This week I’m clearing out an overflowing file of items worth sharing, beginning with this piece sent to me by John Bloomberg-Rissman [thanks John] to help us get in the mood:
FELA KUTI & AFRIKA 70 “ZOMBIE”
LYRICS
Zombie-o, zombie** **(police/army-unthinking followers)
*[CHORUS] ZOMBIE-O, ZOMBIE (2X)
Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go
*[CHORUS] ZOMBIE *(after each line)
Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop
Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn
Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think
Zombie-o, zombie
*[CHORUS] ZOMBIE-O, ZOMBIE (2X) *(repeat last 2 stanzas)
Tell am to go straight-- Joro, Jara, Joro
No break, no job, no sense-- Joro, Jara, Joro
Tell am to go kill-- Joro, Jara, Joro
No break, no job, no sense-- Joro, Jara, Joro
Tell am to go quench-- Joro, Jara, Joro
No break, no job, no sense-- Joro, Jara, Joro
Go and kill
*[CHORUS] JORO, JARA, JORO *(after each line)
Go and die
Go and quench** **(destroy)
Put am for reverse
Go and kill
Go and die
Go and quench *(3x)
Joro, Jara, Joro- O Zombie way na one way (3x)
Joro, Jara, Joro- Ooooh
Attention
*[CHORUS] ZOMBIE *(in time- average every 2-3 words)
Quick march
Slow march
Left turn
Right turn
About turn
Double time
Sa-lute
Open your hat
Stand at ease
Fall in
Fall out
Fall down
Get ready *(2x)
Ha-lt
Or-der *(Repeat 3x from "Attention")
*[CHORUS] ZOMBIE (repeat on ‘1’ of each measure as desired)
Dis-miss
ARTS/PHILOSOPHY/THEORY
The Seagulls Inside My Head By Dan Green
What this hybrid point of view allows Robbe-Grillet to do most thoroughly, however, is to create an intimately "realistic" world that both mirrors the narrator's own fixated absorption in detail--his "perpetual interrogation"--and uses that absorption to "invent" scenes and circumstances of dense realistic detail. So dedicated is Robbe-Grillet to the invention of these scenes that he repeats many of them, enlisting his narrator in a repetition and return to specific details and events--the remains of a centipede killed while walking across a wall, workers fixing a bridge, etc.--as if making sure they have been surveyed for all of the attributes they can be made to reveal. The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer's determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.
Swann in Love By Dan Beachy-Quick, Octopus Magazine #11
Kent Johnson: Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, Reviewed By Peter Davis
Kent Johnson’s a complex guy. I know some people don’t like him. I know some people really don’t like him. I also know that there are people like myself who, to use a phrase that Linh Dinh uses in a blurb on the back of Johnson’s new book, are “in awe” of Kent Johnson. Actually, I bet even some of those who dislike him are in awe of him, even if it’s only in a sort of open-mouthed, wide-eyed shock. That there’s such a gap between his admirers and detractors is no surprise when you read Johnson’s work, and Homage to the Last Avant-Garde is no exception.
POLITICAL-ECONOMY
Being Broke By William Rivers Pitt
Being broke means knowing about Coinstar machines and where the closest one is. Usually they're in the back corner of the local supermarket, right between the bank machine you can't get money from because your account is overdrawn and the counter where they sell the scratch tickets you're not quite desperate enough to try just yet.
The Big Takeover: The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution By MATT TAIBBI
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: Will the US default on its debt? By Mike Whitney
Apr 7 2009
Fed chief Ben Bernanke has embarked on the most radical and ruinous financial rescue plan in history. According to Bloomberg News, the Fed has already lent or committed $12.8 trillion trying to stabilize the financial system after the the bursting of Wall Street's speculative mega-bubble. Now Bernanke wants to dig an even bigger hole, by creating programs that will provide up to $2 trillion of credit to financial institutions that purchase toxic assets from banks or securities backed by consumer loans. The Fed's generous terms are expected to generate a flurry of speculation which will help strengthen the banking system while leaving the taxpayer to bear the losses. It is impossible to know what the long-term effects of Bernanke's excessive spending will be, but his plan has the potential to trigger hyperinflation or spark a run on the dollar.
Depression Economics: Four Options By Bradford DeLong
When an economy falls into a depression, governments can try four things to return employment to its normal level and production to its 'potential' level. Call them fiscal policy, credit policy, monetary policy and inflation.
Bernanke’s Witness Protection Program: The TALF By Mike Whitney
The TALF and the “Public-Private Partnership” are another slap in the face of the international community. They violate the spirit and the letter of the G-20 communiqué. It will be interesting to see if foreign holders of US Treasuries endure this latest insult in silence or if there’s a sudden stampede for the exits. There’s a sense that the world is getting fed up with the Fed’s financial chicanery and would like to chart a different course. Enough is enough.
London Labour and the London Poor By Henry Mayhew
This tome is considered a major source of information for William Gibson and steampunk fictionists...and describe where we may be heading back to.
Bait And Switch: The Real AIG Conspiracy By Michael Hudson
Here’s the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1 per cent – one thousandth – of the $183 BILLION that the U.S. Treasury gave to AIG as a “pass-through” to its counterparties. This sum, over a thousand times the magnitude of the bonuses on which public attention is conveniently being focused by Wall Street promoters, did not stay with AIG. For over six months, the public media and Congressmen have been trying to find out just where this money DID go. Bloomberg brought a lawsuit to find out. Only to be met with a wall of silence…Until finally, on Sunday night, March 15, the government finally released the details. They were indeed highly embarrassing. The largest recipient turned out to be just what earlier financial reports had rumored: Paulson’s own firm, Goldman Sachs, headed the list.
Johann Hari: You Are Being Lied To About Pirates
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
New Work On Lateral Transfer Shows Darwin Was Wrong By John S. Wilkins
A new study into the transfer of genetic material laterally, or across taxonomic divisions, has shown that evolution does not proceed as Darwin thought, and that in fact the present theory of evolution is entirely false. Instead, it transpires that lateral genetic transfer makes new species much more like Empedocles' "random monster" theory over 2000 years ago had predicted.
Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers: Humans, Butterflies Remain Unharmed; The Star Wars Connection By Robert A. Guth
A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the "Star Wars" defense system to knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams. Some of the same scientists are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito…In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.
ECOLOGY
The Superior Civilization By Tim Flannery
A Review of The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, with line drawings by Margaret C. Nelson Norton, 522 pp., $55.00
Parallels between the ants and ourselves are striking for the light they shed on the nature of everyday human experiences. Some ants get forced into low-status jobs and are prevented from becoming upwardly mobile by other members of the colony. Garbage dump workers, for example, are confined to their humble and dangerous task of removing rubbish from the nest by other ants who respond aggressively to the odors that linger on the garbage workers' bodies.
RELIGION/MYTH/CULTURE
Escape From The Zombie Food Court By Joe Bageant
This financialization of our consciousness under American style capitalism has become all we know. That's why we fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die. We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines, and have no soul or human emotions. That we look to them for so much makes us a corporate cult, and makes corporations a fetish of our culture. Yet to us, they are like the weather just there…All of us live together in this corporate fetish cult. We agree upon and consent to its reality, just as the Aztecs agreed upon Quetzalcoatl and the lost people of Easter Island agreed that the great stone effigies of their remote island had significance.
Evangelicals Are Good For Us Whether We Like It Or Not By John Harvin
In other words, Evangelicals are like vultures - unsightly, but a necessary part of the ecosystem. So what if I don’t like them? They fill a role. And maybe instead of rolling my eyes at my future in-laws, I should appreciate them a little more.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Singing Good Friday
There’s something about the arrival of grackles in my yard, the vernal equinox, Seder, Good Friday, Passover, Easter…blooming tulips in life’s joyous insurrection…migrating hawks molting feathers in their wake, black snow sweating over yellow grass, Osiris naked and new for all the world to see and feel and think about…all over again…thank goodness we forget I can’t remember what when we leave wherever it was we were…Iandi Saying Eye Amyou…Reborn intelligence saying Eye Amyou—nitrogen then chlorophyll or id then I now that in human-human beyond being ladder ascending descending from one step perhaps this one to another saying Eye Amyou…Iandi the tide Iandi the evening air Iandi the moonlit night Iandi the vital Amyou crying the sacred cosmos saying Eye Amyou! Eye loves your disguise! Eye savors the taste of your road dust. Eye relishes your chickpea’s flavor. Eye adores being your dog. Eye enjoys your camel’s toe. Eye delights your poet…Iandi’s passion for Eye passes through Amyou finding clarity laughter promiscuity transforming enemies fecunding friends humiliating haters liberating lovers fecunding platelets splattering dancing laughter calling back Iandi saying Eye Amyou!...I Adore Feral Things Almost to Idiocy...lunatic mugs exposing the sea while disguising its blissful gems blessing the solid fuel flying within them determining holiness, that stare in my eye while I dissolve like salt in their liquid swarm, sluicing me of my self, nowhere inside the lingo befalling this muted lily when the newborn, here meat, gets sucked from there unlike that stillness unswept from the fissure in your heart, how feelers adjust their core conditions into feasible creations—that playable song of a locomotive’s remote screeching my unfilled place—tomorrow’s voucher pledging where tonight my elusive pant becomes the glimmer of love reworking the light, insuring your incident is my apocalypse—that blankness of lacking, a delayed morning without direction in the midway human untouchable, insensitively pursuing what I have—be ing no thing why this thick trade of activity pictures demonstrations at the source when all breeds stillness, going subversive and declining to reiterate us—when that unsighted earth trembles like a vagrant in the way, buried in the town of foreigners, yielding from worthy worthlessness, muzzy but stirring, permitting terror-lips to crack open our themes, floating them away, ejaculations of pious conceit flaming Its tower, giving It the flavor of my lovability—fabricating horrors of how I was where a magic ray of skill inebriated my absurdity, making me Babel where the brilliant range of ebbing silhouettes begin with unqualified ease, sun and moon refusing to drape themselves in my enormity—this immense river sinking the raptor so loons can reside happily outside devotion with unruffled esteem, so heron and swan nests might pitch us like sails over this fairy swamp, noshing on sparrows snatched from the sky gushing over many hungry faces—odiferous oppositions free of allied malice when war, that blood-spattered bareness of bowels and brains explodes its confusion without this precise magnificent ingenuity of patience-making sacred tasks converting kingdoms of filth into privileged derelicts so destitute we’re never away, desiring this storm and drizzle of milk-laden Mars suckling Its laughing mother—that visibility when our hushed cerebral envoy crouches, occupied by teeming secrecies, silent furtive tongues syn-taxing the mute frothing boogie woogie washing this orb away by purely subsisting—unfurling the seed’s blooming emptiness…fuck unto fucking fuck unto fucking fuck…Informed By Its Wanting…blowing phlegm from your head for the shaman to cure—that nameless love dog grieving out your crying from, running toward us with my tongue out, dripping anticipation, wild reunion Expressing this longing you long to express answering your spoken prayer, being an echo that squeals this swine in your mind; that intelligent piece of pork boaring you open Birthing itself into your trifle bearing mysterious gifts dangling atop its horn; Provoking your weeping, your fragmented spiritual capacity the reckless and profuse scattering of your seeds your prodigal deadbeat wandering ignorant of Thanatos preferring the wind and rain that have always eroticized our climate that lactating earth milked by her whining child—Informed by Its wanting…a room occupied by visitors…I Am A Visitor’s Room…in which a passing wakefulness goes—A sudden guest, friendly and compelling, comes—flushing me for some new delight, a guide from beyond, doing what lovers do with love—Being that word, that sense of Romeo Juliet felt in his name—the sound that worked for her, dripping its essence on each thing absorbing it, becoming an inner meaning only she knows, poking her why Wherefore art thou becoming a ruby at sunrise, that transparent daily order ripped open by happiness, the purity of name-action a good host who keeps digging your well, knowing: Water’s there somewhere, submitting to its daily practice, knocking on the door until that window opens and you look out to see me—A shape—some uncreated love unmet—becoming the heart that’s informed us from the start, mirroring that well we face, adding sugar to the water from this jar of pouring stones Heaping a mountain to maintain my echo the way I grasp your voice, your name sound burning me into smoke from its fire, an emptiness more beautiful than life obliterating life to create life—This blind world squatting like a beggar in the road, a great soul hiding in a city of strangers, surrendering to praiseworthy emptiness, groggy but awake, letting the fear-language of our themes crack us open and float away, releasing the priest from his tower by burning it, giving him a taste of your almond cake—Where the stars rise spinning every night—blown by a bewildered god kissing his flute Breathing notes with a need that pierces us, memories of that breathing mouth, singing loud Sweeping the floor like a gatekeeper guarding a silence that won’t break And your heart-mule naked enough to get us there…
Sunday, April 5, 2009
My friends, my friends...the beer is on me!
I’d like to thank these wonderful people/blogs/sites, etc., for adding links to my blog this week:
Michael Rothenberg/Big Bridge; Christopher Higgs/Bright Stupid Confetti; B. Graham/Dogzplot; Robert Higgins/Worldwide Sawdust; Mark Fisher/k-punk; Bennett Lovett-Graff/New Haven Review; Sam Sacks/Open Letters Monthly; and Jeff Hansen.
If I missed you, or you've found something that needs correcting, please let me know.
Michael Rothenberg/Big Bridge; Christopher Higgs/Bright Stupid Confetti; B. Graham/Dogzplot; Robert Higgins/Worldwide Sawdust; Mark Fisher/k-punk; Bennett Lovett-Graff/New Haven Review; Sam Sacks/Open Letters Monthly; and Jeff Hansen.
If I missed you, or you've found something that needs correcting, please let me know.
ROCKPILE AT BIRD & BECKETT—SAN FRANCISCO
David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg with the fabulous Bob Malone on piano
4:30, April 12, 2009
Bird & Beckett Books & Records
http://www.bird-beckett.com/
653 Chenery Street, between Diamond & Castro in Glen Park, 1-1/2 blocks from Glen Park BART Station & MUNI lines 23, 26, 44, 52 & J-Church
ROCKPILE an improvisatory performance of poetry & music
Poets David Meltzer & Michael Rothenberg, together with pianist Bob Malone, will cobble together some of the raw materials that Meltzer & Rothenberg will take along on an 8-city road trip in the fall, troubadors on a meander through some sites central to the cultural upheaval that was America in the 1960s and 1970s, performing their collaboratively-assembled journal of the trip at stops along the way, with artists and musicians local to each spot.
This pre-amble workshop for the project is not to be missed!
ROCKPILE online http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=72289992264&ref=ts
ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer and Big Bridge, www.bigbridge.org, made possible by a grant from the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, supported by grants from The James Irvine Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. ROCKPILE is Sponsored by Allen Ginsberg's Committee on Poetry, Inc.
Also, check out this amazing YouTube performance by Bob Malone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLdqBEhDoUE&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fhome.php&feature=player_embedded
4:30, April 12, 2009
Bird & Beckett Books & Records
http://www.bird-beckett.com/
653 Chenery Street, between Diamond & Castro in Glen Park, 1-1/2 blocks from Glen Park BART Station & MUNI lines 23, 26, 44, 52 & J-Church
ROCKPILE an improvisatory performance of poetry & music
Poets David Meltzer & Michael Rothenberg, together with pianist Bob Malone, will cobble together some of the raw materials that Meltzer & Rothenberg will take along on an 8-city road trip in the fall, troubadors on a meander through some sites central to the cultural upheaval that was America in the 1960s and 1970s, performing their collaboratively-assembled journal of the trip at stops along the way, with artists and musicians local to each spot.
This pre-amble workshop for the project is not to be missed!
ROCKPILE online http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=72289992264&ref=ts
ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer and Big Bridge, www.bigbridge.org, made possible by a grant from the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, supported by grants from The James Irvine Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. ROCKPILE is Sponsored by Allen Ginsberg's Committee on Poetry, Inc.
Also, check out this amazing YouTube performance by Bob Malone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLdqBEhDoUE&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fhome.php&feature=player_embedded
Experimental Nippon Fetishists Alert: Read Line and Pause by Forrest Roth
What type of reader might enjoy Forrest Roth’s experimental and innovative novella, Line and Pause?
Roland Barthes, in The Pleasures of the Text, imagines a “typology of the pleasures of reading…linking the reading neurosis to the hallucinated form of the text.”[1] He describes my default mode of pleasurable reading, the “paranoiac,” as the consumer-producer of intricate writings. This style of reading works with Line and Pause, but alone will not do for a fully pleasurable experience. For that to occur, the reader must also be something of a “fetishist,” who prefers the pleasures of the word, grammatical formulae, deconstruction [though Barthes didn’t call it that], all of which require a background knowledge, in this case, of Japanese culture, calligraphy and history.
It also seems to me the “fetishist” reader may enjoy Roth’s work more than any other Barthes’ types, as the fetishist, perhaps, seems the most likely to enjoy the spectacle seaming this minimalist yet highly complex text together.
In his essay “The Novel As Spectacle,” Italo Calvino writes: “If we know the rules of the ‘romanesque game,’ we can construct ‘artificial’ novels, born in the laboratory, and we can play at novels like playing at chess, with complete fairness, re-establishing communications between the writer, who is fully aware of the mechanisms he is using, and the reader, who goes along with the game because he, too, knows the rules and knows he can no longer have the wool pulled over his eyes.”[2]
But how well does the reader know the rules of any given text or unfolding spectacle? It seems this fundamental mystery is also an absurd necessity. The first rule seems to be admitting to yourself and others you have no idea what the actual rules are. In my case, I found myself struggling to imagine the rules at play in Line and Pause, and so found entry points into the novella’s meaning as difficult and challenging as I might finding a particular restaurant down a Kyoto sidestreet. By default I landed on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a means of attempting some hold, no matter how slippery. I knew I was altering the text by reading it, warping its process by re-conceiving it in my own terms. If I am unsatisfied with my unsettled feelings upon finishing a first reading of Roth’s highly intelligent work, it is due to my numerous shortcomings as a reader, not Line and Pause’s failure to deliver “the goods” I was initially looking for. And don’t get me wrong, I totally dig this. My feelings here seem akin to those of a scientist who enjoys having his hypotheses and theories shot to hell because it means he’s learned something. No one is ever completely right. When someone, like myself [sic], who’s right the vast majority of the time [lordy, lordy] finds out they’re wrong, it’s very healthy and stimulating. These are the goods Roth delivers in Line and Pause, and I wasn’t ready for them. Surprise, surprise.
One rule I did detect or imagine occurred to me on pages 37 and 38, where it seems there might be an analogy between reading clouds and reading fiction in general or the text in particular. Roth seems to be employing an indirect self-reflexivity, or deploying a critifictional technique to give the reader some insight to the rules possibly governing the narrational prosody. Consider:
“There must always be a conscious separation between the viewer and the cloud, between the observer and the observed; otherwise, the message of the cloud-vision disintegrates and the observer acts—[crossed out] irrationally…”
And: “Clouds meeting standard meteorological criteria have image-potential. Either this image-potential is utilized by a cloudwatcher, or it is negated by simply not recognizing its existence. The primary skill of the cloudwatcher to interpret image-potential into cloud-vision is dependent on previous knowledge of the augury and the ability to recognize entry points…”
This appears like critifiction to me because it seems “a kind of narrative that contains its own theory and even its own criticism.”[3]
Each page of Line and Pause seems a chapter…seems an independent piece of flash fiction or prose poetry…You have a narrative line of dependent-independent flash fictions/prose poems in diverse fonts and sizes, so one must pause at each to digest their peculiar implications [something which seems both particle and wavelength]…Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle consistently subverts the text’s phenomenology via abstraction, and the phenomenology of abstraction via materialization… one exhaling as the other inhales, the other then exhaling as one inhales…forming internal and external clouds to read-write…So to write Forrest Roth’s Line and Pause is to “read a cloud”…or imagine constellations in the night sky critifictioning themselves into existence, or not.
Furthermore, the recursive link or recurrent feedback loop between narrator and author seems calligraphy/writing…what calligraphy and writing have in common is paper/membrane/medium …calligraphy concerns itself with actual aesthetic presentation on the page, which is like a painter’s canvas; writing concerns itself with projecting the clouds abstracted/read from the blank canvass itself. The text becomes, via line and pause, a phenomenology unto itself. One must not focus on what may or may not exist beyond the borders of the page.
Roth's narrator also seems to suggest [or at least I read p. 153 on fainting and shopping as suggesting] one reason why the modern self seems empty when contrasted with perceptions of the experiences of prior generations, differences that point toward a historically situated psychology where the pursuit of being, in this case the narrator’s, brings us back to how we imagine ourselves living:
“In the early Showa Era, the floors of the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihombashi were all lined with tatami; it may have been one of the very last department stores in Japan to do so. If one can find photos of it, they will see well-dressed ladies in formal kimono taking their sandals off at the entrance. This was likely construed as formal shopping, whereas today no one really notices the difference; shopping is now merely the means to an end, no matter where one goes. Not to mention the average contemporary woman will spend a good chunk of her lifespan walking the aisles of a store, whether she actually wants to shop or not.”
On page 206 the narrator blatantly states what might be my biggest challenge reading this novella:
“…the artist must be in control at all times, even while at rest. Before beginning, then, examine the black felt lining the worktable. Do not look beyond the edges of this felt because nothing is there.”
This artist, this narrator, seems hyper-disciplined [having a fetish for discipline and control?], writing what s/he knows rather than exploring what s/he doesn’t know via wildness, exploring the uncanny. There’s nothing loosey goosey here. It reminds me of Masuji Ono’s approach to his art in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. I imagine the narrator of Line and Pause, a modern Japanese woman living a very conservative life [whether she herself really/actually is or not], could have also been on the receiving end of this criticism of Ono, the artist referred to in the title of Ishiguro’s novel:
“There’s a certain kind of artist these days…whose greatest talent lies in hiding away from the world…your knowledge of the world is like a child’s. I doubt, for instance, you could even tell me who Karl Marx was.” Ono answered: Leader of the Russian Revolution.[4] Roth has constructed a brilliant novel with a highly intelligent, seemingly aware yet uninformed narrator, a complex construction if there ever was one that seems conversant with Ishiguro’s concern about the results of too much discipline in life and art, in my opinion.
Now back to an earlier point, my default mode of reading seems paranoiac. To derive more pleasure from Line and Pause I need to find a way of becoming a fetishist, which seems as though it would require knowledge of today’s Japan, Japanese history, calligraphy, and haibun.
Short of that, my natural tastes lean toward what Barthes called “Writing aloud…[which] searches for (in a perspective of bliss)…the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.”[5]
Like Kathy Acker and others I’ve read about, I tend to get horny when I read something extremely pleasurable. That can happen across a variety of genres…
I am currently unable to adequately fetishize Line and Pause, though I’m working on it. I think this may come down to a matter of literary sexuality…a mere “gender” difference with regards to reading-writing that probably has more to do with nurture than nature [which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a choice]. Gender, after all, is culturally defined. When the sexuality-gender type of a text matches up with the sexuality-gender type of the reader-writer, bliss occurs, or what Barthes refers to as jouissance.
What works for me, however, is how impersonal and abstract the first person narrator’s voice is, speaking in the past tense of the strictness of Japanese calligraphy, the challenges of cloud reading, the perceived boundaries of her arranged marriage, the ensuing shape of misery in the form of emptiness and absence, the abortion, the attempted suicide, and now apparently feeling a pervasive emptiness…an acute numbness saturates every line, forcing me to pause. It is both moving and chilling…an unbearable weight of lightness.
I imagine I would agree with Elizabeth Switaj’s conclusion in her Mad Hatter’s [r]eview of Line and Pause, if I knew what she was talking about:
“…a meaningful journey and an intriguing experiment in the synthesis of the western novella and Japanese haibun. The form that results from this fusion fits perfectly the content, a synthesis of metaphysical ideas and keen observation of Japanese life...”[6]
Perhaps Roth’s narrator, Kei, says it best: “Being a calligrapher appears as easy as putting ink to paper…except only the paper itself speaks in the end.”[7]
I highly recommend Line and Pause to anyone who’s turned on by Japanese culture, the ways and means of the human psyche, and innovative fiction. I’m very much looking forward to Roth’s next book, whatever form it takes…Not knowing is part of the pleasure.
NOTES
1. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, NY, 1973, p. 63.
2. Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, pp. 194-5.
3. Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays, SUNY Press, 1993.
4. Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Aritst of the Floating World, First Vintage International Edition, 1989, pp. 171-2.
5. Ibid #1, pp. 66-7.
6. http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue10/reviews_roth1.shtml
7. Roth, p. 126
*****
Upon a glance, two other novels that appear to have a similar architecture:
My Life at First Try
A Novel
MARK BUDMAN
In this semi-autobiographical debut novel, Mark Budman chronicles the life of Alex, a boy born in Siberia in 1950. Short chapters—sometimes hilarious, sometimes sobering—chronicle Alex’s life year by year as he matures, starts a family, gets a chance to leave the Soviet Union, and then goes on to discover the rhythms, disappointments, and small pleasures of suburban life in upstate New York.
“This blazingly fast and funny ‘semi-autobiographical’ novel follows a Russian man’s comically earnest pursuit of the American dream." —Publishers Weekly
COUNTERPOINT | 978-1-58243-400-1 | Cloth | $24.00
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Ponge
In his most famous work, Le parti pris des choses (Often translated The Voice of Things), he meticulously described common things such as oranges, potatoes and cigarettes in a poetic voice, but with a personal style and paragraph form (prose poem) much like an essay. These poems owe much to the work of the French Renaissance poet Remy Belleau. Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects. His work is often associated with the philosophy of Phenomenology.
He described his own works as "a description-definition-literary artwork" which avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry.
*****
More on Forrest Roth:
http://www.buffalostate.edu/library/rooftop/members/roth.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Line-Pause-Forrest-Roth/dp/1934289094
http://artvoice.com/issues/v8n5/literary_buffalo/forest_roth_and_kim_chinquee
http://www.snreview.org/0305Roth.html Proust’s Moustache
http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue10/reviews_roth1.shtml
After Birthing, Curio http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1252
Real Eisenhowers http://www.thievesjargon.com/content/workview.php?work=1102
http://www.webdelsol.com/Double_Room/7/Forrest_Roth.htm
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=forrest+roth&aq=f&oq=
Roland Barthes, in The Pleasures of the Text, imagines a “typology of the pleasures of reading…linking the reading neurosis to the hallucinated form of the text.”[1] He describes my default mode of pleasurable reading, the “paranoiac,” as the consumer-producer of intricate writings. This style of reading works with Line and Pause, but alone will not do for a fully pleasurable experience. For that to occur, the reader must also be something of a “fetishist,” who prefers the pleasures of the word, grammatical formulae, deconstruction [though Barthes didn’t call it that], all of which require a background knowledge, in this case, of Japanese culture, calligraphy and history.
It also seems to me the “fetishist” reader may enjoy Roth’s work more than any other Barthes’ types, as the fetishist, perhaps, seems the most likely to enjoy the spectacle seaming this minimalist yet highly complex text together.
In his essay “The Novel As Spectacle,” Italo Calvino writes: “If we know the rules of the ‘romanesque game,’ we can construct ‘artificial’ novels, born in the laboratory, and we can play at novels like playing at chess, with complete fairness, re-establishing communications between the writer, who is fully aware of the mechanisms he is using, and the reader, who goes along with the game because he, too, knows the rules and knows he can no longer have the wool pulled over his eyes.”[2]
But how well does the reader know the rules of any given text or unfolding spectacle? It seems this fundamental mystery is also an absurd necessity. The first rule seems to be admitting to yourself and others you have no idea what the actual rules are. In my case, I found myself struggling to imagine the rules at play in Line and Pause, and so found entry points into the novella’s meaning as difficult and challenging as I might finding a particular restaurant down a Kyoto sidestreet. By default I landed on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a means of attempting some hold, no matter how slippery. I knew I was altering the text by reading it, warping its process by re-conceiving it in my own terms. If I am unsatisfied with my unsettled feelings upon finishing a first reading of Roth’s highly intelligent work, it is due to my numerous shortcomings as a reader, not Line and Pause’s failure to deliver “the goods” I was initially looking for. And don’t get me wrong, I totally dig this. My feelings here seem akin to those of a scientist who enjoys having his hypotheses and theories shot to hell because it means he’s learned something. No one is ever completely right. When someone, like myself [sic], who’s right the vast majority of the time [lordy, lordy] finds out they’re wrong, it’s very healthy and stimulating. These are the goods Roth delivers in Line and Pause, and I wasn’t ready for them. Surprise, surprise.
One rule I did detect or imagine occurred to me on pages 37 and 38, where it seems there might be an analogy between reading clouds and reading fiction in general or the text in particular. Roth seems to be employing an indirect self-reflexivity, or deploying a critifictional technique to give the reader some insight to the rules possibly governing the narrational prosody. Consider:
“There must always be a conscious separation between the viewer and the cloud, between the observer and the observed; otherwise, the message of the cloud-vision disintegrates and the observer acts—[crossed out] irrationally…”
And: “Clouds meeting standard meteorological criteria have image-potential. Either this image-potential is utilized by a cloudwatcher, or it is negated by simply not recognizing its existence. The primary skill of the cloudwatcher to interpret image-potential into cloud-vision is dependent on previous knowledge of the augury and the ability to recognize entry points…”
This appears like critifiction to me because it seems “a kind of narrative that contains its own theory and even its own criticism.”[3]
Each page of Line and Pause seems a chapter…seems an independent piece of flash fiction or prose poetry…You have a narrative line of dependent-independent flash fictions/prose poems in diverse fonts and sizes, so one must pause at each to digest their peculiar implications [something which seems both particle and wavelength]…Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle consistently subverts the text’s phenomenology via abstraction, and the phenomenology of abstraction via materialization… one exhaling as the other inhales, the other then exhaling as one inhales…forming internal and external clouds to read-write…So to write Forrest Roth’s Line and Pause is to “read a cloud”…or imagine constellations in the night sky critifictioning themselves into existence, or not.
Furthermore, the recursive link or recurrent feedback loop between narrator and author seems calligraphy/writing…what calligraphy and writing have in common is paper/membrane/medium …calligraphy concerns itself with actual aesthetic presentation on the page, which is like a painter’s canvas; writing concerns itself with projecting the clouds abstracted/read from the blank canvass itself. The text becomes, via line and pause, a phenomenology unto itself. One must not focus on what may or may not exist beyond the borders of the page.
Roth's narrator also seems to suggest [or at least I read p. 153 on fainting and shopping as suggesting] one reason why the modern self seems empty when contrasted with perceptions of the experiences of prior generations, differences that point toward a historically situated psychology where the pursuit of being, in this case the narrator’s, brings us back to how we imagine ourselves living:
“In the early Showa Era, the floors of the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihombashi were all lined with tatami; it may have been one of the very last department stores in Japan to do so. If one can find photos of it, they will see well-dressed ladies in formal kimono taking their sandals off at the entrance. This was likely construed as formal shopping, whereas today no one really notices the difference; shopping is now merely the means to an end, no matter where one goes. Not to mention the average contemporary woman will spend a good chunk of her lifespan walking the aisles of a store, whether she actually wants to shop or not.”
On page 206 the narrator blatantly states what might be my biggest challenge reading this novella:
“…the artist must be in control at all times, even while at rest. Before beginning, then, examine the black felt lining the worktable. Do not look beyond the edges of this felt because nothing is there.”
This artist, this narrator, seems hyper-disciplined [having a fetish for discipline and control?], writing what s/he knows rather than exploring what s/he doesn’t know via wildness, exploring the uncanny. There’s nothing loosey goosey here. It reminds me of Masuji Ono’s approach to his art in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. I imagine the narrator of Line and Pause, a modern Japanese woman living a very conservative life [whether she herself really/actually is or not], could have also been on the receiving end of this criticism of Ono, the artist referred to in the title of Ishiguro’s novel:
“There’s a certain kind of artist these days…whose greatest talent lies in hiding away from the world…your knowledge of the world is like a child’s. I doubt, for instance, you could even tell me who Karl Marx was.” Ono answered: Leader of the Russian Revolution.[4] Roth has constructed a brilliant novel with a highly intelligent, seemingly aware yet uninformed narrator, a complex construction if there ever was one that seems conversant with Ishiguro’s concern about the results of too much discipline in life and art, in my opinion.
Now back to an earlier point, my default mode of reading seems paranoiac. To derive more pleasure from Line and Pause I need to find a way of becoming a fetishist, which seems as though it would require knowledge of today’s Japan, Japanese history, calligraphy, and haibun.
Short of that, my natural tastes lean toward what Barthes called “Writing aloud…[which] searches for (in a perspective of bliss)…the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.”[5]
Like Kathy Acker and others I’ve read about, I tend to get horny when I read something extremely pleasurable. That can happen across a variety of genres…
I am currently unable to adequately fetishize Line and Pause, though I’m working on it. I think this may come down to a matter of literary sexuality…a mere “gender” difference with regards to reading-writing that probably has more to do with nurture than nature [which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a choice]. Gender, after all, is culturally defined. When the sexuality-gender type of a text matches up with the sexuality-gender type of the reader-writer, bliss occurs, or what Barthes refers to as jouissance.
What works for me, however, is how impersonal and abstract the first person narrator’s voice is, speaking in the past tense of the strictness of Japanese calligraphy, the challenges of cloud reading, the perceived boundaries of her arranged marriage, the ensuing shape of misery in the form of emptiness and absence, the abortion, the attempted suicide, and now apparently feeling a pervasive emptiness…an acute numbness saturates every line, forcing me to pause. It is both moving and chilling…an unbearable weight of lightness.
I imagine I would agree with Elizabeth Switaj’s conclusion in her Mad Hatter’s [r]eview of Line and Pause, if I knew what she was talking about:
“…a meaningful journey and an intriguing experiment in the synthesis of the western novella and Japanese haibun. The form that results from this fusion fits perfectly the content, a synthesis of metaphysical ideas and keen observation of Japanese life...”[6]
Perhaps Roth’s narrator, Kei, says it best: “Being a calligrapher appears as easy as putting ink to paper…except only the paper itself speaks in the end.”[7]
I highly recommend Line and Pause to anyone who’s turned on by Japanese culture, the ways and means of the human psyche, and innovative fiction. I’m very much looking forward to Roth’s next book, whatever form it takes…Not knowing is part of the pleasure.
NOTES
1. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, NY, 1973, p. 63.
2. Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, pp. 194-5.
3. Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays, SUNY Press, 1993.
4. Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Aritst of the Floating World, First Vintage International Edition, 1989, pp. 171-2.
5. Ibid #1, pp. 66-7.
6. http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue10/reviews_roth1.shtml
7. Roth, p. 126
*****
Upon a glance, two other novels that appear to have a similar architecture:
My Life at First Try
A Novel
MARK BUDMAN
In this semi-autobiographical debut novel, Mark Budman chronicles the life of Alex, a boy born in Siberia in 1950. Short chapters—sometimes hilarious, sometimes sobering—chronicle Alex’s life year by year as he matures, starts a family, gets a chance to leave the Soviet Union, and then goes on to discover the rhythms, disappointments, and small pleasures of suburban life in upstate New York.
“This blazingly fast and funny ‘semi-autobiographical’ novel follows a Russian man’s comically earnest pursuit of the American dream." —Publishers Weekly
COUNTERPOINT | 978-1-58243-400-1 | Cloth | $24.00
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Ponge
In his most famous work, Le parti pris des choses (Often translated The Voice of Things), he meticulously described common things such as oranges, potatoes and cigarettes in a poetic voice, but with a personal style and paragraph form (prose poem) much like an essay. These poems owe much to the work of the French Renaissance poet Remy Belleau. Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects. His work is often associated with the philosophy of Phenomenology.
He described his own works as "a description-definition-literary artwork" which avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry.
*****
More on Forrest Roth:
http://www.buffalostate.edu/library/rooftop/members/roth.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Line-Pause-Forrest-Roth/dp/1934289094
http://artvoice.com/issues/v8n5/literary_buffalo/forest_roth_and_kim_chinquee
http://www.snreview.org/0305Roth.html Proust’s Moustache
http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue10/reviews_roth1.shtml
After Birthing, Curio http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1252
Real Eisenhowers http://www.thievesjargon.com/content/workview.php?work=1102
http://www.webdelsol.com/Double_Room/7/Forrest_Roth.htm
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=forrest+roth&aq=f&oq=
Friday, March 27, 2009
Myth & Theory: Babbling, Procrastination & Babel
First, the procrastination. This week has been one of fiddle farting and might be characterized by this "poem."
Note: I consider myself no poet, but...
The way this works is as you click on each stanza you'll go to a wordle cloud. Then when you return to the poem, the part you've read will have disappeared. And each wordle word cloud gets smaller with each ensuing stanza.
It also seems each word cloud might be another poem randomly generated from the remnant stanzas.
Of course this is stupid and duh. But I'm procrastinating...farting around rather than writing my novel…
This may also be a humorous poem, intended as a joke [perhaps validating the intentional fallacy, making Wimsatt rather Beardsley]. For instance, "Myskin" seems a proper noun and in its context, seems an event. “Meta-For” and “Odd-Appeal” are perhaps the proper names of people.
Or not.
What a waste of time, or was/is it? I don't know. You decide...
Propersubjects/Impropernouns
Word/Wound de Meta-For sutures Odd-Appeal during Myskin, sweating Inside-Out
vibrating like This the Simile sewing Its scattered Black Hole Ashes, blowing Saturated Trombone
awareness as Onset de Mew-Tate Offspring stitching Redundant Emergencies, perverting Chaos into Arabesque Patterns of Itits Loving
regardless of Him Orher
*****
Poet and BlazeVox[books] publisher Geoffrey Gatza informed me at last weekend’s wildly successful Buffalo Small Press Bookfair that the cover of my novel, Smoke, which he designed, is a photograph!
This blew my mind as I was certain it was a work from Photoshop. It turns out he’s a sharpshooter and shot a series of photos of “Cloud Gate” by British artist Anish Kapoor in Chicago’s Millennium Park while attending the AWP conference in February.
Here are the links to these amazing pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#5303467281626059714
And here is the whole set of images around it. They start about half way down:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#
My favorite:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#5303472397146743506
These photos remind me of my limited understanding of M-Theory, which is related to string theory. M-theory states the big bang was actually the membranes of two universes colliding. The sparks from that collision and ensuing friction seams the observable matter of this universe or dimension. All we perceive and reflect-project-express—among them language and art—seems to seam reflections on this membrane, or brane as some pros may have it. So appearances change as we and "others" move through space time [consider Escher].
Gatza’s photos of Kapoor’s work seems to me a representation of mind-matter-energy in motion...a river-like progression projecting/reflecting cognitive material energy confronting space-time and scooping out portions of it with a camera lens.
And one of these spoonfuls made the cover for my novel.
For more info see:
http://www.millenniumpark.org/artandarchitecture/cloud_gate.html
"What I wanted to do in Millennium Park is make something that would engage the Chicago skyline…so that one will see the clouds kind of floating in, with those very tall buildings reflected in the work. And then, since it is in the form of a gate, the participant, the viewer, will be able to enter into this very deep chamber that does, in a way, the same thing to one's reflection as the exterior of the piece is doing to the reflection of the city around."
-Anish Kapoor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor
An excerpt from Kapoor’s Wikipedia article:
"Kapoor's pieces are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured. Most often, the intention is to engage the viewer, evoking mystery through the works' dark cavities, awe through their size and simple beauty, tactility through their inviting surfaces and fascination through their reflective facades. His early pieces rely on powder pigment to cover the works and the floor around them. This practice was inspired by the mounds of brightly coloured pigment in the markets and temples of India. His later works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female and body-mind). His most recent works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings.
"When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said, 'I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.[1]'"
Note: I consider myself no poet, but...
The way this works is as you click on each stanza you'll go to a wordle cloud. Then when you return to the poem, the part you've read will have disappeared. And each wordle word cloud gets smaller with each ensuing stanza.
It also seems each word cloud might be another poem randomly generated from the remnant stanzas.
Of course this is stupid and duh. But I'm procrastinating...farting around rather than writing my novel…
This may also be a humorous poem, intended as a joke [perhaps validating the intentional fallacy, making Wimsatt rather Beardsley]. For instance, "Myskin" seems a proper noun and in its context, seems an event. “Meta-For” and “Odd-Appeal” are perhaps the proper names of people.
Or not.
What a waste of time, or was/is it? I don't know. You decide...
Propersubjects/Impropernouns
Word/Wound de Meta-For sutures Odd-Appeal during Myskin, sweating Inside-Out
vibrating like This the Simile sewing Its scattered Black Hole Ashes, blowing Saturated Trombone
awareness as Onset de Mew-Tate Offspring stitching Redundant Emergencies, perverting Chaos into Arabesque Patterns of Itits Loving
regardless of Him Orher
*****
Poet and BlazeVox[books] publisher Geoffrey Gatza informed me at last weekend’s wildly successful Buffalo Small Press Bookfair that the cover of my novel, Smoke, which he designed, is a photograph!
This blew my mind as I was certain it was a work from Photoshop. It turns out he’s a sharpshooter and shot a series of photos of “Cloud Gate” by British artist Anish Kapoor in Chicago’s Millennium Park while attending the AWP conference in February.
Here are the links to these amazing pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#5303467281626059714
And here is the whole set of images around it. They start about half way down:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#
My favorite:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#5303472397146743506
These photos remind me of my limited understanding of M-Theory, which is related to string theory. M-theory states the big bang was actually the membranes of two universes colliding. The sparks from that collision and ensuing friction seams the observable matter of this universe or dimension. All we perceive and reflect-project-express—among them language and art—seems to seam reflections on this membrane, or brane as some pros may have it. So appearances change as we and "others" move through space time [consider Escher].
Gatza’s photos of Kapoor’s work seems to me a representation of mind-matter-energy in motion...a river-like progression projecting/reflecting cognitive material energy confronting space-time and scooping out portions of it with a camera lens.
And one of these spoonfuls made the cover for my novel.
For more info see:
http://www.millenniumpark.org/artandarchitecture/cloud_gate.html
"What I wanted to do in Millennium Park is make something that would engage the Chicago skyline…so that one will see the clouds kind of floating in, with those very tall buildings reflected in the work. And then, since it is in the form of a gate, the participant, the viewer, will be able to enter into this very deep chamber that does, in a way, the same thing to one's reflection as the exterior of the piece is doing to the reflection of the city around."
-Anish Kapoor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor
An excerpt from Kapoor’s Wikipedia article:
"Kapoor's pieces are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured. Most often, the intention is to engage the viewer, evoking mystery through the works' dark cavities, awe through their size and simple beauty, tactility through their inviting surfaces and fascination through their reflective facades. His early pieces rely on powder pigment to cover the works and the floor around them. This practice was inspired by the mounds of brightly coloured pigment in the markets and temples of India. His later works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female and body-mind). His most recent works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings.
"When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said, 'I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.[1]'"
Friday, March 20, 2009
Don’t forget the bonobos, Dennett!
Jesus Murphy this is the medicalization of illness in the peach shirt of philosophy.
Jared Schickling
Correspondence between myself and Jared Schickling this week worked over a fifteen minute talk by Daniel C. Dennett on TED, among other things.
The conversation began with me sending him these links and comment:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_dangerous_memes.html
Something's wrong with his picture, though it seems relevant to Germ.
Also, here’s some salt with that pepper. Or maybe it’s garlic salt…I’m not sure.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html
Jared: "Memetics is morally neutral." Yeah ok…Sorry don't mean to bombard you. But I'm watching and increasingly tired…reducing the realm of thought to biological mechanisms does more harm than good, it isn't particularly useful at getting at the complexity of the thing. The logic of the analogy is wonderfully conveniently workable. But the shape of an idea once it's involved itself in a brain is unpredictably irrational at the level of detail in a way observable bacteria isn't. Jesus Murphy this is the medicalization of illness in the peach shirt of philosophy.
ME: You're nailing it. What he's saying about "germ" is kind of the very basic premise from which I'm writing the novel. However, beyond the premise, beyond the useful fiction and his allusions to a kind of recursive symmetry across scale [recursive typology?][the fluke parasite in the ant’s brain being analogous to a meme in the human mind], all kinds of other stuff is going on that pops up in the writing…Dennett appears to be a major domo reductionist. He can't seem to get his head around the idea that though mind, matter, and energy are aspects/dimensions/scales of the same thing, they are not the same thing themselves. Dennett/Dawkins have the problem of being rational secular humanists, which means they each operate brilliantly from false premises. Luckily, this doesn't prevent them from falsifying others' premises. Neither seems capable of saying the productions of their rational minds—their philosophies—are useful fictions. They have complete faith in themselves, that is to say their philosophy. They seem quite Romantic about their rational anti-Romanticism. They seem the protagonists of their own anti-stories, the rational heroes who destroy narrative with grammar. Very similar to Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost...ego run amok...passing judgment on God. They fail to perceive that the most important thing is the premise itself. Humans produce premises. Dennett/Dawkins are trying to do away with that...They are not tinkering with the Mechanism of Premise, but assuming premises about imagined mechanisms...prejudiced against premises... That seems wildly inadequate to me, using philosophy to justify one's own perceived superiority, the validity of your false premise over other false premises. Premises are always false, yet humans incessantly produce them. In this sense/aspect/dimension/scale, false premises are therefore true premises. The odor of urine and urine itself are two different things that signify the same thing. The assumption that the smell of urine and urine itself are the same thing is a false premise that is nonetheless useful and true within certain parameters of action. Useful fictions and delusion are necessary to the human experience. Without them, there is no "human" experience… That said, looking at Dennett-Dawkins from the imagined self-perception of the human superorganism [if memes are viruses and alive how else can one contextualize their environment or ecosystem or milieu than to say they exist within the human superorganism as seams or fascia or membranes of Its mind-being?], I'd say they're doing their jobs as "mental" enzymes and/or psychic catalysts within the human membrane [member brain? meme brain?]. They're pimples not on God's ass, or chancres upon Its divine genitalia, but blemishes upon Its imagined forehead, the protrusive pus-erupting kind that make other angels look away, re-membering their own traumatic follies with such cysts and boils…Just my opinion from out here in the cheap seats... And yes, I love popping zits. The bigger more subaceous the cyst the better. Hooray!
Jared: I also think this guy goes astray at certain basic points. e.g. the idea that human genetic interests can be subordinated to "other interests." Yes they can, yes they are; no they can't, no they aren't. He doesn't get hung up on the prospect, which sounds convenient, leading to an idea that must feel good, "humans are the only species that do this." Were he to get hung up, at least caught up, it might lead to deeper suspicions of deeper affinities with non-human species, which might find relational undifferentiation that is human and non. Or not.
ME: Absolutely. Some of my favorite writers are bonobos [see more, and comments below these].
Jared: Here's an excerpt [of a] Dennett quote from a Michael Pollan article titled “An Animal’s Place”. I think Dennett's comment here is very stupid for such a learned man: "As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is not Sean Penn in "Dead Man Walking," that in a bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is blissfully absent. 'If we fail to find suffering in the animal lives we can see,' Dennett writes in "Kinds of Minds," 'we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.'"
ME: First of all, as a point of fact, many bovine species have evolved the ability to hide suffering/illness as a defense mechanism in the wild. You don’t need predators knowing you’re not feeling well. This is fairly common knowledge among Dennett’s crowd, so why would he so willfully ignore it when advancing his ideas, or viral memes, germs we must defend ourselves against?
Jared: The whole thing shows its colors. He talks of infectious ideas—certain ideas are "to die for," but all ideas are infections. That's the scheme. This raises a problem when he begins to talk about using ideas responsibly; what real I is actually capable of using ideas responsibly? It's not itself, it's an idea of itself that is something ("why is there something rather than nothing"). Allowing the "benign variance of our ideas to continue to spread" would be a utopian myth without admitting the act of thinking is a religious act in the first place—If ideas are infections, they must compete like other viral things.
ME: Aside from the messenger, I'm very intrigued by the idea of memes as viruses because looking at them that way forms a seam between mind and matter. They are recursive types situated in different dimensions. To complete the picture, however, an energy aspect might be imagined. It's not just two things, it's three. Once that's grasped, we might imagine a fourth necessary aspect or dimension. To catch up to string theory, we'd have to find a total of eleven. Dennett's dealing with two thinking that's all there is. I'm trying to incorporate three, intuiting that's not all there is. Dennett seems to ignore Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as he doesn't see himself changing the equation at all. Perhaps the perceiver might somehow fit in as "energy" somehow. Maybe the intention of the perceiver isn't so much mind as energy. I don't know. I do think, however, that it's possible that memes/ideas/intentions compete on the personal level, but cooperate on the level of the superorganism. All ideas are necessary to It. My will is a dimension of The Human Will, my perception is an aspect of The Human Perception, my body is a scale of The Human Body...I am a microcosm of human civilization...but I am different from It in terms of scale/dimension/intention/energy etc. & et al. So will/energy/intention seem to be necessary for any paradigm fictively imagined to be useful on a personal level for the "creative person" trying to adequately imagine The Human Being, which is but one small thing in an effectively infinite multiverse…I know I don't know what I'm talking about, and the more I speak the more certain this uncertainty becomes. Dennett & Dawkins might put that in their pipe and smoke it...if they "Smoke."
*****
Remarks about about "Apes that Write:"
Jared: Bonobo: I remember a while back reading in a class about chimps and language acquisition. It involved defining human language in order to talk about similarities/differences across species. The conclusion I came to, and I can't remember if it was Kanzi or Koko (I believe Koko was a "common" chimp) who convinced me of this, that chimps can acquire language skills that humans develop by age 5. That's as far as it seemed to go in the papers and videos I was looking at. My question then was why is this the case, that this was a more useful question than simply whether or not chimps can acquire a defined human language. What language faculties do these chimps already possess, how is it expressed in the land of chimps, and why won't these chimps go on learning more. I think this comes to bear somehow on her basic point in accounting for differences between human and chimp behavior, that it's cultural and not biological. I think she's on to something, that the learning environment accounts for chimp cultural development, not genetic makeups. But there seems to be biological differences preventing chimps from becoming fully-fledged humans. This would seem obvious; except that Rumbaugh suggests through continued exposure to humans there's no reason to assume chimps couldn't develop similarly human abilities. They're almost genetically indistinguishable and share many of the same desires—both are intrigued by the capacity to make musical sounds, both are driven to communicate, both are curious about what they don't understand (though there might be some devolution here in the course of turning human), etc., but she talks about bonobo sexuality—a free, permissive, communicative tool—against human sexuality, categorized into a discreet area of experience, removed from public view, often variously taboo. I'd account for this by suggesting humans attach emotions and traumas and more to sexual acts in ways bonobos don't. Neuromechanisms must structure this…I wonder how similar human and chimp brains are or aren't.
Me: Very interesting. I couldn't help feel, however, that the bonobo who hadn't been outside for days and was looking longingly out into the forest, was being dumbed down, tortured in effect, for the purpose of these studies. Interesting they didn’t tell us why she hadn’t been outside for days. The struggle of the researcher to put what they're observing into their own terms...The inventors and teachers of grammar...liberal colonist’s not shrugging off their “white man’s burden”…presuming the innate inferiority of the enslaved…certitude run amok...spinning Heisenberg in his grave…I actually saw and see the whole thing as tragic and pathetic. I am not so curious about these things that it snuffs out my empathy for a captured ape longing for freedom. Does the good we derive from this communication justify the evil that's been done, that is being done to these poor beings? …Which leads to food consumption, which puts me on a moral level with Hitler and Stalin. I occasionally drool for a Big Mac and fantasize torturing "evil" folk in the name of the "truth." That's part of the American/Western delusion. Is it cultural or genetic, or both, this phantastic ideology of violence/oppression/dominion/zionism? Perhaps that's a recursive delusion necessary to all civilizations [human organs within the human superorganism?]…It occurs to me the role of the postmodern hero [or anti-hero] might be to rebel against the superorganism, which necessarily oppresses individuals [mere cells], exercising its dominion over them, in its desire to reach the promised land of self-satisfaction, that Zion of self-actualization. Less "society" [which is always virtual and public] seams more sociability [which is always actual and private]. I've met very few individual beings I've despised and very few groups of beings I didn't despise. I'm digressing, but the point I'm trying to make is that the "modern" "human being" is living in a box. Most of the "modern human being's" experiences are mediated by technology, which is a mediation itself from a media personality that [not who] reads what his producers have imagined themselves to have interpreted. The "modern human" "hero's journey" may lie in stepping down from her perch and out of her box to participate, cooperate and empathize with all the beings composing her present milieu. This may also mean the heroic human cell might choose to go malignant or viral in terms of not only defending itself against its national or tribal superorgan and that superorgan’s superorganism's internalizing/consuming necessities, to which a thus contextualized individual being might respond by seeking out its own justification via some ideology espousing radical individualism? Of course, "chosen people" never operate in a vacuum, so the game goes on...I naturally empathize with the egg, not the wall it’s whipped at. Most people just see a mess...I feel a bonobo longing for home…These scientists and their studies, as well-intentioned and empathetic and even necessary in light of habitat destruction as they may be, might never reveal anything innate about those they’re manipulating any more than physicists have ever pinned down an ultimate particle of matter. Whether the subjects they observe seem animate or inanimate beings will not matter in the objective sense. These scientists have perhaps not yet come to grips with the essence of their own objectivity, their being as objects. Nothing of true value can emerge from their false premises [the object's essence—neither the observer's nor the observed's] beyond the random and unintended effects of their actions...So that's why my favorite writer's a bonobo...a great ape longing for freedom, bound by inferiors who think otherwise, in a room not a forest breathing, hoping change will bring him home. If I were Jesus, I'd say forgive them Lord for they know not what they do. But I'm not Jesus and I don't care if they're forgiven or not. I just want them to stop studying these fine beings in this stupid way. Love them more. Go all the way. Shatter the tabboos and enter new planes of reality. Find a new heroic face to wear. Become more human by becoming more of an Earthling. Fuck everything, literally. And get married to whatever you want…And, I know, this contradicts my earlier idea about rebelling against the superorganism and harkens back more to my Lutheran upbringing: Love thy enemy. If Nature/nature’s your enemy, learn to love It/it…cause you can never leave It. This might be one of those times when insisting on non-insistence is insisting too much. But I won’t insist upon it. Aside from all that, Rumbaugh’s presentation was a rather fascinating and charming little presentation wasn't it? Yes, the music and narrative of some of the clips was annoying, and it’s tone exemplifies my criticism, I did enjoy it very much. It stirred my compassion.
*****
This is in regards to Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on Genius at TED:
Jared: Just watched the Gilbert talk on genius. I more or less don't take issue with what she's suggesting though I think how she talks about it is troublesome and might work against itself. It's a mistake to draw clear boundaries between pantheons and human experience. The god or spirit or Muse that is outside material and over and above is a trick. The classical notion of genius, which persists idiosyncratically and persecuted up to the present (Melville talked in these terms, as does Dan Beachy-Quick) is that it's a shared thing. It's beyond the human capacity to confine it, to own it completely, which Gilbert suggests, but contrary to her schema it's a shared human event, necessarily entailing failure at completely embodying it. Genius exhausts "the" genius's abilities. Melville read Shakespeare's work and called it "genius," while noting in a letter to Hawthorne that the most incredible thing is what the work never said, perhaps what the artist couldn't say, all that this genius took to the grave. Genius, then, as it finds shape through individuals and their work, should be understood in terms of the work it leaves to be done as much as it should be understood as the work that is actually done. Genius, when we find it, makes us accutely aware of what hasn't been accomplished. Genius reveals failure! Shortcomings! You might say it's inspirational, that it inspires, remaining ever a shared, visionary potential. The source of this for Gilbert are demons in the wall spreading "fairy juice" over the work, who either graces the worker with its presence or not. It might be much simpler (though not really), the force shaped in the constellation of texts and voices and faces and rivers that we encounter and will shape our capacity for thinking about them, this material of genius everywhere abundant.
ME: Well said. I think you took her a bit literally, though. I viewed her as espousing useful fictions, recognizing them as such, and lightening up. Genius is not a burden. For people in touch with genius as you so ably describe it, I would imagine that's an inspirational thing to hear, because I’ve read and heard elsewhere that dealing with genius can be exhausting. The river must be heard. The river is the genius. It erodes, fascinates, reveals, drowns, floods, nurtures, destroys...it's wild and natural. We can dam[n] it for a little while, but eventually such damnations are always futile. Genius is the mind evolving, which is to say expanding consciousness in time. Where I thought she dragged was saying how the writer shows up to work every day and the genius is fickle. I didn't buy that. I’ve heard some "pros" say that they’ve learned how to contact and communicate with the genius on a fairly regular basis. Tiger Woods' drives while warming up on the driving range are all better than my best drive ever. That's because he's become a pro at communing his matter-energy with the golf genius, which is an aspect or dimension of the genius-at-large that all genius taps into, that river of Mind in the mind-matter-energy exemplasy. What do I know beyond my own processes? The universe is vast, but when I think of it, I fail to know It. Also, Elizabeth, should you read this, I think you're gorgeous...
Jared Schickling
Correspondence between myself and Jared Schickling this week worked over a fifteen minute talk by Daniel C. Dennett on TED, among other things.
The conversation began with me sending him these links and comment:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_dangerous_memes.html
Something's wrong with his picture, though it seems relevant to Germ.
Also, here’s some salt with that pepper. Or maybe it’s garlic salt…I’m not sure.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html
Jared: "Memetics is morally neutral." Yeah ok…Sorry don't mean to bombard you. But I'm watching and increasingly tired…reducing the realm of thought to biological mechanisms does more harm than good, it isn't particularly useful at getting at the complexity of the thing. The logic of the analogy is wonderfully conveniently workable. But the shape of an idea once it's involved itself in a brain is unpredictably irrational at the level of detail in a way observable bacteria isn't. Jesus Murphy this is the medicalization of illness in the peach shirt of philosophy.
ME: You're nailing it. What he's saying about "germ" is kind of the very basic premise from which I'm writing the novel. However, beyond the premise, beyond the useful fiction and his allusions to a kind of recursive symmetry across scale [recursive typology?][the fluke parasite in the ant’s brain being analogous to a meme in the human mind], all kinds of other stuff is going on that pops up in the writing…Dennett appears to be a major domo reductionist. He can't seem to get his head around the idea that though mind, matter, and energy are aspects/dimensions/scales of the same thing, they are not the same thing themselves. Dennett/Dawkins have the problem of being rational secular humanists, which means they each operate brilliantly from false premises. Luckily, this doesn't prevent them from falsifying others' premises. Neither seems capable of saying the productions of their rational minds—their philosophies—are useful fictions. They have complete faith in themselves, that is to say their philosophy. They seem quite Romantic about their rational anti-Romanticism. They seem the protagonists of their own anti-stories, the rational heroes who destroy narrative with grammar. Very similar to Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost...ego run amok...passing judgment on God. They fail to perceive that the most important thing is the premise itself. Humans produce premises. Dennett/Dawkins are trying to do away with that...They are not tinkering with the Mechanism of Premise, but assuming premises about imagined mechanisms...prejudiced against premises... That seems wildly inadequate to me, using philosophy to justify one's own perceived superiority, the validity of your false premise over other false premises. Premises are always false, yet humans incessantly produce them. In this sense/aspect/dimension/scale, false premises are therefore true premises. The odor of urine and urine itself are two different things that signify the same thing. The assumption that the smell of urine and urine itself are the same thing is a false premise that is nonetheless useful and true within certain parameters of action. Useful fictions and delusion are necessary to the human experience. Without them, there is no "human" experience… That said, looking at Dennett-Dawkins from the imagined self-perception of the human superorganism [if memes are viruses and alive how else can one contextualize their environment or ecosystem or milieu than to say they exist within the human superorganism as seams or fascia or membranes of Its mind-being?], I'd say they're doing their jobs as "mental" enzymes and/or psychic catalysts within the human membrane [member brain? meme brain?]. They're pimples not on God's ass, or chancres upon Its divine genitalia, but blemishes upon Its imagined forehead, the protrusive pus-erupting kind that make other angels look away, re-membering their own traumatic follies with such cysts and boils…Just my opinion from out here in the cheap seats... And yes, I love popping zits. The bigger more subaceous the cyst the better. Hooray!
Jared: I also think this guy goes astray at certain basic points. e.g. the idea that human genetic interests can be subordinated to "other interests." Yes they can, yes they are; no they can't, no they aren't. He doesn't get hung up on the prospect, which sounds convenient, leading to an idea that must feel good, "humans are the only species that do this." Were he to get hung up, at least caught up, it might lead to deeper suspicions of deeper affinities with non-human species, which might find relational undifferentiation that is human and non. Or not.
ME: Absolutely. Some of my favorite writers are bonobos [see more, and comments below these].
Jared: Here's an excerpt [of a] Dennett quote from a Michael Pollan article titled “An Animal’s Place”. I think Dennett's comment here is very stupid for such a learned man: "As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is not Sean Penn in "Dead Man Walking," that in a bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is blissfully absent. 'If we fail to find suffering in the animal lives we can see,' Dennett writes in "Kinds of Minds," 'we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.'"
ME: First of all, as a point of fact, many bovine species have evolved the ability to hide suffering/illness as a defense mechanism in the wild. You don’t need predators knowing you’re not feeling well. This is fairly common knowledge among Dennett’s crowd, so why would he so willfully ignore it when advancing his ideas, or viral memes, germs we must defend ourselves against?
Jared: The whole thing shows its colors. He talks of infectious ideas—certain ideas are "to die for," but all ideas are infections. That's the scheme. This raises a problem when he begins to talk about using ideas responsibly; what real I is actually capable of using ideas responsibly? It's not itself, it's an idea of itself that is something ("why is there something rather than nothing"). Allowing the "benign variance of our ideas to continue to spread" would be a utopian myth without admitting the act of thinking is a religious act in the first place—If ideas are infections, they must compete like other viral things.
ME: Aside from the messenger, I'm very intrigued by the idea of memes as viruses because looking at them that way forms a seam between mind and matter. They are recursive types situated in different dimensions. To complete the picture, however, an energy aspect might be imagined. It's not just two things, it's three. Once that's grasped, we might imagine a fourth necessary aspect or dimension. To catch up to string theory, we'd have to find a total of eleven. Dennett's dealing with two thinking that's all there is. I'm trying to incorporate three, intuiting that's not all there is. Dennett seems to ignore Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as he doesn't see himself changing the equation at all. Perhaps the perceiver might somehow fit in as "energy" somehow. Maybe the intention of the perceiver isn't so much mind as energy. I don't know. I do think, however, that it's possible that memes/ideas/intentions compete on the personal level, but cooperate on the level of the superorganism. All ideas are necessary to It. My will is a dimension of The Human Will, my perception is an aspect of The Human Perception, my body is a scale of The Human Body...I am a microcosm of human civilization...but I am different from It in terms of scale/dimension/intention/energy etc. & et al. So will/energy/intention seem to be necessary for any paradigm fictively imagined to be useful on a personal level for the "creative person" trying to adequately imagine The Human Being, which is but one small thing in an effectively infinite multiverse…I know I don't know what I'm talking about, and the more I speak the more certain this uncertainty becomes. Dennett & Dawkins might put that in their pipe and smoke it...if they "Smoke."
*****
Remarks about about "Apes that Write:"
Jared: Bonobo: I remember a while back reading in a class about chimps and language acquisition. It involved defining human language in order to talk about similarities/differences across species. The conclusion I came to, and I can't remember if it was Kanzi or Koko (I believe Koko was a "common" chimp) who convinced me of this, that chimps can acquire language skills that humans develop by age 5. That's as far as it seemed to go in the papers and videos I was looking at. My question then was why is this the case, that this was a more useful question than simply whether or not chimps can acquire a defined human language. What language faculties do these chimps already possess, how is it expressed in the land of chimps, and why won't these chimps go on learning more. I think this comes to bear somehow on her basic point in accounting for differences between human and chimp behavior, that it's cultural and not biological. I think she's on to something, that the learning environment accounts for chimp cultural development, not genetic makeups. But there seems to be biological differences preventing chimps from becoming fully-fledged humans. This would seem obvious; except that Rumbaugh suggests through continued exposure to humans there's no reason to assume chimps couldn't develop similarly human abilities. They're almost genetically indistinguishable and share many of the same desires—both are intrigued by the capacity to make musical sounds, both are driven to communicate, both are curious about what they don't understand (though there might be some devolution here in the course of turning human), etc., but she talks about bonobo sexuality—a free, permissive, communicative tool—against human sexuality, categorized into a discreet area of experience, removed from public view, often variously taboo. I'd account for this by suggesting humans attach emotions and traumas and more to sexual acts in ways bonobos don't. Neuromechanisms must structure this…I wonder how similar human and chimp brains are or aren't.
Me: Very interesting. I couldn't help feel, however, that the bonobo who hadn't been outside for days and was looking longingly out into the forest, was being dumbed down, tortured in effect, for the purpose of these studies. Interesting they didn’t tell us why she hadn’t been outside for days. The struggle of the researcher to put what they're observing into their own terms...The inventors and teachers of grammar...liberal colonist’s not shrugging off their “white man’s burden”…presuming the innate inferiority of the enslaved…certitude run amok...spinning Heisenberg in his grave…I actually saw and see the whole thing as tragic and pathetic. I am not so curious about these things that it snuffs out my empathy for a captured ape longing for freedom. Does the good we derive from this communication justify the evil that's been done, that is being done to these poor beings? …Which leads to food consumption, which puts me on a moral level with Hitler and Stalin. I occasionally drool for a Big Mac and fantasize torturing "evil" folk in the name of the "truth." That's part of the American/Western delusion. Is it cultural or genetic, or both, this phantastic ideology of violence/oppression/dominion/zionism? Perhaps that's a recursive delusion necessary to all civilizations [human organs within the human superorganism?]…It occurs to me the role of the postmodern hero [or anti-hero] might be to rebel against the superorganism, which necessarily oppresses individuals [mere cells], exercising its dominion over them, in its desire to reach the promised land of self-satisfaction, that Zion of self-actualization. Less "society" [which is always virtual and public] seams more sociability [which is always actual and private]. I've met very few individual beings I've despised and very few groups of beings I didn't despise. I'm digressing, but the point I'm trying to make is that the "modern" "human being" is living in a box. Most of the "modern human being's" experiences are mediated by technology, which is a mediation itself from a media personality that [not who] reads what his producers have imagined themselves to have interpreted. The "modern human" "hero's journey" may lie in stepping down from her perch and out of her box to participate, cooperate and empathize with all the beings composing her present milieu. This may also mean the heroic human cell might choose to go malignant or viral in terms of not only defending itself against its national or tribal superorgan and that superorgan’s superorganism's internalizing/consuming necessities, to which a thus contextualized individual being might respond by seeking out its own justification via some ideology espousing radical individualism? Of course, "chosen people" never operate in a vacuum, so the game goes on...I naturally empathize with the egg, not the wall it’s whipped at. Most people just see a mess...I feel a bonobo longing for home…These scientists and their studies, as well-intentioned and empathetic and even necessary in light of habitat destruction as they may be, might never reveal anything innate about those they’re manipulating any more than physicists have ever pinned down an ultimate particle of matter. Whether the subjects they observe seem animate or inanimate beings will not matter in the objective sense. These scientists have perhaps not yet come to grips with the essence of their own objectivity, their being as objects. Nothing of true value can emerge from their false premises [the object's essence—neither the observer's nor the observed's] beyond the random and unintended effects of their actions...So that's why my favorite writer's a bonobo...a great ape longing for freedom, bound by inferiors who think otherwise, in a room not a forest breathing, hoping change will bring him home. If I were Jesus, I'd say forgive them Lord for they know not what they do. But I'm not Jesus and I don't care if they're forgiven or not. I just want them to stop studying these fine beings in this stupid way. Love them more. Go all the way. Shatter the tabboos and enter new planes of reality. Find a new heroic face to wear. Become more human by becoming more of an Earthling. Fuck everything, literally. And get married to whatever you want…And, I know, this contradicts my earlier idea about rebelling against the superorganism and harkens back more to my Lutheran upbringing: Love thy enemy. If Nature/nature’s your enemy, learn to love It/it…cause you can never leave It. This might be one of those times when insisting on non-insistence is insisting too much. But I won’t insist upon it. Aside from all that, Rumbaugh’s presentation was a rather fascinating and charming little presentation wasn't it? Yes, the music and narrative of some of the clips was annoying, and it’s tone exemplifies my criticism, I did enjoy it very much. It stirred my compassion.
*****
This is in regards to Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on Genius at TED:
Jared: Just watched the Gilbert talk on genius. I more or less don't take issue with what she's suggesting though I think how she talks about it is troublesome and might work against itself. It's a mistake to draw clear boundaries between pantheons and human experience. The god or spirit or Muse that is outside material and over and above is a trick. The classical notion of genius, which persists idiosyncratically and persecuted up to the present (Melville talked in these terms, as does Dan Beachy-Quick) is that it's a shared thing. It's beyond the human capacity to confine it, to own it completely, which Gilbert suggests, but contrary to her schema it's a shared human event, necessarily entailing failure at completely embodying it. Genius exhausts "the" genius's abilities. Melville read Shakespeare's work and called it "genius," while noting in a letter to Hawthorne that the most incredible thing is what the work never said, perhaps what the artist couldn't say, all that this genius took to the grave. Genius, then, as it finds shape through individuals and their work, should be understood in terms of the work it leaves to be done as much as it should be understood as the work that is actually done. Genius, when we find it, makes us accutely aware of what hasn't been accomplished. Genius reveals failure! Shortcomings! You might say it's inspirational, that it inspires, remaining ever a shared, visionary potential. The source of this for Gilbert are demons in the wall spreading "fairy juice" over the work, who either graces the worker with its presence or not. It might be much simpler (though not really), the force shaped in the constellation of texts and voices and faces and rivers that we encounter and will shape our capacity for thinking about them, this material of genius everywhere abundant.
ME: Well said. I think you took her a bit literally, though. I viewed her as espousing useful fictions, recognizing them as such, and lightening up. Genius is not a burden. For people in touch with genius as you so ably describe it, I would imagine that's an inspirational thing to hear, because I’ve read and heard elsewhere that dealing with genius can be exhausting. The river must be heard. The river is the genius. It erodes, fascinates, reveals, drowns, floods, nurtures, destroys...it's wild and natural. We can dam[n] it for a little while, but eventually such damnations are always futile. Genius is the mind evolving, which is to say expanding consciousness in time. Where I thought she dragged was saying how the writer shows up to work every day and the genius is fickle. I didn't buy that. I’ve heard some "pros" say that they’ve learned how to contact and communicate with the genius on a fairly regular basis. Tiger Woods' drives while warming up on the driving range are all better than my best drive ever. That's because he's become a pro at communing his matter-energy with the golf genius, which is an aspect or dimension of the genius-at-large that all genius taps into, that river of Mind in the mind-matter-energy exemplasy. What do I know beyond my own processes? The universe is vast, but when I think of it, I fail to know It. Also, Elizabeth, should you read this, I think you're gorgeous...
Friday, March 13, 2009
Mish-Mash
I’ll be reading something from Smoke or a novel-in-progress somewhere at the Third Annual Buffalo Small Press Book Fair between noon and 6 p.m. Saturday, March 21, 2009 at Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, 453 Porter Avenue, Buffalo, NY. It’s free and open to the public. For more info: http://www.buffalosmallpress.org/
My Smoke is not the first Smoke. Just found out Turgenev beat me to it. So far, there’s the obvious comparisons… There’s also the film starring Kevin Spacey, of which Paul Auster wrote the screenplay, which I haven’t seen. That has nothing to do with my novel…though Turgenev seems to have stolen a thing or two. Russian bastard. Should we ever meet …
I’m purchasing Joshua Cohen’s, A Heaven of Others, with my next paycheck. Consider this from the New Haven Review: “A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen’s second novel and fourth book of fiction, is a horrifying, terrifying, and instructive account of the wrong heaven in another’s shoes. Real shoes, that is, left forever in a real river of honey following abduction by eagles and a missed tête-à-tête with “the man named Mohammed”—the only one, it turns out, who might be able to bail our narrator, Jonathan Schwarzstein, of 37 Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, out of a surreal and macabre but theologically accurate wasteland of a Muslim afterlife, and restore him to the heaven of his faith or choice. Though he is only ten when a Muslim boy his age explodes him on the street outside of a shoe store in latter-day Israel, by the time we hear him speak, from heaven, he is no longer a child but a child of eternity, “maturing to infinity,” and beyond and beyond, amen…” Good God! See the publisher’s site
It seems someone else named Charles Richardson had a way with people, too. See: “There is no evidence to support later suggestions that Richardson whipped Chinese while horseback riding in China, though according to a local English-language newspaper Supplement on the Incident, he had been heard to say just prior to the incident, "I know how to deal with these people" at Namamugi Incident. Sometimes, history’s hilarious!
From Sam Hamill’s In Her Company: Denise Levertov, at Jacket: “We shared some “affinities of content,” to borrow the title of her 1991 essay on poetry of the Pacific Northwest, as well as convictions about the role of the “engaged” artist. And we both felt passionately about the necessity of serving poetry[1] — in my case including work as editor-printer as well as poet-translator-essayist. As “engaged poets,” we shared a common struggle to resist bending one’s art to the purpose of mere propagandizing while acknowledging one’s politics within the living arts of poetry.”
An interesting piece on David Foster Wallace at Rain Taxi: “One thing that Wallace did incredibly well was to co-opt metafiction’s recursive involuted style and redeploy it outward in the service of the reader. He likened metafiction to a literary Armageddon (“art’s reflection on itself is terminal”) and called it a “permanent migraine”: you’re writing a novel about a novelist who sits down to write a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist who paralyzingly suspects that s/he’s nothing but a character in some novelist’s novel, and so on—sigh—you get the idea. Wallace called this kind of writing cleveritis, and he saw it as toxically solipsistic because its terminal point is the writer.”
An interesting interview with Ted Pelton, novelist and publisher of Starcherone, at Experimental Fiction Poetry: “I was very angry when I wrote that piece, in 1991, and I think the excitement of the form reflects that anger, that bitterness that after all this time, we are still putting stock in war to solve problems. What could be stupider? Really, what? Who can have so much certainty about themselves and their truths as to kill other people, simply for control of resources? And the first Gulf War was the one that changed how we look at wars today, sans reporters on the ground, showing us what’s really going on. Gulf War 1 was about information control, as much as it was about anything – and now we are very far from even remembering to be critical of what we are told is happening in combat areas. In essence, Dubya and his administration gave us a gift in being so stupid and incompetent in how he managed the wars; his father had figured out how to do brutal, illegal, moneymaking things very quietly. Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops! … I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.”
Bizarro scientist look to weaponize ball lightening.
New Blogs:
Experimental Fiction Poetry & Jazz
Mike Palacek’s New American Dream
Arts & Letters Daily
Book Forum
Kirkus Reviews, Fiction
Daily News:
Climate Feedback at Nature.com
Talking Points Memo
Today’s Papers
My Smoke is not the first Smoke. Just found out Turgenev beat me to it. So far, there’s the obvious comparisons… There’s also the film starring Kevin Spacey, of which Paul Auster wrote the screenplay, which I haven’t seen. That has nothing to do with my novel…though Turgenev seems to have stolen a thing or two. Russian bastard. Should we ever meet …
I’m purchasing Joshua Cohen’s, A Heaven of Others, with my next paycheck. Consider this from the New Haven Review: “A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen’s second novel and fourth book of fiction, is a horrifying, terrifying, and instructive account of the wrong heaven in another’s shoes. Real shoes, that is, left forever in a real river of honey following abduction by eagles and a missed tête-à-tête with “the man named Mohammed”—the only one, it turns out, who might be able to bail our narrator, Jonathan Schwarzstein, of 37 Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, out of a surreal and macabre but theologically accurate wasteland of a Muslim afterlife, and restore him to the heaven of his faith or choice. Though he is only ten when a Muslim boy his age explodes him on the street outside of a shoe store in latter-day Israel, by the time we hear him speak, from heaven, he is no longer a child but a child of eternity, “maturing to infinity,” and beyond and beyond, amen…” Good God! See the publisher’s site
It seems someone else named Charles Richardson had a way with people, too. See: “There is no evidence to support later suggestions that Richardson whipped Chinese while horseback riding in China, though according to a local English-language newspaper Supplement on the Incident, he had been heard to say just prior to the incident, "I know how to deal with these people" at Namamugi Incident. Sometimes, history’s hilarious!
From Sam Hamill’s In Her Company: Denise Levertov, at Jacket: “We shared some “affinities of content,” to borrow the title of her 1991 essay on poetry of the Pacific Northwest, as well as convictions about the role of the “engaged” artist. And we both felt passionately about the necessity of serving poetry[1] — in my case including work as editor-printer as well as poet-translator-essayist. As “engaged poets,” we shared a common struggle to resist bending one’s art to the purpose of mere propagandizing while acknowledging one’s politics within the living arts of poetry.”
An interesting piece on David Foster Wallace at Rain Taxi: “One thing that Wallace did incredibly well was to co-opt metafiction’s recursive involuted style and redeploy it outward in the service of the reader. He likened metafiction to a literary Armageddon (“art’s reflection on itself is terminal”) and called it a “permanent migraine”: you’re writing a novel about a novelist who sits down to write a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist who paralyzingly suspects that s/he’s nothing but a character in some novelist’s novel, and so on—sigh—you get the idea. Wallace called this kind of writing cleveritis, and he saw it as toxically solipsistic because its terminal point is the writer.”
An interesting interview with Ted Pelton, novelist and publisher of Starcherone, at Experimental Fiction Poetry: “I was very angry when I wrote that piece, in 1991, and I think the excitement of the form reflects that anger, that bitterness that after all this time, we are still putting stock in war to solve problems. What could be stupider? Really, what? Who can have so much certainty about themselves and their truths as to kill other people, simply for control of resources? And the first Gulf War was the one that changed how we look at wars today, sans reporters on the ground, showing us what’s really going on. Gulf War 1 was about information control, as much as it was about anything – and now we are very far from even remembering to be critical of what we are told is happening in combat areas. In essence, Dubya and his administration gave us a gift in being so stupid and incompetent in how he managed the wars; his father had figured out how to do brutal, illegal, moneymaking things very quietly. Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops! … I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.”
Bizarro scientist look to weaponize ball lightening.
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Today’s Papers
Sunday, March 8, 2009
WHY WRITE: A MEANDERING ONTOLOGY OF VOICE
A Conversation with John Bloomberg-Rissman
The
River wants
To be heard.
John Bloomberg-Rissman, No Sounds of My Own Making
I don't know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn't feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I'm talking about writing, in particular, writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
Paul Auster, “I Want To Tell You A Story,” The Gaurdian
*****
When actually writing, I'm in that world with the things that move me... Antidepressants and Xanax were designed to enable me to come and go from that world as I pleased, but the end result was a grey mishmash of nonsensical sensibility. Leaving these SSI inhibitors behind and self-medicating with mother earth put me to bed in her womb, which is exactly as Kerouac stated: An Indian thing…Sometimes it's so beautiful I'm glad I'm apparently human, among other things.
Me, I Just Made That Up While Actually Writing
*****
This week John Bloomberg-Rissman responded to last week’s blog entry at FCF48. Zeitgeist Spam, which is permanently linked to at the bottom of this page, is an ongoing poetry project of John’s. I’m more of a fiction guy, but I think we have a lot in common. Here’s my response to his feedback and what transpired after [the added links are mine, some contributed by John, others may be seen as areas where I may have questioned him, and may still]:
Me: Would this be flarf? What I like about this piece is the way you seam together a wide range of sources, which you've read deeply, or thought deeply of, and yet ably gleaned from surfaces, snatches of this and that, then pooling them together into something that seems to occupy its own field of activity, its own mind grappling...and the point is, if there is a point, is yes it's bullshit, but what wonderful, pleasurable bullshit it can be. It seems to me a kind of schizo-sanity. Diversity glued together. I've heard of Tom Beckett, but now I'm going to look him up. We're having a conversation!? His virtual and real seem to jibe with my actual and real…The struggle seems to be distinguishing the two in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse, I think.
John: The bit I sent you is from Flux, Clot & Froth (=FCF), which will have 100 “sections” that are in fact 1. It’s written in discrete bits but will be presented as one long rolling river ... Or at least as the foam on the surface of that river. …it’s no more bullshit than any other work of “culture” ...... The whole work is an assemblage of many many language-bits (hence the “schizo-”). I find it kinda funny how every time I escape myself, well, there I am waiting ... Which brings me to your virtual/real, actual/real, erlebnis/ereignis; don’t forget Husserl’s noesis/noema, or – better yet, because not a duality, Lacan’s imaginary/symbolic/real. …I’m really taken w/Irigaray’s translation of philosophy as “the wisdom of love” rather than as the “love of wisdom” [John, I relate similar ideas to Thich Nhat Han] …I’m not sure I fully buy your “The struggle seems to be distinguishing the two in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse, I think”. I get what you’re saying; my only quibble is that it might be true that (Derrida, Lacan) “there’s no outside to language”, Heidegger’s “no exiting the house of language”, and at the same time it might be true that, and this is a bit of JBR “insight” (bullshit?), there may be no inside, either ... And perhaps Heidegger’s “house”, unlike his beloved hut, has no walls ...Which doesn’t mean we aren’t being lied to all the time, or that the external world doesn’t exist ... Or that politics is unnecessary, or ... It just means that, to go all “Buddhist” on you, maybe the struggle is “no-struggle”, or something, to quit wriggling on the hook, because there is no hook, and to just get on with it. It? The struggle you describe, of course, which (to stay “all Buddhist” another moment) I tend to think of as the struggle to “get” and to live up to the boddhisattva vow ... Which, in political terms, might mean some form of progressivism ... Tom B is well worth checking out. He’s a really really fine poet, and a really really good man. He interviewed me, by the way, in the latest Otoliths (no. 12), where a collaboration between Jared [Schickling] and me also appears…Chuck—The struggle we’re discussing ... That all takes place in as you note “the mind”. ..“When I was young, I laughed a lot at Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. He opens it with these words: "At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation..." Isn't this an exemplary introduction? A collection of examples in the same vein, so austere and meager, inspire the descriptions that follow. From his window the author sees some tree, always in bloom; he huddles over his desk; now and again a red blotch appears - it's a quote. What you can decipher in this book is a nice ethnology of city dwellers, who are hypertechnicalized, intellectualized, chained to their library chairs, and tragically stripped of any tangible experience. Lots of phenomenology and no sensation - everything via language...My book Les Cinq sends cries out at the empire of signs. (Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 131-2.)” … To quote Serres once again, “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!” …That’s from his Angels: A Modern Myth…Now, Merleau-Ponty’s not as desiccated as Serres makes him, and Serres isn’t as out of his head as he’d like one to think. But, in any case, let’s not forget the flesh ...
Me: "Let's not forget the flesh." But what is "flesh?" A membrane? What is a membrane? What occurs there? How? What is it? Does it operate like a synapse? Is "communication," stimulus-response, cognition Its essence? What about energy? How is that related to mind and matter? And what am "I" that produces/recycles/regurgitates this bullshit in what we call language? It seems one might try to detach from the escapement into escapeness...forming a triaxial esemplasy of mind-matter-energy [compare Barth's "coaxial esemplasy"]...Now I really don't know what I'm saying other than “it”—what “I” “am” “saying”—is a mish-mash of mind-matter-energy here now…[it seams an index, among other things—referring to a JBR statement after-the-fact, see further]...the escapeness of meaning that feels like a lazy river [I am upstream in the now going over this]. Perhaps I am not the one writing, perhaps I’m just along for the ride. Perhaps The Writing is somewhat distinct from me, or entwined with me, among other things. We’re all polluted with many things. As you say, “the river must be heard.”
John: What is flesh? Hell if I know. (According to the OED, no one really does. No one even really knows the etymology of “flesh” – which tells me it’s always been a mystery, “who feels it knows it”, but …)…Acid told me fast vibrations (of what I never grasped) appear immaterial, slow ones appear as “stuff”. Nevertheless, and somehow: flesh is the medium of thought. Most thought happens in and with the flesh, with what we think of as thought as the bringing to consciousness of what’s already been thought (That hurts, I’d better move my leg. I’m hungry. I gotta piss. She’s hot …). Most thought never comes to consciousness (beat, heart; breathe, lungs; twitch, muscles …). And as for the thought we normally call “reason”, well, that is utterly conditioned by our sensory apparatus, brain structure, etc. as well as by our cultures (which too are epiphenomena, so to speak, of our flesh. I mean, culture’s etymology: classical Latin cultura cultivation, tillage, etc etc.) It seemed to me that when you wrote “The struggle seems to be distinguishing the [actual vs. real/virtual—I’m saying reality is virtual and actuality is what exists beyond the virtual, of which faith—more later—plays a vital role] in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse” you were disembodying us (your synapse being the space *between* axon and dendrite) or forgetting for a moment to conceive us as embodied. Which of course could be over reading. So I mentioned the flesh. …Acid also taught me, by the way, that language doesn’t appear til the vibrations are plenty slow, down to flesh-level:
Words are thick, opaque,
Not Amida’s sweet clear light …
That’s from something I wrote more than 35 years ago. I’m still “there.”…I don’t think communication is stimulus-response because I’m not a [someone] who needs the black-box behaviorist. Behaviorism, by the way, is a metaphor. Which has been “replaced” by the more “sophisticated” metaphors of cognitive science (computation, connectivism, neural nets, etc). Which of course are totally dependent on the metaphors of neuroscience for their “validity”, or appropriateness. Not that neuroscience isn’t science, as much as any science is science. If you ever have a couple of years in which to devour a book, I suggest Margaret Boden’s *Mind as Machine*, which is an absolutely wonderful 2 vol history of cognitive science. I’m about halfway thru v.1. It’s a treasure, a big room full of fascinating geniuses (definition of genius: anyone who blows my mind with their mind)…All we have are metaphors for who-knows-what, man. And hunger pangs. And pangs of compassion. …You also ask (rhetorically, I know, but I can’t resist): “And what am "I" that produces/recycles/regurgitates this bullshit in what we call language?”… I think I is what’s called an indexical. It doesn’t stand for anything. It just helps point to something (Unspoken? Outside language, tho language has no inside or outside?). Since we use the same pointer, we think we’re always pointing at the same “thing”. What is that “thing”? Pound called it a “patterned integrity.” Of what is it made? I dunno. Perhaps statistical “likelihoods” created by big-bang asymmetries??? …From a poem about 5 yrs old:
Is a tree the seed’s adventure?
Am I the adventure of the first moment of time?
Big Bang Boy
High stepping
Howling
Time’s arrow sticking out of his ass?
This is a great conversation. Bits have worked their way into FCF. I don’t see why my poem can’t contain a record of this. Especially because I’m a magpie, and you write so great. Shiny! (exclaimed as only a happy magpie could) …Oh, one other thing, which *I* think is funny. You mentioned Barth. I thought Karl, not John. Which gave that esemplasy thing a whole different twist. I learn (OED again) that esemplasy’s a word from Coleridge: the power, that is, of infusing into the various parts of a subject an ever-present unity. Imagining that coming from a theologian, as I did, got me onto a whole train of thought …At least I didn’t think Barthes!
Me: There's so much I could say, much of it agreeing with you, basically, just saying it in a slightly different way…Karl Barth. That is funny. About 20 years ago I absorbed The World Treasury of Modern Religous Thought, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. It begins with Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor and ends with Solzhenytzin's Beauty Will Save the World. Barth's Faith as Confession is included in the first section: "Faith is God's mystery breaking forth; faith is God's freedom and man's freedom in action." I read that as the self-declaring “Christ” is the first person pronoun faithfully reflexing/reverbing/feedback looping itself into a sentient biological entity [a sentient triaxial esemplasy of mind-matter-energy going through a self-conscious phase space trajectory in time, which may be an awareness in and of itself] that commonly mistakes its body—that membrane coordinating/indexing its six senses contained within the membrane—for its flesh. It occurs to me that "faith" could just as well be replaced with "language" in the context of our discussion, and that "freedom" could be replaced with "will," which I see as akin to energy in the Mind-Matter-Energy formulation [a triaxial esemplasy leading to multi-dimensional arabesques displaying recursive symmetries across scale during their phase space trajectories as “I” faithfully perceive them from here?]. What's important, in my opinion, is that faith/language is dynamic and freedom/will/energy is something we can only participate in and never control, like that river you speak of, it is that river to my way of reading, which further upstream in my [mostly] self-education, leads back to Gleick's Chaos and Capra's Tao of Physics and The Web of Life. I don't think of my synapse metaphor as dis-embodied any more than the electric signal between neurons [in the synapse] has escaped the neurological system, or has escaped my body, but rather in terms of spandrels, which is a cognate term between evolution and architecture, a branching off that's still attached, signifying an evolving complexity that produces arbitrary forms which seem to serve no purpose in the overall systemic structure of its native environment....analogous to the human mind being a byproduct of evolutionary forces that seam a “spandrel” which seems to be evolving the means of linking up with other “spandrels,” finding a way to make themselves functional within the overall life system, which somehow becomes dependent on spandrels seaming spandrels at a particular point in imagined time. I agree wholeheartedly that language and mind are of the flesh, and so is faith [despite what many folks mistakenly believe]. I'm not an Ist of any sort, meaning I'm not an atheist. I think the struggle is to overcome the babel...we always did feel the same we just saw it from different points of view...but we're not tangled up in blue, we're swimming in it. Eventually we'll all drown, but that's life…I'm just beginning to connect the dots in my head for this week's blog entry. I received your books yesterday. No Sounds of My Own Making. Now that looks like a text I'll derive some pleasure from. At first look it seems to be taking a bath in jouissance (as long as we're talking about Barth[e]s). It might be interesting to consider what you're doing here and what Barthe's is doing with Balzac in S/Z...the difference being he's using one source and commenting directly, you're using multiple/many sources and commenting [I presume] in the way context emerges within the text [see how I feel the message existing between the chemical stimulus and electric response without escaping the body in my synapse metaphor? In terms of scale, this is the Hotel California…we’ve checked in but we can never leave—once we do we’re not us in any recognizable form anymore, at least in my opinion]. Of course, I'm probably way off. I'm not a poet or particularly good at poetry criticism. I prefer making things up. All writers are liars, I am a writer. The less I know the more I have to write about.
John: For you to substitute “language” for Barth’s “faith” is almost kabbalistic. It also brings to mind Kukai’s theory of language, about which I’m reading in a book by Ryuichi Abe, The Weaving of Mantra. As summarized in an article on the web: “Kukai advanced a general theory of language based on his analysis of two forms of Buddhist ritual language: dharani and mantra. ... Kukai made mantra a special class of dharani which showed that every syllable of a dharani was a manifestation of the true nature of reality — in Buddhist terms that all sound is a manifestation of shunyata or emptiness of self-nature. Thus rather than being devoid of meaning, Kukai suggests that dharanis are in fact saturated with meaning — every syllable is symbolic on multiple levels. One of Kukai's distinctive contributions was to take this symbolic association even further by saying that there is no essential difference between the syllables of mantras and sacred texts, and those of ordinary language. If one understood the workings of mantra, then any sounds could be a representative of ultimate reality. This emphasis on sounds was one of the drivers for Kukai's championing of the phonetic writing system, the kana, which was adopted in Japan around the time of Kukai.”…The Stanford Ency of Philosophy also notes: “Ji, meaning “sign,” “word,” “letter,” or “character/graph,” is sound in its signifying character as naming or meaning something. As letter, it also provides a material base whereby the sign's distinction from other signs becomes retained and fixed.” …Derrida’s differance avant-le-lettre??...As for “will”, are you channeling Schopenhauer/Nietzsche? You write: “What's important here, in my opinion, is that faith/language is dynamic and freedom/will/energy is something we can only participate in and never control, ...” We certainly are on the same wavelength when it comes to seeing control as a consoling myth. Language certainly can’t be tamed. Energy is something we uh well sing along w/Crazy Fingers: “Gone are the days we stopped to decide where we should go, we just ride.” In Kukai’s world, of course, to distinguish between language and energy would be to reify two “versions” of the same thing…As the title of a Bruce Fink book has it: *The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance*. Not a bad place to be sandwiched ...I like your “I think the struggle is to overcome the babel...we always did feel the same we just saw it from different points of view...but we're not tangled up in blue, we're swimming in it. Eventually we'll all drown, but that's life.” I’m not sure I’d use the word “overcome”, tho, since we’ve just agreed that control is out of the question. Unless you mean overcome in the sense of roll with, be-there-now with, don’t shrink from, the babel ... Seems to me that remaining-present is the ONE way we have of actually “getting” that whether or not we always did feel the same, you felt what you felt and once I didn’t fight it it was cool ...I think that’s a definition of love, by the way. Being-present with someone, staying-present with them ... Relinquishing control. I think it’s also a definition of self-love ...
Me: And the only thing I can seam to that seems A-u-mmmm…
Also see FCF49, where this conversation beats on, elsewhere …
*****
Tom Beckett interviews John in Otoliths...
From Tom Beckett’s blog…
The Virtual and the Real:
I've dealt with some pretty gritty stuff in the course of doing public health work. And I've had some frightening encounters over the course of the last 30-some years. I've even been threatened with bodily harm from time-to-time. Once, memorably, at gun point. I say all of this because I want to establish that I do exist in your so-called real world, but...
I think as a poet I exist on a dividing line between realities.
I think as a poet I exist like basic but underappreciated parts of speech. Let me explain, or at least hint at an explanation, by quoting my buddy William James:
"With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my--these words designate types of conjunctive relations arranged in a roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness."
Conjunctive relations.
I am a fucking allegory of virtual intent and a walker through messes, too. I am scathed.
POSTED BY TOM BECKETT AT 4:07 PM
*****
Next Week: Perhaps Tom Beckett, Kent Johnson and more as the conversation continues…or not. Stay tuned.
The
River wants
To be heard.
John Bloomberg-Rissman, No Sounds of My Own Making
I don't know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn't feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I'm talking about writing, in particular, writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
Paul Auster, “I Want To Tell You A Story,” The Gaurdian
*****
When actually writing, I'm in that world with the things that move me... Antidepressants and Xanax were designed to enable me to come and go from that world as I pleased, but the end result was a grey mishmash of nonsensical sensibility. Leaving these SSI inhibitors behind and self-medicating with mother earth put me to bed in her womb, which is exactly as Kerouac stated: An Indian thing…Sometimes it's so beautiful I'm glad I'm apparently human, among other things.
Me, I Just Made That Up While Actually Writing
*****
This week John Bloomberg-Rissman responded to last week’s blog entry at FCF48. Zeitgeist Spam, which is permanently linked to at the bottom of this page, is an ongoing poetry project of John’s. I’m more of a fiction guy, but I think we have a lot in common. Here’s my response to his feedback and what transpired after [the added links are mine, some contributed by John, others may be seen as areas where I may have questioned him, and may still]:
Me: Would this be flarf? What I like about this piece is the way you seam together a wide range of sources, which you've read deeply, or thought deeply of, and yet ably gleaned from surfaces, snatches of this and that, then pooling them together into something that seems to occupy its own field of activity, its own mind grappling...and the point is, if there is a point, is yes it's bullshit, but what wonderful, pleasurable bullshit it can be. It seems to me a kind of schizo-sanity. Diversity glued together. I've heard of Tom Beckett, but now I'm going to look him up. We're having a conversation!? His virtual and real seem to jibe with my actual and real…The struggle seems to be distinguishing the two in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse, I think.
John: The bit I sent you is from Flux, Clot & Froth (=FCF), which will have 100 “sections” that are in fact 1. It’s written in discrete bits but will be presented as one long rolling river ... Or at least as the foam on the surface of that river. …it’s no more bullshit than any other work of “culture” ...... The whole work is an assemblage of many many language-bits (hence the “schizo-”). I find it kinda funny how every time I escape myself, well, there I am waiting ... Which brings me to your virtual/real, actual/real, erlebnis/ereignis; don’t forget Husserl’s noesis/noema, or – better yet, because not a duality, Lacan’s imaginary/symbolic/real. …I’m really taken w/Irigaray’s translation of philosophy as “the wisdom of love” rather than as the “love of wisdom” [John, I relate similar ideas to Thich Nhat Han] …I’m not sure I fully buy your “The struggle seems to be distinguishing the two in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse, I think”. I get what you’re saying; my only quibble is that it might be true that (Derrida, Lacan) “there’s no outside to language”, Heidegger’s “no exiting the house of language”, and at the same time it might be true that, and this is a bit of JBR “insight” (bullshit?), there may be no inside, either ... And perhaps Heidegger’s “house”, unlike his beloved hut, has no walls ...Which doesn’t mean we aren’t being lied to all the time, or that the external world doesn’t exist ... Or that politics is unnecessary, or ... It just means that, to go all “Buddhist” on you, maybe the struggle is “no-struggle”, or something, to quit wriggling on the hook, because there is no hook, and to just get on with it. It? The struggle you describe, of course, which (to stay “all Buddhist” another moment) I tend to think of as the struggle to “get” and to live up to the boddhisattva vow ... Which, in political terms, might mean some form of progressivism ... Tom B is well worth checking out. He’s a really really fine poet, and a really really good man. He interviewed me, by the way, in the latest Otoliths (no. 12), where a collaboration between Jared [Schickling] and me also appears…Chuck—The struggle we’re discussing ... That all takes place in as you note “the mind”. ..“When I was young, I laughed a lot at Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. He opens it with these words: "At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation..." Isn't this an exemplary introduction? A collection of examples in the same vein, so austere and meager, inspire the descriptions that follow. From his window the author sees some tree, always in bloom; he huddles over his desk; now and again a red blotch appears - it's a quote. What you can decipher in this book is a nice ethnology of city dwellers, who are hypertechnicalized, intellectualized, chained to their library chairs, and tragically stripped of any tangible experience. Lots of phenomenology and no sensation - everything via language...My book Les Cinq sends cries out at the empire of signs. (Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 131-2.)” … To quote Serres once again, “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!” …That’s from his Angels: A Modern Myth…Now, Merleau-Ponty’s not as desiccated as Serres makes him, and Serres isn’t as out of his head as he’d like one to think. But, in any case, let’s not forget the flesh ...
Me: "Let's not forget the flesh." But what is "flesh?" A membrane? What is a membrane? What occurs there? How? What is it? Does it operate like a synapse? Is "communication," stimulus-response, cognition Its essence? What about energy? How is that related to mind and matter? And what am "I" that produces/recycles/regurgitates this bullshit in what we call language? It seems one might try to detach from the escapement into escapeness...forming a triaxial esemplasy of mind-matter-energy [compare Barth's "coaxial esemplasy"]...Now I really don't know what I'm saying other than “it”—what “I” “am” “saying”—is a mish-mash of mind-matter-energy here now…[it seams an index, among other things—referring to a JBR statement after-the-fact, see further]...the escapeness of meaning that feels like a lazy river [I am upstream in the now going over this]. Perhaps I am not the one writing, perhaps I’m just along for the ride. Perhaps The Writing is somewhat distinct from me, or entwined with me, among other things. We’re all polluted with many things. As you say, “the river must be heard.”
John: What is flesh? Hell if I know. (According to the OED, no one really does. No one even really knows the etymology of “flesh” – which tells me it’s always been a mystery, “who feels it knows it”, but …)…Acid told me fast vibrations (of what I never grasped) appear immaterial, slow ones appear as “stuff”. Nevertheless, and somehow: flesh is the medium of thought. Most thought happens in and with the flesh, with what we think of as thought as the bringing to consciousness of what’s already been thought (That hurts, I’d better move my leg. I’m hungry. I gotta piss. She’s hot …). Most thought never comes to consciousness (beat, heart; breathe, lungs; twitch, muscles …). And as for the thought we normally call “reason”, well, that is utterly conditioned by our sensory apparatus, brain structure, etc. as well as by our cultures (which too are epiphenomena, so to speak, of our flesh. I mean, culture’s etymology: classical Latin cultura cultivation, tillage, etc etc.) It seemed to me that when you wrote “The struggle seems to be distinguishing the [actual vs. real/virtual—I’m saying reality is virtual and actuality is what exists beyond the virtual, of which faith—more later—plays a vital role] in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse” you were disembodying us (your synapse being the space *between* axon and dendrite) or forgetting for a moment to conceive us as embodied. Which of course could be over reading. So I mentioned the flesh. …Acid also taught me, by the way, that language doesn’t appear til the vibrations are plenty slow, down to flesh-level:
Words are thick, opaque,
Not Amida’s sweet clear light …
That’s from something I wrote more than 35 years ago. I’m still “there.”…I don’t think communication is stimulus-response because I’m not a [someone] who needs the black-box behaviorist. Behaviorism, by the way, is a metaphor. Which has been “replaced” by the more “sophisticated” metaphors of cognitive science (computation, connectivism, neural nets, etc). Which of course are totally dependent on the metaphors of neuroscience for their “validity”, or appropriateness. Not that neuroscience isn’t science, as much as any science is science. If you ever have a couple of years in which to devour a book, I suggest Margaret Boden’s *Mind as Machine*, which is an absolutely wonderful 2 vol history of cognitive science. I’m about halfway thru v.1. It’s a treasure, a big room full of fascinating geniuses (definition of genius: anyone who blows my mind with their mind)…All we have are metaphors for who-knows-what, man. And hunger pangs. And pangs of compassion. …You also ask (rhetorically, I know, but I can’t resist): “And what am "I" that produces/recycles/regurgitates this bullshit in what we call language?”… I think I is what’s called an indexical. It doesn’t stand for anything. It just helps point to something (Unspoken? Outside language, tho language has no inside or outside?). Since we use the same pointer, we think we’re always pointing at the same “thing”. What is that “thing”? Pound called it a “patterned integrity.” Of what is it made? I dunno. Perhaps statistical “likelihoods” created by big-bang asymmetries??? …From a poem about 5 yrs old:
Is a tree the seed’s adventure?
Am I the adventure of the first moment of time?
Big Bang Boy
High stepping
Howling
Time’s arrow sticking out of his ass?
This is a great conversation. Bits have worked their way into FCF. I don’t see why my poem can’t contain a record of this. Especially because I’m a magpie, and you write so great. Shiny! (exclaimed as only a happy magpie could) …Oh, one other thing, which *I* think is funny. You mentioned Barth. I thought Karl, not John. Which gave that esemplasy thing a whole different twist. I learn (OED again) that esemplasy’s a word from Coleridge: the power, that is, of infusing into the various parts of a subject an ever-present unity. Imagining that coming from a theologian, as I did, got me onto a whole train of thought …At least I didn’t think Barthes!
Me: There's so much I could say, much of it agreeing with you, basically, just saying it in a slightly different way…Karl Barth. That is funny. About 20 years ago I absorbed The World Treasury of Modern Religous Thought, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. It begins with Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor and ends with Solzhenytzin's Beauty Will Save the World. Barth's Faith as Confession is included in the first section: "Faith is God's mystery breaking forth; faith is God's freedom and man's freedom in action." I read that as the self-declaring “Christ” is the first person pronoun faithfully reflexing/reverbing/feedback looping itself into a sentient biological entity [a sentient triaxial esemplasy of mind-matter-energy going through a self-conscious phase space trajectory in time, which may be an awareness in and of itself] that commonly mistakes its body—that membrane coordinating/indexing its six senses contained within the membrane—for its flesh. It occurs to me that "faith" could just as well be replaced with "language" in the context of our discussion, and that "freedom" could be replaced with "will," which I see as akin to energy in the Mind-Matter-Energy formulation [a triaxial esemplasy leading to multi-dimensional arabesques displaying recursive symmetries across scale during their phase space trajectories as “I” faithfully perceive them from here?]. What's important, in my opinion, is that faith/language is dynamic and freedom/will/energy is something we can only participate in and never control, like that river you speak of, it is that river to my way of reading, which further upstream in my [mostly] self-education, leads back to Gleick's Chaos and Capra's Tao of Physics and The Web of Life. I don't think of my synapse metaphor as dis-embodied any more than the electric signal between neurons [in the synapse] has escaped the neurological system, or has escaped my body, but rather in terms of spandrels, which is a cognate term between evolution and architecture, a branching off that's still attached, signifying an evolving complexity that produces arbitrary forms which seem to serve no purpose in the overall systemic structure of its native environment....analogous to the human mind being a byproduct of evolutionary forces that seam a “spandrel” which seems to be evolving the means of linking up with other “spandrels,” finding a way to make themselves functional within the overall life system, which somehow becomes dependent on spandrels seaming spandrels at a particular point in imagined time. I agree wholeheartedly that language and mind are of the flesh, and so is faith [despite what many folks mistakenly believe]. I'm not an Ist of any sort, meaning I'm not an atheist. I think the struggle is to overcome the babel...we always did feel the same we just saw it from different points of view...but we're not tangled up in blue, we're swimming in it. Eventually we'll all drown, but that's life…I'm just beginning to connect the dots in my head for this week's blog entry. I received your books yesterday. No Sounds of My Own Making. Now that looks like a text I'll derive some pleasure from. At first look it seems to be taking a bath in jouissance (as long as we're talking about Barth[e]s). It might be interesting to consider what you're doing here and what Barthe's is doing with Balzac in S/Z...the difference being he's using one source and commenting directly, you're using multiple/many sources and commenting [I presume] in the way context emerges within the text [see how I feel the message existing between the chemical stimulus and electric response without escaping the body in my synapse metaphor? In terms of scale, this is the Hotel California…we’ve checked in but we can never leave—once we do we’re not us in any recognizable form anymore, at least in my opinion]. Of course, I'm probably way off. I'm not a poet or particularly good at poetry criticism. I prefer making things up. All writers are liars, I am a writer. The less I know the more I have to write about.
John: For you to substitute “language” for Barth’s “faith” is almost kabbalistic. It also brings to mind Kukai’s theory of language, about which I’m reading in a book by Ryuichi Abe, The Weaving of Mantra. As summarized in an article on the web: “Kukai advanced a general theory of language based on his analysis of two forms of Buddhist ritual language: dharani and mantra. ... Kukai made mantra a special class of dharani which showed that every syllable of a dharani was a manifestation of the true nature of reality — in Buddhist terms that all sound is a manifestation of shunyata or emptiness of self-nature. Thus rather than being devoid of meaning, Kukai suggests that dharanis are in fact saturated with meaning — every syllable is symbolic on multiple levels. One of Kukai's distinctive contributions was to take this symbolic association even further by saying that there is no essential difference between the syllables of mantras and sacred texts, and those of ordinary language. If one understood the workings of mantra, then any sounds could be a representative of ultimate reality. This emphasis on sounds was one of the drivers for Kukai's championing of the phonetic writing system, the kana, which was adopted in Japan around the time of Kukai.”…The Stanford Ency of Philosophy also notes: “Ji, meaning “sign,” “word,” “letter,” or “character/graph,” is sound in its signifying character as naming or meaning something. As letter, it also provides a material base whereby the sign's distinction from other signs becomes retained and fixed.” …Derrida’s differance avant-le-lettre??...As for “will”, are you channeling Schopenhauer/Nietzsche? You write: “What's important here, in my opinion, is that faith/language is dynamic and freedom/will/energy is something we can only participate in and never control, ...” We certainly are on the same wavelength when it comes to seeing control as a consoling myth. Language certainly can’t be tamed. Energy is something we uh well sing along w/Crazy Fingers: “Gone are the days we stopped to decide where we should go, we just ride.” In Kukai’s world, of course, to distinguish between language and energy would be to reify two “versions” of the same thing…As the title of a Bruce Fink book has it: *The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance*. Not a bad place to be sandwiched ...I like your “I think the struggle is to overcome the babel...we always did feel the same we just saw it from different points of view...but we're not tangled up in blue, we're swimming in it. Eventually we'll all drown, but that's life.” I’m not sure I’d use the word “overcome”, tho, since we’ve just agreed that control is out of the question. Unless you mean overcome in the sense of roll with, be-there-now with, don’t shrink from, the babel ... Seems to me that remaining-present is the ONE way we have of actually “getting” that whether or not we always did feel the same, you felt what you felt and once I didn’t fight it it was cool ...I think that’s a definition of love, by the way. Being-present with someone, staying-present with them ... Relinquishing control. I think it’s also a definition of self-love ...
Me: And the only thing I can seam to that seems A-u-mmmm…
Also see FCF49, where this conversation beats on, elsewhere …
*****
Tom Beckett interviews John in Otoliths...
From Tom Beckett’s blog…
The Virtual and the Real:
I've dealt with some pretty gritty stuff in the course of doing public health work. And I've had some frightening encounters over the course of the last 30-some years. I've even been threatened with bodily harm from time-to-time. Once, memorably, at gun point. I say all of this because I want to establish that I do exist in your so-called real world, but...
I think as a poet I exist on a dividing line between realities.
I think as a poet I exist like basic but underappreciated parts of speech. Let me explain, or at least hint at an explanation, by quoting my buddy William James:
"With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my--these words designate types of conjunctive relations arranged in a roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness."
Conjunctive relations.
I am a fucking allegory of virtual intent and a walker through messes, too. I am scathed.
POSTED BY TOM BECKETT AT 4:07 PM
*****
Next Week: Perhaps Tom Beckett, Kent Johnson and more as the conversation continues…or not. Stay tuned.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
At times even monsters must have their fun
Starcherone Books Presents: Naked Kitchen Yoga
Friday, March 6, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Rust Belt Books
STARCHERONE BOOKS is celebrating NATIONAL SMALL PRESS MONTH with NAKED KITCHEN YOGA on FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2009, 7 pm, at RUST BELT BOOKS, 202 Allen St., Buffalo, NY. So far, these 17 writers and small press fans have tentatively agreed to partake: Mike Basinski, Robin Brox, Lisa Forrest, Kristi Gansworth, Gregory Gerke, Mark Gunther, Paul Hogan, Aaron Lowinger, Douglas Manson, Liz Mariani, Steve McCaffery, Ted Pelton, Chuck Richardson, Gary Earl Ross, Forrest Roth, Mike Sikkema, Ed Taylor.
You too are invited to be a part of this fundraising event. Participants are invited to share with us a 5 minute or less work written by themselves or others that has been published by a small press book, magazine, journal, chapbook, or other construction strongly or loosely affiliated with small presses. One lucky attendee will also win a complete set of the 18 (maybe 19) Starcherone Books published to date!
Starcherone Books is itself a nonprofit small press publisher of innovative fiction and hybrid prose stuff. This event will not only be a fun occasion to see old and new friends and together celebrate non-mainstream contemporary literature and its offshoots, it will also (hopefully) help us pay some bills. We are asking a $5 donation, which will entitle the contributor to ONE FREE DRINK (beer, wine, or nonalcoholic). Further refreshments will be available all evening.
Venue Information
Rust Belt Books
202 Allen St.
Buffalo
*****
A hodge-podge of this week’s thoughts and communiqués:
It is conscious relations
A friend writes: “I don't know how you can watch that stuff—MSNBC, CNN, etc etc. Since we've been without cable, I watch less and less TV, to the point that if I turn it on, as I did last night to eat my dinner, I last minutes at most…as to hope, I don't really see it…I see much more of the opposite, despair, hopelessness, being a form of emptiness…If I'm to live, I should do something and, I think, I'll choose to be a counterweight to that.”
Ah, to choose. A romantic notion. But I think the choice is given if you're here. In other words, if you haven't killed yourself you're choosing to be here. And since you're choosing to be here, what the fuck are you doing about it? For a thinking person, things get messy quick. And when things get messy it's hard to be smart. I think the most ethical and courageous thing a writer of any stripe can do today is admit s/he doesn't know anything outside his or her mind [this would not be ethical behavior for people who have different functions like actors, politicians, business people]. We only have clues…
I feel the whirling dervish in the tight mess of my perceptions. All living things are emergencies striving for delightfully complex, becalmed horrors that increasingly terrorize themselves over time, thanks to the way the dervish fevers a virus in one's memory banks, forcing dubious re-categorizations and classifications, etc., due to the modification of habituated identifiers...it's all fucking babble, and if we're loving it we're monstrous...maybe.
At times even monsters must have their fun. Life seems, among other things, a perpetual pursuit of pleasure...by and large people feel Life is something to get through properly so they can have a good afterlife. Life seams an undesirable temporary stitch to these self-perceiving, perhaps self-deluded, possibly infinite beings who believe that they, in and of themselves, are at the very least in conscious relations with God almighty.
Or, if one's an atheist, replace God almighty with "human mind" or some form of secular humanism.
I prefer It when referring to It. One doesn't have conscious relations with It. It is conscious relations, however, among other things, some of which are beyond our imagination…
The problem with APES
I hear what you're saying re: the economy. The way things are going finding a teaching job might be tough. Although English departments may fare better due to their budgets being much lower than the nuclear rocket departments. Literature is cheap, relatively speaking [a thousand dollar bailout could save the world!].
My theory is this: Obama knows damned well that the whole thing is fucked. He also knows damned well he can't say it and retain power until it's obvious to everyone. He also knows he has to be able to position himself outside the blame once everyone knows how thoroughly fucked the American Political-Economic System [APES] is [and he has to do this while appearing to work very hard to save it and being thwarted and frustrated by his eco-political-economic enemies who run the mainstream media (eg: GE, et al) ]. He's doing this by giving the political economic elite a lot of rope by which they're hanging themselves. He's keeping the military commissions act intact for the day when the new reality strikes home to a critical mass of the population and he has to put his enemies in a box. Extraordinary times calling for extraordinary measures. If he's successful beyond this wildest of wild dreams, by 2016 there will be no more Republican Party, Wall Street will be history, the Federal Reserve will be history, the big three automakers will be history, the m.i.c. will be broken beyond repair, the empire will be completely humpty dumptied, and his successor will be tasked with the gradual, peaceful dissolution of the federal level of government and begin the formation of something modeled on the EU. Large political-economomic entities will disappear because there's no longer a place for them, no longer enough stuff to sustain them, and the UN will be re-invigorated in an attempt to fill the power vacuum. Paradoxically, as the nation-state folds local eco-political-economies will form and a global framework of interaction among these communities will emerge. Nation states exist in the muddied unworkable phantasy between local and global. Nations are undesirable, parasitic middle men filling the dangerous voids of inaesthetic scales. Somehow, full scale nuclear war will be avoided, but I think a smaller scale exchange will occur resulting in people waking up all the more to the bullshit that is technology/growth. Anything that links progress to increased production/consumption will fail.
And, of course, that was all a bunch of bullshit. I don’t know anything. I only have clues which are dealt with by my imagination imagining what it sees…
The most profound problem the APES has, is that it seems to reward bad thought/behavior and punish adequate thought/decent behavior.
Nothing to do but dharma bum.
Going Rambo
I think when I finish Germ, which I hope is soon, I'm going to go on a radical physical regimen to totally reclaim my body. And if I can try to stop needing all my meds and drop health insurance for the extra money so I have it for absolutely necessary stuff like my animals’ health care, I will. I love them. I'd be lost without them.
It's beginning to be now or never. Can I will myself into adaptation or perish? We'll know the answer to that by 2012. I'll be a free man or a dead one.
It doesn't actually matter...what seems to matter most is a life worth the expense of living, which means a mind that's alive and bearing its own fruit. And that requires an indeterminate yet substantial amount of energy and matter…
Stupid consequences
When I repeatedly watched those towers come down something inside shifted. I could no longer hang out with my old friends and drink beer and watch football or go to a bar and jam with them or anything. The stuff that came out of their mouths about things seemed unbearably stupid. That stupidity was/is having actual consequences. They became little Eichmanns in my eyes. How awful, to discover the people you love are little Eichmanns.
So rather than kill them, I withdrew. I killed them mentally. The writing had a mission and within a month I was off my meds and back to work at the newspaper trying to kill Stupidity.
And I haven't been able to tolerate wrong thinking ever since.
There are all kinds of right ways of thinking and even more gray areas. But there are also wrong ways of thinking, ways of thinking that denigrate one's experience of living and pollute the experiences of others.
People who think wrongly can never be all they can be. They grow frustrated because of it and drown their sorrows in commodified fetishes, saying stupid things, and growing fat.
I see myself in the mirror and call him “you.” I’m fucked up. Call it a consequence of being stupid. You raised me that way.
When confronted with mud, wrestle in it
Back in my Navy daze I was privileged to attend a couple private affairs beyond the military...the most memorable being a pig roast in Monck's Corner, S.C. Rodney D---- and Timmy P----, shipmates and buddies of mine, the two who jammed bluegrass together at 200 feet, were hired to play and I went along. It was in this guy's back yard in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a swamp in October. The weather was perfect. I swear to god every person who came to this thing came with an instrument in hand, including homemade ones. I was [and still am] a fat stupid yankee, but I could sing and I loved the music and learned words quickly and the more stoned I got the better I got at making them up. I was fed lots of ribs and once I couldn't get up to get my re-fills this old farmer would laugh and hand me another one. I remember when it came time to piss and puke I was assisted to the bushes. I haven't remembered that in a long time, but that's why deep down I could never hate the South. The vast majority of rednecks [for my positive meaning of this term, see Joe Bageant’s Dear Hunting With Jesus] were no different from you or me at rest. It's when riled, like a beehive, that they'll sting ya. And yes, sometimes they—we—have to be riled in order to act. But there is an ideal way of instigating action, and bluegrass and partying together is, in my view, the very first step in many positive behaviors. I've digressed. Obviously. Just thrilled about the choice of music [at the wedding]. Ole!
Now the only thing that worries me about this whole wedding is what I'll be wearing. I'm a real baby about wearing anything uncomfortable. I'll look nice if I must but will not wear a stiff buttoned collar with my Adam's apple garroted by some obscene necktie, symbolic of something far more heinous than a noose. In my dreams I would wear a light, loose fitting ensemble like Jesus. Perfect for "toasting," as the pope might say.
I know how you feel about -------, that it seems done. But trust me. It's not done with you. You're tired. You're begging it to stop squirming so you can tie off the knot...deep down we all want to be useful and productive, that's why the suggestion we're otherwise rankles us so [by "us" I mean artists in general]. But no, the fact is we strangle our productions, not to death but "out of consciousness" [our consciousness]. Once the work is limp in our hands we pass it on to its audience, which may or may not revive it. Of course, once others revive it you may wish to re-intervene and alter the evolved alterations emergent from its having passed through the other side. And every book is different, but if allowed to adequately develop, most seem to follow this basic or general framework. After putting together maybe a dozen or so booklength manuscripts over the years, this is what I've observed was common to them all...the way they ultimately achieve their final thought-feeling. And this seems to echo everything I've heard from other weirdo bookmakers.
I always say when confronted with mud, wrestle in it.
Friday, March 6, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Rust Belt Books
STARCHERONE BOOKS is celebrating NATIONAL SMALL PRESS MONTH with NAKED KITCHEN YOGA on FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2009, 7 pm, at RUST BELT BOOKS, 202 Allen St., Buffalo, NY. So far, these 17 writers and small press fans have tentatively agreed to partake: Mike Basinski, Robin Brox, Lisa Forrest, Kristi Gansworth, Gregory Gerke, Mark Gunther, Paul Hogan, Aaron Lowinger, Douglas Manson, Liz Mariani, Steve McCaffery, Ted Pelton, Chuck Richardson, Gary Earl Ross, Forrest Roth, Mike Sikkema, Ed Taylor.
You too are invited to be a part of this fundraising event. Participants are invited to share with us a 5 minute or less work written by themselves or others that has been published by a small press book, magazine, journal, chapbook, or other construction strongly or loosely affiliated with small presses. One lucky attendee will also win a complete set of the 18 (maybe 19) Starcherone Books published to date!
Starcherone Books is itself a nonprofit small press publisher of innovative fiction and hybrid prose stuff. This event will not only be a fun occasion to see old and new friends and together celebrate non-mainstream contemporary literature and its offshoots, it will also (hopefully) help us pay some bills. We are asking a $5 donation, which will entitle the contributor to ONE FREE DRINK (beer, wine, or nonalcoholic). Further refreshments will be available all evening.
Venue Information
Rust Belt Books
202 Allen St.
Buffalo
*****
A hodge-podge of this week’s thoughts and communiqués:
It is conscious relations
A friend writes: “I don't know how you can watch that stuff—MSNBC, CNN, etc etc. Since we've been without cable, I watch less and less TV, to the point that if I turn it on, as I did last night to eat my dinner, I last minutes at most…as to hope, I don't really see it…I see much more of the opposite, despair, hopelessness, being a form of emptiness…If I'm to live, I should do something and, I think, I'll choose to be a counterweight to that.”
Ah, to choose. A romantic notion. But I think the choice is given if you're here. In other words, if you haven't killed yourself you're choosing to be here. And since you're choosing to be here, what the fuck are you doing about it? For a thinking person, things get messy quick. And when things get messy it's hard to be smart. I think the most ethical and courageous thing a writer of any stripe can do today is admit s/he doesn't know anything outside his or her mind [this would not be ethical behavior for people who have different functions like actors, politicians, business people]. We only have clues…
I feel the whirling dervish in the tight mess of my perceptions. All living things are emergencies striving for delightfully complex, becalmed horrors that increasingly terrorize themselves over time, thanks to the way the dervish fevers a virus in one's memory banks, forcing dubious re-categorizations and classifications, etc., due to the modification of habituated identifiers...it's all fucking babble, and if we're loving it we're monstrous...maybe.
At times even monsters must have their fun. Life seems, among other things, a perpetual pursuit of pleasure...by and large people feel Life is something to get through properly so they can have a good afterlife. Life seams an undesirable temporary stitch to these self-perceiving, perhaps self-deluded, possibly infinite beings who believe that they, in and of themselves, are at the very least in conscious relations with God almighty.
Or, if one's an atheist, replace God almighty with "human mind" or some form of secular humanism.
I prefer It when referring to It. One doesn't have conscious relations with It. It is conscious relations, however, among other things, some of which are beyond our imagination…
The problem with APES
I hear what you're saying re: the economy. The way things are going finding a teaching job might be tough. Although English departments may fare better due to their budgets being much lower than the nuclear rocket departments. Literature is cheap, relatively speaking [a thousand dollar bailout could save the world!].
My theory is this: Obama knows damned well that the whole thing is fucked. He also knows damned well he can't say it and retain power until it's obvious to everyone. He also knows he has to be able to position himself outside the blame once everyone knows how thoroughly fucked the American Political-Economic System [APES] is [and he has to do this while appearing to work very hard to save it and being thwarted and frustrated by his eco-political-economic enemies who run the mainstream media (eg: GE, et al) ]. He's doing this by giving the political economic elite a lot of rope by which they're hanging themselves. He's keeping the military commissions act intact for the day when the new reality strikes home to a critical mass of the population and he has to put his enemies in a box. Extraordinary times calling for extraordinary measures. If he's successful beyond this wildest of wild dreams, by 2016 there will be no more Republican Party, Wall Street will be history, the Federal Reserve will be history, the big three automakers will be history, the m.i.c. will be broken beyond repair, the empire will be completely humpty dumptied, and his successor will be tasked with the gradual, peaceful dissolution of the federal level of government and begin the formation of something modeled on the EU. Large political-economomic entities will disappear because there's no longer a place for them, no longer enough stuff to sustain them, and the UN will be re-invigorated in an attempt to fill the power vacuum. Paradoxically, as the nation-state folds local eco-political-economies will form and a global framework of interaction among these communities will emerge. Nation states exist in the muddied unworkable phantasy between local and global. Nations are undesirable, parasitic middle men filling the dangerous voids of inaesthetic scales. Somehow, full scale nuclear war will be avoided, but I think a smaller scale exchange will occur resulting in people waking up all the more to the bullshit that is technology/growth. Anything that links progress to increased production/consumption will fail.
And, of course, that was all a bunch of bullshit. I don’t know anything. I only have clues which are dealt with by my imagination imagining what it sees…
The most profound problem the APES has, is that it seems to reward bad thought/behavior and punish adequate thought/decent behavior.
Nothing to do but dharma bum.
Going Rambo
I think when I finish Germ, which I hope is soon, I'm going to go on a radical physical regimen to totally reclaim my body. And if I can try to stop needing all my meds and drop health insurance for the extra money so I have it for absolutely necessary stuff like my animals’ health care, I will. I love them. I'd be lost without them.
It's beginning to be now or never. Can I will myself into adaptation or perish? We'll know the answer to that by 2012. I'll be a free man or a dead one.
It doesn't actually matter...what seems to matter most is a life worth the expense of living, which means a mind that's alive and bearing its own fruit. And that requires an indeterminate yet substantial amount of energy and matter…
Stupid consequences
When I repeatedly watched those towers come down something inside shifted. I could no longer hang out with my old friends and drink beer and watch football or go to a bar and jam with them or anything. The stuff that came out of their mouths about things seemed unbearably stupid. That stupidity was/is having actual consequences. They became little Eichmanns in my eyes. How awful, to discover the people you love are little Eichmanns.
So rather than kill them, I withdrew. I killed them mentally. The writing had a mission and within a month I was off my meds and back to work at the newspaper trying to kill Stupidity.
And I haven't been able to tolerate wrong thinking ever since.
There are all kinds of right ways of thinking and even more gray areas. But there are also wrong ways of thinking, ways of thinking that denigrate one's experience of living and pollute the experiences of others.
People who think wrongly can never be all they can be. They grow frustrated because of it and drown their sorrows in commodified fetishes, saying stupid things, and growing fat.
I see myself in the mirror and call him “you.” I’m fucked up. Call it a consequence of being stupid. You raised me that way.
When confronted with mud, wrestle in it
Back in my Navy daze I was privileged to attend a couple private affairs beyond the military...the most memorable being a pig roast in Monck's Corner, S.C. Rodney D---- and Timmy P----, shipmates and buddies of mine, the two who jammed bluegrass together at 200 feet, were hired to play and I went along. It was in this guy's back yard in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a swamp in October. The weather was perfect. I swear to god every person who came to this thing came with an instrument in hand, including homemade ones. I was [and still am] a fat stupid yankee, but I could sing and I loved the music and learned words quickly and the more stoned I got the better I got at making them up. I was fed lots of ribs and once I couldn't get up to get my re-fills this old farmer would laugh and hand me another one. I remember when it came time to piss and puke I was assisted to the bushes. I haven't remembered that in a long time, but that's why deep down I could never hate the South. The vast majority of rednecks [for my positive meaning of this term, see Joe Bageant’s Dear Hunting With Jesus] were no different from you or me at rest. It's when riled, like a beehive, that they'll sting ya. And yes, sometimes they—we—have to be riled in order to act. But there is an ideal way of instigating action, and bluegrass and partying together is, in my view, the very first step in many positive behaviors. I've digressed. Obviously. Just thrilled about the choice of music [at the wedding]. Ole!
Now the only thing that worries me about this whole wedding is what I'll be wearing. I'm a real baby about wearing anything uncomfortable. I'll look nice if I must but will not wear a stiff buttoned collar with my Adam's apple garroted by some obscene necktie, symbolic of something far more heinous than a noose. In my dreams I would wear a light, loose fitting ensemble like Jesus. Perfect for "toasting," as the pope might say.
I know how you feel about -------, that it seems done. But trust me. It's not done with you. You're tired. You're begging it to stop squirming so you can tie off the knot...deep down we all want to be useful and productive, that's why the suggestion we're otherwise rankles us so [by "us" I mean artists in general]. But no, the fact is we strangle our productions, not to death but "out of consciousness" [our consciousness]. Once the work is limp in our hands we pass it on to its audience, which may or may not revive it. Of course, once others revive it you may wish to re-intervene and alter the evolved alterations emergent from its having passed through the other side. And every book is different, but if allowed to adequately develop, most seem to follow this basic or general framework. After putting together maybe a dozen or so booklength manuscripts over the years, this is what I've observed was common to them all...the way they ultimately achieve their final thought-feeling. And this seems to echo everything I've heard from other weirdo bookmakers.
I always say when confronted with mud, wrestle in it.
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