"Yesterday a student came to talk to me about grad school. Mindful of the dismal prospects, I urged her to think carefully about the decision, to recognize its likely economic consequences, and to take a year or two off after completing her undergraduate degree before applying. But the best advice I gave her—advice I would have liked to receive when I was in my twenties—was not to put her trust in institutions. Instead of waiting to be recognized, Lana-Turner-at-Schwab's style—or worse, disciplined, shaped into a round academic peg that may never discover any holes, round, square, or otherwise—any writer today needs to DIY, even—perhaps especially—those who have found some kind of institutional niche.
To succeed as a writer—and I define "success" quite simply as being able to continue in one's work—you not only have to "create the taste by which [one] is to be relished" (Wm. Wordsworth) but you have to create relationships and infrastructure and paths of distribution. Start a press, start a blog, form a reading group, start a reading series. If you can synergize with institutions, do so, but don't sit around waiting for them to recognize or rescue you: they can offer you everything but initiative. This is the best path I've found for resisting the otherwise inevitable alienation from one's own creative labor that comes from permitting oneself and one's work to be processed by workshops and editors and tenure committees."
-Joshua Corey
At Marco and Luca
"It's like this girl in my discussion last semester, didn't wear shoes."
"To class?"
"In life."
"She like, couldn't get into places. That's like, a rule."
"I asked her once if it was a protest against, like, global warming or something. She said no, she just didn't like them."
"It was sick. Sick life."
"To class?"
"In life."
"She like, couldn't get into places. That's like, a rule."
"I asked her once if it was a protest against, like, global warming or something. She said no, she just didn't like them."
"It was sick. Sick life."
Notebook dump #2 (Ketjak 2)
Ketjak 2 —— at once soothingly hypnotic & ominously opaque, a sea of language that washes over & envelopes the the mind, the your world, complete w/ ryh ebb & flow, waxing & waning rhythm of sentence length, recurring phrases & motifs (sex, surgery, public transit), those indiscriminate boldfaced words that, whatever unknown-to-me logic may underlie them, certainly create a variegated pattern of light & shade, heavy & dark, that helps make the bulk of the poem feel sublime rather than monotonous.
An exceptional instance of this kind of poetry—& K2 is exceptional, even among the poems in The Alphabet (at least thru K)—raises the challenge of
2055 Abbey Rd
(804) 497-7100
ID or permit?
Satisfying
how to identify & describe exceptionalness of a poetry w/ so few handholds, sofew much local & so little global. What makes poems like this or LH’s My Life great while other, similar productions may be only mediocre? Is it only the quality of the individual sentences—no, the sentences are exceptional in themselves, but if that were the case the power of the poem would be only episodic, ‘as good as its last line,’ which it isn’t—it’s sustained & consistent. So in addition to the individual sentences, there must also be a [illegible strike through] art of orchestration—an ear for juxtapositions that will heighten contrasts yet still satisfyingly cohere; a sixth sense for how often & how frequently to revisit recurring motifs—like a thru-composed, atonal fugue, its not a non-structure but a structure of such fine-grained complexity that the structuredness can only be perceived as in hints, a vague consonance w/ no clear source, or a dissonance that calls cries out for a justifying order. Reading it is much like experiencing life—a barrage of details that aren’t obviously non sequitors yet feel occultly related, groping reveling in the thickness of chaos, yet groping for the order that would bring it to rest.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
An exceptional instance of this kind of poetry—& K2 is exceptional, even among the poems in The Alphabet (at least thru K)—raises the challenge of
2055 Abbey Rd
(804) 497-7100
ID or permit?
Satisfying
how to identify & describe exceptionalness of a poetry w/ so few handholds, so
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Three Subjective/Objective Lists About Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina
Four Reasons Why I Thought Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina Would Be Really Good
1 Enthusiastic write-up on HTMLGiant
2 The basic premise—44 creation myths followed by one “destruction myth”—is great. I love that no two myths overlap, and that most of them begin with a complicated and even familiar world already in place—there is no beginning, it’s all beginnings. I also love that most of the creations quickly wind up spiraling into apocalypses; as the publisher describes it: “This book attempts the world again and again, only to find that even the most ridiculous of creations contains the seeds of its own destruction.”
3 Blurb from Anne Boyer, who knows what picante sauce is supposed to taste like (I thought)
4 The first poem (see the link to the publisher above), which I still think is pretty excellent overall. The way something seemingly silly turns, without warning, into something kind of uncanny and then into something kind of profound; our universe as God’s attempt to escape from his own mortifying omnipresence; the inherent funniness of the name/attendant mental image of Larry Bird
Three Reasons Why It Was Actually Pretty Disappointing
1 Poems are made of words, not ideas, it says here. Svalina has a nasty habit of trying to write with ideas. The prose reads like prose; the poetry reads like prose
2 Not all of those ideas are as good as he maybe wants them to be. The absurdist setups and quirky turns sometimes feel slightly contrived, and the philosophical punchlines can get downright trite. There’s a lot of “people escape from okay but dissatisfying situation only to (ironically!) find that they wish they were back in the situation they escaped from.” That sort of thing
3 These lines from the still mostly excellent first poem should’ve tipped me off:
All the clubs shut down, no one
could watch a Larry Bird dance without understanding
that they danced like this, pursed lips, flagellum legs,
arms like wild fire hoses.
That is a dude trying to “describe” something. I conclude that my aesthetic allows for no “description” in poetry. (That’s description in quotes, description without quotes can be good.) Worse, it’s a dude explaining his own joke, trying to convey the inherently funny mental image of Larry Bird, which he’s already done much more effectively by just writing “Larry Bird”
Approximately Ten Reactions I Had to This Disappointment
1 Maybe I should read it again
2 Read it again, it was even more disappointing
3 Sense of uneasiness created by cognitive dissonance between my desire to like the book, because of all the things about it suggestive of things that I’d really like, and the fact that I actually didn’t like it
4 Desire to write a negative review that would quantify all of the reasons that I didn’t like it, thus reassuring me about the boundaries of my taste and helping to resolve the cognitive dissonance
5 Desire not to write a negative review because there are already too many opinions on the internet, it’s a pet peeve of mine
6 More cognitive dissonance because of 4 and 5
7 Decision to write the review in this deconstructed form in the hopes of exploring the issues raised by 3 through 6, thus accomplishing 4 while sidestepping 5
8 A little bit more cognitive dissonance due to self-awareness about sidestepping 5
9 Nothing after 4 or so was actually a reaction to the book anymore, but actually reactions to my reactions to the book
10 That probably means I should stop
1 Enthusiastic write-up on HTMLGiant
2 The basic premise—44 creation myths followed by one “destruction myth”—is great. I love that no two myths overlap, and that most of them begin with a complicated and even familiar world already in place—there is no beginning, it’s all beginnings. I also love that most of the creations quickly wind up spiraling into apocalypses; as the publisher describes it: “This book attempts the world again and again, only to find that even the most ridiculous of creations contains the seeds of its own destruction.”
3 Blurb from Anne Boyer, who knows what picante sauce is supposed to taste like (I thought)
4 The first poem (see the link to the publisher above), which I still think is pretty excellent overall. The way something seemingly silly turns, without warning, into something kind of uncanny and then into something kind of profound; our universe as God’s attempt to escape from his own mortifying omnipresence; the inherent funniness of the name/attendant mental image of Larry Bird
Three Reasons Why It Was Actually Pretty Disappointing
1 Poems are made of words, not ideas, it says here. Svalina has a nasty habit of trying to write with ideas. The prose reads like prose; the poetry reads like prose
2 Not all of those ideas are as good as he maybe wants them to be. The absurdist setups and quirky turns sometimes feel slightly contrived, and the philosophical punchlines can get downright trite. There’s a lot of “people escape from okay but dissatisfying situation only to (ironically!) find that they wish they were back in the situation they escaped from.” That sort of thing
3 These lines from the still mostly excellent first poem should’ve tipped me off:
All the clubs shut down, no one
could watch a Larry Bird dance without understanding
that they danced like this, pursed lips, flagellum legs,
arms like wild fire hoses.
That is a dude trying to “describe” something. I conclude that my aesthetic allows for no “description” in poetry. (That’s description in quotes, description without quotes can be good.) Worse, it’s a dude explaining his own joke, trying to convey the inherently funny mental image of Larry Bird, which he’s already done much more effectively by just writing “Larry Bird”
Approximately Ten Reactions I Had to This Disappointment
1 Maybe I should read it again
2 Read it again, it was even more disappointing
3 Sense of uneasiness created by cognitive dissonance between my desire to like the book, because of all the things about it suggestive of things that I’d really like, and the fact that I actually didn’t like it
4 Desire to write a negative review that would quantify all of the reasons that I didn’t like it, thus reassuring me about the boundaries of my taste and helping to resolve the cognitive dissonance
5 Desire not to write a negative review because there are already too many opinions on the internet, it’s a pet peeve of mine
6 More cognitive dissonance because of 4 and 5
7 Decision to write the review in this deconstructed form in the hopes of exploring the issues raised by 3 through 6, thus accomplishing 4 while sidestepping 5
8 A little bit more cognitive dissonance due to self-awareness about sidestepping 5
9 Nothing after 4 or so was actually a reaction to the book anymore, but actually reactions to my reactions to the book
10 That probably means I should stop
The Tao of Tao #1
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.
"A few days later he and Sheila were on a train to New York City. They drank from a large plastic bottle containing organic soymilk, energy drink, and green tea extract and wrote sex stories to sell to nerve.com for $500. Sheila's sex story had chainsaws and Sam's had Ha Jin doing things in a bathroom at Emory University."
-Tao Lin, Shoplifting from American Apparel
"Matt stares at Rachel's rib cage with a neutral facial expression. He has an urge to scream in despair because the rib cage is very sexy, but is able to control himself completely, without it affecting his neutral facial expression."
-Tao Lin's sex story on nerve.com (warning: Tao Lin's sex story is actually full of sex)
"Ha Jin brought his burrito supreme in front of his face to block his eyeballs so his wife wouldn't see him staring at the teenager, who was caucasian. Ha Jin said, 'I'm going to the restroom.' 'Me too,' said Ha Jin's son. Ha Jin said, 'I'm going to the bathroom alone.' 'Are you going to work on poetry a little?' said Ha Jin's son. 'Yes,' said Ha Jin."
-Tao Lin, "Ha Jin's Big Day," posted in the "reader feedback" section
Tao Lin's sex story is aggressively unerotic, seething with barely suppressed self-loathing and sexual hang-ups, and is easily the funniest thing in the world since Thursday's Daily Show. There are a few lessons here: 1) Shoplifting from American Apparel is pretty much straight memoir; 2) once you've got a few books out, you can get nerve.com to pay you $500 to basically make fun of the whole idea of sex; and 3) Tao Lin is very forthright, but probably has some issues.
National Lady Gaga Day
In honor of National Lady Gaga Day, here's my favorite of her videos.
Highlights include: disability fetishism, eroticized murder scenes, Hitchcock references, Lady Gaga's face on the hundred dollar bill.
"Maybe a little acknowledged truth is that Gaga is in reality gifted. She can sing live and comes with a piano. She is at present working at Polaroid. All this is the reason we all love her so much and want to celebrate the National Lady Gaga Day!"
Highlights include: disability fetishism, eroticized murder scenes, Hitchcock references, Lady Gaga's face on the hundred dollar bill.
"Maybe a little acknowledged truth is that Gaga is in reality gifted. She can sing live and comes with a piano. She is at present working at Polaroid. All this is the reason we all love her so much and want to celebrate the National Lady Gaga Day!"
Notebook dump #1 (The Brandon Book Crisis)
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.
Self-billed as a ‘thriller movie about photoshop,’ The Brandon Book Crisis actually consists of 140 pages of g-mail chats, e-mails, text messages, and other material relating to the printing of Brandon Gorrell’s Book by Tao Lin’s Muumuu House Press.
A bizarrely self-indulgent project, but also a showcase for Tao Lin’s gift for presentation, recontextualization, & timely self-exposure. From the cover—which duplicates the troublesome .psd file
This weird little injoke is likely to be forgotten in the history of lit, even if Tao Lin & Brandon Gorrell are not. Yet in its own way it’s a masterpeice of the slight—or the sleight—a flick of the right mouse button that turns real conversation into reflexive commentary, totally fucking the boundaries between artifice & sincerity, public & private, narrative & annecdote, genius & just goofing
If you look up ‘insouciant’ in the Free Online Dictionary there’s a link to Tao Lin’s profile pic
God Save Luke Henley (and Daniel Bailey)
Equal parts Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, and Gordon Gano, with maybe a shot of Leonard Cohen and garnished with a sprig of Neutral Milk Hotel, Luke Henley is a Tucson, Arizona, based singer/songwriter that I discovered totally randomly a few years ago via the website Song Fight. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have an album, a label, or a decent microphone, but he writes some pretty amazing songs and performs with wrist-slitting vulnerability. I thought no one else had ever heard of him; hell, I’m not sure I’ve technically heard of him. But then I came across this, while reading another potential “God Save...” nominee, Daniel Bailey’s The Drunk Sonnets:
LISTENING TO LUKE HENLEY
IS POSSIBLY THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING EVER
LUKE’S SONGS ARE HONEST IN THE WAY
THAT A BULLET IS HONEST WHEN IT GRAZES YOUR TEMPLE
AND YOU ARE OK BUT BLEEDING A LITTLE
YOUR TEMPLE WILL SCAB AND BLOOD WILL STAY IN YOU
BUT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHO SHOT YOU
BUT YOU HAVE A GOOD IDEA
AND YOU JUST WANT SOMEONE THERE
AND NO ONE IS THERE
AND LUKE’S GUITAR IS YOUR FAVORITE DRUNK SCAR
I LIKE LOOKING AT MY SCARS AND FEELING THEM
I CAN NEVER FEEL MY SCARS BUT I FEEL THEM ANYWAY
I WANT AN EARTHQUAKE TO DAMAGE THIS PLANET TONIGHT
That seems like a pretty fair description, caps lock and all.
****
Go listen to lots of Luke Henley songs at the Song Fight archive, where I especially recommend “Courage,” the short but sweet “Welcome to _____,” and the long and bitter “Ran Away to Paris.” I also recommend 1) starting from the bottom of the page, since the arrangement is chronological and the overall quality does go up, and 2) bearing in mind that, per the Song Fight rules, all of these songs were written and recorded in one week a piece starting from the titles.
Then go to Henley's Myspace page with his current band, the Works of Mercy, where you can hear newer songs. Judging by some of these songs I guess he’s a little happier and maybe in love and has a pretty good mic now, so... that’s cool I guess.
“Small and Grey” is an amazing song that used to be on the internet somewhere, where I got it, but isn’t there anymore as far as I can tell. Now it’s here.
Get a fuller explanation of The Drunk Sonnets here. Read more of them at this excellent blog, then go buy the book from Magic Helicopter Press.
God save Luke Henley. (Also Daniel Bailey.)
“God Save…” is a feature highlighting things that are just too good for this shitty world, in the hopes that maybe if I ask nicely God will keep letting that slide.
Wrapped up in (the Furthest Thing from) Books
Two current blockbusters, plus one from this summer that I just got around to.
Avatar - The “Dances with Smurfs” joke is pretty fair, but totally misses just how fascinating a piece of twenty-first century Hollywood liberal wish fulfilment this post-postcolonial ecofantasy actually is. The movie exploits a genre swap—historical drama to sci-fi adventure—in order to pull a Quantum Leap on the familiar doomed-natives storyline, setting right what once went wrong by making all the Indians ten feet tall and giving them dragons to ride into battle. But it also goes further, turning New Age pantheistic mythology into a literal reality that’s one part cognitive science, one part MMPORPG. The mystical web of life becomes a biological version of the worldwide web, while cultural immersion becomes the immersive experience of a VR simulation—allowing the white hero of Dances with Wolves and countless other Euro-American fantasies to finally make his transcultural migration total, physical, and permanent.
Judged objectively for its politics, Avatar is well-intentioned but unforgivable. Judged as a pure piece of blockbuster cinema, it’s intelligently constructed, surprisingly imaginative, and undeniably dramatic. Judged as a cultural artifact, it’s the finest piece of Žižek bait since The Matrix.
Sherlock Holmes - A solidly constructed, if somewhat slight, action-adventure with just enough deduction tossed in to give it a Holmesian flavor. Director Guy Ritchie and star Robert Downey Jr. reimagine Holmes as kind of a cross between Dr. House and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, a man driven by his tortured genius to engage in shirtless pit-fighting and experiment on adorable British bulldogs. Holmes diehards (are there any?) will probably find this unforgivable, but Downey is just the actor to pull it off, and Ritchie actually benefits from the restraints imposed by a PG-13 rating, which prevent him from dishing up another attempt at Reservoir Dogs in London. Jude Law makes a fine comic foil for Downey, and the rest of the cast mostly keeps pace—with the serious exception of a wooden and anachronistic-feeling Rachel McAdams as Holmes’s love interest, a woman who we know is Holmes’s perfect equal mostly because the other characters say so a lot.
It would’ve been nice if the story had been an actual mystery in which the viewer could participate, but at least the movie does play fair in showing us how Holmes collects the data that lead to his deductions. Anything more would probably be too much to ask from a big dumb blockbuster that’s already significantly smarter than it had to be.
Star Trek - Director J. J. Abrahams attempts to revive the moribund Trek franchise with young actors, hip retro-mod styling, and a return to the original series characters. He largely succeeds in freshening up the Enterprise and her crew; but unfortunately, the script calls for a time-traveling, older-than-ever Leonard Nimoy to crash the party, dragging along a villain (Eric Bana) who seems like a refugee from one of the later Next Generation flicks that this movie was supposed to make us forget. Bana tries his best to make the character credible with a kind of off-handed brutality, but he can’t carry the weight of yet another gothy space-Nosferatu tooling around in another boring, how-do-we-stop-that-thing monster spaceship.
Meanwhile, Abrahams’s roller coaster–style direction tries to cover for a script with little heart and less brains, but only succeeds in creating a thrill ride that blows its load on the first big hill. And, while Spock, McCoy, and even Checkov seem more engaging than ever with their youthful new faces, Chris Pine’s Kirk is too much of a jackass to be remotely believable as someone who could take command of an entire starship. Shatner’s Kirk may have been a cowboy, but he was always an adult; the comparison with this movie’s borderline Labeouvian revamp makes a sad case for the infantilization of American ideals of masculinity.
Now that the reboot has been accomplished, however clumsily, maybe the franchise can thrive in sequels—but only if Abrahams discovers as much interest in his story and its characters as he seems to have in their uniforms or the IKEA lighting on the Enterprise bridge.
Avatar - The “Dances with Smurfs” joke is pretty fair, but totally misses just how fascinating a piece of twenty-first century Hollywood liberal wish fulfilment this post-postcolonial ecofantasy actually is. The movie exploits a genre swap—historical drama to sci-fi adventure—in order to pull a Quantum Leap on the familiar doomed-natives storyline, setting right what once went wrong by making all the Indians ten feet tall and giving them dragons to ride into battle. But it also goes further, turning New Age pantheistic mythology into a literal reality that’s one part cognitive science, one part MMPORPG. The mystical web of life becomes a biological version of the worldwide web, while cultural immersion becomes the immersive experience of a VR simulation—allowing the white hero of Dances with Wolves and countless other Euro-American fantasies to finally make his transcultural migration total, physical, and permanent.
Judged objectively for its politics, Avatar is well-intentioned but unforgivable. Judged as a pure piece of blockbuster cinema, it’s intelligently constructed, surprisingly imaginative, and undeniably dramatic. Judged as a cultural artifact, it’s the finest piece of Žižek bait since The Matrix.
Sherlock Holmes - A solidly constructed, if somewhat slight, action-adventure with just enough deduction tossed in to give it a Holmesian flavor. Director Guy Ritchie and star Robert Downey Jr. reimagine Holmes as kind of a cross between Dr. House and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, a man driven by his tortured genius to engage in shirtless pit-fighting and experiment on adorable British bulldogs. Holmes diehards (are there any?) will probably find this unforgivable, but Downey is just the actor to pull it off, and Ritchie actually benefits from the restraints imposed by a PG-13 rating, which prevent him from dishing up another attempt at Reservoir Dogs in London. Jude Law makes a fine comic foil for Downey, and the rest of the cast mostly keeps pace—with the serious exception of a wooden and anachronistic-feeling Rachel McAdams as Holmes’s love interest, a woman who we know is Holmes’s perfect equal mostly because the other characters say so a lot.
It would’ve been nice if the story had been an actual mystery in which the viewer could participate, but at least the movie does play fair in showing us how Holmes collects the data that lead to his deductions. Anything more would probably be too much to ask from a big dumb blockbuster that’s already significantly smarter than it had to be.
Star Trek - Director J. J. Abrahams attempts to revive the moribund Trek franchise with young actors, hip retro-mod styling, and a return to the original series characters. He largely succeeds in freshening up the Enterprise and her crew; but unfortunately, the script calls for a time-traveling, older-than-ever Leonard Nimoy to crash the party, dragging along a villain (Eric Bana) who seems like a refugee from one of the later Next Generation flicks that this movie was supposed to make us forget. Bana tries his best to make the character credible with a kind of off-handed brutality, but he can’t carry the weight of yet another gothy space-Nosferatu tooling around in another boring, how-do-we-stop-that-thing monster spaceship.
Meanwhile, Abrahams’s roller coaster–style direction tries to cover for a script with little heart and less brains, but only succeeds in creating a thrill ride that blows its load on the first big hill. And, while Spock, McCoy, and even Checkov seem more engaging than ever with their youthful new faces, Chris Pine’s Kirk is too much of a jackass to be remotely believable as someone who could take command of an entire starship. Shatner’s Kirk may have been a cowboy, but he was always an adult; the comparison with this movie’s borderline Labeouvian revamp makes a sad case for the infantilization of American ideals of masculinity.
Now that the reboot has been accomplished, however clumsily, maybe the franchise can thrive in sequels—but only if Abrahams discovers as much interest in his story and its characters as he seems to have in their uniforms or the IKEA lighting on the Enterprise bridge.
"There is another world and it's this one."
Today’s Reading: With Strings, Charles Bernstein
Confessions of a former academic #1: I managed to write a dissertation chapter, and attempted to publish an article, on Charles Bernstein without ever actually reading one of his books from start to finish. I did, however, skim and spot-read enough of them to develop a firm—if not well-tested—theory of the shape of his career: the trenchant, almost proto-conceptualist experimentation of the seventies; the meaty, well-orchestrated, and obliquely hilarious anti-soliloquies of his mature period in the eighties and early nineties; the careless and often merely silly doggerel of his ongoing decline ever since.
Collecting poems written from 1986 to 1999 (with one outlier from 1982), With Strings offers tentative support for parts of this hypothesis. The book includes a remarkable range of different sorts of poetry, but unfortunately only about two that are regularly any good. The best resemble the poems of Bernstein’s high period (I bet)—extended, dissonant symphonies composed from competing modes of discourse, each hollowed out, flipped upside down, and sat on its head by Bernstein’s determined wit. That wit falters more in these apparent out takes than it did (I predict) in the poems that made it into his collections from Controlling Interests through Dark City; but where the humor flags a surprisingly almost-lyrical warmth can step in to take up the slack:
The song is not in the melody
but what comes after, in the space between
cup & lip. For we have been spared nothing –
but nothing is the one thing we might spare.
Bobbing & tossing in the crank. midget
rats invade pluto. This is what I always want-
ed, to return to the replica of
the simulation in which I am borne.
– “Like This”
Excessively spacing these achievements are shorter poems that vary widely in quality. The best are like shorter, more chiseled versions of the long poems. Then there are the hit-or-miss parodies—funny but in ways that seem a bit too easy for a former Language poet—and finally the truly mystifying doggerels and attempted nursery rhymes. So for every poem like “Like This” or “Log Rhythms,” you’ll have to sift through a handful like “O! Li Po!” (which is not atypical in that the title is better than the actual poem):
My Murphy bed is rusted
I took it to the store
They charge me $50
Won’t see that cash no more
Fortunately, with a few exceptions, the quality of the poems tends to be in direct proportion to their length, so you’ll spend little time sorting out the throwaways and can really settle in with the good stuff. And the good stuff, being close to if not quite Bernstein’s best, is well worth the effort.
Confessions of a former academic #1: I managed to write a dissertation chapter, and attempted to publish an article, on Charles Bernstein without ever actually reading one of his books from start to finish. I did, however, skim and spot-read enough of them to develop a firm—if not well-tested—theory of the shape of his career: the trenchant, almost proto-conceptualist experimentation of the seventies; the meaty, well-orchestrated, and obliquely hilarious anti-soliloquies of his mature period in the eighties and early nineties; the careless and often merely silly doggerel of his ongoing decline ever since.
Collecting poems written from 1986 to 1999 (with one outlier from 1982), With Strings offers tentative support for parts of this hypothesis. The book includes a remarkable range of different sorts of poetry, but unfortunately only about two that are regularly any good. The best resemble the poems of Bernstein’s high period (I bet)—extended, dissonant symphonies composed from competing modes of discourse, each hollowed out, flipped upside down, and sat on its head by Bernstein’s determined wit. That wit falters more in these apparent out takes than it did (I predict) in the poems that made it into his collections from Controlling Interests through Dark City; but where the humor flags a surprisingly almost-lyrical warmth can step in to take up the slack:
The song is not in the melody
but what comes after, in the space between
cup & lip. For we have been spared nothing –
but nothing is the one thing we might spare.
Bobbing & tossing in the crank. midget
rats invade pluto. This is what I always want-
ed, to return to the replica of
the simulation in which I am borne.
– “Like This”
Excessively spacing these achievements are shorter poems that vary widely in quality. The best are like shorter, more chiseled versions of the long poems. Then there are the hit-or-miss parodies—funny but in ways that seem a bit too easy for a former Language poet—and finally the truly mystifying doggerels and attempted nursery rhymes. So for every poem like “Like This” or “Log Rhythms,” you’ll have to sift through a handful like “O! Li Po!” (which is not atypical in that the title is better than the actual poem):
My Murphy bed is rusted
I took it to the store
They charge me $50
Won’t see that cash no more
Fortunately, with a few exceptions, the quality of the poems tends to be in direct proportion to their length, so you’ll spend little time sorting out the throwaways and can really settle in with the good stuff. And the good stuff, being close to if not quite Bernstein’s best, is well worth the effort.
Getting the News from Poetry: Market Crash
Today’s Reading: Day, pp. 202-448 (lots of skimming)
Contrary to my expectations, Day actually gets more interesting the more I read it. Maybe that’s because so much of its effect comes from scale and contrast—the more and more diverse information accumulates, the more unmanageably sublime and genuinely epic the whole mess seems. This effect hits a kind of crescendo with pp. 233-448, the massive list of stock prices and other sorts of financial indicators that takes up roughly a quarter of the book’s total length.
This ought to be the truly unreadable part of the book, Goldsmith’s own Chinese history cantos or “Oxen of the Sun,” and to some degree it is. I challenge anyone to read every character in these massive walls of numbers, in which, even for someone who understands the stock pages better than I do, any intelligible information is disassembled by Goldsmith’s left-to-right reformatting of the pages. Giving full attention to stretches of it may offer a kind of Zen-like calm, but my strategy was mostly to let my eyes skim quickly across the page, mostly looking rather than reading, letting names of various stocks occasionally snag my eye like rapids in a raging stream of raw data.
The effect is sublime, almost in Kant’s mathematical sense of the term—the sense of something so large as to seem endless, beyond the capacity of our imagination to conceive size. That’s only heightened by interruptions that turn into false endings, like the vodka ad that repeats the phrase “The same way my father made it” eight times (246), or the glib and ultimately inaccurate promise of “STOCK TABLES EXPLAINED” (256), or the several times the listings seem to spontaneously and maliciously start over from A just as you think you’re nearing the end, or every repetition of the call-and-response refrain: “Continues on Next Page,” “Continued from Preceding Page.”
Here is the mysterious machinery of capitalism that pervades our daily lives—right down to the price of a dozen eggs (343)—reduced to a sea of numbers, like looking at the green lines of code that compose the artificial world in The Matrix. Maybe it would be better to call this Goldsmith’s “Circe” or Hell cantos.
****
Goldsmith has talked about the edifying, surprising, and powerful experience he had in composing this book (for example, see the passage I quoted at the end of a previous Day post). In that light, his other, more often recognized claim that you don’t need to read the book in order to know it—that the idea is really all there is—seems at best contradictory and at worst selfish, denying his readers the same experience that, in preparing the book in the first place, he implicitly offers them. In part, I think this is just a bit of typically paradoxical Goldsmith self-marketing, discouraging you from reading the book in order to encourage you to buy it. But it also seems to be an effort to stake a claim to newness at the expense of a (I think more justified) claim to brilliance, an almost phobic denial of just how old-fashionedly, poetically powerful this book is.
Throughout my blogging on this book so far, I’ve repeatedly questioned whether the aesthetic, even narrative structures I’ve been imposing were really legitimate, whether it’s a permissible reading strategy to start constructing traditional artistic structures where there’s really nothing but accident. But now I’m thinking there’s no accident here at all. Yes, the individual, local effects may be fortuitous, but the fact that the book as a whole reads as some sort of modern epic—that’s the whole idea, that’s why he did it in the first place! That gesture of reframing is, in fact, the essence of Goldsmith’s transcriptional poetics: not just copying down ephemeral, low-status language, but revaluing that language through paratextual apparatuses (titles, chapter headings, etc.) that recast the New York Times as Ulysses or a week’s worth of babble as Shakespeare.
Well, duh: I knew that. But somehow I’m seeing it in a new, more virtuosic light right now, perhaps because of my reading of The Brandon Book Crisis, a book that represents the moment of reframing within the content reframed, capturing the flash of inspiration in a way that makes it clear that Goldsmith’s witty tag “uncreative writing” is a total misnomer: Not only does this kind of work not strip out the creativity from the usual process of literary writing, creativity is almost the only thing it retains.
But I have a post all about The Brandon Book Crisis coming up soon, and this post is getting long, so maybe I’ll say more about this idea then.
Contrary to my expectations, Day actually gets more interesting the more I read it. Maybe that’s because so much of its effect comes from scale and contrast—the more and more diverse information accumulates, the more unmanageably sublime and genuinely epic the whole mess seems. This effect hits a kind of crescendo with pp. 233-448, the massive list of stock prices and other sorts of financial indicators that takes up roughly a quarter of the book’s total length.
This ought to be the truly unreadable part of the book, Goldsmith’s own Chinese history cantos or “Oxen of the Sun,” and to some degree it is. I challenge anyone to read every character in these massive walls of numbers, in which, even for someone who understands the stock pages better than I do, any intelligible information is disassembled by Goldsmith’s left-to-right reformatting of the pages. Giving full attention to stretches of it may offer a kind of Zen-like calm, but my strategy was mostly to let my eyes skim quickly across the page, mostly looking rather than reading, letting names of various stocks occasionally snag my eye like rapids in a raging stream of raw data.
The effect is sublime, almost in Kant’s mathematical sense of the term—the sense of something so large as to seem endless, beyond the capacity of our imagination to conceive size. That’s only heightened by interruptions that turn into false endings, like the vodka ad that repeats the phrase “The same way my father made it” eight times (246), or the glib and ultimately inaccurate promise of “STOCK TABLES EXPLAINED” (256), or the several times the listings seem to spontaneously and maliciously start over from A just as you think you’re nearing the end, or every repetition of the call-and-response refrain: “Continues on Next Page,” “Continued from Preceding Page.”
Here is the mysterious machinery of capitalism that pervades our daily lives—right down to the price of a dozen eggs (343)—reduced to a sea of numbers, like looking at the green lines of code that compose the artificial world in The Matrix. Maybe it would be better to call this Goldsmith’s “Circe” or Hell cantos.
****
Goldsmith has talked about the edifying, surprising, and powerful experience he had in composing this book (for example, see the passage I quoted at the end of a previous Day post). In that light, his other, more often recognized claim that you don’t need to read the book in order to know it—that the idea is really all there is—seems at best contradictory and at worst selfish, denying his readers the same experience that, in preparing the book in the first place, he implicitly offers them. In part, I think this is just a bit of typically paradoxical Goldsmith self-marketing, discouraging you from reading the book in order to encourage you to buy it. But it also seems to be an effort to stake a claim to newness at the expense of a (I think more justified) claim to brilliance, an almost phobic denial of just how old-fashionedly, poetically powerful this book is.
Throughout my blogging on this book so far, I’ve repeatedly questioned whether the aesthetic, even narrative structures I’ve been imposing were really legitimate, whether it’s a permissible reading strategy to start constructing traditional artistic structures where there’s really nothing but accident. But now I’m thinking there’s no accident here at all. Yes, the individual, local effects may be fortuitous, but the fact that the book as a whole reads as some sort of modern epic—that’s the whole idea, that’s why he did it in the first place! That gesture of reframing is, in fact, the essence of Goldsmith’s transcriptional poetics: not just copying down ephemeral, low-status language, but revaluing that language through paratextual apparatuses (titles, chapter headings, etc.) that recast the New York Times as Ulysses or a week’s worth of babble as Shakespeare.
Well, duh: I knew that. But somehow I’m seeing it in a new, more virtuosic light right now, perhaps because of my reading of The Brandon Book Crisis, a book that represents the moment of reframing within the content reframed, capturing the flash of inspiration in a way that makes it clear that Goldsmith’s witty tag “uncreative writing” is a total misnomer: Not only does this kind of work not strip out the creativity from the usual process of literary writing, creativity is almost the only thing it retains.
But I have a post all about The Brandon Book Crisis coming up soon, and this post is getting long, so maybe I’ll say more about this idea then.
"He often suspected that The Future Was Now."
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: Bed, Tao Lin, pp. 1-157
I’m going to go right out on a limb and say this: Reading Tao Lin’s Bed, I am utterly convinced that I’m reading the juvenalia of a budding literary genius. The prose has a quality that reminds me of nothing except James Joyce’s early writing—a virtuosity lightly held because quickly won, deployed with an almost indifferent facility and ready to be cast off in favor of unforseeable creations. And the sense is only heightened by the book’s occasional tackiness and loose grasp of punctuation, marks of youth (Lin was just 24 when the book was published) that only make the indications of a precocious mastery more clear.
I feel more confident saying this having already read some of Lin’s subsequent work, like the pop-conceptualism of The Brandon Book Crisis (more on that later), the rigorous neutrality of Shoplifting from American Apparel, the weird little poems, the pop-art publicity stunts at his blog. It’s an amazing range of work that Lin has turned out in barely two years, and he apparently already has another novel read to go.
I might be wrong, of course. The laser-like myopia that gives Lin so much of his idiosyncratic force—a kind of explosive and reluctant narcissism that reaches out only to suck the world in—may well turn against him, limiting his horizons once his most interesting subject—himself—is exhausted. Or his creative versatility might never develop beyond a degree of dilettantism; he may wander off with his cartoon doodles of sad manatees and his indie band named after Jesus and never be heard from again.
But, putting down Bed, feeling disoriented and unlike myself, my perceptions pulsing with a disjointed yet vibrant clarity-haze contracted from the stories themselves like a contact high, today, I’m going to bet against it.
I’m going to go right out on a limb and say this: Reading Tao Lin’s Bed, I am utterly convinced that I’m reading the juvenalia of a budding literary genius. The prose has a quality that reminds me of nothing except James Joyce’s early writing—a virtuosity lightly held because quickly won, deployed with an almost indifferent facility and ready to be cast off in favor of unforseeable creations. And the sense is only heightened by the book’s occasional tackiness and loose grasp of punctuation, marks of youth (Lin was just 24 when the book was published) that only make the indications of a precocious mastery more clear.
I feel more confident saying this having already read some of Lin’s subsequent work, like the pop-conceptualism of The Brandon Book Crisis (more on that later), the rigorous neutrality of Shoplifting from American Apparel, the weird little poems, the pop-art publicity stunts at his blog. It’s an amazing range of work that Lin has turned out in barely two years, and he apparently already has another novel read to go.
I might be wrong, of course. The laser-like myopia that gives Lin so much of his idiosyncratic force—a kind of explosive and reluctant narcissism that reaches out only to suck the world in—may well turn against him, limiting his horizons once his most interesting subject—himself—is exhausted. Or his creative versatility might never develop beyond a degree of dilettantism; he may wander off with his cartoon doodles of sad manatees and his indie band named after Jesus and never be heard from again.
But, putting down Bed, feeling disoriented and unlike myself, my perceptions pulsing with a disjointed yet vibrant clarity-haze contracted from the stories themselves like a contact high, today, I’m going to bet against it.
Last Comic: "I ain't Frederick H. Coca Cola but I do know something about building a brand."
I’ve heard all the hype—at this point the legend, really—surrounding Chris Onstad’s Achewood, consistently treated as the pinnacle of online comic strips by anyone smart enough to not read Penny Arcade. And I’ve read enough of the strip to know that its reputation is well deserved. But somehow, I never could bring myself to read it regularly. The strip’s bizarre, massive cast—the sort of random assortment of decontextualized in-jokes that long running comics so often accumulate—seemed like too much of a barrier, and for all the wit mixed in with the gross-out absurdism, I couldn’t really get around the fact that the main character seems to be a well-endowed bulldog who wears nothing but a thong and some sunglasses.
It didn’t take very long for this book, collecting one of the strip’s most well-loved storylines, to overcome that reluctance. Sure, Onstad’s humor may start from sophomoric premises like the “ChatSack,” a set of fake testicles for your cell phone patterned after the similar items available for truck hitches. But he immediately spins that setup into satiric gold, offering a whole line of increasingly high-end models that perfectly skewer the glossy fetishism surrounding consumer electronics. (At the pinnacle is the “Solo, by ChatSack with Karl Lagerfield,” a one-ball model because “at this level, the market demands nonlinear value.”)
But ultimately, this book is hardly even about the humor. It’s about the elaborate mythology of the titular fight itself—elaborated still further in the weirdly convincing, highly amusing front and back matter—and about the genuinely touching friendship between the two main characters.
Mind you, both those characters are poorly drawn, anthropomorphic bulldogs, one of whom wears nothing but a thong and some sunglasses. But somehow, as they take on three thousand crazed brawlers with nothing but their wits, their loyalty to each other, and their utter inability to recognize when they’re in over their heads, this weird, ingrown little comic strip metamorphoses into a piece of real storytelling. And—an even greater trick—it manages to do so without ceasing to be relentlessly moronic, gross, and damn funny.
More Comics: "OH MY GOD, is there SERIOUSLY no room on this planet for a dude who loves actions but hates their consequences?"
David Boring is the story of a guy struggling to escape the influence of his overbearing mother. David Boring is the story of a guy and his lesbian roommate making their way in the big city. David Boring is the story of a guy whose old friend is mysteriously killed. David Boring is the story of a guy trying to get over the perfect relationship. David Boring is the story of a guy trying to understand his absent father by pouring over his obscure superhero artwork. David Boring is the story of a guy who wants to be a filmmaker but never gets around to filming anything. David Boring is the story of a guy trapped on an island with a half dozen of his friends, relatives, and enemies, while the world may or may not be coming to an end around them. David Boring is the story of a guy who happens to be a sexual deviant with a fetish for... ah, women, apparently? David Boring is the story of a guy wanted for a murder he didn’t commit. David Boring is the story of a guy who gets shot in the head and lives. (Oh also those are all the same guy.)
In other words, David Boring isn't really a story at all, so much as a collection of high concepts wrestling for panel space. It reads like Dan Clowes decided to toss all of his b-ideas into one book, in the hopes that the whole would be more than the sum of the parts, or at least he'd get them out of his system. It’s not without its moments, especially in the first act, before the excess complications move in and Clowes loses the thread of his narrative. But on the whole, it’s rambling and incoherent, and not in that Lynchian, bone-shaking way like Clowes's earlier Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (which does nearly everything David Boring tries to do, only better and without losing its focus). Just regular, “Is this actually going anywhere?” incoherent, unfortunately.
Hey kids, it's comics week all the sudden!
Deserves a place with Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One and Daredevil: Born Again as one of the great superhero reimaginings of comics’ grim-and-gritty era. Except that it’s hardly a superhero comic at all: Wolverine is never called by that name, never appears in his costume, never does anything terribly heroic—hell, he hardly even speaks. Instead, he’s cast as the monster in a harrowing sci-fi/horror story about cruelty, inhumanity, and abuse of power, of the miserable-bastards-get-what’s-coming-to-them variety.
Really, it’s amazing that Windsor-Smith was able to convince Marvel to spend twelve months publishing a story about three unethical, unlikeable, and largely incompetent people relentlessly torturing the comatose shell of one of their most popular characters. If that sounds like an unpleasant read—it is. But unlike so many other efforts to take superhero characters into this sort of ultra-dark territory, it’s executed with enough skill, intelligence, and maturity to actually reap some dramatic rewards in trade for the sense of fun it surrenders.
The closest thing to a misstep is the final chapter, which reads like a compromise with the demands of in-continuity storytelling. But then again, its awkward twists also add some valuable ambiguity to what otherwise might be a bit too pat of a genre-fiction wrap up. As it is, “pat” is the last word you’d use to describe anything about this book. From the panel layouts to the characterization, the narrative chronology to the thematic content, it’s remarkably oblique and nonlinear, with the courage—rare enough in any artistic medium—to make its readers work to understand what’s going on and who they should be rooting for, and to leave them ultimately as bereft of any emotional closure as the abused hero himself.
God Save John Campbell
Elegant, simple, agonizingly funny and hilariously painful, deadpan surrealist, achieving complex effects with an absolute minimum of means, this might be the platonic ideal of a John Campbell comic. Except that all John Campbell comics are already the platonic ideal of something or other. Maybe Achewood, or New Yorker cartoons. I don’t know.
Go read his regular strip Pictures for Sad Children.
Then go read miscellaneous other strips posted on his journal.
At some point soon, when the second printing comes in, you can buy his book, too. In the meantime, I guess you can help support him by buying some totes depressing merch.
God save John Campbell.
“God Save…” is a feature highlighting things that are just too good for this shitty world, in the hopes that maybe if I ask nicely God will keep letting that slide.
Wrapped up in Books: Little Presents from the Internet
I’ve recently received three short books in the mail (after I ordered them and paid for them).
The Readies, Bob Brown – This book was originally printed in an edition of only 150 copies, and has been out of print ever since. Now, thanks to Rice University Press’s new print-on-demand model and the Literature by Design series, you can get a perfect bound facsimile edition for around twenty dollars. Or you can read it for free online, though in what seems to be a deliberately uninviting format. This is either the future of publishing or another sign of the death of the book. Actually I think those are both the same thing.
The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Kevin Davies – From my admittedly idiosyncratic perspective, Kevin Davies clearly declares his poetic lineage on page 4 of this book, when he abruptly ends a section of his poem with the phrase “So that,” followed by a colon. An inauspicious looking phrase on its own, but Poundians (I wrote a dissertation chapter on Pound and even published my one article out of it) will recognize it as the ending of canto 1 and the indisputable (I said indisputable, dammit!) high point of The Cantos. It might place this book squarely in the line of syncretic, pointillist verbal collage that stretches from Pound through Zukovsky and Olson to contemporary practitioners like Susan Howe or Mi Young Kim.
Except that Davies doesn’t actually end anything with the phrase “So that.” The page ends there, and a different poem appears on the next page, but the “so that” poem actually resumes two pages later with a line about zucchini. This is Davies’s primary innovation: his poems not only collide fragments of heterogeneous discourse, they actually collide with one another, interrupting each other from page to page and sometimes even on the same page. It’s a gimmicky-sounding device that produces surprisingly durable effects, as if the familiar disjunctive techniques of modernism had suddenly sprouted a third dimension, like a Miró painting that, when touched, actually turns out to be a Calder mobile.
With his allusions to MapQuest and scanning the Times, it’s tempting to describe Davies as a post-Flarf Pound, more interested in synchrony than in history, in discursive cacophony than in divine order. But there’s something of a baroque harmony in Davies’s polyphonic fugue—especially in the way the poems trail off one by one, finally leaving a lone voice to close things out—that seems too consonant, too faithful to the seriousness of poetry, to be anything other than resolutely modernist. This is, perhaps, the decadence of an already decadent style, the disjunctive tendencies of modernism involuting on themselves in a tail-swallowing act that can only be done once. But this time anyway, it definitely works.
Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin – Sort of like a Hemingway story for slacker hipsters with autism.
Most of you will think that sounds terrible but I actually really enjoyed this book. It did make me think that Tao Lin’s style must work better in short(er) forms, though, and I will probably read one of his collections of short stories or poetry later. It also made me think that it is very hard to read much Tao Lin without compulsively imitating him, at least a little. The “comments” at his “blog” seem to “bear this out.”
The Readies, Bob Brown – This book was originally printed in an edition of only 150 copies, and has been out of print ever since. Now, thanks to Rice University Press’s new print-on-demand model and the Literature by Design series, you can get a perfect bound facsimile edition for around twenty dollars. Or you can read it for free online, though in what seems to be a deliberately uninviting format. This is either the future of publishing or another sign of the death of the book. Actually I think those are both the same thing.
The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Kevin Davies – From my admittedly idiosyncratic perspective, Kevin Davies clearly declares his poetic lineage on page 4 of this book, when he abruptly ends a section of his poem with the phrase “So that,” followed by a colon. An inauspicious looking phrase on its own, but Poundians (I wrote a dissertation chapter on Pound and even published my one article out of it) will recognize it as the ending of canto 1 and the indisputable (I said indisputable, dammit!) high point of The Cantos. It might place this book squarely in the line of syncretic, pointillist verbal collage that stretches from Pound through Zukovsky and Olson to contemporary practitioners like Susan Howe or Mi Young Kim.
Except that Davies doesn’t actually end anything with the phrase “So that.” The page ends there, and a different poem appears on the next page, but the “so that” poem actually resumes two pages later with a line about zucchini. This is Davies’s primary innovation: his poems not only collide fragments of heterogeneous discourse, they actually collide with one another, interrupting each other from page to page and sometimes even on the same page. It’s a gimmicky-sounding device that produces surprisingly durable effects, as if the familiar disjunctive techniques of modernism had suddenly sprouted a third dimension, like a Miró painting that, when touched, actually turns out to be a Calder mobile.
With his allusions to MapQuest and scanning the Times, it’s tempting to describe Davies as a post-Flarf Pound, more interested in synchrony than in history, in discursive cacophony than in divine order. But there’s something of a baroque harmony in Davies’s polyphonic fugue—especially in the way the poems trail off one by one, finally leaving a lone voice to close things out—that seems too consonant, too faithful to the seriousness of poetry, to be anything other than resolutely modernist. This is, perhaps, the decadence of an already decadent style, the disjunctive tendencies of modernism involuting on themselves in a tail-swallowing act that can only be done once. But this time anyway, it definitely works.
Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin – Sort of like a Hemingway story for slacker hipsters with autism.
Most of you will think that sounds terrible but I actually really enjoyed this book. It did make me think that Tao Lin’s style must work better in short(er) forms, though, and I will probably read one of his collections of short stories or poetry later. It also made me think that it is very hard to read much Tao Lin without compulsively imitating him, at least a little. The “comments” at his “blog” seem to “bear this out.”
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