If That’s What You’re Into, Go For It

for Chris Daniels

When misery overwhelms your heart, as inevitably it will, don’t run from it. Go for it.

Then go fuck yourself.

Find a way to use it. Be open. Be completely generous. If that’s what you’re into, go for it. Demand complete generosity in return.

Then go fuck yourself.

Make mistakes. Suffer and rage. Rejoice and love. Work hard. Go fuck yourself. Get into it. Go for it.

Play as seriously as a child.

Talk about it, think about it all the time. Have a sense of humor about yourself. Be honest and go fuck yourself.

That’s how people grow.

Library & Lottery

The soi-disant postmodernist is the comic book hero who takes "The Library of Babel" to be an allegory of the times. Unfortunately, it is just a paradox; our tragedy is "The Babylon Lottery".

Close Reading Assignment

In what sense (if any) are "Westward Ho, or the Migration of Guilt" (Ryan G. Van Cleave) and "Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay" (Michael Magee) "in the same neighbourhood" (Josh Corey)?

Busy Doing What I'm Doing and Enjoying What I'm Doing

LARRY KING: What are you going to do after 2008?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. I'm so busy doing what I'm doing and enjoying what I'm doing and feel that we're making progress, that I don't think about that.


CNN Larry King Live
Aired May 25, 2006, 21:00 ET
(Full Transcript)



"What is the most compassionate pace at which to dig this ditch?"

Cheri Huber, Fall 1996

More portable light.

My life is not an experiment in radical subjectivity.

The arrangement of materials that maintains the materiality of the arrangement.

Ideas have consequences beyond their implications.

Two more things to be proud of

Simon DeDeo likes my compositions in Typo 8. He rightly notes that these are "instruction poems". In fact, since I believe that philosophy is to assertions as poetry is to injunctions, I suppose I think that all poems are ultimately written in the imperative.

Also, I'm currently listed among The Page's New Poems, in the company of people like Anne Boyer and John Ashbery.

These are good times for me.

The Clamour of Personality

[I wrote this post back in February and decided against posting it. Rereading it now, it seems to me to have gained something that applies more generally.]

There is a good feeling surrounding Tom Raworth. He is not a clamorous personality.

No negativity is justified. All negativity is based on a misperception of reality.

Gabriel Gudding

It occurs to me that, for all my claims to take an impersonal interest in poetry, my personality generally precedes my criticism. Certainly it seems lately to be preceeding the reception of my criticism. There has been some talk recently about the essential "egoism" of blogs, and I fear that I have carelessly transported my blogging persona into various corners of the Internet that are less tolerant of it, or less resistant to it. And for which it may be ill-suited.

Gabe describes a "clamorous personality" as one who

seem[s] to accuse or shout or fight or contend or argue or scramble or vie or stoke debates or flap about for attention or toot or boast himself or pretend to be attacked or beg for aid or tout his work from sun to sun or exact a loyalty to a pettiness or threaten the ruination of friendships.

I think those words, "seem to", are important. One of the projects I probably won't get around to until I retire is something I call the literature of "elemental vehemence". I constructed the idea as an inversion of the title of Thomas Carl Wall's Radical Passivity, which is an enviable little book. He presents a single, reasonably well-defined idea by locating it in the the work of three specific authors: Blanchot, Levinas and Agamben. If I recall, his aim is to identify and, in his way, insist upon "the passion that I must be". While he explicitly rejects the opposition of his idea of "passivity" with the notion of "activity", there is an all pervading sense of humility, of "letting be", in the book, a reverence for being, indeed, for being "whatever" (Agamben's qualqunque, L. quodlibet). I also get the sense that he wanted to write a wholly unobjectionable book. At one point (again, I'm quoting from memory) he says that he would be content merely to note as it were "in parenthesis" (or in quotation marks) the passivity that is his theme (the typographical gimmicks are his, as I recall.) There is a distinct effort in the book not to be clamorous.

I bought Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself in a used book store. The notes in the margins are written in green ink and seem to belong to someone who was studying Mailer from the point of view of, say, Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. On the first page, for example, she underlines the words "settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time" and writes the following remark at the bottom: "typical Mailer arrogance - reflects his fascination with power". Reading this running commentary is quite interesting, and I get the sense that she finds Mailer clamorous.

I'm a bit puzzled by people who pride themselves on identifying (or at least feel themselves compelled to identify) the "fascinations" and "arrogance" of people who are obviously themselves very conscious of their self-consciousness. People who are putting themselves "out there", so to speak, to find out what they mean by seeing what they say. Gudding praises Raworth for being "a real person, not someone stuck inside a fantasy of himself" as opposed to those who "poison social networks" with their clamorous being. It would be clamorous to name names, I suppose, but I imagine that the relevant beings know who they are.

Like I say, I think it is in any case worth looking at the literature of this clamour of personality, this elemental vehemence. Its modern examples are people like Norman Mailer, Mordecai Richler, and Irving Layton; there is reason, I think, to count Melville and Whitman among their progenitors. Henry Miller could probably be listed here (though Mailer has noted the spiritual progress in his work towards something like a sage; Hesse's Siddhartha, of course, has an important period of bawdy decadence). And there is certainly something vehement (the etymology of the word is interesting, by the way: "deprived of mind") about Pound (Mr. Directio Voluntatis) and Hemingway (Mailer said, "Hemingway has always been afraid to think"). I'm a long way from having a theory about it, but I think it is worth pointing out that Wall's thesis depends on a particular kind of literature; once we look at other voices, a different sense of the "the passion I must be" emerges.

Love, I call out, find me
Spinning around in error.
Display your dank, coarse hair,
Your bubs and bulbous shoulders.
Then strike, witless bitch, blind me.

(Irving Layton, "Love's Diffidence")

And this brings me back to the epigraphs. You often hear people say stuff like "negativity is based on a misperception of reality" especially when faced with the palpable negativity of someone in the room. This response is generally "justified", in the sense of "socially acceptable"; making this judgment displays, and perhaps exhibits, "emotional intelligence". But we have to keep in mind that there is a parallel argument to be made about "positivity", if you will: it is the elaboration of an unfeasible ideality. I think the sages would back me up on this. Any judgment, good or bad, is in error. Party pooping is perhaps to be frowned upon; but is not partying itself predicated on maya? We tend, however, only to censor the fantasies of clamorous people, we prefer quiet errors to loud ones. We should keep in mind that a good many sweet and gentle people are only as "seemingly" so as someone like Mailer is seemingly arrogant. To judge them as sweet or as arrogant, as passive or as vehement, as peaceful or clamorous, is precisely a judgment. It is directed at a phantasm that haunts the mind of the judge.

In science, the value of an experiment lies in its potential effects on an established theory.

In literature, experimental writing is valued for its potential to transform mainstream writing?

Typo(s)

I'm very proud to have three poems in the new Typo.

I've also noticed that the typographical quality of the Pangrammaticon is slipping. Thus, "hegomony". Thus, "Erza Pound".

On the Possibility of Performing Flarf

The performer is interested not in form but in opportunities for vituosity or in the communication of his "personality".

T. S. Eliot

As I've said before, my hunch is that many of those who don't get or don't like Flarf also think that it is impossible to perform it at some level. The poems, it might be argued, lack a "voice" or "immanent orality" to be "realized" in a "reading". Sorry about all those scare quotes. I'm trying to connect the sense in which poets do "readings" with the sense in which critics do "readings". Reading a Flarf poem is famously difficult.

So I'm watching the videos of the Flarf Festival at YouTube with great interest these days. I am enjoying it as much as the next guy, I'm sure, but there is something about these performances that once again makes me think that what I like about Flarf is something other than what its poets themselves see in it.

The readings I've watched so far all seem to introduce personality or "character" into the work (Jimmy Berhle's may be an exception). Many of them do different voices, and they certainly seem to be impersonating (and, arguably, sometimes mocking) their sources as they do this. That is, in reading their work out loud, they lend some support to Tony's "re-imagining the sources" theory.

Tony once applied Kasey's reading of Barrett Watten to Flarf. The key image is that of a poem

"spoken" through a bullhorn by a figure in black pajamas standing on top of an imposing but faceless public structure.

Like Tony, I think this image provides a model for reading (in both senses) Flarf.

Actually, I always try to read Flarf as though presented on a teleprompter in front of a talking head (news anchor, talk show host, president, etc.). The reason is that I think the Flarf materials (let's simplify by thinking of them as Google searches) achieve their maximum effect when passed through the constraints of an established, monolithic form. That is, Flarf calls for a radically entrenched subject position, a well-endowed enunciative modality. On the page, this normally means subjecting the materials to the hegomony of "free verse".

I was suprised that Drew Gardner used different voices. I always read that poem "straight" as a single, coherent statement. Something similar goes for Kasey. Sharon Mesmer's hillarious "Annoying Diabetic Bitch", which is probably the performance that works best (at least when seen on video) used a single voice but does seem to impersonate (and to an extent mock) the sources (though, like I say, construing what must be multiple sources as one). One way to avoid this would be to imagine Scott McClellan reading it off a teleprompter ...

in black pajamas, of course. Or, alternatively, and just as obviously, he might wear a pair of bunny ears and get someone to play bagpipes in the background.

As you can see, this isn't a finished thought.

Duino Epigrams

Listening to CocoRosie's "Terrible Angels" tonight, I suddenly remembered where the refrain ("every angel's terrible") comes from: Rilke's first Duino Elegy.

...beauty is nothing/ but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure/ and we are so awed because it serenely disdains/ to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

Rereading the whole elegy, I was reminded that what I enjoy about it is its arrangement of epigrams. The rest seems like filler: a medium in which to suspend its substance. But part of that impression comes from straightforward misprision, i.e., from plucking groups of words out of their context and distorting their meaning. That is, I like the following phrases much better in isolation than in the role in Rilke's poem.

It serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Every angel is terrifying. (And CocoRosie's translation is even better.)

Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the[se] huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming an often staying all night?

Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough?

That fierce example of soaring.

What I mean can probably best be illustrated by providing the shared context of the last two epigrams:

Have you imagined/ Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl/ deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love/ and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her"?

I think my intuitions here follow Pound's imagist programme, i.e., the injunction not to add "of peace" to "the dim lands".

Laboratory Conditions

On vacation last week at the cottage, I had a chance to reread more or less all of Williams' Paterson (especially Book III), Lerner's Lichtenberg Figures, Tost's Invisible Bride and Gardner's Petroleum Hat. I'll probably have something to say about this experience/experiment in the weeks to come. For now, suffice it to say that I recommend it to anyone.

Borges, the Prado, and I

On March 15, I sent the following question about Velazquez's Las Meninas to the Prado by email.

In his essay, "When Fiction Lives in Fiction", Jorge Luis Borges describes his encounter with the painting, recalling that "the Prado's adminstrators had installed a mirror in front of the painting to perpetuate [its reflexive] enchantments." Is this also how the painting is currently displayed? Is there any record of that way of hanging it? Also, has the painting ever been displayed by setting it on the floor like the canvas depicted in the painting itself?

On April 6, I got a reply.

Efectivamente, hasta 1976 el cuadro "Las Meninas" se exhibía en una sala pequeña, con un espejo al fondo y una ventana entreabierta, que proyectaba la misma luz y en la misma dirección que la ventana que aparece en el cuadro. El cuadro estaba situado a una altura que situaba los ojos de Velázquez a la altura de los ojos del espectador. Con este montaje se pretendía recrear la atmósfera que hay en el cuadro e integrar al espectador dentro del espacio creado entre el cuadro y el espejo, en un efecto muy teatral y barroco.

Babel Fish translates this as:

Indeed, until 1976 the picture "the Meninas" was exhibited in a small room, with a mirror to the bottom and a half-opened window, that the same light and in the same direction projected that the window that appears in the picture. The picture was located to a height that located the eyes of Velazquez to the height of the eyes of the spectator. With this assembly it was tried to recreate the atmosphere that there is in the picture and to integrate to the spectator within the space created between the picture and the mirror, in a very theater and baroque effect.

If anyone can improve that translation, I'd be very grateful.

[Update: Effectively until 1976 the painting Las Meninas was exhibited in a small room, with a mirror at one end and an open window that projected the same light in the same direction as the window that appears in the painting. The painting is situated at a height that places Velazquez's eyes at the same height as the spectator's eyes. With this set-up they attempted to recreate the atmosphere in the painting and to integrate the spectator in the space created between the painting and the mirror, in a very theatrical and baroque effect. (Thanks, Stower.)]

In any case, what I find interesting about this is that Michel Foucault, who seems to have seen the painting sometime before 1966, managed to feel his subjectivity not integrated but "elided" under these (almost) ideal conditions.

I'll explain that "(almost)" in a later post. I have myself never been to the Prado.

On Vacation

Back next week.
Happy Easter.

The School of Resentment

At its simplest, the historical method is not interested in asserting the transcendent or autonomous aesthetic value of literary texts but, to use Marxist terminology, in researching the contexts of their production, consumption and status.

J. A. Cuddon
(Dictionary of Literary Terms)

Much of my disagreement with Dan Hoy and Chris Daniels and, to a lesser extent, R. J. McCaffery, stems from their (at least) implicit New Historicism. Since Flarf is not a stable historical phenomenon, however, this amounts more to the sense in which their perspective on Flarf is informed, let us say, by an amateur sociology of contemporary poetry (see Seth Abramson's widely discussed posts, for example.) It is a historicism of the present in the sense that it undertakes to judge contemporary literary works in terms of their historical moment(um), if you will, rather than their (more or less) "autonomous literary value". Since I simply insist on reading the poems, much of the conflict lies just as simply in their refusal to do the same.

So we might, as Comrade Daniels suggests, just leave each other alone. I could let them have their historical or sociological opinion of Flarf and they could let me value it aesthetically. Except, of course, that there is no sense in which a book I enjoy reading might conceivably be a "pretentious turd" unless I, as it were, like that sort of thing. So there is a real problem there. People like Hoy and McCaffery, who want to call Flarf pretentious, must, in order to convince me, say that particular poems pretend to be more than they are, and in order to do this they must, I would think, look at the poems and identify the relevantly pretentious parts of them. People who want to call it "crap" must also identify the parts of it that are worthless. And this must mean doing more than quoting (parts of it) and saying, "well, obviously, right?"

Another reason that I cannot simply ignore Hoy, Daniels and McCaffery (though there is a weariness in me that would have me do so, to be sure) is that my object, Flarf, actively implicates itself in historical and social concerns, i.e., in "the contexts of [its] production, consumption and status". It also, I would argue, actively engages with, overcomes, undermines, subsumes, subverts, evades, escapes, mocks, rejects, eschews, or even satisfies, the very judgement that "history" would bring to bear upon it. And, by extension, it pre-empts the new historicists critical objections. I want to say that at a programmatic level Flarf, and the critical conclusions I draw from it, asserts the immanent autonomy of literary texts, or what I have often (now) called the mission of a work of art to extricate itself from history. Kasey Mohammad made a permanent contribution to my understanding of Flarf on the Lucipo list when he suggested that there was an "ethical stickiness" to the poems.

[The following paragraph has been cleaned up a bit since being posted.]

Flarf seems to know with exceptional clarity what the historicist dimly perceives: that the artist is free but that beauty is difficult. The historicist converts a vague sense of this circumstance into a profoundly insensitive capacity to read a poem without looking at it (or, perhaps more charitably, to look at a poem without reading it). At its worst, as in the rantings of Comrade Daniels, it proceeds by first declaring that bourgeois poets are free and then suggesting that they've got it easy. This absolves him from having to appreciate the very particular (though of course limited) hardship of poetry. (Which is why it is odd to read that he is "interested in a very particular thing that [he's] noticed about flarf and flarfistes" [my emphasis].) It is only in historical hindsight (which the historicist, rightly, tries to correct) that the artist seems have been granted a transcendent space in which to move. At the time, we always work with what we have on hand.

It is disappointing (it is even a little sad) that the critics who are in an important sense best qualified to appreciate Flarf seem the least willing to do so. Harold Bloom's appelation, the School of Resentment, applies here almost too precisely. The opposite of "resentful" is, of course, "Tostian".

On Being "Too Formulaic"

I think I know what Jordan is talking about here. My gut says the same.

Flarf & the Revolution

Just a quick note that this post exists. I can't think of anything at the moment to say about it.

[Update: it's because I don't see the mockery. I don't think Flarf is "about" its sources. The materials allow certain effects, help to avoid many others, that's all.]