For The Birds

Le Frisson des Vampires

2011-03-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

AKA the Shiver of the Vampires
d. Jean Rollin
1971

By 1971, French director Jean Rollin already had two films, Le viol du vampire (Rape of the Vampire) and La vampire nue (The Nude Vampire), under his belt. What's more, he had established a singular cinematic vision distinctly his own. One could draw connections perhaps to the serials of silent film director Louis Feuillade as well as more obtuse efforts by sexploitation directors such as Jess Franco and also the bande dessinee comic serials being produced in the Franco-Belgian market of the period, but Rollin's mixture of sex and surreal somnambulism stands apart. It is this very apartness that defines his work. True, these earliest of Rollin features are very much of their time, in a way unlike anything else in his oeuvre. The vampires hippies and psych rock scores date these first few films, or at least give them a retro flavor, but these psychedelic garnishes simply ornament a more profoundly ineffable center, one that is not beholden to linearity. These are films displaced in time, or perhaps it would be better to say that the time period they occupy is an amorphous one - call it memory. And as the time between their production, the late-sixties, and their present viewing increases, the otherness of these trappings only deepen the greater otherness at play. Kitsch is displaced as the camp bypasses nostalgia to stress another transcendence. Perhaps something inward.

These early films, floridly literate and tethered to Surrealism, are in direct opposition to the French New Wave which was then in vogue. Jean Rollin is a resolutely individual director, but he is not an auteur in the sense the French New Wave privileged. He is something else. And we must move towards what that something else is. It is easier to identify what Rollin's films are not. Rollin's work is just as out of step with traditional horror fare, with his preference for elliptical plotting and dreamlike pace, as they are with the art film. Is Alain Robbe-Grillet a possible analogy? Is Walerian Borowczyk? Maybe? Not quite? Where do these movies belong, then? Who is the intended viewer?

Rollin's third picture, Le frisson des vampires, known internationally as both Sex and the Vampire and the Shiver of the Vampires, continues to mine a twilight terrain between commercial exploitation and a profoundly personal cosmology. The film further stabilizes the tropes and tendencies first seen in Le viol du vampire, a movie Rollin has stated stands as a blueprint for his entire career. We return again to a place we never left. The hallmarks of Rollin's hermetic vision are present - Le frisson des vampires is replete with orphan girls and entourages of vampire hippies. Everything is illuminated in a garish, artificial lighting. It all ends, as is often the case with Rollin, on a deserted beach. The melange of late-sixties kitsch framing these images, as well as the uncharacteristically developed plot, fosters an accessibility uncommon in his oeuvre. But where does this supposed accessibility take us?

Is Le frisson des vampires a good introduction to the director's films? That's a difficult question, but perhaps the difficulty doesn't lie in the prospect of an answer, but in the question itself. Rollin's films work best as an accumulative whole. Viewed in totality, they compose a dream narrative of modular points. The viewer does not move in a linear fashion from point A to point B to point C, but from point A to an alternate point A to yet another possible point A. Sychronicities fall into place as if by accident, as inevitable as they very well may be. Is it even possible to truly first encounter a Jean Rollin film, or can the viewer only return to them again and again? The pleasure derived from his films grow as the viewer is further acquainted with the larger body of work and with Rollin's sense of le fantastique. A viewer divorced from a sense of the whole may become bored or disoriented, put off by stilted acting and an often dehabilitating low budget. A horror fan may get annoyed by the lack of gore. Another viewer, one accustomed to art cinema, may be dismayed by how the camera follows nude bodies with the same lingering gaze of pornography. Is this pornography?

The problem is that Le frisson des vampires possesses the signifiers of exploitation; it uses language developed by exploitation cinema to define itself, but employs this vocabulary towards a more personal vision. An exploitation director like Jess Franco falls more securely within the parameters of what the French New Wave classified as an auteur than Rollin, who I would argue does not. Perhaps this is because each of Rollins' films are on some level about their self-referentiality, the film's inevitable return to itself, while a Franco film simply returns to familiar tropes and themes on account of their director's personality and force of will. Jean Rollin's films compose a personal cinema rarely, if ever, seen outside of the arena of the art film. And such intensity of personal vision is uncommon even there. Is impractical, even there. But Rollin does not rely on the language which has been codified as acceptable for art cinema. And while this may be in some respect intentional, it is also circumstantial. An early film project of Rollin's was to involve French novelist Marguerite Duras, but was never completed as finances petered out. A collaboration with a recognized writer of the avant garde such as Duras, especially so early in his career, could have shifted any subsequent appraisal of Rollin towards a different demographic, towards what some would call a respectable canon. Instead, Rollin had to rely on the horror industry to produce his films. This perhaps worked in the favor of Rollin's pictures. Early shorts like Les amours jaunes, inspired by the poetry of Tristan Corbiere, are guilty of perhaps too earnest a literary pretension. The harsh realities which accompany such a profit-based industry as exploitation forced compromises of content and limited shooting schedules that, while they may have been pragmatically difficult to deal with, resulted in films of an unheralded dislocation and sense of the uncanny.

To a viewer familiar with the more severe minimalism of Rollin's later work, Le frisson des vampires may even seem over-stuffed. The plot may be simple; it involves three vampires' seduction of a young bride and her lover's attempt to halt the subsequent demonic transformation, but for Rollin such an involved plot approaches the baroque. The sheer amount of dialogue may surprise someone who has also seen the later Requiem pour un vampire, in which 40 minutes elapse before the first dialogue is even spoken. The resultant film is uncharacteristically extroverted, with an almost parodic playfulness and buoyancy. It occupies the space we expect a horror film to inhabit, but refuses to comply with expectations. The scaffolding which is the plot allows Rollin's moments of persistent image their incongruence and brilliance. When the female vampire played by Dominique descends from a chimney or creeps out from a grandfather clock, we are moved because these events are not addressed by the banalities of plot. The images exist as they are. The film is constructed like a carnival ride through a haunted house - the plot provides the tracks which the viewer moves along so that images may reveal themselves in succession. But the tracks exist on account of these image events. A successful viewing of the picture does not demand an explanation for what occurs. In fact, a better method of watching would be to actively divorce the images from the plot, to digest them within the context of how they relate to Rollin and his oeuvre, instead of how they relate to the plot or the confines of the film itself.

During a recent viewing of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, I was struck by just how thoroughly it subverts the tropes of the horror film. Von Trier interrogates the conventional usages of these tropes, and then reorients them towards another purpose, perhaps towards a reflection of their purpose. Jean Rollin's films, like von Trier's Antichrist, exist at a distance, or disconnect, from the greater contingency we can call genre horror or the horror industry. But Rollin exists at a different position in relation to horror than von Trier. Rollin is not a provocateur and while he is a consummately literate and intelligent director, he is not an intellectual director. Von Trier may be a ideologically anti-intellectual director, but only within the confines of his own particular intellectualism. The Danish director subverts the horror genre for other ends - Antichrist is the image of a horror film, rather than a horror film itself. Von Trier's Antichrist uses the horror film to approach the other, while the otherness of Rollin's films is their very dedication to the self.

Who is the ideal viewer of Jean Rollin's films? Perhaps it is Jean Rollin, or the image of Jean Rollin which the films present to the viewer - the Jean Rollin the viewer is willing to occupy.

Love and Rockets # 4

2011-02-11T16:51:00.000-08:00

Everybody loves bridges. They get you from here to there. Bridges are also beautiful things in and of themselves - to say nothing of the perspective gained while standing on one. New perspectives on old buildings.

I love bridge comics. I guess another word for them would be ground-level, though no one uses that term anymore. Ground-level comics were a middle-ground, or is that a bridge, between the underground comix sold in head shops and the monthlies on the rack at the drugstore. Star*Reach, an anthology edited by Mike Friedrich, is a prime example of these ground-level books. Here you could find work by Howard Chaykin, Michael T. Gilbert and Dean Motter, all under the same title. A lot these guys, like Chaykin, did freelance for the big companies, while some, like Dick Giordano, would work as editors at those same big companies. The early Heavy Metal, back when it was still owned by National Lampoon, and Epic, Marvel Comic's answer to Heavy Metal, can be seen as two other examples of bridge comics. These comics pushed formal boundaries of the medium, while still staying within the trappings of genre.

But format often follows content, or maybe it's more complicated than one leading to the other. Bridge comics were often published as magazines rather than the smaller periodicals. This was to some extent tied into the restrictions of the then-mighty Comics Code Authority, which could not regulate magazines as it could standard issue comics. 'Love and Rockets' began as a magazine, sparking connections in my mind to the above-mentioned anthologies, to the Warren books, to RAW and Weirdo, and to the European Bande Dessinee albums.

'Love and Rockets' is a bridge comic. Or, 'Love and Rockets' was a bridge comic in the eighties, along with 'Cerebus' and 'ElfQuest.' But the work of the Los Bros. Hernandez has since become something else - I won't say something more, but something different. People don't compare it with 'American Flagg!' or 'Church & State' much anymore. But is that really a good thing? 'Love and Rockets' has found a shelf-life as a series of graphic novels, and like Neil Gaiman's 'the Sandman,' it has shifted its identity from a periodical series that has been collected to a series of collections that were once published periodically. These are the realities of the comics market, which is thriving, but in a manner unpredicted by those who used to swear 'Comics aren't just for kids anymore.' While the majority of 'Love and Rocket's individual issues were printed as standard comics, the first handful were published by Fantagraphics as beautiful, magazine-sized volumes.

In 1983's Love and Rocket's # 4, we get an exciting melange of early work by Los Bros. Hernandez. The book is bookended by installments of 'Locas' and 'Palomar' by Jaime and Gilbert respectively. Jaime's rapid development is incredible, as the Milton Caniff and Alex Toth affections are streamlined into a style distinctly Jaime's. Look at the party scene from '100 Rooms.' We can spot female wrestlers, cartoonish dictators and even a women sporting a jumpsuit out of Kirby's Fourth World!

Gilbert's page composition in 'Heartbreak Soup' is looser than his brother's. While Jaime often relies on tight variations of the nine-panel grid, Gilbert's pages sport fewer, wider panels. His composition also finds more room for the truly strange. Sometimes we'll only see the top of a character's head, or the head might even be cut off. Everything is rounded and I'm at a loss to find a comprehensive antecedent - maybe because there isn't one. I am reminded of Jacques Tardi, but with a far greater sense for naturalism. Maybe Jose Munoz as well? There is an architectural eeriness to Gilbert's artwork that approaches the surreal, despite the often earthy content of his stories. Gilbert's shadows are round blotches thrown against walls and dirt yards. Jaime is more likely to use tight shadows defined by their architecture - narrow windows or dark doorways. It's such a lovely aesthetic contrast that it's hard not to believe it's intentional on the part of the brothers. It's also one of the strong arguments for doing the legwork and tracking down these original issues - the reader can experience the interplay of the brothers' work against each other, rather than segregated into separate tomes.

Above is a scan of Gilbert's short story, 'Twitch City.' It is a jarring followup up to '100 Rooms,' which directly precedes it. The Locas epic closes with the skyline of a Latin American ghetto, complete with ragged antenna shooting from the roofs of block buildings. 'Twitch City' opens with a splash page clotted with futuristic skyscrapers all jagged light and shadow. It's a breathtaking transition - the sort that anthologies excel at.

From one city to another.

Gary Groth writes on the inside front cover that "Twitch City" follows in the tradition [Gilbert] began with "Radio Zero" in L & R #2, succinct but devastating commentary on the present hidden masterfully in a tale of the future." That reading strikes me as dishonest. Groth, especially in the early 80s, was prone to ham-fisted and bellicose editorializing. His attempt to position 'Twitch City' as a social parable smacks of an urge towards relevancy.

The Over-Boys, the neighborhood practice of going 'thermo,' president (Brooke) Shields, these are all hilarious red herrings masquerading as world-building detail. We get near-death visions of Frida Kahlo, bio-regenerative booster shots and teenage Nazi parties. What does it add up to? It all builds to a crushing malaise. to a dead time of emotion. Emico, our seventeen year-old protagonist complains "It's all getting so old... all that shit people do for kicks nowadays... it's getting worse, of course... that is, more boring than ever..." And the story ends with Emico having sex with the man-child she earlier saved from the Over-Boys, holding a bowl of cottage cheese and trying. "When I joined the force two years ago, somehow," she thinks, " I thought it would be different..." The final image is loaded, with a number of potential centers. My eye is drawn to the tears trailing down Emico's cheek, as well as the bowl of cottage cheese she awkwardly cups in her hand. But then we see Ito's hand in the lower left corner of the panel, flat on her stomach. It vitalizes everything that came before in the story - the estrangement, the boredom and the dread.

One of the delights of handling back issues is reading the letter pages. I wasn't even born until 1984, so the best way to get some sort of context for this work is via the correspondences and ephemera at the edges of the comics themselves. There are letters from both Scott Hampton, a talented artist with a Franzetta-influenced style who did some excellent work with writer Bruce Jones at Pacific Comics, and Bhob Stewart, who occasionally contributed articles to Heavy Metal in the early 80s when Lou Stathis used to provide (unpopular) music and arts coverage for the magazine. I was especially amused to find a letter from artist Steve Leialoha. Leialoha is an occasionally brilliant artist whose collaboration with Elaine Lee, 'Steeltown Rockers,' is a favorite of mine. 'Steeltown Rockers' is a charming teen comic sometimes reminding me of Archie, and sometimes reminding me of 'Love and Rockets' itself. I always thought the Leialoha of the mini-series was under the spell of Jaime's Locas work. I was glad to see that hunch somewhat substantiated.

Here is the cover to an issue of 'Steeltown Rockers.'

The letter pages on the whole speak more of Gary Groth and the mentality of Fantagraphics in the early 80s than it does of either Los Bros. Hernandez or 'Love and Rockets' itself. His responses are often curt and defensive. At one point he quips, "...things could be worse. We could hire Deni Sim to write our editorials for us." But then, Groth comes off every bit as insouciant as Dave Sim. And I get just as much of a kick out of reading vintage Groth editorials as do Dave Sims'. Groth explains Fantagraphics' "...editorial/ explanatory overkill may be a result of our perception of the direct-sales market as controlled by the four-color comics sheep and of 'Love and Rockets' as bucking this trend." Any early issue of the Comics Journal or Amazing Heroes is littered with such harsh soapbox-ranting about the 'sheep' who dare to enjoy their four-color funnies. But Groth does pinpoint one of the chief causes of such anxiety - the direct market. I could be wrong, but I'm assuming 'Love and Rockets' wasn't sold in the head shops that used to stock 'Dope Comix' or 'Bizarre Sex.' Instead, 'Love and Rockets' could only be found at the direct sales comic store, shelved next to Marvel's direct market titles like Micronauts or Moon Knight. It wouldn't be until the mainstream exposure and acceptance of cartoonists such as Daniel Clowes, Seth and especially Chris Ware that 'Love and Rockets' could be seen in a comfortable context. I can imagine a comic store owner being bewildered how to sell the book when the majority of customers can in on Wednesday looking for the latest issue of Dazzler. He should have just sold them both.

Talking

2011-02-04T15:46:00.000-08:00

by David Antin
Introduction by Marjorie Perloff

Poetry is parsed incrementally. We come to sense via the unit - how it is delineated, how it is twisted, how it harkens back to itself and its parts. This is the holographic sense of poetry, where each unit refracts and reflects the whole. Poetry then becomes a mechanism for referring to its own parts in a cogent and expansive fashion. The poem is a machine that manifests itself; it becomes a worker demon. David Antin's poetry constantly loops back upon itself in a series of games - his poetry is one at play. This play takes Antin's work to esoteric arenas most poetry shies away from. His talk poems just don't look like poems, but then, what are poems supposed to look like? Still, David Antin's talk poems are poems. They just don't look like what some people expect, that is demand, poems to look like. "Talking," his landmark 1972 book opens with the question, "If someone came up and started talking a poem at you how would you know it was a poem?" You would know because it's a poem. But Antin helps the reader along. Antin is known for his talk poems, but it would be more beneficial if we identify him and his work as Wittgensteinian. By looking at Antin within those perimeters, "Talking" becomes a bridge from the early work, such as "Meditations" and the mature talk poems. We then find that a bridge isn't necessary, as both facets of Antin's work form an integrated whole. There is a profound Wittgensteinian sense to all of the work, but the manner in which it manifests allows an entry-point. We find fractal units which accrue significance through repetition. The poem becomes an event.

When a poet privileges incident and occurrence to the degree David Antin does, the book, the published object, is also brought into focus. The book becomes an occurrence. The dimensions of the Dalkey Archive edition are wider than your average book, it feels like a musical score or a collected folio or facsimile sheet. The book is large and unwieldy in your hands - it's difficult to forget you're holding a book, and that vitalizes the reading experience. "Talking" only takes a single sitting to read. This brevity only accentuates the small dramas of the book. The first three pieces in "Talking" are "the november exercises," "in place of a lecture: 3 musics for 2 voices," and "the london march." All three can also be found in their entirety in Sun & Moon's collection of Antin's early writing. To reencounter them in the Dalkey edition of "Talking" is to discover new poems using the old words. The wider page dimensions suggest the words as notation, each phrase becomes a musical site. This is a score - recognize the themes repeating, enriching themselves and each other through that selfsame repetition. Marjorie Perloff, in her introduction to "Talking," points us to a revealing passage in "Culture and Value" where Wittgenstein states, "Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles." Compare this to science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany's similar idea of the text as a hologram seen in such short fiction as 'High Weir' - what a Wittgensteinian notion!

Both "in place of a lecture" and "the london march" pivot on the interplay of voices. The rolling of voice throughout "in place of a lecture" allows for comedy in its collisions. How does power relate to voice? Is hierarchy inevitable? The piece revolves around a dry scientific experiment investigating a farmer's claim that a whalebone "..was an extremely powerful instrument capable of detecting the existence of even small quantities of water." The scientific text is dry and authoritative. It is read by David Antin's wife, the filmmaker and performance artist Eleanor Antin. The authority of this voice is supplanted by David Antin himself and his wife as they respond to a recording of the above-described text. The interjections are mischievous, as Antin tends to be. There is a disregard for decorum and a stubborn iconoclasm. Both David Antin and his wife react to the first voice, but let us not forget that David Antin's voice is the first interruption - he is the one who asks "What was the farmer's name?" and initiates this interrogation. It is Antin the author who orchestrates the entire affair, not his wife. He is the author of "in place of a lecture" because of his authority over the text, not necessarily because he generated it. The scientific text was in all likelihood found by Antin. It is the very fact that he sabotages and deconstructs this text that we acknowledge him as the author of it. Antin attacks the lazy assumptions of the source voice, introducing indeterminacy and doubt through detail - what is the farmer's name, what is he wearing, how old is the doctor who supervises the experiment?

Specificity leads to complexity, and complexity invites ambiguity. He activates the piece. The scientific voice intones that "the statistical test indicates only the probability of a particular set of results upon the basis of the statistical hypothesis tested, namely that chance alone is determining the outcome." Antin makes the proceedings that much stickier. Generalizations must come from specificities. Antin's interrogative voice supplants the scientific voice as the guiding narrative. The story of "in place of a lecture" is not that of a farmer tested for clairvoyance, but of narrative being upturned, or perhaps the correct word would be sidelined. The interruption of narrative becomes the story of the piece.

If "in place of a lecture" is a farce, "the london march" is a comedy fighting against tragedy. David Antin interrupts his wife's humming with the question, or invitation, "ready to play?" Eleanor responds, "what shall we play for?" This is the central question, of course, of "Talking." Why, it's a central question of Antin's poetry. The stakes, ultimately, are not "...to play for a great crowd tomorrow? in London?" at an anti-war rally, or to play for "...natasha to be married so that charlie doesn't have to pay her alimony." Playing solitaire cannot directly effect events on either side of the spectrum - the political or the personal. No, the question is to determine what the playing is for. The interrogative act creates power, the power to recognize and cognate. "What are we playing for," is the question that allows Antin to supplant the scientific voice throughout "in place of a lecture," it's the question at the heart of "talking at pomona." The irony is that "the london march" is also about inefficiency and the lack of power, just as the poem is in some ways an empowering act. The piece is a transcription of the conversation Eleanor and David have while Eleanor "plays" solitaire for various stakes - how many people will turn up at the anti-war protest of the title. The piece isn't even the solitaire game in question, but only the shadows of the act - not even the recordings, but transcriptions of faded voice.

And the truth of the matter is that a solitaire game doesn't resolve anything other than a solitaire game. And the truth of the matter is that an anti-war march is not going to end the Vietnam War. Eleanor and David Antin's anxiety at their inability to move the center of history is a universal anxiety. Even if a center can be found, no single person could be found to move it. What Eleanor and David are playing for is some recognition of the thing. This is done by talking around a dilemma, as Antin does in regard to "the question of art" in "Talking at Pomona." A game of solitaire consists of the same repetitive act of accumulation, as each successive act redefines the limits of the whole. The intrusion of personal reminiscence into a piece ostentatiously "about" the war does the same thing the Antins' questions about details does in "in place of a lecture."

Interjections bring about a necessary wholeness. Antin's approach in "Talking at Pomona" is more elliptical than in the previously discussed poems. His very first statement is evasive - "what i would like to talk about/really/ is a subject that probably doesn't have a name...how you think about making art... how can you talk about it such a way/ that/ it will lead to making more art." And while Antin is directly engaging subject, he does so through expansive rumination. He talks about art, he talks about sculpture and what he doesn't want to say or address about sculpture, but what is Antin really saying? He dwells on a piece by performance artist Doug Huebler where the artist "...proposes that you apprehend a criminal and he offers the closed system/ if the work is bought/ if the criminal is apprehended the buyer pays for the apprehension..." How does this scenario, that of a performance artist in the 1970s, relate to anything previously discussed. Antin also describes how "...dennis oppenheim did a piece of work in which he managed to get some things harvested in a field...he arranged the field in such a manner as to correspond to the route between there and the place he was shipping the/ grain to..." Antin's response to the Oppenheim is polite, but nonplussed. It doesn't carry the same frisson as the Huebler piece.

Why does Antin praise the Huebler and criticize the Oppenheim? The Huebler performance piece "...verges on obscenity and triviality and/ the huebler is a very violent piece...," intimating that the Oppenheim isn't as violent, and therefore isn't as interesting. The Huebler piece is about pornography in art, about "...art as it [is] opportunizing over social/ human activities/ now it seems one of the problems here that's raised is the kind of conflict that exists between human value and the idea of art making itself as a career." AH! Now we're getting somewhere! More intrusions! The question isn't of art about art, but the dilemma of the intrusion of life into art and art into life. It is this collision that brings the absurdity and obscenity to the Huebler. This dilemma of intrusion is what makes Antin's poetry so exciting.

Consider the cover of "Talking," designed by David Antin. A series of photographs taken by the poet wrap around the book. In each photo, we see newspaper dispensers outside of storefronts. "Talking" was written during wartime, as made explicit in "the london march." The book is also written in the wake of the Antins' relocation from New York City to a sleepy California town outside San Diego where the only way you could tell a war was going on "...was by walking down the hill to check out the headlines in the newspaper dispenser in front of the post office or the local market."

The comedy of the world's upheavals as it tiptoes into our lives

Trouble on Triton

2011-01-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

by Samuel R. Delany

With a new foreword by Kathy Acker

Desire doesn't follow compatibility, and no, the reverse isn't true either. But the two do collide, even in their respective deficiencies, and that is where difficulty arises. In his 1984 novel, 'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,' Samuel R. Delany writes about the collision of two men, one an illiterate worker with state-administered brain damage, the other an intellectual and cosmopolitan, a diplomat by trade - they are each other's perfect erotic objects to "point nine-nine-nine and several nine percent." This engenders consequence, not just for themselves or their immediate acquaintances, but for all of the galactic empire they live within. Such an alignment is a rare and perplexing thing, as desire usually runs afoul of the tenacity and conditions of reality. Delany's novel is very much a romance of the text. Yes, the reader is the one seduced. The romance of 'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,' of the book itself, ends abruptly and painfully, as romances sometimes do. The book was intended as a diptych, but its second half, 'The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, Of Cities,' was never to be. The relationship of which the diptych was a love letter to ended before the second half could be completed, and the gay NYC community which the book celebrated was also ending with the onset in the eighties of the AIDS epidemic. The conclusion of the diptych remains unpublished; it remains unwritten.

The first half is one of my favorite novels, my memory of it is a romance - one that never quite got off its feet and is all the more treasured because of that. The work of Samuel R Delany is, in a ways, the perfect literary match for me. I've always had difficulties synchronizing my interests - how do I reconcile my passion for reading and writing poetry, with my love of comic books, my affection with european sex and horror films, and my obsession with industrial and experimental music. How does it all fit together? Is it supposed to? Delany is a peculiar writer - his idiosyncrasies are his own. Delany is a difficult writer because of the bizarre nexus of his disparate predilections and tendencies. His contemporary, J.G. Ballard, also wears his obsessions on his sleeve, but Ballard was always good at giving them a sexy sheen. Either Ballard was such a keen observer of our word that he was able to first notice some recurrent cultural trend and subsequently have it dubbed 'Ballardian,' or by some force of will Ballard has been able to manifest his eccentricities into the flesh. And Ballard is an artist's writer. Delany is a writer's writer, or to make things even more knotty, he is a poet's novelist. Not an easy thing to be. I wonder if any one ever asked Kathy Acker, who wrote the introduction to the Wesleyan edition to 'Trouble on Triton' just what she thought of that. Reading Delany is the only time I can expect Fritz Leiber, Joanna Russ, Ron Silliman, Robin Blaser, Dick Giordano and Howard Chaykin to all signify.

And that means something to.

Claire E. Evans, at her exceptional blog, Urban Honking, ( http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/ ), puts Delany in his proper perspective. She writes "it’s kind of a Catch-22: to understand Delany, you have to be at least somewhat fannish, willing to let down your guard and accept that genre-specific content isn’t a sign of weakness. At the same time, you can’t be so committed to the genre that you would sell someone like Delany down the river for getting liberal with the rules." But, that's why I love Delany. That is why I love 'Trouble on Triton.' I have never encountered an author who manages to cogently articulate so many of obsessions and interests as Delany is, whether through his early pure SF period, his later more academically-oriented writing, or novels like 'Trouble on Triton' and 'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.'

'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,' 2004 Wesleyan Edition.

The protagonist of 'Trouble on Triton' is the unlikable Bron Helstrom, a former Martian prostitute who is now living on the small moon of Triton as a metalogicist. He resides in a co-op for males of unspecified sexual orientation, a place which in his society is often the dumping ground for people who don't fit in anywhere else. His neighbor is the elderly Lawrence. Lawrence is one of the few people who can stand Bron, let alone consider him a friend. He exlains to Bron that his alienation is because Bron is "...a logical pervert, looking for a woman with a mutually compatible logical perversion. The fact is, the mutual perversion you are looking for is very, very rare - if not nonexistent. [Bron is] looking for someone who can enjoy a certain sort of logical masochism." I've encountered some negative criticism of the novel which takes issue with Bron's unsavory character. But as Delany explained during a lecture on the book, some novels require you to identify with the protagonist, other novels invite you to approach them as a case study. Bron isn't a heroic figure, but neither is he a villain. He possesses the ambiguities of character which mark us all. But yes, he is selfish. And yes, he is a bit of a prig. Delany shows us that this isn't just a personal problem, but a cultural, or perhaps the right word is political, problem.

Bron comes from Mars. Mars is a world, which owing to its size and perhaps its date of colonization, is much more conservative and uptight than the more libertine and permissive satellites. Owing to their further distance from our point of origin, Earth, it is safe to assume their colonization comes at a much later date. In fact, Bron is shocked by the age of everything during his short trip to Earth. He passes "...buildings that might have been eighty, a hundred eighty, or eight hundred years old... [while] the oldest extant structure in Bellona was a hundred and ten years old; in Tethys, no more than seventy-five..." Bron comes from a relatively new world, Mars, but he comes from one still tethered to history and to an accumulated social convention. The satellites, owing to their recent inception, their lack of space and their distance from the mother hub of Earth, have fostered the privilege of subjective reality. it is because of this schism that Bron is unable to escape his neuroses on Triton. This is why the Outer Satellites are engaged in a protracted cold war with the Worlds.

Ursula Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed, An Ambiguous Utopia.'

The novel is subtitled "An Ambiguous Heterotopia," in deference to Ursula Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed,' Le Guin's novel is subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia." Delany read Le Guin in the course of his revisions and added the subtitle to encourage a discourse between the two books. So what is he trying to say about utopias, or heterotopias as it is? Delany quotes Foucault, who says utopias "...afford consolation; although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the roads to them is chimerical." But Delany sees utopias as limiting lens for a novel of ideas. A utopian novel, though founded upon some chimera, resolve matters into this and that. The novel's imaginary science of metalogics has two goals, "...one) the delimitation of the problem and, two) an exploration of the interpenetration among the problem elements in significance space." Metalogics is founded upon the permeability of ideas. Bron explains "Language is parametal, not perimetal. Areas of significance space intermesh and fade into one another like color-clouds in a three-dimensional spectrum. They don't fit together like hard-edged bricks in a box." Utopias are built of just such hard-edged bricks. "What makes 'logical' bounding so risky is that the assertion by the formal logician that a boundary can be placed around an area of significance space gives you, in such a cloudy situation, no way to say where to set the boundary, how to set it, or if, once set, it will turn out in the least useful." Bron may have made a career parsing significance as parametal, not perimetal, but his cultural upbringing comes from a place, Mars, which positions itself into just such 'utopian' strictures. Bron's world view is constructed out of some pretty hard-edged bricks.

The Outer Satellites are not a utopia, but a heterotopia. These can be seen as disturbing, threatening even, "... because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and opposite one another) to 'hold together." But a heterotopia is also simply a technical word for a sex change. Bron undergoes just such a procedure in the closing chapter of the novel. She believes this operation will be an elementally transformative one, but Bron remains Bron. Other than the obvious physical ones, the most conclusive changes are the shifts in character which Bron initiates. Bron changes in these small ways, such as in her word productivity, because that is how Bron thinks a woman should behave. The values Bron assigns gender are fixed, even if Bron's gender may fluctuate.

The original 1976 Bantam edition, simply titled 'Triton.'

Bron's conflicted desire for the Spike, a brilliant director of micro-theaters, spurns on many of his decisions throughout the novel. The micro-theater performance she leads him into, and their brief sexual exchange a day afterward, offers Bron an opportunity to step outside his fixed reality. The Outer Satellites encourage their citizens to foster subjective realities, but Bron's fabrication is ultimately dehabilitating because he insists upon its immobility. He returns to his fixture, and in turn alienates the Spike, just like he does everyone else. He tells her, upon their first encounter that "...to meet a new person here in Tethys is always like entering a new city?' He said that before." Bron forgoes the vitality of the new for a simulation of novelty.

Delany visualizes 'Trouble on Triton' as a sort of SF prologue to his 'Return to Neveryon' Tetralogy. Both works engage the concept of a Modular Calculus, Delany's conceit of a logical system by which, essentially, any problem can be solved. Let us look at the book's publishing history for some context here. 'Trouble on Triton' follows close on the heels of 'Dhalgren,' perhaps the greatest success of Delany's career, both commercially and critically. The sheer ambition of the work of this period, 'Trouble on Triton,' 'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,' and the Neveryon books, provide us with some of the most stunning work done in the SF and Fantasy modes. But the promise of these brilliant novels was cut short due to circumstances. Bantam, Delany's publisher, refused to publish the last of the Neveryon books, and prompted a withdrawal on Delany's part into academia. Delany has never turned his back on SF, but these novels are the last time he worked within the boundaries of the industry. Delany came into SF as a prodigy - a dangerous entry if there is one.

An omnibus pairing 'Trouble on Triton' with Joanna Russ' 'The Female Man,' which was also selected by writer and editor Frederick Pohl for the Bantam SF series, along with Suzy McKee Charnas' 'Walk to the End of the World.'

SF grandmaster, Isaac Asimov, in an introduction to the Hugo Award-winning short story, 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,' provides an excellent summation of Delany's liminality. Asimov, while granting the brilliance of Delany's writing, can't seem to shake a certain distress. Delany, as anyone who has read his excellent essays would know, is a voracious polymath. This is in direct opposition to the more codified convention of SF. The Science Fiction industry is a room, it is the enclosed area of the convention space - there are no windows. Mind you, I am speaking of industry here, not genre. Asimov writes that "...for years, we science fiction writers; we warm band of brothers and sisters; have entered this field as our specialty. It was 'our thing,' it was what we did. Often, if we were driven enough, we graduated to broader fields, but even then (as in my own case) we had lingered long enough to know that science fiction was our home, our only true literary home." But Delany, of course, best fits in with Delany.

Though he was not a member of the social circle constituting the New Wave of Science Fiction, Delany could be said to share many of their tendencies. And Asimov, as the old guard grandmaster, if a generous and diplomatic one, has his careful reservations about this new wave. Asimov, as astute as ever, writes "...the day has come when writers, without necessarily feeling a tight identification with the field, choose to write science fiction because of the liberty it gives them; the opportunity to speculate and experiment beyond anything possible in any other genre." Why, that sounds like Delany, who has often stated that SF is "... richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmatic organization. [He] feels it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic."

Delany never abandoned that richness of genre, nor has he ever wished to, at least not like his peer Philip K. Dick apparently desired to 'get outside of the ghetto' with his mainstream novels like 'Confessions of a Crap Artist.' Samuel R. Delany's work remains SF, whether or not it retains genre signifiers, much as is the case with JG Ballard, or in the fashion that the writing of Jean Baudrillard can be called science fiction. Asimov wonders if writers like Delany "think of themselves as a science fiction writer. Is this their home - or just another hotel room?... he reached the top so easily that he may have had no sensation of passing through." Delany never abandoned science fiction, but perhaps the SF industry abandoned him.

Selected Poems: 1963-1973

2011-01-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

by David Antin

Not thought, but thinking.

We spend so much time grappling with thought itself that we often shortchange the process of thinking. An impenetrability congeals somewhere in that interzone between the noun and verb. Thought becomes a hardened pit of matter - an indigestible irritant that potentially stands in the way of fluent thinking. We become tangled in the physicality. Poet David Antin's career walks towards the boundaries of thought as he privileges the act of thinking. He breaks up the ice and facilitates the splendor of motion. Action. Antin is best known for his talk-poems, an engagement with performance-poetry that spans the majority of his career. These performances are suffused with charismatic arrogance, easy erudition and musicality as Antin talks his way around any variety of subjects. His art is one of approaching a subject. The emphasis of these performances are on poetry as event, rather than the physical sanctity of the book. Occurrence. While a great many of these talk-poems have been subsequently transcribed, the book remains a thing apart in Antin's career- the performance retains its time and site specificity. Some of his talk-poems have indeed been published in books like 'talking at the boundaries' and 'tuning,' but a great majority of them have not. Sun & Moon's collection, 'Selected Poems: 1963-1973,' is a surprising pleasure as the early books aren't so much alternate routes as preliminary soundings towards the later work. That they are books remain a primary distinction.

Antin tells us he "...doesn't usually reread [his] past work once it's published...," probably for much the same reason he moved away from poetry readings towards poetry talking. If poetry readings remind him too much of returning to the scene of the crime, then what of the book? And what is the poem? A murder? A body? Or the murder weapon? In this early work Antin attacks the book as the site of occurrence. We see a clear conflict between process and thingness in these first couple books. Antin offers that "books have a very definitive appearance. My books anyway. Because I tried to make them that way. And i spite of the fact that there is a sense in which the work of poetry is an ongoing process, a book is a self sufficient object, obdurate even, as it gives decisive shape through selection and ordering to a cluster of attitudes and ideas, enclosing them in a definite space and time." The later performances create a more specific space and time, while these early works allow a modular space and time configuration. The collection ends with the majority of 1972's 'Talking,' providing an organic bridge between the early and the mature work.

But let us start at the beginning. At the very least let us start at the beginning of this collection. So many of these poems are about beginning - the very start of the process and how even that moment is an ambiguous, or is it arbitrary, one. Antin writes "this is probably the beginning/ don't you think it was the right place to begin?/ well what would have been a better time?/ if you can tell when it's about to begin how can it be the beginning?" The poem is encircling questions of perception and of boundaries. Beginning is something we do, and someplace we are. As Antin's later poetry 'talks' the space, this early poetry writes the space in comparable fashion. Distinctions blur as we fail to conclusively grid the question.

In 'Code of Flag Behavior' Antin sheds the vestiges of the image-centric lyricism he explored alongside peers such as Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly. The earlier image-poems were, at Antin's own admission, "...more decorative than meaningful and incapable of addressing the kinds to things that were coming insistently to [his] mind then." These things coming to his mind were language and politics - not necessarily two separate subjects, but a braided reality Antin wanted to directly engage, not through the writing, but through the act of writing. But the act of his writing pushes Antin out to the poetic boundaries. Science and technical writing is utilized, as is a warm vernacular, a speaking grammar, untouched by most literary writing. An acrobatic pragmatism is always at play, as Antin works through words in a thrilling praxis.

David Antin once said that if Robert Frost was a poet, he didn't want anything to do with poetry, but if Socrates was a poet, and if Wittgenstein was a poet, then we would consider it. By calling Socarates and Wittgenstein poets, we safely move poetry away from the static thingness earlier mentioned in regard to 'thought.' Poetry is an action, not a codified litany of verse and meter, it is how we think, not what someone thinks it has to be. Antin's writing moves away from stasis and ornament and towards motion and investigative thinking - "a few facts are better than much rhetoric." Writing becomes a conversation of means. He writes, "...they brought their problems to him and he always decided both sides were exactly half right." We are now in the terrain of process as revelation, perhaps more appropriately a constant revealing, as "... the main thing was to make them a ritual." That it is ritual acknowledges process, but there is something more at play - ritual predisposes a certain formality.

A scientific praxis, as noted above, becomes apparent. Antin collapses the perceived divide between scientific thinking and poetic, that is artistic, thinking. Scientific terminology and found detritus, such as an alphabetical list of the words most commonly misspelled by high school students, provide startling passageways owards poetic thinking, rather than away from. The narrative of these poems is totalizing - rolling and continuous as thought. "Everything is relation to a days work/ should be written up/ copied down/ fractionally and ideas." Thought introduces arbitrary boundaries to concepts; thought leads to a gridded reality. But an overlap is natural to thinking. Scientific modes of thinking are related to aesthetic modes, but both are only metaphorical aids as the act remains amorphous.

Part III of Antin's book 'Definitions' is "...pretty much an arrangement of words taken from a translation of Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations.' About the words - nobody owns them - not Wittgenstein, or the translator, or me - and anyone who wants them is welcome to use them again." Antin is not only saying that words are not owned, but that words are meant to be used. An unused word is a dead thing - a word is defined by its use, and is not some inert sculpture. Antin asks, borrowing the question from Wittgenstein, "how do words refer to sensation." We use imprecise, overlapping terminology to allow some sort of communication of sensation via language. By saying "...observing your own grief... what do you use to observe it? a special sense? is it one that feels grief? do you feel different when you observe it? and what is this grief you are observing is it a grief that is there only while you observe it?" In 'Novel Poem,' Antin writes "...it was part of his intention to rob words of their power..." The words themselves give way to Antin's wording, as he creates a continuous space. Antin is placing these words, one's he acknowledges were once positioned by Wittgenstein, in addition to an unnamed translator and by Antin himself, within the specified body of the book. They were used in Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations,' but that does not make them off-limits. The words are also used in 'Definitions.' Antin is inviting the reader to use them as well - use them anywhere they see fit. Anywhere the words fit, and words can fit anywhere.

A process is utilized to generate much of the work in David Antin's early book - the act of the writing remains privileged. We read a piece like 'the November Exercises' as the afterimage of the writing exercise used to create it. 'The November Exercises' were an activity initiated by Antin and the words are only what you are reading as a result of that act. But this leads to subsequent acts, since "to hear about it is to cause it to happen." The text of 'the Separation Meditations' was created as Antin read through a history book, "...reading and writing quickly through the footnotes and continuing forward, taking a phrase here and a phrase, sometimes a word, there, working swiftly to make my kind of sense."This allows a roughness, which in turn resists the completeness of a piece. As with Antin's use of Wittgenstein, the reader is a participant in a layering of language. We are reading 'the Separation Mediations,' but we are also reading the footnotes to the book Antin was reading, and yes, we are reading Antin's reading. Which is, after all what you are doing if you visit my blog - reading my readings of different books, rather than the book itself; criticism of a fashion, but readings more importantly. "The point," Antin writes, " is that the discourses are treated as matters of language without regard to their substance." A scientific methodology clings to the text - "1. attack an argument/ 2. assail an opponent/ 3. reading/ 4. omitting." But here a scientific method of attack is divorced from the specificity of a problem. We are reading the method, but also the omission of a subject other than itself, or of the act. By dating 'the November Exercises' and notating the times each section is written, we position writing in time. This, again, adds layers. We encounter the time specification of the act of writing as we are engaged in the time specification of the act of reading. One may even later introduce a further time specification of the moment of thinking about the text. Does this create a three-dimensionality?

I will hold off on any in-depth discussion of 'In Place of a Lecture' or 'A London March," works which again confront us with the knotty actualities of time. Expect me to engage these pieces soon when I look further at Antin's book 'Talking.' In the last entry of 'the November Exercises,' Antin writes that 'the instruction book gives a false impression of a real picture. Everything you expected to handle with patient acceptance is now speeded up and scattered. Relax, hold onto the steering wheel and pretend that you're driving." The reader may not be writing the text in any actuality, but we can almost stretch the conceit to a fruition.The act of pretending is still an action, and that is a very real thing.

Nova

2011-01-02T19:45:00.000-08:00

by Samuel R. Delany

'Nova' is very much a novel "about" things. Katin, a young college graduate looking to write a book of his own, records countless notes of "aboutness," yet is still in search of a subject. He doesn't realize that the very story of the novel is his subject. Katin must order this diversity into a manageable whole. The subject of his novel is the novel. The reader is faced with the same challenge in 'Nova.' We find within it a galaxy of potential meanings and possible thematic centers, each with a distinct gravitational pull. But gravity remains relational. Is the novel about the Holy Grail, or more specifically, the Grailquest? The Tarot? History and its motion? The role of transportation in economic and cultural functions.? Is it a transliteration of Melville's 'Moby Dick?' Or is 'Nova' about the novel itself, its mechanics and the consequences of its telling? You can make a case for any of the above, but why privilege one vantage point to the detriment of another? Find your own way through these rich veins of meaning. 'Nova' accumulates themes about it, creating a dizzying diversity. Is the novel thematically decentralized, or does it rather possess multiple centers, each one interacting and communicating with the other? What does this communication consist of? What does it sound? 'Nova' is starbound, hurtling towards its own solar body just as the obsessed captain Lorq Von Ray and the motley crew of his starship Roc race toward theirs, constantly pursued by the one-armed Prince Red and his sister, Ruby. But 'Nova' isn't bound within one solar system, or even a single galaxy. This is a novel of intergalactic plenitude, despite the single-minded focus of Lorq Von Ray and the omnipresent pull of his star on the verge of going nova.

The setting of Delany's ninth novel is an intergalactic future redolent with the trappings of the space opera subgenre of science fiction. Delany would return to settings of similar scope in later novels such as 'Triton' and 'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.' Here we see him already comfortable with an intergalactic setting; his future is one rich with racial cross-pollination, and the bio-cybernetic extensions we have since come to term post-humanism. Mankind has colonized the stars and now inhabits three distinct galaxies - Draco, the Pleiades and the Outer Colonies. Delany is, as always, conscious of class within the cosmic. Place is of the utmost importance, whether it be within a class hierarchy or spatially on a world or within a galaxy. 'Nova' is about place, or how we define location in the face of vastness. On Earth, for instance, "...it took the same seven/eight minutes to get from one side of the city to the other as it did to get to the other side of the world."The novel follows Lorq Von Ray as he attempts to pull seven tons of Illyrion from the center of a star as it goes nova. Illyrion is trans-uranic element which makes star-travel possible. This would render space travel easy, and by that I mean cheaper.

First Hardcover edition.

The hierarchy of the three galaxies balances upon transportation and its costs. Lorq Von Ray's father explains that the galaxy of "... Draco was extended by the vastly monied classes of Earth. The Pleiades was populated by a comparatively middle-class movement. Though the Outer Colonies have been prompted by those with money both in the Pleiades and Draco, the population of the colonies comes from the lowest economic strata of the galaxy." He goes on to add that "the combination of cultural difference... and the difference in the cost of transportation is what assures the eventual sovereignty of the Outer Colonies." As mankind has expanded across three galaxies, could each galaxy now be seen as a potential "center" of the universe? Whose universe would we be talking about? Maybe the miners of Illyrion who are predominantly non-white? Or the mostly caucasian and generally conservative inhabitants of Earth and other Draco satellite worlds? Lorq Von Ray speaks for the Pleiades, while Prince Red represents the interests of the Draco system. But despite their different points of origin, both are from the privileged class are are perhaps more similar to each other than to the common man within each galaxy. This breeds peculiar affinities between the two men. The novel hinges upon relation as we investigate what it is that makes Lorq Von Ray and Prince Red both similar and disparate.

'Nova' is the last novel of Samuel R. Delany's first phase, a prolific period of six years spanning 1962 to 1968 in which he published nine novels of more or less "pure" science fiction. These novels easily fit in with the New Wave of Science Fiction then in vogue, a movement defined by Harlan Ellision's anthology 'Dangerous Visions' and remembered for its explorations of the further reaches of genre. Delany's next novels, 'Equinox' and 'Dhalgren' would not be published for another five years; they usher in his middle period, which flirts with pornography in addition to SF, and displays a more openly discursive tactic. There is a reliance upon plot at play in 'Nova' not seen in the those later novel. Its 'boy adventure' plot anchors one's reading and provides a scaffold on which to drape more archetypical figures. Though one is in danger of oversimplification, 'Nova' can be seen as the summation of Delany's first period. It is the last novel written in which Delany seems to consider it a given that he is a 'science fiction writer,' future work would be more promiscuous.

SF Masterworks edition.

The voyage of the Roc is not half as importantto the novel as its voyagers. Delany never forgets people, whether in the context of SF adventure or critical theory. The cast of the novel provides an organic extension of Delany's meditations. One does not exist for the other, rather, one is the other's mirror. Aside from Lorq Von Ray, Delany introduces us to a diverse array of the three galaxies' inhabitants. The Mouse is an orphaned gypsy from Earth. The previously mentioned Katin is a Harvard educated intellectual also hailing from the Draco galaxy, but coming from a markedly different social strata. Sebastian and Tyy are representative of the Pleiades system, since while Lorq also hails from that galaxy, his sphere of reference is one of power and wealth. The twins Lyncecos and Idas come from the Outer Colonies, where statistically one in three individuals, in this case their brother, works in the Illyrion mines. Lorq explains the class differences at play to Katin: "There are ways Tyy, Sebastian, and myself are much alike. In those basic defining sensibilities we are closer than you and I... Some of our reactions to given situations will be more predictable to each other than to you. Yes, I know it goes no further... You're not from Earth, Katin. But the Mouse is. So is Prince. One's a guttersnipe, the other is... Prince Red. Does the same relation exist between them as between Sebastian and me? The gypsy fascinates me. I do not understand him. Not in the way I think I understand you. I don't understand Prince either." Here we see fascination at play. How does fascination relate to understanding?

Fascination is not the same thing as understanding, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other, but it may lead to a mutually beneficial relationship between two disparate and otherwise unreconcilable beings. In his later novel, "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand," Delany argues desire is what bridges the chasm of difference; it may enable a contract. A bridge is not an understanding, but a tool which allows opposites and transitionals to relate in some capacity.

Understanding is also undertaken via work. Labor, as I've stated elsewhere is important to Delany. The twenty-third century philosopher and psychologist, Ashton Clark - a nod to weird fiction giant Clark Ashton Smith, argued that "if the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man's work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren't there before, things from one place to another." This manifests in 'Nova' through the five cybernetic sockets surgically implanted into almost every one, save the neurologically handicapped such as Prince Red and hold outs such as a few itinerant gypsy tribes on Earth.The cybernetic sockets are prescient of cyberpunk's machine/human interfaces - such as the net jacks implanted into the cowboys in William Gibson's 'Neuromancer.' Yet while cyberpunk often adopts dystopian trapping, Delany's futures are as optimistic as Asmiov's or Gene Rodenberry's. Delany presents us with avenues of utopias. A utopia is fostered in the short story "We in Some Strange Power's Employ..." via a worldwide nexus of free power and information, while in 'Nova' a similar future is arrived at through the implantation of sockets, but in a broader sense, through a revolution in labor that finally addresses the issues of Industrialization.

My personal favorite cover. Despite the hard-SF trappings of the painting, the layout and font convey an austere beauty missing from either the garish psychedelia of the first edition or the bland nicities of the more recent Vintage reissues.

At various points in 'Nova,' students and intellectuals across the three galaxies complain that despite the utopianism enjoyed by all, something is missing, "...there seems to be a certain lack of cultural solidity..." Katin argues this isn't the case. People who make lament the lack of cultural solidity are wrong, "...they're all just looking for our social traditions in the wrong place. There are cultural traditions that have matured over the centuries, yet culminate now in something vital and solely of today." Mouse, who accrues and appropriates the ornaments of various societies for his own use is the canvas upon which the tensions of the three galaxies are acknowledged and mediated. Mouse represents, rather, a new totalism.

Mouse, who ironically suffers a speech disorder which he manages through playing a sensory syrynx, facilitates communication in others. The sharing of information and customs via communication and transportation - offered conveniently and affordably. Mouse enables an elemental communication between those he encounters through his syrnx playing. Lorq Von Ray does so by providing cheap Illyrion, the heretobefore incredibly rare and costly element essential to intergalactic travel. Katin does so as well; he provides dense columns of information and cultural context for the characters, and through them the readers. In this sense, Katin is also a reflexive version of a common SF trope - the info drop. A peculiarity to the genre is the virtue of the info drop or dump, the unloading of a large chunk of information in raw exposition. Delany's treatment of this convention is loving, while remaining bemused - the other characters in the novel often become impatient with Katin's long-winded explications. Is such blunt exposition an effective method of communication? Or, Delany asks, is the opening of avenues through which communication may, or may not, occur more beneficial? Lorq and Mouse enable such streams to flow, and allow a revolution of here to there and back again. The transportation of humanity and information spins the web upon which we hang our archetypes and our holy grails.

The New American Writing, 1945-1960

2010-12-20T13:16:00.000-08:00

edited by Donald Allen

"The body is real and all real things perish. Augustine discoverd in the City of God, unrealities, fantasies, mere ideas, can never be destroyd. Soul is the body's dream of its continuity in eternity - a wraith of mind. Poetry is the very life of the soul: the body's discovery that it can dream. And perish into its own imagination." - Robert Duncan

Fifty years on, we approach Donald Allen's seminal anthology, "the New American Poetry," not as as assault upon the stalwarts of canon, but as an epoch-defining machine of canon-building. Allen stratifies the 44 poets anthologized into five, at times arbitrary, locative centers. This effects a geographical gravity to the groupings; Ron Silliman in his discussion of the anthology points towards this unspoken hierarchy. The selections privilege Black Mountain poetics, followed in preeminence by the "S.F Renaissance," the Beats, the New York School and finally to non-localized "Independents," many of whom could conceivably be placed within the four central groupings. Yet while we can debate the merits of these groupings and their inevitable failings, credit must be given to the anthology for stressing the importance of community and place within the poetic discourse. Allen writes in his afterword to the 1999 edition, "... at the time, I tended to think of the poets in terms of communities." Yes, problems arise. Individuals without the privilege of residing near geographic hotbeds may as a result be pushed to ideological fringes and be consequently branded outliers. Looking back on "the New American Poetry" from the vantage point of 2010, the myopia of Allen's gendered and race-based lens is startling - of the 44 poets included, a scant four are women, while LeRoi Jones is the sole non-white contributor). Any appraisal of the book must consider these deficiencies, but how does one resist becoming mired in such a deficit?

Earlier Grove Press Edition

Criticism of the anthology's indiscretions must take stock of history. We must place "the New American Poetry" in its historical moment, as well as identify its relevance to us today. Poetry today is an invisible possibility - it remains disturbingly absent from the mainstream. I stopped by the Barnes & Noble in Syracuse recently and had difficulty finding the Poetry section - it was eventually located in a corner over by Music Reference books and Arts & Crafts. Let us not speak of the selection available at most bookstores when one finally finds the poetry section! But at the same time, it is incredibly easy to log online and order volumes of poetry either directly through the publisher or through a host of third-party dealers, to say nothing of the wealth of free material available via the Electronic Poetry Center. We are the lucky ones. In 1960, this anthology presented readers unable to hunt down issues of Yugen, Black Mountain Review or Big Table with their first exposure to many of these poets. But if the anthology provided many readers with their first exposure to the 44 poets included, we must acknowledge that due to Allen's omissions, the book perpetuated the myth of a white male-dominated field.

This is the popular criticism of "the New American Poetry," but such criticism must not suppose we are writing from an inevitable place of progress- a better clime. The contradictions and errors of the anthology are glaring, yes, but they must be recognized as ongoing difficulties. The problems of the anthology are problems which persist. To assume we exist in are era without gender bias or racial exclusion is naive, if not downright dangerous. An outright condemnation of such omissions in "the New American Poetry" is in danger of exacerbating the ugliness of our contemporary landscape by refusing to admit that such prejudices are ours as well as our forebears. How do the prejudices of 1960 mirror our own?

Allen's original compositional intention was "... leading of with recent work by William Carlos Williams, H.D., e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound and Waillace Steven..." and finally focusing on 24 new poets following a selection of "bridge" poets such as Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky.This original semantic favors a through line of influence. Instead of explicating how the new generation skates upon the ice of influence, the published anthology, by omitting these elder poets, in effect breaks the ice. This is the new thing, prefigured by Williams in particular, but typified, yes, unified, by its very newness and youthful vitality. The volume is presided over by Charles Olson, who leads off both the poetry and poetics sections and also garners the largest page count of all poets compiled.

Charles Olson

The anthology can be seen through the lens of Olson's theories on a projective verse. Olson privileges "...the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader." I would argue that not only does Olson's concept of projective verse influence how syllable, word and line are positioned within many of the poems of the anthology, but that we can look at the positioning of the poets within the anthology itself as indebted to projective verse. Allen argues towards the poetic landscape of 1960, that is, of a 1950s poetry poised to undergo the new reactions and ventures of the 60s, via the placement of these poets and their poetries on a greater field. We return to Allen's insistence on a location-based order. This field is an abstract, the nebulous matter of a poetry landscape, as it is also literal - America as a physical space hemmed in by two oceans. Art must acknowledge geography, yet not be confined by it. Let's quickly look at location in other mediums. We can observe how Power Electronics and Industrial music finds a national identity whether in England, Italy, or Japan, or how the particulars of national funding and politics colors the film industry outside of the box factory of the American Hollywood paradigm. Allen's above-quoted statement on his tendency to think geographically is prefaced by an admittance that "... there was much movement between the coasts..." At their worst and most insoluble, the groupings of the anthology enforce a biased hierarchy, but if we allow these boundaries to become diffuse, the dance of poetries becomes apparent.

Location not only emphasizes the identity of a mapped territory, but provides exegesis on the relation between spaces. We need look no further than the debt the New York School owes to French writing. Kenneth Koch in his biographical note writes "... since I didn't read French very well but managed to be very excited by French poetry anyway, I began to try to get the same incomprehensible excitement into my own work." Remember the moment in Frank O'Hara's "the Day Lady Died," when he buys "... an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days..." Like the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School revolved around a large urban space, but so much of the community's flavor and vitality derived from the interplay between disparities - a cosmopolitan promiscuity.

Grove Press Edition, via Ron Silliman's blog

"The New American Poetry" is not only important because of the major poets contained herein, but also on account of its placement on a hinge of history. Allen presents the 44 poets as following in the Pound/Williams (and we really should add Gertrude Stein to that axis) tradition, but we also see the errant proclivities seeping into the greater landscape. The five groupings are imprecise - influences accrue and expand. It would be impossible to compile such an anthology in 2010. In the interim, an effusion of poetries and poetics have exploded drawing upon disparate and dizzying influences. As the identity of Americans has shifted, and as boundaries have taken on new meanings in the Electronic age, we find ourselves moving towards greater and greater complexities. "The New American Poetry" exists at a turning point, a final point where such a task was at least conceivable, if not executable.

aye, and gomorrah

2010-12-16T11:18:00.000-08:00

by Samuel R. Delany

Diversity strikes one in its brilliance. Plenitude, plenitude, plenitude. Samuel R. Delany's work is rife with such fertile variation , whether through the vast spectrum of his novels, his essays' Guy Davenport-esque polymathic pleasure, or the short fiction that graced periodicals such as If and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction throughout the late-60s and 70s. The rich variety of the stories collected in "aye, and gomorrah" is all the more striking the collection's brevity. The small body of short fiction Delany has produced is striking for a SF writer of such influence and power. SF is a field exhibiting many of its most rarefied splendors in the short form. In his afterword to the novel "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand," Delany argues that SF, perhaps more than any other fiction, is specially suited to addressing Charles Olson's advice "to keep [their] fictions up to the real." SF short fiction, rarely bogged down in the world-building and fanic mythologizing which can mar sustained works in the field, is then doubly adept for Olson's task.

The SF short story often hinges upon the shock of the new, whether through some rote twist ending or a visionary ostranie. And before the economy of the SF market was overtaken by the juggernaut of multi-volume doorstop epics, the short story was the primary source of income for writers struggling to feed and support their families. Yet Delany, always roving through disparate yet beaded means of investigation, never lingered on the craft of the short story. The 383 pages of Vintage's "aye, and gomorrah" is a nigh complete collection of his short fiction baring a few omissions. It is a svelte affair compared JG Ballard's gargantuan Collected Stories recently published in paperback. In addition, the majority of these stories, excepting 1988's "Among the Blobs, were published in the late sixties, though their composition stretches back to the early sixties.

A case can be made for these stories as investigative excursions. In the early work of Samuel R. Delany, we see him claiming and repositioning (or is that enriching?) the modes of the genre. His early trilogy, the Fall of the Towers, as well as his later tetralogy Return to Neveryon, claim and reclaim the SF serial. The two series serve as informal borderlines at either end of his tenure within the conventional bounds of SF, if Delany could EVER be said to exist on the pale side of convention, that is. The sustained dialogue of the short story "Omegahelm" prefigures the above-mentioned novel, "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand." It both introduces key historical figures as well as the overarching theoretical binary of the Family and the Sygn expanded in the novel. "Omegahelm" is a hologram of the latter book, a rich metaphoric mine for Delany. The original title of the story when it appeared in "Beyond the Horizon" was that of the subsequent novel. Both works "are" "Stars in My Pocket Likes Grains of Sand," aren't they? "Omegahelm" can then be seen as an approximate hologram of the later novel.

Samuel R. Delany himself

A hologram, Delany writes, is "...a method of information storage... you take the ordinary hologram plate, cut it in half, and then shine a laser-beam on it, and you get the complete, three-dimensional image hanging there, full-size. Only it's slightly out of focus, blurry, a little less distinct... Theoretically, even a square millimeter cut from a hologram will have something to tell you about the whole object." The jubilant, modular variables of Delany's work functions in such a manner, providing a total sense in each small flicker or flash. Following the above exposition of holograms in the story, "High Weir," a character asks, "Does that 'theoretical' mean something... or is it just rhetoric?" But within the fictions of Samuel R. Delany, both theory and rhetoric "mean" something; they express the dance of diverse intentions, the horseplay of function and wide preponderance of thought. The meat is in this rhetoric. It is what slips between the cuts.

The least fulfilling selections of the collection are, predictably, the early stories, as they are tied more tightly to the expectations of genre. And since Delany has since developed in a master prose stylist, it is doubly strange, though admittedly exciting, to see him stumble towards dexterity in early pieces like "Prismatica" and "Tapestry." Yes, "Ruins," a fairly straightforward tale of tomb-robbing horror, is only a doom-shrouded glyph away from a Robert E. Howard yarn, but watch it s conclusion explode into a thrilling rumination on jobs and function in a primitive world. As the treasure-hunter Clikit flees a haunted tomb, he comes to the hut of a kind, elderly woman who brings him soup while he rests on her doorstop. The woman's "... position in that hamlet was akin to a dentist's, an art at which, given the primitive times, she was very skilled... her knives and picks and files were valuable..." An emphasis is placed here, and throughout Delany's oeuvre, on the small pleasures and honor of work and craft. To some extent, such an outlook may come from Delany's associations in both the SF and comics field, where the schism of art and commerce is often fore fronted.

1989 Tor SF Double Edition of "the Star Pit," paired w. John Varley's 'Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo. Cover by Tony Roberts

The mechanic of "the Star Pit" is defined by his work, as are the goldens, beings who through some quirk of psychological makeup are able to travel between galaxies. Work, here as elsewhere, engenders class. Delany does not sentimentalize labor. Labor molds identity to some extent, though mystery remains at the fringes as at the center. Labor both limits and expands within the fractal of those limitations. One of the mechanics in "the Star Pit" explains that "...you gotta accept limitations, but the right ones. Sure, you have to admit there are certain directions in which you cannot go. But once you do that, you find there are others where you can go as far as you want." Delany never ignores the lines of limit, but instead inhabits these stretches, plumbing their alephic exuberance.

The title story and the brilliant "we, in some strange power's employ..." both touch upon sexual difference and desire and how the earlier spark fuel the latter. "Aye, and gomorrah..." confronts the perturbances and estrangements of sexual desire head-on, albeit via the visionary conceit of Spacers and Frelks. This is justly considered a classic of the genre. "We in some strange power's employ...," on the other hand, sublimates sexual desire in a broader exploration of power - whether it be authoritative, social, resource or information-based. Sex becomes a satellite rotating about the spoke of power. The sexual effusions of leather biker gangs seen in "Dhalgren" is herein prefigured, watch Blacky's subtle attraction to the tactility and vibrancy of the Angels. The Angels, a sort of reconfigured, futuristic Hell's Angels, exist as a final outpost of isolation in a world increasingly mapped and gridded by global power and information sources. Speaking about the former leader of the Angels, one character states "He insisted on living in a way totally at odds with society. That takes... power." Power may manifest as the acknowledgement of an overriding weakness or inevitable failure. These oscillations of power and authority, through information or design, reconfigure and reappear across the text. The story closes with a seemingly casual social exchange. Blacky, a section-devil or a section-head, stands before a charred corpse, the casualty of the story's climax. Sue, a worker-devil, stumbles on Blacky as she steps out of her sleeping-unit. They exchange nicities. "Hello, Blacky." "Hi. How do you feel?" "Fine." Blacky mentions "You just stay away from the trouble until we cover it up. We had some trouble there last night." "Why? Isn't it a perfectly lovely-?" "That's an order." "Oh. Yes, sir." The casual, the social, is the hotbed of authority, of power, of relation.

Delany's work explodes from these pressure points - typically through dialogue or vivid description seen through a pertinent subjective lens. Situations spin around subjective revelations or enumerations. Layers accumulate. It is not so much that Delany's fiction reveals the layers of an onion, as that it adds successive filaments and degrees. This collection of his short fiction, then, to both the devotee and recently-acquainted, should not so much boil Delany's work down to some inscrutable core, as provide alternate pathways and divergent possibilities. We approach the real as we recognize and recognize again the vast diversity and unknowables dancing beyond the ken of our subjective girth.

Odd John & Sirius

2010-07-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

by Olaf Stapledon

The idea of the super-being just isn’t what it used to be.

The super-being has, from its racial and Nietzschean roots, been popularized and repurposed as the modern day super-hero. While such a transformation was already underway throughout the early years of the pulps, it truly took shape in the late-sixties with the Marvel Comics of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others. Marvel revolutionized the super-hero, shifting the focus to that of the super-powered everyman. This is the image today popularized in movies like Iron Man II or Spider-Man – film productions, mind you, of Marvel Comics’ properties. But lets not forget the earlier image, investigated within the confines of fantastic fiction, of a super-being – a pinnacle of racial conditioning and cosmic coalescence. Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Odd John’ and ‘Sirius,’ here collected in a single volume from Dover Books, both posit a super-being with acute racial awareness and a sense of intelligence’s relation to the universe at large.

What are we driving at here? A super-being is the summation of a race; he is the contraction of linear history into a moment in time. We witness in the span of a life the conflict between historical immensity and the inconsequential. The super-being encapsulates a race, but stands apart from it. This is the alienation of superiority, especially as this in turn highlights the super-being’s insignificance in relation to the machinations of the greater universe.

First edition of Odd John.

John Wainwright stands at exactly such a juncture. ‘Odd John’ is his record; that of a sickly and deformed Scottish youth possessed of a disconcerting intelligent. ‘Sirius,’ on the other hand, chronicles the short, sad life of an Alsatian sheep dog artificially endowed with human intelligence. Both novels deal with the violent extermination of the individual by an unsympathetic and hostile alien race, that of Homo sapiens. John finds solidarity in the founding a colony, albeit a doomed one, of his super-intelligent ilk. Sirius is tormented by solitude, finding what compassion and understanding he can in the companionship of Plaxy, the daughter of the scientist who created him. But whatever else they endure, both John and Sirius must negotiate their inconsequentiality in the face of history. And that is what lies at the heart of Stapledon’s writing.

Stapledon’s novels oscillate between history, a dizzying Hegelian panoply of vast array, and the individual, tormented due to his detachment to this greater motion. Stapledon’s tragic heroic characters are beaten down by history’s indifference to their personal concern. Stapledon’s best-known works, ‘First and Last Men’ and ‘Star Maker,’ leave behind the specificity of the individual to detail the history of the human race and of the universe respectively. The individual, according to Stapledon, yearns for a greater connectivity to the universe itself. As the individual rises from the dregs of its own limited self-awareness, it registers the disconnect with its personal needs and those of the universe, or of history. It is only through sublimation into a greater cosmic mind or racial consciousness that the individual can then fulfill its desires. Stapledon writes of the cosmic mind – of the shape a diversity of minds form in collusion.

Olaf Stapledon

Olaf Stapledon studied history at Balliol College, Oxford and subsequently earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Liverpool. While his first published work of science fiction was the epochal ‘First and Last Men’ in 1930, this was actually preceded a year earlier by a book-length expansion of his doctoral thesis entitled ‘A Modern Theory of Ethics.’ He would continue to publish philosophy between his more fantastic fictions. His novels are, in addition to narratives, treatises on the conflict between spiritual yearning and the universe’s apathy towards such a striving. If ‘Odd John’ and ‘Sirius’ are ostentatiously less ambitious than a work like ‘Star-Maker,’ which purports to tell the history of an entire universe, then their scope is still expansive, as each charts the totality of a super-being’s life from birth to early demise.

‘Odd John’ was published in 1936, as tensions across Europe mounted and the issue of racial transcendence, and conversely racial extermination, raged. Stapledon addresses the concept of the super-human in great complexity, stripping it of the pomp and bombast that the National Socialists cloaked it in for their own political means. To the hyper-evolved John Wainwright, Homo sapiens are the sub-human race. It is man’s pettiness that ultimately destroys John and his colony. John himself is described in vivid detail by Stapledon, a writer with a gift not only for philosophical inquiry, but a gently grotesque physiology as well. Here is Stapledon’s description of John at twenty-three, “…far more like a boy than a man, though in some moods his face would assume a curiously experienced and even patriarchal expression. Slender, long-limbed, and with that unfinished coltish look characteristic of puberty… they called him spiderish… his eyes were indeed too big for his face, which thus acquired a very cat-like or falcon-like expression.” John does not enjoy the easy allure and Olympian physique of a super-hero; instead John and his super-human companions possess a mutant deformity. Stapledon also pinpoints a Mongoloid origin for all of his super-beings. Could this be a further affront to the Aryan superman?

Transcendent super-being or bronzed rapist?

If John does not adhere to what we, as Homo sapiens, would consider extraordinary physical grace, neither does his intelligence operate in the manner human intelligence could predict. Mankind, that is, normal humanity, suffers from its crude suppositions about the world and of sentience. John ponders “Surely that is one of the penalties of being more than beast but less than fully human. Pterodactyls had a great advantage over the old-fashioned creepy crawly lizards, but they had their special dangers. Because they could fly a bit, they could crash. Finally, they were outclassed by birds. Well, I’m a bird.” Morality is a social issue and not an inalienable truth. John commits incest, murder, sexual flagrancy and other acts that would be deemed despicable by human morality. The only morality, John and his brethren conclude, is a racial one. John and the others eventually do discover an island in the South Seas appropriate for their colony – the only problem is that it is inhabited by a tribal society. John bluntly explains, “we might have kept them alive on the island as domestic animals, but this would have wrecked our plans. It would also have undermined the natives spiritually. So we decided to destroy them… I said to them, in their own language, that we were gods, that we needed the island, that they must therefore make a funeral pyre for themselves, mount it together, lie down together, and gladly die. This they did, most gladly, men, women, and children. When they had all died we set fire to the faggots and their bodies were burnt.” This is a troubling incident, but it is also one recurrent throughout history.

‘Sirius’ is altogether more somber novel, and ironically enough, its protagonist is also a more sympathetic one. The novel is from Stapledon’s late period, published in 1964. Sirius is a sheep dog bestowed a comparable to human intelligence through the experiments of Thomas Trelone, a Cambridge scientist. He is described a mighty beast, but “what distinguished Sirius from all other dogs was his huge cranium. It was not, as a matter of fact, quite as large as one would have expected in a creature of human intelligence… his cranium was far bigger than the Border Collie’s. The dome reached almost up to the tips of his large Alsatian ears. To hold up this weight of head, the muscles of his neck and shoulders were strongly developed.” Sirius struggles due to his physical discrepancies to Homo sapiens – though he is bright by human standards, his poor eyesight and lack of hands prevent him from reading easily, he is never able to attend school and is at best able to run a sheep farm. Despite the exceptional circumstances of his existence, Sirius’ life is defined by boundaries.

Sirius is torn between his nature and his reason. One day, while walking back from a series of laboratory tests at Cambridge, he “…felt an increasing impulse to run amok in the street. Life was no good to him. Why not throw it away, why not kill as many as he could of these ridiculously bedecked, swell-headed apes, until they destroy him?” Amidst this alienation and murderous torment, Sirius is overcome by a scent, “if it was a fragrance at all, it was the fragrance of love and wisdom and creating, of these for their own sake, fragrance of love and wisdom and creating, of these for their own sake, whether crowned with success and happiness or not. It was this fragrance, trailed across the universe, which somehow came to me with such a fresh poignancy that it was something entirely new to me. It was this fragrance, trailed across the universe, winding in and out of all its chasms and interstices, that had also so often enticed me…” Sirius pursues a spiritual truth in the face of the deficiencies and diminished returns of his own existence.

Penguin paperback edition of Sirius.

The short, idyllic time Sirius spends living with Plaxy at the small cabin of Tan-y-Voel stands as perhaps the most transcendental in the novel. The racial gulf between the Scottish woman and the Alsatian sheep dog is bridged as the two of them form some semblance of a life together. Of course, it is this idyll that leads to Sirius’ demise, as bigoted and small-minded locals, including members of the Church, persecute Sirius for their own means. His final words, after being hunted like a rabid beast, are “Plaxy-Sirius – worthwhile.” Both Sirius and John Wainwright face their deaths, and the tragic failures mandatory to existence, with a dignity and humor.

An awareness of the pathetic futility of it all.

A pleasure in this accumulation of small failures and victories before an inevitable defeat.

NEXT: Samuel R. Delany's Hogg.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

2010-07-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

by Samuel R. Delany

The Times Square envisioned in polymath Samuel Delany’s collection of two collusive essays is one occupying a science fictional space. Here, the stratification of our society is dispersed amidst the soiled seats and shadowed balconies of the adult cinemas and peepshows that thrived in the area from its heyday in the 70s to its demise in the early nineties. Delany disseminates this stretch of blocks at the heart of Manhattan that have since been transformed under the watchful eye of the government, contractors and business interests. What was once a utopia of sexual permissiveness is now a den of Disneyland glass and concrete. A commonality between the intergalactic phantasmagorias of Delany’s early work and his more recent critical and introspective nonfiction, of which “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” is endemic, is an interest in diversities and their interplay, as well as a forging of communities of utopian investigation and experimentation. Delany writes, “… the dual pieces here present a sociological and diachronic periplum.” The two essays therein are a speculative work of appraisal and acknowledgement. These essays map out the topographical dimensions of desire and interaction in an urban arena. This fashions our metropolitan body.

While “Times Square Blue” is predominantly anecdotal, offering a personal recollection of the era, “Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red” takes the form of a discursive interrogation. To provide an infrastructure, Delany borrows the concept of the periplum from Pound’s Cantos: “…those early texts from before the advent of universal latitude and longitude that allowed the navigation of the Mediterranean…Periploi were detailed descriptions of the coastlines of the mainland and the various islands…” that allowed sailors to navigate according to both their own memory and the accumulated recollections of their peers. Delany asks, “…whether it is worth going back and making a more historically concerned and concerted visit/invasion” of this particular Times Square based solely on his own impressions. The book itself is his affirmation of such a project’s validity.

Walk through Times Square today. If I depart from my job at Barnes & Noble on 5th & 46th, I pass visiting families clustered outside theaters playing this year’s musicals, The Addams Family or Rock of Ages. A little further on, I see a Ruby Tuesday’s, an Olive Garden, some international tourists in bike-driven carriages. It’s all very family-friendly. Look a little closer and you’ll find a porn store stocked with an entire wall of crude bestiality DVDs. Walk a little further and you’ll find another adult video store with a live peepshow on the second floor haunted by shriveled men with their pants up well past their waists. Are these the remnants of the Times Square described by Delany? Or are these bastions of sleaze simply the lonely, pathetic pisspots that have taken the place of what were basically social sexual locations? No one talks to you in a porn store; they stare at you to make certain you aren’t masturbating in the aisles. Delany describes the peepshows as a teeming hotbed of interaction, of what Jane Jacobs describes in “the Death and Life of Great American Cities” as contact. The porn store of today does not facilitate the contact that Delany extols.

Delany’s rare gift as a writer and thinker is his refusal, no matter the extremity and severity of the fetishes and obsessions on display, to apologize or moralize. The sensuality and thrill of fulfilling our desires does not become a moral battleground. He does not apologize, nor does he romanticize. Delany doesn’t fall pray to nostalgia, which “…presupposes an uncritical confusion between the first, the best, and the youthful gaze (through which we view the first and the best) with which we create origins.” Delany does not shirk from the death, the disease and the mental illness that played a factor in the adult theaters he frequented from the seventies on to their close. He also refuses to allow those darker elements from assuming an unnecessarily large component of such. A lot goes on underneath that vast umbrella which our moral majorities label exploitation.

The social element is privileged in Delany’s recollections. Sex, as in the act, is “certainly one of the necessary places where socializing and sexualizing actually touch for, dare I call it, health or just contentment…” Sex as a process is, even more importantly than a physical one, a social process. The casual sexual encounters of the porno theaters are that of a true promiscuity. A female friend accompanies Delany on one occasion to the theaters and is shocked by how frequently and politely people turn down sex, to which he replies “…when so many people say ‘yes,’ the ‘nos’ don’t seem so important.” If we prioritize the free exchange of ideas to such an extent, why don’t we do the same for sexual favors? A democratic community in which communication is facilitated with the greatest speed and efficiency must also be one in which sexual desires, no matter how aberrant as deemed by a moral mainstream, may be fulfilled, that is transacted, with ease and expedition. Promiscuity is simply another word for free exchange. But it’s one that has been tagged far too frequently as derogatory. In terms of sexual intercourse, “however supportive, the response of a single partner just cannot do that. This is a quintessentially social process, involving a social response.” This social response, as often described by Delany throughout both essays, is one that spans social and class boundaries.

A fairly simple thesis underlies ‘Times Square Red:’ “…given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at it’s most rewarding, productive and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.” But due to frisson between class and clashing societal elements, “…it is only by a constant renovation of the concept of discourse that society can maintain the most conscientious and informed field for both the establishment of such institutions and practices, and by extension, the necessary critique of those institutions and practices…” Delany is writing towards a useful methodology by which to appraise the world – a means to facilitate a greater degree of ease and happiness. The functionality of desire cannot be ignored – as has been done by city planners wishing to eradicate the peepshows and adult theaters of Times Square. They see only vice – vice being a perceived sin that in turn must be regulated. The functionality of words, the functionality of nets of discourse, cannot be ignored, as “…the structures, conflicts, and displacements that occur in the unconscious, the class war, and the space of discourse are simply too useful to ignore in explaining what goes on in the world we live in…” We balance our lives on nets of desire.

As is often the case, a concern for security and safety is used as permission to execute agendas that in actuality carry no heed of good will or health. These are the specialized interests. Interclass communication, any sort of exchange between elements of the urban diversity, is deemed destructive. It is “in the name of ‘safety’ [that] society dismantles the various institutions that promote interclass communication, attempts to critique the way such institutions functioned in the past to promote their happier sides are often seen as, at best, nostalgia for an outmoded past and, at worst, a pernicious of everything dangerous: unsafe sex, neighborhoods filled with undesirables, promiscuity…” Ah, there’s that word again.

A good portion of the latter essay deals with contact versus networking. Networking “…is what people have to do when those with like interests live too far apart to be thrown together in public spaces through chance and propinquity.” Delany further explains, “Networking tends to be professional and motive-driven. Contact tends to be more broadly social and appears random… Contact is associated with public space and the architecture and commerce that depend on and promote it. Thus contact is often an outdoor sport; networking tends to occur indoors.” The restructuring of Times Square is in effect the construction of a concrete sarcophagus – a monument to the death motions of an artificial corporate interest. And if “small businesses thrive on contact,” then “Big businesses promote networking as much as they possibly can…” The sex theaters of which Delany offers deep anecdotal exposition of in the first essay stand as an alternative to this further isolating social trend. Contact can therein occur – a spontaneous, organic social process, as opposed to a artificial one maneuvered by a larger, possibly corporate interest.

Here, we see sexual desire not just as a moment in time, but as an action constructing a social space, or perhaps more aptly a social stream. Refuse the reality of such, or attempt to stymie it via baroque regulation, and one disables man’s social function.

NEXT: Olaf Stapledon's Odd John and Sirius

Girly Man

2009-12-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

by Charles Bernstein

It is as impossible to read a poem alone as it is to write one in isolation – associative tendencies sing. We find ourselves in metropolises of words followed by words. The poems of Charles Bernstein’s 2006 collection, ‘Girly Man,’ comprise a co-inhabited space. This space may be endangered, as is the case in “Some of These Daze,” a chapbook responding to September 11th, but poetry facilitates communication about such catastrophes. The poem becomes a community, but it also serves as the conduit for a discourse within such a community. The poem moves through space and memory; it becomes “…a walk down the street/ of the imaginary enclosure that becomes real/ when shared.” These are packed streets and busy market places. Bernstein’s poetic verse shares space with devolved ad slogans, corroded turns of phrase, bad jokes and misheard conversation. The sections of “Girly Man” originally found life as chapbooks written and published in the wake of the September 11th, yet they operate as a modular whole unified by Bernstein’s wit and caustic determination. We find islets of communication – inspired by the installation work of Nam June Paik, Bernstein writes in ‘Jacob’s Ladder’: “Spent light’s pooled mirror/ Wet green in vertical beam/ Chill out – chaos binds.” In this collection the chaos of these poems’ divergent forms and manners are bound into a luminous whole – the shimmer of the city’s lights spied miles out in the country on a clear night.

But the hiccups and discrepancies of Bernstein’s poems aren’t easily streamlined into a whole. The pleasure of this poetry is that of community, and the multiplicity it engenders – the difference necessary for its occurrence. You can’t dissolve indeterminacy into a totalized poetry, neutralizing it so that it is easier to parse, and hence, less dangerous. Bernstein’s poems allow a community fostered upon poetry and the discourse surrounding it. This is a vision of multitudes, but it is not a multi-culti Pepsi word falling under the aegis of a Capitalist, commodity-based confluence. This is an ambivalent and complicated sphere. The robust humor of ‘Girly Man’ highlights the inherent difficulties of language, Bernstein does not want use to forget the quarrelsome component. He writes, “…shadows create community…” The discrepancies, the very areas that the umbrella of community can never cover, are the actual bedrock of such a group.

Look at the collection’s very first poem, “In Particular,” wherein issues of community and identity collide with those of language and meaning. We see “A Eurasian boy on a cellphone/ An Arab with an umbrella/ A Southerner taking off a backpack/ An Italian detonating a land line/ A barbarian with beret/ A Lebanese guy in limousine/ A Jew watering petunias/ A Yugoslavian man at a hanging…” The poem stretches over multiple pages, with the individual descriptions existing in isolation; each line is its own island. The fat girls and Irish lads and dyslexic sailors of the poem never interact, and in that sense they accumulate to an associative community. Any interaction of the parts occur on the cognitive level of the reader – Bernstein makes certain to keep them seperate.

Yet another photo on my blog of Charles Bernstein, this time with Karen Weiser.

Bernstein’s affinity for Wittgenstein is felt here, as he interrogates the fault lines of language – specificity turns to language. Are we really looking at a ‘community’ within this poem? Is this an inclusive act of cataloging? No, it seems more likely Bernstein is using the specificity of each line to investigate the ultimate interchangeability of their details. Is there any good reason why it must be a Jew watering the petunias? This is Bernstein’s sense of humor at work. But then, the cultural implications of these statements complicate their context. “A Mongolian imitating Napoleon” is a different matter than a Parisian imitating Napoleon. A Parisian imitating Napoleon connotes differently than a Frenchman doing the same thing. Language, even this poem’s unpretentious, plain language, does not simply transmit data – it envelops the information. The poem begins with a couplet, “A black man waiting at a bus stop/ A white woman sitting on a stool…” which is inverted at the close to “A white man sitting on a stool/ A black woman waiting at bus stop.” The race and gender modifiers may be exchanged, but by doing so, the implication drastically shifts.

The line is an individual unit in “In Particular;” sense and statement is bracketed within the boundaries of the line. Repetition calls attention to the isolation of each line, albeit one of interchangeable specificity. The line functions as a more permeable unit in the poem “Likeness.” Again, repetition builds to a chiming regularity of construction and meaning. The poem opens, “the heart is like the heart/ the head is like the head/ the motion is like the motion/ the lips are like the lips/ the ocean is like the ocean/ the fate is like the fate…” and so on. Bernstein muddles the sense in the later lines: “...the is is like the is/ the the is like the the/ the like is like the like…” as the words in and of themselves become the subject. We are at play with language. If we are indeed going to read the line as a complete unit, then we are left with statements not of equality, but of semblance and seeming. The heart is only like the heart, and is not actually the heart itself. We descend down a hole of similarities and not actualities. We find, as Bernstein writes elsewhere in the collection, “…the space between a thing & itself…” But then again, we are assuming each line must always be read as a complete statement. Why don’t we allow the lines to bleed into each other? So no longer do we find “...the care is like the care/ the book is like the book/ the web is like the web/ the skid is like the skid/ the pull is like the pull/ the pall is like the pall...,” but the ‘care, the book’ is like ‘the book, the web,’ which is then like ‘the web, the skid.’ The poem encourages such a modular reading. The poem’s recitation and the repetition within it, fosters a diversity of sense.

“Girly Man” never loses sight of language’s political ramifications. The title itself is culled from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s statements during a Republican convention, in which he taunted dissenters to President Bush’s incumbent policies as ‘girly men.’ An oxymoron such as this has clear political resonances. Elsewhere, Bernstein tells us “Let’s just say that pretty ugly is an aspiring oxymoron.” There is a contradiction in this statement, just as there is in Schwarzenegger, but Bernstein is aware of this complication. Then, Bernstein concedes, “Let’s just say that mankind suffers its language.” Language is not just the tool which poets and artists use against oppressors in possession of military arms and political might – language is a weapon wielded by all of mankind. If we do not grapple with the incongruities and ambivalences of language, we allow ourselves to be exploited by the rhetoric of power.

Arnold Schwarzenegger amongst his constituents.

The final poem in the collection, ‘the Ballad of the Girly Man,’ is a pronouncement of protest. Bernstein has long been an enemy of “official verse culture,” and here he implicates the narrowing of linguistic potentialities with the limiting of rights, as “A democracy once proposed/ Is slimmed and grimed again/ By men with brute design/ Who prefer hate to rime/ Complexity’s a four-letter word/ For those who count by nots and haves/ Who revile the facts of Darwin/ To worship the truth according to Halliburton.” The political dimension of poetry, as well as its ability to be difficult and diverse, is the poet’s defense against, as Bernstein puts it, “rhetorical crap.”

Bernstein has become a controversial figure in the poetry community because he doesn’t simply pay lip service to the democratic iconoclasm of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, but instead embodies their restless activism within language. It is easy to appreciate the iconoclasm of someone such as Ginsberg after the fact, but it’s a very different matter to respect it in one’s own contemporary moment. Like Ginsberg, Bernstein’s politics are a matter of poetics. What is the political sphere of a poem? In “Sign Under Test,” Bernstein writes “the politics in a poem has to do with how it enters the world, how it makes its meaning, how its forms work in social contexts. The politics in a poem is specific to poetry not politics.” The poem moves through aphoristic swerves, as it tackles thought and poetry. Bernstein fires off one-liners like “When you say baroque you’re barking up the wrong tree, which suits me,” beside succinct statements such as “Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.” We must remember must poetry search for, yet never definitively finds, such unpatterned mind.

Bernstein equates the emotional value of “official verse culture” with a commoditized value. He writes, “My cares turned to wares.” The insidious reality of a poetry that does not admit its ideological purpose or that it even has one engenders complicity with its truth-absconding rhetoric. Bernstein satirizes “official verse culture” in “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” as which he promises, “This is a totally/ accessible poem. There is nothing/ in this poem/ that is in any/ way difficult/ to understand. / All the words/ are simple &/ to the point. / There are no new/ concepts, no/ theories, no/ ideas to confuse/ you. This poem/ has no intellectual/ pretensions. It is/ purely emotional. / It fully expresses/ the feelings of the/ author: my feelings, the person speaking/ to you now. / It is all about communication.” But such a poem would only be the masquerade of communication, as it does not confront the ambivalences of language. Such as poem, “While/ at times expressing/ bitterness, anger, / resentment, xenophobia, / & hints of racism, its/ ultimate mood is/ affirmative.” The poems of ‘Girly Man’ admit they exist in a community of poems, and that they exist in order to contribute to such a community. This discourse can not be definitively quantified, as it is an argument, or perhaps more aptly, a conversation, and its worth is in how well it identifies boundaries, and then pushes past them.

Go to http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/books/girly-man/ for electronic versions of some of the poems under discussion, as well as critical responses from writers such as Ron Silliman and Ange Mlinko. Of particular note are the audio files of Bernstein reading selections from 'Girly Man.' Check out his reading of 'The Bricklayer's Arms!'

Republics of Poetry: 1975-1995

2009-12-01T16:57:00.000-08:00

by Charles Bernstein

Contains:
Parsing (1976)
Shade (1978)
Poetic Justice (1979)
Senses of Responsibility (1979)
The Occurrence of Tune (1981)
Stigma (1981)
Resistance (1983)
The Absent Father in ‘Dumbo’ (1990)
Residual Rubbernecking (1995)

The title of Sun & Moon’s collection of Charles Bernstein’s poetry, ‘Republics of Reality,’ suggests a governmental, or at the very least, a politicized space. What is the political agent in poetry? Does it also possess an aesthetic value? But then, we must consider the perimeters of a space, both its content and boundaries. A space may be defined by its possibilities, just as it may be marked by what is disavowed. What is the role of the poet in the politicized space, in the republic of a sequestered or mandated reality? ‘Republics of Reality’ collects eight rare & out of print chapbooks spanning over twenty years in the career of poet and critic Charles Bernstein, in addition to a new selection of poems called ‘Residual Rubbernecking’ – that’s a lot of space to cover.

Now, the book isn’t a Collected Poems. We aren’t getting a definitive statement or anything of the kind; Charles Bernstein is very much a living writer and he continues to publish invigorating work in a variety of fields. Instead, this is a published progression, an account focusing on Bernstein’s poetry directly prior and concurrent with his influential work as editor with Bruce Andrews on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, but extending well into the nineties. The book retains an imaginative focus despite its giddy predilection for swerves and digressions. This is an exploratory text. Bernstein is a voluminous writer, his work comprises both poetry and critical theory, and in seminal pieces such as ‘the Artifice of Absorption’ he has questioned the distinction between the two, effacing a generosity of genre. Over the course of his career, Bernstein has persuasively arguing that a poetics that isn’t itself poetry can be of much worth, just as the assumption that a poem must be illuminated by a third party does a disservice to everyone. Bernstein’s body of work can’t be neatly collected into a single volume or under an encompassing header; instead we have in ‘Republics of Reality’ a book that invites the reader to consider how the perimeters of form and language shift and expand.

Considering the large span of time covered, these poems do not convey or investigate the life of the poet as much as they comprise a life. They become in a sense a lived thing. Bernstein writes “…the things that are really valuable don’t/ so much happen as you experience them/ in the actual present/ a lot of what I experience/ is a sense of space/ & vacant space at that…” Here we return to space, but it is an absence, rather than a geographic space. Bernstein argues for an exploratory space within poetry, a region of possibility instead of a sequestering of form. He notes that “…when I do feel almost best/ is when I don’t care/ whether they make me feel good/ whether they have any relation to me/ that’s a very pleasant/ that’s a real feeling of value/ in the present moment/ to just sit & do nothing/ & that’s what writing is for me a lot/ or just sitting/ sometimes when I/ I sit in my office/ with my eyes closed/ on my chair/ & let my mind wander/ there’s a certain sense of not caring/ & letting it just go by…” He concedes there is “…something/ in/ the/ actual/ experiencing/ of/ it/ that does seem/ vacant/ in the way a lot/ is vacant/ but also/ the way/ yeah/ okay/ new mexico/ is/ vacant.” Bernstein uses ‘vacant’ to convey a sense of ‘space,’ but it is the absence of a space – that is, again we return to possibility. It is within these vacancies, such as when Bernstein just sits and allows his mind to wander, that confluences and adjacencies occur beyond a notion of worth or value. There is a potentiality, instead of a product.

Bernstein, a one-time student of philosophy, playfully picks at Plato’s notion of an encompassing republic – a governing body in which the poet is quarantined and censored as danger or licentious. Within the wide breadth of these poems, we see Bernstein as the skeptical, yet bemused sophist. He does not envision a sanctified republic, but the possibility of republics – there is a pluralism of reality. Reference to truth or a Socratic inalienability is dismissed, and we reproach a core in the language, as “…love of language – the hum – the huhuman- excludes its reduction to a scientifically managed system of reference in which all is expediency and truth is nowhere. Schooled and reschooled. The core is neither soft or hard. It’s not the supposed referent that has that truth. Words themselves. The particulars of the language and not, note, the ‘depth structures’ that ‘underlie’ ‘all languages’ require the attention of that which is neither incidentally or accidentally related to the world. It’s sweet enough. Not mere grids of possible words, as if truth were some kind of kicking boy, a form of rhetoric.” Poetry cannot be reduced to an economic function, but is instead an opening up of a wider field.

Elsewhere, Bernstein writes of “the sight of the ocean implying all kinds of knowledge.” There is a limitless to this space without boundary, to the consistency of change within the ocean as observed by Bernstein. But such a statement doesn’t consider the ocean as a resource – not in the sense that it can be mined for knowledge; that an economy of wisdom can be fished out like a sunken tanker or pirate doubloons. We should note that the sight of the ocean “implies” knowledge, instead of containing it. Bernstein’s poetry implies, or suggests meaning, while denying the desire to codify. We read the ghost images of a sense, with “each part passing away in a look.”

Charles Bernstein

In a poem such as ‘the Taste is What Counts,’ Bernstein locks onto, slantwise, the persistencies of sense, as “consciousness solitary in the way it insists on forming signs, hovering above an event, constituting and reconstituting its meaning… the signs constructed by the borders projected by a language hover in actuality around the crisses and crosses obediently answering to my expectations.” These poems flaunt the geographic limit of meaning, as “the boundaries perceivable in a form attended on both sides by a border within which limitlessness lives, hung as a press of confusion. I in boundary, the very hum of it.” Plato’s walled republic bursts with its confluence – its winding arcades and dark verandas of recompense and diversion.

The later poems of ‘the Absent Father in ‘Dumbo’ and ‘Residual Rubbernecking’ skirt a sort of shadow sense. The Bernstein of ‘Have Pen, Will Travel’ retorts that “It’s not my/ business to describe/ anything. The only/ retort is the/ discharge of/ words… transport into/ that nether that/ refuses measure.” But there is a musical cadence and a philosophical ghost of meaning that betrays his appreciation of poets such as Swineburne. The humor and sidereal associative vaudeville of this more recent work calls to mind John Ashbery. Bernstein strikes upon beauty in lines such as “a soul is an imaginary thing we bestow on what we love,” but he also finds it in conflagrations of sense more willfully indeterminate or disruptive. Take “the Vanishing of Aporia,” where the cadence of musical verse hiccups and decays: “Slowly as advent/ Fixed as the mad/ Poltergeist reflects/ Contagion at an/ Unknown, unapplied/ Exposure, where/ Willing as charms/ Glide to attention/ When only invention/ Keep the.”

While the individual poems herein often imply the fluencies of meaning, “Republics of Reality” as a book provides only the implication of Charles Bernstein’s wide body of work. The chapbooks assembled here are often startling in their brilliance, from the leap-frogging of sentence-length banalities in “Parsing” to the “Poetic Justice’s” didactic opacity and the musical lyricism of the more recent material. Yet this work only implies the riches available elsewhere in Charles Bernstein’s oeuvre – whether it be the poetry of ‘the Sophist’ or ‘With Strings,’ the essays of ‘Content’s Dream’ and ‘A Poetics,’ as well as Bernstein’s continued work towards the formation of a poetic community, whether through reading series or within academia at SUNY Buffalo and the University of Pennsylvania.

This is a book warranted its diversities.

The History of the Runestaff

2009-11-29T21:15:00.000-08:00

by Michael Moorcock

I: The Jewel in the Skull
II: The Mad God’s Amulet
III: The Sword of the Dawn
IV: The Secret of the Runestaff

And there’s the question of format. Not just what to read, but what edition to read; which configuration of a particular text is the most suited to that work’s purpose, while also serving the reader’s specific needs or expectations. Remember, a book is an object - that makes it both a product and a talisman. This is an aura that assimilates both the commercial utility and unit-based functionality of a book with a more ineffable creative quandary. It’s not a question or x or y, but of a point along an x-y axis. This aura is modified by the oftentimes disposability of many commercial products. But what happens when we take a book whose identity, its aura, is stable, something that falls safely within ‘the canon?’ Mark Twain’s ‘the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’ for instance? Now, how do we approach ‘Huckleberry Finn’ when read in a hardback Library of America edition, nestled in-between ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson,’ and ‘Life on the Mississippi?’ Or, how do we read the same text couched in a lovely, modern cover by an illustrator by Lilli Carre? or marketed as a juvenile classic? Here we see, if not the disposability of a book as a commercial product, but of its chimerical shift. This is a book, one possessing a through-line that reaches straight back to its initial publishing date, and its identity continues to accumulate alongside a multitude of formats.

The Jewel in the Skull

But I don’t want to talk about Mark Twain. I want to talk about pulp science fiction – a naked man with a black jewel encrusted in his forehead lopping off the tentacle of a giant lizard lurching out of a pool of sacrificial blood. Of course, what I want to talk about is Michael Moorcock, and his multi-volume ‘History of the Runestaff.’ Anyone looking to delve into Moorcock’s prodigious body of work is going to hit a wall – and it’s a wall erected by, yep, formatting. Look at sprawl of Moorcock’s work – countless short stories, novels and multi-volume sequences. Not only do novels link together to form larger narratives, such as the case with the individual books of the ‘History of the Runestaff,’ but also entire sequences retell or reimagine other sequences in separate genres involving completely different settings and characters. But whereas a bona-fide ‘classic’ by Mark Twain won’t go out of print anytime soon, Moorcock’s novels are constantly falling back into and out of print every couple years, constituting yet another cycle outside the cyclical narrative of the books themselves. So, we must content with multiple editions of the same book, sometimes compiled into multi-book omnibuses and occasionally even with revised text.

The Realm of the Runestaff

There can be no definitive edition of a Moorcock novel, instead, we are confronted with manifestations, each constituting a link in a larger chain. Each edition has its own, peculiar resonances, and the novels themselves accumulate connotations. We experience Hawkmoon as a series of slim DAW paperbacks on the racks at a grocery store in the sixties, or we come across a hefty omnibus put out by White Wolf Books in the mid-nineties. Maybe we even read the graphic novel published by First Comics in the late-eighties. There is a depth to the book outside of the text itself. This is true to any book, but I would argue this is particularly true for mediums such as speculative fiction as well as poetry wherein books are constantly reformatted and republished. Within a field such as SF or poetry, we are confronted with the narrative of the object assimilated alongside the text.

The pulp format is a brilliant one; it is both modular and disposable and allows a great margin for spontaneity. Moorcock wrote each of ‘the History of the Runestaff’s’ four slim novels in roughly a weekend. He utilizes rough pulp tropes as a springboard for his wild steampunk inventions and alien architecture. The plot is a rote adventure epic on an “…Earth that has grown old, its landscapes mellowing and showing signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner of a man in his last years.” There’s a fuzzy reality to everything, Moorcock’s willing to stretch credibility if it the creative payoff is worth it – but more importantly, Moorcock never sacrifices the creative integrity of the narrative, even as he sojourns into irreality. The original format of these books, running about two hundred pages each, suggest to the reader how they should be read. Each book is perfect for an afternoon. They were written quickly, and should ideally be consumed quickly.

The Mad God's Amulet

Moorcock inverts the WWII relationship between the British and the Germans, as the novels’ protagonist, Dorian Hawkmoon, is a noble Germanic lord fighting the despotic Granbretan Empire. The Dark Empire, as they have been called, has sent out their nightmarish legions to topple nations, not so much out of political ambition as out of decadent boredom. The armies are separated into orders, each one designated by garish beast-masks. The narrative bends and swerves to allow for breathtaking visual tableaux. Moorcock is one of the few SF novelists whose imaginative prose matches the psychedelic covers adorning his book jackets.

Hawkmoon himself is a rather dull hero, with none of the genocidal angst of Erekose or brooding drug addiction of Elric. Instead, Hawkmoon is relatively simple-minded, primarily concerned with returning to his beloved, Yisselda of the Kamarg, and oftentimes ignoring the wider significance of his actions. The books follow a conventional adventure plot, as Hawkmoon travels to strange cities and accumulates bizarre relics, such as the Red Amulet, the Sword of the Dawn, and eventually the Runestaff itself. But the dullness of Hawkmoon himself is rarely an issue, as Moorcock surrounds him with fascinating companions, such as the diminutive beast-man, Oladahn and the foppish D’Averc. Moorcock never hesitates to move beyond the scope of Hawkmoon himself. The first forty pages of the entire saga follow Count Brass, the Lord Guardian of the beleaguered Kamarg, and later on in the series Moorcock takes extended breaks from the central narrative to further explore the streets of Londra, the baroque capital of the Dark Empire.

The Sword of the Dawn

The saga’s chief antagonist, Baron Meliadus, Grand Constable of the Order of the Wolf, is an intriguing character for all of his unrepentant cruelty. As I’ve discussed in a prior post, Moorcock’s late-sixties Eternal Champion novels excelled at their mix of grotesque imagery and adolescent brooding. While Hawkmoon himself is regrettably bland, Meliadus and the Countess Flana, last surviving blood relative of Huon the King-Emperor, provide an ample amount of angst and pathos in the second half of the series. Huon himself is one of the saga’s highlights – a thousand-year old immortal who floats in a black globe and speaks with the voice of a murdered child. And while Moorcock falls dangerously close to preciousness, I personally enjoyed the encrypted names of his fellow SF writers in the Granbretan’s divine pantheon – Bjrin Adass (Brian Aldiss), the Singing God, and Jeajee Blad (JG Ballard), the Groaning God.

An illustration from James Cawthorn's graphic novel adaptation of 'the Jewel in the Skull.'

But the novels ultimately derive their kinetic energy from the spontaneity of the narrative. Moorcock always maintains a fine economy of prose – he never lingers needlessly on detail, and instead moves along to the next delirious encounter. And that is where we return to format. A walk down the SF & Fantasy aisle of a Barnes & Noble will reveal hefty, 600+ plus page books, themselves only entries in endless fantasy series. The efficiency of Moorcock’s prose is that it never lingers, but allows the book to experiment with successive tableaux. Consider the novel’s final battle, in which almost all of the series’ characters are butchered in dry, unspectacular prose and with little sentiment – they are slaughtered in battle, both heroes and scoundrels. It’s this refusal to fall prey to the easy pomp of heroic fiction, and instead to linger on its ambivalences and tragedy, that causes these books to remain as exciting as they are. A reader who isn’t already engaged with the tropes and traditions of the genre will probably find little to excite them here. The pleasure of early Moorcock is how he flaunts genre but how he works within it. But then again, there is the fetish of genre.

The Silver Warriors

2009-11-12T21:10:00.000-08:00

by Michael Moorcock

Some houses hold secret chambers, accessible only via hidden corridors and locked doors. We assume such a place is fantastic simply on account of its concealment, but both the banal and the occult can be obscured from the public eye. Assume, for instance, that a hidden chamber contains a bookshelf whose duplicate rests in the building’s main concourse. Does concealment alter the functionality of an object? Does it affect its very nature? Shelves do not remain bare for long; we put books on them.

Science fiction has traditionally been seen as just such a secret chamber, entry to which requires an appropriately arcane code or key. But that was then… To a large extent, science fiction has broken out of the ghetto it languished in for the greater part of the previous century. Major studios bank on the spectacle of Sci-Fi blockbusters, while writers such as JG Ballard and William Gibson have migrated from the archipelago of genre fiction to the vast continent of mainstream, ‘literary’ fiction. But a broad acceptance of the genre is a different thing than fluency in its dialect. For instance, take “the Silver Warriors,” a 1973 novel by influential writer and editor of the seminal New Worlds literary journal, Michael Moorcock. Also published as “the Phoenix in Obsidian,” the book is very much a hidden chamber. The reader must descend multiple stairwells and through numerous ever-narrowing corridors in order to reach the peculiar space “the Silver Warriors” unashamedly occupies. This is a remarkably self-conscious pulp novel and therein lays its strengths. But what exactly is “the Silver Warriors” about?

The Mayflower edition, known as 'Phoenix in Obsidian.'

This is a fairly standard pulp adventure novel, albeit one with a fair share of bizarre, psychedelic touches. The book is immersed not only in broader pulp conventions, but also the baroque intricacies of Moorcock’s own personal mythologies. The brawny Frank Franzetta painted cover sums up the content of “the Silver Warriors” pretty well, despite obscuring the sophistication and self-awareness also at play. The image, as shown above, is of a muscled warrior brandishing a black sword as he rides an ice sleigh drawn by four polar bears. Most readers would either be turned off by such a pure pulp image, or succumb to the kitsch of it, and in the process underestimate the book.

Michael Moorcock is famous amongst most fantasy and science fiction readers today due to his creation of the morose anti-hero, Elric the Albino. Elric, with his soul-sapping black blade, Stormbringer, is a foundational figure in much of the so-called ‘dark fantasy’ that rose out of the early seventies. Moorcock’s ingenious move was to invert the cliché of the stoic, self-assured adventure hero. Elric was a brooding, Byronic figure, consumed by inner weakness and as plagued by what he’s done as what he has not done – not exactly the muscled man of action familiar to pulp readers. To this gloomy, melodramatic template Moorcock added timely psychedelic trappings – Elric in many ways resembled a spidery rock star such as Mick Jagger or David Bowie, and the albino swordsman also wrestled with a psych-devouring drug problem. This should be no surprise, as Moorcock also provided lyrics for and performed with the legendary space rock group Hawkwind.

Michael Moorcock & the Deep Fix, a rock group formed between Moorcock and tangential members of the Hawkwind family.

But Elric is only one emanation of the Eternal Champion, a faux-Joseph Campbell meta-myth conceit that Moorcock has used throughout his career to tie much of his voluminous adventure fiction together. This weaves most of his fiction into, if not quite a super-narrative, then very much a superstructure, onto which he grafts heroic sword-and-sorcery, proto-steampunk and psychedelic sex-spy capers. The Eternal Champion is an archetypal template Moorcock propels through a larger multiverse (a term which has since garnered considerable cache, but which Moorcock himself originated) in a war between oftentimes-unseen forces of Chaos and Order.

“The Silver Warriors,” despite it being said nowhere on the book jacket, is actually the second novel in the John Daker trilogy. While the adventures of Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon and other heroes exist very much as their own independent epics, gaining additional pathos and weight due to their connection to a larger mythos, the John Daker books reside at the nexus of Moorcock’s meta-narrative. This leaves the Daker books somewhat dependent upon the larger continuity and makes the novel difficult for those not already familiar with Moorcock’s cosmology; it also contributes to the unevenness of the book. While most of Moorcock’s epic cycles, in particular the heroic romance of Hawkmoon, only gradually integrate bridges to the larger Eternal Champion narrative into their stories, the John Daker books make blunt and frequent reference to key components of the cosmology – the Chalice, the Black Sword, Tanelorn, the Lords of Chaos and Order, the inter-dimensional Conjunctions, and even the dwarf Jermays the Crooked are all mentioned herein.

A reader would be forgiven for thinking that Moorcock is simply hitting the requisite marks in this particular novel. It certainly is a breezy book, with sharp, unadorned prose and an economic plot that does not so much climax as abruptly end. The prolific Moorcock was renowned in his pulp heyday for churning out an endless stream of novel after novel – he has mentioned in interviews that he often wrote a lean science fiction book over about three days. I have no doubt “the Silver Warriors” 220 pages were completed under such a deadline, and while this does leave the book in rough shape, it also lends it a spontaneity that appeals to me. Hawkwind, the rock band with which Moorcock collaborated, were notorious for their consumption of speed, and in similar, the Moorcock novels of the late-sixties and early-seventies read very much as amphetamine science fiction. These are books of a heady, contagious vitality, full of wild gore and mad ideas.

From "The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell," an original John Daker graphic novel on which Michael Moorcock collaborated with the great Howard Chaykin.

Moorcock assembles a heady collision of a variety of half-baked pulp and science fiction tropes, and trots them out with verve and wit. The novel opens as Erekose, the identity John Daker assumed after being torn from his native plane and placed in a foreign dimension, reposes in peace with his wife Ermizhad. Ermizhad is a princess of the Eldren, an ancient, elven species whom human sorcery initially drew Erekose to this plane by human sorcery in order to kill. But disgusted by the bigotry and cruelty of his human brothers, Erekose turned his blade upon his own species and led the Eldren in genocide against humanity. But even after his race is annihilated, Erekose is unable to find peace. He is ripped from the time streams following a bout of disturbing visions and is sent to a barren, dying earth where he is known as Urlik Skarsol of the Southern Ice. It is at this point in the novel that the scene occurs from which the cover image was drawn. And while he is referred to as Urlik from here on out, he retains his memories as Erekose, and to lesser extent as the unremarkable John Daker, and never gives up hope of reuniting with his bride.

Urlik spends a good portion of the novel sulking over his predicament, whether it is on the barren ice itself or within the decadent mountain chambers of Rowernarc. In this dying future, the spreading ice floes have driven the remnants of the human race underground to Rowernarc, where they await their extinction. Unaware of his purpose upon this plane, Urlik questions Rowernarc’s rulers, the ascetic Lord Temporal, Shanosfear, and the gluttonous Lord Spiritual, Bishop Belphig regarding any imminent dangers. Shanosfear pleads ambivalence to secular affairs, while the worldly decadence of Belphig hides more devious subterfuge. Eventually, Urlik comes to the conclusion that he must assist Sir Bladrak and the sea-pirates of the volcanic Scarlet Fjord in their campaign against the tall, silent Silver Warriors of the book’s title.

Though the book is somewhat slight, Moorcock manages to pack in some excellent moments. The feverish decadence of the citizens of Rowernarc is well executed; as Moorcock expertly manages to hint at the grotesquery they wallow in, futilely attempting to abate their boredom. Elsewhere, a naval battle against a mutant sea sow is one of the book’s highlights. And though this novel remains a minor one for its author, a disposable adventure such as “the Silver Warriors” isn’t necessarily a failure. In fact, the very disposable nature of the book is one of its more beguiling features. Moorcock is an accumulative writer – one only gets a decent grasp of his scope after having digested a good number of his novels and short stories. His books often function not as autonomous entities, but as permutations of a larger whole.

The late-sixties/early-seventies novels of Moorcock, such as “the Silver Warriors,” must also be seen within their cultural context. The adventures of Urlik Skarsol and the other itinerant incarnations of the Eternal Champion share much with the comics Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and a few others were creating over at the cramped New York City ‘bullpens’ of Marvel Comics. Like those sixties-era Marvel Comics, Moorcock’s pulp novels melded adolescent angst onto psychotropic fantasy and far-fetched adventure, investigated the anxiety and confusion of the pubescent, teenage male. Yet whereas Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s ‘Fantastic Four’ and ‘Spider-man’ retained their stodginess despite a remarkable vitality, Moorcock’s sword and sorcery epics had considerably more teeth. The Eternal Champion, manifest as Urlik Skarsol or otherwise, is the image of the frustrated male - confused of his body’s transformations as he wields his insatiable blade, a sword which has a life of its own and seems to leap out of its sheath at its own fruition.

Michael Moorcock

The early work of Michael Moorcock in these foundational Eternal Champion novels may not be as ostentatiously progressive as the work of his peers in New Worlds magazine such as Ballard, Thomas Disch, Norman Spinard and Brian Aldiss. Still, one must take a step back and view these novels within the pulp tradition. It is then that one gets a better grasp of just how potentially radical these at times crude paperbacks actually were. Or more appropriately, one must place books such as “the Silver Warriors” in the tradition of weird fiction as covered elsewhere on this site and seen elsewhere in the work of Lord Dunsany, E.E. Eddison and William Hope Hodgeson. The novel’s dying earth premise and the human sanctuary of Rowernarc remind one of Hodgeson’s “the Night Lands,” and much of Moorcock’s heroic romance can be traced back to Eddison and others such as Mervyn Peake. But whereas a writer such as Eddison proposed a regressive, conservative romance of a fabled past, Moorcock’s agenda was considerably more progressive – an aleatory, ambiguous fantasy world serving as a canvas for internal turmoil and philosophical investigation. Moorcock would later develop into a writer of deeper sophistication and stylistic prowess, but these ramshackle and rough early novels stand on their own as perversely weird adolescent transformation fables – peculiar and infuriating in their half-baked, pharmaceutical splendor.

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock, Volume 3, Books 8-10

2009-11-10T20:11:00.000-08:00

by Pat Mills (writer), with David Roach, John Hicklenton, Clint Langley, Henry Flint, Kevin O’Neill, & Carl Critchlow (artists)

Sometimes, it’s simply useless to read in order to find out ‘how it all ends.’ It’s easy enough to do that on the Internet; you can just go to wikipedia. In an age of soluble media, it’s a task in itself to resist the urge to peak ahead and find out what happens next in a story. A story is what is withheld. Reading to reach some ultimate conclusion misunderstands the process, and mind you, reading is first and foremost a process. We are involved in the process of discovering a moment as we capture it and in that moment loss it to its successor. It misrepresents reading to think of it either as a race to be finished, or worse, a menial task to be accomplished and then checked off a list. Yes, narrative exerts a pull over the reader, compelling them to its conclusion, but this is the cumulative death wish of narrative- the story’s lemming rush to the cliff’s edge. Narrative dies on the page, little deaths leading to that last, conclusive page – only to repeat its life if and when begun again.

I can’t imagine reading Pat Mills’ sprawling multi-book series, ‘Nemesis the Warlock,’ with an invested interest in seeing how it all works out. The series excels in the absurdity of the moment – its gory glory and dark humor. In fact, I didn’t even initially intend on reading the final chapters, books 8-10, as collected in “the Complete Nemesis the Warlock, Volume 3.” It was only after my friend recommended the phonebook on the strength of book 8, ‘Purity’s Story,’ that I ordered it online, after having read volumes 1 and 2 over six months ago. To its credit, the struggle between the despotic Torquemada, ruler of the Termight Empire, and his scourge, the chaotic alien menace, Nemesis, seems to cycle through time and space, never drawing closer to any conclusion as the participants change bodies, yet remain in spirit immanent and despicable in turn.

Torquemada by Henry Flint

‘Nemesis the Warlock’ had its origins at the dawn of the British sci-fi periodical ‘2000 A.D.’ back in the early eighties, and writer and co-creator Pat Mills finally ended the series at the close of the millennium in the pages of the same magazine. Mills and initial artist Kevin O’Neill established Nemesis as a protagonist ultimately unknowable in his motivations and alien psyche. He aids the alien resistance against the genocidal tyranny of the human Termight Empire, helmed by the bigoted evil of Torquemada. Over the course of volume 2, Torquemada was developed to the point that he arguably became the series’ protagonist. In the serial ‘Torquemada the God,’ we followed his quest for a bride, and even caught glimpses of a peculiar brand of marital bliss in short features like ‘Torquemada’s Second Honeymoon.’ While Nemesis was initially written in volume 1 serials such as ‘the Alien Alliance’ as a traditionally hard-bitten 2000 A.D. hero, in subsequent books his motives become far murkier. Nemesis’ allegiance to chaos magic is increasingly stressed, and as we moved deeper into the turgid psyche of Torquemada in storylines such as ‘the Two Torquemadas,’ Mills and co. consciously pulled back from Nemesis – what the reader had mistaken as a conventional hero in the early stories is revealed as something else entirely as the series progresses.

The first storyline in volume 3, ‘Purity’s Story,’ makes the moral ambivalence of Nemesis explicit. Purity Brown has assisted Nemesis from the early stories onward, a remarkable exception to 2000 A.D.’s reliance on muscled machismo. Purity acted as much as an in-story human liaison for Nemesis as well a sympathetic gate for the reader into the chilling alien nature of Nemesis himself – Purity humanized the cloven demon. With ‘Purity’s Story,’ Mills and artist David Roach sever the tether between the human freedom fighter and the series’ namesake. In this ‘untold tale,’ we learn that Nemesis basically coerced Purity to whore herself to Torquemada in order to gain a strategic advantage. This develops concurrent to a bloody rampage through the urban zones of Terra as the Mimesis, a mutant hybrid genetically engineered by Torquemada, wrecks havoc under the guise of Nemesis. In the climactic battle, Torquemada inadvertently lops off the head of the horned Mimesis as the demon and his human charge speed off to Nemesis’ lair in his bioorganic steed, the Blitzspear.

Art by David Roach from 'Purity's Story.'

Nemesis rushes Purity Brown off to the secret headquarters of Credo, the alien resistance movement “…sworn to overthrow Torquemada.” The headquarters is unimpressive, a vast amphitheater littered with garbage and other refuse. A massive termite mound rests in the middle of the great hall, and it should be noted that artist David Roach’s depiction greatly resembles a massive vulva. Nemesis complains that the he’s “…afraid [the headquarters are] looking a bit tidy at the moment.” Purity responds in disbelief, “tidy? It’s a tip?,” to which Nemesis admits “it will be after I’ve emptied out some of these filing cabinets…too much order offends me. Paper work, secret documents, tidiness are alien to me.” This is a wonderful moment, and as overt as Mills may play it, it’s a turning point in the greater narrative arc of the series – this moment broadcasts the series’ final milieu. Nemesis admits he “…quite likes things the way they are – with that psychopath Torquemada running the madhouse. When Purity incredulously charges Nemesis to treat the fate of innumerable lives, both human and alien, as trivial sport, a game, he agrees, revealing to her “…how exhilarated I felt when the Mimesis had me at its mercy. Can you imagine the boredom of being what you would call a god? A being capable to having anything he wants… Your planet – with its nightmare inhabitants – offers me excitement. It has the same fascination for me as this termite mound.” And when Purity Brown balks at Nemesis’ callous disregard, he magically eradicates her memories of the entire incident – he violates her mind as he allowed Torquemada to violate her body.

This dialogue is noteworthy not only because it signals a turning point in the narrative, and a telling character reveal for the series’ namesake, but also because it highlights Mills’ playful contempt for the conventions of the form. When Nemesis tells Purity he likes things as they are, the conflict between him and Torquemada remaining in some sort of stasis, he isn’t only speaking for himself. Nemesis is verbalizing the essential nature of so many of 2000 A.D’s heroes, from Judge Dredd to Strontium Dog down to Nikolai Dante. These heroes’ adventures accumulate, but they don’t necessarily progress through time to a final conflict. I admit 2000 A.D. does offer a more sophisticated character stasis than the mainstream American corporate heroes such as Batman or Spiderman, Judge Dredd ages for one, but the emphasis is on the momentism of the conflict, rather than its resolution. Essentially, this momentism remains 2000 A.D’s strength. A strip like ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ privileges the tension of the genre narrative – the illusion of story progress is in the end subservient to the absurdity and vitality of the moment. Remember, Alan Grant may have written the pathetic and useless death of mutant hit man Strontium Dog in the popular 2000 A.D. series of the same name, but that story has since been retconned out of existence and Strontium Dog is now alive and well.

Book 9, ‘Deathbringer,’ reunites Mills with artist John Hinckleton, who earlier handled ‘the Two Torquemadas.’ Like in their previous collaboration, Mills focuses on Torquemada, choosing to keep Hinckleton’s spindly Nemesis to the shadows as the two foes travel to an alternate reality England where mutant contamination from time-stream leakage has lead to an oppressive police state patrolled by the leather-clad Reapers. This entry makes the pointed leftist satire explicit, as Mills angrily takes Thatcher-era England to task. The mutant contamination is itself a thinly veiled stand-in for the AIDs epidemic. In this nightmare England, Torquemada sets up ‘OY,’ his organization for youth. He rallies his skinhead masses, proclaiming ‘OY! stands for opportunity for youth! Order for youth! Onward for youth! We say, ‘OY! Wake up, world! Before it’s too late! Before the aliens take over!” Mills runs with a delightful satire on Rock Against Communism and far-right punk xenophobia in general, as Torquemada’s followers burst into song: “We are OY boys, We ain’t dumb! We kick aliens just for fun! When we’ve nutted them, we ain’t done! Then we blast ‘em with our gun! ‘cos they like it and want more… then we start on the chainsaw!” While this entry does feel like filler, a short breather before the series’ conclusion, it allows Mills to stretch out the concepts one last time without the constraints of concluding the narrative. ‘Deathbringer’ is a mess, with both half-baked characters and muddy ideas, but that sort of confusion is one of the pleasures of the serial.

Art by John Hinckleton

‘The Final Conflict’ promises a resolution to the series in its title, but Mills seems to be attempting to convince not just the readers, but himself as well, of the story’s gravitas. The art by nineties’ 2000 A.D. regular Henry Flint is fine, a mix of Kevin O’Neill’s hyper-detailed caricature with a more cartoonish manga influence, but fails to deliver either O’Neill or Bryan Talbot’s claustrophobic density or Hinckleton’s unhinged sprawl. In ‘the Final Conflict’ we see Torquemada’s Termight Empire abruptly fall, and an alien/human coalition put in power. Purity Brown, since estranged from Nemesis, is elected to represent this new democracy.

The trial of the vanquished Torquemada should provide Mills with ample opportunity for satire and exaggerated humor. And in some regards, he doesn’t disappoint. I particularly enjoyed the exchange between Behell Junior and a reporter inquiring into “...the millions of extraterrestrials exterminated in the vaporization vats.” Behell replies, in a response familiar to anyone who’s been exposed to Holocaust-deniers, that “They weren’t vats! They were teleports! Torquemada was sending them back to their home planets!” But Mills fails to draw the potential returns from such a farce, and the series’ collapses in yet another lackluster battle between Nemesis and Torquemada. The throwaway gore and black humor of the volume’s back-up feature, “Nemesis and Deadlock in ‘the Engimass Variations,” succeeds where ‘the Final Conflict’ does not, mainly because it is not encumbered by any commitment to narrative closure.

Art by Henry Flint

And while the concluding stories in volume 3 of “the Complete Nemesis the Warlock” tidy up the narrative and brings it all to its logical conclusion, as Nemesis himself reminded Purity within the disorder of Credo Headquarters, chaos is it’s own virtue.

Oh, I'm sorry. It's 'khaos.'

Ballad of the Sad Cafe

2009-11-08T23:17:00.000-08:00

by Carson McCullers

The setting of “The Ballad of the Sad Café” is as much canvas as it is character, providing a fitting milieu of mud and mosquitoes for its dismal dissections of ruptured love and obsession. Carson McCullers, who burst onto the literary scene at twenty-three as something of a prodigy with her first novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” is a gifted stylist wonderfully suited to establishing mood. She tells us that “the town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where he workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long… the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world.” Retrospectively, there is quaintness to McCuller’s Southern Gothic flair – in late 2009 it is easier for us to envision such impoverished isolationism in the muddy Eastern Europe of Bela Tarr’s films than in our own backyards.

This isolationism manages to heighten the drama in “The Ballad of the Sad Café” as the narrative progresses to its dreary endpoint. McCullers fares less well in the more metropolitan short stories also included in this collection– “Wunderkind” or “A Domestic Dilemma,” with all their mannered pathos and hollow etiquette come across as little more than filler for the New Yorker. What these lesser stories share with the far-more successful “Ballad of the Sad Café” is a tortured repression. In the bottled high society of these short stories, another bottle offers a muddled reprieve. The jockey in the story of the same name, Emily in “A Domestic Dilemma,” and perhaps even Ferris in “the Sojourner” find a, a socially acceptable, or socially ignored, respite in alcoholism.

Alcohol also provides one of the few social outlets for the townspeople in McCuller’s “Ballad of the Sad Café.” Alcohol creates a community space, in the story it’s literally a physical space as the town has no other places set aside for social gatherings. When Miss Amelia first meets Cousin Lymon, the hunchback, she offers him and the nearby townsmen a drink. The novella, as much as it is an investigation of gender roles and the bond between the lover and the beloved, is lubricated by liquor. Miss Amelia distilled her own liquor, and “the whisky they drank that evening (two big bottles of it) is important. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for what followed. Perhaps without it there would never have been a café. For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward.” At Cousin Lymon’s insistence, Miss Amelia transforms the modest country store she had up to that point managed into a café, complete with a gaudy mechanical piano. This was an anomaly for a town so emotionally taciturn and repressed, and “the café itself proved profitable and was the only place of pleasure for many miles around.”

Carson McCullers

For four years Miss Amelia’s bar prospered, selling liquor, warm dinners and homespun medical attention. Despite, or perhaps aided by, Cousin Lymon’s grotesque eccentricities, the café offers the townspeople a public space in which to interact beyond the ken of everyday business transactions. In a story haunted by repression, both sexual and emotional, it is important that the narrative hinges upon alcohol, a substance that removes inhibitions and provides a temporary reprieve from repression of all sorts. But this sanctuary is inevitably demolished. Remember, the bleak townscape of the novella’s opening occurs after the events of the narrative have passed. It is in this barrenness that we catch our first glimpse of Miss Amelia, confined to her home, which “…looks completely deserted. Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window that is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams – sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief.” Miss Amelia is the center of the love triangle consuming the novella, and it is worth noting that she is here described as sexless.

This post-narrative Miss Amelia as we see in the story's introduction appears to have been neutered - rendered a sexless being. But at the beginning of the story proper, we are introduced an imposing, masculine figure. We learn that “Miss Amelia inherited the building from her father…” She has assumed the traditional role of the male son – the heir apparent. McCullers is not particularly subtle in her blurring of gender roles throughout, Miss Amelia “…was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man… [she] cared nothing for the love of men and was a solitary person.” On top of her outwardly masculine appearance, she assumes a very masculine control over her affairs, while her beloved, Cousin Lymon, preens and dallies.

Cousin Lymon is the second of the three main characters. If Lymon is not outwardly feminine, he is at least emasculated, in both his deformity and his buffoonery. He also assumes the traditionally feminine role of the beloved, as Miss Amelia adores him and he exploits this affection both extravagantly and with cruelty. And it is the exploitation attendant to love that McCullers is concerned with. She explains that “…love is a joint experience between two persons – but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love that has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this.” In this particular instance, Cousin Lymon is the beloved and Miss Amelia is the lover - the relationship is an exploitive one, but it is a self contained one; it involves two people.

Carson McCullers

The final element, that is, the disruptive element, is the return to town of Miss Amelia’s ex-husband, Marvin Macy. The hermetic relationship of lover to beloved is destroyed with the arrival of a third person. Marvin Macy is described as a despicable individual, “…when he was a boy, he had carried about with him the dried and salted ear of a man he had killed in a razor fight. He had chopped off the tails of squirrels in the pinewoods just to please his fancy, and in his left hip pocket he carried forbidden marijuana weed to tempt those who were discouraged and drawn toward death.” But Macy isn’t the ruin of Miss Amelia and the café of the title because he smokes grass or kills woodland creatures, but because he reorients the power structure of the lover and beloved.

Marvin is a menace because of his role as the lover and how he thwarts the concept of the beloved. While Marvin loved to the unresponsive and increasingly spiteful Miss Amelia, he himself is the beloved of Cousin Lymon. Pay attention to this description of Marvin prior to his short, violent marriage to Miss Amelia: Even though Marvin is described as “…the beloved of many females in the region – and there were at the time several young girls who were clean-haired and soft-eyed, with tender sweet little buttocks and charming ways. These gentle young girls he degraded and shamed. Then finally, at the age of twenty-two, this Marvin Macy chose Miss Amelia. That solitary, gangling, queer-eyed girl was the one he longed for. Nor did he want her because of her money, but solely out of love. and love changed Marvin Macy.” Which is the key to McCuller’s desperate novella.

Love proceeds to change Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy each in turn, but this change is not necessarily a positive one. While his love for Miss Amelia may have softened the young Macy, one thwarted, it warped him into a revenge-sodden killer. Love ultimately siphons all of Miss Amelia’s strength from her constitution, even going so far as leaving her a sexless husk by the end of the story. And if one could argue that Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy became malformed owing to the ruination of their affection, what is to be said of Cousin Lymon? While it is true that Macy subverts the hunchback’s love in order to destroy Miss Amelia, one could argue that even prior to the ex-convict’s arrival, Lymon was exploiting Miss Amelia out of opportunism and sadism. Exploitation and contempt become not just the results of shattered love, but also characteristics of love itself.

Reflections

2009-11-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

by Walter Benjamin

translated by Edmund Jephcott

Edited & w. an introduction by Peter Demetz

Preface by Leon Wieseltier

The writings of Walter Benjamin circumnavigate a vast and enigmatic continent – that of Benjamin himself. Or, a transverse hesitancy. Benjamin writes around the possibility of writing thought’s definition. This is a task even the great minds, and especially the great minds such as Benjamin, must attempt while never actually succeeding. This futility is integral to such a process. Benjamin writes in “A Berlin Chronicle” that “it is likely that no one ever masters anything in which he has not known impotence.” The struggle is itself a futility, and “…if you agree you will also see that this impotence comes not at the beginning of or before the struggle with the subject, but in the heart of it.” Or, it is the very heart of it. “Reflections,” a Peter Demetz-edited collection of assorted Benjamin writings makes good upon such a struggle. When philosopher Hannah Arendt compiled the earlier “Illuminations,” she provided an early entrance for English-speaking intellectual circles into the writings of the famed Frankfurt school thinker. And “Illuminations” is for the most part an easy entry-point, beginning with the affable “Unpacking My Library” and culminating in the brilliant “the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a text which even today we must contend with, both in its acuteness and its inaccuracies, to this day. This volume continues such a project, while admirably complicating it as well.

Both “Illuminations” and the considerably thicker “Reflections” include the same preface, written by Leon Wieseltier, who remembers “…in my own student days, not so long ago, [when Benjamin] was only an exciting rumor. It was the publication of “Illuminations,” and then a few years later of “Reflections,” these lovingly assembled and beautifully translated volumes, that confirmed the rumors. These were the books that brought the news.” And it is hard not to read a superstructure both within each individual volume and between the two. The lucid intelligence of “Illuminations” introduces us to a trenchantly relevant thinker, one who in both writing and in his life can be seen as both the last Romantic and an early vanguard of Modernism. The Benjamin of “Reflections” is much more difficult affair, composed of mystifying literary criticism along the lines of “Karl Kraus,” of which Kraus admits to not having understood what Benjamin had written about him, to the philosophical acumen and political vehemence of the “Critique of Violence,” and onto the vivid junctures of place and memory in “A Berlin Chronicle.” While “Illuminations” introduced the English reader to a series of well-light streets, “Reflections” takes us into the sprawl of alleyways and arcades beyond.

“A Berlin Chronicle” negotiates the shifting junctures between geography, memory and writing. Benjamin concedes to the sense of impotence in the face of memory’s attendant sprawl. The ‘Lived Berlin’ he writes towards is as much place as experience. He details “…the middle period of my life in Berlin, extending from the whole of my later childhood to my entrance to the university: a period of impotence before the city.” Benjamin celebrates his “…very poor sense of direction…,” an almost willful ignorance of the difference between left and right. But this apparent ineptitude to perform even the basic functions of walking uncovers the digressive wonder of Benjamin’s writing. Isn’t he telling us here the manner in which to read him? That we must proceed as Benjamin the flaneur does through Berlin? Aimless, yet rapt? He confides that “I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life – bios- geographically on a map.” A map, like memory itself, is a transitional thing, existing only as a fluctuation, and any attempt to capture it, to set it down on paper, provides us failed glimpses at a possible past. Cartographers do not make maps of Europe. They craft images of a European moment in history.

Benjamin considers the map as both a site of experience and of possibility, as he writes, “I have evolved a system of signs, and on the gray background of such maps they would make a colorful show if I clearly marked in the houses of my friends and girl friends, the assembly halls of various collectives, from the ‘debating chambers’ of the Youth Movement to the gathering places of the Communist youth, the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night, the decisive benches in the Tiergarten, the ways to different schools and the graves that I saw filled, the sites of prestigious cafes whose long-forgotten names daily crossed our lips…” This rolling, geographic recollection blurs both the private and the public spheres. We see a map as a potentiality – a series of maps laid on top of each other, intersecting and erasing each other as they are laid over one another. But how do we separate the debating chambers of the Youth Movement from the brothels Benjamin remembers from lost sexual escapades? Perhaps such a vision hints at the political nature of pedestrian life, just as it outlines the sexual proclivity in political action.

The endless flaneries of Benjamin, his aimless treks through Berlin’s streets, approach the veracity of how we experience memory – not because these walks explicate memory, but precisely because they mirror memory’s mystery. We become lost in both – as we must. Doesn’t this sound like William Bennett’s exhortation at the end of Whitehouse’s “Dumping the Fucking Rubbish” to become “…willing/ to feel that out of control…?” Losing oneself is contingent upon the apparent endlessness, both of the city and of memory. Benjamin points, as he so often does, especially in his more personal texts, to Proust. We are presented with an image of a fan, as “he who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch… from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.” Benjamin isn’t pleading us to stop to take in all the details, like some sentimental cliché, instead, he admits the overwhelming infinitude of these details.

Walter Benjamin

We must be open to the flood of details, due to their sheer immensity, as Benjamin writes “…of a space, of moments and discontinuities.” These moments are frontiers of experience. It is, ultimately, these frontiers, entire landscapes of boundaries, that Benjamin enters through his experience both as a flaneur, and perhaps more importantly, his writings about the flaneur. One is reminded not only of such obvious forbears as Baudelaire, but also of the Bruno Schultz of “the Street of Crocodiles,” who transforms the Polish city of Drogobych into a dream territory.

Benjamin sees linguistics as the encompassing entrance into such dreamlike borderlands. He notes “…the unfathomable mystery that certain words from the language of adults possess for children.” The intersection of linguistic wonder with geographic mystery enchants Benjamin as he remembers the garden on the Brauhausberg, because “to approach what it enfolds is almost impossible. These words that exist on the frontier between two linguistic regions, of children and of adults, are comparable to those of Mallarme’s poems, which the conflict between the poetic and profane word has as it were consumed and made evanescent, airy.” The city becomes a dictionary, not only as it is composed of both street signs and place names, but also as we must define it through our words. It becomes, then, the possibility of a sentence, as much as a possibility of a street or a shop.

Elsewhere in “Reflections,” Benjamin considers “the Destructive Character,” of which it is difficult not to draw analogies to the writer himself. Remember the shift inherent to the nexus of geography and memory in the earlier “A Berlin Chronicle.” Benjamin here tells us that “the destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. The tactics of the flaneur should also be applied to the consummate thinker in the 20th century, and which bears relevance as we enter a new century. Because “where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always positions himself at crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring.” The privileging of the moment again reminds me of my earlier post on William Bennett and Whitehouse. Bennett denies that Whitehouse seeks to “raise questions,” as he believes this is a flaccid concern of a hoary art establishment. The destructive character, likewise, does not necessarily annihilate so that something new may come, instead “what exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.” We must map the city because such a map reminds us that such a space cannot be charted. But to not even attempt to do so reduces the world to the vagrancies of a windowless room, smelling of urine and stale coffee.

Dumping the Fucking Rubbish

2009-10-30T07:48:00.000-07:00

Whitehouse's "Asceticists 2006" read in conjunction with Paul Hegarty's "Noise/Music: A History."

Philip Best, first from left. William Bennett, third from left.

William Bennett shouts into a mic, he points at the crowd with his free hand – accusatory, cynical, but most of all critical. Behind him, Philip Best gesticulates, arms spread wide and mouth agape. Bennett, as the founder and sole constant of Whitehouse, is a figurehead of the power electronics genre. He irritates and aggravates – a cross between a motivational speaker and a disciplinarian as he paces the stage, backlit by harsh lighting. There’s an exaggerated air of bombastic empowerment to the whole image as captured on the back cover of Whitehouse’s “Asceticists 2006.” Both men wear shades as they grimace and strike extravagant poses of masculine dominance. Are Whitehouse parodying, or unabashedly wallowing in the pomp of “rocking out?” Is Whitehouse actually promising that most hoary of rock clichés – transcendence through an ecstatic immersion in sound? Are the pumped fists and hooked “noise claws” of the audience an ironic mockery of the consumptive illusion of the rock concert, or has the skepticism of noise fallen into the restrictive boundaries of a genre? Is there a culture of noise? If so, what does it look like?

Noise/Music: A History by Paul Hegarty. An excellent study of the historical trajectory of noise music and well worth hunting down.

Culture, that is, a Hegelian history of affairs, is comprised of disruptions. The sound of history is one of noises – an inconsolable dissonance of failures woven into a fabric that must then be apprehended as a success. This cultural noise is the testing of a boundary, that boundary being the order indicated by culture itself. According to Paul Hegarty in his study “Noise/History,” this “noise is negative; it is unwanted, other, not something ordered. It is negatively defined –i.e. by what it is not (not acceptable sound, not music, not valid, not a message or a meaning), but it is also a negativity… it helps structure and define its opposite (the world of meaning, law, regulation, goodness, beauty, and so on…” Noise then, is the failure of Hegelian organization; there are excesses and irreconcilables, yet these must be contended with if history is to retain a shape. Noise as an intention, that is, the pushing of an avant-garde or ‘progressive’ artistic or intellectual endeavor to investigate the hinterlands beyond or more aptly outside sense, is bound to fail. Noise must fail, as it is subsumed into a view of history. Noise stabilizes our society as it is assimilated within it. This is potentially problematic from the perspective of noise itself. For example, Whitehouse’s “Asceticists 2006” is their 18th release – that positions it on a timeline. Whitehouse exist as an entity moving through time – that necessarily puts them within a context, even a community. “Asceticists 2006” becomes a linear point between their previous album, 2003’s “Birdseed,” and 2007’s “Racket.”

Writing about Whitehouse in the closing months of 2009 is not the same as writing about Whitehouse even so late as 1985. This is a historicizing at play which in the past may have seemed reportage – conveying facts. Bennett himself has avowed that the reception of the audience to Whitehouse then becomes just as integral to the art as the albums and live shows themselves. Does writing about Whitehouse simply aid in the canonization of thought around disruptive noise? Is noise neutered as it is written about? We now contend with not just the personal history of William Bennett and Whitehouse, but with that of the power electronics genre, a term Bennett himself coined in reference to the album, “Erector.” “Erector” in many ways stands as the first Whitehouse release of purpose. Whereas “Birthdeath Experience” and “Total Sex” made a strong, albeit sloppy, statement, it was with “Erector” that Bennett & co. began focusing in both intent and execution.

Erector

Ah, which proves my point, as even an entity as disruptive as Whitehouse finds itself locked into a history. But then, it would be misreading Whitehouse to assume their primary concern is to move or exist ‘outside’ a particular stricture. Bennett has described himself as “avowedly hostile to the orthodox academic model,” but he does not position himself outside of intellectual discourse. Instead, William Bennett and Whitehouse inhabit a fracture in declension. Whitehouse can be found in ‘place of,’ instead of ‘outside of’ a model. That is, Whitehouse exists as if it were music or art. Whitehouse takes the place of music – it occupies the same place as art or music. Does this, in fact, make it music? Can a thing occupy the same of a signifier without signifying the same?

Remember:

Cruise

What we see here is an invested interest in community and response. Again, I’ll return to Hegarty, who writes that “Noise is a phenomenology of noise, insofar as it exists in relation to individuals, who define themselves as being subject to noise (a community forms around the hearing of a house or car alarm). Certain types of noise are to do with the sounds of ‘other people’, and these are the ones that are most complicit with power…” Now, Hegarty in this instance is talking about the literal sounds of other people – your roommate always slamming their bedroom door late at night, the zydeco blasting from the upstairs apartment, the ice cream truck which circles endlessly around the block, but there is also another noise, it’s one of ‘other people.’ Community, and discourse itself, can be seen as a noise. Whitehouse may employ the shrill feedback of analog synthesizers, but the ‘noise’ component in their work is one of response. A sound in itself is not necessarily noise, this categorization hinges on its deployment.

Whitehouse ‘provokes,’ but they do so in a manner removed from punk potty-mouths like GG Allin or the Meatmen, or latter-day power electronics practitioners such as Macronympha or Grey Wolves. Which is not a creative judgment, I personally enjoy listening to Grey Wolves; it is only a distinction of placement. The accusations and discomfort, both sonic and lyric-derived, of Whitehouse involve response in order to position the band’s output in the place of art while being something else. The response is meant to confound expectations, not to ‘raise questions,’ but to inhibit the very ability to ask them. There is a deliberateness in William Bennett labeling himself an ‘Animal Response Technician’ within the booklet to “Racket,” the latest Whitehouse release.

Consumer Electronics at No Fun Fest 2008. Philip Best (right) w. Dominick Fernow (Prurient)

But we must here return to the rock bombast hinted at on the back cover of “Asceticists 2006.” Now, we will listen closer to that album’s mix of pummeling digital beats and didactic screed. In an era where noise has been normalized as a genre and can now be curated, or is that corralled, into events such as No Fun Fest, what prevents Whitehouse from simply becoming noisy music? Look at the youtube clips of Philip Best performing as Consumer Electronics at the 2008 No Fun Fest, replete with bombastic noise claws and sweaty-machismo glorification. What’s going on here? Is Philip Best simply giving the audience what they want? Not just what they want, but what they expect? One could almost confuse Best for a rock star. . On the early track, ‘Rock n Roll,’ Bennett taunts the listener, asking, “do you believe in rock n roll?” It does not seem likely that he has had a turn about in the intervening years; it is much more likely that the context that surrounds him and Whitehouse has changed.

Before we continue, lets go back and look at the accompanying booklet to the Susan Lawly reissue of the 1985 album, “Great White Death.” Bennett & co. include excerpted reviews and a Q & A concerning a 1984 live show. One person writes that he “…thinks Non blows Whitehouse completely out of the room, down the street and up the hall. I mean those guys were so pretentious about their stance and their attitude and about what they were doing that to me it was meaningless, it wasn’t what they wanted, which was to scare people, or disturb people in the audience, they just bored people,…They didn’t walk out of the room because it blew them away or it made their ears bleed or anything else, it just bored them…” What is being misunderstood about Whitehouse, here, is that the intent is to ‘make the listener’s ears bleed,’ as would be the goal of noisy acts from Blue Cheer on down to Prurient. Instead, Whitehouse aim to exist in a state of contention, whether it is through moral disgust, or when that becomes acclimated, boredom or irritation. It is also important to note how Whitehouse presents this information without any explicit commentary. Negative reviews of a Whitehouse performance are printed alongside lyrics like “this one’s dedicated to Chuck Traynor/ I’m comin’ up your ass/ I’m so bored with your cunt/ you won’t like it, sugar/ I’m comin’ up your ass/ try and be grateful…” No attempt is made to delineate between divergent information.

William Bennett took a substantial hiatus from Whitehouse following the release of ‘Great White Death,’ sincerely believing that with that release he had done as much as he could with the project. In a sense, he was correct, as with “Great White Death” Bennett solidified the mixture of declamatory recitation and harsh, pulsing electronics that would dominate his subsequent output. The austerity of “New Britain” and “Buchenwald” was to give way to a more complicated, though no less controversial tableau. Philip Best assisted Bennett on the next release, 1990’s “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” adding his barked rants to the analog synth pulses of Bennett and Peter Sotos. Through the final, Steve Albini-recorded analog releases and into the initial Trevor Brown-illustrated forays in digital sound, Whitehouse moved further and further away from the straightforward serial killer soundscapes of “Dedicated to Peter Kurten” and to a new place where, as Hegarty writes, “…the shocking elements are not necessarily where we expect them, so neither is the ‘noise.” What exactly does one expect out of a Whitehouse release?

The packaging of each Whitehouse release is impeccably designed. But what’s the point? The nature of Whitehouse is that each subsequent release is the ‘quintessential’ Whitehouse product, rendering past endeavors obsolete. Whitehouse does not only question the utility of conventional rock protest, but that of Whitehouse itself. Throbbing Gristle may have attempted to release substandard product to mock the spectacle of commodification, but it is actually Whitehouse’s finely designed releases that truly mock the concept of consumption. These are impeccable products, and they’re destined to become obsolete.

Quality Time

Latter-day Whitehouse expertly navigates such notions. An argument could be made that the environment in which Whitehouse produced work had become more interesting, thus allowing Whitehouse to create more interesting work. The terrain of Industrial and noise music had shifted in the interim between “Great White Death” and “Thank Your Lucky Stars.” As Graeme Revell of Industrial pioneers SPK recently noted, noise has transformed from a music of refusal to one of acceptance. It has been codified into a specific product – a boutique market. Whitehouse in 1990 found themselves the progenitors of a genre they didn’t want anything to do with. From “Thank Your Lucky Stars” to “Cruise” we see a distinct arc as lyrical purpose and digital acumen is investigated and perfected. A strong case could be made for the two early 2000s albums, “Cruise” and “Birdseed,” as the group’s artistic zenith.

These are invigorating, caustic releases. Tracks like “Cruise (Force the Truth)” and “Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel” marry punishing digital beats with expertly barked diatribes attacking psychoanalysis and post-New Age self worth with vitriolic aplomb. These albums also find William Bennett embracing the African tribal influences first seen on the “Extreme Music from Africa” release (which while not attributed to Whitehouse, is rumored to have been produced entirely by Bennett). Band member Peter Sotos takes the child molestation and rape fantasies common to power electronics and positions them beyond any concern for genre or craft, as he splices sensational excerpts from local news and Geraldo into bleak ten-plus minute tracks such as “Public” and “Bird Seed.” A track like “Public” does not aspire towards any semblance of art, sharing much more of an affinity with the functionality of pornography. Like pornography, “Public” or the earlier “Private” from “Mummy and Daddy” can be entered and exited at arbitrary points. The entire track becomes an erogenous zone. These late period albums push the Whitehouse template, and with it the bedrock of power electronics itself, to another phenomenological end point. We find ourselves not just at some facile horizon of ‘good taste,’ but at a paradoxical conceptual dead end. But rather than render Whitehouse inert, this seems to propel Bennett, Best and Sotos onward.

“Cruise” is a ‘good’ power electronics album, so is “Bird Seed” a ‘better’ one, because it follows “Cruise?” The almost interchangeable nature of these two releases, compounded by their short running times, questions the autonomy of each record. Perversely, these albums were also released during the brief surfacing in the early noughties music press of noise, propelled by the visibility of acts such as Black Dice, Lightning Bolt and the Load Records roster. So are we to view “Cruise” and “Bird Seed” as a creative peak for the project? Wouldn’t such a critical judgment attribute similar artistic intentions to Whitehouse as that of a more conventionally minded ‘rock’ group? Misreading the group as some raincoat collective of sweaty-palmed perverts brings one to a dismal creative block, one occupied by pale, pig-minded imitators like Black Leather Jesus and Deathpile – ‘rock music,’ but only more so, louder, denser and viler. Is this what Whitehouse is about?

Maybe this vision of excess can be applied to Japanese noise such as Masonna or Merzbow. Hegarty observes that many Japanese noise musicians “…see themselves as carrying on the project of rock, jazz, or both, with many citing King Crimson and Black Sabbath as key influences.” Whitehouse and similar minded projects-Sutcliffe Jugend, the Sodality, Ramleh and the Broken Flag label of artists, as well as early Maurizio Bianchi, do not fit within that mold. These artists are involved in what SPK and Maurizio Bianchi have termed the ‘decomposition’ of sound, rather than its explosion in bombast and excess. But with propulsive numbers such as “Why You Never Became a Dancer,” Whitehouse positions themselves as the fist-pumping figureheads for a displaced male violence. Is William Bennett really vindicating such self-congratulatory displays of self-delusion?

Buyer's Market. Peter Sotos' solo album is a curious release. It is composed entirely of audio collages of sexual molestation victims along the line of tracks such as "Public," "Private," and "Bird Seed."

I would argue that something much more complicated is going on here. If the two previously mentioned Whitehouse releases can be said to ‘define’ the noise genre in the early-noughties, then “Asceticists 2006” refutes the genre and its expectations. What we have is in many ways a negation of the clichés and tired postures of the noise genre that claims Whitehouse as inspiration. Between 2003’s “Bird Seed” and “Asceticists 2006,” third member Peter Sotos had been expelled from the group. This bears consideration. Sotos is an incredibly important figure within the power electronics community even outside of his contributions to Whitehouse. He first came to prominence for publishing the child pornography fanzine, Pure, and gained further notoriety as the author of a series of books that can only nominally be termed crime novels. Peter Sotos can be viewed as an even more elemental figure within the power electronics community than his former bandmates. Bennett and Best both position themselves as critical intellectuals opposed to hypocrisies within the present modes of discourse, rather than the apparatus of discourse itself.

Asceticists 2006

On “Asceticists 2006,” Whitehouse has been pared down to the sympathetic duo of Best and Bennett, and much of the album can be read as an attack on Sotos, and therewith, a certain breed of ‘noise’ connoisseur whom Sotos typifies. The Best-recited vocal tracks in particular seem to mull over a Sotos-type; “Ruthless Babysitting” is unremitting in its bluntness. Best screeches how he’ll “…give you fucking honest/ your favourite movie: the War Zone/ favourite album covers/ :Virgin Killer, Houses of the Holy, U2 Boy/ favourite photographer: Dodgson/ favourite artists: Balthus, Remarko/ :anything with a kid in it/ favourite Google search/ :Russian orphanage/ :ruthless babysitting/ :elite gymnastics…” The boutique obsessions of the noise aficionado are ridiculed as cheap stabs at individuality. Impeccable taste is just another one of the false signifiers of identity Whitehouse dismantles. The cliché predilections of the ‘power electronics’ fan are insulted as Best barks “the leggy Burzum fan started it/ when she sent pictures of her tiny ass/ nestling snugly in a mini-bikini…” The accepted codifiers of worth and taste within the power electronics community are disseminated to useless trash. The Burzum fan is an empty signifier of good taste – Burzum himself, Varg Vikernes, represents a bombastic, but ultimately empty show of rebellion and violence. Empty actions.

There is a clear disconnect between the cultivated detritus of life and the source of self-worth, if such a thing even exists. Best dismisses “those exquisite books” accumulated over time, those “…Octavo editions of poets that sit still unread/ on the shelf by the bed/ for dreaming of who-the-fuck-knows-what.” This disconnect is one of empirical intent. Best’s vocals are for the most part composed of specific taunts and tirades against specific banalities. He attacks the limp mysticism so prevalent in British industrial culture, asking “what kind of wronged animal are you?/ And just how are you on/ : Remote viewing, crystal worship/ :Water divining, and other esoterica/ :the Vienna Boy’s Choir, pissing on Limahl/ :Intergenerational intimacy, bedwetting + web design…” Best diatribes are, significantly, ones of negation, as he eliminates the empty placeholders for value.

William Bennett’s vocal contributions lack the masculine bravura of Philip Best’s, but don’t loss any of the intensity or the high camp. The Best-dominated “Language Recovery” or “Ruthless Babysitting” speed towards an unapproachable horizon; but the promised climax never arrives. The tracks simply end in abrupt, almost arbitrary stops. Bennett-dominated tracks like “Guru” or “Killing Hurts Give You the Secrets” proceed at a slow burn; he is more concerned with abstractions, often intimating an ideal of some elemental source of self-hood, while ultimately admitting the predominance of artifice. Bennett delivers most of his lines in a throaty whisper far-removed from the shrill screeches of “Shitfun” from Whitehouse’s earlier release, “Erector.” He incredulously wonders at “the fact you still don’t know you know the fuck how it is/ the fuck how you lived, the fuck how you’ll die/ so while you stare at your blank self/ from where I see it/ from up here/ it’s just the way it is/ just as that’s just the way it was…” These tracks reach for some core of truth, but can only get so far as negations of hypocrisy. Bennett promises “I’ll call your fucking bullshit/ just as I’ll turn your hate to sympathy/ just as I’ll fuck you so hard/ just as I’ll work you like fucking slavery… and if: you’re willing to work and create alters (sic)/ I’ll reach over/ take hold of the zip of your fucking parasite façade/ and pull it down so so so quickly/ strike so very fucking fast/ that a desperate tortured fragile soul of yours/ your tired slow tendered dissociated fucking core/ slides onto this floor…” Again, Bennett strikes towards a core, but the very idea collapses into a mockery.

By the time “Asceticists 2006” reaches its final track, “Dumping the Fucking Rubbish,” the very idea of the aggressive power electronics provocateur has been exaggerated into caricature. Best taunts the listener, asking “Do you think could you foster all that hate?/ Could you foster enough hate?,” bluntly mocking the supposed integrity of the violence inherent in the genre. Best utilizes the clichés of psychoanalysis both to trivialize the hyperbolic ‘transgression’ of power electronics, and the very futility of explaining away human behavior. He sneers, “Were your parents mean to you?” as if such an act could explain the complexities of human depravity and insecurity. The certainty and stability that power electronics promises for so many listeners, the inalienable right it imparts, is decimated by Phillip Best’s lyrics. But it is the final verse from William Bennett that clarifies this loss of control. He promises “you’re about to/ experience getting seriously fucked up/ and once you’re willing to/ feel that out of control/ dump the fucking rubbish/ rise up/ rise up/ kill this fucking nightmare/ that’s inside you.” The pathologies Whitehouse struggles against are those of control, and it is only that an acceptable of the lack of control that any worthwhile experience can occur.

The Complete Ro-Busters

2009-09-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

written by Pat Mills, illustrated by Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons, Mick McMahon, Kevin O’Neill & Bryan Talbot

For the past couple months I’ve been stopping by the Time Machine, a comic shop on 6th Avenue, down the block from a tanning saloon and across the street from a papaya joint. It’s on the second floor of a building whose first floor is apparently abandoned, and it’s easy enough to miss if you don’t know what to look for. The place is everything a comic shop should be – joyously disheveled and overwhelming in its unmanageable clutter. A certain degree of obsessiveness is required to appreciate the place. Ease and convenience simply isn’t the point. The sheer disorder and the maddening logic behind it all accentuate the experience of the collector. That is, one must appreciate the time and patience necessary to seek something out in order to get the most from such a shop. In the age of online shopping and blogs, one often wonders whether hole-in-the-wall places such as the Time Machine are still viable. I can, after all, acquire a complete run of any comic book from Amazon much more easily than by flipping through countless long boxes at various shops throughout the city. Which begs the question, why go to the trouble? The act itself, that is, the very gesture of collecting, is tantamount. As prone to snobbery and cultish materialism as the collector may be, the practice facilitates a sensitivity to place. That is, items become imbued with the aura of location – a particular record or first edition of a book of poetry becomes fixed to the spot of acquisition. Certain spots, then, acquire a glow all their own, accumulated through numerous visits on drizzly Thursday afternoons and hangover-clouded Sundays.

The Time Machine has become just such a place. Every week or so, I’ve rung the bell next to a rather unassuming door and climbed the creaky wooden steps to the second floor. On one of my first stops to the store, and completely on a whim, I picked up a back issue of the Francophile adult fantasy anthology Heavy Metal from the late 70s. I’ve been coming back for more every week since, moving through the late-seventies and into the early-eighties. For anyone only familiar with the bare-chested zebra women and Franzetta wet dreams of latter-day Heavy Metal, these early issues will serve as something of a revelation. Yes, you’ll still find your fair share of cheesecake and robust barbarian gore, but you’ll also find the stream-of-conscious oddity of Moebius’ ‘Airtight Garage’ serial and the baroque psychedelia of Phillipe Druillet. Even the beefy warriors of Richard Corben’s epic fantasies seem to carry a bit more satire and bemused self-awareness to them. These early issues subvert their hyper-adolescent gore and flesh extravagances while admitting there’s something inherently awesome in an intergalactic chess match played with massive interstellar spacecraft.

In its early years, the editors of the American Heavy Metal drew much of its material from the trailblazing French periodicals Metal Hurlant and Pilote. This work, spearheaded by the previously mentioned Moebius and Druillet, as well as others including Dick Matena, Enki Bilal, He, and Francois Schuiten, proved influential and far-reaching, inspiring artists in the American underground, Mexico and elsewhere. This intuitive and progressive French tradition could almost be deemed a continental tradition, as Eastern European and Italian creators such as Milo Manera were similarly implemental in the forging of an aesthetic identity. What, then, of Britain?

If Metal Hurlant and Pilote can be seen as a heady brew of May ’68 agitation, commercial design and 60’s head culture, then Britain’s premier anthology of progressive and esoteric comic serials, 2000 A.D., finds its genesis in Thatcher-era dissent, boy’s adventure periodicals such as Eagle and, perhaps most importantly, in punk rock. The transcendental stoner idealism of Metal Hurlant is nowhere to be found in 2000 A.D. The cynicism of strips such as the seminal Judge Dredd and Sam Slade, Robo-Hunter, therefore retain a relevance and a vitality which it is hard to see, 20-30 years hence, in the naïve, even to the point of arrogance, ‘us-vs.-the squares’ humor of Caza.

Where Heavy Metal has walked that fine line between subverting cheesecake exploitation and becoming exactly that, 2000 A.D. has been similarly problematic in terms of the boy’s adventure trope. 2000 A.D. has, at times, fallen pray to just such clichés, even to such an extent that writer Alan Moore and artist Ian Gibson felt impelled to satirize these conventions in their unfinished epic, ‘the Ballad of Halo Jones.’ But ‘Halo Jones’ was not, as its creators were quick to forget, so much a subversion of the 2000 A.D. tradition as a return to its foundation upon wild satire and hyperkinetic ideas. Which is, of course, where the great Pat Mills factors in. Mills is the co-founder and first editor of 2000 A.D., in addition to being the founder of the more politically iconoclastic Crisis magazine. Mills in many ways bridges between the gleeful cynicism and over-the-top satire of 2000 A.D. and the baroque surrealism of Francophile comics. John Wagner and Alan Grant’s Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog serials may have served as the backbone to the 2000 A.D. aesthetic, but Mills contributions to the magazine brought us many of its strangest and most vital series, including Nemesis the Warlock, Slaine the King, the A.B.C. Warriors and its antecedent, the slapstick-and-violence class comedy, the Ro-Busters.

The Ro-Busters didn’t begin serialization in 2000 A.D., but rather in its color spin-off, the short-lived Starlord. When Starlord folded, Pat Mills brought the Ro-Busters over to 2000 A.D. Aside from a practical switch from one periodical to another, this move to 2000 A.D. also brought a pronounced aesthetic shift in the serial, as it opened itself to more experimentation and willful oddity in its second half, as well as making explicit its class criticisms. What then, were the early Ro-Busters strips like? First off, the recent 2000 A.D. omnibus of ‘the Complete Ro-Busters’ does a great disservice to these early strips, which were originally printed in color, but assumably due to cost-restrictions are available here in sloppy black and white reproductions, many of them with a noticeable blur from the transfer. These early strips very much set the premise – that is, Hammerstein, a decommissioned military droid, and Ro-Jaws, a wise-cracking former sewage robot, are members of the Ro-Busters, a disaster crew composed of expendable, out-dated androids.

Part of the appeal of these clumsy early strips, dating from the late 70s, is to see Pat Mills and his artistic collaborators gain confidence in their approach. The first couple adventures are fairly rote, as the stoic Hammerstein and the acerbic Ro-Jaws battle humans infected with a murderous gas (as well as crocodiles!) in the bayou, stop a robot insurrection aboard an interstellar pleasurecraft and neutralize a nuclear device aboard a plane that has crashed into a skyscraper (!). The artwork by Pino is serviceable at best, though to be fair, something is lost in transferring color artwork to a black and white format. The shift from Starlord to 2000 A.D. roughly one-third through the omnibus is instantly apparent, as Mills is paired with artists such as a young Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon and the incomparable Kevin O’Neill. These 2000 A.D. strips find the Ro-Busters finally drawn by artists who can match the anarchic and violent slapstick of Pat Mills.

It is also apparent in these 2000 A.D. strips that Mills is growing tired on the initial premise, that of a disaster corps. of rescue robots. In ‘Hammer-stein’s War Memoirs’ and ‘Ro-Jaws’ Memoirs’ Mills pushes the stories beyond the rescue-and-recover formula and expands upon the implicit class criticism at the heart of so much of his work. The final story in particular, the fantastic ‘the Fall and Rise of Hammer-stein and Ro-Jaws,’ uses robot oppression to highlight many of the glaring injustices of Thatcher-era England. The oppression Mills attacks is not so much that of race, but that of labor-based class inequalities. At one point in the story, Ro-Jaws and Hammer-stein enter Oil-a-Go-Go, a robot bar with a house band fronted by Led-Belly. This makes a cursory connection between robot and race oppression. Indeed, the colonization of a gold planet by rogue robots also reminds one of the mid-century founding of the nation of Israel. Still, Mills only uses these beats to further imply the vast subjugation of the robots.

The robots plight can, ultimately, only be understood in reference to labor. Each robot is, in fact, completely defined by their job. Ro-Busters is littered with robots doomed to the scrap heap after they are no longer needed. The heart of the Ro-Busters serial is the Charlie sequence. Series stars Hammer-stein and Ro-Jaws are nowhere to be seen, as we follow Charlie, a massive robot build to steer ships to Northpool’s harbor. But as Northpool’s harbor begins to fail, Charlie is no longer necessary. A robot built for specialized labor is useless when the job it is build for is no longer needed. The contractors looking to renovate Northpool wish to move the lower-class human citizens out of the sun and into claustrophobic subterranean flats with deceptive names like ‘Cosy-Down Burrows’ and ‘Snuggle-Down Warrens.’ Though the contractors can’t kill the lower-class residents of Northpool outright, like they can destroy Charlie, they can at least shuttle them off to a negligible existence in some underground ghetto. An obsolete Charlie, confused as to what is even happening, must battle a squadron of destruction droids commissioned by the Ro-Buster’s sleazy owner, Mr.Ten-Per-Cent, in order to save his working-class town from being obliterated in the name of economic progress.

While the first half of the Ro-Busters omnibus stands as little more than a curiosity for 2000 A.D. and Pat Mills devotees, in the latter half of the book, we see Mills crafting these stories into a bizarre, hyperviolent, Marxist song-and-dance comedy where the working class, in this case ‘soulless’ robots, must relinquish their very limbs to the more able-bodied. It’s a remarkably revolutionary comic, and all the more so for the conventional adventure comics trappings on its surface. Mills’ work on Nemesis the Warlock may remain the first stop for the curious, but those already familiar with Nemesis and the A.B.C. Warriors are encouraged to look at these early strips, where many of Mills’ signature quirks are already gloriously on display.

Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories

2009-09-14T21:47:00.001-07:00

by Thomas Mann

translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

There is a glimmer of twilight here. Something vast fading, resigning itself to a quiet end in exhaustion. The stories which make up ‘Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories’ were composed between 1903 and 1929, ranging from evocations of somber grotesquery, in the title story and others such as ‘Mario and the Magician,’ to philosophical ramblings on nature in as ‘A Man and his Dog,’ to broad comedic episodes, such as ‘Tonio Kroger’ or ‘Felix Krull.’ One would not be fooled into thinking that this is a deliberate collection of interlocking works, instead we are confronted with a succinct introduction to a prolific writer. Nonetheless, it isn’t much of a stretch to find a thematic affinity between translator H.T. Lowe-Porter’s selections. These are elegiac short stories written on the edge of obsolescence. Thomas Mann writes a dignified German modernism fully engaged with the romantic flair and gravitas of its history. These stories were for the most part, written in the intermittent period of the Weimer Republic. This was a time of ennui and incipient collapse, of terror and denial, and the studied poise of Mann’s prose comes across as a vain guard against the tumult of change.

The confidence man Felix Krull, whose short story of the same name would later be expanded to a novel left unfinished at the time of Mann’s death, narrates how his “…parents bored each other to tears and got relief by filling the house with guests from Mainz and Wiesbaden so that our house was the scene of a continual round of gaieties. It was a promiscuous crew who frequented these gatherings: actors and actresses, young business men, the sickly young infantry lieutenant who later proposed to my sister; a Jewish banker with a wife whose charms gushed appallingly out of her jet-spangled frock; a journalist in a velvet waistcoat with a lock of hair falling over his brow, who every time brought along a new wife.” The walls are coming down all around the Krull’s as the they dance and drink to the early morning, painfully aware of the inevitability of their own fall. The demise of the aristocracy, of the guardians of Western culture, hangs over each of these stories. We are confronted with death – the suicide of Krull’s father in his bed-chamber, where “…he lay, upon the floor, with his clothing opened; his hand was resting upon the roundness of his belly, and beside him lay the fatal shining thing with which he shot himself in his gentle heart.” Elsewhere we observe the beachside collapse of von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice,” and the incestuous and empty embrace of the twins Siegmund and Seiglinde in “the Blood of the Walsungs”

This culminates, perhaps, in ‘Tristan.’ The action occurs at “Einfried, the sanatorium. A long, white, rectilinear building with a side wing, set in a spacious garden pleasingly equipped with grottoes, bowers, and little bark pavilions. Behind its slate roofs the mountains tower heavenwards, evergreen, massy, cleft with wooded ravines.” Yet, as prosaic as the estate may be, it remains the site of a sanatorium. It is here that we witness the death of an aristocratic sense of history. The vaunted legacy of the Enlightenment’s rationalism is confined to a madhouse. It is here that Herr Kloterjahn’s ailing wife convalesces. It should be noted that she is predominantly identified in relation to her husband, a businessman of the firm of A.C. Kloterjahn & Co. She exemplifies an aristocratic frailty, with “her beautiful white hands, bare save for the simple wedding-ring, rested in her lap, among the folds of a dark, heavy cloth skirt; she wore a close-fitting waist of silver-grey with a stiff-collar – it had an all-over pattern of arabesques in high-pile velvet. But these warm, heavy materials only served to bring out the unspeakable delicacy, sweetness, and languor of the little head, to make it look more than ever touching, exquisite, and unearthly.” Herr Kloterjahn’s wife exemplifies, much like von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice,” the final manifestation of a dignified German lineage which the outbreak of World War II proved to shatter – a war in which the face of which the notion of German romanticism and History was called into doubt, a war that sent Thomas Mann himself fleeing to California, due to his public denouements of National Socialist policy.

Also interned at Einfried is a Herr Spinell, described multiple times in story by Mann as “…a queer sort of man, with a name like some kind of mineral or precious stone.” Spinell is an aestheticist, a gallantly strange man not far from the decadence of Huysmans or Louys. He has written “…a novel of medium length, with a perfectly bewildering drawing on the jacket, printed on a sort of filter-paper. Each letter of the type looked like a Gothic cathedral… Its scenes were laid in fashionable salons, in luxurious boudoirs full of choice objets d’art, old furnitures of all sorts and kinds. On the description of these things were expended the most loving care…” Spinell is an interesting figure. In some sense, he serves as Mann’s mouthpiece, as Spinell espouses on art and culture. Yet Mann doesn’t refrain from satirizing Spinell clearly seen in the above excerpts. On Spinell’s sole novel, which he keeps on display in his quarters, the Fraulein von Osterloh remarks she “…read it once, in a spare quarter-hour, and found it ‘very cultured’ – which was her circumlocution for inhumanly boresome.”

Spinell explains to Herr Kloterjahn’s wife, whom he prefers to remember by her maiden name of Eckhof, that “…it not infrequently happens that a race with sober, practical bourgeois traditions will towards the end of its days flare up in some form of art.” Spinell envisions a halo or crown above the head of the infirm Gabriele Kloterjahn. The eccentric author writes a letter to Herr Kloterjahn denouncing the base businessman, claiming in a letter that he “…lead her idle will astray [and beguiled] her out of that moss-grown garden into the ugliness of life, you give her your own vulgar name and make of her a married woman, a housewife, a mother. You take that deathly beauty –spent, aloof, flowering in lofty unconcern of the uses of this world- and debase it to the service of common things… I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty.”

The story closes with Spinell confronting the ghastly visage of Herr Kloterjahn’s spawn - the infant Anton Kloterjahn, with “…a bone teething-ring in one hand a tin rattle in the other… his eyes [almost] shut, his mouth gaped open till all the rosy gums were displayed; and as he shouted he rolled his head about in excess of mirth.” This is the vulgarity of the new bourgeois, as they displace the elegance of the past with broad pleasures and cheap strength. As Europe’s Krulls and Eckhofs fade into silence, the whoops and cries of the Kloterjahn’s gain in bluster.

After reading through the eight stories in “Death in Venice,” one can’t help feel as if Mann, his writings, is as doomed as Gabriele Kloterjahn. These stories are smothered by their stifling literary dignity. There’s a cold formalism at play here, and it is evident in the successful stories, including the title piece, just as much as it is in the weaker entries, such as “Tonio Kroger.” Look at “Death in Venice!” The persistent of the malodorous odor wafting through the streets of Venice is a crushingly obvious, as are the formal symmetries at play - the old man drinking with the young party at the beginning of the story is a clear foreshadowing of Aschenbach towards the close of the novella, as he dyes his hair black, paints his face a florid pink and swallows overripe strawberries on the streets of a mephitic Venice. There’s a dark humor at play in Mann’s best work, and this grotesquery makes “Death in Venice” and the similarly perverse “Mario and the Magician” two of the strongest pieces in the volume. But Mann lacks the restless skepticism and malleability which delighted me when I recently read through a selection of an early German author, Hoffmann.

One wishes Mann had written more pieces such as “A Man and His Dog,” which straddles personal essay and philosophical rambling in a manner not dissimilar to Henry David Thoreau. In this novella, Mann is, for once, not bound by the hoary constraints of formalism and allows himself the freedom of many digressions as he chronicles his relationship with a spirited hound. Mann’s descriptions are exhilarating, as his prose pursues the river along which he walked - the water “swollen and dark yellow it rolls threateningly along, rushing and dashing in a furious hurry this way and that; its muddy tide takes up the whole extra bed up to the edge of the undergrowth, pounding against the cement and the willow hurdles… the water is quiet, it makes almost noise at all. And there are no rapids in its course now, the stream is too high for that. You can only see where they were by the fact that the waves are higher and deeper there than elsewhere, and that their crests break backwards instead of forward like the surf on a beach.” These passages rush toward the reader with none of the stultifying pomp so prominent elsewhere in Mann’s prose. Instead, they are almost humble, sacred perhaps. They fell alive.

Mann defers to nature; he allows it to speak for itself. This frees his prose of some of its shackles. He admits that “having gone into some detail in describing the riverzone, I believe I have covered the whole region and done all I can to bring it before my reader’s eye. I like my description pretty well, but I like the reality of nature even better. It is more vivid and various; just as Bashan himself is warmer, more living and hearty than his imaginary presentment.” Now, it is possible to attack such a sentiment – is Mann saying that his art’s main goal is mimesis, in which case it will inevitably fail in the face of nature itself? Doesn’t art instead reach for something beyond mimesis? “A Man and His Dog,” with its digressions and extending wanderings, allows the book’s strongest and most vital entry into the act of thinking. As I work my way through the books on my shelf, I don’t always encounter writers I enjoy, but it is thrilling to find moments that still manage to ignite.

NEXT: Reflections by Walter Benjamin.

Illuminations

2009-09-11T00:25:00.000-07:00

by Walter Benjamin

translated by Harry Zohn

edited w. an introduction by Hannah Arendt

preface by Leon Wieseltier

And we travel from here to there. ‘Here’ can be the Morgan stop off the L in Brooklyn. ‘There’ can be the Rockefeller Center stop off the F, right in midtown Manhattan. These are places, fixed physical locations in space. But each is also anchored to a specific time. We move from here to there, but our conception of each lies with particulars. Geography has the tendency of slipping away. Where does it go? The immovable flickers, as inconsistent as it is incandescent. Sure, you can find first-century Gaul on a map, but can you go there? I still remember how to get to the two-floor apartment I shared with my friend Connor while living in Baltimore over three years ago. But I can’t go there. We must expand our idea of topography. Is memory another type of place? Or is it simply another place? Additional locations. Layers? Is it an arcade down which we wander - aimless flaneurs in phantom cities? Memory allows us to investigate time from a privileged perspective – the nonlinear swervings of its actuality.

Now, to focus. In his epic sequence, ‘the Maximus Poems,’ the great Charles Olson charts a geography of place and position utilizing both memory and utterance. Voice becomes a means of measurement. Space, its tactile heft, is carved out of remembrance and mind. Olson wrangles this accumulative memory out of the very terrain, the poplars off the path, the smell of seasalt. What he illuminates here is vastly different from the homogeny of a more familiar idea of the Jungian collective memory. This is something else. Olson reveals to us a transfluence of contradictory and aleatory elements. Don’t imagine a common core from which all disparities emanate, no one single wellspring. It is more beneficial to envision each disparity contributing to a brilliant polyglot. A group effort becomes a group identity. Olson is the pioneer of the lived moment, the communal moment; he unearths a totalizing past and activates it in the continuous now.

The German cultural theorist and critic, Walter Benjamin must also be understood as a writer inhabiting, and perhaps actualizing, a topography. But we should remember the diversity in both writers’ modes of thought. Benjamin wrote beneath the burdensome aegis of history, which loomed over 20th century Europe in a decidedly different fashion than it did Olson’s America. Hegel is an active figure for Benjamin to both react to and against. As we further engage these startling essays spanning the tragically short literary life of Walter Benjamin, we find ourselves in a place both weighted down and liberated by the text.

Benjamin’s essays, his fragments and aphorisms, even his casual sketches, construct a metropolitan throughway. Benjamin loved the cities of the 20th century. They created him as much as he helped to define them. The essays of Walter Benjamin beg to be wandered through much like a lonesome metropolitan district, with a concentrated aimlessness and an attentive eye to innocuous detail. He found a kindred spirit in Baudelaire’s flaneur and in the Surrealist’s whimsical urban rambling. To focus upon a single essay of Benjamin’s would be to miss the point. We must appreciate each essay as just one stop on a vast, subterranean subway system. Along the way, we transfer from line to line, linger at particular stops, and move in multiple directions at once. Always moving.

Hannah Arendt compiled ‘Illuminations’ as an English-language introduction to the works of Benjamin. Leon Wieseltier writes in his preface how “it is hard to imagine a time when Walter Benjamin was not a god (or an idol) of criticism, but I can remember when, in my own student days, not so long ago, he was only an exciting rumor. It was the publication of ‘Illuminations,’ and then a few years later of ‘Reflections,’ these lovingly assembled and beautifully translated volumes, that confirmed the rumor. These were the books that brought the news.” It is no longer necessary, fifty-one years hence, for anyone to make the case for Walter Benjamin, but these two handy collections remain extraordinary travel guides for further exploration. ‘Illuminations’ begins with Benjamin’s introduction to a German translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisiens.’ As such, he not only investigates ‘the Task of the Translator,’ but also questions what it means to translate a text. And what exactly is a text? As Benjamin repeatedly reminds us in his writings, we must not restrict our readings to the page, but look outward to the widening possibility of texts. And Benjamin excelled, like Barthes after him, at reading the world around him as a text.

One cannot help be impressed by the swift movement of Benjamin’s thinking. That is, we must remember here that translation is a matter of transference. But what is being transferred? He writes“…any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information – hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information – as even a poor translator will admit- the unfathomable, the mysterious, the “poetic,” something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?” It is no coincidence that Benjamin has, like Wittgenstein, found so many devotees amongst poets.

He operates best as a poetic thinker, in that he lives within those cognitive leaps poetry enables. These seemingly inconsolable leaps are reconciled in a manifestation of a Hegelian transcendence. Therefore, “all purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance. Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages.” Each language possesses a hidden relationship to another, not because each is an emanation of some higher ur-language, but rather because “languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.”

This discussion of translation inevitably leads to a further consideration of authenticity. On the subject of reproduction and authenticity, I direct any curious reader to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which I will not attempt to tackle here, but remains a revelatory text. A translation, Benjamin argues, does not simply transfer a piece of information from ‘here’ to ‘there,’ instead it concerns itself with distinct auras. What is the relationship between an original and translation? He insists it “…requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory.” Translating is not, then, a hermetic instance of a = a. Cognition is not objective, therefore “…it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.” And “while a poet’s words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal.” Translation is not the communication of information, but a communication about information.

Consider the poetry of Baudelaire and Poe. Both writers enacted enormous change within their respective spheres, Baudelaire in the French tradition and Poe in regard to the development of a distinct American poetic lineage. But each poet has also had enormous influence outside of the limits of their own language. Then, “translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.” Baudelaire, and in particular his mastery of the urban prose poem, have unquestionably altered how we all approach poetry, but we are not only engaged with the French-language text, we engage in a discourse on Baudelaire, which we carry on in our respective languages. We approach Baudelaire through possible translations, and how we understand writers in foreign languages, like Benjamin, is through interpretation. This privileges diversity; it privileges potentiality. A translation can, then, conceivably be called a discourse rather than a transference, and “it stands to reason that kinship does not necessarily involve likeness.”

Charles Olson uses diverse histories and voices in his “Maximus Poems” in order to build an accumulation- something akin to a seabed, in which sediment and organic matter over an immense period of time coheres into new configurations. Or, perhaps we should think of language as a coral reef? Both Olson and Benjamin plumb the resources of diversity, since “while all individual elements of foreign languages – words, sentences, structure- are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions.” For instance, “the words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same.” It is to Benjamin’s credit that he does not attribute a sacred essence to each word. He admits a functional link between languages as “…intention and object of intention complement each of the two languages from which they are derived…” But unlike the Kabbalists, Benjamin is not mislead by the mystical fallacy of each object’s intrinsically ‘true’ name. His mode of thinking does not lead to such reductive a narrowing.

Translation can best serve us as a tool for plumbing the potentialities of language, “for to some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings.” As we read Benjamin, we are never far from the city, from the boundless potential of the streets and the crowds. Language, and by extension cognition, offer us a common space of discovery and travel. Speaking of Proust, memory, and his Byzantine sentences, Walter Benjamin evokes “...the Nile of language, which her overflows and fructifies the regions of truth…” Language is here a place wherein we may build our community. It is the river on which we travel, and it is the wellspring of our sustenance. Language, that unknowable yet known Nile, is the agent of our transcendence, as well as the sum of the banal and everyday – all around us and at the edges.

NEXT: Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann.

Lost Girls

2009-08-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

by Alan Moore (writer) & Melinda Gebbie (artist)

What is the dividing line between erotica and pornography? Where can we find it? Alan Moore argues that the distinction is one of class pretension – the lower class has their pornography, the upper class their erotica. Furthermore, erotica is a subterfuge, a shadow play of appearance and intention. But pornography can pride itself as being a direct force, an elemental expulsion of the imagination. Pornography taps the vein, erotica dances around it. Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard speaks of pornography as the event with no consequence. Pornography is the flashpoint- an alchemical moment that stands apart amidst the dull monotony of moments. It is no wonder, then, that the great science fiction writer, Samuel R. Delany, prefers to classify his later novels such as ‘Hogg,’ ‘the Mad Man’ and ‘Phallos’ as unabashed gay pornography. Not erotica, porno. The term should by no means be understood as derogative. If a work of pornography can be called base or dirty, it isn’t a slight, but actually a mark of its peculiar virtue. ‘Lost Girls’ is Alan Moore’s large-scale tribute to pornography and young adult fiction, assisted by artist Melinda Gebbie. We follow the female leads of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘the Wizard of Oz’ as Alice, Wendy and Dorothy investigate the boundaries of their sexuality at an Austrian retreat just prior to the outbreak of World War I. It’s an audacious work – as bold as it is bloated. But as hermetic as ‘Lost Girls’ may be, it is best viewed as a bridge. Let us see how ‘Lost Girls’ works as a transitional piece, as well as its greater implications.

Alan Moore’s career in comic books corresponds to two general movements – that of a deconstructive and then a reconstructive phase. Both stages depend heavily upon appropriation and irony. Moore’s deconstructive phase can (almost) be neatly contained within the first half of his career; he is here moving away from the established mode of genre in graphic novels. These early works push away from the genre specifications of superheroes (Marvelman, Watchmen, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?), horror (Swamp Thing), and even boy’s science fiction (the Ballad of Halo Jones). Sex is a reconfiguring device – Alec & Abby’s psychedelic yam assisted lovemaking in ‘Swamp Thing,’ the subsumed perversion of costumed heroes in ‘Watchmen,’ both defamiliarize old tropes. In Moore’s deconstructive works, the emergence of a sexual identity dismantles previously unquestioned elements of genre.

If the first half of Moore’s career is a movement away from a normative genre, then the second half, and particularly the late works, pushes to construct a holistic meta- or supra-genre to serve as a fictive umbrella under which all of Moore’s books fall. The mature works, ‘Promethea,’ ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,’ and ‘From Hell,’ reveal that the deconstructions of genre in his earlier work weren’t necessarily meant to defuse genres as much as to pool them together, or to position them as a web. Sex and magick serve as the unifying agents towards this consolidation. For a better understanding of the development of Moore in the latter half of his career, one should compare the issue of ‘Promethea’ in which the title character engages in issue-long sexual intercourse with Aleister Crowley-stand in, Jack Faust, to the previously mentioned issue of ‘Swamp Thing’ where Alec and Abby first make love.

Sex and magick, particularly a Crowley-derived thelemic magick, have both figured in Moore’s work from the start. But whereas in ‘Watchmen’ sex and magick serve as disruptive or explosive agents pushing the book away from genre, in the later ‘Lost Girls,’ sex pulls together the genre trappings towards a holistic world view – remember the Blazing World seen at the close of ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: the Black Dossier.’ The later projects still find their root in genre – ‘From Hell’ appropriates both historical fiction and conspiracy theory. You can see Moore drawing together influences and disparities, whereas before he was pulling them apart. I can’t place enough emphasis, here, on the importance of world-building in both speculative fiction and genre graphic novels – whereas there was a general fragmentation going on in the main wing of 20th postmodernism, progressive genre comics of the same era are concerned with pulling everything together.

And where does that leave ‘Lost Girls?’ Of his major works, it remains one of the more maligned. Those critics not instantly negative to the book are instead dismissive. It’s funny. I’ve noticed a hostility, either subtle or outright, of most comics bloggers towards Moore, where it is just as common to find the same blogger heaping praise upon Grant Morrison. Why is this? The thing is, both Moore and Morrison adore genre, it is simply a question of which genre we’re talking about. Whereas Morrison is willing to almost unconditionally congratulate the reader of superhero comics for his fannish devotion to the genre, Moore has made a career out of attacking those same fans’ convictions. On top of that, he has become increasingly enmeshed in the anachronisms of fin-de-scele writers such as Pierre Louys as his career has progressed. Alan Moore has moved closer and closer to the fringes, while Morrison has over the years gravitated towards the center. Moore is simply out of touch, and unabashedly so. But is this always a bad thing? Whereas both writers have their flaws, comics bloggers are more inclined to forgive Morrison’s fannish mugging and difficulty with characterization in light of his respect for well-loved tropes, whereas Moore’s heavy-handedness and boorish elitism goes under the gun.

Which is a shame, as the later works of Alan Moore are a fascinating, if occasionally tedious, minefield of pastiche, sexuality and thelemic unity. Moore’s dedication to pornography remains both his crutch and his greatest strength in these works. ‘Lost Girls’ is a peculiar work in his oeuvre, in fact it might even be a representative one. 16 years passed between its first appearance in a 1991 issue of Stephen Bissette’s ‘Taboo’ and the publishing of Top Shelf’s 2006-collected edition. As such, the book is a Rosetta stone for Moore’s output following the dissolution of his working relationship with DC. Both ‘From Hell’ and ‘Lost Girls,’ works begun at roughly the same time and both anthologized in ‘Taboo,’ share Moore’s desire to detach himself from the depiction of superheroes, either in a deconstructive sense or any other. But ‘Lost Girls’ also looks forwards - the first seeds of ‘the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s shared universe can also be seen in the sexual entanglement of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy’s fictive dreamworlds.

‘Lost Girls’ is set at the expensive Austrian resort of the eccentric dandy, Monsieur Rongeur. A former pimp and forger, Rongeur is the author of a scandalous erotic anthology, referred to as the White Book. He leaves a copy of the book in each of the rooms of his hotel. Many of the aesthetic homages of ‘Lost Girls,’ such as an imaginary Egon Schiele and Oscar Wilde collaboration, can be attributed to Rongeur and his notorious White Book. Most of Rongeur’s guests flee the hotel following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, leaving Alice, Wendy and Dorothy to cavort with Rongeur and the hotel staff in a sumptuous orgy. As the participants of the orgy swoon to their climaxes, Monsieur Rongeur offers a tidy summation of Moore’s philosophy regarding pornography – “Pornographies are the enchanted parklands where the most secret and vulnerable of all our many selves can safely play… They are the palaces of luxury that all the policies and armies of the outer world can never spoil, can never bring to rubble… They are our secret gardens, where seductive paths of words and imagery lead us to the wet, blinding gateway of our pleasure, beyond which, things may only be expressed in language that is beyond literature, beyond all words.”

Pornography has traditionally existed outside literature – much like genre fiction. Pornography, then, occupies a curious position where it may express with words what word cannot, or perhaps are forbidden to, say. Can words reach their own limit? Can words express their specific limit – the breaking point of a language? Pornographic prose is a perfectly soluble fluid, the paradox of it is that it allows a corporeal quality beyond language into the text. Imagination is Alan Moore’s philosopher’s stone, the permissive entryway into a realm beyond boundaries. Does this also, as Baudrillard hints, mean a space beyond consequences?

Rongeur reads Alice, Wendy and Dorothy a pornographic tale written in the style of Pierre Louys. Wendy protests, “It’s an exciting story, but the children, doing things with their own Mother! I mean, I have a son myself, and I’d never never of..” To which Rongeur interrupts, “But of course you would not, dear Madam. Your child is real. These, however, are only real in this delightful book…” Is Rongeur’s statement devaluing the fictive reality of storytelling - keeping it at a safe and manageable distance? Or is Rongeur perhaps doing something else. Is he in fact privileging storytelling the ability to render reality – a reality relegated to the confines of the book, but a reality nonetheless?

The Louys pastiche ends with an entire family engaged in a massive orgy and the admission that “Surely there can be no happier clan in all of Christendom than mine! I thank God for the institution of the Family, founded on nothing save for fucking and its endless consequences.” Consequence, here, is something of an irony, as the only consequence of sex for the husband and wife of this story is the potential for future sexual partners. Monsieur Rongeur replies that “Incest, c’est vrai,it is a crime, but this? This is the idea of incest, no? And then these children: how outrageous! How old can they be? Eleven? Twelve? … except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear upon, no less, no more… You see, if this were real, it would be horrible. Children raped by their trusted parents. Horrible. But they are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent.” But then, in the next chapter Rongeur discusses the years he spend as lover and pimp for a prepubescent boy and girl who may have been his children. Rongeur himself is guilty, even though he is himself a fictive creation.

This complexity of the complicit in ‘Lost Girls’ is one of the books most fascinating elements. And one of its greatest strengths. Alice admits to the psychic trauma done to her when she was sexually molested as a child. It has haunted her into adulthood and will never leave her. Wendy and Dorothy also express the guilt and hurt carried from their childhood sexual awakenings. Moore and Gebbie maintain this subtext of consequence throughout ‘Lost Girls.’ There is a tragic naiveté to the sexual idealism of the three protagonists. Dorothy asks, “You don’t think we ought’ve been gone sooner?” To which Alice replies, “Absolutely not. Sod the war. Finishing our stories was more important. More of a victory.” Yet the final page of the graphic novel is of a dying soldier, who may very well be Dorothy’s lover Rolf, lying on a bomb-pocked battlefield with his guts splayed out on his belly. Is there an extent to the body? To the imagination?

NEXT: Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.

Bad Bad

2009-08-21T23:29:00.001-07:00

by Chelsey Minnis

And here, a young poet slowly approaches herself. It’s a wonderful thing to so clearly be able to mark progress – to see those effusions that push past the promising to become truly memorable. A rocky read isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it has its own distinct share of thrills and pleasures. I found Chelsey Minnis’ first book, ‘Zirconia,’ to be something of a mixed bag. Minnis developed an ingenious form for her first book; the poems of ‘Zirconia’ were predominantly composed of short phrases separated, or more aptly, connected, to each other via long stretches of ellipses. This format allowed a brittle austerity to the lines, while expanding the poems outward, until the pieces approach, while never quite arriving at the prose poem form. It’s a lovely device, but I felt Minnis often sabotaged herself through lurid imagery. Minnis’ over-heated syntax often took the reins of the poem at hand and served itself, rather than the poem’s elemental needs- to the piece’s unfortunate detriment. One would hope, then, for a refinement of this technique in the poet’s future work.

‘Bad Bad’ arrived in 2007 as a proper follow-up to the previous book, and is, like ‘Zirconia,’ published by Fence Books. The two books are very much of a piece, though where ‘Zirconia’ at times felt anchored to the afore-mentioned poetic form, ‘Bad Bad’ is much more expansive. “Preface,” the book’s longest piece at 28 pages, utilizes a more economical trio of ellipses at the end of most phrases. This causes the piece’s declamatory and straightforward statements to trail off, to linger, and even to bleed into each other as a bold attack on dogmatic encryption. Elsewhere, ellipses cover the page in a fashion reminiscent of ‘Zirconia,’ but Minnis lets herself be much more playful here – ellipses break off before reaching the end of the page, occasionally they lapse before resuming their even trail. This allows poems to sway with a limber humor that befits lines such as “…this is bad fluffy thoughts…” and “…I must try not to feel a fake kindness…” The poems are personal, but inquisitively so, and always with a refreshing humor to them.

Both of the above lines come from ‘Double Black Tulip,’ the first poem following Minnis’ lengthy preface, as well as the first written in a furtherance of the mode established in ‘Zirconia.’ The poem plays with certain accepted mainstream stereotypes of poets, especially female poets. Minnis writes “I have emotions and I also have death wishes…,” as if the one leads to the other in a personal poet, that is, in a female poet. Minnis continues, “I like most things because I know I am going to die… my love is like weak… black-legged lambs… I have never had the right to say things that are true and no one does… death is the actual worst hope… I write this poem like a girl in a black wig…” What Minnis is playing with is a popular conception of the death-obsessed female poet, the self-destructive Anne Sextons and Sylvia Plaths who remain the exemplar of ‘women’s writing’ within so many college courses in 20th century American Poetry. Minnis declaims, “…this is the total conciliation of my self with my destined self… or else a great phoniness… that is sung with a ukulele… I feel like I have been posing as a human being... with my eyelids open… and my head at a doll-tilt… it is very sad to have to get up and walk home… the purpose of poetry is to seem as lifelike as possible so that you actually exist…” Ah! Minnis furthers a contemporary poetry of the personal by here dismantling the idea of self-actualization and dramatization – or, perhaps Minnis is configuring a new means of self-dramatization? One drawing on a more diverse pool than the claustrophobic “confessional” poetics of a Lowell or Olds and instead looking to poets such as Minnis’ self-described mentor, Ed Dorn? Is this something like the Hybrid, or Third-way poetics poet Cole Swenson talks about?

I was initially drawn to Chesley Minnis due to the dedication of her first book, which was to Ed Dorn, a poet I greatly admire. In ‘Bad Bad,’ Minnis does more than simply commemorate her mentors. These poems, particularly the introductory ‘Preface’ and the almost equally incisive title piece, have incorporated the irreverence and casually epic scope of Ed Dorn. The best poems in ‘Bad Bad’ continue a poetic tradition of the borderland – an in-between place outside of either the confines of a so-called School of Quietude ethos, or any well-defined progressive camp. Minnis writes that “I am not writing poetry to uphold a tradition…,” and while that may not be her intention, Minnis is continuing a bold tradition. And it’s something she should be proud of.

Throughout the preface, Minnis attacks many of the stalwart characteristics of the contemporary poetry community. But then, Minnis’ militantly isolationist stance must be ultimately seen as just that - a stance. That is, she is making a point, and it is indeed refreshing for a poet to attack the hoary norms of a stifled and shocking careerist poetic community. If ‘Double Black Tulip’ dismantles a conventional conception of the anguished poet awash in their own self-mythologizing, then the ‘Preface’ takes aim at the careerist community that has arisen in the last sixty-plus years around the workshop. Minnis’ antagonistic stance is clear in statements such as “If anyone thinks they need to write reviews, teach classes, edit magazines, or translate books in order to write good poetry… then maybe they should just take a rest from it…” This is followed by, “You should not think of getting a job with your poetry…/ If you do, then you will begin to count your own books…/ Poetry careers are a bad business…” She writes in ‘Preface 36’ that “Poetry writing” is a hardship.” Note the quotes around ‘poetry writing;’ what is being written about is not the simple act of writing, but its standardization in the workshop environment.

Later, she confesses, “Sometimes I am bored by poetry and I am supposed to think it is my own fault…/ But how can it be my fault when I am so trusting-hearted?/ As a young poet I was well entertained by discouraging remarks…/ Now I have to bark like a dog to forget that memory!” And yes, Minnis does bark, that is, she makes many reactionary swipes at the workshop system, but it’s an infrastructure far too complex and multifaceted to simply dismiss out of hand. Still, it’s a treat to read lines like “People will give me a compliment when they don’t know if I’m any good or not…,” which to me sounds like a dig directed at careerist back-cover superlatives. It should be noted, then, the ambivalence of her back quotes, such as “…many won’t find her…acceptable at all…” from Cole Swenson, or Robert Strong’s admission that “…her poems take some getting used to…” How much of Minnis’ cheek is critique and how much is simple insolence is a valid question.

This does set up the book as something of a challenge, as an affront to ‘good’ taste. Take the title for instance. What we have here is not the vapid “good bad” of popular culture and kitsch, of a ‘safe’ irony, but an actual “bad bad.” Like the Flarf poets, Minnis intentionally courts poor taste, and the included illustration of a two-headed deer does have something of a spiritual kinship to Gary Sullivan’s rainbow-shitting Pegasus-cum-unicorn. But it would be a misplaced assertion to align Minnis’ brand of defiance with the conceptual pranks of the Flarfists, a group of poets who possess a much clearer through-line to the Pound-Zukofsky-Stein tradition and postmodernist poetics. Minnis positions her own poetry quite accurately when she writes, “Intellectual, anachronistic, superserious: I’m not going to start crying because “experimental” and I’m not going to start crying because “not experimental” …I just want to piss down my own leg…” Aside from Minnis’ wonderful collapsible grammar in this selection, the above excerpt is notable because she clearly puts herself in the borderland I mentioned before. One of Minnis’ clear strengths is that she fails to respect our conventional idea of a binary poetic tradition.

If only the rest of “Bad Bad” was as cheeky, clever and clear-voiced as “Preface!” The defiance of lines such as “It is very outdated to be so drunk, but my poems will not be outdated…” is infectious. Unfortunately, “Bad Bad” loses steam as Minnis retreats into a lurid kitsch of “…chartreuse ostrich boots” and “marmot fur.” The remainder of the ellipses poems traffic in a similar gaudiness. Take “P-Irate,” which begins with “…the roaring… blouse of the moment… is chiffon… with ruffles… and is a smocked chiffon… that you wear as the… swans walk around you… in a circle… and is simply a stylish pellucid object… which may be held in one hand out an open window… or look good draped over your frail lungs…” The problem is that Minnis’ pose becomes progressively snarky and condescending as the book continues.

A poem like ‘Mildred’ with its emerald-tinged imagery and lavish costumes comes across as decorative and slight. Despite Minnis’ desire to avoid dogma, she excels at ars poetica. Lines from the earlier ‘Preface’ like “Don’t mystify me with poems…” and “If you are a poet then it should be foremost on your mind to say something and not conceal it…” excite to a far greater extent than ‘Man-Thing’s’ “…you are permissive… and I… like it… like nasturtium… I like it like cavil… I come back to you…” or lines in ‘Bad Bad’ such as “…it is tight… to be with you… it is crucifix… it is a butterfly pavilion to submit to you… and a… a star of hate in each eye… and that’s why you have to be spanked…” Perhaps I prefer Minnis when she utilizes an unadorned style to support what she wishes to say than the more lavish poems which seem to favor execution and incremental imagery.

Chelsey Minnis has a fairly new book out, ‘Poemland,’ from Wave Books. I am curious to see how she has further developed. If the creative leap between ‘Bad Bad’ and ‘Poemland’ is anything like the one between ‘Zirconia’ and ‘Bad Bad,’ then it promises to be quite an exciting collection. I may have my qualms with Minnis – she is a poet with glaring flaws, but she is also an incredibly intriguing poet, and an invigorating one.

And thanks to Seth at Fence Books for providing a review copy of 'Bad Bad!' It's much appreciated!

NEXT: Expect a post on 'Illuminations,' Hannah Arendt's collection of Walter Benjamin essays, in the near future. Also, I am considering an essay investigating pornography, seen through 'Lost Girls,' the graphic novel by Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie.

The Tales of Hoffmann

2009-08-20T20:47:00.001-07:00

by ETA Hoffmann

selected & translated with an introduction by RJ Hollingdale

As I was finishing the second half of William Hope Hodgson’s ‘the Night Land,’ I began reading Penguin Classic’s selection of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short stories. I was finding ‘the Night Land’ difficult to finish, and decided to get a head start on another book. I’d picked up this title at the Free Book Thing over two years ago while I was still living in Baltimore. It was picked up on a whim, and I honestly only began reading it last month out of a stubborn obligation peculiar to obsessive bibliophiles. These stories offer a wide berth of German Romanticism’s extravagances. And they really are incredibly entertaining. I wasn’t expecting these stories to be as funny, insightful and coy as they are. The charm of these tales is not too far removed from such exemplars of storytelling as ‘the Decameron’ or ‘the Arabian Nights.’ Hoffmann taps into a similar whimsy, as well as those tales’ occasional frightfulness. These stories can be outlandish, while still echoing the basic necessities and realities of life. E.T.A. Hoffmann possesses an enviable flair for both the grotesque and the picturesque, with one often providing a slantwise perspective on the other. There is, then, a pleasing wholeness to these stories, amidst all the flamboyance.

None of the stories lack narrative twists or exotic color either. The short story ‘Mademoiselle de Scudery’ weaves together secret societies, hell-bent detectives and even hints of Satanism. In ‘the Sandman,’ Hoffmann throws together alchemy and insanity, with a dash of swashbuckling for good measure. There is an emphasis throughout on psychic depravity and creative delirium. While these stories possess a baroque charm that may veer close to the precious to the contemporary reader, it is important to keep in mind Hoffmann’s radical affront to the tenets of the Enlightenment. German Romanticism does not just mean mad violinists and alchemists, but is more importantly a challenge to rationalism and its capacity to explain the world.

If the cruel logic of the Marquis de Sade mercilessly satirizes the methodic rationalism of the Enlightenment by using its own tools at cross-purpose, then the unhinged carnality and mystery of Hoffmann’s tales question the rational extent of the world by showing us the delirious alternatives. The Marquis de Sade takes the Enlightenment’s rationalism to a logical extreme, while Hoffmann shows us the shadow world outside rationalism’s grasp. Existence, in these stories, cannot be contained by the explainable. But to Hoffmann’s credit, he never stumbles into naïve spiritualism. Hoffmann is too much of a skeptic for that. Instead, he offers a bemused world of coincidences and contradictions. Let’s look at some of the more fantastic turns in his stories.

For instance, lets focus on ‘the Entail,’ one of the longer and more amusing stories in the entire collection. This story contains one extremely clear supernatural element - the phantom of the deceased castle servant, Daniel that is supposedly seen shambling through the rooms he once inhabited. But Daniel’s specter, despite looming over all the logistical affairs at Castle R., is only actually seen by an elderly man who very well may have been dreaming. We hear of Daniel’s bizarre somnambulism, his possible trafficking in alchemy and sorcery, but nothing preternatural is substantiated. Everything is suggested.

‘The Entail’s’ narrator is a somewhat foolish young man accompanying his uncle, Herr Justitiarius (the afore-mentioned elderly man), on the uncle’s yearly call to Castle R., the foreboding estate of the Lord Roderich and his frail, young wife, the Baroness. The young man becomes entangled in a sordid scandal of inheritances and familial, while yet remaining witlessly on the sidelines. One evening at dinner, our narrator excuses himself after having drunk too much wine. As he stumbles down the empty corridors leading to his chamber, he is animated by the strange ambiance of the castle. What exactly is the power of the grotesque? of the suggested? Our narrator considers “…we all know what power the unusual has to grip the mind; even an idle imagination comes to life in a valley surrounded by strange cliffs, within the gloomy walls of a church; it anticipates experiences such as it had never had. If I add that I was then twenty years old and had drunk several glasses of strong punch, you will easily believe that my baronial hall filled me with strange sensations… I was indeed likely to have felt that a strange kingdom might now rise up visibly and tangibly before me. Yet this feeling was like the pleasurable chill one experiences at the vivid telling of a ghost story; and it occurred to me that I had never been in a better mood to read a book which, like so many others at that time, I carried in my pocket. It was Schiller’s ‘Ghost-Seer.’ I sat and read and heated my imagination more and more.” Our narrator has passed from the rational world to a shadow realm of impressions. The borderland shifts – it has no clear boundaries.

At this point “…there came a scraping, and louder, deeper sighs, as if emitted in the dread of death, and they came from behind the new wall.” Ah! So literature, art itself, is able to affect reality! The rational world is beset by the overbearing ghost of history that this story revolves around, which is, this scandal of inheritance, by mind-altering substances, in this instance alcohol, and most importantly by art, exemplified by the Romantic writer, Schiller. But it is important to remember that our narrator is beset by a phantom of impressions. Impression is also of preeminence to Hodgson, whose epic ‘the Night Land’ I covered in this blog’s previous post. Both writers are concerned with the impression of immensity – something beyond rationalism’s capacity to contain.

Hoffmann courts the supernatural as an affront to rationalism, but he doesn’t subscribe to any mythos – that, of course, would simply be another set of explanations. Remember those characters in Hoffmann’s stories who most exist in the supernatural sphere- Torbern, the old man of stone in ‘the Mines of Falun,’ or Leonhard Turnhauser, the sly goldsmith, in ‘the Choosing of the Bride.’ Both characters hint at a supernatural presence, if not exactly a malfeasance, beyond the comprehension of human rationalism. These characters’ morality is ambiguous, and it’s exactly in lieu of such ambiguity that one is better able to understand Hoffmann’s relation to the supernatural. The very ambivalence of the world.

At the climax of ‘the Choosing of the Bride,’ Turnhauser, who has been orchestrating the whims of the story’s various characters, delivers a telling monologue. He cautions the assembled crowd that “…I have never admitted that I am the Swiss goldsmith Leonhard Turnhauser of the sixteenth century. These people are therefore free to assume that I am a clever trickster and to seek an explanation of any supernatural events that occur…” What is important to Hoffmann, of course, is suggestion, rather than actuality. Semblance is privileged precisely because of its instability. Art, then, thrives upon the associative.

A young Hoffmann devoted himself to painting, and then music before eventually turning to literature. This polyglot of interests is evident throughout these stories. Music in particular of all the arts holds sway over these stories. In fact, Hoffmann himself composed an opera, ‘Undine,’ which was performed in Berlin in 1816. He earned a good deal of his livelihood giving music lessons. These are musical stories, both in content and Romantic extravagance. The young narrator of ‘the Entail’ is an amateur pianist; the title character of ‘Councillor Krespel’ devotes himself to acquiring and then taking apart master violins, while his precious daughter suffers from a rare ailment where she will perish if she were to use her exquisite singing voice. Offenbach used many of Hoffmann’s stories, including the here collected story ‘the Sandman,’ as the basis of his famous opera, ‘Contes d’Hoffmann.’ The musical provides a world of the sensual and the intangible to these stories. They are fugues.

Hoffmann’s prose is endlessly digressive; his stories do not possess gravitational centers. Instead, they manifest as emanations from a fixed point – a point that may in fact be inconsequential. Take the novella, ‘Doge and Dogaressa.’ This, “….according to the catalogue of the September 1816 Exhibition of the Berlin Academy of the Arts was the title given to a painting by the excellent C. Kolbe, Member of the Academy, which so fascinated visitors to the salon that the space before it was rarely empty.” Hoffmann provides a dry description of said painting, “A Doge of Venice, in sumptuous robes, the equally splendid Dogaressa by his side… a man with an open sunshade… [as] a young man is blowing a horn like a triton shell, and on the water at his feet floats a richly accoutered gondola flying the Venetian flag, while two oarsman stand by in attendance.” We move out from this dry description to the conversation of a couple of friends upon the meaning of this painting. A flamboyant stranger joins them and proceeds to tell the story of the Doge and Dogaressa in the painting before them. This leads to various digressions as we follow the serendipitous fates of each figure in the painting – all of which culminates in a watery grave for two lovers. Reading through Hoffmann, I now have a better understanding of the tableau Raymond Rousseau was working with in his endlessly digressive novels.

The fatal ending of ‘Doge and Dogaressa’ highlights the bold skepticism that causes Hoffmann’s tales to transcend mere dalliance. Hoffmann’s cynicism often led to personal and professional trouble. In his novel, ‘Meister Floh,’ he included “…a satire on the proceedings of the Commission of which he was himself a member. This interesting intelligence came to the ears of the president of the Ministry of Police… [the manuscripts] were seized by the Frankfurt Senate and transported to Berlin…” Hoffmann only escaped prosecution due to his early death from a neural disease. This same cynicism is on wonderful display at the end of ‘the Choosing of the Bride.’ After winning his true love Albertine’s hand in marriage through the machinations of Leonhard Turnhauser, the young artist Edmund travels to Rome for a year in order to further his painting. But, Hoffmann tells us “Edmund has already been in Rome for over a year, and they say his letters to Albertine have grown steadily rarer and cooler. Who knows whether anything will ever come of the idea the two young people had of marrying one another? Albertine will in any event not remain single; she is much too pretty and much too rich for that… Perhaps Albertine will marry the nice junior barrister once he has attained to a decent position. We must wait and see what happens.” Yes, that, after all, is the real charm of Hoffmann’s tales- they mix the fantastic with the practical, while always retaining a healthy skepticism.

NEXT: Chelsey Minnis' Bad Bad.

The Night Land

2009-08-06T15:37:00.001-07:00

by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Lin Carter

Literary isolationism, or the isolation of literature.

Both aptly describe William Hope Hodgson’s massive dead earth epic, ‘the Night Land.’ Published in 1912, but with its first draft most likely written around 1904, Hodgson’s overlong 587-page curiosity is a literary rabbit-hole of grotesquery, archaic prose and willful peculiarity. In my last post, I called Wolfgang Bauer’s ‘the Feverhead’ a book that invites its own obscurity. ‘The Night Land’ does not ask for obscurity– but what it does is demand isolation within the niche that has since been termed ‘weird fiction.’ Which is not to say its author wasn’t writing for a mass audience. In fact, Hodgson was a workingman’s writer, he wrote to put food on the table, even as he also wrote in an ill-conceived pursuit of fame. This is the same man who opened a weight-training and self-defense school, rode a bicycle down a steep flight of stairs for publicity and controversially jammed Harry Houndini’s handcuffs on stage so that the escape artist would not be able to remove them. Yet, for a writer so doggedly obsessed with recognition, both critical and commercial, Hodgson inexplicably wrote with little to no consideration of an audience.

In a letter dated November 17, 1903, Hodgson writes, “…I've tried hard to be commonplace with it; but, I'm afraid, with poor success. I cannot ride above that failing of mine which urges me to write original stuff.” Hodgson’s four fantasy novels, ‘the House on the Borderland,’ ‘the Ghost Pirates,’ ‘Boats of the Glen Carrig,’ and ‘the Night Land,’ do contain a strong esoteric and fecund discomfort – these are strange and singular books. There are few shadow-rooms in our literature as mysterious and bizarre as the elliptical architecture of Hodgson’s collected novels and short stories. But to be fair, Hodgson’s notorious 427 rejection notices were probably not on account of his originality, they can be squarely placed upon Hodgson’s leaden mock-seventeenth century prose style, saccharine sentimentality and his wanton disregard for characterization or narrative motion.

I was drawn to ‘the Night Land’ both through my appreciation of Hodgson’s best known novel, ‘the House on the Borderland,’ as well as the fantastically bizarre cover illustration to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition of the book. ‘The House on the Borderland’ is a singular horror novel of albino pig-men and cosmic entropy only occasionally marred by its faux-Victorian sentimentality. It remains a touchstone in the canon of weird fiction. Over the past year, as I’ve methodically made my way through my stockpile of paperbacks, I’ve been looking forward to finally reading ‘the Night Land.’ Which perhaps accounts for how severely I was disappointed. The drab narrative is stretched over two monotonous volumes, and the incredibly difficult task of plowing through it in its entirety can only be compared with the more tedious prose sections towards the end of Dave Sim’s ‘Cerebus’ saga.

‘The Night Land’ follows an unnamed young man as he ventures out of the Great Redoubt, an immense silver pyramid, let’s call it an arcology, which has housed the handful of remaining humans for countless centuries. This young man embarks on a journey across a dread landscape populated by mountain-sized Watchers, shambling Silent Ones and baying Hell-hounds, in order to rescue Naani, his metaphysical beloved. Naani lives in the Lesser Redoubt, a recently discovered smaller settlement of humans, who reside in another pyramid hundreds of miles away. Ballantine Adult Fantasy series editor, Lin Carter, decided to divide the book into two volumes, as “It is a very long novel. It must be close to two hundred thousand words in length; far too long to appear in one volume at our standard price.” While this bifurcation may have been prompted by financial necessity, it makes aesthetic sense. Robert LoGrippo’s gorgeous wrap around cover for volume one is simply reversed for volume two; the front and back covers trade places. Whereas the first volume describes the narrator’s journey to the Lesser Redoubt, which has been ravaged by demons, leaving his beloved Naani the sole survivor, the second volume monotonous reverses this journey. What’s worse, the repetitive tablet taking and hour marking of the first half remains, but are now accompanied by sappy plaits of love and devotion.

Even my stubborn tenacity was tried as I read yet more statistics of hours walked versus hours slept divided by food tablets consumed. As happened when I read ‘the Worm Ourobouros,’ a novel marred by a similarly artificial prose style, I found myself lying in bed, my thoughts actually slipping into stilted faux- Victorianisms as I tried to fall asleep. But whereas at least Eddison exercised some acumen in his archaic prose, Hodgson has neither the chops nor the history to pull it off.

I left my copy of the book in my friend Zach’s van the other night. While waiting to retrieve it, I started a collection of ETA Hoffmann’s short stories. Though Hoffmann’s prose is, much like Hodgson’s, unfashionably padded and expository, I could not help notice Hoffmann’s expedient, smooth rhythm. His prose moves! In contrast, take, for example, the tedium apparent in this passage from Hodgson’s ‘the Night Land’: “…I was wondrous glad, and did make the Maid to sit upon a little rock, while that I made a fitting of the shoes. And, surely, they did be utter big and clumsy upon her little feet; so that I was in surprise to know how great is a man, beside a Maid.” Mind you, the narrator’s gentile reflections on feminine precociousness and charm occurs in a squat cave amidst a gore-streaked barren populated by horrendous humped creatures eager to pull the wet spines from the bodies of both him and his Maid.

Or consider the narrator’s account of his sleeping arrangements: “And I turned my back, and went a pace away and lay down, for truly there did be no way else but to be near the Maid, for it was a little cave. And I lay very husht, because that I was so sore in the heart. Yet, truly, I could not come unto my slumber, for I was so disturbed in my love; and I stayed very quiet maybe for a great hour; and did fight that I shake not mine armour to jinglings with the utter cold that did make me to tremble. But the Maid did sleep very sweet and calm, as I perceived by her breathings.” First, isn’t it ridiculous for the narrator to concern himself with some facile chivalry about keeping a ‘proper’ distance between himself and Naani as they sleep? Secondly, in the wake of the genocide of a good third of the remainder of the human race, and hopelessly lost hundreds of miles from any refuge, should a recent lover’s tiff with Naani really keep the narrator up at night?

Ok, so I’m being somewhat harsh here. If ‘the Night Land’ is such a poorly written book, why read it? Or, for that matter, why write about it? We often assume that people read books on account of quality. A book is worth reading because it’s ‘good.’ Isn’t it? But Weird Fiction doesn’t necessarily operate that way. Maybe that’s what draws me to it. Which is not to say that there aren’t well written works in the genre – HP Lovecraft, for all his faults, has emerged from the isolationism of the Weird Fiction ghetto for a reason. I have not read any Clark Ashton Smith, but I have heard similar praise for his writing. As for the others? There is no need to make an apology for the Pegana cycle of Lord Dunsany, for Eddison’s ‘the Worm Ourobouros,’ or David Lindsay’s ‘Voyage to Arcturus.’ Despite the clumsy writing. Despite the inconsistencies and missteps. That’s where Lin Carter misreads the genre. He attempts to apologize for the genre. In the anthology “Dragons, Elves, & Heroes,’ discussed elsewhere on this blog, he erroneously attempts to place Weird Fiction in a mythic context. But myth deals with cultural extroversion, while Weird Fiction is first and foremost introspective. And why shouldn’t it be?

Hodgson was killed in 1918 by shrapnel while serving the British army in the First World War. Most of the notable works of the genre were written prior to the war’s outbreak. I mentioned ETA Hoffman earlier in this post, and it is important to note the influence of German Romanticism on the Weird Fiction genre. ‘Pickman’s Model’ or ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ by HP Lovecraft has something of the delirium and madness of Hoffmann’s ‘the Sandman’ or ‘the Artushof.’ There is a similar concern for the transcendence of wild inspiration – its corresponding creative and corrosive elements. But the hundred or so years separating European Romanticism from the pulp genre of British and American Weird Fiction demands a drastically different context. Whereas Romanticism was a push outward, Weird Fiction signifies a desire to move back. Romanticism questioned the tenants of the Enlightenment - rationalism was not a sufficient lens with which to view the world. Weird Fiction, on the other hand, arose as a reaction, conscious or otherwise, to modernism. The abstract is terrifying. The non-Euclidean is demonic. This is an anti-Modernist sentiment! If cyberpunk novelists William Gibson and Bruce Sterling at the end of the 20th century spoke of the post-human with an air of utopianism, them Hodgson at its inception wrote with derision of the Ab-humans and others – a race engendered from humanity mating with ‘the other.’

The eugenics of Weird Fiction is, of course, the elephant in the room. What does one make of the smug Orientalism of Lord Dunsany or the debased races of HP Lovecraft? Even the ‘gentle grandfather’ of the genre, JRR Tolkien, can either be misappropriated, as in the Nordic overtones of Middleearth, or is, at times, himself blatantly racist – how does one reconcile the alliance of the ‘dark races of the south’ who side with Sauron, or the racist implication of the Orcs? Hodgson writes “…to be mixt and made monstrous or diverse by foul or foolish breeding- as you to have knowledge of in the bodies of those dread Monsters that did be both Man and Beast.” Soon after, he weighs in on Darwinian evolution, writing “…I still then to have no occasion that I think Man to have been truly a Fish, or aught truly different from a Man; but only that he did be once modified physically to his need, and to be still possessed of the Man-Spirit, though all lackt of development.” To ignore the bigotry and ignorance of the genre is dishonest.

But it’s not an outright condemnation as such. ‘The Night Land’ is not a well-written book, but there is something to be said about such curious literature. Books like ‘the Night Land’ or Eddison’s ‘the Worm Ourobouros’ present us a telling portrait of their contemporary moment, just as much, or arguably, moreso, than the great works of their era. ‘The Night Land’ is a strange novel. It is a singular novel. The faults of Hodgson and his peers, then, offer us an exhilarating and peculiar challenge to our conceptions of literature. These novels exist on a planet where the sun has indeed burned out. It is a frozen earth, and books such as ‘the Night Land’ are its frozen literature.

NEXT: Penguin Classic's Tales of ETA Hoffmann.

The Feverhead

2009-08-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

by Wolfgang Bauer

translated by Malcolm Green

And the microscopic school girls. And the three-eyed sailor inhabiting two bodies 3.5 metres apart. And ULF itself - a fleshy head sprouting from the Brazilian earth as well as a huge, bleached skull somewhere in that same jungle. Not to mention hermaphrodites, transvestite nuns, international coalitions of detectives and a woman whose dress constantly changes its color.

‘The Feverhead,’ by Austrian Wolfgang Bauer, is the sort of book difficult to imagine doing anything other than slipping into obscurity. Which is by no means a knock at this delightfully irreverent novel, written in 1966. I deeply enjoyed ‘the Feverhead.’ The history of 20th century literature is littered with similarly exciting little mysteries, all relegated to the nooks of anonymity. The book itself is a fresh, playful jaunt through bourgeois mores and poetic pretension. Bauer skewers both mysticism and rationalism with equal aplomb. It is incredibly fun and breezy. But it’s hard to foresee ‘the Feverhead’ breaking through to a larger audience. Which is, perhaps, fine - but why is that so?

It is exciting, for instance, to read a novel so engaged in stretching, or at the very least confounding, the medium’s expectations. Wolfgang Bauer’s ‘the Feverhead’ fits nicely alongside other curiosities such as Robert Kelly’s ‘the Scorpions,’ Roland Topor’s ‘the Tenant’ and Rene Daumal’s ‘Mount Analogue.’ All four writers are not usually thought of as novelists. Most of them only completed a handful of novels. Bauer himself was a playwright and ‘the Feverhead’ is his sole novel. Kelly and Daumal are known primarily as poets. Robert Kelly’s contributions to poetry are significant; he can be largely credited with bringing Deep Image to American poetics, but his latest novel, 2009’s ‘The Book from the Sky’ met with little to no press. Daumal is considered, when considered at all, more as a dissident footnote to Breton’s battalion of surrealism than anything else. And Topor tried his hand at everything from illustration and animation to film acting. But what remains truly engaging about these four writer’s novels (and the work of many like-minded others, such as American-born Oulipo Harry Mathews) is that they attack the medium slantwise. One does not feel the lugubrious weight of the Novel bearing down on them. Their novels are a nexus of deliberate thought and overheated whim. The absurdity of Bauer doesn’t so much remind me of novelists such as Pynchon or Coover as much as playwrights such as Slawomir Mrozek and Richard Foreman. It is just such a suppositional freedom that similarly draws me to science fiction.

‘The Feverhead’ bursts with phantasmagoric images of malapropism. We meet one man who “…is 2.3 metres tall. But the largest part of his body is his cranium, which makes up about a third of his body… [and has] roughly 10 cm wide sparkling eyes.” A few pages later we are introduced to Olga the living train car, who “…was as white as snow. Nor was it made of metal, old chum! but of flesh and blood! There were veins pulsing away inside, the chimney stack was covered in a down of hair – and instead of headlights it had four large eyes!” Still, despite Bauer’s evident strong turn with startling imagery, ‘the Feverhead’ ultimately reveals itself not as a novel of fantastic images, but as primarily a book concerned with being a book. Which is distinct from the previously mentioned hubris concerning the Novel, which is not only localized in medium, but also a particular tradition.

We follow the ongoing correspondence between Frank and Heinz, two hapless Austrians obsessed, among other things, with a missing daughter named Karin, the feckless murderer Ottomar Fohne, and thermometers. Frank and Heinz’s letters to each other form the bulk of the novel, aside from two final, short letters, written by Wolfgang Bauer and Ulf Halda respectively. But Bauer quickly destabilizes the conceit of correspondence, one as old as the novel itself. Perhaps a better word would be mocked? This is an epistolary comedy gleefully dismantling any vestigial veracity within the tradition of correspondence. Letter writing falls apart, the intrusion of privacy and the serendipity of coincidence intervene. Frank writes Heinz, “It seems my letter has crossed with yours,” while Heinz tells Franks “Unfortunately your letter crossed with mine.” At first we see these mundane collisions - “Now even our telegrams have started to cross, so I tried phoning you at midnight, but unfortunately your number was continually engaged.” The very means of communication crumble. The technology of it all can, and does, break down. Eventually, these small absurdities escalate into the esoteric.

Language falls apart in a tossed word salad. Language displaces location. Heinz’s daughter, Karin, stays at “Ottokar’s Famed Ski Lodge, Under the Smoked Bun, Post Gerlitzen, near Breitfuss,” while Frank tells us that his son Alex had spent a winter at “Ottomar Fohne’s Skee Lodge, Under the Smote Bun, Post Merlitzen, near Seitfuss.” Alex “…assumes that the words and some of the initial letters have changed slightly over the last 20 years ‘as a result of the so-called workings of the language,’ and that here we are dealing with the self-same hut.” The confusion, that is, the inadequacy of language, both shuffles identity – as Ottomar becomes Ottokar, but also place and geography – Seitfuss becomes Breitfuss. Language serves as the barometer of reality, but is itself suspect. No wonder Frank and Heinz are so obsessed with thermometers – with means of measurement!

Frank and Heinz both embark on absurdist journeys. I would like to focus on Frank’s in particular. He makes his way to Paris where he encounters at least one Ulf (there are many) and is astonished by the locals; as he exclaims, “By the way, another negro is walking past at the moment!” This excursion to Paris is one of the most telling in the novel in terms of Bauer’s pliable language. Frank signs his name “Francois” and strews tired French jargon throughout his letters written in Paris. He writes, “ Please excuse any words of French extraction in this letter, but you know how it is: la France, Oh lala! C’est la vie! Je t’aime, etc! etc!” Frank tells Heinz he has “…walked past the Louvre four times now, once every hour. Incidentally, the Louvre is supposed to contain the greatest art treasures in the world (e.g. the Mona Lisa etc.). Quite fantastic!” And later still, “… I saw a negro walking along the street. Apart from which, nothing too stupendous has happened.” Frank’s letter is clogged with references to wearisome French clichés. He “…at that moment… saw the peak of the Eiffel Tower shimmering in the distance,” and is “…dropped off by Roger Halda-Vohne on the banks of the Seine late that night. Not far from Notre Dame. Schuller and I walked for a while through the night lights of Paris.” What is Bauer doing here? Aside from playfully highlighting the inanity of his protagonists, Bauer skewers much of the continental French pretension so prevalent in western literature. Why does he do so?

Bauer, we must remember, is an Austrian writer. The West has traditionally cast a wide blind eye to the arts of Eastern Europe, either through a history of political dissolution or Communism’s specter of the Eastern Bloc. When work from this region of the world does find its way to wider audiences, such as the films of Bela Tarr or the novels of Witold Gombrowicz, there is often a somewhat cultish air of amusement. But here, in Bauer’s novel, the myth of ‘France’ is deflated and reduced to some doggerel of catchphrases and tourist traps. The very nation of origin of ‘the Feverhead’ dooms it to obscurity.

It is not in France or anywhere else in continental Europe that ‘the Feverhead’ reaches its conclusion, but in South America – or more precisely, Canca, Brazil. ULF? Again, location infiltrates language – Frank addresses Heinz as “Mio Amigo!” and calls the commanding officer of his ship “Capitano.” Frank is not so much accumulating languages, that is – these disparate tongues are not permeating Frank’s existing lexicon, instead they are bouncing against the surface of his linguistic perimeter. Language leads to disjunction, not conjunction. The world strikes Frank’s surface, nothing more.

But perhaps ULF is the key to the novel. Frank and Heinz bounce off of each other throughout the novel, their identities increasingly blurring, but it is in the reoccurrence of the ‘Ulfs’ that we get a more holistic vision of the novel. We first find a cryptic reference to Ulf as Heinz asks, unbidden, “I’d like to have heard how Ulf is doing.” This is given no explanation. Who is Ulf?

But Ulf, we learn, is not necessarily one person. Ulf is, rather, a situation, isn’t he? Early on in the novel, Heinz relates to Frank a dream in which Ulf appears in a pastoral wood, and “…goes likewise to the tulip(s), snaps off the second one and disappears into the forest. End. At this point I wake up, soaked in sweat. And I’ve never seen Ulf in all my life! I would pass him by on the street as if he was a total stranger. But I recognize him in my dream. It’s Ulf! I know it!!” Ulf materializes not as a person, but as a name. Karin announces her travel plans to ‘Ottokar’s Famed Ski Lodge,’ and at the bottom of the letter, Ulf signs his greetings.

Later, Alex gives us the address of his new friend, the poet “Dr. Ulf Kiemburg-Nurser, Free lance writer, Annenheim by Lake Ossiach, No.16/4/4.” The same Ulf? Or more of the same? Later, Frank finds “…the way Ulf keeps making himself noticeable quite mysterious in fact downright incredible! Not only did he sign Karin’s letter twice, no, he put his scrawl at the bottom of yours!” As the novel progresses, Ulf places his signature at the bottom of each and every one of Frank and Heinz’s letters, even as the two friends travel to increasingly disparate reaches of the globe. By the novel closes, there are numerous characters named Ulf. Or, numerous characters are Ulf. Are they maybe the same person? Reverberations of the same person?

A doubling occurs in ‘the Feverhead,’ whether it be the two bodies of Captain Ox, the hermaphrodite Schuller, or the peculiar fever causing both Frank and Heinz’s “…pores [to] open up and become veritable cavities.” This doubling eventually opens to an intensive and diffuse multiplicity. Perhaps singularity is the word? Frank arrives in Canca with his traveling companions, including an Ulf Thermsbauer, and implores Heinz, “…please don’t think I’m mad, I’m quite clear in my mind and obviously one way or another I am still the Frank of yore. Still the wag of old and Canca anyway is the locus, as it were, of all waggishness, as you’ll shortly find out. It’s hard to say where Canca lies. All of us who have just traveled here assume that it is hidden, as I’ve already hinted, in the Brazilian jungle; but it could just as easily be in Alaska or Lower Austria…” Canca, then, could be anywhere. It is a transcendental place of recognition, much like the Mount Analogue of the novel of the same name by the previously mentioned Rene Daumal.

When Frank arrives at Canca, he sees “A giant head with its neck stuck in the ground. It was about 400 metres tall and 300 wide. But it wasn’t some giant papier-mache head, such as you know perhaps from the various fun fairs that visit Villach! It was a head made of flesh and blood! It lived, saw, breathed and spoke like a human head! And its face – was my face! Please don’t laugh – all the others thought they recognized their own features in Canca as well.” A couple pages later, Heinz describes his arrival at Canca with his traveling party, including “…tiny model girls and Ulf Kiemburg-Nurser, the mini-poet….” But Heinz doesn’t quite see the fleshy head that Frank observed; he sees “…a giant skull jutting out of the earth. Inside the skull is a town. ‘The town has been dead now for thousands of years… it has frozen up…in the old days it was full of hustle and bustle… the houses, indeed, everything here was made of flesh and blood… Once upon a time it was a living organism… all that’s left now is ice and bones… Canca is Ulf…”

At this point, Frank and Heinz’s correspondences dovetail into each other, forming a sort of feedback loop. The novel then closes with two letters written between the psychiatrist Ulf Halda and Wolfgang Bauer. Halda writes that one of the patients, a young man, has written a novel that “…centres around a postal correspondence – the last two letters of the ‘work’ keep carrying on at the end of one another. According to the patient, he has no other alternative but to continue the correspondence ad infinitum.” Bauer then writes to Halda “…the last two letters in my [novel] keep leading into each other – and there is no end to it!” The overarching awareness of Frank and Heinz’s final letters, a transcendence perhaps leads to a madness or sublimation of intellect, is mocked here in the final two letters and relegated to psychoanalysis or creative frustration.

And where does that leave us?

NEXT: I still intend to finish William Hope Hodgeson’s Dead Earth epic, The Night Land, but since I left my copy of the book in my friend Zach’s van, I won’t get a chance to retrieve it until Monday. In the meantime, I’ve been making my way through Penguin Classic’s ‘Tales of ETA Hoffmann.’ I’ll be weighing in on one or the other in the next couple days.

Simulacra and Simulation

2009-07-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

by Jean Baudrillard

Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

The essays collected in ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ envision a means of looking at the world beyond the formidable shadow of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt school. Or, Jean Baudrillard furthers the extent of this shadow, but through an extension in time and space; he demands we once again consider our models of representation. The point of origin of such a model must also be revised. Can we perceive such an origin? Does one even exist? And what is the model itself? Baudrillard contends that our lives are inundating with so many models, so much simulation, that the old distinction of authenticity is no longer relevant. So where does that leave us? Baudrillard writes that “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory…” Postmodern culture is not artificial, that must be stressed, as the very concept of artifice is archaic, seeing as there is no binary upon which to qualitatively judge. Therefore, strictures of authenticity as a basis of aesthetic judgment have collapsed, or rather, dissolved. We have lost our ability to perceive a distinction between the real and the artificial – is Baudrillard also saying that no such distinction even exists? We can see our world, then, as a great dissolve.

The hyperreal is not a facsimile reality shorn of consequence. A thing that is not real is not without danger, an order of intent, consequence or definition. For example, Baudrillard suggests a person “Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal)… remain close to the “truth,” in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won’t be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements…” It is impossible to place simulation outside the real, just as the intrusion of the real into the simulated furthermore questions the very realness of an event. Power structures are ill-suited to work in mind of such a distinction, as “The simulation of an offense, if it is established as such, will either be punished less severely (because it has no “consequences”) or punished as an offense against the judicial system… but never as simulation since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power.” Ah! Power, and with it capital, are addressed in relation to this emerging culture of the simulacra. We must look at “Simulacra and Simulation” according to the interstices between culture and dominant power structures.

So, therefore, “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of social, of the gravity of the economy and finalities of production. To this end it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also, why not? that of desire.” To maintain itself, power must utilize the myth of disaster in order to perpetuate the crisis of the real. Power remains so, then, by virtue of its ability maintain an imaginary status quo from perceived disruptions. Baudrillard calls this deterrence. He investigates the American film, “The China Syndrome,” in which a nuclear disaster is averted. But, Baudrillard argues, “... nuclear catastrophe does not occur, is not meant to happen, in the real either, any more than the atomic clash was at the dawning of the cold war. The equilibrium of terror rests on the eternal deferral of the atomic clash.” What could then be made of the endless ‘War on Terror’ perpetuated under the Bush-Cheney administration? Terror’s purpose is “…making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.” But in the Bush-era ‘War on Terror’ isn’t terror itself the specter of deterrence?

Baudrillard touches upon economic theory, yet thankfully retains a degree of skepticism. “Capital was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc., and if it is the one that fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all use value, all real equivalence of production and wealth, in the very sense we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation.” This had lead to an implosive dissolve as “…power played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger comes at it from simulation… power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, and political stakes.” But it’s too late for that, since “Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance.” Since an empty equivalency still maintains its stranglehold upon power, how can this chain of command be disrupted?

The very structure of “Simulacra and Simulation” must at this time be inspected. The collection begins with ‘The Precession of Simulacra,” by far the longest single essay in the book, consisting of roughly a third of its length. It is also with this extended essay that Baudrillard establishes many of the book’s themes, positioning concepts of the hyperreal, fascination, implosion, the end of the panopticon and deterrence in larger constellations of interrelation. This ‘precession’ must be understood as both a movement through space, or rather an insertion into space, and also a position in time – that is, the representation precedes and defines the real. Again, we must remember the hyperreal does not alleviate the danger of the real – this truism in fact neuters the suppositions of power, founded on deterrence, which wishes to perpetuate the danger of the real. Because a simulated “…war is no less atrocious for being only a simulacrum – the flesh suffers just the same, and the dead and former combatants are worth the same as in other wars.” So, we are left with the simulacrum, and not with either reality or its artificial constituent. The hyperreal is not a movement outward, as in an explosion, but an implosion - a consolidation?

Having established a basis of intent, that is, a basic lexicon, through “The Precession of Simulacra,” the remainder of the book can be understood as modular points of entry rather than a linear accumulation of an argument. I am reminded at times of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. Hegelian history, the shopping mall, science fiction and motion pictures are all investigated in dense, consolidated essays, often running three to eight pages. Any argumentative arc is contained in its totality within each individual essay. It is simply a question of compression in terms of each individual essay. Take, for instance, “Clone Story,” in which Baudrillard chases the significance of scientific advantages in cloning technology. So, “If all information can be found in each of its parts, the whole loses its meaning.” The whole is deprioritized, as each part is in a sense the whole – though such distinctions are further marginalized as we acknowledge a cultural implosion.

Baudrillard expands upon the prospective place of information in such an implosion. He states, “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” But he provides three possibilities: “Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain…” or “… information has nothing to do with signification…” or even that “…very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them.” Baudrillard contents that “the third hypothesis is the most interesting, but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion.” Information must be reimagined – it “…devours its own content. It devours communication and the social,” because “Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication,” and therefore “…information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.” So we are left with the media producing the implosion of the social.

The media must be further interrogated. Baudrillard wants one to ask, “…do the media neutralize meaning and produced unformed [informe] or informed [informee] masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them?” Baudrillard states that the media are “…themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction…” But whereas in past writings he “…condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response…” he did so under an old model of appraisal. Because “…this absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they encounter power.” In this instance, then, perhaps the old methods of judgment have been rendered inadequate.

Is “Simulacra and Simulation” simply another aesthetic or academic condolence to the myth of the new - an era which must be envisioned with new eyes, even if it is an era of simulation? Or is there instead a layering and consolidation of methodology, an implosion and dissolve? Baudrillard calls JG Ballard’s “Crash” “…the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the one with which we will all now be concerned – a symbolic universe, but one which, through a sort of reversal of the mass-mediated substance… appears as if traversed by an intense force of initiation.” Baudrillard’s collection is perhaps, much like Ballard’s novel, just such an initiation. The book must arguably be judged based on its merits as a piece of science fiction. In the novel of galactic empire, “…the conquest of space constitutes an irreversible crossing toward the loss of the terrestrial referential.” And “…science fiction can no longer be a romantic expansion… it would evolve implosively, in the very image of our current conception of the universe, attempting to revitalize, reactualize, requotidianize fragments of this universal simulation that have become for us the so-called world.” Science fiction is an exploration of this new universe, but what is this new universe doesn’t expand, but implodes? Then, “…this new universe is ‘antigravitational,’ or if it still gravitates, it is around the hole of the real, around the hole of the imaginary.” In that regard, then, ‘Crash’ or ‘Pattern Recognition’ are works of science fiction, not solely because their authors are ‘SF writers’ but because they chart this imploded terrain. In this sense, Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” is also a work of unparalleled speculative fiction.

NEXT: William Hope Hodgson's the Night Land.

Is Nancy Allen In Carrie Fisher On Tattooine?

2009-07-09T21:58:00.001-07:00

Of course some
Street girls bother
Me
It’s really insulting
There are never
Any girls out that
Late when I’m out
Just guys
They were like ‘Do
You want to get
Married?’ ‘I’m Lisa’ I
Guess it’s bc. it’s
Summer
Yeah, they thrive in
The summer like
Maggots and
Dogshit welfare
Cock receptacles
I hope you’re going
Well and not sick
Anymore
I can do WNYU on
Mon. 13
WFMU I need to
See early Augs
Schedule I am will
Just need to see &
Then shuffle my
Shifts
Would you like to
Read at my house
27th or 28th of this
Month
What if the msg
Etched on our
Record was a jab
At him nothing
Mean, just funny
Is everything ok
Is Nancy Allen in
Robocop related to
Carrie Fisher
Is Nancy Allen in
Robocop related to
Carrie Fisher
Hey man, my
Schedule for the
End of the month
Is already full w.
Band & work thnx
Tho
Ever seen
Frankenhooker

On the Flarf & Conceptual Writing Feature in the July/ August 2009 issue of Poetry

2009-07-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

I don’t really know what to make of the July/August issue of Poetry Magazine. I mean, I could just go ahead and commend the Kenneth Goldsmith-edited Flarf & Conceptual Writing feature. Or, I could take to task the bland and occasionally awkward poems found elsewhere in this issue. I guess I probably ended up doing just that in this post, but I hope I've avoided any overt snarkiness or smugness. What’s more interesting to me here is trying to find out exactly what’s going on in this issue. What does it mean? I wish I knew some of the back-stage preparation that went into the current issue, because reserving a feature for the two leading progressive traditions in contemporary American poetry in a magazine more likely to dedicate further space to Tony Hoagland and Charles Simic is indeed a shock comparable to the 1931 ‘Objectivist’ issue, edited by a then-young and untested Louis Zukofsky. And that was, what, eighty or so years ago? Therefore, despite any reservations I hold concerning the issue’s actual execution, I’m excited to think of the many readers getting their first taste of Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad or Christian Bok. That’s a big deal, irregardless of any odious politics haunting the margins.

But then, let’s not pack it in and call it a victory just yet. It’s disorienting to finish the Goldsmith-edited feature and find one’s self glaring at ‘the Necessary Minimum,’ a Clive James-penned article that begins, “At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to, and the only hankering was to get something said in memorable form.” What? Now, I’m not naïve enough to have assumed this issue would lead to a gentle ‘softening’ of Poetry’s general aesthetic close-mindedness, but I can’t help detect a certain haughtiness here, not just on the part of James, but perhaps on the editorship of Poetry Magazine itself.

For literally the very first sentence following the Flarf & Conceptual Writing feature to be one in such staunch aesthetic opposition to Goldsmith et al. cannot be chalked up to coincidence. Clive James then praises the unconventional turns in the late work of poet James Merrill, explaining “…the best reason for trying to follow what he was up to was that he had proved he could actually do what he was no longer doing.” Now, this application of that old hoary dictum “Learn the rules before you break them,” is yet another slap in the face of Goldsmith’s selections. Even later, James praises Michael Donaghy’s poetry because he “…future-proofed the poem by cutting back on its context.”

Hmm, one wonders, then, what Clive James would make of the end of Mesmer’s ‘The Swiss Just Do Whatever,’ where she writes, “Why don’t you and Hannibal Lecter/ just kick out the jams?”/ ‘Cause you know you got the chamber, / the chair, / and Fear Factor.”? Or even better, Robert Fitterman’s ‘Directory:’ ‘Macy’s/Circuit City/ Payless ShoeSource/ Sears/ Kay Jewelers/ GNC/ LensCrafters/ Coach/ H&M/ RadioShack/ Gymboree.” I think James would be disturbed, and not just because that mall directory doesn’t even list a WaldenBooks. James would fail to note, then, how Fitterman’s ‘Directory’ assumes a form appropriate to critique millennial commericialism in a way Tony Hoagland’s far more conventional “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” fails to - exactly on account on the aptness of form in the face of the contemporary moment.

The segregation of the Flarf & Conceptual Writing feature has its advantages and its disadvantages. Now, the feature does serve to solidify the twin movements, if they even needed any further assurance. But then, this separation also lessens the potentially seismic effect of this feature. Goldsmith, at least, is as always a charismatic and articulate spokesman. He gleefully declares, “Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building… With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material.” Goldsmith also stresses the movement of the poem off the page, as “This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book: it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.” This, mind you, being the same issue where Charles Simic writes, “ There was a melon fresh from the garden/ so ripe the knife slurped/ as it cut it into six slices. / The children were going back to school. / Their mother, passing out paper plates, / Would not live to see the leaves fall.”

But then, the Flarfists actively engage their setting, even if the prevailing mood threatens to neuter their provocative vitality. Believe it or not, but the intentional crudity and ‘poor form’ of the Flarfists does occasionally pale in comparison to the repugnance of the standard Poetry Magazine fare included elsewhere in this issue. Nada Gordon’s “unicorn hardcore soft-porn abortion e-cards” fails to match the crass machismo of John Hodgen’s “For the man with the erection lasting more than four hours.” I was also struck by the downright archaic nature of many of Poetry Magazine’s selections. Tony Hoagland paints a quaint picture of “Summer in a Small Town” that begs one to ask whether such a charming scene actually even exists in 2009, while elsewhere we see clumsy “joy-buzzer buzzes” reminding the reader of nothing less than 1950s gag toys. The pop cultural and information rich appropriation of the Flarfists and Conceptual Writers integrate their poems in the midst of our late-Capitalist culture, and actually amount to a nightmarish realism - they are of our contemporary moment. But elsewhere, Derek Sheffield’s “…big, wild woodpecker” gives way to “a boy/ waiting for the bus and laughing/ at the cartoon bird laughing like crazy.” Though, wouldn’t the boy more likely be watching Pokemon, or something even more current, than old reruns of Woody Woodpecker? When was this poem written?

Drew Gardner’s zombie-killing heroines, K. Silem Mohammad’s police who are “90% Khalil Gibran, 10% carved wooden men,” and Gary Sullivan’s petitions to “Help me how do I look goth/emo without my mom noticing?” simply belong to, and actively engage our contemporary moment. The terror of Kenneth Goldsmith “Metropolitan Forecast” is, along with the ending of Noah Eli Gordon’s ‘Inbox,’ a book discussed elsewhere on this blog, one of the strongest artistic investigations yet made into 9/11. The sad arrogance of Goldsmith’s “Islam” is shocking, as he appropriates a New York Time interview with French literary ‘bad boy’ Michel Houellebecq, who notes that “Islam is a dangerous religion,” he said it was condemned to disappear, not only because God does not exist but also because it was being undermined by capitalism.” Hmm.

The flair and vitality of the Flarfists and Conceptual Writers simply displays a greater verve and beauty than the WS Merwins and Bob Hicoks who usually frequent Poetry Magazine. Take Jordan Davis’ “Turtles Generate Poems:” “No wonder they move so slowly-/ Somebody in there is/ Trying to write.” or Caroline Bergvall’s “The Not Tale (Funeral):” “The great labour of appearance/ Served the making of the pyre./ But how/ Nor how/ How also/ How they/ Shal nat be toold/ Shall not be told.” These are beautiful poems, with or without all the critical scree about their intentional ‘bad writing’ and offensiveness.

Can we honestly expect to see a greater tolerance for progressive poetry in established bastions of conservative writing like Poetry Magazine? I doubt it, but it would be nice to actually see a Christian Bok or Nada Gordon poem integrated every once and a while into the general selection of the magazine, where it can thrive in absurd juxtaposition to the Philip Levines and Charles Simics of the print world. We can only hope.

Miracle of the Rose

2009-07-09T15:01:00.000-07:00

by Jean Genet

Translated by Bernard Frechtman

The prison is the double of life. Not so much that prison mirrors or replicates life; it is a simulated environment whose verisimilitude is independent of any ‘liberated’ life. Prison is the actualized space upon which the outside world is contingent. Life is lived by the prisoner, not by the freed man. That prisoner navigates through a series of chambers, spaces not necessarily geographical, and this progression in fact binds the him to these chambers. This sequence of containments ultimately builds to the double of life – life itself. Jean Genet composed his second book, ‘Miracle of the Rose,’ in 1943 while still interned at La Sante prison. The book chronicles Genet’s stay at the Fontevrault penitentiary as he looks back on his youth at Mettray and investigates his attraction to his fellow prisoners, Divers, Villeroy, Bulkean and the saintlike murderer, Harcamone. This is my first encounter with Genet, but I was instantly struck by the debt many of my favorite writers, Kathy Acker and Samuel R Delany in particular, owe to him. Genet’s insights on the tattoo and identity directly remind me of Acker, while Delany seems to have found much inspiration in his approach to naming from this French author.

Genet rambles on erotic games, decapitations and inter-prison power struggles, but ‘Miracle of the Rose’ is not necessarily without structure. Instead, bear in mind the earlier image of a procession through a network of corridors and chambers. ‘Miracle of the Rose’ undergoes protean transformations. These transformations anchor the book’s digressions. Genet does not break his meditations into chapters; instead, a paragraph may very well begin in Fontevrault prison, and end at Mettray Reformatory. Memory and transformation are the prevailing themes of ‘Miracle of the Rose,’ as they enact themselves upon space and the eroticized body. What differentiates the interior from the exterior? What is the erotic scope of friendship? This book is a Proustian development of thought through writing. It is interesting to keep in mind any similarities between Genet’s act of writing while in prison with the deeds of his subjects, such as the murders Harcamone commits.

The act of transformation ties all these concerns together. But then, so does identity and image. Genet, writing from prison, engages the image, the question of seeming and being. He is seized by “…the fear that honest people may be thieves who have chosen cleverer and safer way of stealing.” But then, that begs the questions, what does ‘the image’ of the honest signify? Might it not actually connote something radically different? Prison allows, for Genet, a reversing and a revealing of signs. Genet spent his adolescence amidst the contained gardens of the Mettray Reformatory, and after a spell as a cabin boy on a sailing vessel and a short turn as a petty thief, arrives at Fontevrault. Prison recontextualizes, or perhaps clarifies, the role of objects for Genet. The walls of the prison are contrast with the open air boundaries of Mettray. Do walls bind or can they liberate? Remember Genet’s conscious pursuit of punishment in the ‘hole.’

Genet regards things “…for their practical qualities. The objects here in jail have been worn out by my eyes and are now sickly pale. They no longer mean prison to me, because prison is inside me, composed of the cells of my tissues. It was no before long after my return here that my hands and eyes, which were only too familiar with the practical qualities of objects, finally stopped recognizing these qualities and discovered others which have other meanings.” That is, Genet does not so much discover the double of the image, but that images are doubled. There nature is one of many. Images can be others. Transformation is intrinsic. The protean is the fundamental quality of the thing. But then, things aren’t this simple for Genet.

Furthermore, “Everything was without mystery for me, but that bareness was not without beauty because I establish the difference between my former and present view of things, and this displacement intrigues me.” Genet, then, offers “…a very simple image: I felt I was emerging from a cave peopled with marvelous creatures, which one only senses (angels, for example, with speckled faces), and entering a luminous space where everything is only what it is, without overtones, without aura. What it is: useful.” Genet is not only discussing the object that is seen, but also the manner of seeing. Seeing itself is as much at issue within ‘Miracle of the Rose’ as is seeming. Genet clarifies the dimensions of his world, he lives “...in so closed a universe, the atmosphere of which is thick, a universe seen through my memories of prisons, through my dreams of galleys and through the presence of convicts: murderers, burglars, gangsters, that I do not communicate with the usual world, or, when I do perceive it, what I see of it is distorted by the thickness of the wadding in which I move with difficulty. Each object in your world has a meaning different for me from the one it has for you.” Genet invests the object with a singular meaning, a meaning alien to those living in the outside world.

The cave scene is a difficult passage to parse. It is an ironic one as well; as the reality is one of Genet entering the confined space of the prison in order to metaphorically exit the cave within the vision. It echoes Plato’s famous parable of the cave in order to divest it with an air of revelation. But what is being uncovered? And what does it mean? In one regard, this is a dreary world of the image stripped naked. Yet at the same time Genet offers us a vision of the angels, the image stripped bare is the actual ecstasy of the image. Genet’s view of the world is both uncovered and obscured. The prison is the entirety of the world, yet it is also the lack of the world – its insufferable absence. Is it even Genet’s intention to reconcile these negations?

Perhaps the give and take here described could be better understood as one of seduction. The book both opens and closes with evocations of the beheaded child murderer, Harcamone. The very idea of Harcamone seduces Genet. But the doomed inmate Bulkean also seduces Genet, as does the memory of Mettray. No, memory itself seduces Genet, as we shall see later when we discuss the final pages of ‘Miracle of the Rose.’
Accompanying this seduction is a complex series of contractions as Genet is both attracted and repulsed by the objects he adores. Genet views Bulkean, his lover, with a strange mix of love and indifference. It is worth paying attention to the importance are given by Genet in ‘Miracle of the Rose.’ Bulkean accumulates names. Perhaps this naming is an attempt by Genet to retain some vestige of the man after his death in a botched prison escape.

Genet first addresses Bulkean on a stairwell – marking a transition, a liminal point. Genet “…remembered he was in for a jewel robbery and not knowing his name, yet… called out, ‘Hey… Hey… Jewel! Hey, Jewel!’ He turned around, his face lit up. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I don’t know your name.’ But he said very fast and in a low voice, ‘You’re right, call me Jewel.’” There is a strange sublimation at work here. Genet in effect conjures Bulkean through naming him – he gives the jewel thief an identity. At the same time, ‘Jewel’ sounds like Genet. Bulkean is on some level a double of the author. Later, Genet “…learned that his name was Bulkean a little later when I heard a guard rebuke him for walking too slowly…” In this instance, Bulkean is again named, but through a negative conjuring, he is being reprimanded. Names continue to form a constellation, as “it was on a back of a photo that I saw that his given name was ‘Robert.’ Anyone but me would have been surprised that at first he told people to call him ‘Pierrot’ and later ‘Jewel.’ I was neither surprised nor annoyed. Hoodlums like to change names or distort their real ones until they are unrecognizable.”

A name conjures an identity, but even a naming is ultimately inconclusive. We are left with signs. Genet considers poetic naming, literary language itself, as “In a poem, ordinary words are shifted around in such a way that their usual meaning is enriched by another: the poetic import. Each of the things, each of the objects that recur to my mind composed a poem. At Mettray, each object was a sign that meant grief.” Here we both have the multiplication of signs, as well as the narrowing of their signification into a single meaning – grief. But then, as Genet tells us, “I refer everything to my system, in which things have an internal signification, and even when I read a novel, the facts without being distorted, lose the meaning which has been given them by the author and which they have for you, and take on another so as to enter smoothly the otherworldly universe in which I live.” The book concerns itself with memory, and as such, it privileges the subjective. The only means to really confront reality is through this subjective lens.

The passion of Harcamone is the emblematic transformation in ‘Miracle of the Rose.’ Harcamone “…realized that the incarnation which had transformed him into a field hand was coming to an end. He had to fulfill his mission.” Harcamone assaults a young girl, he “…hurt her. She tried to scream. He strangled her. This murder of a child by a child of sixteen was to lead me to the vision of an ascension to the paradise which is offered me.” Again we see a subjective reversal, as a repulsive act is the catalyst for the sublime. The descent into Fontevrault leads to the ascent out of the cave, as now Harcamone’s murder is the cause for a greater transcendence.

Let us then look at the final pages of ‘Miracle of the Rose,’ in which Genet enters the phantasmagorical interior. As Harcamone slept, “…four men entered his dream. Then he awoke. Without getting up, without even raising his torso, he turned his head to the door. He saw the black men and understood immediately, but he also realized very quickly that, in order to die in his sleep, he must not disrupt or destroy the state of dreaming…” Then, the narrative assumes a nightmarish grotesquery, as “…he became huge, overtopping and splitting the cell, filling the universe, and the four black men shrank until they were no bigger than four bedbugs… the four men quickly took advantage and climbed up his leg and sloping thigh… the judge and the lawyer wormed their way into the ear and the chaplain and the executioner dared enter his mouth.” The four men travel through strange corridors and down dark alleys before, “finally, all four met at a kind of crossroads which I cannot describe accurately. It led down, again to the left, into a luminous corridor lined with huge mirrors.” The four black men move into the heart of Harcamone’s heart to encounter the mystic rose at the center of his being. They lean over into the central abyss, and “All four made the gestures of people losing their balance, and they toppled into that deep gaze.”

Harcamone is dead. Bulkean is dead. Genet tells us so in the very first few pages of ‘Miracle of the Rose.’ But then, Genet does not intend to write a novel in any such words. We are not reading to find out what happens next. We read to relive, or maybe more accurately retain, what has been before. We create for the first time what has already passed. What are words before the image? “Words have no power over Harcamone’s image. They will not exhaust it, for its matter is inexhaustible. Novels are not humanitarian reports.” No, instead ‘Miracle of the Rose’ is an imprecise impression of lives. The lives, those of Harcamone, Bulkean, and now even Genet, have rotted away, leaving only names. These are ghosts, doubles. Something else, but also a real thing. “These papers are their graves. But I shall transmit their names far down the ages. These ages alone will remain in the future, divested of their objects. Who, it will be asked, were Bulkean, Harcamone, Divers, who was Pilorge, who was Guy? ...If I take leave of this book, I take leave of what can be related. The rest is ineffable.” Genet does not pretend that life can be related with words. But words can relate life’s double – itself a sort of life. A name is a manner of life, but not for a separate thing, but for the name itself. A form of life.

NEXT: Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra & Simulation.

Recreational Society

2009-07-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

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Inbox

2009-07-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

[a reverse memoir]

by Noah Eli Gordon

I keep returning to the social role of the writer. Not so much a responsibility, but a climate. The poet writes within the social sphere, and a life in writing is a social engagement. The romance of the lone poet composing in her solitude is simply that, a romance or fantasy. We find our way to the world with words. This all sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? A poet is a member of a community – there is a polis of words to which we belong, words are the timber, stone, and mortar. That is, after all, the point of this Vito Acconci image I’ve been using as a header for my blog – a shared space, a linguapolis. Far too often, though, social engagement is misunderstood as social conscription or obligation. Look at the position of the U.S. poet laureate – how long is a poet typically in office before he or she starts petitioning for poetry’s popular functionality or ‘relevance?’ Does poetry need to be ‘socially relevant’ as such? What is ‘socially relevant, by the way? DARE seminars and after-school specials? When the government requested Billy Collins compose a poem in the wake of 9/11, was this a possible misunderstanding of the actual ‘function’ of poetry? Words bind us in the manner in which they constitute us. Our words can’t serve as an explication. This line of reasoning leads to a bitter conclusion - words as a witness to, or even complicit agent in, abomination. Ask Paul Celan or Tasdeusz Borowski if the words managed an explication. What then, of Celan’s silence? Of Edmund Jabes’?

Words themselves, then, and the world they compose.

Noah Eli Gordon does something special in ‘Inbox,’ a brilliant book of conceptual poetry published in 2006. It’s a poetry of everything about our medium that isn’t poetry. What I mean by that is actually a lot more simple than it sounds. Gordon compiled “… 55 pages of uninterrupted prose that constitutes a kind of temporal autobiography…” Gordon takes “… the body-text of every email that was addressed specifically to me… currently in my inbox [over 200] and let all of the voices collide into one continuous text. The work is arranged in reverse chronology, mirroring the setup of my email program.” This explanation, similar to the procedural notes accompanying some of Jackson Mac Low’s procedural pieces, makes up the only text in the book originally written by Noah Eli Gordon. The book is a multitude of voices, a digital stream of the text accumulating around the poetic text. This is a book of correspondence conclusively indicating the necessity of a community to poetry. Last year on this blog, I discussed Michael Alexander’s compilation of “The Earliest English Poems.” Those early Anglo-Saxon poems, whether “Beowulf” or “The Book of Exeter,” comprise a word-horde, that is, a hearth of language in the face of the blank oblivion without. It is not the particular moral or ‘relevance’ of a poem that is necessary, but the very fact of its existence.

‘Inbox’ is composed, as early indicated, of the texts that surround poetry, everything that we generally dismiss as standing outside ‘poetry.’ Here we find explanations of poetry that position poems within a certain sphere of physical place: “The sentences collected here were originally written in three small notebooks, spontaneously and in the order in which they appear, over a period of several months in 2001. The sentences in the first group were written almost entirely in January, in David Scher’s apartment in New York, most of the sentences in the second and third groups were written while walking in Baltimore in late summer and fall.” Elsewhere, the possibility of poetry is pursued: “I host and coordinate a reading series at a café and gallery called A Taste of Art in the Tribeca district of New York City. We feature a range of styles from the very performative to the exceptionally academic. David loaned me The Frequencies and I really enjoyed it, and have been meaning to invite you down to our series for quite some time now.” Poetry is a machine, constructed and maintained by an entire crew, calling to mind Sol LeWitt’s famous statement on conceptual art that “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” The apparatus is not localized in a particular locality, a specific idea, but in the entirety of a community. Or, the world!

‘Inbox’ emphasizes the importance of community in the shaping of individual identity. Other than the explanatory introduction, the only texts in the book originating from Gordon is a stray quote here, or an excerpted poem there, such as one bit from “Matchbook: from Looking Lets Go the Thought.” But really, is there any text or language that could be said to ‘originate’ with a single person? What a conceptual work of appropriation like ‘Inbox’ does is simply organize text within large enough chunks to indicate the communal origins of a language within a social nexus. Gordon imagines community in terms of writings “…as a nexus of celebration, one that includes all the ancillary yet necessary endeavors and institutions: literary journals, reading series; reviews; interviews; lectures, etc. I’ve never lived in an area with a huge social network revolving around its literary scene, so I’ve had to look elsewhere to be fed in that way. I’ve made it a point to pay particular attention to what’s going on in the world of literary journals; for me, this is a big part of my community. It’s the celebration. Although I do think it’s incredibly important for writers, especially poets, to add something other than their own poems to the party.” This book is a celebration.

Noah Eli Gordon is the obvious present absence at the heart of ‘Inbox.’ The nodal streams of emails that make up ‘Inbox’ build to an absent identity – the writer. But a second, and perhaps even more important nodal absence is that of the poem. We are told “…our books are 6” by 8” with a variable spine.” and that “It’s 8.5 X 11 folded, good paper, transparent inlay. I’m playing with a few ideas for a cover image,” but the actual thing arrives amidst these preliminaries. The possibility for a poetry, that is, the fostering of the community, is the poem.

On the Poetry Foundation website, I found an article by Allison Glock titled “I Blame Blogs.” Glock rails against blogs with an Inquisitional zeal, as “Just because you can tell the whole world about the sexy porpoise dream you had last night, doesn’t mean you should,” and, even better, “Instead of fostering actual connection, blogs inevitably activate our baser human instincts—narcissism, vanity, schadenfreude. They offer the petty, cheap thrill of perceived superiority or released vitriol. How easy it is to tap tap tap your indignation and post, post, post into the universe, where it will velcro to the indignation of others, all fusing into a smug, sticky mess and not much else in the end. You know those dinners at chain restaurants, where they pile the plate with three kinds of pasta and five sauces and endless breadsticks and shrimp and steak and bacon bits all topped in fresh grated cheese? Blogs are like that: loads of crap that fill you up. With crap.” These harsh, condescending accusations bring “… us to the antidote: poetry. Poems are like diaries too. But they are not the first draft. And generally, they do not include musings about porpoise dreams or photographs of one’s cat.” In the comment’s bar, K. Silem Mohammad replies, “Clearly you haven't read much contemporary poetry.” And, of course, he’s right.

What Glock fails to recognize is that the wonderful possibility of poetry becomes, or already is, poetry. This community is what Noah Eli Gordon illuminates throughout ‘Inbox,’ these bad puns, dinner plans and business negotiations make up not just the lives of poets, but all of our lives. This is poetry, and it’s as rarefied as it comes. A blog can be a horrible thing; it can consist of shallow personal attacks, misinformed elitism and snobbish snark. But so can a poem. Art, and yes that includes poetry, maybe even especially poetry, is complicit. Poetry has condoned as many mass murders as any government. Let us not call our poetry blameless. It is not the place of poetry to stand above a community or to somehow serve as an exemplar or justification for humanity. No, poetry is humanity – the community, the interference, and the banality. Noah Eli Gordon’s ‘Inbox’ could not exist if people were not moving, that is writing, in real-time. In Samuel R Delaney’s ‘Return To Neveryon’ Tetralogy, writing is first generated as a means to record figures for fiscal computation. ‘Inbox’ is a record of how poetry becomes poetry, not just in someone’s email, but also out in the world. And that’s where poetry is, out in the world, not apart from it.

Noah Eli Gordon is a wonderful young writer already on his way to establishing himself within this great discourse. I recommend his work to poets and readers across the entire spectrum of American poetries.

NEXT: Jean Genet's Miracle of the Rose.

After Yesterday's Crash

2009-06-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

The Avant-Pop Anthology

edited by Larry McCaffery

I stumbled onto the Larry McCaffery-edited ‘Storming the Reality Studio’ as a middle school student, browsing through the Science Fiction/ Fantasy section at a Media Play in upstate New York. It didn’t make any sense. What was this fat, shrink-wrapped book with its cover illustrations of animal corpses attached to clockwork mechanisms? I was about 14 years old and starting to explore different literatures. I’d recently jettisoned my RPG novelizations and Robert Jordan doorstops for JG Ballard, Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson. I had also just begun to write with any real intention, and was desperately searching for something, some direction for what I was doing. This tan anthology was subtitled ‘A casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction,’ taken from a William S. Burroughs quote: “Storm the Reality Studio. And retake the universe.” It contained fiction from Gibson, Ballard and Burroughs, as well as other strange and exciting writers I’d never even heard of, such as Kathy Acker, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Bruce Sterling. I was startled, confounded and immensely inspired at an age when the idea of a literature actually engaged with technology and cultural progress struck me as radical and unprecedented. Even today, I look back at ‘Storming the Reality Studio’ and marvel at just how well it was edited, both how pertinent and prescient it continues to be. I recommend ‘Storming the Reality Studio’ not just to those readers interested in 80s cyberpunk literature, but to anyone engaged with the interstices of mass media and innovative writing.

McCaffery gets ‘Storming the Reality Studio’ right in large part because of its sharp focus – he provides a close investigation of the cyberpunk subgenre, while also exploring affinities in other fictions (DeLillo, Pynchon, Vollmann), in addition to cultural theory and philosophy (Baudrillard, Derrida, and Jameson). The anthology works within a determined boundary and seeks out possible bridges outside the strict practices of the defined subgenre. Last year, at a flea market with my then-girlfriend, I came across another anthology edited by Larry McCaffery, published roughly around the same time – 1995’s ‘After Yesterday’s Crash.’ It’s a much more modest affair and focuses solely on innovative fiction. Penguin publishes ‘After Yesterday’s Crash’, while ‘Storming the Reality Studio’ came out through the Duke college press.

Once again, McCaffery’s selections are impeccable. Not only does he acknowledge the influential work of novelists such as Paul Auster, Robert Coover, and Raymond Federman, he also spotlights major young writers who had at that time yet to work their way into any fickle canon. It’s a real pleasure to find Steve Erickson, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace here. The great Steve Erickson was still years away from his mainstream breakthrough, ‘Zeroville,’ and the appendix tells us David Foster Wallace “…currently teaches in the literature department at Illinois State University, Normal, and is completing a new novel.” That new novel being ‘Infinite Jest.’ Better yet, McCaffery publishes in this collection an early story from Ben Marcus, the terrifying and hilarious ‘False Water Society,’ years before the arrival of Marcus’ first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String.’ This is a collection of exciting and innovative fictions, where even the misfires are worthwhile for their audacity. So what is the problem with ‘After Yesterday’s Crash?’

This ultimately falls at the feet of editorship. At their best, editors provide an open receptivity in addition to a discerning mediation. Look, for instance, at the somewhat related field of essay-writing. That is, both can serve as organizational fields, something like what blogging has become. Great essayists, such as Guy Davenport or Hugh Kenner, feed a polymath’s appetite while searching for larger patterns. A good editor does much the same thing. Of course, an editor also functions best while working from an acknowledgement of the very reality of a situation, in addition to a personal aesthetic or political agenda. Look at Donald Allen’s ‘The New American Poetry,’ Ron Silliman’s extremely focused ‘In the American Tree,’ or Cole Swenson and David St. John’s ‘Hybrid American Poetry,’ from earlier in 2009.

‘After Yesterday’s Crash’ suffers from an editor’s desire to seek out, or more correctly to ‘discover,’ the trends of the New. This is related to, but importantly, not the same thing as, the relevance of the moment. Trends, or more aptly put, developments, in the literary landscape should not be ‘sniffed out’ or ‘whipped up,’ so much as observed, or in a more proactive instance, acted upon. It might even be argued that its precisely McCaffery’s blind insistence on the novelty of ‘this particular moment’ circa 1995 derailing this otherwise wonderful anthology. McCaffery’s enthusiasm gets the best of him as he fails to observe localized factors with the same skill as in ‘Storming the Reality Studio. Instead he indulges his zeal for generalizations and punch-drunk manifestos. Critics often trip up when they rely upon aesthetic bridges they themselves sniff out, rather than the social and geographical connective tissue of organic ‘movements’ like cyberpunk, LangPo, or contemporary traditions such as Flarf or Conceptual Poetry. Writers as diverse as Joanna Russ, Raymond Federman and Mark Leyner may indeed share tendencies, but it does the work, and the reader, a disservice to foist an unwieldy umbrella over their heads. Observe the differences along with the affinities.

And McCaffery has dubbed this umbrella Avant Pop. The book is subtitled, after all, ‘the Avant-Pop anthology,’ and boasts on the back cover that this is ‘Writing for the New Millennium.’ The collection’s focus does not fall under the broad reach of writing, but within the particular of fiction. It isn’t as if McCaffery hasn’t elsewhere shown an admirable receptivity to divergent mediums - to innovative poetries such as those of Lyn Hejinian, as well as radical philosophy and cultural theoretics. The book is even preceded by two quotes of poetry. Arthur Rimbaud’s command to ‘Unfold strange flowers/ And electric butterflies!’ nicely segues into a quote from Charles Bernstein’s ‘The Lives of the Toll Takers’ that “There is no plain sense of the word,/ nothing is straightforward,/ description a lie behind a lie:/ but truths can still be told.” Unfortunately, McCaffery does nothing to tie the strong tradition of innovative poetry into his conception of Avant Pop.

Avant Pop itself is something of a test-tube baby. Like Stephen Burt’s New Thing, McCaffery’s Avant Pop is well intentioned, but suffers from a grievous misunderstanding of surrounding social and cultural factors contributing to a linear tradition in the arts. McCaffery conceives of Avant Pop as a trend developing out of postmodernism. After postmodernism. But while postmodernists such as Guy DeBord and Frederic Jameson lament “the Spectacle [that] originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle express[ing] the totality of this loss…,” McCaffery’s Avant-Popists “…share a fascination with mass culture and the determination to find a means of entering and exploring the belly of this beast without getting permanently swallowed or becoming mere extensions of its operations…” Furthermore, “Avant-Pop combines Pop Art’s focus on consumer goods and mass media with the avant-garde’s spirit of subversion and emphasis on radical formal innovation.” Which is already a dangerously vague generalization of the Avant Garde, not to say anything about the tradition of experimentalism that exists outside the hubris orbiting our notions of the Avant Garde. The break in Avant-Pop is that “…whereas Pop Art was an expression of the logic and technologies associated with the ideology of consumption (which governed capitalist expansion during the fifties and sixties), Avant-Pop represents the logic and technologies associated with the next phase of capitalist expansion, initiated during the Reagan era: the ideology of hyperconsumption.” But how does David Foster Wallace or Lynne Tillman’s appropriation of mass media differ from James Joyce’s use of newspaper techniques and typography in ‘Scylla and Charybdis?’

Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t a difference both in motivation and context. I argued as much in my previous post on Place & Fitterman’s ‘Notes on Conceptualisms.’ But I would argue McCaffery’s statements lack sufficient definition. McCaffery circumnavigates possible illuminations whose failed opportunities manifest as contradictions. McCaffery quotes from the 1918 Berlin Dadaist Manifesto that gives this anthology its title: “The highest art will be the one which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day… Hatred of the press, hatred of advertising, hatred of SENSATIONS are typical of people who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street.” What then of the resultant writing of these Dadaists? What then of Apollinaire’s integration of advertising language and vernacular into his poetry? Aren’t these evocations of “the noise of the street?” McCaffery fails to reconcile these blind spots.

He writes how “High culture, of course, had always regarded this bedlam of disposable images and words to be useless, trivial, mere noise, but Avant-Pop and the Berlin Dadaists sensed this chaotic, endlessly circulating swarm of sounds, words, images, and data was actually speaking a new kind of language… a kind of dream symbolism.” Now, this ‘new language’ actually has its origins in industrial culture, and has its expression in the works of early theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. McCaffery isn’t “…sure if the Dadaists were right about this suspicion, but [he] personally feel[s] that Avant-Pop writers are.” Perhaps. He offers no further explanation. Is McCaffery’s point simply that earlier appropriators and assimilators of mass media were grappling with consumption, while the writers who fall under the umbrella of Avant-Pop are grappling with a ‘hyperconsumption?’ - with ‘more’ consumption? This feels like a rather specious difference, as well as a very subjective one. I’m sorry, it’s also a bit of a cop-out.

Place & Fitterman’s ‘Notes on Conceptualisms’ offers a cogent and articulate definition of the contemporary moment in poetry. The book tackles methods by which Conceptual writing takes account of a tradition, while referencing a particularity. It is a manifesto, yes, but it feels as if it is addressing the development of a localized trend, of a group of writers who have been in dialogue. Perhaps that answers Ron Silliman’s question as to why the similar, yet earlier, works of poet Jackson Mac Low were not included in Fitterman’s appendix. Mac Low perhaps does not possess the same personal and professional clout with younger Conceptual poets that he did with the Language poets. This is not a bearing on Mac Low’s work, I personally find him to be a great poet, but simply on personal proximity. McCaffery’s ‘After Yesterday’s Crash’ exists as a complicit project of critics revolving around McCaffery himself, and including others such as Mark Amerika and Lance Olsen, and in that regard forces selective assessments of particular works and writers in order to fit them into an artificial cult of the New.

This is a fantastic and exceptionally curated collection of progressive fictions. I simply find it unfortunate that such diverse and luminous works are mishandled in the service of Avant Pop. But if Larry McCaffery’s aesthetic notions of incipient movements fall flat, he rises from the affair on the strength of his selections as a paragon of taste and relevance. Read this anthology for the brilliant writing, if not for its specious agenda.

NEXT: Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox.

Notes on Conceptualisms

2009-06-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

by Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman

There has already been a great deal written on the Internet about this slender blue book and its claim for novelty. Is it new? Is it different? Yes, Pound’s dictum “Make It New” remains pertinent, it remains true, all these years since its first utterance. But, at some point, wouldn’t it serve us to consider other foundational questions? Such as - Is it relevant? Which is, essentially, a question of moment. The point instead of the line. Perhaps too much time has been spent asking whether Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman’s ‘Notes on Conceptualisms’ legitimately presents a new, that is a culminative, development in the ongoing history of innovative writing. In his introduction to this 76-page volume published earlier in 2009 by Ugly Duckling Presse, Fitterman acknowledges, “we are painfully aware that Conceptual Art was termed nearly half a century ago, and much of what we address might equally be called post-conceptual or neo-conceptual (to borrow terms from the visual arts).” Of course, this volume belongs within a tradition, one incorporating Mallarme and Barthes alongside Jackson Mac Low and LangPo. But there are also strong ties to the tradition of visuals arts, some of which have been traced in UDP’s recent reprint of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s magazine, ‘0 to 9.’ So, in that regard, ‘Notes on Conceptualisms’ is a line.

But it is also a point. Conceptualism as a term, then, is fittingly modular, or variable, in that it can expand and contract in order to facilitate the appraisal and consideration of a particular work. Fitterman cautions that “…we use the term Conceptual Writing in the broadest sense, so that it intersects other terms such as: allegory, appropriation, piracy, flarf, identity theft, sampling, constraint and others.” Conceptual Writing is then taken out of strict boundaries of text, along with execution, and into that of context, as it “might be best defined not by the strategies used but by the expectations of the readership or thinkership.” We must modify our grasp of the points; at the very least we must place great emphasis upon our own reactions to the writing.

The collaborative essay of the same name comprising the majority of ‘Notes on Conceptualisms’ finds Place & Fitterman employing a Wittgensteinian sequence of points. These numbered sub-series are ostentatiously sequential, though such an ordering is actually ambiguous. For instance, there is no ‘3,’ but there is a ‘3a’ and ‘3b.’ Is ‘3’ an actual absence, then, or is it more an admission of absences? Think of John Cage, “…where silence is the song, and once absence is presence, presence is absent, and the present absence is simply another absent presence.” Are we misguided to deliberate upon it as site of contention, rather than an indication of methodology? Place & Fitterman write, “There are end-points to any spectrum, and infinite points between them. How one defines the end-points and the points between instructs how one defines conceptual writing.” Points are both locative and associative: a place, that is a point, can also ‘point’ in a particular direction.

Ron Silliman recently undertook a wonderful reading of ‘Notes on Conceptualisms,’ particularly in reference to mastery, over at his blog. But he makes a number of criticisms of lineage that I feel are telling misunderstandings. He lingers on the book’s newness in relation to a tradition. Silliman acknowledges the wonderful writing of the book’s second essay, Vanessa Place’s ‘Ventouses,’ but found that it “…doesn’t say anything about reference that language poets haven’t been saying for 30 years.” Perhaps. And perhaps that might even be the point – Place may be making a point about reference that has been previously made by the language poet, but she isn’t a language poet. And that says something else. Things can not simply be said, we must say them. Continuously. Maybe that is the point of literary Conceptualism’s appropriation of appropriation techniques from visual artists of the 60s onward. LangPo said it before, but Place hasn’t said it until now.

But perhaps there is a telling difference in the writings of poets such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Bok, Jen Bervin and the work of Conceptual visual artists. Sol LeWitt, who also contributed to Acconci and Mayer’s ‘0 to 9,’ writes “If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.” Place & Fitterman respond, “I have failed miserably – over and over again.” The foundational sentence in the essay is that “Conceptual Writing is allegorical writing.” But soon after the idea of failure is introduced. We are then asked to “Note the potential for excess in allegory. Note the premise of failure, of unutterability, of exhaustion before one’s begun. Allegorical writing is necessarily inconsistent, containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, and guisings that combine and recombine both to create the allegorical whole, and to discursively threaten this wholeness.” A manifesto, such as it can be argued ‘Notes on Conceptualisms’ is one, proposes a novelty of purpose and change, of a revitalized or reactive identity. But for all the boldness of this book, it does not succumb to naïve idealism. Failure isn’t something to dismiss, though perhaps a failure to acknowledge failure would be. “Failure is a goal of conceptual writing.”

Failure. Where is there failure within the word, or of the word? Place & Fitterman write “Words are objects.” And “Conceptual writing mediates between the written object (which may or may not be a text) and the meaning of the object by framing the writing as a figural object to be narrated.” This emphasis on the word as object partially echoes Bataille’s discussion of object and sanctity in ‘the Accursed Share,’ as we are here told to ‘Note that in allegorical practice, the commodity-object is revalued as an object via allegorical practice itself. There is restoration at work, and the promise of fetish.” While at the same time “The allegorical mind sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluing it for the second time in allegorical practice.” And whereas the Language Poets offer a theoretical positioning informed by the Frankfurt school, Place & Fitterman at last make a viable case for post-Benjamin critical theory. They quote Benjamin Buloch’s Marxist/Benjaminian perspective: “…in a culture where objects are already devalued by their commodification, an allegorical relationship to the art object (or text) further highlights the process of devaluation.” Place & Fitterman now take this further, as “One might argue that devaluation is now a traditional/canonical aim of contemporary art. Thus there is now great value in devaluation.” Devaluation is itself capital.

Place & Fitterman concede to Slavoj Zizek’s remark that “The fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations.” Therefore, “…capitalism has a knack for devouring and absorbing everything in its path – including any critique of capitalism. Furthermore, capitalism is naturally a meaningless system.” Institutional Critique, and particularly the work of artist Andrea Fraser, is used as an example thereof, as “Conceptual art, cannot destroy these institutions, but aims to unveil and underscore them through demystification.” So how is literary Conceptualisms, circa 2009, any different from some work by a visual artist, such as Fraser’s ‘Museum Highlights’ from 1989? The twenty-year divide is telling – again, we begin to consider these Conceptualisms as points, just as we have traditionally conceived of them as a line. We must underscore context, as “The poetry community has a vastly different relationship to its institutions, both historically and economically,” than the art world. Therefore, “…because institutions of poetry and progressive writing already wield so little cultural and economic capital, conceptual writing has been increasingly shifting its attention to mass media and the larger bodies of language management, e.g., websites, ads, blogs, etc.” We are then told that “This is another embrace of failure.” This perhaps helps us to understand certain problematics of the contemporary art world that have not made it to the literary community.

One must be engaged in the moment, in the situation. So, in a sense, “Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense – one does not need to “read the work” as much as think about the ideas of the work.” There is a primacy on the act – this can be seen in postmodern poetics in which the reading is emphasized over the product itself in an attempt to dislocate capitalist commodification. But the reading has been further destabilized in conceptual writing. One can not only commodify an object, but also a service. Reading here gives way to mediation – as previously mentioned, to a thinkership over a readership. Then, we are told, “…these are strategies of failure… failure in this sense acts as an assassination of mastery…” This goes deeper than simple mastery of craft. Place & Fitterman aren’t taking aim at the Charles Simics, the Robert Frosts or the Richard Wilburs of the poetry world. No, they aren’t so dogmatic, nor are they so vindictive.

Instead, they quote from Hal Fosters essay, “Subversive Signs,” in which he write that the visual artist as appropriation artist is “… a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular.” Okay, Place & Fitterman take this further, they “Note that ‘more than’ and ‘rather than’ betray a belief in the segregation or possible segregation of these concepts; conceptualisms understands they are hinged. Note that in post-conceptual work, there is no distinction between manipulation and production, object and sign, contemplation and consumption.” Old binaries are removed.

In “Ventouses,” the second of the two essays included in “Notes on Conceptualisms,” Place asks us to look towards the possibilities beyond outmoded binaries, because “…once things are placed in opposition, they can’t help but come together, if only to fight.” Which is, of course, a very Kantian notion. But these essays do not so much support Kantian formulae, but “…the possibility of possibility.”

NEXT: After Yesterday's Crash, edited by Larry McCaffery

Spook Country

2009-06-18T17:31:00.000-07:00

by William Gibson

William Gibson’s previous novel, 2003’s ‘Pattern Recognition,’ constituted something of a break-through, if not an actual break, for the Vancouver-based science fiction writer primarily associated with the cyberpunk subgenre. ‘Pattern Recognition’ found Gibson supplanting the linguistic fission of speculative fiction into a record of our tangential presents. He’d been moving in this direction, towards the present, with his Bridge trilogy, but Gibson finally arrives there in ‘Pattern Recognition.’ It’s a brilliant book, despite its flaws. The writing is masterful when taken sentence by sentence; this is language crafted with exactitude and a clarity to its imagery. Which is the issue. Is Gibson’s sharp, image-centric prose in danger of subsuming itself to the worship of the product itself? Is there a common ground to the contemporary copy ad and mimetic prose? Science Fiction is an object-based medium as much as it is a medium of ideas. Do the two intersect? Blur? The space rockets and zip guns of science fiction are seductive ideas in and of themselves. Mind you, they are also imaginary objects, even if they do exist. ‘Pattern Recognition’ looses sight of itself in its boundless enthusiasm for our gadgets and gizmos, iPhones and Wi-Fis. It is also sabotaged by Gibson’s concern for the well-crafted form, for the ‘tight’ narrative, but still, ‘Pattern Recognition’ remains a powerful book, as prescient as it is timely.

But we’re not going to talk about ‘Pattern Recognition,’ I already did that in a previous post. William Gibson’s latest novel, 2007’s ‘Spook Country,’ occupies much of the same narrative space as ‘Pattern Recognition,’ only moreso. That is, how much of ‘Spook Country’ is Gibson co-opting the form of the thriller, and how much is basically just the components of another mass market, perfect for plane travel? But then, anyone who’s read the Bridge trilogy is familiar with the empty climaxes and tidy conclusions that end-cap most of Gibson’s novels. But why linger on resolutions? Gibson as craftsman takes over the last couple hundred pages of ‘Spook Country. The second half of the book is an entertaining read, but it’s the first half where we find the meat. What’s really important here is the set-up. It doesn’t matter where the chips fall, so much as what colors they come in.

‘Spook Country’ returns to Gibson’s familiar device of triangulated narrative. We know the three apparently divergent narratives will dovetail, and the pleasures are in seeing the initial brushes of contact mount to a full-on collision. The focal narrative is that of Hollis Henry, former member of the Curfew, a Goth band that broke up in the wake of drug-related death, and now a freelance journalist on assignment for Node magazine. But “Hollis had yet to meet anyone from Node, or anyone else who was writing for them. A European version of Wired, it seemed, though of course they never put it that way. Belgian money, via Dublin, offices in London…” Hollis is assigned to cover the emergence of locative art. In L.A. she meets Alberto Corrales, a young artist utilizing GPS technology to create virtual shrines to dead celebrities. The future, as readers of Gibson’s novels should know, lies in architecture, whether it be locative or purely information-based, “Alberto is concerned with history as internalized space…He sees this internalized space emerge from trauma. Always, from trauma.” In that regard, the trauma of space investigated in ‘Spook Country’ is not too far from the undulating Tokyo of nanotechnology and spatial violence seen in Gibson’s earlier novel, ‘Idoru.’ The book also follows Milgrim, a junkie captured by dangerous spook agents, and Tito, a Cuban-transplant in New York who lives amongst the ‘ghosts’ of our political-technological space.

The contemporary is understood as code recognition. Things, constellations of information, are divined and organized. People are, to paraphrase Hal Foster, manipulators of signs more than producers of art objects. Gibson’s ‘heroes’ are the individuals who negotiate information identity. Milgrim is kidnapped by an aggressive spook, Brown, to translate the Russian communications of IF, or Illegal Facilitators. Brown is tracking a family of ghost operators who text each other in Volapuk, a strange language of jumbled letters. Milgrim explains that “when they text, they’re keying in a visual approximation of Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. They use our alphabet, and some numerals, but only according to the Cyrillic letters they most closely resemble.” Volapuk is similar to Esperanto, “…an artificial language, a scheme for universal communication. Volapuk was another. When the Russians got themselves computers, the keyboards and screen displays were Roman, not Cyrillic. They faked up something that looked like Cyrillic, out of our characters... I guess you could say it was a joke.” Volapuk, then, is a perfect metaphor for Gibson of the reappropriation and innovation symptomatic of globalization. The recontextualized gesture is the contemporary gesture. A reorientation.

‘Spook Country’ explores the nexus of an orientation and its subsequent, even its inevitable, reorientation. This is grounded in place. GPS was conceived to perform a particular function – a sort of virtual geo-mapping via satellite feed. But innovation and diversity only truly occur when an object is recontextualized for a function other than that originally conceived. Chris Anderson, in his book “Free: the Future of a Radical Press,” writes, in reference to computer technology, that “Engineers both built the computers and decided how to use them – no wonder they couldn’t think of non-engineering applications…the real transformation would come when those regular folks found new ways to use computers, revealing their true potential.” Come to think of it, that is basically what occurs in both of Gibson’s earlier trilogies, the Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy. In the former, Artificial Intelligence is originally conceived of as a security mechanism, while in the latter nanotechnology eventually leads to Idoru’s transcendence. In ‘Spook Country,’ tech-maven Bobby Chombo recontextualizes GPS technology for locative artists like Alberto.

This is all a matter of space, or as Alberto says, “I start with a sense of place…With event, place. Then I research. I compile photographs.” When a detailed virtual atmosphere is completed, its actual ‘space’ remains ambiguous, despite its reliance on place. Alberto tells Hollis that “The original only exists on the server, when I’m done, in virtual dimensions of depth, width, height. Sometimes I think that even if the server went down, and took my model with it, that that space would still exist, at least as a mathematical possibility, and that the space we live in… might work the same way.” The virtual and the actual have become negligible qualifiers. What’s the difference.

JG Ballard famously wrote that “Technology + sex = the future.” Technology is, ultimately, based more in culture than in hard science. Gibson writes within this dissolve of technology in the cultural moment – that movement towards. New applications of extant technology occur, as Bobby Chombo explains, in two places. He found that “the most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”

Gibson investigates technology as a grid. He turns towards the application of internet technology, of reality-affecting technology. This culminates, or perhaps only truly surfaces, when a bleed or integration occurs. Hollis is told “…that cyberspace was ‘everting’… And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here.” Locative art facilitates a new way of looking, or better yet, a new method of moving. When looking for Chombo’s locative presences, “Right now, if you hadn’t been told it was here, there’d be no way for you to find it, unless you had its URL and its GPS coordinates… That’s changing, thought, because there are an increasing number of sites to post this sort of work on. If you’re logged in to one of those, have an interface device… a laptop and wifi, you’re cruising.” The contemporary moment becomes a matter of choices of simultaneous contemporary moments. Plural. Always plural.

This reminds me of Robert Creeley’s observation that there are American ‘poetries,’ plural, and no longer an American poetry. It also reminds me of that moment in the anime, ‘Akira,’ where a scientist watches the psycho-biological shape of test subject Tetsuo’s psychic powers spill over the boundaries of the measuring grid. A GPS allows us, then, to see all the possibilities of simultaneous place, instead of linear destination. “The world we walk around in would be channels.” Possibilities for contemporary spaces stacked on top of each other – or simply coexisting upon diverse frequencies. Gibson compares this to blogs, “… how each one is actually trying to describe reality… But when you look at blogs, where you’re most likely to find the real info is in the links. It’s contextual, and not only who the blog’s linked to, but who’s linked to the blog…” Hollis asks why everyone, then, isn’t blogging, why aren’t our modular grids of realities visible? It’s like how my friend Mike often asks, if so many cultural theorists, scientists and artists are discussing nanotechnology as the ‘future,’ that is, the present –where is it? Actually?

Gibson answers that maybe these modular, constructive realties are already here. When Hollis asks “How’s it different from virtual reality? Remember when we were all going to be doing that?,” Chombo replies “We’re all doing VR; every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are doing it. But you can’t just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We’ll have internalized the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you’ll just walk down the street.” That is, after all, Gibson’s point, that technology only really activates when it dissolves into culture. How many of us think twice before Googling something? How many of us think about how foreign an idea it seemed twenty years ago?

The grand climax of the novel involves the irradiation of a large sum of bills. Whether this act functions successfully as a narrative climax is debatable – as I said earlier, Gibson’s conclusions are often little more than ephemera. But on a metaphorical level, the level on which Gibson is most interesting, this act succeeds in signaling the future of paper money, of the doggedly physical sum, as obsolete. There is something pulsing all around us, without a body, just waiting for us to develop methods to touch it.

NEXT: Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman's Notes on Conceptualisms

Divine Filth

2009-06-17T21:37:00.000-07:00

by Georges Bataille

Translated by Mark Spitzer

This 2004 collection of prose and poetry fragments from French cultural theorist and writer, Georges Bataille, begs the question, if we’re reading Georges Bataille, which one are we reading? Whose Georges Bataille? That is, the George Bataille we encounter in the Mark Spitzer edited and translated “Divine Filth” is a very different beast than the one discussed elsewhere on this blog. I want to investigate why that’s the case. I’ve previously looked at “the Accursed Share,” a fascinating work where Bataille fuses Marxism and sun-worship within the framework of economic theory. But what’s going on here? What is localized in this particular text? Spitzer is our mediating agent, the lens through which we experience Bataille, as he subsumes certain aspects of Bataille’s writing in order to emphasize a scatological sensationalism. The reader can be forgiven if they lose sight of Bataille’s relationship with Hegelian transcendence and Marxism in the face of Spitzer’s exaggerations of “…the various threads of ecstasy and death permeating these translations – a loss through which Bataille exceeds himself by seducing his readers with instances of excess.” Ok. But what does that mean? Or, what is that actively meaning?

“Divine Filth” is in constant danger of becoming a dishonest collection. Does it deceive the reader? Does it deceive the text itself? The book masquerades as a cohesive volume of fissures, yet its gaps are promulgated by an outside agent – Spitzer – and not design. It’s best to keep this in mind. Not that Spitzer’s effort isn’t without its pleasure and its charm – it’s hard not to appreciate his efforts to bring these fragments to a general readership beyond the hoary bounds of scholarship. But these “lost writings,” as Spitzer calls them, are indeed fragments, and they must be reconciled as such in reference to the larger infrastructure of Georges Bataille’s complex and at times daunting body of work.

The jottings and half-finished prose pieces of “Divine Filth” are exciting not because they afford us a new ‘product’ to assimilate, but because of the rough scaffolding it displays. These are the cogs of Bataille’s procedural mechanism, amidst both the chaff and the treasure. Bataille asks, “How to disconnect myself? Imagine myself drunk? a drunkard? But alas, that’s false! What words can only touch upon: I get where I am by noticing nothing. A blunder, I slipped, I fell…” The act of writing acknowledges itself. Here are a series of mistakes, some brilliant and many negligible, which leads to a greater illumination of truth. No, to the greater search for transcendence, if not that very thing. As we read and enjoy these unpublished writings, we should ask ourselves why Bataille decided not to publish them. Such an appraisal does not cross out this text, but bring it into context.

The ambiguity, the great arbitrariness of this collection, cannot be forgotten. Why should it be? We must question this work as we make our way through it, if we hope for any actual glimpse of it. Perhaps my qualms about “Divine Filth” would be partially assuaged if the work under discussion was apprehended as selections from a notebook, and therefore chimerical, instead of solidified as poetry. Bataille is a promiscuous writer! His work roves with a solar ferocity across disciplines – poetry, philosophy, pornography, and all pushing outward. Why not explode this diversity? But does Spitzer’s Bataille illuminate the writings available elsewhere? Or does “Divine Filth” deemphasize certain elements in an attempt to bring Bataille in collusion with the gaudy ‘derangement’ of its publisher, Creation Books?

My issues with this volume’s editorship collide nicely with Bataille’s own consideration of negation throughout these fragments. These pieces, these discarded pieces, chase annulment as they recede and cease. Writing is an act of erasure, as is the case in the work of Bataille’s countryman Jacques Roubaud, and others, such as Paul Celan and Edmund Jabes. But Bataille’s negation is of a different sort – the cyclical nature of destruction is here inescapable. Bataille “…can destroy all observers by crossing them out. From the moment I start writing, I’ll spend a lot of time crossing out, ripping apart, burning, and getting rid of others!” But is this a sort of paring down to reach an ineluctable veracity, or is it something else, a negation with a more ritualized vigor?

“Divine Filth” unspools as the reader progresses through its spacious and vast blankness. We begin with two prose pieces, move onto complete poems, then fragments, and finally the wisps of an appendix. “Divine Filth” is a sea shell, circling inward to its nullified spiral. The two prose fragments, here titled “Filthy” and “Divinity,” come and pass, insubstantial and incalculable glimpses of transcendence, its futility. The first of the two fragments, “Filthy,” is prefaced by a lengthy excerpt from Hegel. Is the individual itself another fragment, another incomplete thing? Hegel suggests that “with the positing of the individual, the Beyond is established even if it is perceived only as existing alongside it, as in spatial intuition.” Can this Beyond even be reached, or do our attempts to exceed ourselves only affirm our own selfhood, and therefore exclude any transcendence?

The main character, Filthy, rebels against the strictures of class and propriety expected of her, but these transgressions are also affirmations of her very class identity. She drunkenly leans against the walls of an elevator and reminisces about “…when I was a kid… about ten years ago… when I was twelve… I was here with my mother.. a tall old lady… past her prime… like Queen Mary or… and right here… getting off the lift… the operator… the same one… he didn’t stop it very well… it went too high…” This spatial movement upwards is a desultory subversion of transcendence. It concludes with her telling us that “My mother fell flat on her face…,” followed by Filthy herself toppling to the ground. Is this an entrapment?

The characters in “Filthy” strive for a greater freedom in the libertine tradition of Sade. Filthy hopes to push beyond her limits by reinforcing the social and class-based limitations of those around her, in this case members of the working class, an elderly lift operator and a frightened chambermaid. Freedom is not an elimination of power, but an affirmation of it. Filthy, a member of a privileged aristocracy, depends upon her class-mediated superiority. It’s all a matter of economics, as she “…motioned for her purse and the maid brought it over. An extremely long minute passed before she put her hand in it, then threw a bundle of banknotes on the floor, simply stating: “Split it up.” Behavior is here a defined limit.

Filthy flaunts proper conduct in hopes of moving beyond its strictures, but this excess reveals itself as a futile derangement. She is as trapped by her own social status, just as the lift operator and chambermaid are by their own. Filthy turns to her male companion and asks, “Do you know why they’re so calm and collected? They’re afraid. Their knees shake. Their teeth chatter. They don’t dare act out. I know because I’m scared too. Do you understand, my little man? I’m even scared of you. Scared enough to faint.” Filthy shrieks “I have a hole in my head…,” as she blunders around the room - in negation towards a hoped for transcendence. She stumbles “… to the window and looked out at the Thames beneath her and the monolithic monstrosities in the distance. Promptly, she vomited out into the sky…” Is this defiance successful? Filthy’s male companion believes so, he testifies “In that room, and in those dives we visited, our hearts were crushed by anguish and we exceeded our limits.” Negative value provides the only opportunity for transcendence.

Prose fragments give way to poems in varied degrees of completion. Here, Bataille returns to the question of negative value, asking “Value based on what?/ In indifference to myself/ (I watch)/ what surrounds me/ calm empty void/ which is nothing/ the absence of limits/ escapes me in every direction/ on its own/ the immensity annihilates itself/ while annihilating me/ (I am no longer anything)/ except a sliding toward that empty void…” In light of such absence, then, Filthy only achieves transcendence upon a nullification of selfhood, attained through degradation (both of the self and of others) and drunkenness. Bataille also suggests that “Anguish is the horror of time./ So is constraint and neurosis.” Filthy’s behavior, then, discards constraint in the ecstatic moment of revelry and derangement. But how does one truly transcend to such an absence of limits through this derangement, which is itself a product of these neuroses that define selfhood?

It is when the book circles around these contradictions that I found “Divine Filth” the most rewarding. In such moments, Spitzer sheds his reverence for the surface excess of Bataille as icon and strikes upon the stubborn mystery of these passages. Bataille proposes “To write is to seek luck, not for the author individually, but for all common, anonymous people. In me, the passionate action that compels me to write is part of the trajectory of luck pertaining to man in general.” Bataille purposefully circles that word, ‘luck,’ yet the term is further negated with each subsequent utterance. The erasure is here accomplished through presence instead of elimination. The concept of luck begins to shift and fluctuate, that is, to fade out. What is luck? “Luck animates the smallest parts of the universe…” But again, what is it? How does Bataille’s conception of luck relate to terms more familiar to this blog, those of indeterminacy, the arbitrary or of chance? Perhaps some indication can be found in the relationship of luck to expression. Bataille writes “To measure lost luck while trembling to express it is just a blind leap within us taken in the progression of human luck. It is neither stupidity or feebleness, but a state of grace.” Of course, luck is here defined in terms of its absence, rather than its presence.

In this regard, “Divine Filth” could be an appropriate vision of Bataille through its absence of Bataille – in fragments, blank pages and endless reiterations. Unfortunately, Spitzer’s tendency to sensationalize Bataille in the context of the rather tired trope of some black-clad literary bad boy only disservices this potentially illuminating collection. Instead of a fascinating negation of Bataille, we are confronted with Spitzer in the guise of Bataille. And while I commend his efforts to further excavate an important French writer, “Divine Filth” ultimately comes off as something of a failed promise.

NEXT: William Gibson's Spook Country