uh, dunno

Can you eat your face while your mouth is drinking?

pile

". . .plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbling."--Duchamp

"A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes."--Robert Smithson

And then Noah at the rose garden, renaming them: "that one's called White Customer. And that one's called Light Conductor."

Well, that's like hypnotizing chickens. . .

When I mentioned, the day before last, to a fellow student, that I had read an article describing how the Israeli Defense Force [today's spin term: defense]uses Debord's Society of the Spectacle, D&G's chapter on "The War Machine, and the Situationist International's "Theory of the Derive" to better describe, exploit and reconceptualize the space of urban warfare in the modern age, she first said that "she didn't believe it" and then, when I explained further, "that she wasn't sure she was interested in it." I'm interested in this (if interest can come anywhere near the churning in my stomach), interested even if I do not or do not want to believe it. But I also understand her cool non-chalance, her assumption (which I will not, liking this person, chalk up to the disease of chilly, cynical all-knowingness which often infects graduate students and academics alike). It's history, right? The IDF uses '68-ism to register changes in which they have already participated, been the promulgators of, and already understood otherwise. But can we really think of this as an epiphonemon, a off-gassing of proto-super-capitalism, without real consequences? I think not. The excerpt in last month's Harper's of a recently published book, Fail Better!, on the insights of Samuel Beckett for contemporary business and marketing strategy (ambiguity, perseverance. . .), only confirms my sense that the power of Nabisco or IDF to capture and exploit the most intelligent kinds of negativity and criticality that "theory" has to offer must be examined, all the more if you believe that, eventually, Gertrude Stein becomes a billboard on I-95. [Note, here, the sale of Iggy Pop's fantastic song "Lust for Life" to Carnival Cruises (or was it Princess), a sale which sets Johnny Yen and his striptease and lotion in a floating mall where he has little chance of harming anyone.]

Of course, I'm not saying anything not predicted or considered by these writers themselves, especially Debord and the SI, who talk explicitly of a need to negate the negation, to follow criticality with an imaginative positivity--the dérive is a way of describing and breaking up urban space that would, ideally, then be followed by a restructuring of the city so as to better serve desire, needs, and better stymie enervation and immiseration. I'm rereading D&G, now, and everywhere finding their admonitions against exactly this kind of despotic application or manifestation of the BwO: "Even if we consider given social formations, or a given stratic apparatus within a formation we must say that every one of them has a BwO ready to gnaw, proliferate, cover and invade the entire social field, entering into realtions of violence and rivalry as well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money (inflation), but also a BwO of the the State, army, factory, Party, etc. If the strata are an affair of coagulation and sedimentation, all a stratum needs is a high sedimentation rate for it to lose its configuration and articulations and to form its own specific kind of tumor, within itself or in a given formation or apparatus. The stata form their own BwO's, totalitarian and fascist BwO's, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency" (1000 Pl., 163). Or again, worryingly: "That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty, vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification, and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consitency (keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, also for the suicidal and demented)" (165). From this and other passages, departs the kidnapping of D&G by the IDF, as well as the many formidable critiques that writers have directed his way over the last twenty-five years. Such a passage can help describe, too, what strike me--here on the blog-plane, and elsewhere--as misreadings of D or D&G (perhaps undenounceable), alternately too hot or too cool.

What, then, for those who would resist? What, then, when the IDF and U.S. military and Hallibruton as well as Al-Qaeda, can be described and empowered by such terminology? Is this view too blurry? Is there a way to dechunk and reassemble at the same time? to make by breaking? It seems that I can get either: 1) a slippery tone, a worrisome ambiguity 2)or a careful, patient and intelligent analysis that defers any answering.

Property damage, propaganda.

Thank you for your patience while we remodel the world in the image of nothing whatsoever. Little 'n.' Big zero. Use alternate route.

Saw Lytle Shaw's O'Hara book, The Poetics of Coterie, in Moe's yesterday. Perhaps this will stave off some of Jordan's hunger for O'Hara's side of the story until the biopic (one imagines, sadly, cellular tissue on a slide) arrives. But Kevin Spacey is starting to look too old, don't you think? Jude Law has the look but probably couldn't pull it off. Come to think of it, Jordan, you're not a bad match yourself. How's your acting?

Deer Reader

Arrived, yesterday, a packet of materials from Kasey and Anne's new nano-press Abraham Lincoln--"Monsters" a chapbook by Kasey, the "Dark Deer," a sheaflet poem with a blue transparent cover from Anne, and broadsides by Joseph Massey, Anne and Kasey. And so now, beholden as I am to the dark imagination of Anne and Kasey it appears that I am going to have to talk, again, about poets associated with Flarf, but I'll try to steer away from discussing the movement in its entirety.

Monsters succeeds, for me, in sidestepping many of the critiques levelled at Kasey and his cohort by allowing the jumbled speakers (never given the mic for very long) to reflect upon the agency that puppets them along. No doubt, the work of writing these poems can be compared to Dr.Frankenstein's long nights spent "collecting and arranging [his] materials." It's always seemed important to me that Shelley directly compares Dr.'s "filthy creation" to the discovery of the Americas. But like Dr.'s monster, these poems do a fair amount of Oedipal hungering (with results usually no less tragic) after self-knowledge. In the first line of the chapbook's first poem, "The Kids / are all giving each other the virus " or later in "Grey Areas"--"the bad moment I had was when I realized / I am part of a list that is inhaling the wrong things / people saw my text and got the wrong impression." Or yet again: in his poem "In the Future," where "we all have gonorrhea for half an hour." This then is the moment of meta-flarf, flarf able to conceive of itself as a social construction, and by, perhaps, de-reifying the forces that surround, allows us to imagine something else. [OK, breaking my promise here, sorry] Perhaps this is characteristic of a good portion of that written under the sign of flarf--it's certainly the case with the book-frame of Rodney Koeneke Mus'ee Mechanique, and its postscript, which in considering the museumified entertainments mechanical and electrical of a mechanical and electric past, allows itself to think the discontinous machines in which we now find ourselves, and the tug-of-war between entropy and the continuous counter-entropy of the new, the neo- in say "Neo Adapts Badly." And, on the subject of monsters, isn't a pizza kitty a textbook definiton of the chimerical? My noting of self-reflexion in these poets could probably apply also to Mike Magee's Mainstream.

I'm interested in the way that, in Kasey's poems, the elimination of the noise (residue, perhaps, of internet searches) that had been characteristic of, say, some of the poems in Deer Head Nation, and the here finer-threaded, less perceptible (less "seamy"), inter-phrase stitchwork, actually allows the discontinuities in the speaker's voice to be more easily noticed. The more the speaker of these poems insists on being a unity, rather than a concatenation of incompatible language games (and no, Peli, I'm not using this term lightly, cf. Lyotard's _The Differend_) the more s/he begins to unravel.

__

I guess Anne is to be considered a flarf-writer now--whatever this appellation is worth--and the poems included here seem to muse upon what this means, as much as they are a consideration of Kasey's work--The Dark Deer a critique/reading of "Deer Head Nation," and her knockout poem "I Love Literature" is an ars (or perhaps, arse, to make a bad but (in)appropriately scatological joke) poetica if ever there was one. A two line poem in Monsters provides (to assume a perhaps fallacious temporality) the pitch: "an army of deer led by computer-generated dog / man-beasts / is more to be feared than an army of lions" ("Darkling Plain").

I take it that one of the critiques of Kasey was that "deer" is/are (a) metonym(s) for middle-america, poor whites, red states, what have you, and that Kasey used this tag to appropriate language that could then make fun of haters from S. Dakota. I dunno'*. Deer are fucking everywhere!--in Beverly Hills, Scarsdale, in gated communities, etc. In fact, in many (sub)urban areas it's usually the wealthy who have the worst deer problems, living on the edge of the natural, at the top of hills. One of the many, many things I've learned from reading Faulkner is how rare, at the turn of the century, deer were. In "The Bear," there are outdooorsmen who've spent their entire life without seeing anything but the mere traces of totemically charged deer. I don't know if this was, then, a result of overhunting or what, and if, at the time Wyatt wrote "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind" deer were any more common (but he didn't write--I know too many hind). But how different from today! Deer, in these poems, are metonyms of overproduction, overaccumulation, overdevelopment of wilderness, and the gradual squeezing and starving of deer populations into smaller and smaller parcels of land where they work their multiplicatory magic. And what a perfect symbol, no?--an animal with rich poetic lineage and signification clusters now become as common as, and for some as beloved as, the cockroach. Deer, here, figure excess and lack, a nature imbalanced and both scarce and in excess of itself. So thick that they begin to colonize the internet!

In Anne's poems--here and elsewhere-- deer specifically and animality in general are figures of art in an age of electronic reproduction. They are symbol and sign of informational excess; where deer appear, so too does reproduction and sex. Last year, some will remember Anne talking about Giorgio Agamben's The Open, and I think this short work (an essay really) is key to understanding what she's up to. At the very end of that book, in typical Agambenian cryptic cliffhanger fashion, he suggests with prophetic immodesty that the future holds two paths for humanity--a return to animality via the technological as means of absolute control or a return to animality via the technological as means of absolute freedom. The provocative claim of this book is that, rather than see technology as anti-animal and anti-biological, we should instead look at the technological as drawing us ever deeper into a series of circuits and attractions that might, at last, fundamentally destroy the subject/object split, Heidegger's standing-over-against- the-world (one can read The Open as essentially a critique of Heidegger's "What are Poets For" and the notion of the open therein). Like animals, a pure technoworld means living in a continuous loop of stimmung (attraction-affect) in which there is no longer an I and a thou, only a snaking-through the labyrinth. I don't like this vision so much, and neither does Agamben. The other option--well, he ain't so clear. I think we're supposed to stay tuned for the end of the series, since everything he's writing is essentially an expansion upon or footnote to Homo Sacer.

A very intelligent friend of mine, who shares the name (except for an initial) of a well-known poet I've never read remarked, once, in conversation that one of the things he loves about Anne's blog is her continuous hurling of images of the natural and the animal into a space (the internet, the blog) that is seemingly, constitutively, anti-biological, anti-visceral, that means community in the dry abstract and post-democratic sense. In this sense, Anne flouts these kinds of distinctions, and moves closer to Agambens' notions, without perhaps some of the ontological utopian convictions of Agamben. I'm going to quote "I Love Literature" in full, so that you can get a sense of how clear all that I've been mentioning is within it:

I was attacking Culture.
I have seen her and she is so big and beautiful.

Pulling a thirty-six-inch-strip out of Language
and eating it,
she has given me an opportunity

to pattern gothic specialties, small farmers, and starfish
out of the reddish-brown essence that implies a native land

Outlines of legacy are a minimal-production glass creature.
I worry it's too much like voice and structure.

What's better is when we can eat our fermenteed hurt

and someone gives a seminar on Kathy Acker's
regional, agricultural, and mining sectors.

I am not free to be mad.

When I smell Archer Daniels Midland
it is as if an oligarchy has dived into wreck

Yes, I love Literature
but what I love about it is
the reproductive organs of Capital.


Here, Anne perhaps moves beyond the "document of culture/document of barbarism dyad," or at least does something different than recover or expose the barbarities latent in culture. She knows that our literary activity is subsidized in one way or another by surplus-value and exploitation, subsidized like Archer Daniels Midland (a personified name for a faceless mega-agro-corporation) is by billions of dollars of cash inflows that keep alive the lie of free market economy. But she also knows that the problem for capital is, aside from the age-old problem of how (like Kasey's virus) best to extract maximum-value without killing its host, what to do with its massive cash holdings now that information and production (in some but not all places) is being informationalized and no longer requires large outlays of capital. I'm not sure I fully understand her answer, but I think it's something like this: honor the relationship between these gifts and exploitation without pretending to know the exact way the connection works, and turn the excess into affirmative affect that, who knows, might be a difference that makes a difference.

[Note on debts: I am here, basically, paraphrasing the basically unparaphrasable final turn of an essay by Chris Nealon on the poetic defense which concludes with a reading of Jennifer Moxley's "On this Side Nothing," a poem that also ends, after a tortuous process of reasoning, with a similarly improbably and open-ended affirmation.]

* Correction: I mispoke here originally. I realize that a good deal of the language in the deer head part of the book does appear to have this provenance. But a good deal of it doesn't.

Two summers ago, this when we still lived in Ithaca, Anna and Noah (6. mos. old at the time) and I were driving north from Berkeley to a house that her parents had rented in Mendocino when we passed the establishment a photo of which now adorns the banner above, and wherefrom, by way of a Tom Waits song, this blog takes its name. I recently had the chance to retrace our route, and although my memory had placed "Red's Recovery Room" about forty miles away, in a much nicer spot on the erstwhile "Bohemian Highway" between Sebastopol and Bodega Bay, probably because Tom Waits, I was told at the time, lives around there somewhere The bar is actually in Cotati, just off the 101, right next to a seemingly uninhabited surfeit of tract-housing. I didn't get a chance to go in--but I imagine looking, on the inside, like the setting of Iggy Pop and Tom Wait's wonderfully maundering and inconclusive conversation in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes."
I haven't listened to this particular song, or in general any Tom Waits, in the intervening time but not for lack of admiration for what he does as songwriter and noisemaker. I'm taking a break--like I'm taking a break from the Pixies, from Charles Mingus, from Dylan, from Nirvana, etc., and all kinds of music I've worn through from overlistening. In general, I feel pretty dumb about music but I like this song, and I feel drawn to and repulsed by its lyrics, their recovery and preservation of a historical moment, a U.S., that the sign above refuses to any longer portend--"sawin on a jaw bone violin there /Kathleen was sittin down /In little reds recovery room /In her criminal underwear bra" (the credits here belong to Waits and the aformentioned Kathleen, his wife I think). Sometimes, it seems that majority of us poetry-bloggers (late babyboomers or gen-x'rs) are trying to sort through the leavings and residues, failures and wrong turns of the revolutionary moments of the late 1960s and early 1970s--the artistic products of which are now the dominant voice in poetry and art, and the political legacy of which (liberalism's auto-cannibalization--which is not, Jordan, to say democracy sucks but rather what democracy, whose, which one? Lots of people speak for me. They get paid to do so even) needs to be better understood if we are to understand where we are since 2001--the neoprimitivists and constructivists and post-situationists and neo-Mallarmeans and dialecticians and techno-artists and the macaronics, all of us blindly feeling our way along toward the promise of the promise of promise betrayed. A song like this, retrospective as it is, makes some of that work easier.
But if this is a space for recovery, it's largely the recovering of things that were never mine to begin with, that I either did not know I had, didn't have any idea what to do with or just plainly did not have at all. Starting a blog, and starting to read blogs, and argue and befriend and confabulate with poets, has completely changed my sense of what it means to write and to read--and it's pointed me in the direction of more points of interest than I could ever countenance with an army of self-clones. Where before I saw scarcity and a moribund artform I practiced dutifully and for the benefit of seven or eight people, I know see abundance. Maybe that's community--but it's a community that overspills and fails to encompass any term like "the poetry blogging community" or "the Bay Area poetry scene." Less like the avant-garde neighborhood watch and more like a garden where you know the vegetables much better than the hands that tend them.
But there's something to be said for solitude, for the eremite, too. I think that's the (un)happy medium that blogs offer--a social hermitude.
(I know this has a strange valedictory ring to it, but don't worry--or do--I'm not going anywhere).

What I'm Doing

Hey _______--

OK, so I'm now mentally totally inside this project and want to communicate some thoughts before they evaporate. I've sent you a draft/version/adumbration of what the text might be, feel free to do with it as seems appropriate--decrypt it, read it, cut it up, bury it in the yard until it sprouts, make n-dimensional superstrings from it, paper airplanes, whatevs.

I've been reading this really useful book by Johanna Drucker: The Century of Artists' Books. I'll send it to you once I'm done with it, and can take some notes. Probably this weekend.

It makes me begin to think about decisions we'll want to make about the form (or forms, no need that this be only one thing) of what we're doing. Drucker's definition of the artist book, as a product that challenges or re-imagines its own book-ness, that makes "meaning" by its structurality rather than its content, is really useful here. And so I ask: do we want to do 1) a relatively cheap edition of x copies on relatively inexpensive paper, printed with a laser printer, maybe two colors, or colored pages, which uses a standard format of--book cover, contents, rectangular serial pages. 2) a smaller number of reproducible objects--out of better paper, cloth, metal, trash, etc. 3) a single, one-off totally weird object that probably no-one will ever see or hear about but which will be our delightful secret. 4) All and none of the above.

I'm imagining now (without a clear image of what this would look like) a book-object whose structure imitates that of DNA, of the chromosome, of codes in general. I'm interested in the idea of folding (as this is the way that the relatively limited information of the DNA sequence gets turned on and off as it gets twisted by various chemical bonds and charges) of pleating and unfolding. I'm interested in the idea of topological forms (forms defined purely by their shapes, the kinds of knots they make, and not their relative or absolute dimensions--the meaning of say, in the famous topological problem, the seven bridges of the city of Konigsberg which in their holes and points of connection define a limited set of possible movements--there is no way, if I remember correctly, to cross each of the seven bridges only once. Deleuze has a book (The Fold) which gets into this productively, as it's his idea (following Spinoza/Leibniz against Hegel) to imagine the universe and consciousness as a single substance that folds into itself, that mixes inside and outside (the outside is inside in consciousness, and the inside is outside in bodyness), where human experience is just a part of this substance turned back on itself, snake eating its tail, yadda yadda--this to get away from Hegel's and Marx's dialectic vision of opposing and interacting forces (which, some say, isn't really that different, I don't know where I stand here). I can send you some of this book if you want. So, this makes me think of a way in which your art and my text can mix together, fold into and unfold from each other, rather than relate dialectically across the gutter/spine of the book. Meta-commentary note: As for us working together, this means that rather than imagine a synthesis through the reconciliation of our different (delightfully so) sensibilities, I'd like to humble myself so that I can become changed by your vision, your critique of my text, etc. I'd like to unfold from within what you do, as perhaps you will unfold from me. [insert "summer of love" music sequence here, kaleidoscopy hearts]

Lately, the idea that has been important to me is the imagination of the form as meaning here, rather than the content, the form of code and its subversion--a script which can be expressed in any way possible, simply by imagining new rules. This means (at least for me) that the content isn't in the code (in the sense of the code representing some kind of truth) but in the way that the surrounding body and world act upon it--allowing for the expression of its infinite virtual potentials (its ability perhaps to create all kinds of beautiful monsters and monstrous beauties) folding the code in on itself and out of itself--we can think of all that "noise" in the genome as that potentiality. Thus, we have then a model of code or language or visuality as expression, as production, rather than representation of some absent content. This allows me to imagine a book where meaning is generated, unfolding, exfoliating, rather than represented. Right now, after a talk with a friend last weekend, I'm feeling nervous about what I've written being interpreted as espousing an idea of an essential biological ground for human experience (since these ideas have been, historically, so dangerous and since I believe that most of the biologicalized theories are often just materializations of ideology, false consciousness, samsara), not to mention biological determinism. But maybe I'm wrong--again, I want to be open. It's not my project.

So that's what has emerged as the first idea of the project--secondly is a kind of dystopian vision of a super-capitalism (all of the pieces of which are in place already) in which the body is parcelled, cut-up, mapped, commodified, and systems of exploitation and racism and sexism and control and class-structure are completely internalized, in which the social relations based on domination (which are already made to look real by "spectacle," by a swallowed false image) are made more powerful because biologized--by personalized pharmaceuticals (yes, I'm a hypocrite), designer genes, etc, and in which the disparities of wealth and accumulation are further ramified and compounded by a class-structure based on biotech-haves and biotech-havenots. Lately I've been asking myself: if skincolor and race become a matter of choice, like a hairstyle, will this make racism stronger or weaker? All of this seems, sadly, from where I stand, pretty likely, unless anticapitalism finds some way to get its shit together (and yes, I'm not doing much here). Seriously, I look at Noah and wonder how many more generations of non-bioengineered babies the world has left. Or if it even makes sense to talk like that so traversed by chemicals and weird pollutants and whatnot is the body. It makes me fucking crazy. Of course, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this technology--in a non-capitalist world that I fail always to even imagine, perhaps, it could be totally fine, could enable some kind of ecological and social homeostasis. I'm not romancing some idea of what a human is essentially. I'm just pretty sure that (as the world stands now) this shit means some new and improved baby-eating, world-destroying, poverty-making monsters to come--the sick political unconscious of the U.S. and its love of disasters thinks this one's real good, real pretty. Not to mention the environmental degradation which this will indubitably hurry along. How to write about that, too, I don't even know. . . ( another project, another day)

Back to folding, I should say of course, that this idea is partly inspired by your sculpture/painting, by the idea of three-dimensionality unfolding from the picture plane and into hipster-clogged galleryspace, those chutes and ladders that lead not where I know. . . And then, of course, the baroque psychedelia of your ink drawings, of the interwebbing of people, erotic, codependent, liberatory, however. Hopefully some of these thoughts will find a place in your imagination. If not, talk to me and tell me what you're thinking. With much love.

Your friend,

J'espere Quesi

Right away (that's right, NOW) go and read Lisa Robertson over at the Poetry Foundation site:

The word community is a common currency right now in poetry blogs and certain bars. Community’s presence or absence, failure, responsibility, supportiveness, etc—everyone is hovering around this word. It could be that I just feel its ubiquity since I moved to rural France from Vancouver, ostensibly away from “my community.” When I think about it from here I feel ambivalent. I don’t miss community at all. I do miss my friends. How much of this notion of community is an abstraction of the real texture of friendship, with all its complicated drives and expressions—erotic, conversational, culinary, all the bodily cultures concentrated in a twisty relation between finite, failing persons. When I try to think of what a friend is, I imagine these activities we pleasurably share with someone we love—grooming, reading, sleeping, sex perhaps but not necessarily, intellectual argument, the exchange of books, garments and kitchen implements, all these exchanges and interweavings that slowly transform to become an idea and then a culture. Or a culture first, a culture of friends, and then an idea. Or both simultaneously. Writing is an extension and expression of friendship. Maybe friendship is more dangerous to think about and talk about because of its corporal erotics, mostly not institutionalized, not abstracted into an overarching concept and structure of collective protocols. For me, the drive to talk, to be in a room with someone I want to laugh or dance or fight with, to feed, all of those things—this has more to do with how writing happens for me, and also how I receive others’ writing, than community does. I think my friends have become models and incentives for my relationships with books and writing. Certainly I primarily write to my friends and for them, seeking to please and delight them above all, and sometimes mysteriously and painfully falling out. But I don’t want to call this community. I want to preserve the dark body of friendship.

I'm so happy she's coming to Berkeley for the fall semester.

Acephalous

I wonder if this might be a proleptic parable about the film version of A Scanner Darkly and Dick's work itself. As in: all that's left now is the body (of work); no presiding intelligence there, not even a robotic one.

But, of course, for that metonym "Hollywood," it's gravy either way:

In Hollywood, though, executives have found a way to turn the loss to their advantage. Noting the oddity of the story, Ms. Kim said of the android: "He was perfect for the film. Now he's disappeared — and that's perfect for the film too."

Today's Spelling Lesson: Long Way to Go

Noah: X starts with the letter 'shark'

Back from LA and lots of books in the mail to make bills and other unpleasantries easy to swallow:

from Ugly Duckling Press: After You, Dearest Language by Marison Limon Martinez; a book of Mandelstam translations; and also Gabriel Pomerand's Saint Ghetto of the Loans, a long prose poem here twice translated (by Michael Kasper and Bhamati Viswathan into English) and by Pomerand, on the facing page, into strings (rebuses) of pictographs and hieroglyphs. Pomerand's version of Lettrist practice--breaking down words and sentences to the materiality of the letter in order to discover a magical, immediate and directly effective language (he conceives of his poem as a spellbook, a magical primer) evinces hopefulness about the power of poetry that is rare or non-existent today. It's hard to imagine any writer today searching for "intrinsic figuration" or believing that onomotapoeia is anything but a illusion that meaning creates. And yet, the search for linguistic materiality by way of fragmentation and negativity is something recognizable in other poetries from later moments in the century; it's hard not to think of Ron's notion of the new sentence here, and the peculiarly paradoxical language of uncovering and covering, language "tightly wrapped in searing penetration," is something little writing gets away from. Any revelation's a covering, too.

Also--Josh Corey's chapbook Compostition Marble and Mike Magee's Mainstream (which they were both kind enough to send). I'm looking forward to reading all of these books. I start intensive French on Monday (25 hrs/week) and have no idea how much time this will leave me with for extracurricular reading.
_________________


I have wanted to respond to Standard's remarks, here, about the technologization of poetry as a set of new "enclosures" (at least that's the implication of the final paragraph) and his opposing to this a "voluntary history" that breaks free from the habits of memory and official histories. It's a provocative and unsettling claim, and I see it as in part a response to the question I asked two or three posts back about the nature of the public and private in the blogosphere. It is all the more timely a remark given the current bill in the legislature which would allow for a further privatization and corporatization of the internet. (Note: what follows is not about Flarf, but about technology and artistic practice more generally).

The book that comes to mind here, and that I think Standard is referencing, aside from _Capital_,--is the Retort group's account, in Afflicted Powers, of the 21st century as a new age of primitive accumulation and dispossession, a new age of enclosures--by way of not only privativation, market liberalization, free trade and mass media but also blatant colonialization and occupation. The other works that comes to mind are Hardt and Negri's books Empire and Multitude. Hardt and Negri would agree, to a large degree, with Afflicted Powers notion of primitive accumulation and extend it to the realm of the informational (the internet, etc.) and the biopolitical (genetic engineering, agricultural science). Hardt and Negri are optimistic where Retort is pessimistic, and so as much as they see a new age of displacement and dispossession they also see a simultaneous back-creation of a "common," here analogically linked to the common lands which the enclosures in England destroyed. This common, in their account, can be found on the internet, in shared knowledge, and in the biological. For Hardt and Negri, these areas are in excess of capital's ability to control and adminster them and allow for subversive reappropriative actions by individuals. As much as the internet is most commonly used to buy and sell things, it is also used to organize political actions and distribute information in a manner that is in excess of the state's, and Capital's, regulatory abilities.

The counterargument here (perhaps Standard's and perhaps not) is that the derealization and virtualization of the world allows for a internet world of pseudo-freedoms and pseudo-life all the while that exploitation and domination in 3-D-ville (land and air and sea) proceeds apace; the worry, I suppose, is that action in the media, in blogs etc., will substitute for action in the world. So this would be a pseudo-common, a common that is in fact an enclosure, and which permits dispossession in other spheres. This is the basic plot structure of so many science fiction books and movies, right? We're watching a thrilling and endlessly entertaining movie while our organs are being removed.

But it's wrong, I think, to over-identify a particular technology with the exploitation for which it allows. And this is where I disagree with Standard, at least as I'm reading him, and as much as I agree that historical consciousness of this type is crucial--in fact, I think it sounds little different than Benjamin's exhortation to seize an image of the past that flashes up in a moment of danger, to use the past for the purposes of present political consciousness. But the society of the spectacle and its enclosure(s) are a set of social relations, not just a technology; it is a social image fostered by image-machines, and to the extent that we take as our object of critique the technology itself we miss the point, and we may run the risk of getting rid of the technology and maintaining the social relations. It's not technology that's the problem, as I see it, but the use or misuse of that technology. To a certain degree, no doubt, the social relations of late capitalism have become part of the very form of the internet, a kind of sedimented content that is structural and hence inescapable. But I suspect that this is only part of the story of digital technology, and that a good portion of the deleterious effects of it have to do with the uses to which it is put. Uses that are, also, voluntary.

Mediation of life occurs through various devices, low-tech, hi-tech, no-tech. To the extent that, on the one hand, we think that avoiding the hi-tech or the popular makes a substantial difference we've conflated cause and effect. To the extent that we think some kind of internet image-war is what it's all about--and this would be the danger of certain technologist positions-- we're set up for a series of pyrric victories. We have to look for the ways in which the internet points back to and feeds into social life in the world in which we still, thankfully, live. Both of these interpretations are part of what T.J. Clark has referred to, in trying to counter misreadings of Afflicted Powers, as Donald Rumsfeld's theory of spectacle. We can't forget the society part of Debord's title.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not interested in living here, in ones and zeros, while public space withers and gets more and more desertified. And yes, I'm aware that for the most part the online world is a machine for keeping us in a "depthless present" in which we avoid, in fact, the terrors of the present moment, ditto the past and future. But I think that search engines or whatnot, or other technologies can be used, if not for historical investigation, then for a lateral recovery of the full sprawl, the full excessive (abundant) massiveness of the present in all of its aspects. And one gets to make voluntary present-worlds here, too. One gets to see connections here, too. And I think that there is a slippage, in Standard's account, between information-economies and commodity-economies. Information is in abundance in the world today; the way that one makes information into a commodity is by limiting access, valuing certain types of information and devaluing others, and in all respects convincing other people that the "real information" is here, not there. But most of the time that same information can be had for free, so being-in-the-know is a scam. The commodity part of information is all in its organization, its form, and so, perhaps, there are ways of arranging and rearranging information that do not follow the logic of the commodity. [I'm going to continue to think about this. Any thoughts would be appreciated.]

Look, I'm more than aware that every time I buy a book online, or download an article, I'm contributing to the death of the street. But I also know that, for instance, the BBQ I went to yesterday at Rodney Koeneke's house, where I saw Alli Warren and Kasey Mohammed read their thrilling poems, and met Rodney's beautiful little boy Auden (only ten days younger than Noah!) was partly a social connection spurred on by the internet. The same thing happened a couple of weeks ago when, after an e-mail exchange, I ran into Standard at Normal Cole's, Melissa Benham's and Mary Burger's Artifact reading. A disagreement that might have turned more negative than necesary turned into a truly pleasant and edifying conversation, and I found Standard an immensely likeable fellow with whom I have numerous common interests. And no doubt more than a few points of difference.

So, I think that, as with any technology, there is little that is inherently open or closed in digital technology. It's a question of how, and to what purpose, something is used. Or so says my Wittgenstein. I think the same goes for the ostensibly trivial aspects of popular culture--yes, a song by X or Y may be basically ideological and obfuscating or toxic, but if contextualized correctly, if juxtaposed in intriguing ways, it's anything but.

demultiplier

By what factor should we multiply reports like those of the massacre of Hadifa, or torture in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo and Bagram Air Base and _____? What is the ratio of reported to unreported atrocities? How often is the military successful in suppressing information?

To think like this--to search for a horrible and unspecifiable multiplier--runs counter to the work of feeling, it seems, the work of disgust and compassion which wants to value every death like this as infinitely unaccountable and unbearable. Comparisons are odious (quoth Marianne Moore). These things can't be quantified. And yet, it seems that the predictable pattern of reportage and response--doubt followed by indignation and promises of "justice," the intensity of anger and disgust devoted to the singular atrocity only helps to reinforce the notion that these are isolated events. On the other hand, to see something like Hadifa as the visible portion of a field of violence where, everyday, soldiers and security forces out-of-mind with fear kill people armed and unarmed--babies and old men and all--pushes me beyond the limit of feeling and into the realm where I can mostly only cogitate. Maybe I'm dead in a few hard to find places, so that the big picture ( seems to push against the work of disgust and indignation that Hadifa deserves. It's wrong, wrong and necessary.

Focusing on the singular event is, to me, akin to the equally seductive tendency to lay the war in Iraq--in here, over there--on the doorstep of "the administration." It's easier if there's a human explanation, a series of choices made by people with beating hearts. I think often of a friend's description of Bush as "merely the most repulsive face of the machine." And even the phrase "machine" has a hidden anthropomorphic component (a maker, right, a hand?), a way of giving face to something that is faceless: broken machine that keeps on working.

I am irrational in grief. I am unable to give up magical thinking, to stop reading horoscopes, to give up looking for agency, the agency, the icy A. And here, too, the seductions of conspiratorial thinking arise--in the vertigo of the big, unclear picture: a plot, a little story with explosions and perfect hair and betrayals and midgets who live in the Los Angeles sewers, that makes everything make sense.

This is where Thomas Pynchon's novels can help: allowing the drift into the magical, refusing any ground for it.

--

I'm off to LA for a week.

--

Speaking of perfect hair, though, I highly recommend Clean. One of the best new movies I've seen since, oh, the other movie with Maggie Cheung. I've been thinking about intensity lately--how there's a kind that comes from speed and another kind from slowness (concentration) and then a third kind that comes from both speed and slowness--slowness in the foreground ( that seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of affects that Cheung's face contains balanced from a brief moment), but speed in the background, the camera jerking to keep Cheung in the frame while everything else is in flight, in disarray.

This happens in poetry, too, sometimes.

Interdict of the Day

No Camouflage in the Disco Area.

Getting _Lost_

Isn't the interest of the central but oh-so-familiar device in the addictive TV-show Lost--the suspense-building countdown that needs to be reset every 108 minutes via the manual entry of "codes"--that it gives a kind of recursive (and hence false) teleological structure to something that by virtue of it being an ongoing series has no defineable or clear-cut endpoint, whose hook is that it continually promises a resolution which it can postpone or complicate for episode upon episode, season upon season, until we get fed up or bored or move on? And yet I tune in each week, enter the tele-visual codes, submit myself to a hyper-manipulative waiting game without any real hope of an end; I keep watching even though I know the whole thing is probably a hoax and whatever resolution, whichever answers to my questions I eventually receive--some variation on "it was all a dream"--will fail, must fail, to satisfy. Those poor cast-members in the hatch, entering the codes every 108 minutes, doing something they aren't even sure has any meaning--that's me! And what do I learn is the result of failing to enter the codes? A toxic and dangerous accumulation of electromagnetic energy (otherwise known as suspense!) which rebooting the system (tune in next week!) disperses. 108 minutes: probably close to the average length of a feature film.

A Tonalist and Flarf

I was more inclined to step into this conversation (extended here and here and here) before things got heated and, it seems, not so nice. To start with, I think that Standard's oblique remarks about transgressivity (a metonym for you-know-what) are an inaccurate characterization of most of the flarf--not that much admittedly--that I've read. In _Deer Head Nation_ and _Petroleum Hat_ , for instance, I see nothing of the mere reversal of binaries--where transgression of power simply solidifies the power of power--of which Standard accuses the Flarfitrix/ -ator. But uh, doesn't this critique write off a huge portion of potent artistic, political and theoretical practice-Swift, Pope, Byron, Tzara, Mina Loy, the Baroness, Bataille, Schwitters, Artaud, Beckett, Amiri Baraka, self-immolating monks, Iggy Pop, Karen Finley? In the comments box of Standard's post, Pamela Lu distinguishes between "a kind of theater of harrassment to expose aggressive power dynamics that couldn't otherwise be called out without incurring immediate, heavy-handed backlash" and transgressive art that simply uses experimentalism as a pretence for its own violent, racist or sexist interests. I think this is a good test, and also that the two books above fall under the first category. I see flarf--in its finest instances--as not doing violence for violence's sake but exposing the already existent formal and contentual violences--on the internet, in the stock tropologies of poetry. I don't see it as brutality for the sake of a sadomasochistic readership, but of exposing the brutality that underwrites most every calm. Things can edge away from this first category into the second--this happened in earlier avant-gardes, too--in Bruce Andrews, for instance. I've seen "Flarf" that I found merely reactive and sensationalist. I stopped reading Jim Behrle months ago.

[On the term politically correct: I have on occasion used a personal computer type the term P.C. I regret all of these instances. It's a stupid term, an example of the enormuously successful, Karl Rove-ian marketing strategies which rendered the concepts behind terms like "illegal immigrant" and "pro-life"seemingly value neutral, and yes, I think continuing using it perpetuates the idea that a respect for difference and a desire for a world free of oppression is merely a polite fiction. But I do think that the current protocols of discourse force people to mask their hatred and stupidity in more palatable terms. I'd rather see it out in the open where it can be engaged with as the balderdash it is, instead of hidden behind a scrim of legalistic and scientistic and pseudo-rational nonsense. This is the line that Badiou (In Ethics) and Zizek (The Fragile Absolute) take, and I think that to some degree they're right.]

So, to me, the poems in the books above seem interested in engaging, orchestrating and deploying multiple levels of social voice--some offensive, some inoffensive, some whatever--not for the purpose of exploitation or a Vice-magazine laugh at the different or other, but to have the conversations that are not happening. It's pretty basic social constructivism, the way I read it, pseudo-documentary or documentary, allowing for carnival and polyphony and the social illuminations that derive from this. Except the tone is very different than what you might find in Reznikoff or something like Mark Nowak's Shut Up, Shut Down--ecstatic and frenetic instead of austere and morally serious. It is the mad, hysterical voice of Capital, ready to market any identity or subject position back to itself, with interest, ready to turn any negativity into an instrument blunt or pointed or spectral. I think it's an effective portrait of where we are, of what is and who isn't--and to the extent that it makes visible what goes by other names, or none at all, it's powerful critique.


This to me seems the first and most obvious point of difference between Flarf and the A Tonalist--Flarf's odes to A-Tonalism's elegies; pressure of speech to aphasia; plenum to void. [Here I should say that I also very much admire Brent's and Standard's and Laura's poetry; my claims here are meant to be descriptive not evaluative, in line with Brent's desire for "affirmation without silencing"]. In Brent's version, and in his poems, it seems that the A Tonalist imagines poetry as a reconstellating event taking place within the utter absence of regulating materials--no continuous rules or procedures, no continuous subject: a Mallarmean throw of dice which forms a totality to which we can choose to become subjects or choose to turn our backs. Each poem is a world entire, free (and perhaps the a tonalist only pretends to believe this) of all the messy straps and fetters which precede and therefore limit the non-abolitions of chance. In this, the work that an A Tonalist does may imagine a future world in which people are actually free as such. But if an A Tonalist occurs as subject and as vanishing in the whiteness of the page, in the spaces of non-being and absence--then the Flarfist situates her poetic production amidst excess, plurals and surplusses, landfill, oilspills, exploding populations of deer. She is the "Man on the Dump", the commodifying the, repurposing and recrafting the cast-offs and left-overs of the constant search for value. Seen like this, these two positions couldn't be more opposed, and couldn't be a more interesting pair of interlocutors. Maybe I'll write an essay.

The danger of the A Tonalist position above is a blithe ignorance of the materials which actually constitute its supposed autonomy and the freedom of each and every poetic event (most of these people seem too smart for this, 'cause like, yo, power is coming down from above, below inside, sidewards ); the danger of the Flarf position is that, instead of picturing the moment of the social and of capital to itself, it merely ends up reinstating it, reinforcing it; instead of pointing up and undressing power, it merely volunteers for it. From this derives Dan Hoy's half-thinking that Google was writing flarf poems and therefore the poets were corporate tools--this is a misunderstanding of the kind of work that a poet can do. Arranging or repurposing or re- or decontextualizing is also an act of "voice," an action of the subject [cf. "Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote"]--a snipping subject rather than a speaking subject, to quote David Larsen. Whether such vocal arrangements are manipulative or effective and what kind of sociality they picture can, of course, only be considered on a case by case basis.

As much, though, as these are irreconcilabe notions of poetry they are also hopelessly imbricated --this was the point of Kasey's original remarks, I think. For, in Brent's diagram, the machinery that produces the poetic "event" does so by separating looseness from the undesirable by-products of vagueness and negativity. This shows that for all of the Platonism of Badiou's intriguing and potent aesthetic theories--his desire for purity (or sobriety or a/tonement) is always going to produce a remainder as much as it produces a totality to which we choose or choose not to elect ourselves as contemporaries. At times, I kind of wish Badiou believed in history. But oh well. As for us who still live here, what happens to that atoned and purified vagueness and negativity is something that Brent's diagram can or will not show because, it seems, once the A / Tonalist has become subject to her event that vagueness and negativity no longer really exists. It devolves to someone else to deal with it. And along comes the flarfist bricoleur.

Last Week

Little there is, in truth, more fascinating than the fact that Noah decided this morning that he wanted to watch an "imaginary" DVD "about" the TV. Also, horses which were cleaning the DVD player. How very meta- of him.

---

A couple of exchanges have refused to leave me alone, and although responding to something written last week is like, basically, a conversation with myself, here I go anyway.

I take Jordan's critique of "aura," of value derived from scarcity, quite seriously. He's right, of course, that the constant drive toward novelty, originality, freshness, moistness, crunchiness and all other things Madison Ave. is, well, the new yesterday. As many will agree, this leads to work that just tries too hard, and more generally, to a raft of commodities we don't need/don't understand/can't use/don't want.

But the scarcity model, and I think Jordan notes this (though I can never really tell with Jordan), also engages the opposed phenomenon of massive superabundances. In this one reader-per-writer poetry economy, there are too many poems! Just looking at Jordan's list of journals makes me contemplate taking a nap for an hour or two. I'm a slow writer and a slow reader, and while I admire the industriousness of Jordan and others like him, it is often the case that reading through an author's 700 page collected poems is kinda' disappointing. Nice to know she had her off-days or off-years, but disappointing nonetheless. And confusing if, like me, you are easily overwhelmed or stupefied. _Fascicle_ scares me.

Truth be told, the real application of Bataillean economics would involve a celebration once a year where we drink beer (or, in my case, soda), crash the blog servers and build bonfires from those endlessly proliferating journals. It's hard not to see how poets being more forthcoming (and posting every scribble, as Jordan says) would only continue the problem of (to continue my problematic economic metaphor) overproduction (and its friend inflation? does this work?). Blogs and list-serves are testament to a boundless energy among poets that journals (a good way to insure you are *not* read) and books (a dying form, as they used say in the 1970s?) can't accomodate. And this is where Jordan's desire for a poetry more like a baseball game (though baseball bores me) comes in--where we get the Million Poems Show and the Flarf Festival. A place to put all the energy that journals can't accomodate. Different distribution models, says Jordan. And he's right.

Sometimes, it's difficult not to feel that blogs (the energies herein) are wasted on bloggers. I think this is from whence derives the muddle-headed claim that Flarfists and bloggers are closet techno-utopians. I'm having a great deal of fun and getting pointed in all kinds of lovely directions, discovering pleasures--of reading, listening, looking, talking-- that I never would otherwise. Despite the assholes. But on this side of the screen: yep, same world; same gutting of social entitlement programs, schools, cities; same war; ditto domination, ditto exploitation.

Which brings me to Bourriaud and Relational Aesthetics (by way of Anne). I've only read the introduction, but I'm inclined to say: Sure, art and semiotic surfing can model relations and sociality, but it can also substitute for it. I think blogs run the risk of creating a social imaginary from which most people are excluded. They are obviously a catalyst, but are they also a distraction? 10 years from now we'll look back, I'm sure, and see how this thing we are all participating in completely transformed the field of poetic production. But transformed how?

I would be interested in a conversation which looks at the basic structure of blogs, and thinks about the invisible limits they impose on thought, communication, and sociality. Do terms like private space and public space even apply here? How does time work (or not work) in blogs? Sometimes this seems like the meta-conversation no-one is having, though admittedly I read an infinitesimal portion of what's out there.

----

Next up: the Flarf / A Tonalist conversation.

Noah’s Response to Elif Batuman’s Article on the Death of the Short Story, Or, Why I Should Quit Smoking.

[Link to article in n+1]

When doggies go to sleep, they turn into kitties.
And when kitties go to sleep, they turn into bees.
And when bees go to sleep, they turn into fireflies.

And what do the fireflies do?

The fireflies bite you.

And what do you do?

I put them in one of your drawers.

Is that the end of the story?

No. When fireflies go to sleep they turn into smoke-a-cigarettes.

Is that the end of the story?

No.

What comes next?

The letter H.

What does the letter H do?

The letter H turns smoke-a-cigarette into these little things.

Is that the end?

No, it’s not. You should press those buttons.

THE END

Just when you thought labor power had been dead (U.S.-wise) for forty years: asi se puede. Si se puede.

Half of the restaurants and stores on Telegraph closed: like a national holiday, celebrating a day that hasn't yet come.

Not guilty.

Hey!: come see Ben Lerner and Javier Huerta read tomorrow (Tuesday, Apr. 25) in the Holloway Series: 7 p.m., Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler)

In discussing the finer points of last week's gender/sex discussion, Noah had this insight: "Mommy is daddy and I am daddy and you are daddy too."

Wow. For those of you not already in The Know(tm), I've just discovered that the Tate Gallery, which has some of the best web curating I've yet come across, in addition to allowing walk-through tours of exhibitions, webcasts all of its symposia and artist talks.

Read an excerpt from the soon-to-be published Hashish writings of Benjamin. If only I'd read that stuff at 17 instead of Terence McKenna's space-aliens-in-the-magical-mushrooms gibberish, who knows where I'd be now.

--

Probably here anyway, probably a day almost exactly like this one-- reading Hardt and Negri's Multitude, writing an essay on Jeff Wall and Benjamin, and surfeited by news sources (all bad, all meanings of this) such that the melting of the polar ice caps and an economy based increasingly on churning liquidity and speculation on speculation, combine, by both displacement and condensation, in the entirely banal phrase: trying to keep afloat.


--

Here's one for the poetry wars: "All the elements of corruption and exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative regimes of production: destroying them in words is as urgent as doing so in deeds. . . Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real reappropriation of knowledge." (Multitude, 404)

Write your poems; you too can experience "the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist." (Empire, 413)

--

I'm going to pretend I believe that words are as urgent as deeds and keep at the essays and research. Meanwhile, if anybody wants to do something. . . Please, please, be my guest.

--


I like Jane's remarks about (the) soul as surplus value. I used to think the unconscious was the shoebox full of unopened mail I kept in the closet.

--

Somebody please post a YouTube video of Anne Boyer kicking Jim Behrle's ass at the Flarf Festival.

--

I might be scarce until I finish up classes mid-May. But I'll be listening.

I don't have much time to post. But I did want to say that I am glad that all the women-bloggers, and feminist man-bloggers, are speaking up. I hope everyone takes note: here, here, here, here.

I don't roam very far afield, blog-wise, but I don't buy the whole essentialist women are more visual hypothesis (and I find Stephanie's claim that this has to do with the treatment of women-bloggers as objects of a privileged male gaze pretty chilling) Whether female-bloggers are more apt to employ a non-normative ecriture feminine than male bloggers are apt to exercise whatever kinds of non-normative writing options are theirs, I don't know. (I resist it now, but I could be convinced otherwise).

But isn't blog-topia's favorite sexual harasser and homophobe also one of the most imagistic?

Plaza

________________________________

__________________________

The following are urban samples uncovered during trial apocalypse. We
thought it weird to have loved survival so, wanting place on a plaque,
boulevards with vertigo trees. Armored cars raced in and out the thick
goings-on the dream flush with cash. Of flesh: glittering hyperlinks flee
the paving stones, astride the Intro-Duct, the splash page, a suspension
of time-sensitive abbreviations, by the waters of Of. Having died at
some future date our feet factored primes of, so I would (gone) go, begot
by dint of my new, radiant, heat-seeking and child-safe preposition
which, a propos of nothing, proposing nothing but purest impropriety,
was neither about nor to nor of the city it would make its non-object.
House to house like institutes for social research collect affect and fact,
such that we don’t have to deal with or even disinfect their non-history.
At the theological center of the city, where the posthumans congress in
underground malls, what no-one said (poetry): how the north was done.

______________________________

______________________________

No Rule for Applying a Rule

open cover letter

Toward a Pornography of the Sublime is a collection of poems about—but also “of” and “to” and “from” and “for”--Los Angeles.

That said, a book of poems “about” Los Angeles is like a piece of jewelry about homelessness.

I am not the first to suggest that hyper-visibility is one of the form common forms—one of the most conspicuous types—of invisibility. It is “the nothing that is.” LA’s long shots of long shots, its aerial views and mirror play, memorializes its own speechlessness, its lost voice. But Los Angeles only pretends to have no voice. Its voice, its many voices, are not really lost, only thrown, its would-be observer led astray, toward the bright patches.

Los Angeles is anti-poetry—is narrative and image, which are poetry too—and so for my purpose, that voice is poetry, just as the content of the expensive piece of jewelry does turn out to be poverty—poverty zero-degree, invisibility zero-degree, poetry zero-degree.

Poetry is blind; it doesn’t see; it can make images that are not visible. And for this reason, poetry has carte blanche in Los Angeles. It breezes right through the checkpoints. It goes everywhere without anyone noticing. It is LA’s open secret, its theology; the city is laid out on top of a series of lines and stanzas and enjambments cobbled together from land deeds and labor and diaries. Ed Ruscha knows this; that’s why he can represent the city with a few words on a chemical-acrylic backdrop. All of the Europeans who came—Adorno and Fritz Lang and Schoenberg and Stravinsky and Baudrillard—they all missed the poem for its words (which were pictures).

And now it seems almost too late, since every city has its Los Angeles, a little pastel and Pilates whereby it can feign its own authenticity as elsewhere. When an American says Los Angeles these days, she means modernity, she means secularism, she means a concept or an evacuated category of the understanding.

So a book of poems about Los Angeles is a book about modernity and Pilates but also a book about this concept and how it misses the place for its replacements and clichés; how the place everywhere exceeds the concept and cliché; which moves into the clichés and decorates them wildly and in colors no-one has invented yet.

Like LA, Toward a Pornography of the Sublime spreads from multiple and competing centers. Like LA, poetry is not a genre but the absence of genre and the form of this absence (abundance), for which Los Angeles is a metonym. Poetry as cinema, as utopia and its dear friend dystopia, as sprawl and suture and cars and tele-__ ; as race and class in the wrong sit-com, the wrong .com. It has its real: subdivisions, historic buildings, pools, theme parks, surfaces and depths; its riots, floods, fires, earthquakes; its childhood and old age, paved-over trolley lines, beaches, piers, cul-de-sacs, freeways, backalleys; its countries of origin, its history of chauvinism, racism, intolerance, its romances, political corruption, police, movie sets, myths and weathers. All these poetry can do.

And this . . .

SPD SPRING OPEN HOUSE
Saturday April 1st
12 Noon-4 PM * 20-50% off all books!
30% student discount
Readings at 2 PM * Music at 12:30 and 3 PM

Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the US, teaches at UC Berkeley.
Etel Adnan, Lebanese American poet and painter, will read from In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country.
Aaron Shurin, author of Involuntary Lyrics, co-directs the MFA in Writing Program at USF.
David Larsen is author of The Thorn and co-curator of the New Yipes series in Oakland.
Geraldine Kim’s first book, Povel, won Fence Book’s 2005 Modern Poets Series.
Steve Orth is the band Shivshark. They write story telling songs with no choruses or guitar solos and sing them to people, young and old.

At Small Press Distribution
1341 7th St. (off Gilman), Berkeley

updates

Down in LA over the weekend, with Anna and Noah, I caught the Courbet landscape show at the Getty's hyper-classical mountaintop purgatory. So much of the energy in those paintings--that wind which seems to pick you up and plant you inside the painting--comes from the decisive placement here and there of patches where the grain of the canvas shows through. What's that in poetry? Grammar, letters, stuttering.

________

Two from Noah:

"Stop talking to mommy. It hurts my ears."

And then, playing with his imaginary watch (a rubber band), he says , "I need a bandaid on it."
He should be grateful, I tell him. Some of us need a tourniquet.


____________________



One of the great pleasures of Blog-o-ville has been watching Josh think through and work out his dissertation--starting with what seemed, originally, a difficult and super-specific idea, and turning it into something that has been invaluable to me in understanding the current moment in N. American poetry and its antecedents--a moment that, with its confluence of coasts west, east and internal, romanticism and modernism, visionary-poetry and deconstruction, seems to find its analogue in European philosophy's turn toward ethics, politics and the theological. I haven't worked out what this means exactly--or how I feel about affirmation, construction or mythology in an age that seems to need the destructive as much as any, even if construction and destruction, in the best poets, seem two side-effects of the same motion. I see this in Lisa Robertson, in Josh's own poems, in Juliana Spahr, in Joshua Clover, in Anne Boyer and, in general, in much but not all of the poetry that moves me these days, moves me out of days and out of work, too. Less of a turn, then, than an addition to the continuing negational-critical project of things like Flarf.

Lately, I've been trying to learn to avoid a general impatience with groundwork and a general desire to overreach, to get to The Point--so I'll admit, for now, that my sense of all the history here is perhaps not clear enough for me to really map out what's happening. Is this just an extension of Modernist mythography? My suspicion is that the answer is no, but I'm still a ways off from that no.

I'll save my overreaching for the poems, where it's fun and where nobody (well, most body) cares.



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What's up with Charles Valle's editor's note in the new Fence? It's going to take more than name-checking (or, perhaps, mike-checking) Althusser and Benedict Anderson to make the last cover into an attempt to "question the reproduction of the relations of production." I didn't see any question there at all. Just a dull descriptive sentence--a crass attempt to link Fence to some vaguely edgy indie-rock eroticism, in hopes that the readers of Nylon might pull it off the shelf and find it impossible to relinquish. Any stoner with a pair of scissors and a gluestick could do better. Nevertheless, I always find good reading in Fence.

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32 years old today. Huh.