Imaginary Fan Letter in Response to "Eeee Eee Eeee" by Tao Lin (as if Melville House Press Were Silver-Age Marvel)

A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: I later learned about Tao Lin’s acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person. I've left up posts about him on this blog because I don't want to erase my support of him in the past, but I've removed links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.

Today’s Reading: Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee, pp. 85-211

Dear Dennis and Tao:
Near the end of Eeeee Eee Eeee you had the President say: “Actually there is a oneness in the world because of consciousness and this oneness—what does it want, mostly. To avoid pain and suffering, seek pleasure and happiness. Patriotism and everything else like language denies the oneness; makes a twoness, threeness, so on.... You live a horribly distorted life.... Any unsarcastic thought or action is a horrible distortion. Anything is a horrible distortion.” I don’t know if that’s what Tao actually thinks, but the President really goofed!

In order to be a distortion of the oneness, language and everything like it would have to be added onto that oneness from outside! There would have to be something like a separate person that was not part of the oneness but was trying to see the oneness through a medium like language, which would also have to be separate from both the oneness and the person. There would also have to be a way that the oneness “really” looked, if you could somehow see it without any distorting medium.

But really, since the self and language and everything else are all part of the same oneness, the way that language makes everything look separate isn’t a distortion, it’s just a point of view. It’s like the way that a thing might look blue under one light and purple under another and be totally invisible under no light at all. The thing isn’t really blue or purple or totally invisible, it’s all of those, depending on the light and your eyes seeing it. None of those ways of looking are distortions or things added to the thing from outside it; they’re all versions of the thing in relationship with different other things (light, eyes). All the thing is is relationships with other things, so none of those relationships is any more “true” or “distorted” than another.

That one goof aside, Eeeee Eee Eeee was a great novel! I loved how seamlessly Tao managed the asequential narrative and how loaded with indeterminate meanings all the talking animals seem to be. And Ellen was a really likable character—I don’t understand why she doesn’t have any friends! I think in your next book, you should have her meet someone like Sam from Shoplifting from American Apparel and get married. Also, that story Tao just published on Storychord is maybe his best yet! Until Zachary German starts using compound sentences, make mine Melville!
                                                   Morgan Myers
                                                   The Internet
                                                   The proximate future
Okay smart guy, now answer this one: if everything is part of the same oneness, how do you get any relations in the first place, huh?

Readings from the Gurlesque Anthology (#1--Ariana Reines)

Todays Reading: Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, eds., Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, pp. 27-65

“Spackles the info bits. Language is the kind of failure inside of which you learn to fall in love. Much of her giant digestion has to do with metaphor or is it, is its essence. I don't care about my sorrow anymore because I and the minors who used to be me are not curable. Giantessa, hide me”
                                            -Ariana Reines, “Valve”

It seems necessary to read these poems as being extremely sincere, by which I mean both “sincere to an extreme degree” and “extreme in a sincere way.”

But then it seems necessary to be unsure whether the person being sincere in the poems is really Ariana Reines, or something like a small puppet of meat she has constructed inside her, like a conjoined twin or an unwanted pregnancy, for the purpose of articulating extremely sincere poetry.

These poems are all about “embodiedness,” yes, but being embodied is made to seem like being caked in blood or buried under rotting meat, or being a tiny, malformed fetus that operates a robot shell shaped like a full-sized human and made out of human meat.

So, yeah, really accurate.

My Michael Magee’s Susan Howe’s Emily Dickinson (’s Jen Bervin’s Billy Collins)

Today’s Reading: Michael Magee, My Angie Dickinson (click links to read some excerpts)

Reread this “classic of flarf”—in which Michael Magee cobbles together Google results into Dickinsonian hyphen-punctured hymn stanzas—and this time feel that I really “got it.” The secret is to relax your ear (mine has been overtrained to hear Dickinson’s characteristic cadences by attempting to write a dissertation chapter on her) so that the flashes of sing-song meter can get into a sexy wrestling match with the stretches of flarfy tumbling syllables. Like in this stanza, from one of the better poems, in which the final line delivers a nonsequitur both in content and in form:

    Nay — near superhuman said —
    Show me the Kournikova hate-mail —
    Show me the ways to button up buttons —
    That have forgotten they’re buttons —
    Show me the Buzz that was —
    Show me the way — to be — Squishy Can Man!

Forget Billy Collins’s creepy groping; this is the way to make (kinky, dirty, embarrassing) love to a fellow-poet and still show you’ll respect her in the morning.

That’s a metaphor that deserves some interrogation, I admit, but there’s a point behind it, and one that I think isn’t entirely alien to Magee’s book. Magee genuflects at the altar of Susan Howe’s Dickinson criticism in his acknowledgements and epigraph; but it’s hard not to believe that Howe is one target of his stated aim to “disrupt some of the pieties around Emily Dickinson’s work that I don’t believe have served her poems very well.” It’s especially tough when you consider that his title is a deliberate parody of Howe’s influential My Emily Dickinson, or that the visual and formal template of his Dickinson pastiches is clearly Ralph W. Franklin’s “domesticating” edition, so strenuously critiqued in the last essay in Howe’s The Birth-mark.

No woman—no person—Magee seems to suggest, could be well served by the kind of dehumanizing reverence that has led some of Howe’s inspirees to transform Dickinson’s most causal jottings into something approaching holy relics. While post-Howian interpreters like Marta Werner or Jen Bervin instill every paratextual mark with a kind of transcendental intentionality that paradoxically reduces Dickinson to the status of divine stenographer, Magee takes the opposite tack—dumping out the contents of Dickinson’s most inherited, least personal forms and refilling them with random junk, pure contingencies, in a way that grants Dickinson the vital human privilege of carelessness and accident. (Not to say that Werner’s and Bervin’s artistic readings don’t produce remarkable works of art in their own rights; it’s their readings, not their writings, that I’m arguing with.)

Bervin’s wordless canvases are, I think, still one layer of erasure shy of totally respecting Dickinson’s intentions—because Dickinson’s most likely intention, based on a lifetime of hoarding poems away in her fascicles, must surely have been that no one read the vast majority of her work at all. Once we admit that to read Dickinson in any presentation is to violate her authorial intent—indeed, to violate her privacy—then what good is there in denying that every edition is a compromise between the privacy of Dickinson’s drawers and the publicity of a Barnes & Noble shelf? Or in denying that every edition expresses the force of a desire as much the editor’s own as the poet’s—the editor’s desire for a certain version of the poet, the editor’s effort to shape that poet into being?

Billy Collins’s version of making love to Emily Dickinson is most unsettling because of the expressly objectifying way that it engages the poet’s person in the place of her poems. But it doesn’t help that Collins too wraps Dickinson up in a lot of depersonalizing pieties, a reverence that paradoxically demands her passivity in direct proportion to her transcendent presence (“the iceberg of her nakedness,” “like riding a swan into the night”)—sort of the way that Kevin Smith could only write a female God as mute. With the most appreciative and feminist of intentions, I want to argue, readers like Werner and Bervin try to write Dickinson as a mute God (less so Howe herself, whose critical work seems torn between humanizing Dickinson’s poetic process and sacrilizing the results of that process). Magee, by having the disrespect to talk back to Dickinson, shows respect enough to engage her work in a conversation—to let Dickinson step down from the pedestal and over to the podium, to acknowledge that the whole asynchronic conversation depends on her having written (written, with all the Derridean implications of the word, not spoken or drawn or channeled) in the first place.

In that spirit, I hope, I’ll give Dickinson the last word, but framed (inevitably) by my own interpretation. In poem #429 in Franklin’s edition, Dickinson eloquently asserts the muteness of the divine in terms that perfectly anticipate post-Howeian, visual readings of Dickinson’s own poems. It’s an inarticulate sort of divinity that, I’d argue, ought to be wished on no creature of language, much less of poetry:

    Omnipotence - had not a Tongue -
    His lisp - is Lightning - and the Sun -
    His Conversation - with the Sea -
    “How shall you know?”
    Consult your Eye!

The Tao of Tao #2

A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: I later learned about Tao Lin’s acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person. I've left up posts about him on this blog because I don't want to erase my support of him in the past, but I've removed links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.

Tao Lin has twelve new poems up at The Lifted Brow. He’s also casually tossed off twelve more “in the same style” in the comment stream at HTMLGIANT (scroll down), where all twenty-four poems have occasioned a debate that quickly jumped past “Are these poems any good?” to “Are these actually poems?”

I’m somewhat ambivalent about these myself. Taken individually, they seem almost prankishly slight; but as I read through either set of twelve consecutively, I find myself gradually becoming gently, inexplicably, yet undeniably moved. It’s like what Lin has said (here) about the intended theme of Shoplifting from American Apparel—that the passage of time itself is emotional. Lin seems to be reaching after those moments that are too slight, too vacant, too fleeting, to be caught by more traditional poetry. But that goal leads to an aesthetic quandary: he can’t turn those moments into something that would be “worth writing a poem about” without destroying his whole reason for writing a poem about them.

In response, it seems to me, Lin turns to two forms that specialize in capturing ephemeral sensations—upper limit haiku, lower limit tweet. Whether or not that move creates “actual poems” seems to be the question for most of the objectors over at HTMLGIANT. But it also seems to me to be a question that these poems can’t help but raise—that, in fact, they deliberately try to make us think about. As usual, Tao Lin winds up doing something that, on the surface, makes him look like a disaffected adolescent wiseass; but that, viewed more sympathetically, actually expresses a kind of pomo, existentialist Zen to which he is clearly deeply and sincerely committed.

Imaginary Fan Letter in Response to Fantastic Four #29, April 1964

Today's Reading: The Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 1, pp. 776-800

Dear Stan and Jack:
FANTATIC FOUR #29 was a great, action-packed story! The Red Ghost and his super apes are some of your nuttiest super villains ever, and I was happy to see them make a comeback. It would be great to see a story about what the super apes will do now that the Red Ghost isn’t around controlling them anymore. Even better than the issue’s villain, you finally had the Invisible Girl use her new powers like a full-fledged member of the team.

I do have one big gripe, though. It seems like the greater Sue’s powers get, the wimpier you make her personality. Back in #17, when all she could do was turn herself invisible, she had the guts to take on Doctor Doom himself single-handed! In #29, now that she’s strong enough to save the whole team from suffocating on the moon, she spends the whole ish whimpering and whining! And why did you have Reed Richards announce that the Red Ghost’s gun was empty at the end of the story? It turns Sue’s otherwise heroic act into a great big goof up! Reed’s saved her enough times, hasn’t he? Why not let her rescue him for once!

I’m telling you, Stan, in forty years time all this “Reed I’m frightened” nonsense is going to make your marvelous mags look more dated than a communist super villain out to win the space race!
                                                                                            Morgan Myers
                                                                                            The Internet
                                                                                            The Future 
What can we tell you, Morgan? If you think Stan and Jack are weird about women, wait till they invent Chris Claremont!