A Brief History of the Individual

1938: "In this domain the individual will remain, individualism will remain, without any theoretical and ideological bulwarks. A man will continue to gain or lose his own soul." (Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 52)

1944: "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?" (Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, p. 100)

1947: "Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué. He lit a cigarette." (Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 5)

Flarf and Fascism

"There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism." (Ernest Hemingway)

"How to write: go to your nation and strive." (Barrett Watten, used by Kasey Mohammad as an epigraph for Deer Head Nation)

If the "badness" of Flarf is of any literary importance, this is why.

Poems and Novels

A novel orients you in your culture; a poem extricates you from it. A novel helps you cope. A poem gets you out.

(Nabokov would balk: literature just makes you tingle. It's easy to find your way around a cell. You don't try to leave.)

Billy Joel

Sean Cole's "Poem for Billy Joel" (Court Green 6, page 91) is quite effective.

I did happen to start the fire actually ...
...all the nimrods in your music keep breaking up with each other.
...
"New Radiant Storm King" on whose albums all connubiality
remains in tact. You could learn a thing or two from them ...

I say this to disarm the dedomiciling bomb of your baleful lyric, Mr. Joel.
I beg you: tear down this Italian restaurant.

The effect admittedly depends on a generalization about Billy Joel's work (a sort of typecasting) and some specific knowledge of particular songs. So it's probably limited in that sense, and arguably inexorably "American". Still, it accomplishes a neat little extrication of real emotion from the grip popular culture.

Novels

I just finished reading Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version. I think he's a wonderful novelist and there is something about his books that is, to me, essentially novelistic. One reason for this has something to do with what Norman Mailer writes in A Fire on the Moon: "everybody, literate and illiterate alike, had in the privacy of their unconscious worked out a vast social novel by which they could make sense of society" (p. 147). Richler's novels are very clearly expressions of a "conception of society".