How do you react to our slogan 'Total Everybody Always'? Have you at last understood that your miserable failure as an individual is proof that you pursue a lost cause? (Palinurus, TUG, 100)
Reading The Unquiet Grave over Christmas, I am now prepared to declare it the key text. It is at the root, somehow, of our present efforts. I make a pact with you, Palinurus—we have detested ourselves long enough...
Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to dismiss such activity as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes. (The Unquiet Grave, part I, page 1)
Comment: we must remember that, however true these words may appear to us, they are proposed not as truth but as a symptom of a troubled mind. They are the expression of a man in whom "something is badly wrong". They channel the disillusionment of Palinurus, whom it is plausible to believe adandoned Aeneas—jumped ship. It is also, of course, a weariness over "the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes" (Hamlet 3.1.73-4), a phrase that I never quite know how to parse but feel confident means roughly, "right perfection wrongfully disgraced" (Sonnet 66, i.e., patient merit is effectively spurned by unworthy people). It manifests a contempt for a corrupt society that does not strive to perfect itself. But, for Connolly, it ultimately expresses the sufferings of a "core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within" (TUG, p. xiii). From within. I am not yet ready to accept that judgment, which concretely traces indignation over "the war effort" to some "private sorrow" (xiv).
"No use for Stein to fly to Paris and forget it. The thing, the United States, the unmitigated stupidity, the drab tediousness of the democracy, the overwhelming number of the offensively ignorant, the dull nerve—is there in the artist's mind and cannot be escaped by taking a ship. She must resolve it if she can, if she is to be." (William Carlos Williams, 1930, "The Work of Gertrude Stein", Selected Essays, p. 119.)
"Science has done little to help the artist, beyond contributing radio, linotype and the cinema; inventions which enormously extend his scope, but which commit him more than ever to the policy of the State and the demands of the ignorant." (Cyril Connolly (Palinurus), 1944, The Unquiet Grave, part II, p. 54)
...that's where I have my life where I had it where I'll have it vast tracts of time part three and last in the mud my life murmur it bits and scrapsSamuel Beckett
How It Is, part 2, p. 51
The thesis that I'm trying to defend is that a Flarf poem arranges scraps found in the mud in accordance with a pattern or image that "takes over the seeing". That's where we have our lives.
Let's try to make a poem out of the roughed out materials from the last post.
when Serbs get mad, they talk aboutWhen Albanians get mad,When Codi asks if anyone has publicized the problem, Viola reminds her thata small town like Grace.
Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages,and smells there, even though I have to share a bathroom.She is awesome…a regular person….which i ..... envy -I pity her.The most humiliating experience a workinglikethey think ...I suggest that you keepp your dumb comments to yourself.and around40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us.
That is, something like:
when Serbs get mad, they talk
about a small town like Grace.
Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages.
I pity her. They think 40,000 Americans
conceived in petri dishes walk among us.
I'm not entirely sure what this shows or proves, except perhaps that the search results do not determine the poem. After all, we are already making a rather different poem than the one made by Katie Degentesh.
Let's remove all overtly political effects. This can require drawing some interesting lines. For example, the act of "angering the Serbs" is a political one; but it is not necessarily political "when Serbs get mad". That's just a bit of cultural stereotyping. Let's, in any case, see what happens:
angering the Serbs;when Serbs get mad, they talk about"human rights" and "European integrations."When Albanians get mad,
When Codi asks if anyone has publicized the problem, Viola reminds her that a small town like Grace. Wandering around the cemeterythe UN anymore, particularly since they elected Libyans to chair the Human Rights division.Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages, and smells there, even though I have to share a bathroom.Sarah Palin…She is awesome…a regular person….which i ..... envySarah Palin- I pity her. The most humiliating experience a workingThey should go there and do the fine job of building a nationlike they think ... I suggest that you keepp your dumb comments to yourself.
we've gotten used to it human dignity has been unsullied, and around 40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us
OK. Next, let's remove all overtly poetic material:
when Serbs get mad, they talk about When Albanians get mad,
When Codi asks if anyone has publicized the problem, Viola reminds her that a small town like Grace.Wandering around the cemetery
Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages, and smells there, even though I have to share a bathroom.
She is awesome…a regular person….which i ..... envy - I pity her. The most humiliating experience a working
like they think ... I suggest that you keepp your dumb comments to yourself.we've gotten used to it human dignity has been unsullied,and around 40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us
What are we left with?
when Serbs get mad, they talk about When Albanians get mad,
When Codi asks if anyone has publicized the problem, Viola reminds her that a small town like Grace.
Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages, and smells there, even though I have to share a bathroom.
She is awesome…a regular person….which i ..... envy - I pity her. The most humiliating experience a working
like they think ... I suggest that you keepp your dumb comments to yourself.
and around 40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us
It is from these strophes that we will want to shape a poem. Now, having lost the reference to nation building, and used material originally situated in a comment on Sarah Palin, we are obviously not going to arrive at the same lines that Degentesh did. But we are learning something about how to recognize "the scraps of poems" that Jerome Rothenberg suspects are "left behind in the mud" after the khurbn.
Lemon Hound has an auspiciously named series called "How Poems Work". It reminds me a bit of Simon DeDeo's Rhubarb is Susan—especially with its focus on one poem at a time. Like Simon, it also has good taste; the poems that are examined in the series are definitely worth looking at.
But two recent posts on Flarf, at least, strike me as a bit too theoretical for the "how things work" genre. Ryan Fitzpatrick's post on Katie Degentesh's "No One Cares Much What Happens to You" begins with a quote from Baudrillard about "the ecstasy of the social". That's a perfectly interesting notion, of course, and the post is a worthwhile read, to be sure. But it suggests something more in spirit of a program of perception, i.e., what Bourdieu called theory. We are being told "how poems look" (one way of reading them) not "how poems work" (another way of reading of them).
In a different way, the same is true of Jordan Davis's reading of Drew Gardner's "Fixing a Real Phantom Limb". Again, this is a great selection for the series, but this time I'm much more hesitant about the reading itself. At the center (or at least near the middle) of the post, Davis emphasizes
the sense of responsibility and obligation that leaks out of the poem in places. Horney has written extensively of the trauma the ego sustains in the face of unreasonable expectations which it experiences as "shoulds."
This is something Davis sees in the poem, not something the poem does. We know this because he immediately grounds his interpretation in the work of Karen Horney, i.e., psychology. Indeed, earlier on, Davis offers the following:
Wide reading in the key psychology texts of the last midcentury -- Karen Horney, D.W. Winnicott, S.J. Perelman -- informs Gardner's therapeutic approach to the lyric.
We don't have to read this as a psychological theory of Gardner's work—being "informed" can mean many things—but this certainly looks more like a representation of a poet's intentions than the diagram of a poem's operations. We can call this Davis's Theory of Microdistortion in Flarf.
But I'm not being wholly serious. Nor is Davis, I suspect, and nor (certainly) is Gardner. To interpret "Fixing a Real Phantom Limb" as, say, a sequence of microdistortions that carries out (or even just "mimicks") an ego-therapy of the trauma of unreasonable "shoulds", is somehow, not really wrong, but just not really "getting it". Davis, I think, is putting us on, because Davis, of course, does really get Flarf. He's not telling us how flarf works, he is mocking how it looks to a particular kind of critic.
In fact, in both cases, it seems to me that the reading tells us much less about how Flarf works than it shows us how a particular critical apparatus breaks down in its attempt to read it. I'm pretty sure that Jordan Davis, at least, is producing this effect intentionally. And I'm not at all against making even an earnest attempt to theorize Flarf. (Tony Tost, whose thoughts on this I respect a great deal made such an attempt in Fascicle.) But I think there is a much more practical task for critics to undertake in relation to Flarf, and a more urgent one: to catch its kopóltuš red-handed. So far, I think we're still too preoccupied with the theoretical khurbn that is the proximal occasion of Flarf. Instead, we need to really reveal how the thing works. I don't claim have done that yet. But that, in any case, is where my earnesty is currently being deployed.
We know something about how Katie Degentesh's "No One Cares Much What Happens to You" was made. The title was taken from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) test, parts of which were then "[fed into] internet search engines and piecing the poems together from the results pages" (The Anger Scale, Combo, 2006, p. 75). The materials I gathered earlier were found the same way (except in one case where I had to go to the source itself, though for ultimately incidental reasons).
It is obvious that part of the method (in this case) involves removing the directly MMPI-inspired material first (which ultimately appears in the poem only twice: as the title and in line 13):
No one cares much aboutangering the Serbs; when Serbs get mad, they talk about "human rights" and "European integrations." When Albanians get mad, ...
When Codi asks if anyone has publicized the problem, Viola reminds her thatno one cares much abouta small town like Grace. Wandering around the cemetery ...No one cares much aboutthe UN anymore, particularly since they elected Libyans to chair the Human Rights division. Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages, andno one cares much aboutsmells there, even though I have to share a bathroom. ...No one cares aboutSarah Palin… She is awesome…a regular person….which i ..... envy Sarah Palin - I pity her. The most humiliating experience a working ...*
They should go there and do the fine job of building a nation like they think ... I suggest that you keepp your dumb comments to yourself.nobody cares to...
we've gotten used to it,no one much cares,human dignity has been unsullied, and around 40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us ...
This gives a first indication of what is meant by "Google sculpting". Here, in fact, the block is being, let's say, "roughed out" or set up for the finer work of finding the poem in the results. We are left with
angering the Serbs; when Serbs get mad, they talk about "human rights" and "European integrations." When Albanians get mad,
When Codi asks if anyone has publicized the problem, Viola reminds her that a small town like Grace. Wandering around the cemetery
the UN anymore, particularly since they elected Libyans to chair the Human Rights division. Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages, and smells there, even though I have to share a bathroom.
Sarah Palin… She is awesome…a regular person….which i ..... envy Sarah Palin - I pity her. The most humiliating experience a working
They should go there and do the fine job of building a nation like they think ... I suggest that you keepp your dumb comments to yourself.
we've gotten used to it human dignity has been unsullied, and around 40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us
Next we are going to look through this to discern what Robert Duncan called a "jig-saw conformation of patterns of different orders ... a pattern of apparent reality in which the picture we are working to bring out appears ... a pattern of loss", an opportunity for kopóltuš.
___________
*Like I say, this one was obviously not part of Degentesh's search for this poem, which was written long before anyone might have pitied Sarah Palin. I simply hadn't been able to find any other combination of "no one cares much" and "I pity her" when Google threw me this bone.
Here are some materials gathered using Google to set alongside the first six lines of Katie Degentesh's "No One Cares Much What Happens to You":
No one cares much about angering the Serbs; when Serbs get mad, they talk about "human rights" and "European integrations." When Albanians get mad, ...
When Codi asks if anyone has publicized the problem, Viola reminds her that no one cares much about a small town like Grace. Wandering around the cemetery ...
No one cares much about the UN anymore, particularly since they elected Libyans to chair the Human Rights division. Stop laughing; I'm serious.
Its all I can afford on my nursing home wages, and no one cares much about smells there, even though I have to share a bathroom. ...
No one cares about Sarah Palin… She is awesome…a regular person….which i ..... envy Sarah Palin - I pity her. The most humiliating experience a working ...
They should go there and do the fine job of building a nation like they think ... I suggest that you keepp your dumb comments to yourself. nobody cares to ...
we've gotten used to it, no one much cares, human dignity has been unsullied, and around 40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us ...
At least one of these samples, of course, can't actually be one of Degentesh's sources, but it was sufficiently flarfy for me to stop my search when I found it. More later.
