What I'm Reading

The Canary

A first turn through the pages of this magazine finds me among most entertaining aned engaging of accomplices and interlocutors. I’m about where Jordan was when he gave it his enthusiastic approval the first time around—and like Jordan I find the editors’ sensibilities consonant with mine. Jennifer Moxley’s poems, which open the journal, are rueful meditations on how quickly political engagement can turn to empty formalism; at the same time, these are also, it seems, a reflection on Moxley’s poetics, and they evince her obligation to a continued engagement with poetic (as well as political )form, if she is to maintain the integrity and intensity of disposition that readers have come to expect from her. The stunning last poem, surreal in the best sense of the term—an engagement with, rather than withdrawal, from the real—with its post-apocalyptic mall scene, seems to set up a image reservoir that the rest of the journal, oddly, keeps drawing from. Some kind of revenant keeps returning throughout these poems—in Alice Notley’s spare and broken and absence-haunted songs; in Raymond McDaniel’s Oulipo meets Hopkins meets Night of the Living Dead meets Mother Goose; in Gillian Conoley’s Frankenstein. No zombies in Moxley’s poem, but I’m reminded that malls and other places of public exchange are, of course, the sites of choice for undead hordes because there, within the regurgitated melodies and brand-lighting and must-have non-needs, they blend right in. This makes The Canary less the kind that sings kindly by the window than the kind you take into the coal-mine. It’s also a nice object—the not-quite-sky-blue, artless cover lets us look through to the contents, and I find the font and the not-quite-square size of the thing particularly satisfying: where too big meets too small, where things do not equal themselves, yep, there’s poetry.

There are lots of other poems that deserve mention—Brenda Shaughnessy, Philip Jenks, Anne Boyer (we love you! come out of the barn and publish your book!) and Joshua Clover, whose sublime The Totality for Kids just arrived. I need a couple of days to think on this book before I can say a few words about it. Do get a copy, though.

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Pretty Young Thing (Danielle Pafunda)

Someone should write an article about poets like Danielle, Heidi Lynn Staples and Lara Glenum, among others, who it seems are working hard to reanimate/ disinter the seemingly decomposed (and not so exquisite) corpse of surrealism and the powers of negation it offers us in this particular damaged and damaging time. Danielle’s book reminds me of Lara’s (which I reviewed here) to a certain degree: they have a milieu in common (places called Body and Non-Body)—but the poems in PYT don’t use the narrative or topical frames that one finds in Hounds of No. Danielle’s book truly goes on its nerve, pushing forward, Beckett-like, by a thread of texture or by dint of poetic will and desire. The long poems in this book are particularly good, continuously generating and then displacing narratives as they go—here a wedding, an operation, subjectivity, sex, here womanhood in all its intellectual and biological armature. One can hear, to a certain sense, the riddling and riddled textures of Berryman’s Dream Songs and Dickinson’s best poems. Indeed, you could probably make the case that the form of these poems is, in many cases, an example of the seven-beat line which some prosodists have found occasion to think of as a kind of ballad meter (two lines for the price of one):

When I got out in the weather, the weather was missing. The hour
slit like an electric cord, splintered, and fused to the pavement.
There was a space in the road where I thought a handsome cab should be.
There was really a space, and you would’ve been here to fill it.

Not incidentally, that handsome cab does appear in the final line of the book. But it’s on fire:

At the end of Oklahoma, only the haystack was burning. The surrey.

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Last but not least, I wanted to mention that those of who are in New York early next week should go see Ben Lerner read at the Poetry Project on Monday, Mar. 13 (8:00 p.m). Ben’s Angle of Yaw (out from Copper Canyon late this year, or early next year) was one of the highlights of my 2005 reading season. You can find a chunk from the book in the recent Conjunctions. There’s a fierce directness and clarity and license to Ben’s poems. As well as anyone, Ben gets the feeling of the present moment—its vertigo, its floating blidnesses, its perversities—right.

So, no, as it turns out, it is not, in point of fact, exploitation or environmental degradation that gives coffee most of its flavor.

Next item: let's hear it for an agenda-crippling, troop-withdrawing impeachment in early 2007.

Public service announcement: If like me you've searched long and hard for a Fair Trade/Organic coffee bean that is not only doesn't taste like battery acid but is less expensive per weight than prohibited substances, search no further: Terranova Coffee Roasting, from Sacramento. At, like, $6.50/lb.

Happy to hear that Pavement Saw is going to bring out Josh's chapbook Composition Marble (f.k.a. "Kiosk/Stylus"). It's a truly exquisite poem, and I hope that many people order copies. Definitely my favorite piece of writing by one of my favorite writers.

"Mommy is mommy. That's funny."

The pleasures of tautology in an age of contradiction.

R.I.P. Barbara Guest

The Minus Ones

She submitted a few stories she called The Minus Ones.

They came to her as short signals, as if they lived on her roof top. They rolled off the roof of her mouth climbed there from memory or from a table where empty cups glistened with tearfulness. Also menu-like out of her stung heart came surprising plots: Spanish women and high shoes, stories of valleys and boatless seas no cargoes. Rocks similar to the porpoises in her marine story appeared. They were made of coal hard yet they chipped flakes of coal dust blew off them soiling her clothes.

From her reading she borrowed a lake bottomless and a body without gravity flying over it. This appropriation brought on a serious malaise; she became plotless and her stories were bound without the usual wrapping of ribbon.

Seasons became important, ivy on green trees and the mournful rhododendron, icicles appeared more frequently. And meadows with horses. She neglected to include the rituals of contemporary life and the Scenario Department complained. When she wrote of wood burning she said the devils inside the fire were excited.

The fire scene destroyed any chance she had for her new stories to be accepted. They told her they liked real fires and not those of the imagination. Imagination was harmful and always messed up the set.

--from The Confetti Trees

What's a Poet?

I agree that the tendency to construct a person out of words, and to interpolate into these words whatever we know about a poet--Josh plays D and D, Jordan likes Anime, some of us are parents, some aren't--is probably to some degree inevitable, and indeed I don't think there's anything wrong with this kind of reading practice, as long as it's one practice among many.

But there's a big difference between missing the words for the poet, looking past the page to the life, and seeing the poet as words, as an authorial intention emanating not from an apartment in D.C. or Oakland but from the particular arrangement of verbal references language allows. So much of the poetry that I value frustrates any other kind of experience. And although I know that the part of me that seeks to predict the behavior of others will always construct some kind of intention, there is poetry that reminds me of what a fictional intention this is--and thank god.

I'm very sympathetic to the desire to recuperate terms like personality and sensibility for poetry criticism. But, for me, it's important to know what I'm talking about.

"What makes my image of him into an image of him. Not its looking like him!"

Otherwise, aren't we just playing Oprahs to The Tiny's Freys and James? As Jane reminded us awhile back--a comment that Ron reiterated--most of the cultural forms with "wide circulation" love the idea of poetry, the idea of the poet, the life of the poet, but they don't want to do the hard work of actually reading a poem.

And this is one of the ways Kasey's category 2 turns into category 1. This is the way we start working for Sales rather than R&D.

Oh yeah, and on the subject of Legislating Danger I was just talking to someone yesterday who pleaded with the editors (in many e-mails, apparently) to change the title, or at least the subtitle. But they wouldn't budge. And so he refused to put his poems in. Wasn't the only one either, I guess.

Being clueless to how things might read is one thing. I'm sure I'm guilty of this from time to time. But having it explained to you and then insisting on remaining oblivious, well, that's another thing altogether. They probably could've taken a simple poll. Does this sound creepy and Orwellian or just plain bad?45 out of 50 poets choose yes.

Kasey gets to have all the fun . . .

My double-header tomorrow is Helene Cixous in the morning and Bernadette Mayer at night. Not quite SWAT Teams and Vagina Monologues, but hey. . .

On the subject of the absurd, I was sort of hoping that somebody besides Tony would provide a general rebuttal of the Hoy piece in Jacket, but I guess its asininity was fairly transparent, and fairly clearly not worth the effort.

A more nuanced, astute and less ad hominem consideration of the technologization of the poetry world--and the changes (good, bad, indifferent) it might augur is worth asking for. But I don't think Hoi Polloi's our guy. It's hard to not detect the smell of vendetta on his keyboard stomp-dancing. It seemed pretty, well, lame that someone who takes such obvious pains to carefully and level-headedly explain where he stands--agree with it or not--should be the target of a basically personal attack.

I certainly don't have any doubts that it's only a matter of time before Google calls in its loans--you, me, everyone. But by that time, man, it might be either too late or too early. Anne Boyer will have let the squirrels loose. . . There might not be any way to get them back into their cages. Don't Be Evil? OK: Don't Be a Publicly Traded Corporation.

Be as I may a subsidiary and fleshly annex of Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Google and Microsoft, "addicted to oil," I aver now that the poetry of mild comfort doesn't stand a chance against the wonder trio of Kasey, Anne and Steve Evans.

It's worth adding that, of course, all those travelers reaching into the bedside table for a copy of the tedious verselets in Poetry magazine will be depressed more quickly than you can say "biopower twins activate." And the dollars spill back into Eli-Lilly.

Andrews Elmo Parker Shapiro

Bruce Andrews gave a devastating reading last night for David Larsen's New Yipes! reading series, in the concrete and drywall space of endless possibility that is 21 Grand. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard and with such abandon, or had such a clear sense of the violence upon which so much belly-humor depends. Stopping then, and thinking, not so funny.
Andrews read his poems with an expressive variety and a sense to the value of pauses and tempo changes that I wish more poets would learn from; you could really hear the prose form as a series of grammatical constraints: a set of sentence-forms wherein his avalanche of mixed categories (mixed metaphors, as I meta- here) click into place. I do wish that I got more of a sense of this when I read Andrews on the page, as much as I realize that the all-at-onceness and the brutality of the prose is part of its work. I suspect, though, that now when I turn to read Andrews I'll have a different, and much improved, experience of it. Perhaps, to some degree, the extension and success (or, to some I'm sure, the diminution) of writers like Kasey and Bill Luoma and Kevin Davies is that they bring this kind of variety to the page, and with it a wider range of possible gestures, swerves and gear-shifts.
Perhaps a year ago, Jonathan Mayhew made the remark that Bruce Andrews reminded him of hip-hop, for which comment, as I remember, he was castigated by bloggers various and sundry. Although I see how this is a deeply problematic comparison, I think that what Jonathan was picking up on was the common influence of beat poetry on both forms --those noun paintings and register collisions that you hear in performance poetry today, and which eighties and early-nineties hip hop to some degree resembled. Perhaps the historical argument is shaky, and the common denominator is only an apprent one. Obviously, lots of other influences (vernacular traditions, etc.) that the two don't share, but there was something to Jonathan's comment nonetheless. . .



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In other news, it appears our children's toys are in favor of euthanasia. Possible subtitles: paging Melanie Klein; or, revenge of the commodity--potty training = want not equaling need; excess here, privation there (with all apologies to those bloggers/readers who are in the process of potty training their children). The revolution will be really cute.


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Saw the Cornelia Parker installation at the Good Herb center--beautiful and eery, certainly, but how much anti-work a bad pun for a title can do. A word is worth at least a thousand pixels in this instance, or else a superficial politics poorly hung. I sort of wanted the one church in front of the other--a seeing-through rather than a seeing-next-to. And why so cubic? I'm still trying to figure that out.

But Noah was so happy to go on the carousel. He rode the goat. All goats lead to roses.

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Reading a David Shapiro book for the first time ever (A Burning Interior). What a thrill!

Apologies to those who feel I missed the subtlety of their poems. "About" is always a bad preposition for poetry, implying as it does a distinction between content and form, subject matter and presentation that often doesn't hold. In English, propositions are like the streets of D.C. or Boston or an awkward simile. . . There should be (but ain't) a quicker, more direct way to get where you want to go. I would, however, have to be a deep literalist of the body to miss the sex--metaphorical or not--in those poems. It doesn't really require any exegetical jujitsu to extract. It's not like I'm saying that walking up a staircase (as Freud does) resembles sex in that it involves repetitive motion with an eventual endpoint. Nor am I playing a dull round of find-the-privates.

Of course, I agree that the way the anthology was described by Reb, as well as the way the preface and the cover frame the poems in it, colors my reading. I was responding to the anthology as an object, as poems in a specific context. I would assume that most people, like me, don't believe that the poem is some kind of stable unchanging object capable of resisting whatever context might impinge upon them. . . Maybe certain poems can do that to a certain degree, but not these ones. And this is not like a remark about quality; I like all the poems to which I referred. . .

I mean, if you acknowledge that Art Brut are ten times as talented instrumentally, and much better writers. . . .Same tone, same note-to-self dividing line downjoy.

Are Art Brut and Bloc Party the same band?

Bedside Anthology

Since receiving it, I have wanted to write about, and recommend, Reb Livingston and Molly Arden's provocative anthology The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel--even though I haven't had the time to read all of the poems in it.

It's an anthology full of fantastic work, as those of you who regularly read No Tell Motel already know. But I also find it disturbing--as an anthology about sex in the present moment in American culture, it leaves a somewhat troubling afterimage in my mind. It makes me feel that sex as a meaningful aspect of bodily life is in trouble, as all things interpersonal are in trouble. If this anthology presents, between its pages, a safe harbor for the erotic, a place where one's needs and desires will not be betrayed, it is one so threatened by isolation, non-communication and indirection, that most of the fucking/lovemaking/intercourse, etc. in this anthology fails. Maybe sex, as a nodal point where social power is both performed--(assume the position)--and subverted( (_________)-style), has always been this way. But somehow I suspect that the quintupling of porn consumption (and I am all for porn, I have no qualms about it) tells us something. Between the Paxil/Prozac/Zoloft holy-trinity and the adult film industry, I somehow feel that Americans (for all our professed liberatedness about sex) have more sexual hangups than fin-de-siecle Viennese. When everything is sexualized, when sex is, as Shanna Compton's poem has it, just a font advertisers use to sell products, just something you can have added to your latte for thirty-five cents, you get sex like the Johnny in Anne Boyer's poem imagines it: "His popular mechanics lacked imagery." One wonders, have we gone from "Having a Coke with You" to "Having a Coke with Coke"? I've often felt that the supposed liberation of sexuality of the so-called "sexual revolution" had, as one of its untoward consequencs, the diffusion and, as such, liquidation of sexuality. Sex, then: everywhere and nowhere. Or maybe this is just parenthood talking. Maybe people aren't really more afraid to flirt; maybe I'm just becoming gradually less attractive.

I'm not an expert in these matters (an amateur, certainly), and I don't pretend to have fully thought through what this means. As such, I'll refrain from concluding that all of this signals the end of the human, of history, the body. Thoughts?

Probably Not

Just discovered Clayton Banes blog Eyeball Hatred.

In Pegasus books a couple of months ago, checking out their small but excellent poetry selection--from presses large and small and even smaller--I said to myself, "I bet somebody here reads poetry blogs." And I was right.

I'm sure that there are writers and presses that get left out by the kind of tastemaking done here in the blog-o-sphere, but it seems like a good thing to me--because, well, I think many of my favorite bloggers have good, eclectic taste not obviously beholden to any particular clique or ideology.

It won't last long. You'll all be replaced by corporate robots designed to write and act and draw vindictive cartoons just like real live humans. Oh, wait, cancel that thought. I just remembered, we don't matter to corporate publishing. Might we start to?

Bling-Bling, Darling!

My review of Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No and Gabriel Gudding's A Defense of Poetry is up at Jacket 29.

Which means that I value many of the same poets/poetries (the poetries of inelegance, affront, etc.) that Gorranson does. But how am I supposed to take seriously a blog post that calls Berryman monoglossic? Maybe only one or two other poets of that generation that achieve the same kind of schizic polyvocality. And who is less afraid to "needle, wheedle, singe, disarm and scarify the reader" as Adrienne Rich, in one of my all-time favorite blurbs, has it?

Like Silliman, I sense in this post a tendency to read poetry as a mere product of its genealogy, criticism then becomes the kind of name-dropping game that New Criticism came into being to stop, by directing our attention to the pleasures and possibilties of poetic surface. In this, Silliman and Gorannson join hands (surprise!) with Harold Bloom: "the meaning of a poem is another poem." Certainly, there are poets who trade, complacently, upon the aura of sophistication/radicality (like Jane's LeRoy readers/gentrifiers who want the aura of edginess that comes from moving into the Mission or Echo Park or Fort Greene) that prior language-experiments bring to their poems. I'm not sure how one establishes one's anti-hierarchical stance, and I worry that the implication of Gorannson's post would reduce a poem to 1) who publishes it 2) some statement akin to "I may seem like the the man, but really, I'm not darling. I care." There are other ways, but form (in the widest sense of the terms) is the best way to do this. As Glenum and McSweeney demonstrate in their own poems.


When we get down to it, I think Kasey provides a really excellent marker: sensibility. There is powerful poetry that is elegant or skillful. If you don't like early Merrill or all of Marianne Moore, fine. I do. But there isn't really much powerful poetry that is bored/boring or complacent or self-satisfied.

Let's remember this: Repugnant people, and pugnacious cultures, can produce great art. Repugnant art, I think, rarely makes great people.

If Jim's petition succeeds in graduating Silliman from UC Berkeley, do you think he'll go on to get an MFA at Iowa? I spidey senses tell me there's a graphic novel on the horizon.

Then again, if Ron came back to finish up his credits, he might be a student in a class I'm TA'ing. Now *that* would be an *occasion* for asterisks. I'll start writing my post-post-avant syllabus (on post-it notes of course) now.

Notes from Los Angeles

Very pleasantly surprised by Ecstasy, the current show at The Geffen Contemporary. I'm ambivalent about the current trend in curation to title, market and organize shows such that they stand a chance of drawing the kind of audience that would usually steer clear of modern art. As an outgrowth of the corporatization of the museum, I'm right well repulsed. But as an attempt to present exciting, stimulating and disturbing art to a wider audience, I'm down. There has to be some way, though, to do this without curation-as-pandering--for if there were, on free night in the museum, scores of MDMA-victims emptily examining the paintings and sculptures, the primary affect of the show was far from ecstatic or jubilant. This, it's worth noting, from someone who would rather go to a Kevin Costner double-feature than consume a psychedelic: 98-percent terror, 2-percent bliss. Yes, despite the frequent exclamations of "woah, man, that's weird," Takashi Murakami's big tryptich was more Hiroshima than Haight-Ashbury. Vertigo and not elation or transport was what the show continuously delivered.

Most worth mentioning is Franz Ackermann's installation "Sky Shop--Lobby." It gave me exactly what I've hoped to find on this trip, a visual rhetoric for thinking the flattened, low-depth city which eludes any total concept. Ackermann encyclopedializes a great number of the devices of twentieth-century art--the geometrics of conceptual art, the big gestures of Ab-Expressionism, the flat acrylics of pop-art and minimalism, the return of the figure, photocollage. I especially like the way that geometrical drawing explodes into the infolding and unfolding painted (bodily) and photographed (architectural) spaces. As much as this article criticizes the apolitical apparatus with which Ackermann surrounds his installations, I'm not as convinced that I should listen to him (Ackermann). For my money, the installation gives a symphonic, total vision of urban life, from the ideological-conceptual substrates of the drawings to the literal imagery of the photographs to the emotionality/viscerality of the swirling acrylics. Even if Ackermann thinks of himself as an uncritical and detached flaneur, a tourist, I'm not sure that his vision isn't more interventive and transformative than he thinks it. There's a keen sense of the emotional and mental (psychogeographical) terrain of the city and the possibilities (sort of) for cutting and pasting and reconstituting these spaces to make them more hospitable to, umm, life. In any case, the installation challenged me to think and see space differently, to push against the resistances to vision with which any complex visual cityscape presents me.

Also wonderful: Eija-Liisa Ahtila's video tryptych "Talo/The House." I'm not sure that I've ever seen a more effective visual portrayal of psychosis, of the multi-channel experience of time and space that accompanies a psychotic break, where "a boat in the harbor is everywhere boat that has ever crossed the harbor" (probably misquoting), and where, like Borges's "Funes the Memorious," every moment in time is simultaneous, richly and fully present. This reminds, of course, of the kinds of psychological and literary moments that Deleuze and Guattari focus on in Anti-Oedipus but it also reminds of the pain and paralysis (which they tend to overlook) that comes with this. The actress in this piece is great, and so, too, is the writing, all of which suggests that Ahtila would probably make a great feature film.

The big room with Amanita Muscaria growing from the ceiling? Not so much.

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Plus, I saw these houses yesterday (above).

Not too sure how I should feel about the fact that, now that Los Angeles is nearly tolerable, it feels more and more like a borough of New York. Only: lower rates of bodily collision. And better weather.

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Corollary:

Such an art hotspot, now, LA, that you can't actually see any of the art produced here. It's all in Chelsea.

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Terrible news (from Josh) about Ithaca's bookstore, the Bookery closing. He did really build an incredible poetry selection there. It's a big blow to pedestrians, too: one less place which sells items of value, as opposed to overpriced (tourist shops) and very cheap (dollar-stores) things for which no true purpose (besides sheer accumulation for accumulation's sake) can be found. If it's 7:00 in Ithaca, and you need a pen or toilet paper, you're out of luck. But why would a healthy American citizen be without a car these days anyway, except due to scorn or lazineness or plain contrariness? I'd prefer not to say.
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"Level" is a palindrome. A kind of onomatopoeia of the letter.

Tabernacle, Tabernacle, Preach

Paranoia, blog rage, sanctimony. Welcome to the non-event. Please wear your (an)aesthetic identification badge at all times.

I take Jane's point, re: Foetry, about the transposition of real political anxieties, and the powerlessness that results therefrom, into the thinkable realm of poetics. This is what happens with Ron, he confuses forces and flows and market conditions with people. There's no conspiracy here. There's five billion shooters on the grassy knoll, dude. It's not like J.D. McClatchy and who-not are sitting in smoke-filled backrooms plotting their takeover of the poetry world. It's a lot of people, whom the big pictures eludes, making decisions that are for the most part based on what they think is right, and the rest of the time on their own petty needs and allegiances. Talk of a "School of Quietude" or a "Gang of Eight" is just bullshit; it hypostasizes into concrete personages and institutions things that are trans-personal and trans-institutional.

At one point, no doubt, the agonistic model--reader as enemy--of poetry writing which Ron puts forward was necessary, and it produced some great poetry, great criticism. But now it just seems like post-traumatic stress disorder; the enemy is no longer there, the last time there was an object of critique as Ron defines it was probably twenty years ago. Ron and the other poets associated with "Language" have become a dominant force in the poetry world, and so it's foolish for Ron to act as if he's still marginal. Yes, the big publishers don't, for the most part, publish their books. But in terms of cultural capital--well, which poets do you think critics are, for the most part, paying attention to. I won't say more, because I think Juliana Spahr, in her powerful piece "Spiderwasp, or literary criticism" has already made an excellent case for the obsolescence of this conflict-oriented model of thinking. As much as Tony Tost wants to revive it, and as much as it seems to produce good poetry in his case--to my mind it's time to move on. Some other kind of beast is emerging and that's where I want to look.

To Seth Abramson: most bloggers I know don't take Ron all that seriously. In fact, I only read him to make sure I'm still alive. Annoyance is one of the crucial vital signs. If you think he's the oracle at Delphi, you've gotten the wrong impression. It's not like people are saying to themselves, "oh well, Ron hasn't mentioned anything about Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No, so it must not be very good." Jim Behrle speaks for many of us, I think, with his tender and affectionate fuck-you to the kind of egoic, oracular utterances you find on Ron's blog. It's worth noting that, as far I can recall, and I'm certainly not a constant reader, this is the only time Ron has ever responded to another blogger directly. Most of the time, he's talking into dead air, despite the hundreds of links on his page. Elsewhere, you find dialogue. In Ronland there's just dialectic against a not-there. (Caveat: I have deep respect for much of Ron's work--his criticism and his poetry--but I also think he's endlessly wrong-headed in his blog.

To Franz Wright: whatever. The best response to people like that is the phrase formerly known as silence. Engaging with that kind of shit reifies its inital terms, and gives it power. There's no answer, because it's the wrong question.

To Gabe: I love you like a brother, man. But I think Franz Wright probably has plenty of insecurity and shame on his own end. He obviously doesn't need your help feeling worthless. And again--let's direct all of this wasted energy somewhere else. I propose a Flarf e-mail war on the Pentagon and the White House. Paging Brian Stefans. . .

L(ate)M(odernism) Until

And what would we do without Ange Mlinko’s casual brilliance? Happy to note no Pound in the elements, but no Crane either. Perhaps we need a fifth element, void, for which I nominate Stein: background chatter, background grammars in front of which all of the others posit and tip-off and turn.

So, Winter (especially late winter) is Williams. Eliot Fall? Moore-Stevens Summer and Stein Spring? Hmm. . . all mythologies fail, eventually, I suppose. Is that what they’re for?

I’m excitedly waiting for Jordan’s rundown of the year in Poesy.

The New Continent

Google Earth: Now you can look at porn in one window and, in the other, make sure no-one’s going to walk through the door.

We’ll do the spying for you, W. I see London, I see France.

Capital's Punishments

Overheard on the eve of Stanley Williams’ execution.

Three crustypunks in a coffee shop in the Mission.

Citizen One (male): All I’m saying, dude, is if he’s guilty I’d want him killed.

Citizen Two (female): Yeah, but what gives some fat white guy the right to decide who lives and who dies.

Citizen Three (male): Whatever, I think everybody should fucking die.

Reports from Storage

There’s something about the strange travels/travails of the commodity in this  Rauschenberg anecdote quoted below. Before the assemblage can be worth scads of money, it has to be first worth nothing, or more precisely, less than nothing. Not the nothing that’s worth nothing, but the nothing that’s not:
[Once he walked 30 blocks uptown with one of his so-called black paintings - canvases with expressionist black brush strokes that incorporated odd bits of detritus - and tried to sell it to a rich collector for $15. "I won't say who," Mr. Rauchenberg said impishly.
"She said she couldn't buy it so cheap," he continued. "I almost gave it to her, at the thought of walking another 30 blocks home with the painting. But I thought, well, if she couldn't afford to pay so little for it, she certainly couldn't afford to take it for nothing." ]
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Noah’s second birthday on Friday. He’s still singing happy birthday to himself, and half-expecting a second round of presents. Yesterday, in the storm, the lights went off at Anna’s parents house. When they came back on, Noah yelled: party time! Pictures to follow. _______________
Relieved to have survived the semester, and to have finished my essay on Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day and Vito Acconci, the Situationist International and De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life—one of the most arduous and tricky pieces of critical writing I’ve ever done. The poem has such speed and momentum that any kind of attempt to break off a passage to work with is like wading into a fast, cold creek.  Plus, I was really outside of my ken--trying to expand it, rather--with the Acconci.
If anybody’s interested in reading it, I’d appreciate the feedback.
Reading Jalal Toufic’s Distracted (a copy of which Lyn kindly gave me). I’ve tried in the past to abuse and misquote the copyright clause in the front matter of books, but now I see it’s already been done about as well as one can. Hilarious, and absolutely true:
“Some parts of this book can be created by others and hence may be produced by them without permissions from the author and the publisher. No part of this book may be paraphrased in any form or by any means.”
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Rainy, rainy here. An Elmo doll facedown in a puddle in the courtyard. But this Diplo remix of Beck’s Guero (on the album called Guerolito) is pretty great.

Thank you, Mr. Pinter

I quite like semi-colons in poetry, and to the extent that I find them inscrutable, I also find them beautiful. I especially like archaic usages of the semi-colon, and the bizarre sentences they allow, as found in eighteenth-century prose and undergraduate papers. If semi-colons don't display "poetic" beauty, then they do allow for a precision that excites me. I think it's the most indeterminate and yet absolute of marks; it's a piece of punctuation that flouts and points up the problematic conventions of the sentence as whole thought. And as much as this is one of the jobs of poetry, to allow us to think and feel with new grammars, new relationships between things, the semi-colon belongs here, is beautiful because true: a mark of closure and yet, at the same time, openness; equivalence and difference. It does wink, as if to say it knows our secret:

[From ‘Punctuation Marks’ in Notes to Literature, Volume 1. ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. Columbia University Press. 1958. pp. 96-7. ]

The writer is in a permanent predicament when it comes to punctuation marks; if one were fully aware while writing, one would sense the impossibility of ever using a mark of punctuation correctly and would give up writing altogether. For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible: in punctuation marks the check the writer draws on language is refused payment. The writer cannot trust in the rules which are often rigid and crude; nor can he ignore them without indulging in a kind of eccentricity and doing harm to their nature by calling attention to what is inconspicuous – and inconspicuousness is what punctuation lives by. But if, on the other hand, he is serious, he may not sacrifice any part of his aim to a universal, for no writer today can completely identify with anything universal; he does so only at the price of affecting the archaic. The conflict must be endured each time, and one needs either a lot of strength or a lot of stupidity not to lose heart. At best one can advise that punctuation marks be handled the way musicians handle forbidden chord progressions and incorrect voice leading. With every act of punctuation, like every musical cadence, one can tell whether there is an intention or whether it is pure sloppiness.

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Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I is really fantastic: a wonderfully goofy and unabashedly personal sensibility that is surprising in a documentary. If you're interested in the politics and aesthetics of trash, in its possibilities and pathos, this movie is for you.

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The Squid and the Whale is also great--perfect details, perfect timing, just enough humor to make the painful feelings of embarrassment for the characters sufferable. It's the apotheosis of its form, of the "indie" family drama that I would like to see less of but that when done well reminds me where I come from, and almost even tells me why.

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Working on my 75 pages--an essay about waste and The Day of the Locust, an essay about Bernadette May and performance art, and one on Wittgenstein, Michael Palmer and Rosmarie Waldrop. By the middle of the month, I should be blogging again with more regularity.

I don't know what to think about France. But I do know that it's unsettling to watch an argument about violence and social change turn increasingly violent itself. I'm hopeful, though, that the good will and respect among these people I've come to admire so will carry them to the other side.

I do want to register my ambivalence about the events in France, while repeating that I don't feel sufficiently informed. Isn't what's at stake in Franklin and Ange's responses to Jane the fear that means justified by an end become ends in-and-of-themselves?

Shit floats, politically speaking; even though in Republican Barcelona the anarcho-syndicalists outnumbered the Stalinists by about five-to-one, they opted out of participation, perhaps rightfully, in things like policing and hauling trash and establishing confederations. As such, they basically handed over control of the city, and what had been sixty years in the making was unmade.

I do believe that destroying property is perhaps the only thing that makes anybody pay attention. Nonetheless, bourgeois of me as it may be, I can't help but hope for a more tactical, and hence more productive, kind of destruction. As much as I believe Benjamin when he tells me that violence is the ground of law, I don't feel so good about hurting/maiming people. Even those attached to state power. A few choiceful assassinations every now and then, sure.

Of course, when I decide to write a three page post, blogger accidentally deletes it!

Maybe I'll get a chance to rewrite my thoughts--on Mayer, Ashbery, the new de Young museum, life in general--over the weekend.

Not much time for blogging here, and that makes me a bit sad.