Riddle me This

“I’ve been remiss in blogging.”
“You've been remiss in getting a life.”

But really, if these things are to work, you have to keep posting. So I’ve decided I’m going to post every day, even if it’s only one or two lines at a time. It may be a quote; it may be “how I am feeling about my writing today”; or it may be a question that I toss out to you, the Reader. You can regard these as food for thought or as actual queries, and actually answer them, under “Comments.”

For instance: "True or false? Most contemporary academic literary criticism is mostly composed of paraphrase."

Re: Facebook:

"the bales of cotton
the lamps
cisterns
the trees
the barrels
weight of a package
pearly buttons
(count)
counting bricks
(count)
pearly buttons
the books
the soldiers
(count)
counting the bricks
(accounting)
length of a wall
weight of a package
(count)
counting contacts."

- Jean-Michel Espitallier, Espitallier's Theorem

Impersonism

I do think that one feature of modernism that we have not gone beyond is its impersonism. Whether it's the diffused, contingent subject of much recent lyric, the nouveau-cutup (camp) of flarf, or various aleatory practices, it does seem that we're still keen on proving our skepticism about subjectivity. (implications for representing history/agency - subject for future post). But is that just boring repetition, or a pose, or simply the continuation of a fundamental shift dating from c. Dec. 1910 through the present? In any case, obviously a lot of people haven't got the message and are still writing soulful memoirsitic narratives about returning to the small towns where they grew up, etc. - so naturally that creates an equal and opposite reaction. And vice versa. Hence red poets/blue poets.

Impersonism is also an impersonation. But only those with impersonalities know what it means to do a good impersonation, as Eliot once said, in the voice of Rich Little.

Really, it may be that blogs will become the new (acceptable) "personal" genre for Poets who Think. That is, even those who gravitate towards snickering weltschmerzy pop-po write very personal (self-representational, ex-pressive) things on their blogs. So, blogging is the new Romanticism. You heard it here first.

Of course, snippets of your blog might end up in someone else's arch & ironical poem . . .

Oh, and for all you folks back in Memphis . . .

. . . who used to call me a N-lover and who heckled me when I canvassed for black candidates? . . .

kisses, sweeties! [wink]

Further Thoughts Re: Goldilocks

Or, another way to think about it:

I think at some level I still take for granted the notion that one's writing is an expression of one's personality. Hence, I've been writing jokey, somewhat cynical/ironical/satirical lyrical poems (see below). But it occurs to me that those things are also distancing devices. So, either (a.) these poems in fact hide my True Self, or (b.) my True Personality is really a distancing device. Or "Personality" is a distancing device. Or something.

What the hell! - let's take a vote! Are you for (a.) or (b.)?

I heard an interview the other day with a woman who had been obsessively checking election web sites for the last year. "What will you do when it's over?" the interviewer asked. Answer: "Well, I guess I'll go back to my reality TV shows."

Reason to Concelebrate(?)

Here (yes, there) is proof positive that you should be careful about what you "publish" on your blog.

My Goldilocks Problem

“People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort. (Eliot)” (Markson). Whoever said it, it’s true for most Americans, anyway. If you teach poetry in a public educational institution in the US, you probably know what I mean. Give students challenging poetry, and they glower (“What the hell is that?”). If you give them “accessible” or popular poetry, they roll their eyes (“Oh, please – why are you making us read this trash?”). At the height of the 80s Culture Wars, the right embodied this split in an extreme form. If you taught difficult material (like, oh, say, Homer, Milton, John Donne), and you expected your students to actually read it (if they wanted a good grade), you were an elitist. If you taught pop culture, then you were a radical who was intent on dumbing down the curriculum and destroying western civilization.

The quotation is true of people who don’t read much literature. But even people who do so embody this dichotomy. For all the talk of post-avant, it seems to me that, when push comes to shove, people fall back on either the “post” (as in “thank god all that elitist jerking off is over with”) or the “avant” (as in “oh, my god – who reads this [tired, stupid, corny] shit??”). That is another instantiation the Coke/Pepsi, GOP/Dem, black/white mentality that characterizes American life.

I’ve held forth on this theme before, and, yes, as a matter of fact, I do have an axe to grind. See, I have this manuscript ("quick! hide!") . . . Well, it’s part biography, part history, with a little memoir thrown in for bad measure. That means that it’s representing things, events, people, even emotions (hurrah! go the posties, literature is supposed to be mimetic and expressive; undertheorized and tepid, go the avantes). But, formally, it’s a scrapped-up, fragmentary, montage/bricolage that relies heavily on problematic "evidence" (now we’re talking, go the avantes; WTF?? go the posties).

So – is it possible to be both heavy-handed and coldly detached? To be both schmaltzy and cryptic? Well, it’s certainly possible to press on (and maybe disrupt) the marketing and institutional categories we rely upon to navigate texts (incl. genre). But maybe one can narrate and represent without being overly naive or smug about subjectivity and language. We'll see.

Extant

Your atomic number is directly proportional to the number of new posts on your blog. I'm made of hydrogen.

But seriously, folks. One of my students today said that some of Frank O'Hara's lunch poems sound like blog entries. I did not prompt him. This is big news for me, as it brings together the two genres with which this blog is concerned.

In the meantime, I have begun my Facebook experience. I think it should be Namebook. I mean, you don't have to show your face - and even if you do, it's tiny. It's really Who's friends with Whom, isn't it? And that's the whole point of life under conditions of Universal Competition, isn't it?

Did you know that the original investors in Lloyd's of London were called The Names? They may still be, for all I know. Or maybe now they are The Numbers.

Anyway, Facebook, a "social networking site," is a weird medium. (or weird museum) Some people mainly post links to their blogs or to on-line publications. You're aware of others only by the friends they acquire (or who acquire them). I find myself thinking, "Damn! That person has 10x as many 'friends' as I do - I better get cracking!"

Will everyone still be friends if Obama loses the election?

Speaking of which, if you're on Facebook, join "Irish-Americans for Barry O'Bama." You don't have to be Irish to join, since neither is he, exactly.

The Maverick (and other tired ideas)

"Several tags . . . have been attached to me during my political career. One of these is 'maverick,' and if one likes labels, this in some ways is an apt description." - Sen. Albert Gore, Sr., ca. 1972

"I do not want college professors around. They believe in the greatest good for the greatest number, and I do not believe in that." - Prentice Cooper, Gore's unsuccessful opponent in 1958.

Readings Last Weekend

Why do we update our blogs? Because our public awaits us? Because we are sending signals out into the void, like SETI? Maybe we like to hear ourselves talk.

I like to hear Hadara Bar-Nadav talk - and read her stuff, which I did, Friday night. Good crowd at the Writer's Place in Kansas City (70 or so). She started out with a fanciful poem involving her recently-flooded basement, which, in the poem, she's navigating in a paper boat, with the entire family. But then she went into some weirder, darker stuff - such as the series of poems that begin with Dickinson lines (and smuggle other D lines in later, if I understand aright). Much more bodily grotesquerie than in ED, I'd say. Longer lines, too, I'm guessing. Like if Dickinson could write free-verse and had to watch Holocaust documentaries as an adolescent. But the weird part is, it gorgeous. The cross-sectioning of the body is done in such a lyrical way that it leaves you wanting more. Damn I wish I could do that.

But I can't, and I didn't, on Saturday night. Instead, I read some of my cartoony twisted little faux-rhetorical nature poems, as the warm-up act for Cyrus Console's serious poetry. CC read from his MS in progress (which, unlike Brief Under Water, appears to be in verse) - faux-vatic symbolist pronouncements interwoven by a character named Anthony, who is part ex-con, part 19th c. dandy, part schlep, and part *Saint* Anthony, as far as I can tell. The poems I hadn't heard had a distinctly scrambled-biblical air (Miltonic, as it turns out) - funny and scary both (to me).

And that was my weekend trip to KC and Topeka. I hope to return some day!