Stephen Burt in n+1, Number 4

Excerpted from the symposium on "American Writing Today:"

Whom should more poets follow, or at least contemplate? Again, in poetry: George Herbert, Christopher Smart, pre-1937 W.H. Auden, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, James K. Baxter, post-1964 Robert Lowell. Among living writers, maybe Thylias Mass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Laura Kasischke, Liz Waldner. In poetry criticism: William Empson, Donald Davie.

What current modes clog the pipeline and tire me out? (1) Quasi-automatic writing and a kind of comic quasi-surrealism, especially when the author wants to be winning, funny, "entertaining," and shocking at the same time. (2) Slack free-verse autobiography; chatty anecdote without interesting form. (3) Endless zeroxes of '50s formalist poems, copies of Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov. (4) "Spirituality," which, pursued as a primary goal, tends to make poems sound like bad translations.

Most poets today are writing either for a coterie of readers they know personally, who want to participate in the social circulation of new work (rather than in the rereading of old work), or else (in part) for an academic market in which the more you publish (as long as it's in semiprestigious venues), the more your chances for tenure and promotion.

Both paradigns encourage overproduction. Younger poets, in particular, seem to rush things, to make public ten pounds of cookie dough when, had they waited, they might have had five pounds of tasty cookies. I don't know what any of us can do about that, and for certain poets whose work is supposed to sound "raw" (such as Kasischke and Waldner) that may not even amount to a disadvantage.

Anything you can do 100 times in 100 poems without learning a new trick isn't worth doing more than twice. Sense is harder than nonesense; order is harder than disorder. But, as Stevens said, "A great disorder is an order"; as Dickenson said, "Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye."

Something by Caleb Crain, somewhat less memorable, followed.

Having just begun

Gabriel Josipovici on Borges, Poe, the novel, Kierkegaard, Wallace Stevens...:

It may be that Borges’ mode of writing is not such as to engage fully with politics and history, like that of Sartre and Malraux; yet I would suggest that despite this his central contrast of the melancholy and resigned translator and the idealist world of Tlön is more deeply political than Sartre and Malraux could ever be, and that it helps to bring out something that is often overlooked in studies of literary Modernism:  that to write about politics without recognising the complicity of forms of writing with the formation of political consciousness is to betray the cause one thinks one is serving, and that writers  like Eliot, Stevens, Beckett and Borges may in the end be better guides to the times than Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Silone and the rest...…

Actually, I think my favorite sentence is this:

...But there’s this deplorable confusion in that modern times have incorporated ‘actuality’ into logic and then, in distraction, forgotten that ‘actuality’ in logic is still only a ‘thought actuality’, i.e. it is possibility.

 

Thoughts anyone?  Certainly a must-read essay.   (Also via RSB, readers may be interested in the new journal, Affinities:  "a web-based journal that focuses on groups, movements, and communities that set out to construct sustainable alternatives to the racist, hetero-sexist system of liberal-capitalist nation-states.")

Timeline of the Theory of Writing

I thought that as a collective thought experiment, it might be interesting to develop a timeline of important moments in the theorizing of writing.  So whatever instances you can think of, add to comments and I'll insert into the post.

360 BCE: Plato sits down and pens a little dialog about sexual innuendo, rhetoric, and the problems with writing.  Unlike the give and take of oral communication, writing is but dead letters on dead leaves, and worthy only of practicing if it follows upon the heels of already valuable oral communication and touches on non-serious issues.  He and the shining one , by contrast, engage in a bit of non-seriousness.

353 BCE: Plato takes up writing again, this time to explain why he cannot be held responsible for the death of Dion, and that, in fact, his involvement in the politics of Sicily was what we might today call "all good."  While doing so, he takes the time to point out that those malfeasants who claim to be philosophers cannot be so, because they write about serious matters, which this letter, umm, most certainly does not.

1882: In the same year that he publishes The Gay Science and declares the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche’s failing eyesight leads him to purchase an early prototype of the typewriter.  Able to learn the letter placement through feel and routine, Nietzsche becomes the first philosopher to experience ecriture automatique, print inscription without the attention-demanding slowness of the handwritten word.

1942: During the long winter of 1942/43, with the Battle of Stalingrad deciding the future of the Third Reich’s eastern front, Martin Heidegger delivers a lecture course on the fragments of Parmenides at the University of Frieburg, in which he surprises his audience by bursting into a random discussion of how the typewriter is eclipsing the experience of Being.  Dust off those quills and bust out the inkwells, because handwriting is the real deal when it comes to living in the house of Being.  Or so he says.

1968: A student revolution in France fails the same year in which Roland Barthes publicly declares the death of the author and the advent of the scriptor, a figure who no longer believes in the innate, corporeal connection of hand and voice and who celebrates the accelerated speed of modern writing.

1969: One year later, another Frenchman by the name of Michel Foucault explores the strange, spectral status of the author, recognizing that God and the author pretty much died coterminous deaths.  Foucault, the last and perhaps greatest philosophical archivist, links the emergence of the modern author function to particular historical contingencies, even if, like most of his work, he touches only lightly on his own scribal machinations.

Ok, those will get us started.  Anyone got some more?

An upward-looking blognod

Hey Pepys, we see you there (in the strange company of Kafka, Thoreau, Barbellion, Will Self, Bill Knott and Alasdair Gray...did I miss anyone important?).

Moral Laziness (i)

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, freelancer, Texan, dry humorist and author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

Lately, I’ve been pondering Lev Shestov's  essay  (Update:  cache here) about Tolstoy, "The Last Judgment", in trying to understand the changes – the movement from mildmannered literatus to crazed anti-American -- that I’ve undergone over the last five years.

Being a person who likes to have names for things (who even, clownishly, likes the names better than the things), I think my discontent is all about moral laziness. Or, to put it another way: it is all about the moral laziness that seems to have flowed from the liberal order that I’ve always preferred, my whole life long.

I should say right away that I don’t take laziness to be the opposite of busyness. Quite the contrary – the perpetual scheduling self stands in the same relationship to moral laziness as the prison bars stand to the prisoner: they don’t make the prisoner, but they don’t allow the prisoner an option to be anything else. 

Shestov’s essay begins like this:

Aristotle says somewhere that every one has his own particular world in his dreams, while in his waking state he lives in a world common to all. This statement is the basis, not only of Aristotle's philosophy, but also of all positive scientific philosophy, before and after him. Common sense also looks upon this as an indisputable truth.

The remark about worlds sets up Shestov’s theme, which is that Tolstoy’s career can be looked at as a conversion from a man who is quite happy with the world he shares in common with others to the torn world in which such commonalities escape him. In other words, he moves from a man who has a brilliant sense for the ordo et connexio rerum, as Shestov puts it, to a man who doesn’t, and has to make it all up.

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W(h)ither the Philosophy of Pop?

"Do you realize how ridiculous you must sound when you bring into the classroom, the place where should be taught universal truths, this [spluttering]…this rubbish. This is little more than a propoganda campaign for MTV. Pop caters to the lowest common denominator; the energy of pop is too often the testosterone-fueled energy of male adolescence; the languages of pop are impenetrable, ephemeral jargons; it locks into stereotypical patterns which relate purely to physiological artefacts and thus have no significance whatever to philosophy. Man will always have need of entertainment; this is not, however, philosophy; or even philosophically interesting. There is no philosophy, nor politics, in pop."
               -Grayson Darkling-Furniss 

"All art...is...essentailly poetry [Dichtung]"
                -Martin Heidegger

Having heard the phrases, "pop philosophy" or, "the philosophy of pop" resonate in certain corners of the 'sphere, having read this generous transcription by Robin; (from whence the quote above); or this post in particular by K-Punk (since followed up by many others); or, going even further back, this good interview by Infinite Thought...well here a mammoth post, with generous (but hopefully not ponderous!) excerpting from an article by Mark Greif follows...

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annihilation

Perec on Friday

The first in an occasional series, foreshadowed by "techniques of the reading body".

W or The Memory of Childhood. The "or" in the title is ambivalent. It straddles the conjunction's two meanings: both (either) repetition, as in "right or starboard"; and (or) difference, as in "right or left." For this is a book that likewise straddles two narratives, two stories that both repeat and differ. On the one hand, a fiction involving a deaf mute child, shipwrecked off Tierra del Fuego, whose name has been appropriated by an army deserter. On the other hand, a memoir of Perec's own life in the shadow of his parents' deaths, his father we are told in the forces as the Germans advanced on Paris, his mother in or on the way to Auschwitz.

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A recommend

Simon Critchley is interviewed today by Mark Thwaite at the rather peerless ReadySteadyBook. An excerpt below the fold:

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techniques of the reading body

As befits a man who wrote one novel eschewing the letter "e," and another (slimmer) one that did without "a," "i," "o," and "u," Georges Perec thought a lot about the materiality of language: its physical incarnation as marks on a page, marks that could be arranged and rearranged to reveal orders other than the merely semantic. Perec loved palindromes, for instance. Famously, in 1969 he composed a palindrome over 5,000 letters long (that's 1240 words, in each direction). It begins "Trace l'inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule." It ends "Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l'écart."

So no wonder he should have much to say about how to arrange one's books, and about the "socio-physiology" of reading.

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people with ideas

We went out to Deep Cove this afternoon. This is mostly just a quaint little tourist trap with some fairly stunning views. But it's also near here that Malcolm Lowry lived for many years, squatting in a shack he and his wife built down by the shore. And it's here that Lowry wrote much of his masterpiece, Under the Volcano.

The shack no longer exists. The good people of Deep Cove and environs hardly seem to have had much affection for Lowry while he and it were there: they were rather busier trying to evict him. Since then, of course, they've somewhat ruefully installed a small plaque near the site, praising Lowry and by implication also praising themselves by invoking his great love of the place.

But while holed up in this cold (and in his case, inhospitable) part of the world, Lowry was imagining the warmer climes of Mexico: conjuring up another drunk, quietly going to seed, not fully fitting in, not fully comfortable with either himself or his environs. Here he is, in semi-drunken semi-delirium:

The instant the Consul saw the thing he knew it was an hallucination and he sat, quite calmly now, waiting for the object shaped like a dead man and which seemed to be lying flat on its back by his swimming pool, with a large sombrero over its face, to go away. So the "other" had come again. And now gone, he thought: but no, not quite, for there was still something there, in some way connected with it, or here, at his elbow, or behind his back, in front of him now; no, that too, whatever it was, was going: perhaps it had only been the coppery-tailed trogon stirring in the bushes, his "ambiguous bird" that was now departing quickly on creaking wings, like a pigeon once it was in flight, heading for its solitary home in the Canyon of the Wolves, away from the people with ideas.

"Damn it, I feel pretty well," he thought suddenly, finishing his half quartern. (96)

[Update: a nice little note on "Evictions" from Geist, which also points us to Foucault Bluff.]

Against Hebetude

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the death of the writer Italo Calvino.  Particularly fitting for this place (or for these 'places') is a short story about photography, one that I think many here will find interesting.  In any case, I certainly do.  It comes kind courtesy of wood s lot and begins:

WHEN SPRING comes, the city’s inhabitants, by the hundreds of     thousands, go out on Sundays with leather cases over their shoulders. And they photograph one another.  They come back as happy as hunters with bulging game bags; they spend days waiting, with sweet anxiety, to see the developed pictures (anxiety to which some add the subtle pleasure of alchemistic manipulations in the darkroom, forbidding any intrusion by members of the family, relishing the acid smell that is harsh to the nostrils).  It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wife’s legs take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted.  Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of  memory...(read the rest)

'Anti-trilogy': The China Miéville interview, part three

In the long-awaited third and final part of our interview, we discuss the disaster in the southern U.S., blogging, fantasy vs. realism vs. magical realism and the value for progressives of international law.
..........

ALPHONSE VAN WORDEN: You're blogging at Lenin's Tomb! I want to know how you're enjoying it.

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Well, it's nice to have an outlet for the occasional rant. I admit though that it i) gives me performance anxiety, and ii) creates a sense of obligation and guilt. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying. I'm going to try to do one tonight, in fact.

AvW: What's your topic?

CM: It's a follow-up on Hurricane Katrina. Nothing very surprising - this is one of the problems of blogging, I rarely think I'm saying anything the readers haven't thought of - but I'm just obsessed with this story, can't leave it alone.

JOHN PISTELLI: Well, it's just a catastrophe. It's such sorry proof of the mess we're in.

CM: It's beyond belief. I find it more shocking than 9/11. It's shaping up to be a major crisis for Bush.

AvW: Do you feel it is a bit empowering though? Blogging? Contributing to the instant pool of reaction?

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"Whereas, I feel nothing at all..."

Virginia Woolf: though we don't hear much about her in our blogvironment, she's as pertinent as could be... We should all be reading VW. Why? Because what I would argue is her paramount preoccupation - at least in Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, just happens to be (perhaps) the primary issue in our world, the real one, here and now, today...

What preoccupation am I talking about? The preoccupation with not being preoccupied ... Not being preoccupied with the right things. Being distracted by the banal affairs of the day, flowers for the party and the like, while the writing's on the wall, or even up in the sky, just as the shit hits the fan and its all your fault, directly or better indirectly...

A few of my favorite examples... First Dalloway, and then two from TTL...

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