Memo from Mencken to Hitchens

"The fraud of democracy is more amusing than any other—more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion." (1926)

De profundis

There's no particular providence in the fall of an apple.

(Pace Isaac Newton. See Ken Robinson's "The Book of Nature" in Into Another Mould. Routledge, 1992, p. 86.)

Goffman (and Greenstreet) on Institutions

I had occasion to dip into Erving Goffman's Asylums today. Here's the first sentence of the first essay.

Social establishments—institutions in the everyday sense of that term—are places such as rooms, suites of rooms, buildings or plants in which activity of a particular kind regularly goes on. (15)

I will be using this in my work on "composure" as a counterpoint to Kantian intuitions.

In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. (KRV A19/B33).

Intuitions and institutions together are the media of immediacy.

What I like about Goffman's definition of institutions ("in the everday sense") is its concreteness. It's tangibility. We can heighten it by imagining what Kate Greenstreet would do with it:

I think of places
(rooms, suites of rooms, buildings
or plants)
where things regularly go on

Wittgenstein suggested that our belief in the "intangibility" of mental states stems from our "refus[al] to count what is tangible about our state as part of the specific state which we are postulating" (PI§608). In this spirit, I think it is important to approach our institutions through the rooms and suites of rooms in which things happen. Marriage is an institution and the home (the house or houses) is its place. Money is an institution and the bank its tangible place. There are places that put us "in immediate relation" to our activities.

Flarf Reading #12c

Tost, Tony. 2003. "I Am Not the Pilot". Cortland Review 22.

Mesmer's subject is unable to subscribe and certainly no lawyer. Tost's subject is not a pilot and unable to "analyze complicated data". It's simple:

I am not a pilot, and I cannot assert anything with 100 percent certainty.

Nor could you if you weren't a pilot. If you are not:

Repeat after me, 'I am not the pilot,
I will not attempt to fly the ship.'

There is a clear theme of amateur passion. We can make certain demands of "seasoned professionals" but, if we are not pilots, and we most assuredly are not pilots, then we may wonder about both whether "the data is correct" and "how realistic the sky is". That's for pilots to say.

Pilots are wonderful and much like us, but we are not pilots.

[We] have not taken the test
that allows [us] to take over the controls as of yet.

This poem, it seems to me, gestures at what Wyndham Lewis called "the art of being ruled". In recent years we have been faced with a particular problem of control (a beatiful, difficult, thing, Drew Gardner reminded us). We are apparently unable to subscribe, as Mesmer put it. We are not pilots, we are "not part of their operation", and we don't claim to "understand that whole 'brotherhood'". I don't know if things have changed now that we also "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals", as Obama so eloquently put it.

Flarf Reading #12b

Tost, Tony. 2003. "I Am Not the Pilot". Cortland Review 22.

Probably most of what I see in Flarf I saw in this poem first. Most of what I see in contemporary American poetry today, I guess, I first saw in this poem when I read it six years ago. At least in glimts and flashes. But I did not understand what I was seeing. I did not know what it meant.

So let's begin this reading with what I think "I Am Not the Pilot" means. The pilot is Palinurus, Aeneas's helmsman, or gubernator, a word that shares its root with "cybernetics", namely, the Greek for the verb "to steer". Palinurus is also the pseudonym (the false name) of Cyril Connolly, the author—not so much: the compiler—of The Unquiet Grave, which, of course, is also the title Tony Tost gave to his blog.

So the voice of "I Am Not the Pilot" is, implicitly, not the voice modern Connolly and not the voice of ancient Palinurus. And who were they? (Who is he?) "He is the core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within" (TUG, p. xiii). Palinurus is, let us say, unable to work under these conditions:

We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot coordinate what is not there. (TUG, p. 2)

And, of course, we have no time to read; we are emotionally exhausted; the material is cheap. Palinurus is the name of our resentment of what we have been given to coordinate.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck. (93)

It is this resentment of what we have been given—paultry as what we have been given may be—that the voice of "I Am Not the Pilot" renounces. In fact, he simply leaves it on the side. Connolly was aware of this possibility as a possibility of any poem. Indeed, he too renounced the (otherwise undeniable) morbidity of The Unquiet Grave.

All grief, once made known to the mind, can be cured by the mind, the manuscript proclaimed; the human brain, once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and immune from sorrow. (xvi)

Well, Connolly's manuscript is less convincing in its proclamation than Tost's. Where The Unquiet Grave was stitched together of the "finest" material in the literary tradition, "I Am Not the Pilot" makes do with, with all due respect to his sources, "the muck". Coming to this poem as a reader, one finds an experience that is, unremarkably, and with no profundity, beyond time and space. One finds something (something in one's own miserable self) that is, finally, immune from sorrow.

Coming to it as a critic, one says simply (to steal Ben Lerner's line), "It was open, so I walked right in." That's what we will do in the next post.

Flarf Reading #12

Tost, Tony. 2003. "I Am Not the Pilot". Cortland Review 22.

The argument for this poem being a work of Flarf depends on its likeness to, say, Gary Sullivan's "Poem" and Sharon Mesmer's "I Am Apparently Unable to Subscribe". All three poems are obviously Google-sculpted and all three offer shifts between frivilous and sentimental moments. There is nothing "profound" in any one line of these poems. And this lack of "surface depth", if you will, is to my mind the greatest achievement of Flarf.

I have decided to read this poem more closely than planned. So I'll leave it here for now.

Flarf Reading #11

Mesmer, Sharon. 2007. "I Am Apparently Unable to Subscribe". Annoying Diabetic Bitch. Combo Books.

I think a case can made that the "badness" or "wrongness" of Flarf is a challenge to poetic expertise. More importantly, it challenges the idea that there is such as thing as emotional expertise. It gives feeling back to the amateur and that, I think, is the "humanity" that underlies a good piece of Flarf. It is part of its tone—a certain kind of lightness.

Take my word for it, I am not a lawyer.

I will return to this "I am not an authority on the subject" theme in my next post. The point can be generalized however: the speaking subject in this poem is definitely NOT a poet. That makes lyricism difficult, but also more effective when it comes about.

if I were able to subscribe I'd be your first born child,
so sleepy am I, so husband-free,
and old and apparently unable to find the opening of the sleeping bag.

The inability to subscribe (to mainstream, orthodox emotions?) is presented in a variety of ways and compared to not being able to drive, not being able to understand douching and (I like this one) secretly being Canadian. But a "straight" answer is attempted at the end, which is as poignant as keeping the milk in the cow:

Why the fuck am I apparently unable to subscribe?
Oh, that's right—I forgot to "invite myself."

One last piece of Flarf later today. Then on to other things.

Flarf Reading #10

Mohammad, K. Silem. 2003. "Puritan". Deer Head Nation. Tougher Disguises Press. Page 63.

I'm feeling a bit fatigued, Flarfed out. All this discipline. But I have always had an exit strategy. Tomorrow I'm going to read Sharon Mesmer's "I Am Apparently Unable to Subscribe" and on Saturday I will read Tony Tost's (for me seminal) "I Am Not the Pilot". Then I'm going to leave this alone for awhile. I feel a strong urge to read Tony now, and Ben Lerner, and Kate Greenstreet, and Lisa Robertson. So I'm going to do that next week.

Anyway, this poem starts with an albino giraffe. "Under the prying eyes of [a bunch of objects, a suggestion, a person,] I am a sex machine!" Then ("read on") a stanza about pants assigned to people who happen to have the same first names as poets associated with Flarf (Drew, Katie, Gary, Jordan) that closes with a call to find Michael Jordan's pants. Silliness, really. Just loosening us up. "Mind freshening," Ginsberg might say.

until you open your eyes—
until you learn to criticize—

The mood changes now. There's a lot of invective that is NOT intended to "romanticize/the October Revolution".

It is important to pause here and consider the situation, the mood. Since the poem is obviously fucking with us, at least in part, we can't make too much of objects and themes themselves. But we may, as readers, be in some sort of "state" at this point. Perhaps a bit like that scene in Goodfellas when Joe Pesci says, "Funny how?" Everything will depend on how the mood is resolved. And it is resolved thus:

many pledge allegiance to the "blood god"
I pledge allegiance to the freaky horse
who watches over me as I sleep

As Burroughs said: Wouldn't you?

Flarf Reading #9

Sullivan, Gary. 2001. "War Junkie". How to Proceed in the Arts. Faux Press. Page 48-49.

"Desert Storm footage cut & pasted in breakup story w/a thump." Once again, a poem that asks how do we love each other in this crazy mixed up world we live in?

Flarf Reading #8

Mesmer, Sharon. 2007. "The Nuclear Threat of Richard Chamberlain's Ass Stork". Annoying Diabetic Bitch. Page 94.

I don't remember exactly when it dawned on me how offensive the Cold War was and that the sort of "seriousness" that I had attributed to Shōgun as a twelve year-old was part of it. The War on Terror is of course just as offensive; it is a "Bloviating Ass Stork of Mythical Scope". My question when reading this poem is whether it offers a (satirical) critique of the current threat construct or a (lyrical) poem written under the terms of that threat. I always prefer the lyrical reading over the satirical one and, though I will grant it's a stretch, here's my thinking.

"I have never been able to forget," said an elderly Canadian who had been part of the nuclear disarmanent movement to George Woodcock, "the tragic love of those two young people!" They were talking about Orwell's 1984. Mesmer's poem, I submit, is not really about "the nuclear threat of Richard Chamberlain's ass stork" and a fortiori not about the wrongness of the Iraq War ("Fat ass Saddam is lucky if he has an outboard"). It is about "the object of the bewitched Tatiana's desire." It is about "touchy dong resin". To be sure, it IS "asshat week all over again" (Cold War = 1984 = Age of Terror). But that doesn't mean it's not still all about love.

Flarf Reading #7

Sullivan, Gary. 2006. "Poem". Self-published at Elsewhere, July 9, 2006.

This poem is a good demonstration of the combined effect of Google-sculpting and the Flarf aesthetic. As a critic, Gary Sullivan's work always makes me uneasy because it is always entirely possible that he's having me on in some important way. I feel as though I'm damned if I call it a poem, and damned if I don't. I judged "not poem" in the case of "Tarzan Workshop"; I'm going to judge "poem" in the case of "Poem".

It is stitched together out of a few jokes that can be found in various places on the Internet, a quiz meme and a few other odds and ends. None of it appears to be "written" by Sullivan in the ordinary sense. The poet's contribution is confined to cutting and pasting. One of the jokes has been attributed to Andy Rooney and Sullivan tells it pretty much entire. In one performance (available on YouTube) the audience seems to find it straightforwardly funny. One wonders if they find it "flarfy" too. Properly speaking, of course, it isn't. It's just an ordinary joke.

By stringing the rest of the jokes together in overlapping fragments, each derailing the others' progress, and throwing in some products and prices (not sure from where yet), we get a sort 1980s surrealism effect. Everything changes, however, with the introduction of the list of "dated" objects, which was taken from the meme. The quiz is an exercise in nostalgia. And it has precisely that effect here.

The result is that when we get to the last lines, which a Google search identifies as a verbatim transcription of a what is normally offered as a "groaner", the one-liner actually becomes poignant. Gary captures it masterfully in his performance. "Keep it in the cow," he whispers (after a "pause" that he might very well have written in himself).

Flarf Reading #6

Tarzan. 2006. "Tarzan Workshop". Jacket 30.

I'm going to respect the pseudononymous publication of this poem. It is one example I have been able to find of a "mocking" or "satirical" piece of Flarf. Or rather, it is at least alleged to be Flarf, published as such in Jacket 30. But I don't really get anything distinctively "flarfy" out of it. I don't see how it accomplishes itself as a poem.

Yes, I do feel silly using the phrase "accomplishes itself as a poem"; it is so much like saying it does not "feel earned". But my enjoyment of Flarf lies in watching a poem just barely accomplish itself. This one seems to me to fail and its failure is not interesting. That's because it is also, I would argue, trying to do something else. Watch Tim Peterson perform it:

If poetry workshops were a more mainstream part of popular culture, this could be an SNL sketch (if done in costume and with a bit more rehearsal). Even if workshops were as straighforwardly ridiculous as this poem suggests (and I am not at all sure that they are, though I have never participated in one), making fun of them in this way is hardly poetry. I don't see this poem doing anything else.

This reading is important, at least to me, because there is the view that Flarf is intended to fail largely as this poem fails. On this view, I am as ridiculous as Tarzan and what he represents. I think a good poem is a real accomplishment and I think Flarf has produced many good poems. This is one of the few pieces I'm going to read in this series that I don't think is one of them.

Flarf Reading #5

Degentesh, Katie. "I Certainly Feel Useless at Times". The Anger Scale. Combo Books. Pages 18-19.

Katie Degentesh writes some of the "easiest" Flarf I have read, which is to say, the most lyrical, perhaps the most directly useful. Let's begin with a definition.

A lyric is usually fairly short, not often longer than fifty or sixty lines, and often only between a dozen and thirty lines; and it usually expresses the fellings and thoughts of a single speaker (not necessarily the poet himself) in a personal and subjective fashion. (J.A. Cuddon's DLTALT, p. 515)

Well, that certainly describes the individual poems of The Anger Scale. Each "feeling" is defined (if not straighforwardly) by a question from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Normally, these questions would be answered simply "true" or "false". Degentesh writes a poem instead.

"I Certainly Feel Useless at Times" is easy to read because it sticks to the point. Its speaker is "an old, wire-twisting, engineer/inventor type" and although Google-sculpting always allows for (and risks) contradicting such descriptions, shifting between voices without any clear markers (like so much modernist poetry in the Pound tradition also does), there is no reason to be puzzled by the subjectivity that emerges here.

As the title suggests (though Flarf's titles are by no means always this suggestive), our engineer is feeling useless and, you guessed it, his inadequacy has to do with women. Being older, he worries about competition:

In the end it is pretty damn reprehensible
to be a younger, more vigorous man than myself.

But he understands something that younger men do not: "women in this society are oppressed". And they are oppressed by the very rituals by which men try to win their favours.

There is a memory in this poem of a relationship betweeen the engineer and a so-called liberated woman. It begins with one of those rituals, which the engineer seems to have pulled off successfully (if somewhat oddly):

Now is the time to tell her how gorgeous she is
giving her peanut butter sandwiches
stuck together with foreign coins

Secretly it pleased her, and she
held her head higher than ever again

feeling a glory in so rolling
that is four times as dear
as any other in North America

Can we not agree that this is finely wrought lyric? That it expresses a feeling clearly and precisely, even where that feeling is (by its nature) full of ambiguity? What gets in the way of the love of these two people is larger than them. But what we have just read tells us (in a sufficiently new way) that so is what they feel in the first place.

Sexual politics is the enemy of romance. And sure enough, it ends badly for this affair.

God will put anyone to use who has the real thing
One time back in 1979 he called an emergency meeting

Then came the massacre of fourteen women
You certainly feel invigorated after that kind of day
It blows the cobwebs back to the sci-fi well

Remember that he had been worried about men "more vigorous" than himself. Now he feels invigorated. In 1979, the battle of the sexes no doubt required an emergency meeting in Heaven. I recently saw Eve Sussman's The Rape of the Sabine Women and I don't think the comparison is forced. I think this poem is a great example of how Flarf effects a a Kopóltuš in the debris of one or another Khurbn.

Flarf Reading #4

Mohammad, K. Silem. 2003. "Mars Needs Terrorists". Deer Head Nation. Tougher Disguises Press. Pages 27-31.

Critics also need to fail. I can't think of anything to say about this poem. It challenges me a bit like Ben Lerner's "Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan". But only as a critic. I know how to enjoy Lerner's poem. I don't (yet) know how to enjoy "Mars Needs Terrorists". I know it is "the best American poetry" there is (2004) and I own the issue of Kiosk it appeared in (No. 2). I also like many of the other poems in Deer Head Nation. I will return to this one.

[Update: Jonathan Mayhew thinks it is both brilliant and seminal. That's reason enough to discover its virtues.]

Flarf Reading #3

Gardner, Drew. 2005. "Control Is a Beautiful Thing". Petroleum Hat. Roof Books. Pages 71-2.

I was going to stay clear of too many polemics. But my first two readings have had a "corrective" bent anyway, and Kirby's comment to my last reading is well worth countering, if only because it is representative, not least because its general claim is based, he notes, on his familiarity with one (1) poem.

The main problem is that [Flarf] is by its very nature an aesthetically challenged movement in that it doesn't permit lyrical intensity, but is content with a certain half-assed wobbling.

When I read it, I was immediately reminded of Dorothy Sayers. In his "Simple Art of Murder", Raymond Chandler quotes from her introduction to the Omnibus of Crime. The detective story, she says, "does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest aims of literary achievement". Chandler's reply is terse and precise: "The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not 'by hypothesis' incapable of anything."

Drew Gardner's "Control Is a Beautiful Thing" may or may not be a work of genius, I want to say, but an art that is capable of it is not "by its very nature" challenged in any way, nor prohited from anything. Something like that. The poem does not wobble, though it perhaps quivers, and while it's theme is arguably a certain kind of equivocality, there is nothing half-assed about the poem.

It has a very definite mood and a very precise emotion in view. Like "I Am Beautiful", "Control" has a single speaking subject that unproblematically (if this time reluctantly) calls itself "I". There is a "liquid inside" it and "the liquid isn't sticky or confused". The trick is just to keep it, or something like it, from "rolling away". The subject seems to move between the office ("I sat at my desk") and the apartment ("I got home") and has spent some time in "training courses" of various kinds (which you get home from just as they begin). The subject has hands (which are sometimes washed) and emotions ("flecks of rage") and appears to have some experience with what William S. Burroughs called "the crime of separate action": "I'm sure my other half/will use its hands for this." What other half? "I just looked in the mirror/and my head was there again."

Two passages represent the concrete and abstract components of the mood that the poem presents—the emotion that the poem "controls" if you will—"the problem":

The liquid isn't sticky or confused
I move several times a day
directly toward the problem

Then, later:

it was no problem
you can pull
this into the new range
that meets the beautiful sounds,
like a silver shaped cylinder
floating outside your bedroom window.

It is not simply incorrect to say that Flarf "doesn't permit lyrical intensity". Flarf arguably makes a lyrical intensity possible, at least within a certain "range" that we might otherwise "never use". Were it not for Flarf, Mesmer's "ballerina with a clown face encased in a big beautiful teardrop", like Gardner's "silver shaped cylinder floating outside your bedroom window", would be well-nigh impossible.

I'm grateful to Tony for his elegant rephrasing of one of my theses: poetry doesn't make us feel better emotions; it makes us feel emotions better. Here, the poem does not make us feel better about control, but better able to feel control.

Flarf Reading #2

Mesmer, Sharon. 2007. "I Am Beautiful". Annoying Diabetic Bitch. Combo Books. Page 55.

Flarf does not mock the language of its sources, it simply uses it. Often, of course, it uses it for purposes beyond those originally intended. Sometimes more purposefully but often actually less purposefully, at least at the level of the individual line. We will, however, get nowhere in our understanding of Flarf if we imagine that there is some interestingly Bloomian "clinamen" or "swerve", or some sort of irony, sarcasm, or satire, in the relation between the intentions of Flarf and the intentions of its sources. They are as related as the purpose of a tree in a forest is related to the purpose of the hardwood floor in your living room.

"I Am Beautiful" is a great example. While the language has been gathered from personal web pages, obscure songs (like Dax Riggs's "In Death I'm Only Hiding"), and popular culture (like the 2004 movie Sideways), the most interesting reading is one in which we take seriously the recurrence of the "I" as a single speaking subject, and let it bring all the emotions together into the one intense and singular, but of course always fragile, sentiment of the title.

There are moments of real referentiality. We all know what "Al Gore" and "no fucking Merlot" stand for. In fact, it is with the connection of the speaker's sense of her own "famous and gorgeous" body (and soul) to the connoiseur's famous vitriol and the environmentalist's famous spam ("I am also really sick of getting emails from Al Gore./Fuck you, Al Gore, you fucking loser") that a rapport with the reader also becomes possible. There is nothing ironic, mocking, satirical, or sarcastic about the tenderness we next come to feel for this "ballerina with a clown face encased in a big beautiful teardrop". We are now willing not to hate her just because she is beautiful. We are, perhaps, even again becoming capable of loving her outright—for, not despite, her beautiful body, her beautiful soul. And "Daniel"? Well, yes, of course. We "fucking hate that song" too.

Last thought: though I love Sharon Mesmer's delivery in readings as-is, I have found the image of Elizabeth Alexander's "poet's voice" reading the poem (and other poems, like "Squid versus Assclown" and "I Accidently Ate Some Chicken") through a PA system aimed at the Washington monument useful when approaching her work.

Flarf Reading #1

Mohammad, K. Silem. "Does Your Poetry Hold Up?" in Hanging Out with Pablo and Jennifer. Duration Press. (PDF)

If all the judgments that are gathered in this poem were laughable, the poem would be merely satirical. It would mock the pretensions of the editor, or the genuflections of the aspiring poet. But it does not do this. Instead, it shows us what "your poetry" means by showing us how the phrase can be used. You are now free to use "your poetry" as you choose, as your needs require.

This poem says "have done with judgment" but it does not imagine that judgments will go away. It says you will have to proceed and the judging will continue too. It offers no position of ironic superiority: some of the judgments will be right.

Flarf's Biggest Fan

Maybe I think everyone should take a month off and just let John Latta and Thomas Basboll blog for awhile, and then jump back in and try to meet them at the pitch they're playing in.

Tony Tost

I missed the recent flurry of activity about Flarf centred around Dale Smith's Possum Ego. Some key contributions seem to include Kent's remarks and Kasey's, and, very notably, Tony's (first comment), in which he says some very nice things about my approach to Flarf. I think Tony is right to insist on the Google aspect, and I continue to be puzzled by the "community spirit" of the Flarf List. It has been suggested that its reaction to criticism and its insistence on being read "closely" is itself part of "the joke". I don't know. And I don't really care. Even if some sort of joke is ultimately "on me", I have found reading Flarf in my own way very rewarding. In fact, reading through the posts and comments, some of which are quite extensive, I don't think there is any hope that I can find a position to occupy and defend, so I'm just going to make it my goal to make Tony Tost Flarf's biggest fan. That is, I'm going to take up his challenge and read at least one flarfy poem every day for a month and write a post about it. My model will be Jonathan's various reading and listening projects over at Bemsha Swing. Feel free to prod and spur me if I miss a day.

Tomorrow, then, I will answer the question, "Does Your Poetry Hold Up?" (PDF)

Lovely as a Pendulum

Flipping through The Spice-Box of Earth, I just noticed Leonard Cohen's "The Girl Toy". Its theme is reminiscent of E.T.A. Hoffman's "The Sandman", about a beautiful automaton. Two lines struck me immediately:

where now the weeds involved the trees

which is the image of an untended garden, and

she lovely as a pendulum,

which is the image of a beautiful girl, offered in contrast to "he obese and old", which precedes it. I suspect that the second of these was the first line Cohen wrote. He wrote the poem, I want to say, in order to use that line. One knows women who are lovely as pendulums but one cannot use that image without explaining it. Cohen gives us a metaphor: a girl made by a clockmaker who has "learned to work in flesh".

Let the weeds involve the trees, I say; my girl is lovely as a pendulum. [She is a clockwork made of flesh.] I think we here have a poem that has made it possible to say such things. And that, after all, is what poems are for.

New Jacket

Jacket 36 is now online. I have an article in there about Nabokov's "rain sparkling crystograms". It's done very much in the spirit of my "Interaction of Cheese" in Fascile 1. I like this style, and I have one more like this in the works.