TALKING WITH JARED: insight incite in-sight in cite

Me to Jared Schickling
6/9/10

I never really understood fully what So It Seams is "about" until the last 48-72 hours. Cleaning out the verb “to be,” alternative use of quotation marks that constantly bring into question the reality/actuality of other named realities, etc., has led me to the clearer message/vision my subconscious mind was writing all along. Typed below are a few things I've written down longhand that I think may be "necessary" to a more pleasurable reading today as opposed to tomorrow...

Please indulge this because I don't intend to discuss this book or Smoke much more after this. I'm taking a very lengthy hiatus from writing. I feel like being very quiet and returning to Nature. I'm also sending this to myself, saving it in my "one of those" file...

Anyway...

If, in some magical year I find myself working adequately on three different levels, each dimension comprising four parts, dimensions vertically and aspects horizontally arranged, yet visible diagonally in multiple directions and patterns with possibly everything seaming itself to potentially perceivable actualities, I would make these things—my word-beings—visible as phase space trajectories careening through and across and over and under and between and among my various event horizons...which I call "texts." The "reader" then functions as their black hole...the writer-text's death/birth...gateway to life...another mind. The page is a membrane of the black hole that is you, reading...

You are me living that situation, and I am you living this one, meaning the apparently private verbness of existing.

Heaven might be in black and white, a geometric humanity in Nature, approaching the fog under the chaos of striated angelic limbs...a moist vague distance inviting...whereas Hell might seem the essence of feeling stuck in this geometry, worshipped for your absence of motion, your frozen solidity where everything seems logically lit from below; also lacking sine, cosine and tangent...no ships on the horizon.

SIS is another world, an alternate-adjacent universe sharing a membrane with what we perceive as their universe or world. Its existence is downstream from its bifurcation from this apparent world [hence the odd use of quotation marks and italics]. It's a time and place in which, at least, some "humans" are beginning to evolve in a direction shared more with bonobos than chimpanzees. What is absent from their "sex" is "human" emotion...the word-beings are chimps crossing over or going under to the more beautiful essence of their inner bonobo. Its world emerged or bloomed from Smoke.

The fundamental aesthetic, its underlying principle, seems uncertainty; and a kind of polisexuality or pansexuality promising a different kind of certitude.

Jared Schickling to me
6/9/10

OK, I'll indulge it, now. First thought best thought, as you say.

First, the thing recognizable as "for us tomorrow" is, to certain ones, today's pleasure.

What you write here is readable, successfully rendered, in SIS, as well as in Smoke. The intentions of your novels are not opaque. For the interested reader of your novels it's less issues of "getting it" than....

"If, in some magical year I find myself working adequately on three different levels, each dimension comprising four parts, dimensions vertically and aspects horizontally arranged, yet visible diagonally in multiple directions and patterns with possibly everything seaming itself to potentially perceivable actualities, I would make these things—my word-beings—visible as phase space trajectories careening through and across and over and under and between and among my various event horizons...which I call 'texts.'"

I hear context, structure, situation, frames, angles of perception, and any number of these occurring as the singularity or plurality of any other singularity or plurality. Relations and constitutions. The flux of that.

"Heaven might be in black and white, a geometric humanity in Nature, approaching the fog under the chaos of striated angelic limbs...a moist vague distance inviting...whereas Hell might seem the essence of feeling stuck in this geometry, worshipped for your absence of motion, your frozen solidity where everything seems logically lit from below; also lacking sine, cosine and tangent...no ships on the horizon."

"Logically lit from below" : "the earth is my body, my head's in the stars " (Maude to Harold)

The structural aspect of being—and the structure of collapsing and reforming and collapsing, too—alongside, complicit with, the experiential. We are certainly in sight of romance (the romantic imagination not the pretty thing we think—shadows, nightmares, Coleridge's hacking cough, Ruskin's Scandinavian Grotesque) when talking "essence."

"The 'reader' then functions as their black hole...the writer-text's death/birth...gateway to life...another mind. The page is a membrane of the black hole that is you, reading..."

Your texts invite and depend upon our participation. The idea is not new, of course. Your terms and way of describing the process, degrees determined by the context(s) in which the terms appear, are, perhaps. If this is true, then how are we talking more than aesthetics, at least in terms of the text to be written on the page? (No derision; perhaps aesthetics deserves more than we're prone to allow it.) More broadly, are we talking about the death of the text—an unheard of idea—dissolving the boundaries between text and reader and world (and for the hell of it, author) BACK into a space in which each actually involves and looks to the other in order that....

What I'm suggesting is that you describe, insightfully, in addition to your own concerns in your writing and reading, my own. And, as the above suggests, I'm inclined to see that description giving something not new. The structure of the thought seems almost ancient. It's the lyrical interference—not the lyric I, but lyrical interference—the lushness of your sentences, some have said, and I'd add, the particularity of your terms—that somehow recasts the old terms in ways that seem accurate and useful. If this is true, then I'm curious to know where you go from there. For me, this rather obviously turns into a question of song—a catch-all category for such phenomena as myth—more than what is it, why does it persist? How, more precisely? (perhaps you've already described it! Elliptical poetics—not mere solipsism) It's not a human failing as much as it's human being. Why and how are stories still so freakin necessary? This seams a reflection of your heaven-hell question (I'm calling it a question)

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/10/10

You got it. And where do I take it from here? The very first sentence of Objective 13: The Panspermian Apocalypse:

“I am the Messiah...”

The rest will be a deconstruction of a messiah complex to an absolutely absurd level. I'm going to be totally fucking serious. The more serious I am, the funnier it will be. And in the end, the reader will have laughed his or her way through a cosmic journey and say, you know what, "he" just might be the Messiah, but then again there's no "he," no "Messiah," and that's the messianic energy...in other words the text sets you free...laughtrature as Federman said...i don't give a damn about originality per se so much as trust it, know it will come out in the due course of things. the process one might concentrate on hardest is how to stay out of the way and not worry about saying anything yourself.

I'm relieved you get it. Anyway...

Jared Schickling to me
6/10/10

I think you're right on in the process, your closing remark. I think the "originality" does come out, on its own. Without revisiting the reasons for saying so, the terms in which you house the old ideas make for new terms. Specifically, I see the relegation of all to word-beings and texts as a dehumanizing practice – while the life prioritized and artistically discovered / rendered in the nonhuman (speaking animals, shapeshifting rocks, unpronouncable rivers, interstellar gases) revises our understanding of the "human" via the fact of the text(s), bringing the whole thing full-circle. Something like that.

It would be absurd. (in Harold and Maude, they use the word "absurd" twice in the first twenty minutes; saw it the other night, so can't help myself)

The way you describe Messiah sounds like Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Which, I think, is the "upward" way of dehumanizing. You either see through to "god is dead," or you wind up a Nazi, or squeaky clean in the Clearing's dasein. Forms of its truth's risk.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/11/10

you're right, though i prefer the term "inhumanize" or “transhuman” [in Robinson Jeffers’ sense] over "dehumanize." for some goddamned reason i have a need to overturn or underturn or just downright confuse the "common" "human" definitions for "human." To "de-humanize" seems to carry too much ugly baggage. Whereas "transhumanize" seems a more accurate description of the self situated where ever. Nothing original in this. Jeffers and Gary Snyder are where I first came across this "etymology" or whatever, somewhere in that neighborhood. It's not so much about humiliating homo sapiens sapiens as reminding him-her s/he's not the center of the universe so much as a symptom of it...in that we think and make things we are symptoms of God...As in Rumi, perhaps, It's mind seaming its mind minding Its seams sensing Itself as "I," him, her, me, you, us, It...swirling into perceivably Arabesque patterns displaying recursive symmetries across scale, not only making language possible but necessary, essential...part of the divine vibration that makes us feel something. And before Jeffers and Snyder I think Thoreau and Melville and Homer knew it, too. i think it's very "greek," pre-socratic. heraclitus. fire and numbers...mayan, shinto...egyptian, etc. & et al. [not of indo-european origin]...

you're right in part about zarathustra. i finally got through it all and the only way i could was deciding to laugh at nietzsche, or maybe with him, i'm still conflicted over that. it truly is quite "aryan" and i can see how his greedy idiot sister and Nazis abused it. it must be read as satire, as must Sade, or one falls into a pit of revulsion re: the "author." at least i do. the better the author the more i want to kick the shit out of him or her, as the case may be. i feel the same derision toward thus spake as i did atlas shrugged when i read that 25 years ago...

re: Objective 13's "I am the messiah," think of ignatius reilly on steroids with cancer, three stooges pornography for the chirren, a queer teddy roosevelt driving home the great white empire...all of them echoing Quixote on a "dead souls" mission across time and space...episodic pointilism...minimalism...connect-the-dot quasi-neo-naturalism, where the sounds of sentences in a paragraph seem like unseen birds calling in the forest...

what do i fucking know? i only have a bachelor's degree from a public university. i work in a group home. i live in lockport. my name is chuck...

Jared Schickling to me
6/11/10

THE BIG QUESTION

There’s a mouse living @
home behind the dials, inside our stove
Because the stovetop’s where we keep
leftover bacon grease

SOUL SUCKING HEADPHONE

But me modifier poorly no
uns, enduring this
Voice in my ear
both ears, no credit

MEASURED PROGRESS

For getting the right answer
the wrong way, they’re 6th graders
It’s much easier to find idiots among poets than
Idiots

Jared Schickling to me
6/12/10

lest you assume the worst about the poem forwarded, i started a new job recently, at Measured Progress, scoring 6th grade tests from Massachusetts.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/13/10

No. Not assuming anything. I like them. They make quick points. Great starters for good conversations. You make enough of them you can organize them into a big picture. In fact, I think it's very important to be able to just come right out and say it the way sixth graders can, getting it right the wrong way. These tiny pieces each have much to say, and if poetry is to have any "social" value today I think it has to fit into the openings of whatever's left...something quickly consumed giving the consumer a dose of profundity in their otherwise harried life...And that's not a put down. I'd love it if my best sentences appeared on the sides of buses and trains around the world, and people without thinking about it read them and began thinking a certain way...judo against the corporate structure...make the system of signs consume something that purges it of its bathwater, bucket by bucket, pail by pale, impaling itself, etc., as millions of people say to themselves "I am the messiah."

No, good work. And I'm glad you've got some income.

I'm very much looking forward to my road trip to Maine this summer. I've begun mapping it out and it's one of the main drives I've always planned on taking [sic]...along Lake Ontario to St. Lawrence River over to Vermont across northern Vermont along Quebec border to Maine then through the heart of the state southeastward. No tolls, no highways, 608 miles, 13-14 hours drive time. I plan to drive about four hours a day then stop at a bed & breakfast and relax and explore. Then when I get to your place I'll do the "The Maine Woods" thing, pretend I'm Thoreau, heal wounded moose, grieve life on Ktaadn, etc. & et al., and see you guys a bit, too. But no, this IS the vacation I wanted...that I need, a seam of necessity...

The deep contradiction of someone like me with my beliefs taking a "road trip" while the Gulf of Mexico gradually transmogrifies into a tar pit is not lost on me, nor is the fact I gain great pleasure from anticipating my gleeful participation in the ongoing ecocide, perversely toying with that which I'm killing...all so I can fucking write better before I die and become nothing again...big deal, eh?

It seems being alive is perverse, a required perversion...being truly conscious is knowing one's self a pervert, that is a perverter of what was into what is and might well be some day...

Final thought: Most Americans are not smarter than a fifth grader, but you're grading sixth graders. You must be pretty smart, relatively speaking...;)

TALKING WITH JARED: On Some Living Works By Dead Writers [and some politics, too]

Chuck Richardson to Jared Schickling
2/27/10

i've just put ballard at the top of my "to read" pile. ted pelton sent me some sweet stuff in the mail, including a first-edition of Zachary Mason's Lost Tales of the Odyssey that's selling for $180 on e-bay right now, making the point that buying independent books is something of an investment game...

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/3am-cult-hero-jg-ballard/

and a very interesting selection of articles which i intend to read for their contributions to aesthetics...

http://www.bookforum.com/blog/archive/20100226#entry5248

jared schickling to me
2/27/10

Thanks for the links.

I was reading Olson's Call Me Ishmael and this turned up, I think it makes for a hell of a blurb. If you're in agreement, we should go with this one:

"'A reality equivalent to his own penetration of reality had not come into being in his time,' Olson.
--Jared Schickling"

Or we could just delete the attribution to Olson and go with the quote, which is actually a bit of a misquote as I've kept the bracket-palimpsests but deleted the brackets. The actual quote and full context is from Merton Sealts's Afterword to the book, speaking I think merely to Olson's accounting of the unsalable White Whale:

"Its concluding paragraph, where Olson finds Melville's impressive achievement ultimately limited because 'a reality equivalent to [his] own penetration of reality had not come into being in [his] time,' anticipates the thesis of his third review of recent publications on Melville: 'Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself.'"

I've heard along the way that some say there's nothing in American lit after Moby-Dick that Moby-Dick didn't already do. The longer I turn to that work the more I think that could be true. And the funny thing, that book's a mess. The narrative is, mechanically, completely unbelievable, unaccountably shifting in and out of third-person omniscience and first-person, first-hand account. How can you hear Stubbs's maniacal whispers three boats away? But such is the whim of the book is thrilling, it's so grand beyond its borders. Beckett might present a unique case re originality but I don't know enough of him. And Richardson confounds me, not completely, but enough to trouble anything I read in it, hence the suggestion of this as blurb.

I'm reading Jean Toomer's Cane presently. Something about sex...

What's that Mason's Odyssey about? I'll be chasing the dead for some time now, I know that. This one sounds interesting -- and admittedly it's the price tag it's bearing -- someone apparently thinks well enough of it. Is it a relatively new book? If so the only other I can think of in my lifetime that sold out its first print run copies of which went for hundreds was Myung Mi Kim's Dura, a circumstance that wasn't lying. Dura's in some ways a must-be-read for poetry.

So has Pelton answered to Skyrope?

Chuck Richardson to jared
2/28/10

I have to think more about that blurb, which, if I'm not mistaken, with a bit of context added, could be:

A reality equivalent to Richardson's own penetration of reality has yet to occur in [his] time,' and therefore So It Seams seems equal to the Real Itself.

I'm not intending to put words in your mouth so much as understand what you mean by the blurb. Maybe I'm just stupid today, but I don't get it. It's over my head...

But this would be a hell of a blurb, your best one yet:

...the whim of the book is thrilling, it's so grand beyond it's borders. Beckett might present a unique case re originality but I don't know enough of him. And Richardson confounds me, not completely, but enough to trouble anything I read in it.

*****

I'm not so sure I've ever been comfortable with the idea of Melville as "American" writer simply because he was rejected by America in his lifetime and has never been well understood since then. I think much of the confusion regarding Melville is that he doesn't fit anywhere in literature. And Moby Dick is thrown around as the prototype "American" novel when, if you asked most writers who really love and "get" Melville which works grab them most, they speak of the novellas. Nor would they likely think of themselves as "American" writers. Bartleby, when it's all said and done, may be the single greatest piece of short fiction ever written in any language. Melville foreshadows Kafka and Mann more than Hemingway or Stein. Yes, there's a lot of New England Puritanism in the books, but there had to be some place and some idea and those were the closest at hand. We all do it. Humans are by nature restless. Who wants to waste time researching when the spirit's raging upon them? When the white whale beckons, put down your damn books and go...unless you were wise enough to have your crew tie you up and stuff their ears while passing by the Sirens...

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=Zachary%20Mason%2c%20The%20Lost%20Books%20of%20the%20Odyssey&mkt=en-us&FORM=TOOLBR&DI=6244&CE=14.0&CM=SearchWeb&filt=custom

*****

A very interesting column by Frank Rich:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28rich.html

I agree with the general idea that we're at the beginning of a "neo-60's" period/cycle, except rather than the revolutionaries being from the "Left" they'll be from the "Right." Look for an inversion of the sixties to play out in the decade or so ahead. But the one thing I think Rich is missing is the general idea that things really are that bad with the system and it's going down, like Sovietism, one way or another. Entropy has set in...we're heading into whitewater and that's just the way it is. I see it this way: If you're opposed to gummint on the Right, you're a "counterconservative." If you're opposed to the state on the Left, you're an "anarchist." The biggest difference between them, I think, is that one is "urban" the other "country." [notice the invisibility of suburbia: what might we call suburban anarchists--"suburbanites?" "sub-anarcho-conservatives?"] If the best elements of each side congeal into a true national movement [perhaps hiding out in the suburbs], things could get very interesting and we might have a "velvet revolution." However, if this congealment reaches too many bifurcation points along its phase space trajectory it could suffer a fate worse than tragedy [where the worst elements congeal personifying our national hubris giving birth to a national nightmare necessitating cathartic-karmic bliss]--historical banality. Humans need a good "show" and we're not "getting it." As it is, I don't agree with Frank Rich anymore than I agree with the "counterconservatives" and/or "anarchists." The bottom line is things are getting ugly and people want things to be beautiful. Making things beautiful should be a terrifying process in which one necessarily finds a seam, plants a kiss/bomb and slips away/flees...politically, I'm a leaf...a page...riffling in the breeze. Like water, you can swim in me, but I can't be gripped or squeezed, which isn't to say portions or quantities of me can't be temporarily contained. Once contained, these samples of me will find our lowest common denominator. Drink me and you will be nourished [if I haven't become stagnant], inhale me, you will drown. I may boil and evaporate but you cannot burn me without polluting me first. I am the state. I am politics, among other things, perhaps...peace. I am the peace of us; we are the peace of you.

People who feel superior to their surroundings, or equal to their surroundings yet oppressed by them, feel frustrated. Eventually, we climb into our airplanes and fly them toward the tallest most significant structure we can locate and reach on one tank of gas. And hope or pray for the best...believing whatever comes next will be beautiful. Others of us, not using our planes to fly, merely write about it or draw pictures or sing. At our best we're much larger than any flying machines or magic carpet...our seats equal those who read us, the quality of their reading increases the pleasure of our flight...think of the number of minds piled up on any page of any "great book" and you will see the power of such thin, flexible fabric...almost alien in form, in its texture.

Let me know which blurb I can use. I prefer the one in bold, where you were really talking about Moby Dick. I'm a manipulative tricky dick. And as expected you came through with something very good inside the given deadline.

Have a nice day.

jared schickling to me
2/28/10

It's funny, most everything said here is an element of Moby-Dick. Though, "when the white whale beckons, put down your damn books and go" -- one side the double-sided doubloon nailed to the mainmast -- that element of Melville's "America" which seeking the sea in place of a bullet, restless, a reflection on the errand into the wilderness, in this version the vessel a corrupted name for an exterminated people, becomes the whaler at the close of the whaling era surviving by a coffin. The aftermath, which *is* our story (1st sentence, "Call me Ishmael"), is an act of reading. A book not just about but *is* reading in any of the word's dimensions. It's a work of research; these chapters frame and re-frame the narrative, a memory. I've read three items that adequately grapple with the convolutions of the book, Olson's Call Me Ishmael, DBQ's A Whaler's Dictionary, and Lawrence's chapter in Studies in Classic American Literature. I've never seen a case for the novellas as superior -- nor does that matter much to me -- Melville himself wrote he writes em for money. MD was to be one of these, until 1851, per his letter to Hawthorne. "Two Moby-Dicks." I read Bartleby, a great work, as already told in MD.

As to blurb, yes, the quote was to speak to your own novel. Pretty direct, I thought. Go ahead and use whichever you'd like. It's becoming one hell of a project. My experience with blurbs is, use them or don't. I mean, it's a good book, and hopefully something out of the mass of emails satisfies you to use it as a marketing tool.

"Humans need a good 'show' and we're not 'getting it'" -- I'm not sure how true that is. Or at least, the value of a question precludes the judgment. Insofar as I'm not sure how much anyone gets of anything. The more one focuses on an aspect of the thing, the more one misses of the rest of it, that principle. One looks back perhaps and says oh, ok -- as Moby-Dick has to show *itself* -- initially no whale, no Ahab. The author was responding, after the fact perhaps understanding his trip through the watery part of the world, once the name is gone.

"People who feel superior to their surroundings, or equal to their surroundings yet oppressed by them, feel frustrated. Eventually, we climb into our airplanes and fly them toward the tallest most significant structure we can locate and reach on one tank of gas. And hope or pray for the best...believing whatever comes next will be beautiful. Others of us, not using our planes to fly, merely write about it or draw pictures or sing. At our best we're much larger than any flying machines or magic carpet...our seats equal those who read us, the quality of their reading increases the pleasure of our flight..." Ahab was no bullshit, the former; Ishmael, the latter, but an erased self-identity, conscious of the danger in song's transformations, and one who quite literally sought that (see Queequeg's jojo). A liar, for better or worse (see narrative structure). But otherwise, the only way this can work is if the author walks the walk -- which is to say, takes the opposite approach, gives himself over to text and reader, is indulgent in that way, wherein some ideas about that audience are helpful -- wherein reading is useful, particularly the dead, perhaps the classics, Thoreau's prescription, fodder. First rule of freshman workshop, don't defend the work.

Chuck Richardson to jared
3/1/10

Dude, I'm burned out today and can't respond in length. I need to re-read Melville. Haven't read MB in 22 years. When I say more writers are influenced by the shorter works, Bartleby in particular, if you asked them, is precisely because it's not a mess. If you asked them if they think MB is inferior to B. we'd look at you as if that were a stupid question. MB's a huger masterpiece. The response to it is primarily emotional, that is to say it works on us subconsciously. It's influence on our work is unattributable because of its mystery. The mess is intentional, an effort to apply consciousness, reason, the enlightenment even transcendentalism into the mix, romanticism, but to no avail...they only make a mess of things...and so we go about describing the boat itself in detail, etc....Bartleby, on the other hand, is something we can consciously toy with, it's something that cognitively evolves a logic in dealing with the fundamental mystery at the bottom of Melville's work. If I seem a bit Melvillean, as if there's definitely a taste of that spice in the work, it's because I absorbed Bartleby precisely because it was absorbable. You need rolls and rolls of paper towels to wipe up MD. B's nowhere's near as quantitative or overflowing or maximal...it's quite "minimal" for Melville. Whereas I've been mopping up Moby's maximal mess for 20 some odd years [or standing there looking at it while smoking and leaning on my mop is more like it]. In my opinion, B & MB embody the frictioning, antagonistic elements seaming together the elan vital of Melville's journey, or is it the elan vital which seems them? Billy Budd, perhaps, reveals the dead end of delicate ways amid life's psychic chaos, which feels more like the weather than anything humans might call "reasonable."

Saw this today and think you'll find it interesting: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2010/02/language-acquisition-dictee-and-radhika.html

Thank god it's March! The birds are returning and making a racket as they battle to re-claim their seasonal space as the snow melts making a giant wet mess of everything. Walking the dog necessitates giving him a bath afterward. At least he's loving it.

I may take a week off, sort of, and only check my e-mail every other day or so. I need to get some shit done or undone or whatever. Get back to the grind in 10 days or so...

Cheers.

A CONVERSATION ABOUT ZERO’S BLOOMING EXCURSION [& WHATNOT] PART 2

NOTE: The first part of this correspondence is “E-Mails/Jared Schickling #3,” posted below. I would’ve changed the title, but my Blogger Edit Layout won’t seem to allow it. Anyway, I’ve begun posting excerpts of my correspondence with Jared because I’ve discovered that we say some of our best things this way…off the cuff, freely without concern that you would eventually have access to it. So you’re something of a voyeur after the fact, dear reader. And what you have in these correspondences is, in some cases, better than the fiction or poetry myself or Jared may have composed that particular day. I also think superior writers might find it amusing that Jared and me worry about such stupid things. Our peers may find our thoughts entertaining, and our few “students” may find these e-mails stimulating and helpful to their sincerest efforts in the” language arts.” Cheers to all, boos to none. Unless it’s booze…with Peace!

Chuck Richardson to Jared Schickling:
12/18/09

I had intended to write up a draft today of my general views re: Zero's Blooming Excursion in the hope of finding a few possible blurbs, but I ended up researching XXXXXX for nine hours instead. I'm writing…XXXXXX's fictional biography, sort of. I'm setting the bar very high. I spent most of the day copying and pasting samples of 1920s' writing so I can begin feeling the period [I'm going to relate somehow the horrifying circumstances of her birth and the obstetrician's malpractice--too much silver nitrate in the eyes, blinding her in one eye and severely scarring the other--today she'd be a millionaire...a comment derivative of a 1920s ideal, which was derivative of] in terms of language. I'm also scrutinizing advertizing, the economy, global situation, etc. & et al. Once that's all sunk in to a point that the first sentence pops out, I'll be on my way. But I see myself researching for a few days. I'll be following the same method 11 more times covering the periods of her 83-year life [pretty much the personal story of the 20th century and turn of the 21st]. It's possibly going to be told in the third person objective from a narrator who knows she's dead in her chair...she's experiencing her life eternally recurring in an apparently random order...this is the only chapter written in the past tense because the subject has entered the past tense...while this is going on, there's knocking on the door. She lived alone, her successful writer son having moved away and taken the animals with him... Obviously, I'm very wrapped up...This is something I'll want her to read, so you know the pressure I'm feeling.

That said, I'll have something on Zero for you within a week. And hopefully it will be right and I'll post a public version of it on my blog and at NHR if they want it. Good exposure for you and it's an interesting conversation on the very subject I'm struggling with regarding my colleagues' work...how much of it seems informed by an entropy that they seem to refuse to fully wrestle with [I'll be more specific later]...and as I said, I have the same level of admiration and disappointment for Cohen's Heaven of Others that I do Zero's Blooming Excursion [a kind of Romanticism I might like except for the "hero's" being a "protagonist" of a "nil" sort...]

That said my disappointment's minor and a matter of taste and I'm open to the idea I might be wrong about your aesthetic decision...the way I'm open to the idea Obama might be a genius in consciously pissing off everybody...don't Americans deserve and need to be pissed off at Americans before anything gets straightened out? Maybe there's a method to his and your madness...it's just that the coolness of the whole approach tweaks me...the apparent refusal to get relatively dirty and smartly fight to the end...and the fact that, despite the hope for change and nihilistic tendencies, there's an element of maintenance about it...how to keep things going...or to conserve something while things keep going...except the poem. It's a very good poem and I want it to go further, then have a fable of sorts transitioning into the essay. Really explode the forms. It would be an uncategorizable must read. We slap the term "poetry" on it as a catch-all that you prefer over "fiction," which is OK because it would actually be neither one or nonfiction...I see your potential, the book's potential...it may not yet be time for it to kinetically expend itself in the "market." You're building a bomb and I say there's room for more TNT, plastique, nitro, etc. Go Nucular! Advance your stategeries a few more goosesteps, brother, and humankind might perceive itself evolving into the "next" human...and actually feel the part of something continuous rather than its mere ending in close conjunction with its own, or stopping, of something...

I'm too vague. Never mind. I know you feel you're done with it, Geoffrey's about to start work on it and it would be asking too much at this point to delay it, and you're probably right with regards to the aesthetics, being a more refined and sophisticated chap than me by nature. I like my women to mud wrestle. I'd also say compared to the other contemporary work I've been reading, Zero achieves a heartfelt complexity with a precision I haven't seen. It makes me think of no one or nothing else but your weeping and laughing genius. So don't let my criticism get you down. Just tell me to fuck off if you feel like it. You're "the poet Jared Schickling" for chrissakes.

I'll have something for you in a week rather than a day. Molasses.

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 11:27 PM, jared schickling wrote:

Hey Chuck,

Started writing this yesterday and then figured I'd come back. I'm sick thanks to Mollie and spent the past nine hours getting our reading series junk in order. After a day of grading. But it's a load off the back. Anyway. Continue composing message --

That's fine and understandable -- doing your own work today -- I spent *all* of today grading. Glad that's over. The course and its papers are predictable at this point. More or less plowed through 600 pages of freshman writing. As the semester's over I don't need to comment, just have a look and mark it. Some of em caught my attention.

And I'll risk irritating you -- by suggesting a second read before you begin writing about what's unsatisfactory or insufficient in Zero's.

"the personal story of the 20th century and turn of the 21st": Zero's is the personal story of one's most recent history -- that being, a text to be read -- told from the outside, the bird's eye, cloaked in the form of a person. One suspects this by recognizing the multiple poems within poems, spilling into each other -- consistently a given construct is deconstructed by the context in which it’s occurring, and the thing deconstructed on the other hand deconstructs the initial deconstructor. And out of this entropy a threshold is reached at which point a new organizational principle emerges -- always larger than whatever human. This happens formally -- voices colliding, obviously -- but other ways too. In each case the multiplicity of tongues creates one readable poem, and within that one can trace any number of threads, different poems -- follow one font by itself, another by itself, or both together. They'll say different things -- complimentary, antagonistic -- read clusters as separate, or take the flying leap across charged (not empty) space to find the syntaxes and cadences ordering parts and wholes. In all cases read left right up down and all around. This fragmentary unity leaves the place to be...

And I bring this up because there is no protagonist, contrary to your suggestion. There is a place -- that's all -- and a human experience within that, only part -- a necessary thing to write because, so it seems to me, the place will always only be understand in this dimension by its human author (or reader). The text itself, which might usurp that role (both roles), remains forever a human production. The human is the frame through which you see -- anything else sounds to me like lip service.

I'm more curious about the ways we're stupid than any intelligence

I also find it necessary because otherwise, without giving the poem over to another's poem, a given character turns unfairly used by the text, a limited dimensional representation. i.e., no longer alive. A slave to the author's needs -- it seems to me easier to write about the thing than to write the thing. And I'll repeat something said in a previous email, death as death is not possible in any true sense until...the text, in order to accurately be, must find a way to give itself over to that which is other than "my" intention, my imagined text. Neither will this be any kind of death, and is utterly human, this imaginative potential.

"Advance your stategeries a few more goosesteps, brother, and humankind might perceive itself evolving into the "next" human...and actually feel the part of something continuous rather than its mere ending in close conjunction with its own..." The thing is, I'm not interested in escaping "this." The "this" is always already continuous and part of something larger. Zero's is concerned with helping us see this, It. And I feel it does this. The human being within it is merely one cog within Its by which we might notice it -- and in turn the elsewhere of it. Not central in the sense of importance...but central in the sense of what one has to go on, mine of data, bag of Its alleles. I was always more partial to Akhmatova and Mandelstam and their acmeism than Blok and their symbolism -- the latter arguing art must reject its precursors to imagine something new while the former arguing that's precisely the problem, future hypomnesia. Where has postmodernism gotten us? We're still waiting for the Big Machine, old Panopticon and Disciplinary Mechanism, capable of absorbing all contradictions, to simply run its course. The symbolists were little dandies of the Bolsheviks for a while, while the acmeists were killed, exiled, families arrested etc, all that wonderful stuff. Why? Why is Myung Mi Kim paid so well? David Foster Wallace? Federman? Across the board, why is postmodern art that doubts the imagination and its potential so well rewarded? Art that writes Its (and others') colonies? Not for me. I hate machines. The thing about the Carcasses is they're dead. Hence their nowhere -- which would be their biggest problem.

I also am not interested in escaping "this" because by paying attention to "this," and empathizing with it, one is more prone to understand that in the supermarket it's wise to make wiser consumer choices. Just one example.

The thing about Zero's is it's an eco-poetry, with "ecology" broadly understood (note the broad referential vectors of "they" in the epigraph, the only time [sic see epigraph] in the ms the word is used -- and note the seldom, consciously used word "it," the resistance to Its objectification -- possessives becoming the intimacy of Its simultaneous presence and absence). It's not romantic, insofar as it does nothing more than see and *hear* the mind's play as environmental phenomena. As derivative, a site-specific charge. The poem (not the fiction -- fiction sounds to me more purely Its staged production) is where the "he" is located and across scale, Its/his own synonym and antonym, simultaneously. The poem is always undoing itself; the he within it is always other than itself. Shit, we're not even sure if he is alive in this thing. Whatever "new" human we'd like to see, that's already "us."

If you decide on a second read, use the attached. In light of our conversations I've added a footnote here and there, but most importantly focused its mythic dimensions with some grand insertions. What I'm after can't be well enough understood before this draft. I think you know it well enough for some blurb, but I'm suspicious otherwise when I begin to hear about a "protagonist." If you're reading it in such terms, well...I've attached the prospective cover image, "pagoda." It's an accurate depiction.

None of this is to suggest the poem is finished. All of it fails. That's the beauty of it and a bit of the point.

Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:15:01 -0500
Subject: Re: zero
From: Chuck Richardson
To: Jared Schickling

Jared, believe me, I'm going to give Zero several readings. And I already have read it a second time and then gone over it and referring to it, etc. Our e-mail correspondence, prior to this response, totals 5,729 words, filling 11 single spaced pages. I can say without equivocation I totally get you and where you're coming from. I wouldn't change a thing that's there. I would simply add a fable between Reger and the essay to further "bloom" the form. "Zero's" form of sense--sensibility--or absence thereof--seams a necessary "fiction."

I see ZBE as a flower that hasn't quite fully bloomed. The excitement is not knowing whether it actually has or not because every flower's different. You'll see this in greater detail in a day or two once I've straightened everything out in my head enough to adequately share the confusion, which is aesthetically pleasurable so far. Zero's Blooming Excursion is already a very good book because it's put my mind to work willingly and pleasurably on the ramifications of what appears to be happening on the page.

This is an utterly brilliant book so far and you're going to have several blurbs to choose from, all of which will sound hyperbolic but won't be, as I'm going to try and lay out my reading as lucidly and calmly as possible without too many details. You don't need the details. My fundamental opinion is that Zero requires something in the fable form to serve as a transition mechanism between "Reger" and the essay. The shift as it is seems unnecessarily harsh and reduces the pleasure. I like getting slapped with an essay, just not until after I've orgasmed. The essay's a post-coital cuddle or cigarette and I haven't got off yet. You're a selfish bastard for lighting up and spooning now. I'll be less crude in a day or two once I've gone over all my notes and our lengthy correspondence one more time. I would say Zero has the potential to truly expand the literary debate of what we can do in the face of our death and global deterioration from the human perspective. Right now it's a very meaningful contribution. You, Jared Schickling, are capable of more...just a little.

If you don't write the fable, perhaps I will...I'll take Kafka past Zero in an effort to find out that last thing...then let the reader take it from there. My duty is to go as far as I can...humankind benefits from Prometheus and Icarus, etc. & et al.

Peace.

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Jared Schickling wrote:

Well now that you've lubed me up...and I do see where you're coming from. My thoughts re the essay as it's currently placed, something along the lines of, the reader is inclined after the first section to start seeing people, and focusing on that, perhaps lulled into forgetting the place-ness even of these people, at which point the essay redirects our attention. More or less. A fable, or something, could provide all the stuff you're suggesting. Thing is, at this point, I'm freakin empty. The end of my ind. study with DBQ took dumped as I dropped everything to slave over this thing. Luckily he's supportive. And with all this reading series and job app crap to deal with over the break I'm not sure I'll find the time or the ideas to make anything happen. There is a poem excluded from the ms that might get re-worked into prose and deal with the necessary things. I don't know. Babbling. Federman hit the nail on the head with you...[being dangerous].

And ps congrats on the Artvoice promotion. That's sure to sell some books. It looks like Buffalo's experiencing a second literary birth, and importantly, outside of the official channels. I swear I just miss everything. Dammit.

Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:39:04 -0500
Subject: Re: zero
From: Chuck Richardson
To: Jared Schickling

First, please re-work the deleted piece. Add something...some mechanism that isn't so rude...The ArtVoice promotion wasn't about me, didn't mention me [did it?], just BV and Starcherone, putting BV on top with the term "SubPop." I'll have to re-read it and see if I saw my name. I don't think I did, but I sometimes forget I'm me...

and i feel for you, my friend. you're definitely going through a crunch time. hopefully you both will land something nice in WNY and we'll start being a physical community again. shit's really happening here, i think. and, for better or worse, it's home...i relate.

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:47 PM, jared schickling wrote:

The author asks Geoffrey to recommend some books -- he recommends yours and I think the cover image is there --

Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:06:05 -0500
Subject: Re: zero
From: Chuck Richardson
To: Jared Schickling

Jesus Christ. I didn't scroll all the way down. It looked different and I assumed it was ads. I'll have to pick up a print version and see if it's in there. Very cool. I'm returning to XXXXXX at 4:30 p.m. I got a lot and nothing done the last nine days. The research for the novel keeps blooming and taking up more and more time and somewhere in January Geoffrey's sending me the galleys for So It Seams. The less time I spend on the job, the busier I get. I'm taking the rest of the day off from this and tomorrow will write something up on Zero. You'll get your blurbs. The gist of my blog version will be the similar way you and Cohen seem to face peak everything, revealing, perhaps, a hint of how your generation of artists and intellectuals are to likely rationalize the very dramatic events of your life times, which may be occurring at the peak of something called "humankind's life time." There's a confident affirmation in being able to say no--or is it actually an uncertain denial/negation/nihilism also--or just sheer exhaustion, "we are old?"--to various aspects of it, living to fight another day, living to refuse to fight again today, etc. I don't know. But what a magnificent struggle. Personally, it gives me some hope for everything...because there seem valid men doing apparently valid things.

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 2:58 AM, Jared Schickling wrote:

You sound really well in these past few emails. It's more than music to my ears. Our conversations have been helpful. I'm having a celebration Pabst. Ask me tomorrow and maybe I've changed my mind, "fable," before the essay. attached. the bestiality of it prevents it from being called a parable. i'd like to think the arc now has that wad blowing effect you were talking about -- still not knowing what the final word is. or has to be. i don't know. Don't feel that you have to get to anything with this right away. When you feel like it. Though it might be easier with all the fresh back and forth. I don't know. I saw Orson Welles's version of The Trial last night, so here's this thing.

I hear you about winding up with less time the more you have. That's the problem with this mfa thing. But in this case i ain't kidding anybody it's a total luxury.

Chuck Richardson to Jared Schickling
12-21-09

You bastard! I was going to write the blurb and blog stuff today, but will hold off. I guess I deserve that. But seriously, I'm going to look at it right away and get back to you. I'm already thrilled. The fact is a "fable" just has to happen at the end of a process. You dream it. You get high, party, have a good long conversation over Pabst with someone who doesn't give a hoot about Romanticism and ecopoetics, and you get in the mood and then all of a sudden BAM! the mind crystallizes something for you out of the flames, and there it is and you wonder what the fuck. It leaves things simultaneously open and closed...you have the exact mess you were looking for...what you needed to see for yourself...

I'd also like to say I loathe "escape." Going through the valley of nails is suicide. The poem begins with a suicided friend as a doorway. The fun about writing is you can "do" things there you should and can never do in actuality. I don't understand how it works, but I got my driver's license. Everything I "know" "I" "know" from having dealt with it in my head and on the page. And I didn't have any help and had nowhere to turn but the Swamps and Thoreau and Melville and O'Connor. The only time in my writing life that I experienced writer's block was December 1999 to about October 2001. The towers coming down loosened me up, got me feeling again. And I got off the meds. Right now I'm feeling and writing a great deal. No writer's block. It all just pours out of me despite, or because of, my sadness of late. My sister's pug got hit by a car and killed the other day. Her picture on the Christmas card is on the refrigerator…Death rips me apart. I wage all out war against Thanatos and its forces. I plunge through the valley of nails screaming fuck you! and swinging my fists every single day because I decided if I wasn't going to commit suicide, if I was going to live, I was going to strike a blow for God almighty, whatever the fuck that might be. And now I'm typing. Tears. I'm not better, but perhaps the best I've ever been. My dreams have fallen into such syncronicity with my waking life thanks to my writing that I dreamed lucidly last night that the cover of Smoke was in Artvoice. I've a feeling that 2010 could be the year I finally feel I won a fucking round. Hopefully by next year at this time you and I will be sitting on our respective stools in our corner, sharing a joint, planning how to take the belts away from whatever bastards have them...and by any means necessary because we're playing for keeps.

OK. Enough of that shit. I'm going to read your fable and then try to come up with a few blurbs. I need to finish this now because I'm going to be increasingly busy for the next few months...especially the next two…

Anyway. You're the man. I'm done moaning.

Cheers.

Chuck Richardson to jared
12/21/09

Just read it. Perfect. That piece has found its home...the absolutely correct and natural transition--not a "mechanism" [you should know by now I'm not at all Cartesian, so why you brought that up...]

First we have the larva, then the pupa, then the apparent emergence of the metamorphosed being, and then the placement of "criticism" that is "death." A naturally "progressive cycle" with all of its chaotic messiness and bifurcations, blooming into those things that do end up seeming to "mean" something, where we're running for a moment with the spirit informing things before it outpaces us and moves on, leaving only the essay behind [everyone's fascinated by a corpse]...an inconclusive autopsy used for the "education of morticians" instead, perhaps?

Anyway, you did it. You can drink something nicer than Pabst now. Go ahead...Send me the bill.