provides a neutral space, an almost Edenic garden-like space, for a thinking and dialogue exterior to the brute force of competitive market-driven economies. The bar in this way is the space of an aside, a note to self when self exists in the cultural imaginary as an internally differentiated and coherent community of people connected to one another through economic necessity: the neighborhood &c. To take a load off our feet. But (and this is the lie laid bare) the bar "in mass culture and the outside world in general" has always been a site of sport (competition), a construction site where ways continue to be made, where social relations are reinscribed and reproduced, where schemes to flip foreclosed homes are successfully hatched. The bar itself is never not a site of exchange or evidence of a way competing with other ways to be made.

But every lie metastasizes, extends to or creates the conditions for others. The lie in the Season 3 premier of It's Always Sunny is twofold: the "homeowner" living through foreclosure has legal representation; the gang's attempt to flip the house is foiled by their own greed. The thrust of the Brennan Center report focuses on the issue of legal representation in relation to the mortgage crisis:

By some estimates, 80 percent of the legal needs of America’s poor go unmet. The unprecedented foreclosure crisis has significantly intensified what has been a long growing and chronic shortage of legal assistance for low-income citizens.

Because lenders targeted low-income, Latino, African-American and other minority groups for subprime loans, there is also an explicit – and dramatic – race and class component to the current crisis. In these communities, a downward spiral can well be expected: the rolling contagion of layoffs and service cutbacks is hitting low-income and minority communities with disproportionate impact.

The report claims two-thirds of US citizens are homeowners, a shocking figure that, if we accept it, throws the concept of ownership itself (propriety; property; the appropriate) into sharp relief. Like bars, it seems sensible to suggest the shape of neighborhoods are determined by a confluence of factors (i.e. location, demographics, etc.). Cliff Clavin, whose apartment couch doubles as his bed, drinks at Cheers because it resides at the end of his postal route. His presence at the bar is contingent, even incidental. And he pays daily for this contingency through the constant devaluation of his labor and intelligence (Clavin is the only regularly-occurring blue-collar patron at the bar; a stock character framed as dim but loyal, unsophisticated but affectionate; his is a character willfully not developed). In other words, viewers recognize that unlike Frasier Crane (a psychologist) or Norm Peterson (an accountant), Cliff would not be at this particular bar were it not for the postal beat assigned to him. And within the frame of the narrative there's a direct relation between Clavin's intellectual capacity and his job which is immediately clear to the viewer. But the viewer might also recognize Clavin doesn't belong at the pub in It's Always Sunny either, a recognition useful in considering how neighborhoods and their bars ("real" or imagined) take shape. And in both shows, people of color reside beyond the pale.

According to the Brennan Center report providing legal representation for indigent Americans would effectively slow or even stem the tide of the mortgage crisis. But there appears to be a crisis in representation that shoots through the need for legal counsel — and through cultural representations of the unemployed and working poor — toward perhaps a culturally universalized ethos of sport that invests things like predatory lending practices with an unchallenged sense of fairness at precisely the same time it condemns the savage character of these practices once their results are admitted to vision.

DORN FOR PICKARD: AN UNCOLLECTED POEM

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:31:00 +0000

Luke Roberts generously sent to the Miami University Brit Po list a transcription of an uncollected Dorn poem, "To Tom Pickard and the Newcastle Brown Beer Revolutionaries" — not surprisingly a poem beyond the scope of materials available to Don Allen at the time he edited The Uncollected Poems (Four Seasons 1974, enlarged edition 1983). Roberts mentions that the poem appeared in The Lesser Known Shagg, mag edited by Pickard and Tony Jackson circa 1968. I suspect like Pickard's earlier mag King Ida's Watch Chain, this zine too was hastily printed, poorly distributed and abandoned after a number or two. Eager to know more about the journal, but for now the Dorn poem alone worth the price of admission:

that time's intestines took fake shit flower shit
and begged in those streets
for the mouth to take something in
where economy was agreed to be our debt
dropped into the nest, a machinegun nest
when the time's appropriation called
but a chit was offered when that time's times
were that old mother whore like a fixed address

(Photo above: Tom Pickard at the Old George Inn, presumably Newcastle, December 5, 1973. Posted by Jeremy James at Poets In A Lens, an extraordinary blog featuring the photography of David James. If I recall, there's a photo of Dorn at Morden Tower among the images.)

TO BE A HEGELIAN TODAY: SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK IN BUFFALO

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:30:00 +0000

Earlier today Slavoj Zizek gave a wonderfully contingent, wildly perambulatory talk on Hegel: "Is It Possible To Be A Hegalian Today?" Introduced by Joan Copjec and sponsored by the Center for Pyschoanalysis and Culture at UB, the talk ran nearly two hours. I was fortunate enough to catch the first hour on a hand-held digital:

Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four. Part Five. Part Six. Part Seven.

Much of the talk a cursory circumscription of previously trod territory (Sublime Object; essays in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality; For They Know Not What They Do; Multi-Nationalism; The Monstrosity of Christ; etc.) — and further clarification (or reformulation) of his position on Hegel. Dialectical sleights of hand: i.e. Hegel = materialist; Marx = idealist.

In both the talk and The Monstrosity of Christ Zizek names by way of Hegel a structural principle fundamental to Christianity "still worth fighting for." The argument is compelling if not completely seductive. But in an ongoing and seemingly interminable post-911 moment the appeal to Christianity seems confrontational, aimed perhaps at a bourgeois left committed to a separate-but-equal species of multiculturalism. Cf. Zizek's first essay in Monstrosity: a reading of the New Testament through the Book of Job recognizes Christ not as symbolic representation of God on Earth but a God willfully thrown into his own creation and consumed by it — the same God that in Job turns against himself in an atheistic gesture of abandon, self-loathing and negation. For Zizek the fundamental Christian principle worthy of struggle = Holy Spirit = totality without social relations set against a vertical scale of power. The God Zizek locates in scripture is neither compassionate nor angry but a self-effacing God that eventually disavows, through the figure of Christ, the privilege of his own social position. (Rexroth: "If offered a crown / Refuse.")

Like struggling to thread a needle in a maelstrom. Grateful to the Center for Psychoanalysis for bringing him to town.

TREASON TO MY INSTRUMENTS: BARRY MACSWEENEY

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:48:00 +0000

After listening to Sunday's Radio 4 broadcast on Barry MacSweeney I was grateful to see MacSweeney receiving some affection from mainstream media. But I also felt a little stunned and disappointed by the pathologizing rhetoric of alcoholism through which so much of the work was read. Given this it seems especially important to recall Clive Bush's reading of MacSweeney's Book of Demons (1997):

It is no less than the destruction of the poet as a measure of value that MacSweeney takes as his theme and he takes it, too, from the bourgeoisie who like to see their artists wounded, crippled, dying, or in some way at least fatally produced by a culture they have, less-than-secretly, little desire to change.

This reading of MacSweeney's Demons — with the movement of capital at its center — should have been integrated into the BBC program. That it was not reduces the force and complexity of MacSweeney's work and the extent to which he was fully aware of his contradictory relationship to the interpellated role of self-destructive poet within a market system.

Looking through some of the work he produced in the '80s and '90s after the program, I was particularly taken by the relentless rapid-fire rhythms of "Blackbird: elegy for William Gordon Calvert." The metrical contour of Sean Bonney's ongoing series Commons bears a striking resemblance to some sections of "Blackbird" and is perhaps informed by it:

rude unwelcome guest
luckless wind
at family's four doors
nothing fever eyes wear
solid fern
narrow compass
abjuring life
treason to my instruments
of you taken
beamed
invisibled counterfeit
midnight stealer
quiet roofs pigeon croop
sponge boots caress
aching sills
stare at rough slot
magnets on the heart
aery chambers lift
handsome filings
from dust to a star

This poem may very well be included in the Bloodaxe MacSweeney edition, but its useful to recognize that it was first published through Ric Caddel's Pig Press in Black Torch, presumably in a run of no more than two or three hundred. The poem circulated within a fairly intimate community of poets unlike the work of, say, Dylan Thomas or Simon Armitage, both poets whose work is mediated through a rhetoric of disability (alcoholism in Dylan's case and regionally-specific economic disadvantage in Armitage's) in order to market it toward a broader reading audience. Nothing sells quite as well as the mad visions of a raging alcoholic (i.e. Kerouac) or the market-friendly rise-above narratives produced by peasants that somehow yanked themselves up from the dregs through determination and biologically innate talent (i.e. from Stephen Duck, John Claire and Robert Southey's notion of untutored genius to Philip Levine). In short, it seems something of a disservice to MacSweeney to frame his work through the disabling narrative of an alcoholism articulated with a regionally and economically specific Geordie identity when in fact it was precisely the destructive character of such narratives MacSweeney consciously challenged in confronting his own alcoholism.

RABBIT PUNCH : CAESURA : SUNDAY PUNCH

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:48:00 +0000

Philosophy of Right: "The external embodiment of an act is composed of many parts, and may be regarded as capable of being divided into an infinite number of particulars. An act may be looked on as in the first instance coming into contact with only one of these particulars. But the truth of the particular is the universal." Or the Volosinov passage David Harvey quotes:

Consequently, a word is not an expression of inner personality; rather, inner personality is an expressed or inwardly impelled word. And the word is an expression of social intercourse, of the social interaction of material personalities, of producers.

And where the wiggle room for agency? It is there. Somewhere. Althusser insists ideology almost never misses its target. And sometimes it does. Horseshoes and hand grenades.

I suspect the problem of agency has something to do with rest. One is at rest when one is arrested. The fourth section of Andrew Crozier's Veil Poem published by Burning Deck in 1974:

Bend back the edges and pull what you see
into a circle. The ground you stand on
becomes an arc, the horizon another
each straight line swells out
leaving no single point at rest except
where the pitch of your very uprightness
bisects the projection of your focal plane.

Leaving no single point at rest — a ceaseless wave of antagonisms, sonic or otherwise. No rest. No rest except. It is not enough to respond to contradictions or aspire to reconcile identifiable antagonisms; one must insist on the generative power of further unanticipated and contingent antagonisms. The Veil Poem for my own purposes the Crozier poem that counts most — one that makes a gesture toward his relationship with Prynne.

In Prynne there is no rest. In Prynne antagonism and internal contradiction are greeted with comparable force, generating a further set of contradictions. And in a contradictory sort of double movement the poems pile wreckage on wreckage, ascending away from the material base as they perform philological excavations that descend into the engine room of living. I see this as a general movement in the work that characterizes all except perhaps the earliest poems. And if such a broad-stroked reading ain't completely off center one must wonder how much rest was had within city limits during the siege of Stalingrad.

Intercourse is always social, always an erotic species of commerce informed more or less by the interminable exchange of goods and services. Where this is the case there is no room for rest. Rest = caesura. Some poems epic in scope and breath are nothing more than an ongoing caesura extended across far too many miles. Caesuras are the park benches of poetry and like undeveloped commercial properties, ideological caesuras are material vacuums that will be filled one way or another sooner or later. Force at rest is never force as such.

CRIS CHEEK: PART: SHORT LIFE HOUSING

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:12:00 +0000

cris cheek's Part: Short Life Housing is a curiously peripatetic selection of texts. Excessively so. The subsubtitle of the book tells us these texts are "poems performing thematic extraction." So the work walks and extracts through a process of distillation and reconstitution, circumambulating geographical spaces, poetic practices, and genres as they intersect with the active performance of recording, transcription and editing across three decades. Many of the poems have been revised and edited several times and in some cases the interval between one revision of a poem and the next is more than a decade.

Much of the work is grounded in the transcription of recorded utterances. From the preface:

Many of these pieces were initially spoken into a voice recorder. Often during one walk and sometimes a sequence of walks that went onto tape until it felt like time for another beginning.

I am reminded of Wordsworth — or more specifically Antin. Text as the reconfigured residual traces of a walking and talking. But what separates cheek's practice from both Wordsworth and Antin is his commitment to an ongoing reworking of his texts. For cheek no one piece appears to be closed in any way. The poems are not a Wordsworthian struggle to reimagine or construct the contours of an evening walk. Nor are they characterized by the directionality that characterizes David Antin's wonderful straight-from-the-Athenian-Academy talk poems (viz. recorded talk followed by heavily revised transcription = talk poem). In Wordsworth and Antin we see an underlying structure — orality and/or lived experience somehow precede the poem as text and are somehow prior to the poem as print object. cheek's work seems fluid and open to contingency in a way markedly different from Antin — somehow an extension of Antin's project.

Wordsworth travelling: "This is the spot." Or Susan Howe: "Historical imagination gathers in the missing." For cheek both are the case. Each poem as an event articulated through and constitutive of an overdetermined complex of other events.

Transcription as poetic practice. The first section of the book, "mud (and fluff)" is dedicated to Allen Fisher and includes an epigraph by Margaret Thatcher: "It is not enough to delve deeply / into the surface of things." There is no alternative. The poem "and fluff":

Crazy memory
Punches its way to me

[...]

Under snow
Bound lovers
Coding flow

Skimming through the interdisciplinary transcription number of Interval(le)s edited by Jot Cotner and Andy Fitch — a wonderfully curated and overwhelming constellation of writers and artists — I was surprised not to see cris cheek's name among the ninety or so contributors. I was just as shocked by the inclusion of other names, figures I don't typically associate with transcription (i.e. Zach Finch, Ammiel Alcalay, Richard Price). Here Cotner and Fitch seem to be working toward theorizing transcription in a way that widens the scope of the practice. Their introduction to the feature is itself a transcribed talk between the two editors that begins with a question:

J: Did you even bring a swimsuit Andy?

The feature is in excess of a thousand pages. The task of editing the work must have been grueling. To wade through the muck with or without trunks.

In an interview filmed sometime in the 1970s, no more than a year or two before his murder, Pasolini said, "I wish to do things with editing." When I first heard the statement it struck me. To do things with editing. Ronald Johnson's erasure of Paradise Lost came to mind — as did Antin's talks. Other things also came to mind: i.e. the bits of found Appalachian speech in so many of Jonathan Williams poems, the excavated fragments of fossilized language in Caroline Bergvall's work, Thomas Malory playing the role of author as collator, Plato's transcriptions of Socrates, Niedecker's redaction of Thomas Jefferson's life, the centrality of textual assemblage for Paul Metcalf in imagining a critical fiction, or the demoralizing return to transcription that signals the failure of Flaubert's copy clerks Bouvard and Pecuchet.

Intervalles. In Cotner and Fitch's Socratic-dialog-as-intro Fitch wonders what Eileen Myles' contribution to the feature might look like and says:

She writes in Chelsea Girls that a sloppy look always seems good to her, and I consider transcription inherently sloppy. I mean the meticulous itself gets messy — as soon as it becomes obsessional.

cheek's poems are messy — muddied by contingency and the material fragments of history and historical necessity that gather themselves in the missing. Bergvall remarks in her blurb for the book that cheek is "inhabited by Dicken's dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcheritic city. That's at least two hundred years of grim and energy you'll find distilled in the celluar lines and in splashes of this great volume."

And it is this which I find most useful in the work: the unrelenting attention in the work to the determining conditions of its own production. commenting on the range of technologies that came together to make the work possible cheek notes in the preface:

Machinic interventions forcing amendments to a text have been those that interlinked considerations of spatiality and typography. Much of this writing maps an intricate conversation of anomolies between those writing technologies utilized in the process of the production of the writings and those reproduction technologies used for their further circulation. This conversation, whose elements are sometimes separated by several decades of technological modification, not only impacts the content of the practice in evidence, but also serves as a kind of parallel to the always changing domestic and public circumstances which frames it.

Attending to his own locatedness in the making of this edition, cheek closes this passage by noting that "the original texts have been changed to bring them into alignment with North American usage." Spellings have been Americanized so that a work like "Canning Town Chronicles" — first assembled through walks, talks and composition in what was "an industrial area on the edge of London during the reign of Queen Victoria" — carries ideologically charged fractals of its further editing and revision in North America. Or as cheek writes in the poem "Part: Short Life Housing":

Stitching market intertwines top sequit
Into stress, dredges the law
Breaks
Down points where system
Claps
Instant replay

But for cheek technological, economic and ideological determinations don't appear to shut down the possibility of agency:

Draws its strength and resilience
Around itself throughout negotiations
Undermining the details with the straights inform
Belief pulls off road

Exeunt: Antin: "and schwitters was like a little rag picker going through the mess and / producing these elegant little works."

WORKING NOTES: PARTISANSHIP WITHOUT PARTY

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:15:00 +0000

Given the hoopla around Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor's ability as a "wise latina" to rule impartially and also heated discussions among poets regarding the strategic necessity of groupness, schools and movements in the arts (notions crudely equivalent to the idea of a political party) it might be useful to consider the value (arguably the necessity) of open and unswerving commitments to forms of prejudice, discrimination and partisanship without party, constituency, group, school or movement.

Watching several youtube clips of protests organized around last week's G8 meeting in L'Aquila, I was reminded of a Perry Anderson essay on Berlusconi published in the London Review of Books earlier this year. This essay links to another LRB piece by Anderson from 2002 that carefully historicizes Berlusconi's success and moves through the conditions and contingencies that paved the way for his political ascendancy. Half way through the essay Anderson takes a moment to meditate on spregiudicato, a word specific to Italian politics which in contemporary usage has a disturbingly contradictory character:

Literally, this just means ‘unprejudiced’ – a term of praise in Italy, as it is elsewhere. Such was the original 18th-century meaning of the word, when it had a strong Enlightenment connotation, which it preserves to this day. The first entry in any Italian dictionary defines it as ‘independence of mind, freedom from partiality or preconception’. In the course of the 19th century, however, the word came to acquire a second meaning, which the same dictionaries render as ‘lack of scruples, want of restraint, effrontery’. Today – this is the crucial point – the two meanings have virtually fused. For other Europeans, the ‘unprejudiced’ and the ‘unscrupulous’ are moral opposites. But for the Italians spregiudicatezza signifies, indivisibly, both admirable open-mindedness and deplorable ruthlessness. In theory, context indicates which applies. In practice, common usage erodes the distinction between them. The connotation of spregiudicato is now generally laudatory, even when its referent is the second rather than the first. The tacit, everyday force of the term becomes: ‘aren’t scruples merely prejudices?’

As a praiseworthy quality spregiudicato blurs the boundary between acting without discrimination (impartially, as judges are expected to) and acting indiscriminately (without concern for specificity or difference; i.e. when military forces refuse to discriminate between strategic and civilian targets). But spregiudicato as it presently means in contemporary Italian usage may in fact disclose a truth or contradictory quality otherwise concealed in praiseworthy notions of impartiality and fairness. In other words, even beyond the context of Italian politics I suspect there may be some measure of indiscriminate behavior (or an impulse toward indiscrimination) in every act or decision that appeals to a logic of impartiality and fairness. And so I wonder about the usefulness of taking to task the homogenizing logic of equality and fairness that potentially effaces or refuses to acknowledge difference: the notion that all (especially under the law) are equal.

If as Anderson suggests scruples can be imagined as prejudices, what about the possibilities embedded in disavowing both the logic of impartiality and the (related) logic that would allow one to act indiscriminately?

To be scrupulous is to take pause and consider a decision further, to hesitate at a moment when others might act boldly and without consideration. Morality — which the OED regards as "ethical wisdom" — precedes ones ability to act with pause, to behave scrupulously. What interests me here (albeit in a flighty and pedestrian way) is the relation of notions like scrupulousness, morality and ethics to forms of discrimination and partisanship — even notions of commitment, fidelity, loyalty. To be loyal to ones family forecloses in some cases on an ability to be loyal to ones community and a decision made in the best interest of the nation is scarcely ever in the best interest of all communities that reside within or cut across the boundaries of the nation.

Alain Badiou's theory (actualized with some success through his politcal work) of a politics without party is useful here. In the interview that closes out Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso 2002) Badiou says:

'Politics without party' means that politics does not spring from or originate in the party. It does not stem from that synthesis of theory and practice that represented, for Lenin, the Party. Politics springs from real situations, from what we can say and do in these situations. And so in reality there are political sequences, political processes, but these are not totalized by a party that would be simultaneously the representation of certain social forces and the source of politics itself.

I write this in haste, without adequate space to responsibly think the issue — though it nags and I wonder here about the possibility not of a politics without party but a form of partisanship without party. Partisan = an unreasoning, prejudiced or blindly fanatical adherent. Rather than act without discrimination and also act indiscriminately, I wonder about the possibility of an ethics built on non-negotiable forms of partiality, discrimination and prejudice. In short, partisanship. To be unreasonable is to refuse the terms through which a conversation is mediated or legislated. Put differently, to be unreasonable is to engage in a politics of no compromise. (Recall the proliferation of anarcho-socialist organizations throughout the 1990s that mobilized around non-negotiable forms of refusal — i.e. the slogan "No compromise in defense of the Earth.")

Or why not let's talk. Or why we can't all get along. If I enter into conversation with Nurse Ratchet or Bill Lumbergh I knowingly enter into conversation (the only legitimate game in town) at a disadvantage. To accept the structure and terms of this conversation is to forget the conversation has already been performed in advance (viz. to acknowledge and develop game plays around an opponent's home team advantage is to accept teamness and territoriality — i.e. the terms and limitations of the playing field.

Grappling exclusively with the work of philosophy, Althusser addresses the problem of impartiality and partisanship through a careful rereading of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism in "Lenin and Philosophy" (surprisingly one of the least cited essays in Lenin and Philosophy):

This word [partisanship as Lenin deploys the term] sounds like a directly political slogan in which partisan means a political party.

And yet, any half-way close reading of Lenin ... will show that it is a concept and not just a slogan.

Lenin is simply observing that all philosophy is partisan, as a function of a basic tendency, against the opposing basic tendency, via the philosophies which represent it. But [and this is the clincher] at the same time, he is observing that the vast majority of philosophers put a great price on being able to declare publicly and prove that they are not partisan because they do not have to be partisan.

Within the frame of the western tradition philosophy is philosophy and not politics — a position Derrida famously maintained until the end. However:

In Lenin's view, these tendencies [claims to impartiality via the universality of reason in western philosophy] are finally related to class positions and therefore to class interests.

For Althusser, as for Lenin, appeals to impartiality on the terrain of philosophy are a smokescreen. The statement is fair.

Again, these thoughts are sketched out in haste. Nonetheless — and regardless of whether or not one situates class as the determinate element in a theory of philosophy, science, politics or poetics as I am inclined to — partisanship as a concept is indispensable. But at a moment when a number of poetry communities are committed to ideas of groupness, it's also crucial to imagine an idea of partisanship without party, without school, without movement.

INDEPENDENCE DAY | EPHEMERA | DEMOCRACY

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:40:00 +0000

A week ago I was fortunate enough to carve out some time to print a hastily set broadside for Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider just hours before they read at Rust Belt Books here in Buffalo on June 25th. Media announced the death of Michael Jackson earlier that evening. No full moon but somehow all the shithouse wild ones holed up in this crippled city seemed to find their way to Allen Street that night. Strange times all around.

Given the mercenary character of the broadside I was only able to run off a small handful of them and gave all but one to Lindsay and Rider. The poem — drawn from an ongoing collaborative series between the two — frames "the stomach for you" as "a liquid / as though democracy / is a caryatid kidney." Democracy as a caryatid kidney and also the freedom to: a) vote in a CNN Situation Room viewers' poll; b) bury your view in blog comment boxes at the New York Times; c) choose between Pepsi and loganberry pop at Jim's Steakout on the corner of Elmwood and Allen.

(Loganberry: hybrid developed through the unholy union of the European red raspberry and the American blackberry. Loganberry pop: our kidneys filter this highfructose corn syrup slop and are neither strengthened nor destroyed by it.)

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died just a few hours apart on Independence Day, 1826. Whitman was then five years old.

(Mark Lombardi:

Post-Independence Jefferson and Adams discussed the design of the Great Seal of the US. In a letter to Adams, Jefferson — an avid Anglo-Saxonist that angled to situate the study of Anglo-Saxon as a staple of mandatory education — considered including an image of Hengst and Horsa on the reverse side of the seal, confident these Saxon warrior-politicos embodied "the form of government we have assumed" (Cf. Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins). In Bede's Ecclesiastical History, a text especially important to Jefferson, we find Hengst and Horsa were invited to post-Roman Britain by Vortigern to aid in defending the region against invaders from the north. Accepting the invitation, Hengst and Horsa used the occasion to undermine Vortigern's trust, conquer Britain and occupy the region indefinately.

Today the reverse side of the seal features the totalizing gaze of the Eye of Providence radiating outward and is accompnaied by a quote from the Aeneid: "Novus Ordo Seclorum." The scope of the ambition embedded in the phrase is global.

I recall a Dorn poem titled "Song Called Thomas Jefferson" but can't seem to find it at the moment.

Tocqueville: "Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendents and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."

Before the Rust Belt reading Lindsay gave me a copy of Francis Crot's Xena: Warrior Princess (Critical Documents 2008):

Xena is a mighty warrior, everyone knows that. She can wound her enemy in the belly without damaging his skin. She is a master strategian. She once commanded an army of insects in a victory over an amry of people, though the insects were two to one outnumbered. She can make the kind of mistakes nobody makes nice nice. Xena is a skilled sea woman. She learned to sail and fish from a corsair admiral, whose beard changed length with the tides and sometimes rushed and hissed with breakers. He tutored Xena's heart to swim like a fish through her body, so that her enemies never know where to pierce her. Xena is an unsurpassed tumbler. She can spring up the side of a mountain which crumbled to dust centuries ago or climb up a flock of birds or bats or the barks of a pack of dogs. Xena was incensed and had no plans to tire.

No secret: Francis Crot = Jow Lindsay. Last year's Veer Off anthology includes Crot's curiously titled "PRESSURE IN CHESHIRE, or TOWARDS A TRAGEDY OF BEYONCE KNOWLES, a discovery of the late and bloody treason in Cheshire, including a true detection obv. of the doings of Arthur House, unfolding certain diverse speeches with his conspirators in the canting tongue of gypsies, beggars, thieves, cheats &c, useful for all sorts of people, especially immigrants, to secure their money and preserve their lives, together with the names of those notables that should have been slain, and also including a tragic brief of the life, dignites, benefactions, principal actions, sufferings and deaths of the Pooja Ali and Paul Litle-Kiev, lately of Chester, faithfully recorded by F.C. and illustrated and C.C.C.L. of Edinburgh this year; to which is added, A NOTE ON THE CONDITIONAL, or the institution, ceremonies and laws of conditional aid, digested into one body by Jow Lindsay; and also OBSERVATIONS ON SUBTERRANEAN FIRES by Sir Thomas Pope Blount, Baronet, salted with the wit of Harvey Gabriel et al.; printed by Stephen Mooney et al. of Veer Books in London, in the Summertime of 2008."

My landlord tells me — just now — the Seneca Casino at Niagara Falls is packed today.

MISC. NOTES ON FLARF, CONCEPTUAL WRITING &c

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:47:00 +0000

Q: What happens when a gaggle of middle-aged financially-secure nobodaddys tell an old boring joke as if it were new and not boring?

A: Their ponzi schemes are backed by cultural and economic muscle and richly rewarded. The Whitney. The latest issue of Poetry. Viz. whoever's got the cash can make it sing. Nothing tough or edgy in making cultural capital that challenges nothing sing like a nightingale. It always has the blessing of power.

Or:

GRANDMA'S EXPLODING DIARRHEA
=
GRANDMA GOT RUN OVER BY A REINDEER

The joke is safe — like a knock-knock joke. As such boring and old. We share these side-splitting, hilarious jokes with our grandparents over Thanksgiving dinner. These jokes are a species of gratitude that never goes unrewarded. We give thanks by reproducing them.

And if we ironize the boring jokes our grandparents so admire.

Perhaps then we can share them with our grandparents and our friends and cop cheap laughs from both. We can stay out late, impress our pals with something resembling avant-garde "edginess" and at the same time climb into the good graces of the old folks at home. We can have our cake and eat it too. And we can say let them eat cake and boldly call it a shit sandwich because it really is a shit sandwich and our grandmother looking back on her own care-free days as a sprite middle-aged fleamarket giveaway will say, "Those zany kids. They're a wild bunch. But at least they pay their bills on time."

The joke is. Is why we pay our bills on time. Is what guarantees the interminable flow of bills. In other words, the same virtues we admire in the succesful sale of the joke are those we admire in Bernie Madoff. Ponzi schemes are nothing new. Like any appeal to avant-garde practice they promise futures based on forward-looking projections engineered to fool and fail and reproduce themselves like rabbits. They gleefully enter into an already entrenched feedback loop and are in fact produced within it. Like capital. A feedback loop. They profit by it — are constitutive of it — are grist for the mist-producing mill.

__________________________________________

The avant-garde is a risk taken at another fool's expense. Like financial markets, avant-gardes anticipate future outcomes. They anticipate anticipations of future outcomes. They make poorly informed investments based on the probabilty of these outcomes and when their far-sighted investments give way to catastrophic but highly profitable short-term results they're handsomely rewarded by the market and protected from their failure by the state. Their failures are regarded as forms of success achieved by way of a certain daring-do.

Put differently, what publicly announces itself as avant-garde through market and state funded megaphones scarcely ever is. Their daring lies in doing what others have done with the blessing of the market.

(NOTE: The spectacular failure of GM should not be considered apart from its decision to manufacture military vehicles — the Hummer — for civilian consumption. Responding in part to Arnold Schwarzenegger's desire for a street-legal version of the HMMWV, the American Motors Corporation began churning out a civilian version of the Hummer in 1992 and then sold the brand name to GM in 1998. Defending the manufacture of these super-sized, hyper-aggressive, utterly inefficient, economically insensible, rolling disavowals of community, Schwarzenegger exclaimed, "Look at those deltoids!"

It wasn't until GM was muscled into filing for bankruptcy and the Obama admin insisted Rick Wagoner step aside as CEO that GM began brokering deals to unload the Hummer on China. Yet Wagner's disastrous reign at the helm of GM from 2000 to 2009 was rewarded rather than punished, allowing him to saunter into the sunset with millions. After GM lost $30.9 billion in 2008 and accepted however many billions in federal bailout loans, Wagoner's salary increased by 35 percent. In 2007, after announcing the closing of four GM plants, Wagoner's combined pay rose 64 percent to a total of $15.7 million for the year.

Here we find a cowardly form of failure which is in fact a smashing financial success for the engineers of this failure. To laugh all the way to the bank on the back of a destructive joke generated by market forces. The joke is called avant-garde. And like the civilian version of the Hummer, any notion of an avant-garde cannot be disentangled from its martial character. The avantgaird — the coward called hero — can never be considered beyond its relation to notions of leadership, aggression, power and, in the end, military conquest and domination. Shock and awe. This preceded the ground invasion of Baghdad. And this is what the cultural "avant-garde" call for? To be shaken, grabbed by the shirt collar, enraged, unsettled, disgruntled, distrubed and eventually awakened into new forms of consciousness by way of cultural hijinx? This is the joke. From Stein to Tzara to Fluxus to Warhol these challenges to dominant forms of consciousness and the sway of an unconscious grounded in the logic of capitalist accumulation have been for more than a century financially lucrative and economically sound. Warhol behaved like a ruthless investment broker and we worship him for it.

There's a marked difference between a rhetoric of struggle and the rhetoric of military aggression. And any identification with an avant-garde or committment to innovation paves the way for a promising career in the culture industry.

Introducing flarf and conceptual writing for the second or third or thirtieth time in the current number of Poetry, Kenny Goldsmith situates what he claims are two "movements" as "two sides of the same coin." Are these social or cultural "movements" as such? Where does Eurocentric economically-privileged coterie end and the expansive popular appeal of a "movement" begin? Are these "movements" global in scale (and do they cut across internally differentiated communities) or is this simply another artificially-constructed self-appointed center presenting itself as representative of the whole (viz. the bulk of contributors to the feature are grounded in the US)? Is disjunction really "dead" or is it a strategy that continues to offer different but nonetheless productive ways of grappling with similar or shared concerns? Must one practice be disavowed, smeared and disarmed in order to valorize or identify the usefulness of another? This either/or logic is oddly reminiscent of Bush admin rhetoric (i.e. you're either with us or you're with the terrorists) and curiously in alignment with the ill-tempered, bourgeois rhetoric of avant-garde manifestos from the nineteenth century on.

For Goldsmith "digital environments" set flarf and conceptual po apart from other approaches, allowing this "new writing" to "continually morph from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs." Fuck. This just seems like a negligibly small part taking credit for the work of the whole. If we can bracket out the digital divide and issues of economic privilege, who in the whole of the western world is not producing work that "continually morphs" in this way? Kamau Brathwaite's x/self provides a powerful and well-known early example of the overdetermined relation between digital and print technologies Goldsmith insists characterize this (viz. his) "new writing." If we consider contemporary letterpress production, much of it wouldn't be possible without digital technologies (i.e. the electronic transfer of photoshopped image files for the production of photopolymer plates used on otherwise obsolete proof presses). Who isn't aware of the interplay and confluence of conventional, obsolete and emergent technologies that make the present multiplicity of poetries and poetry communities possible?

The insistence that this writing is fundamentally "new" is itself nothing new and in fact disguises in an especially pernicious way commitments to unnamed traditions and tendencies (i.e. the fetishization of newness and innovation that emerges with the rise of industrial production and consumer culture; the slavish privileging of a temporality that destructively pits a hastily discarded past against a recklessly misread present and ill-conceived future).

Nihil Novi. WCW remarks somewhere or other than the avant-garde is nothing more than a set of stubborn peasant loyalties. An uninterrogated fidelity to innovation is undoubtedly one of these loyalties.

But if this writing is "new" in some fundamental way (recall the necessity of newess as an indispensable category for Adorno in Aesthetic Theory; his careful theorization of the new that insists on the separation of surface charm from deep structural differences), then how is it new? Plagiarism, pouching and citationality are practices old as the hills and were certainly coeval with the rise of Enlightenment commitments to authorship, copyright debates and notions of intellectual properties. Goldsmith tells us no practitioner of flarf or conceptual writing has written even a word in the conventional sense: "It's been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry." Based on this description, what appears to separate the "new writing" from, say, Eliot's Wasteland, Pound's Cantos, Benjamin's Arcades Project or any number of Alan Halsey texts is that this work is not disjunctive or "shattered" but crammed "into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard." In other words the practices Goldsmith regards as fundamentally new are heaps of (presumably unedited, uncurated and potentially unread) signs. Heaps of them.

Referring to his Historia Brittonum, Nennius remarked in the eighth century, "I have made a heap of all that I could find." In this heap are any number of indeterminacies, ambiguities and contradictions that Nennius was arguably aware of. David Jones, a disciple of Eliot's, begins his Anathemata with this quote from Nennius and then, after an unusually long preface not unlike those found in works of conceptual poetry, invites us to enter into his impressively complex and contradictory heap of information. But in the case of conceptual writing and flarf it's unclear what is particularly new beyond the use of digital technologies (for instance, how can we not see the continuity that cuts across procedural conceptual works like Jackson Mac Low's Words nd Ends from Ez and Caroline Bergval's Shorter Chaucer Tales or Steve McCaffery's "The Property: Comma" and Christian Bok's "Great Order of the Universe"?

To beg the question again and again: what makes any of this new? Unrelenting critiques of subjectivity (a deep skepticism of identity, expressibility and sincerity)? These have been with us for — wot — more than half a fucking century, as have investigations of flux, fluidity, indeterminacy and undecidability.

Beyond insisting on the newness of the new writing, Goldsmith also leans on "materiality" as a concept. But he seems to confuse it with perhaps mass or excess. In the production of digitally produced excess (viz. the "repurposing" or "regurgitation" of excess information in works like Day, Traffic and The Weather) Goldsmith believes "Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seem to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean." In other words, not representation or signification — no exterior scene or self mediated through a seemingly transparent system of signs and corresponding referents — but a sort of truth to materials as old as Mondrian and Stein. Appeals to notions of materialism and materiality get a lot of play these days, but when a figure like Zizek refers to himself as a materialist philosopher he means this in the post-Hegelian sense (arguably the Marxist sense precisely in spite of his early critiques of Marx by way of a Hegel filtered through Lacan). But what Goldsmith seems to mean by materiality is grounded in the quantity/quality split, matter over mind, body over spirit, etc. Investigations of materialism and materiality in the present moment typically refuse or trouble this split and seek rather to consider the overdetermined relation between the material and ideological conditions of existence (that is, the relations of production are recognized as material relations. Materiality as a concept usually addresses much more than simply the product manufactured by way of these relations. In any case — given Warhol &c — attention to "materiality," citationality and reproducibility is in itself nothing particularly new.

Google: what flarf folk do with search engines, wiki technologies and other web-based applications Ashbery, Bruce Andrews, Bern Porter, Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles and innumerable others have done with print objects and sound texts.

At bottom there's nothing at all fundamentally new about the "new writing." The new boss bears a striking resemblance to the old boss. Perhaps defetishizing innovation and directing attention away from newness and toward shared concerns or sources of pleasure might be the most innovative thing any contemporary writing could hope to achieve.

__________________________________________________

If we think about Lang Po as an Anglophone "movement" or (richly heterogeneous) tendency we don't have to look too hard to find calls for innovation and newness (Ron Silliman's New Sentence being the obvious example). But for my money the most useful catalog of Lang Po concerns and achievements appears in a 2007 academic book review by Steve McCaffery and mentions neither innovation nor newness but instead the practices that emerged out of a culturally specific historical conjuncture. Reviewing Jennifer Ashton's From Modernism to Postmodernism for the summer number of Twentieth-Century Literature, McCaffery critiques Ashton's narrowly defined view of Lang Po and writes:

A contrived textual indeterminacy was but a single facet of Language poetry, a facet alongside a critique of voice and authenticity, an embrace of artifice, a laying bare of the method of production, a preference for heteroglossia over monoglossia while at the same time rejecting narrative modalities, and a general critique of instrumental language under capitalism, mass mediation, and the consciousness industry — all key elements in its early theorizing. Moreover, fragmentation, disjunction, grammatical transgression, and catachresis are ... modernist tactics reincorporated in a different historical moment ...

Beyond associating with Lang Po all of the characteristics (except use of digital technologies) that Goldsmith suggests separate flarf and conceptual po from earlier tendencies, McCaffery avoids the rhetoric of innovation in this description of Lang Po's concerns and achievements.

_________________________________________________

Recall Goldsmith's January 13, 2009 posting to the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog—a post saturated with nostalgia for an early twentieth-century avant-garde he identifies himself with, unabashedly referring to himself as an "avantist." Comparing the economic and political contours of the present moment to those that characterized the shift from roaring twenties to depression era thirties in the last century, Goldsmith buys into the utterly untenable split between high art and low art, good art and bad art, illegible or difficult work and intelligible or popular work. He predicts this historical conjuncture (marked by Obama’s tenure as president) will yield a base and terribly unsophisticated populist order of cultural production. For him this moment recalls "the exile of adventurous art during the Depression when intelligibility wiped innovation off the map…."

The crucial terms in the statement are of course "intelligibility" and "innovation"—terms Goldsmith sets up as mutually exclusive categories. Here intelligibility is equated with the low, the popular, the seemingly readable—in other words, forms of culture so dummed-down that a slobbering rabble untrained in the arts can apprehend and delight in cultural objects produced by formally trained intellectuals and artists. But Goldsmith would be the first to point out that such intelligibility, such accessibility, is itself only an illusion grounded in the notion of a mythic popular audience, a mythic popular reader, a mythic masses. What Goldsmith seems to fear most is that artists and writers, scholars and critics, will buy into this myth. By buying into the myth of a popular intelligibility Goldsmith believes we foreclose on the possibility of popularizing—or exposing the rabble to—authentic forms of cultural and artistic innovation (i.e. formal techniques that can somehow be authenticated by an advance party, a messianic few, and then set apart from those forms that aspire to reach a seething mass of idiots through intelligibility. Goldsmith situates innovation and newness in a privileged position, one that attempts to conceal the relation between the culture industry's lust for innovation on one hand and the market forces that rely on appeals to innovation and newness on the other. Goldsmith also fails to point out that what Peter Bürger long ago referred to as an historic avant-garde—an avant-garde historically located and responding to specific situations—stood in aggressive opposition to the institutions and institutionalization of art. In other words, the very same avant-garde of the nineteen teens and twenties that Goldsmith nostalgically looks back to worked in fact to destroy the cultural institutions Goldsmith presently supports and depends on.

________________________________________________

These notes necessarily incomplete. And at the Niagara International Airport a few days back I saw an adolescent dragging a set of clubs after what must've been a lovely stint on the golf course in Myrtle Beach. He wore a shirt with a smiley face, smile turned upside down into a frown and a tear rolling down the cheek. The text above the face read "CHEER UP EMO KID!"

Aside from wondering what's especially innovative about Gary Sullivan's Brainardesque comic in the Poetry mag flarf feature, I also wonder how dated, banal and completely inoffensive the emo joke is. For a community that fetishizes contemporaneity and innovation, it's surprising to find such an old boring joke still in circulation. Emo = bowdlerized pejorative for emotionally needy bourgeois kids that first emerged as a subgenre of music with DC's Rites of Spring in the mid 80s. Later what? K Records? The mid-90s Olympia scene? In any case, a handful of the records sit here within arm's reach but in the end a genre I was never particularly fond of. In its present usage, a community of kids (adolescents? or for Sullivan confessional poets committed to bankrupt notions of creativity and self-expression?) that make a delightfully easy target.

*yawn*

Like spitting on a scrub at the front of the cheese wagon, who of any consequence will come to their defense? Isn't this what the culture industry wants, produces, demands — that ridiculing, hyper-competetive cultural mirror of market forces that privileges muscle at the expense of those without? Where's the courage, the risk, the avant-garde bravado, in ridiculing a defenseless and (evidently for Sullivan) vaguely defined community of poets, artists or knuckleheads otherwise shoved around by hyper-masculine frat boys, high school football heroes or former cowards with a narrow slice of cultural and economic clout? This is precisely the sort of Malthusian survival-of-the-fittest approach to cultural production and criticism that greases the gears of the market. These approaches are always rewarded. Big fucking surprise.

MICAH ROBBINS | INTERBIRTH BOOKS | DALLAS TX

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:49:00 +0000

It's not often I encounter a handmade, small press book printed, hand-stitched and bound in multiple signatures like those Micah Robbins has produced under the mantle of his Interbirth imprint. The books are exquisitely built with a measure of care and patience comparable to his facility as editor / curator.

Robbins presently has three titles available: David Hadbawnik's Ovid in Exile, Mary Burger's A Partial Handbook for Navigators and Inter 01: Poetry, Prose Plays and Prints. The last of the three is the first anthology in an ongoing series containing work published monthly at the Interbirth site. Each month Robbins features a single author. Some months back—maybe even a year ago now—I had the good fortune of being included in the project and have a few poems appearing alongside an impressive cast of poets and artists. Contributors include: David Hadbawnik, Erin Pringle, Hoa Nguyen, Clifton Riley, Sharon Yablon, Amy Trachtenburg, Mary Burger, Kyle Schlesinger, Christian Peet, Lauren Dixen and Francis Raven.

Robbins curatorial sensibility is something to behold, the juxtaposition of one contributor against another giving rise to otherwise unanticipated formations. His ability to situate work so that certain aspects or particular readings are foregrounded discloses the extent to which editing is a highly interpretive practice. The hand of an editor—like the market—is neither invisible nor disinterested.

This inaugural installment of the Inter series includes an epigraph from Gary Snyder that tells us, at the very least, the source of the imprint's title:

It may well be that rebirth (or interbirth, for we are actually mutually creating each other and all things while living) is the objective fact of existence which we have not yet brought into conscious knowledge and practice.

The seven signatures of Inter 01 are bound in a Long Stitch between two handmade coversheets. Unfortunately only 26 were produced and I imagine most if not all are gone. The two earlier titles brought out by Robbins in editions of 100 (Hadbawnik's Ovid and Burger's Handbook) were both bound in bookboard using a coptic stitch and both are still available.

I'm not sure exactly how to think it, but there's a poetics of struggle, excess or exhaustion in Robbins' approach to editing and bookmaking. Each project seems to exceed any number of limits (labor, strength, material and possibly financial resources, etc). There's also an ethics at play in Robbins' work. The cost for each title ranges between $15.00 and $25.00 dollars—figures which clearly fail to include the hours of labor invested in reading, editing, making (I recall now the itemization of labor in Robert Duncan's prospectus for Groundwork, that he recognized the work of the poet as a form of labor that one should be able to live by).

Editing and publishing. I wish there were a single word, a single concept that would allow for thinking these practices as part of a larger single practice. No one concept allows for imagining editing, criticism, paper-making, printing, binding, distribution, etc as part of a single practice yet for many of us these activities are each part of a single but unnameable activity. Anna Moschovakis, Matvei Yankelevich and others at Ugly Duckling Presse refer to their role in editing/bookmaking as "shepherding"—a concept that seems, on one hand, to minimize their role in bringing a book out and, on the other, to allow for the inclusion of activities that fall outside the rubric of editing or publishing. Diminishing the role of an editor/maker is troubling for me, but making a gesture toward a more flexible and inclusive concept, one that addresses precisely what small press publishers do, is crucial. Either way, I can't imagine a single word that adequately addresses what Robbins does. Shepherding comes close.

ONE ROOM TO ANOTHER: ROBIN BLASER (1925-2009)

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:42:00 +0000

Charles Bernstein sent out a message to the Buffalo Poetics list re-marking Robin Blaser's passing. Blaser died this morning just a few days shy of what would have been his 84th birthday.

Spicer on Blaser (Vancouver Lectures): "Robin Blaser once said in talking about a serial poem that it's as if you go into a room, a dark room, the light is turned on for a minute, then it's turned off again, and then you go into a different room where a light is turned on and off."

The picture of Blaser above—out of focus—is one I snapped during a reading he gave at Trinity Church on Delaware Avenue during the October 2006 Creeley conference here in Buffalo. Despite the poor focus I find the image pleasurable. It seems to disclose a quality in Blaser utterly undefinable to me but something uniquely his own. We see this same quality in early photographs of Blaser. It is the jaw perhaps—maybe the brow—something that comes with the calm, certainty and confidence of a stone in the wood. Self-possessed.

The Creeley conference happened the weekend of a storm that quickly unfolded into a destructive sort of arborgeddon. Winter snow arrived a season too early and as it settled on the turning but unfallen leaves of thousands of trees across the region it brought many of them crashing down across roads, driveways, powerlines, homes, cars and trucks. Much of the city was without electric for several days if not a week. The beginning of the storm coincided with the first day of the conference. Neither Bernstein nor Marjorie Perloff were able to make it. Fortunately Blaser, Ashbery, Rosemarie Waldrop, Anne Lauterbach, Michael Davidson, Stephen Fredman and others were. The mayor of Buffalo declared a city-wide state of emergency and placed a 24-hour ban on driving but the conference unfolded largely as planned.

When Blaser first arrived at the opening reception with DuPlessis, Peter Quartermain, Ashbery, Peter Middleton and others in a large conversion van driven by Michael Cross, I recall Blaser making his way through several inches of snow, ascending the stone steps of the chapel flanked on one side by Michael and the other by his partner David. At 81 years old Blaser moved with a measure of dignity and grace I found myself stunned by. And his body, like his movements, appeared delicate—not fragile but delicate and unswerving. I see this same delicacy, the quiet fall of light metrical feet, in his sense of the line (i.e. "Forest I": "this lovely mind, but the word fall is, for me, too loaded / with a theological beforeness—rather, he or she may step / into oblivion—the state or act of being forgotten—an / answer in real terms—philosophical as they are—of our exit / from origin, that summertime and lacy curtain where we become")

At times Blaser willfully undercuts this delicacy—this measured grace—to great effect with unmasked indignation, scathing irony and humor. Take "The Skill," first written in 1975 and later revised in 2004:

the heart must not be confused
with the body—
the lives of the star-fuckers
who believe a quick rub-down
and come will turn them
into this poetic, thoughtful
art—must not be mistaken
for the desire they never had
except to be beyond themselves
and I love this desire
to go beyond...

A desire to move beyond oneself, the body as permeable shell or discarded shield (that Archilochus fragment, Lattimore's trans:

Some barbarian is waving my shield,
since I was obliged to
leave that perfectly good piece of equipment behind
under a bush.
But I got away, so what does it matter?
Let the shield go; I can buy another one equally good.

Blaser read the opening night of the conference, shortly after the reception. The size of the crowd was surprising given the circumstances (by 7:00 or so in the evening a deep, rolling thunder punctuated the calm of Trinity Church while snow continued to fall and accumulate.

The theological. This was a church (Episcopal) and the podium Blaser and others were to read from was situated immediately in front of the altar. I think now of Blaser's Nerval—Les Chimeres. The epigraph by Jean-Paul that opens "Christ Among the Olives" in both Nerval's French and Blaser's translation: "god is dead! The sky is empty / weep, children, you no longer have a father." According to Stan Persky (his comment in Caterpillar 12) when Blaser read Les Chimeres to he and Spicer shortly after completing it Spicer remarked, "I wish I could write such an apocolypse." Ἀποκάλυψις. A revelation. To lift the veil—that a translation once removed from the source might cut to the chase and disclose or make a forward-looking gesture toward the real. To point us in the direction. The gesture is deeply theological but grounded in a carefully imagined system which, as Bernstein says in his afterward to The Holy Forest , "is wholly secular."

When Blaser stepped up to the podium in front of the altar at Trinity he began to read but couldn't be heard. People in the audience (everyone seated in pews) began shouting, encouraging him to get closer to the microphone. And it snowed out. Each time he stepped closer to the mic people told him to get even closer. And no matter how much closer he got we still couldn't hear him. This went on for what felt like an absurd length of time until finally Blaser climbed up on the mic and mimed a hummer, as if he planned to take the mic into his mouth whole. He asked, "Is that loud enough for you?" And at precisely that moment a sonorous shock of thunder rattled the stained-glass windows of the church. No joke. No hyperbole. Thunder crashed. A priceless moment. A sacred moment. I can't recall if he read from Les Chimeres but I would like to think that he did.

Through the reception, up to that moment, the Church was somber and tense—seeming more a memorial for Creeley than a celebration of his life and work. But Blaser's gesture seemed to break the tension and realign the event. A desperately needed gesture of defiance in an oppressively sacred space. The gesture was apocalyptic, disclosing at one and the same time something about the present moment and also the unactualized possibilities embedded in it. I would like to think of his poetry—his Cups, his Faerie Queene, his Nerval—as work that performs in a similar way, a way that reimagines the sacred, redefines the theological and redirects our attention to the primacy of a particular type of heart capable of moving freely from one space to another, from one room to another. In "The Truth Is Laughter 6" Blaser begins with the following lines:

moving from one room to another a shocked
resilient heart...

And closes the poem with a quote from Blake:

'I cannot,' he wrote, 'consider death as anything
but a removing from one room to another.'

LATTA: CLARK | KEROUAC | ALLUVIAL DEPOSITS

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 05:41:00 +0000

To come across a blog that's not merely information, caster oil or any other pharmaceutical we desperately need but don't necessarily want. To encounter something else. What is a pleasure to read — that jumps and bumps with the same force rhythm speed differentiation and wildly shifting registers that first drew me as a young man to Melville, Crane, Hopkins, WCW, Pound, Olson, Loy, Howe &c — the big guns that made reading a pleasure and not a duty. Like throwing a record on the turntable or pulling a book from the shelf when one doesn't want to work. When one has had enough of work. This is Latta's Isola di Rifiuti. A blessing that strategically understates itself.

Latta mentions "alluvials" in a March 12 posting — a concept Kerouac appeals to when describing the work of Lester Young. Clark Coolidge later devotes some attention to this notion of the alluvial in Now It's Jazz. Like Pound's notion of the Luminous Detail or what Benjamin refers to as the memory that flashes up in a moment of danger, an alluvial is a deposit, a thing distilled, left behind, evidence or trace of prior movement. According to the OED alluvium are deposits of transported matter left by water flowing over land. Disparate and displaced elements of an interminably moving moment bent on echoing itself over and over — a moment that insists on announcing its already having happened but never as it happened.

The very idea of the "alluvial" — as it comes to us through Kerouac via Coolidge and now Latta — is itself alluvial: concept deposited and lodged, embedded and reproduced in dislocated discussions removed countless times from any discernible trace of a source. To drag a rake over a field of cultural production and measure the historically determinate confusion it yields.

Thoreau meditating on a railroad embankment (included in McCaffery and Rasula's Imagining Language):

When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.

That language, memory, the cobbled histories and perniciously convoluted forms of consciousness potentially operate as such. Alluvium as concept has perhaps the potential to be developed further and drawn into discussions of history, memory, consciousness and the unconscious. What comes to us through contingent arteries. Fractals. Broken bits. All things incompleat. Etc.

AMIRI BARAKA | ED DORN & THE WESTERN WORLD

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:17:00 +0000

Amiri Baraka's essay Ed Dorn & the Western World arrived yesterday — the chapbook an exquisitely designed title brought out jointly by Effing Press and Skanky Possum. Edited and introduced by Dale Smith, the essay is a welcome intervention that points toward the ongoing importance of Dorn, Olson and Black Mountain to Baraka's poetics and articulates well with the work Claudia Pisano's been doing for the past couple of years with the Jones-Dorn correspondence. The essay was first delivered as the keynote address at the University of Colorado's Ed Dorn Symposium in 2008. But unlike a formal keynote talk the essay moves like a memoir fueled by Baraka's desire to mark the signal moments of his decades long and at times tense relationship with Dorn.

As Dale writes in his introduction:

Baraka has provided here a rare living document that presents dynamic motivations for ideas and actions that defined the period for him. The vision he offers is of strife, argument, and struggle to attain self-definition against the ideological positions that contested individual freedom of perception and speech. In an era where the heart and mind of the individual are under assault by every element of our so-called culture it is instructive to attend to Baraka's comments carefully.

The period Dale refers to extends from the late fifties, when Baraka and Dorn first began corresponding, through the nineties when their correspondence came to a gradual close. But the thrust of the essay concerns itself with encountering and responding to the west or westness, Baraka reflecting back on the way emerging crises specific to their moment but symptomatic of a more deeply seated longue durée forced him and Dorn to radically rethink their poetics and break from dominant cultural tendencies. As Baraka locates his own transition in the jump from Greenwich Village uptown, Baraka sees the transitional moment for Dorn embodied in his departure for the UK:

So that it was not just Jones journeying through the land of Blackness to become Baraka up through Harlem... there had been deep change in Dorn, but one that had been always sharp in observation, perception is poetry he said, brilliant in rationalization, and the use he made of it in poetry and in practice. The journey away from the states was to me, his own way of signaling the breakup of our camp.

Dorn bounces to England in 1964 to teach at the University of Essex as a Fulbright scholar — a moment that gives rise to much of Geography (1965) and all of The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), both first published by Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum Press. The years in England also see Dorn developing early drafts of what would later become Slinger. So what Baraka identifies as a break for both he and Dorn in the mid-sixties can be sensed to some extent through Dorn's early publication history, his first two titles coming out through Baraka's Totem Press (in association with Ted Wilentz's Corinth) in New York and the following titles published between 1964 and 1967 brought out by Montgomery in London. This break can also be located in the shifting form of the poems contained in Dorn's early collections, the shorter lyrical interludes of the first two books (The Newly Fallen and Hands Up!) giving way to much longer and at times far more ascerbic meditations. Where the lyrical character of the earlier work registers in large part as eulogy or playful celebrations, the work brought out in London through the mid sixties snaps and bites with a cantankerousness and cynicism commensurate with Baraka's increasingly militant position following the assassination of Malcolm X.

But it's in thinking through how he and Dorn each approached an idea of the west that allows Baraka to point toward a deeper continuity in their individual poetics and their enduring friendship:

The moving out to investigate the real West the Westness of us, that is the real openness, freshness, innovation of America the promise is to finally see that this promise has been the threatened future of this world.

Or as he says of Dorn's west:

...the West for Dorn was not just the western part of the United States but that is how he got to the bigness of the whole West. That Western World that Europe claims and has never been.

Or as Dorn says himself in "Song: Europa" (Geography):

The brutality of your frankness
has come to me
inches at a time,
and so slowly the pain marches
through the veins of my soul
with the heavy step of a migrating herd
tramping out the vintage

Just as Baraka's early work as Leroi Jones tends to enjoy more critical attention than the poetry produced after the transformation into Baraka, Dorn's Slinger tends to be read in isolation from those poems produced before and after, dislocated from the broader field it emerges out of — a field of work Baraka suggests coheres to some extent through Dorn's lifelong investigation of the west as both an interminably broken promise and a space of possibility.

MICHAEL CROSS | IN FELT TREELING | WORKING NOTES

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:07:00 +0000

In a recent review of George Albon's Momentary Songs Michael Cross writes, "When I’m really listening to Oppen [not Albon], I find it difficult to read anything without demanding that each word, each lone phrase... call into question the ground it has just established." The same set of demands Cross places on each word, begging each to self-reflexively investigate the conditions — the consequences — of its own call to being no matter the poet, are demands we can responsibly place on his own work. At even a quick glance, In Felt Treeling announces itself as a careful project that unfolds with a keen awareness of the material force of language and the need to develop a language that might adequately respond to the present cultural moment.

On the level of form, the work is a libretto — a form that immediately calls attention to the intersection of text and sound, poetry and music. Libretto. Libro. A relation to the book — a text-based semantic construction that, in Cross' appeal to the form, rigorously thinks its complicated relation to sound through sound. Presenting In Felt Treeling as a Libretto reminds us also that the composition of such work typically resides not with a composer but with a poet, one working in collaboration with a composer or with a prearranged composition. And it is precisely the character of this working with embedded in the libretto form that calls our attention to certain signal words and phrases that recur throughout the work, particularly the words "yield" and "cede":

a smith / wrought burlesque
handsome and to yield / and yield alike
forthright / cede
thy static / chatter there
a useless slag / of villainy

Vengeance. Process of inquiry. Accountability. This is the figure of Eumenides speaking. In Felt Treeling: a libretto — text containing both stage direction and dialogue. Here there are three characters: Eumenides, Lavinia and Forest. Eumenides = Furies. Lavinia of the Aeneid, Titus Andronicus — of another source or perhaps a conflation of these instantiations of the figure. A language of the pastoral ("petals to the ground," "beneath the sycamore / drew crystal to the wood," etc) courses through the work suggesting Shakespeare's Lavinia — and it is this Lavinia, raped and silenced in order to preserve an order of force operating both through and beyond legitimate forms of power, that allows us to think the multiple forms of "yielding" and "ceding" the poem grapples with.

The question the poem relentlessly thinks over and over again is one of gender and its relation to force. But there's the role of language in figuring gender: "useless slag," "wrought burlesque," "debutante," "pasties." On the terrain of gender class difference lends itself to shoring up a zero sum game. But what is it to "yield" and what is it to "cede"? To yield to power is perhaps not to give up power but to accept its terms, allowing it to legislate and effectively determine relations (viz Lavinia's attackers — and later her father — ape the contours of power, yielding to it but not ceding it). And what is it for Lavinia to yield and what does she have to cede beyond the character of a living always already subordinate to the force of those that unknowingly yield to the demands of power? What would it mean for those that yield to power to cede force? Even Eumenides — the Furies — operates by way of an ethics of vengeance registered in an economy of force.

Force. The Forest. A character without dialogue. And a forest is not a ground. An undisclosed narrator discloses the character of this Forest to us. And the character of this persona too is imbricated in a discourse of force and is perhaps force itself or the spaces of relation through which force moves. The narrator tells us:

             (desiccate too tied yield
                                     a tint in berths
                  the upper wealth enlaced
                                               a sanction
                             vines the more still   
                                 virus in the grass

For this Forest, the space within which Eumenides and Lavinia move, the question of yielding is also central. Desiccate. To be desiccate. Lacking in spirit. This too tied yield — possibly an ability to yield, to defer, to renounce the demands of force. Forest itself, the space through which we move, is itself complicit. A form of contagion resides in the grass (recall Burroughs' remark: language operates like a virus).

Like Zukofsky's 80 Flowers or Hopkins' "Harry Ploughman" the poem involves a relentless play of torsion and tension at the level of sound. The insistence on non-normative syntactic formations calls one's attention to sound first — to signal words and phrases and their ability to generate latent but unremarked meanings through a commitment to turning, twisting, reconfiguring. Through the poem familiar words unfold again and again into strange formations and specific narrative contexts such that we've no choice but to reconsider these familiar words and attend to them more carefully, considering the consequences and potentialities embedded in their material force.

As ever, I may be grossly misreading the work. But the book is unsettling. The questions it pursues. The work is difficult — the narrative architecture of the work disclosing just enough to make demands on the reader that work which completely jettison's narrative structure typically does not.

OBAMA ON ORGANIZING

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:35:00 +0000

After reading a Huffington Post article my wife directed me to, I find myself deeply shocked, a little puzzled but nonetheless euphoric. When is the last time an American president openly — publicly and in unambiguous language — defended the right of workers to organize? Yet shortly after taking office Obama publicly insisted:

We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests, because we know that you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement.

This must be some sort of cruel joke, a let-them-eat-cake remark, a statement launched into the world for ironic effect. But the joke — one unbelievably hard to swallow after the last thirty years of unrelenting antiunion rhetoric — is that this isn't a joke. While I remain deeply skeptical of the Obama administration's strong ties to Chicago School economics and corporate interests (i.e. Obama's National Security Adviser James Jones, like Condoleeza Rice, also has deep connections to Chevron) it's difficult not to be pleasantly stunned and — after the shock — deeply grateful to hear such a statement. Although the conversation around labor and the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is grounded in the homogenizing rhetoric of an American middle class, any insistence by an American president that workers have a right to organize after the destructive outcome of the 1981 Airtraffic Controllers strike is momentous.

The call for a strong labor movement from federal government, a force otherwise openly antagonistic to labor — in conjunction with memory of the corruption of the past eight years and the collapse of the economy — may if nothing else signal the emergence of new forms of consciousness in the US that can create the conditions for an order of change that refuses the destructive myth of a middle class and the principles of a market system rooted in the absurd logic of endless accumulation. Wow. A red letter moment.
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ADDENDUM: Spoke too quickly — foolishly seduced by the unacknowledged possibilities embedded in Obama's call for a strong labor movement. Earlier today Obama endorsed merging teachers' pay with a merit system measured by student performance — a system that would place the burden for success on teachers, effectively holding individuals rather than systemic crises accountable for the succes of students. The call for a merit-based system suggests that the conditions of poverty are in no way connected to the cognitive performance and academic success of students. A by-the-bootstraps Chicago School approach to education.

Obama also expressed a desire to further support and ease restrictions on charter schools — and here it's important to recall the centrality of the charter school system (the privatization of public education) to Milton Friedman's vision of education in a successful market-based economy. Here too Obama's loyalty to the fundamental principles of Chicago School economics pierces through the strategically deployed messianic rhetoric of hope, struggle and patience. Disappointing but not surprising.

GAZA TODAY: AGAIN SNOW SENSITIVE SKIN

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:35:00 +0000

When the conflict in Gaza first erupted almost two weeks ago I found myself turning back to Snow Sensitive Skin, the collaborative book-length work by Rob Halpern and Taylor Brady dedicated to those that died during the Israeli bombing of Beirut in the summer of 2006. The book, drawing its title from a recording of the same name released by Franz Hautzinger's ensemble Oriental Space, acknowledges Mazen Kerbaj's "Starry Night," a piece Kerbaj performed on trumpet to the accompaniment of Israeli bombs raining over Beirut. Like Oriental Space's "Snow Sensitive Skin" and Kerbaj's "Starry Night," the collaborative effort between Halpern and Brady appears to be improvisational. Written during the conflict, the poem is an immediate response to the conflict and, more broadly, a mediation on war dedicated not only to the dead but to "the promise of demilitarized time."

Embedded in the work is the lyric force of a deeply utopian impulse that seems to struggle against the powerlessness of distance and politico-economic disenfranchisement. Like Kerbaj who plays his horn to the sound of falling bombs, the poets are not in a position to physically bring a halt to the bombing, nor do they have the economic power or political sway to do so. Nor are they in a position to stand aside. As the poem unfolds one is alerted to Halpern and Brady's awareness of cultural production as a political force. For them this force is either complicit in the slaughter of war or a force capable of creating the conditions of opposition, even in moments of apparent powerlessness, precisely in spite of apparent powerlessness. But for Halpern and Brady the vexed relation between the aesthetic and the political, the work of poetry and the work of war, is more and indeed something beyond this either/or. The poem attempts to name or speak this beyond or excess, this outside which resides beyond the logic of either/or, aspiring through incongruent semantic juxtapositions and improvisational textual meditations to point toward the mass of contradictions that generate both a desire to end war and also the utopian desire that insists on an art not reducible to bumper-sticker slogan or hack editorial in a time of war:

not into me but into the unforseen
negations of enclosure opposition
being no logic of opposites no
disclosure and nothing's more real
than what we still can't see the events
we're living can't say no to what
separates this place from itself my
body from its own negatives
whose labor's as precise as the wall
we don't need to build a place out-
side the place of mask within this
narrow strip these fake estates

It is an utterly unnamable veiled logic, the grund upon which the logic of either/or resides and depends, that seems to interest Halpern and Brady — "and nothing's more real / than what we still can't see". Halpern and Brady aspire to see this, the what-we-still-can't-see.

The poem is split into seven discrete sections, each beginning with an epigraph that advances an argument, a problem that stands at the point of intersection between conflict, aggression and aesthetic production. Each section articulates with one another, accordion-like, through the nagging presence of a real that can't be seen and is utterly unnameable but which is also the persistent lynchpin of the problematique within which art stands in opposition to action, theory in opposition to practice. This contradiction is bluntly summarized in the epigraph to the sixth section of the poem, a passage from the blog Mazen Kerbaj maintained as bombs fell on Beirut in 2006:

anyways, music and drawing are the only things keeping me going these days.... i always said that i regret not being an adult during the war to see if you can do something in these situations. now i feel bad to draw or play music while people are burning. i convince myself by saying it is my only way to resist. that i have to witness. that it is very important. but i am not very convinced.

But it is not merely the appeal to art or music as modes of witness — as forms of crisis intervention — that trouble Kerbaj. It is the character of cultural production as one witnesses suffering, the impulse to stylize one's testimony as it is constructed in a moment of horror. Kerbaj continues:

i try to be a witness.... in my own way.... i cannot stop saying after a bomb: "yeah, this one was huge. i'll leave a long silence then make a small sound to balance the track." this is totally crazy!

Immediately after this epigraph, on the following page and nowhere near the end of the poem (a point not to be missed or mistaken as false ending), Halpern and Brady write:

So here we've come to the end of something that can
Only be called ourselves having already survived their
Deaths erred on each antagonism systematically drained
Of whatever potential to crush the terms that crush it.

The "survival" here is twofold. The speakers have survived the deaths of others (near or far) but they have also survived deaths "erred" on antagonisms neutralized by the very forces that generate antagonism. In other words, it is the force that generates antagonism and also absorbs and neutralizes the antagonisms it generates which the speakers have survived. This survival is at one and the same time a defeat and a achievement. However slight, there is a space of hope, of hitherto unimagined possibility, couched within the rhetorical complexity of this otherwise rigidly pessimistic statement.

Again and again Halpern and Brady circumnavigate the logic that would pit art against political action, theory against praxis, the aesthetic against the political, questioning the very terms of these oppositions at a time of war, at precisely the moment these binaries are most forcefully mobilized and deployed.

The book — exquisitely edited, designed and printed by Michael Cross and published through his Atticus/Finch press — is out of print. But as bombs fall on Gaza and the flow of power and humanitarian aid to its citizens continues to be blocked or impeded — and as "Joe the Plumber," a figure central to the rhetorical force of the McCaine/Palin campaign, prepares to head to Israel and cover the conflict as a war correspondent for conservative website pjtv.com — the need for work like Snow Sensitive Skin to be available to readers is great, if not — as I'm inclined to insist — urgent.

BOOK ARTS: MIMEO MIMEO 2 JAB 24

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:54:00 +0000

Despite editing a journal of contemporary poetry and bringing out a modest number of single-author publications over the past couple of years, book making and book arts continues to remain something of a mystery to me. In fact, aside from taking a child-like delight in material objects fashioned by hands, my own preference for print over web-based publication is likewise a mystery. I imagine this preference has something to do with durability and care, with the fact that the work I read and edit is present and available to me (and thus to others) in a way web-based work is otherwise not. As print news gradually goes the way of the dodo bird, one newspaper after another shifting from print to exclusive internet publication, the political implications of insisting on print over web-based technologies have never been more important. The moment is one situated at the intersection of print and computer technologies — residual and emergent technologies — and it is precisely here, in the present, that we find the two collapsing into one another, giving rise to otherwise unanticipated forms of cultural production.

The political and material consequences embedded in this transformational moment — or the conditions of possibility contained within the overlap between print and digital technologies — have been at the fore of Kyle Schlesinger's work as poet, scholar, editor and book artist for over a decade. His Cuneiform Press has been with us for a number of years. But the journals he presently co-edits are more recent.

Edited by Schlesinger and Jed Birmingham, the second number of Mimeo Mimeo is no less impressive than the first. As Birmingham and Schlesinger relate in their surprisingly brief editorial statement, "Mimeo Mimeo is a forum for critical and cultural perspectives on artist's books, fine press printing and the mimeograph revolution." Informed by Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, the editors "see the mimeograph as one among many printing technologies (letterpress, offset, silk-screen, photocopiers, computers, etc.) that enabled poets, artists and editors to become independent publishers." They continue, "As editors we have no allegiance to any particular medium or media. We understand the mimeo revolution as an attitude — a material and immaterial perspective on the politics of print."

This second issue of the journal features poet and printer Alan Loney in conversation with Schlesinger, James Maynard on the little magazines edited by Robert Duncan between 1938 and 1941, derek beaulieu on Black Mountain and TISHbooks, and an essay by book artist Emily McVarish — who Schlesinger wrote on for the inaugural issue of ON, a journal built around statements on contemporary practice that Schlesinger co-edits with Thom Donovan and Michael Cross.

In addition to Mimeo Mimeo and ON, Schlesinger also co-edited with Craig Dworkin the current number of the Journal of Artists Books (JAB), a special issue devoted to investigating the intersection of experimental literature and artists' books. Schlesinger and Dworkin were recommended to JAB editor-in-chief Brad Freeman by Johanna Drucker for this special issue. The issue is quite extraordinary, particularly the essay by letterpress artist and Poltroon Press editor Alastair Johnston. Provocatively titled "Off the Road," the essay coincides with the traveling exhibition of Kerouac's On the Road scroll. Here Johnston pulls no punches, remarking at the start: "First a confession: I haven't read Kerouac." Addressing Kerouac and the scroll further on, Johnston writes:

He was a drunk with a typewriter who evolved into a speed-freak with a typewriter. The scroll of paper was an expedient to keep typing without worrying about inserting paper and numbering pages. Look at that scroll: the alignment is crooked, so every now and then he has to reset the left tab so there is a mildly Futurist jag visible. But that's not very compelling. What is interesting is the concept of the scroll.

But Johnston isn't so much concerned with Kerouac or historicizing the scroll as a site of textual inscription as he is with artists' books and ur-artists' books, those books that resist commercial success but nontheless introduce the formal techniques that create the conditions for figures like Kerouac to produce texts believed to be formally innovative. As Johnston remarks in a closing comment, "Great book artists, like the true avant-garde, are destined to be unheralded."

The Johnston essay appearing in this special issue of JAB might be considered something of a continuation of the interview that appeared in the first issue of Mimeo Mimeo. Conducted by Schlesinger over the course of several summer months, the interview is a riveting account of the Bay Area small press community during the 1970s replete with a string of delightful anecdotes, including one involving Clayton Eshleman and a six shooter.

Other contributors to this issue of JAB include Susan Vanderborg, Chris Burnett and Tate Shaw, David Pavelich, and Elisabeth Long. The issue also includes a handmade "Handmade-o-Meter" that requires assembly.

Organizing the issue around "artists' book" and "experimental literature" as overlapping, flexible categories grounded in a shared origin, Schlesinger and Dworkin write in their editorial statement: "As the rhetorical histories of the labels 'artists' book' and 'experimental literature' have developed and defined — evolving into genres of their own — they seem now to have separated to the point where one can think of them as distinct categories, with all the potential for interaction and competition, including healthy sibling rivalries and patterns of productive interference."

JOHN LATTA'S TROUVAILLES MALARKEY & GUFFS

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:15:00 +0000

For the past few months I've been following John Latta's exquisite postings at his blog Isola di Rifiuti. Latta is a powerful poet — but he is one that is slow to publish, unencumbered by the drive to fill out a CV and pander to the market forces he carefully critiques. His first book, Rubbing Torsos, was published by Ithaca House some thirty years ago, in 1979. The next book to appear was Breeze in 2003.

Since then his poetic production appears primarily through his blog, poems accompanied by visual images and reading notes. Each posting makes for a richly sedimented, wonderfully disorienting conjunction of texts. The poems that appear in most of the postings are part of an ongoing series called The Everyday — a series that seems to emerge from the close attention Latta's given to Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday, a walking through the everyday that allows him to absorb the cultural materials of the everyday. Latta's poems, as textual instantiations of everyday life, are a moving enactment of de Certeau's concept: "Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others." We find this poaching in Latta's poems, each poem a mound of fragments addressing the spaces of relation that bind the otherwise disparate fragments of a civilization together.

The lyrical force of the poem embedded in Latta's October 30, 2008 posting is especially powerful:

Tan fuertemeintre llorando, I weep
At vainglory deservingly sack’d, at
Fierce antiquity’s runt rehearsal, you
America, every slick’d back hair
In place, strutting impeccably down
Through the accumulated nausea of
Century of misdeeds, poor actor,
Ya se parte de sus
Tierras, unhand’d by history, un-
Marvell’d, rabid, corrupt, wonder-mongering,
Gluttonous, crowd-badgering, and ill.

This poem, the sixty-seventh in the series, rolls with an energy commensurate to the anticipation and anxiety most of us must be feeling as we draw closer to election day, the zero hour that promises to determine the cultural and socio-economic texture of an already turbulent century.

With only two books in the world, Latta's work hasn't yet received the critical attention it deserves. But if we follow the complex of poems, reading notes, observations and images posted to his blog we see an approach to textual production and the poem that reaches beyond the limitations of the book or indeed any of the material and generic constraints that continue to legislate how work is received and read in the world.

AGAIN: RETHINKING THE WORK OF POETRY

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:46:00 +0000

Given present global instabilities, this may be an ideal time to collectively reconsider the relation of the aesthetic to the political, the politicization of the aesthetic, the ideological implications of form, or, more fundamentally, our material relation to language in a seemingly interminable moment of grave politico-economic disorder. Like the grammarians of seventh-century Toulouse, misreading the present moment and arguing "over the vocative of ego amid the crash of empires" is always a danger. But despite this danger, I find myself obsessed with the possibility that poetry, or any form of cultural production, might allow us to read the present situation and respond to it in a meaningful way.

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A recent NYT article addressed the impact of the mortgage crisis on working-class families in a small Indiana town. Sustained by a failing RV manufacturing plant, the residents of Elkhart, Indiana have taken to supplementing their dwindling incomes through garage sales — so much so that the local City Council considered passing a resolution that would limit residents to one garage sale a month. Despite these economic difficulties (but not surprisingly) no small number of Elkhart residents are considering voting for McCain, convinced he and Palin will somehow ameliorate the current crisis. Others are simply reluctant to place their confidence in a "colored" candidate. According to one resident: "When it comes down to it around here, people are going to vote color, and I don't think people are ready to vote for a colored president. I don't care myself, but at work a lot of people talk color there." When the people of this town cast their votes, to what extent will those votes have been predicated on informed decisions? If such a grossly misinformed understanding of race and racial difference continues to determine the decisions white voters make in the ballot booth, to what extent might such voters already be considered disenfranchised? As people of color in Macomb County, Michigan effected by the mortgage crisis are quite literally losing their right to vote along with their homes, white voters making their way to the polls in November will have already been ideologically disenfranchised, casting misinformed votes that work against their interests. To be sure these white voters enjoy a wide range of privileges people of color do not, yet it's precisely the tragically misinformed understanding of race that will drive these white voters to decide against their own more fundamental economic interests.

How is language — and the broader discursive formations language moves through — operating here? If the consciousness of voters is shaped in advance through a process which is profoundly unconscious, how can any vote cast be considered informed in any way at all?

______________________________________________

Addressing British deindustrialization in an editor's preface to Quid 19: Poetry and Class Politics, Keston Sutherland writes: "The outsourcing of the material base of the British economy must, on Marxist terms, mean that some of the superstructure that accompanied it has been outsourced, too." Whether or not you buy into the base / superstructure split orthodox Marxists insist on, Sutherland's statement is an exceptionally canny one. Exported along with the industrial components of the economic base are those forms of consciousness that have developed in relation to it, indeed through it: "I mean the feelings and perceptions and apprehensions and hopes and revulsions that make up the daily experience of people living and working and loving and eating and dying in societies where class difference is a fact that is obvious to everyone and that everyone talks about and acknowledges." Although the British socio-cultural landscape is markedly different from our own — that is, class difference in the UK is markedly less opaque, less disguised, than it is in the US — Sutherland's statement is also applicable to the American context.

Forms of class consciousness in Britain have typically been more sharply delineated, more present, than in the US. But the production and reproduction of subjectivities in the US and Britain alike have always been characterized by an overdetermined tension between race, region, gender and nation. To put it another way, any identification with class in a western context, any form of class consciousness, is always already shot through by a number of other identity-based categories. In times of international crisis, for example, an identification with nation almost always trumps an identification with any other category.

In the US the flight of industry has created a sort of vacuum in the production mill of subjectivity, and among the working poor and the underemployed this vacuum (especially in the wake of 911) has given space to more intense and far more destructive identifications with race and nation. To understand oneself as "working class" does not mean in precisely the same way it may have in the 1970s or even the 1980s. In fact, if we take stock of the proliferation of films released during the 90s that featured idealized representations of industrial workers, we see the release of these films coincides with the moment of deindustrialization. Here culture is gripped by a retrospective nostalgia for precisely that which can never be recovered. And as industry continues to exit out, so do those forms of consciousness associated with it. But, as the current financial crisis indicates, the flight of class-based forms of consciousness has not eliminated economic inequality. The economic is always with us.

In his editorial note, Sutherland claims the task of poetry involves locating "a way that the deep trauma of our comfort and affluence can be exposed for what it is, namely, the foundation of our moral psychology." Considering the volatility of financial markets worldwide, I wonder if the bourgeois comfort and affluence that shapes our moral psychology is itself in danger of falling away like big industry. If so, I wonder if this moral psychology (ideology by any other name) will shift with it and require us instead to find a way of exposing the trauma of our despair and poverty. I also wonder how such an approach to poetic production might take into consideration the moral psychology of people like the residents of Elkhart, Indiana — people that were never truly comfortable or affluent but whose overall world view is, in any number of ways, commensurate with the affluent and comfortable. How, that is, do we account for internal economic differentiation in locations like the US and Britain where grotesque forms of affluence drape domestic poverty in an obfuscating shadow?

However one might view Althusser's own accomplishments on the terrain of theory, for him Marxism was always the "theoretical terrain of a fundamental investigation" — and regardless of what name we assign to this investigation the work of poetry is always located within it. Although it's difficult to identify the task of poetry with any certainty, I suspect the work of poetry — the work of the aesthetic — is located somewhere in that curiously disjunctive gap between the political interests of a community (if ever these interests can be named with any certainty) and the often misinformed and contradictory political decisions a community consciously makes.

MEMORY AS MEASURE OF MYTH

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:59:00 +0000

By now everyone's heard about the $440,000 AIG executives squandered on a bacchanalian orgy celebrating the first $85 billion bailout given to them by Washington. Since then AIG has received an additional $38 billion.

At the tale end of an eight year run that brought us Enron and other disastrous corporate scandals, the invasion of two "sovereign" nations first armed by the US, the privatization of these wars, a wholesale war on civil liberties at home, an undisguised attack on the poor during the Katrina debacle, two rigged presidential elections and god knows what else, the Bush administration chooses to closeout its second term in office by giving kickbacks to investment banks whose deeply unethical antics have finally caught up with them.

After the Reagan years I took comfort in the fact that the historical record would always disclose what a ruthless, evil bastard he was. Ditto for Nixon before him. In the case of Reagan we had the Iran-Contra scandal that armed Iraq at the expense of Nicaraguan self-determination. The Reagan years also gave us anti-union government intervention in the air-traffic controllers strike which eventually broke the back of organized labor in the US. Despite this, Reagan was canonized as a saint by American media at the moment of his death. The same is true of Nixon, whose presidential career was marked by the Watergate scandal and the secret blanket-bombing of Laos and Cambodia. But when Nixon died he went out in a blaze of media-friendly glory that insisted on rewriting the historical record and reinventing American memory. Like Reagan, Nixon too was transformed into a martyr.

Will this also be the case for Bush? When the man is on his deathbed and journalists are clamoring to cover his presidential career, will mainstream media's "investigative" journalists conveniently forget the willful mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the permissibility of torture at Guantanamo Bay, the unwarranted dismissal of US Attorneys, the Valerie Plame case, or the mortgage scandal that gave rise to the current global financial crisis?

Memory is never memory as such. It is invented as if out of thin air. Memory is a narrative cobbled together from the visual and textual materials at hand. The malleability of memory makes it a site of contestation, a site of struggle. It is perhaps for this reason poets like Olson and Duncan preferred Herodotus over Thucydides. In Herodotus there is no pretension to scientific method. History is not science. And it is perhaps for this reason Paul Metcalf insisted that myth is a form of "essential truth" — a truth that struggles to reconfigure the coordinates of power but is also itself a product of power.

EAT THE RICH / SMASH RACISM / FUCK AUTHORITY

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:58:00 +0000

With markets in Europe and Asia completely destabilized by the punch-and-grab antics of US politicos and finance gurus, I found myself nostalgic earlier this morning for the blunt single-mindedness of those slogans often found on badges, patches and t-shirts worn by a select, perhaps more sensible few during the 1980s. Eat the rich. Smash racism. Fuck authority.

Nostalgia is never a good thing and no crisis is reducible to the ham-fisted logic of a bellicose or deeply masculinist slogan. But at this stage of what appears to be a nascent economic meltdown far from over, a firm and uncompromising denunciation of wealth and the mechanisms that create the conditions for its grossly inequitable accumulation may provide some solace. Unfortunately on this side of the Atlantic the vast majority of Hummerkins are busy mapping their desires onto the crisis, believing the $700 billion bailout (and the additional $1.3 trillion the Federal Reserve has committed to buying out short-term debt) will stabilize not only a crippled American economy but an incomprehensibly more complex global economy. While Ben Bernanke gives $1.3 trillion to shore up a market investors have almost completely abandon due to the crisis, Henry Paulson has selected an old Goldman Sachs buddy to dish out $700 billion in corporate welfare:

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has tapped a former Goldman Sachs executive to be director of the government's bailout program. Neel Kashkari, who has worked with Paulson at the department since July 2006, was chosen Monday as the interim head of the government's unprecedented effort to unclog the credit markets.

But what began in the US with huge high-risk investments in mortgages expressly designed to exploit millions of working poor and underemployed Americans has generated a financial tectonic shift that has thrown European and Asian markets into a state of chaos. Despite the fact that accountability for this crisis resides in the US, I was stunned to find an American financial analyst on CNBC this morning mocking Europe. This analyst wondered whether German workers — whom his remark suggested already enjoy the excesses of a living wage and adequate health care — would continue to agitate for higher wages now that German markets are in crisis. The comment seemed to suggest that, like those largely underemployed Americans suckered into high-risk mortgages, German workers seeking more than they are believed to be worth are part of the problem. Workers, the working poor and the underemployed are of course not financial analysts, investment bankers, treasury secretaries or even students of economics. And, for those of us that live in the "developed" world, a living wage and adequate health care in exchange for some form of full-time employment are not unreasonable expectations. Given that this presumably well-paid CNBC analyst was himself a media representative of the nation responsible for the crisis, the comment seemed especially pernicious.

Thinking back to media coverage of the mortgage crisis during the summer, mainstream news anchors, analysts and reporters seemed largely united in their condemnation of those Americans that presumably knew they couldn't afford the mortgages they agreed to. Like the comment leveled against German workers, accountability is assigned to those the financial crisis will most effect in a very material way rather than the investment bankers, stock brokers and executives that will walk away from the fallout with generous severance packages and, in many cases, even bonuses.

What is even more astonishing is the undisguised arrogance American media figures continue to project outward to the world this country has imperiled. If this economic catastrophe worsens and those at the top of the heap continue to reward each other and assign blame to those of us completely impoverished by their antics, perhaps we can stop struggling to reason with the rich and simply eat them.

PRISON-HOUSE OF CARDS: WORTHLESS SECURITIES

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:31:00 +0000

It's not surprising to see how thoroughly integrated in the world financial system the developed and underdeveloped nations of the world are. Despite ridicule from Jon Stewart, the "house of cards" metaphor George Bush appealed to when describing the economic crisis last week may in fact be the most accurate statement of his entire presidential career. The current economic meltdown, which we began to feel in earnest this summer via the US mortgage crisis, has consistently rippled outward, effecting markets in Europe and Asia:

Over the weekend, governments across Europe rushed to prop up failing banks. The German government and financial industry agreed on a $68 billion bailout for commercial-property lender Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, while France's BNP Paribas agreed to acquire a 75 percent stake in Fortis's Belgium bank after a government rescue failed.

Viral as ever, capital and the crises embedded in the very conditions of unregulated exchange move across borders with cavalier flair. Reading Fredric Jameson's pre-911 essay "Globalization and Political Strategy" (the same essay Divya Victor recently quoted at her blog) I found the following passage especially prescient:

The United States has resisted the strategy of introducing controls on the international transfers of capital — one method by which some of this financial and speculative damage [generated in part through instant transfers of capital] might presumably be contained ; and it has, of course, played a leading role within the IMF itself, long perceived to be the driving force of neo-liberal attempts to impose free-market conditions on other countries by threatening to withdraw investment funds. In recent years, however, it has no longer been so clear that the interests of the financial markets and those of the United States are absolutely identical: the anxiety exists that these new global financial markets may yet — like the sentient machinery of recent science fiction — mutate into autonomous mechanisms which produce disasters no one wants, and spin beyond the control of even the most powerful government.

It remains to be seen whether the $700 billion kickback (an exchange of public sector money for the failed profiteering strategies of reckless investment banks) will strengthen the "fundamentals" of the economy or create the conditions for an even greater financial calamity. Either way, basic concepts like "regulation" and "control" are central to this economic crisis. It is utterly impossible to imagine — given the highly international, flaneur-like fluidity of capital — how this crisis could have been anything less than global in scale.

On the terrain of poetry, for those invested in thinking the situation poetically, Pound's insistence on the centrality of the economic comes to mind. The poetics of excess (of computer-generated texts or poems desperately cobbled together using search-engines or labor-intensive transcriptions of massive amounts of information) do not, in the context of the current crisis, seem to repurpose informatic waste as much as it reproduces this waste and the destructive social relations constituted through this waste — that is, these projects grounded in a poetics of excess seem to yield results similar to failed investment banks: a glut of worthless securities.

DAVID HADBAWNIK'S TRANSLATIONS FROM CREELEY

noreply@blogger.com (damn the caesars) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 03:54:00 +0000

Roger Snell recently designed and published, through his Sardines Press imprint, a short selection of poems by David Hadbawnik under the title Translations from Creeley. The book is exquisite, situated in some curiously dislocated region between chapbook, chaplet and broadside. Like Creeley's poems, the work comes to us with a certain plainness and humility about it, refusing to announce itself in any inappropriately ostentatious way. The book itself is the size of a photograph and runs a total of eight pages — in fact, I was shocked to find the pages were numbered. But thinking further through this, the numbering appears to reinforce the scale of the work itself, work small and in motion, at all times ephemeral and passing away from us. We find this in the first poem "The Joke":

Pockets of energy caught up
in words. To release them
in time, as he had
heard it told; but to
hold their attention he
rushed to the end only
to find their
faces, waiting.

The residual trace of that which passes away, whatever it might be. A sort of presencing. As a whole, a modest whole, this is what the book itself does — it marks the trace of things released in time. The scale of the work, which is so crucial to it, is much smaller than David's earlier / other published work, particularly Ovid in Exile. His "translations" don't demand from the eye and are easy to lose among any number of papers and books one might have stacked on table or desk. But this seems to be part of the project, embedded in both the poems and the design of the book. A lovely thing to have pass, however briefly, through one's hands.