CA Conrad at Wesleyan (462)

I've been away. I haven't been around. I made a solemn promise to myself, a vow of consistency, a vow to come here daily and write something. When I made this vow, I didn't make it lightly. I knew what I was getting into, because I'd been there before. Oh yes, Vaintitty has had its many incarnations, and each has crashed as quickly into the same mountain: an igneous clump of laziness and malaise wider and higher than I have the muscles and fortitude--except in brief, occasional spurts--to overcome. And yet, here I am now.

Sort of, I'm here because I just watched CA Conrad read (which was really great, the first time I've ever seen a "riotous applause" after a poetry reading; Conrad is a rock star), but also I'm here because the disappointment I've been feeling over my broken vow has become too much, it has filled up my occasional spurt basket, the basket is primed, and, any minute now, I'm likely to briefly transcend my workaday ennui and attempt something great. Imagine it, all the shadowed piles of unfinished business is about to bask in the flame of my spurting engine. I might finally, after all of these months, write a review of Anselm Berrigan's Notes from Irrelevance. I might finally attempt a second draft of my novella A Sudden Tilt. I might finally revise "Madrigal" or any of the other half dozen projects I've promised myself I would do. I might. Or I might exhaust myself with this ode to the possibility. Time will tell.

Conrad read--what's appropriate, CA? Conrad? the full CA Conrad every time--for probably half an hour, something like that, but he's a commanding performer, and the room was stuffy, and he's a big guy, and, as he said, he'd eaten a lot of spicy food about a half an hour before, so he was sweating ferociously by the end of his reading. A Q&A was proposed, and he was kind enough to agree, but it was apparent that he needed a break. Through his poetry, he put us under a kind of spell. Ordinarily, the podium sets up a kind of barrier between the audience and the poet. It says, one kind of power is on this side, and another kind of power is on that side, but tonight the feeling was different. Surely CA had the floor, but he occupied our collective gaze with such ease and charm to hide the demarcation. I want to say he was good at his job, because that seems to be totally accurate. He killed it tonight, and the books he was selling may very well have sold out. I bought one, and I brought it to him to have it signed. He was kind, he signed my name, squiggled his mark, and talked a little bit. He seemed beat from all of the interfacing, and I thought, this is what being a working poet is. The only parts of your life that aren't poetry, are the parts right after you've read your poetry. When commerce steps in. When the rent is paid because you like people and people like you, and you have to learn all the different ways to spell a name because you want to get it right, you don't want to be insulting, this is your business after all. I wondered what would happen to CA Conrad's poetry if I handed him a check for a lot of money.

Alice Notley Writes About Poetry (505)

Here it is, already Tuesday, and the time keeps rolling, naturally, as it does, without stopping, and there's simply nothing I can do to get out in front of it, being as I am, in it, always, or at least as long as I am I. This past weekend was Martine's class, which was really marvelous. I met with fourteen other people for eight hours a day in Downey 100 and talked about poetry. I talked so much! I couldn't turn it off, rabbitting on and on in high falluting tone about this and that. What was I trying to say? Hard to say. I said it, said something anyway. Was I understood? Not sure. Sometimes wanting to be precise is a real impediment to understanding. You become so specific, the line of your thought becomes so thin and exact, that not everyone else can trace it, or it becomes too tedious. They don't know you, why put in the effort, etc. Not everyone gave off that vibe. Much of the conversation was great, but as much of it was "I thought this." "I thought this." With no attempt made at connecting the two ideas.

Which is a shame. Poetry is about space, but it's about language and ideas in space, making space by being in it. You can make much more interesting space with collaborators.

For Sunday, I have to prepare a presentation on Alice Notley and the first half of the Descent of Alette. This is a big deal. I've been reading and re-reading the book for months, enjoying the hell out of it. It's everything I want in a poem. Epic quest, dirty gritty setting, metamorphosis, ghoulishness, anthropomorphing abstract concepts "The Tyrant", radical politics. What's not to love? My problem is, rather, that there's almost too much to love. How will I break down the presentation? I'll have 15 minutes to give background (the NY School, Ted Berrigan, Needles, Chicago, New York, Paris, Douglas Oliver, Anselm and Edmund, Barnard and Iowa) and to go through the first book (the introduction into Alette, her amnesia-ish, the setting of the subways, the Tyrant, the metamorphosing, the Quotation marks, the importance of poetic voice and the way it works itself out. And the second book too, can't forget the caves of psychic discovery.

I will need to re-read the second book and make notes, something I've done with the first already. I was bummed that I would only get to present the first half to the class, but, as I think about this now, I'm concerned that I'll be able to get everything together. I know that I want to create a presentation, but I've never really done that outside of for work.

Beyond the presentation, I have to get re-familiar with Cole Swenson's The Glass Age, Forrest Gander's As A Friend, and Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 The Joy of Cooking. As A Friend is no big deal. It's quick, and narrative, and wonderful. I can read it the night before if need be. Swenson's book is short as well, though paced more slowly. The Tan Lin is, in some ways, a book built to promote confusion. In a really delightful way, but also a very slow one. 

On top of that, I need to be working on my poems, and writing every day for a few hours. Does this count? No, I think this is kind of the opposite of what I need to be doing. I have been trying to jot to a few lines here and there as I've been able.

we've thrown 
some 
informal ideas 
out 
like migration
 

Hybrid Poetry Proposal (509)

Tomorrow is my first day in Martine Bellen's Hybrid Poetry/Crossing Genres workshop. Our major output in the class is to be a 20-page chapbook of hybrid poetry. Before we begin we have to present and defend a proposal to the class. This is mine:

Hybrid Poem Proposal

Where does my body begin, little Evvy asked his daddy dear? Which is the first flea of my distinction?

I will show you! said he. Get to your room, gather up your pencil or pen, your carving knife or crayon. Hunt in your mind and in your books. Find the woods in all the phrases. Write them down. I'm going now, be done before I get back.

Oak Aspen Alder Larch Fir Hemlock Spruce Bass Cherry Tung Cedar Pine Scrub Pine Ponderosa Pine Sugar Pine Pining for your love. Little Evvy's pencil broke; he took up his box of crayons.

He wrote scary wood and box wood and fox wood and eye wood, and if we could would, and in the brook by the wood. Pine wood derby. Hard wood floors. Rickety red wooden bomb shelter, and on and on and on.

You've trailed me for years, my distant papa dear! he cried at long last, no great pappy forthcoming, and no end to the wood words in sight.
My father died a decade ago in a second-hand ambulance of an heroin overdose. He'd been a fiction til then, a fact of biology and history, an absence only occasionally invested with any real power. He'd been a liar and a psychotic. He'd been switched at birth, saw brown angels at the dinner table, spoke in tongues, disappeared, reappeared. He was nothing but a crude constellation of strange facts, fictions I'd fictionalized further over time. His dying had the feeling of an exhumation, but one that was all empty tomb and no corpse.

By dramatizing my strongest memories of him, and the areas, the plants and animals of Florida, I associate with him and the time of his death, I hope to create a spatial alternative to the man he might have been. This will not be an homage to a dead parent, but rather the reintroduction of various memories, feelings, and thoughts into a new wild of the poetic imagination. I will incorporate interviews with my mother and sister, as well as my father's mother and sisters. I will stack progressive fragments of several near-narrative lines on top of each other as follows:

    1.    Little Evvy tours the island of the absent Daddy Dear, told mostly in prose blocks with occasional choruses for multiple voices.
    2.    Lists of qualities culled from interviews.
    3.    Real life memories of my father alive, the two great laughs we ever had together: a story about roaches, a scene outside a Dairy Queen.
    4.    Real life memories of animals under duress: a turtle crossing a road, manatees warming in factory runoff, a sheepshead (fish) dying of neglect.
    5.    As a hinge, told a line at a time and surrounded in white space, my father's personal creation myth. Told in the voice I remember.
    6.    Because I've committed mindlessly my own origin to dozens of composition notebooks, I intend to take a knife to these and prepare the page with cut-paper images, perhaps to amplify the layout, perhaps in sub-tropical shapes, but definitely in a way that interacts with the territory of the text.

My purpose in this project is neither to research or investigate or uncover my father, or to make a case for his behavior or who he was, but rather to reclaim my own memories, to collage them together in a way that creates a reality and truth independent of my dreamed and remembered experiences. My intention is to make of absence a kind of active space.

Sh-sh-sh-shame (516)

This past Monday I attended a lecture at Wesleyan's Center for Humanities by Professor Colin Wayne Leach (UCONN) titled "Just Feeling? Emotion in Civic Life." Primarily, the lecture was about "shame" and the public expression of emotion, and the relevance of each to public life. What does it mean that on the whole Europeans have no real sense of shame--or, at least, won't admit to one--for the colonization of the secondary world, Professor Leach asked. What does it mean that young Germans feel no shame over the holocaust? What does it mean that American whites feel no sense of shame for slavery? What does it mean considering that these same groups think of themselves as open-minded and liberal? Is it possible that feeling a sense of shame could be humanistically productive?

Though the formulations of these questions are largely mine, and subject to my own particular (white, semi-educated, one-time bootstrapper, sadly sorta southern) bias, the questions were asked, and they raised seriously productive questions for me. Should a person feel shame for an atrocity simply because they happen to be racially similar to the aggressors? Should a person feel shame because they are hereditarily connected to an historic and awful human being? Should I, a white American, feel shame for slavery because I am white? Professor Leach interrogated psychologically the notion of shame and guilt in a meaningful way, but his entire lecture was based on an expectation that those who came after an atrocity would feel a connection to it, should feel a connection to it. Is it because of my bias (see above) that I feel that this connection is too easy, too facile, too much an impediment to thinking forward?

On the one hand, Professor Leach's expectation is important. Someone must be held accountable, yes? If "a people" commit a grave crime against humanity, shouldn't "that people" be responsible for reparations? Shouldn't that people bear a burden of guilt and shame for the acts of their ancestors? This makes sense given a conception of the social field as being built on stable racial, tribal, national, etc. constructions. If you assign every born individual to a single, stable category, you can hand off the debts of each to its subsequent generations. If, on the contrary, you deny this, you deny the encastification of people, both in terms of poverty and privilege, these waters become murky quickly. For example, though I'm white as virgin snow, freckle-faced, etc, I don't consider myself a standard bearer of any sort of slavemaster ideal. At all. Though I feel a kind of shame that humanity engages/engaged in violent, atrocious actions like slave-trade and holocaust, the shame is not personal. It is not my shame, but a shame I feel on behalf of those of "my kind" my kind here being all of humanity.  I feel that those others who actually committed these acts are responsible for them, and should make good on them. This may sound like I believe only actual slave-owners should make good. Not so. Rather, I believe there are several kinds of shame.

So far I have mentioned at least two, and to my mind these two are the most important, the broadest categories. The shame you feel for acts you yourself have committed and the shame you feel on behalf of the society in which you live or others in that society, or hell, in others. By definition, the former begins and ends with your conscious memory--with overflow, so long as you are alive, into the places where you behaved unconsciously. The latter takes on the full history of humanity as it is known by the shame-feeler, the shamee. It was a failure to speak to the full variety of human shame that pissed me off about the lecture. The central thesis though, that shame could be a motivator, in rare circumstances, though more often not so much, was interesting it its own way. It was both a notion that societies could self-regulate toward some central, moral goodness, and the idea, so long as that regulation was the endpoint, this kind of cultural engineering by shame was something to be promoted, or to be striven for, an alternate psychological route to this moral highground.

Professor Leach's primary example of a society self-regulating according to his shame paradigm had to do with Norway and its treament of its Tartere minority. From the 1930s to the 1970s the Norwegian and Swedish governments followed an institutional practice of forced sterilization and disenfranchisement of gypsies. Often, the "travelers," as the Tartere are called, would be sterilized under the guise of free medical care. This was something of a state secret until the 90s, when it was made public. Of the Norwegians polled a third felt a kind of shame for being perceived negatively in the eyes of others. The other two-thirds felt shame that there was something wrong with their national character, and they expressed a deep desire to change for the better. It is this latter that Professor Leach raised as being hopeful and useful.

That it may be--really, that it has. Shame has been used in this way for a long time. Religious institutions especially have focused this sort of moral coercion time out of mind. Of course, what I'm calling moral coercion is simply the way it is within their belief system. I'm thinking right now of the boy in this Jesus Camp who wants so much to be able to speak in tongues, to feel the spirit of the lord moving through him, but doesn't, and can't. He clearly feels tremendous shame.


The current debates over women's healthcare are an excellent counter-example of how shame can be used to a "positive" effect. Seemingly out of nowhere (to me at least), there is a debate going on threatening abortion rights, and even preventative contraception. From my perspective assholes like the douchebag in the following video should feel ashamed of their behavior, their language, their beliefs, and the sick way they choose to make a living by using their fame to infect others to bigotry, hatred, and violence. I feel a kind of shame on his behalf, and a kind of responsibility to speak out against him. In this way, Professor Leach's thesis is accurate. Seeing the lows possible within our human race, my gender, my society, etc., I feel a kind of motivating shame that makes me want to affect positive change in the world.

The complication here is that "positive change" in the world is a subjective notion, based on a particular view of morality. Rush Limbaugh inspires this change by his awfulness, but he inspires an opposite kind of change to others with other view points, with other moral conditions. To those who believe with him, who champion his moral vision, or even get close to it, it's Sandra Fluke who should feel shame, on whose behalf they feel shame. Within this world view, a listener to Limp-bog's show might feel a desire to make "positive change" in the world. For them that might mean writing a blog post about how much of a slut this courageous woman is, or worse. It might compel them to commit a physical, violent act against another woman. It might not. Limpdick's words alone, his harassment have the affect of shaming not only Fluke, but all woman who would use contraception, or a have sex, etc.

Professor Leach's thesis was primarily that shame could have a positive effect, which is doubtless true. The problem with his thesis is that it misses the fact that what a positive effect is is determined entirely by the moral framework of the perceiver. Our Civic Sphere is enormously polarized in the United States right now. The talk of culture war is not always overblown. It is fair to say that we are in a hyper-tribal time period where a kind of micro-multiculturalism based on contentious difference at various talking points is the norm. For this reason, pursuing shame as a productive civic endeavor seems misguided without examining the great moral difference across the world.

I don't feel done with this topic, but I do feel done with this post. I'd like to revisit this and think about the way power uses the body as a tablet, as a location for scripting its own story, thinking about the transvaginal ultrasound, the forced rape in Libya, the Tartere and American Blacks being secretly sterilized, etc, but also thinking about the way that fame and shame interact along these lines--Rush Limbaugh's fame, but also Balthazar Garzon, the Spanish justice. I think there's an essay in here, definitely something to come back to.

Narrativity Scene (519)

Sometimes I wonder what the hell it is I'm trying to learn. Writing? Art? Publishing? Writing/Art/Publishing? are the common answers, but that's not it exactly. That's a fair list of what I'm studying, but they're roads to the thing.  Every so often I'll add "Narrative Theory," which is as much not the thing as the other three, but with the added bonus of being something I really don't know much about. I have studied writing and printmaking, and I've been around publishing in an indie way enough that I can bullshit my way through even with truly knowledgeable people. Narrative theory though, that's a whole new minefield, one I try to cross with new (or so I think) jargon.

Once, I was in a Faulkner book club. We made it through one book, though, chances are good they've continued on without me. I had great intentions to discuss what I was calling "Relational Ontologies." What I meant by this was the way the various perspectives co-created the being of the fictive realm. In that the narration of the story is given through the characters' perspectives, it's necessarily the case that they co-create the novel. In sheer space on the page it's true. There would be a different novel if only one were spoken, even if all of the material were some how covered. But that refers to a particular design choice on Faulkner's part, and not really what I meant at all. I meant to refer to the sense of a real story hologrammed in the interstices of the several stories. In hindsight there are a few things problemmatic with this formulation, first among them the dependence it places on a "real" story, a "true" account of what has happened. Certainly, I never felt like there needed to be a true. Rather, I was interested in the way the narratives, the voices of the narrators, and their characters overlapped to create a kind of spatial depth that was--I hate to use the cliche--a mosaic of this town... Something like that.

Regardless, I didn't realize (and it really doesn't matter) that "Relational Ontology" was actually something Religious Philosophers had coined years before to explain how the father, son, and holy ghost could all be the same and distinct. It was a similar patter of thought. In the CHUM lectures, a lot of relational, network type theories are being brought to light. I was in good company; a neat thought wasn't the problem. Not knowing precedents was. A poor understanding of the literature was. That was just last August, and not much has changed since then. I have more big ideas, but as shoddy a foundation to lay them on.

My primary concern is with the space where narration happens, and narratives exist. At least in the mind of the reader, on the page of the text, and out in the culture. It seems obvious--or at least beyond my interest, a physiological fact--how the narrative is received by the reader from the page. It seems less obvious--and more interesting--how it ends up in the culture, how the culture adds to it, reproduces it, subtracts from it, manipulates it, appropriates it, etc. Moreover, I'm interested in understanding enough of narrative theory, which is the theory of how stories are put together, to put together some sort of a first attempt at narrativizing great swaths of media production... or at least of understanding the way that narratives are or are not produced in the same arena. Can something be non-narrative? If it is encountered by a reader, is it narrativized? It's hard to imagine a tax-form narrativized, but a lot of that depends on the context.

Joe Fitzpatrick, the professor of the European Literature course, has suggested we get coffee and talk about some of these things. I had hoped to write him a sterling response, one that would show off my mastery of the subject. I realize now that I really have no mastery of the subject whatsoever, but a lot of interest. That's worth something.

Don Quixote de la Mancha; History (521)

Anne Carson's Nox

Who would have expected the world's first novel had so much in common with a twenty-first century book-object so singular in form?

While the bank phone sqwauked the twenty disembodied voices of Database Admins, DNS specialists, LOB SMEs, all the many accents and abbreviations, I laid on the floor of my office, snuggled up with an afghan, and read the first two hundred pages of Don Quixote. I'm a little ADD under normal circumstances, but with the dissonance of bank-speak choking the room, I couldn't read just one book. I opened the hard box of Anne Carson's elegy to her dead brother, an accordion book a few hundred pages long, and spread the first third or so out on the floor. For the first eight hours of bank working I flitted back and forth between them, from laying with the blanky to hunching over Nox's long, creased span.

Don Quixote
 To be honest, I've never read the world's first novel. It's one of the "Books That Everyone's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too"--to use Calvino's phrase--and always seemed to exist outside of "serious scholastic reading." Or something like that. It really had transcended its being a book and became a story the gist of which I already knew. Don Quixote is a small land-owner with grand delusions of a bygone, romanticised era who dons costume armor and fights windmills thinking them giants. That much I knew. That's just one piece of action though, and, in the tradition of the knight's romance (I presume) there are a great many misadventures. As much as you can say "there's so much more than windmills," it's fair to say that the windmills, so far at least, are a fair summation of the kind of ideas at work. And they work as a useful thumbnail for discussing subtext Cervantes laces into the way the story itself is told.

Don Quixote's delusions have their particular source in the hundreds of chivalry books he has read over his life. A rather meagre landowner, one with only a small household, a few nice clothes, and just enough of an inheritance to provide for a life of leisure without extravagance, he reads to pass away the ennui of his life. So perfectly does he memorise this entire body of literature, that he comes to see himself as one of the many knights-errant described therein. He comes to see all of his real world in terms of that literature. Life comes to imitate cheap art for Don Quixote, his squire Sancho Panza, and the many people who cross their path.

I lied when I said I didn't like chaos, lied about having structure (521)

I've spent this weekend focused more or less completely on Notes from Irrelevance. I've written, as I do, pages and pages of worthless information. I wrote a long paragraph about the texture of the book: 

The cover is the first surface you see looking at a new book, and with Anselm Berrigan's newest, Notes from Irrelevance, that surface is simple. The poet's name bleeds in from the left and right edges, the tiny title hovers just up from the bottom lip. It's slim and spare, and inside the short lines are spaced wide apart. The whole thing feels great in your hands when you read it, and the paper is thick enough and smooth enough the pages never stick together no matter how roughly you turn them. The book is a unified vessel for the poem it contains, and the poem itself, though running on the twists and turns, the dramatic register shifts, and tangents of content common to Berrigan's voice, has a kind of powerful unity. Though it throws off fragmented bolts of lightning, it is at the center a stable beam of light.

Isn't that nice? Kind of blowdar. Overwritten, meaningless trash. But that's okay, breaking eggs right? I realized, writing lines like these, that I was missing the point entirely. There's no reason a book review shouldn't talk about the physicality of the book itself, but it's a hard place to start. Notes from Irrelevance is a book about stuff, and shouldn't that stuff take first position? Berrigan is talking about what it means to think in our techno-choked world, what it means to be at home, to feel at home. We're composed of innumerable, connected surfaces, and we're connected to the same. In the face of the huge field of potentials activated by our existence, it doesn't make any sense to model "influence" along arborescent lines. 

Berrigan's talking in similar language--his voice is maybe more balanced, sharper with its register shifts, etc.--but he's not on the Deleuzean quotation bandwidth. There's something so much more personal in the way he does his theorizing that is at once really courageous, strong, and really sensitive. This is like emo-core elevated to a philosophico-poetic form of address. Berrigan talks about work--his many small bosses, lack of Big Boss. He talks about his past, his work as a poet. He talks about being a kid lost outside of the tininess of his universe, five blocks off St. Mark's Place where he grew up. He talks about knowing, and meaning. Meaning he describes as a violent, offensive agent. Meaning isn't hard to come by, it's hard to escape. He says, "I find/meaning to be constantly/on the offensive, attacking/my desire to get going/and be a responsible/citizen."