cottonwool

Generous

2008-01-31T22:37:00.000-05:00

Marjorie Perloff characterized the late Burt Hatlen as "generous" of spirit. This is worthy of a significant amount of consideration; poets, students, critics, there are a lot of us who are doing what we do in large part because of Burt. And that IS generosity embodied, and then given to us as the gift of his life.

I think maybe I'll blog again

2008-01-28T21:05:00.000-05:00

as soon as i have something to say. keep an eye on cottonwool, sjbr, and conspicuous consumption -- i'm not yet sure which one i'll return to. like you care. but whatever. i'm back bitches.

sjbr is the new, er, blog

2007-01-05T17:42:00.000-05:00

i'm just saying, is all

over and out

2006-09-11T14:18:00.000-04:00

at some point, my blog started to seem more like a job than an interesting exercise, so i am going to sign off for a while. i have enjoyed keeping this blog and i even made some new friends in the blogsphere. so, good.

keep an eye on me in the future; the idea of a food blog is becoming more and more attractive to me.

13 things

2006-07-11T11:26:00.000-04:00

I stole this "MeMe meme" from Jessica's blog. And she got it from someone else, so if you want its origin, wander over to looktouch and find out for your damn self.

13 Things About Me that Are Weird (only 13?)

1. I don't like ice cream. That's right, you heard me correctly.

2. I can't burp. Have never done so. It's rumored in my family that this is some kind of hereditary medical condition, but I have never bothered to find out as I don't really care if I can or cannot burp.

3. I drink neither beer nor pop. (See above)

4. I get hives from especially difficult coursework.

5. Nervous puke-r.

6. I find furniture... difficult. This is possibly a manifestation of my fear of commitment. Ditto houseplants.

7. I am possessed of an uncanny ability to locate the cheapest plane-tickets online.

8. I love dickering with car salesmen; hence, I am invaluable to those buying a new car.

9. I have a stupendous sense of direction and can find my way around anywhere. Except, oddly, Detroit, where I have lived for 2 years. If you put a gun to my head I could not get from point A to point B in Detroit and, this being Detroit, that scenario will probably be realized someday.

10. I'm 30 years old and I still babysit.

11. I'm 30 years old and I still call my mother "Mommy."

12. I only use red toothbrushes. I arbitrarily made this decision several years ago just to see if I could stick to it, and so far I have.

13. I own so many alarm clocks that I have lost track of the exact number.

cliche-spotting: academia edition

2006-07-04T11:03:00.000-04:00

i was just looking through this week's cpf and i realized that it is time to put the kibosh on:

"queer" as a verb, as in "to queer," or "queering."

this word is officially overused. i don't know why this bothers me so much, but see my Louisville post for more tired academic cliches. i guess i feel like once certain buzzwords become institutionalized, nobody really thinks about what they mean anymore. so now that everybody "queers," it's no longer necessary to think of what the process of queering entails. queering has in effect become reified into just another academic thing that doesn't really need to do anything anymore. one just inserts it in one's paper title, or sentence, or abstract, and POOF! the entire project is magically queered (no pun intended). which, of course, sort of misses the whole point of queering by rendering it, like, not at all queer.

although i should say that i know people who have used, and continue to use, "queering" to do actual work because they are simultaneously using the concept and problematizing or developing it. so, okay. keep on queering in the free world.

hey, "queering": it was fun while it lasted. you had a good run.

a manifesto of sorts

2006-06-27T13:03:00.000-04:00

Wow. I am way behind on my blogging.

This morning it occurred to me that I have been thinking a lot about relationships and that it is about time that my camp released some kind of a statement regarding love.

This was brought on by two things. One, the recent realization that I do not fit in the conventional conceptualization of relationships. And with this, the attendant suspicion that a lot of other people don't either. And two, I spoke to one of my ex-boyfriends for the first time in almost a year (wherein I realized that we should be friends again because he's a pretty cool guy; so I will no longer refer to him as my ex-boyfriend, but instead, as my friend. A, can I get a "hell yeah"?).

Okay, so. How do I "not fit"? Lots of folks will assume that this has something to do with confused sexuality. This is, uh, not the case. I'm straight, y'all, and about this fact I am not the least bit conflicted. But I think that it has become the norm to immediately ascribe an individual's discomfort with conventional relationships to some kind of flaw in her personality that can then be pathologized as "closeted" or whatever. That is, it's not the relationships that are flawed, it's you.

Likewise the less offensive but still problematic idea that a given individual is "not ready" for a relationship, thus suggesting that the individual will be somehow "cured" when she fianlly arrives at the ultimate goal of being "ready." This idea implies, of course, that we humans are all teleogically oriented toward the end of a relationship with one other human being as the fullest realization of existence, whether that relationship is homo or hetero. But look! The terms homo- and hetero- only exist if we accept this single, finally overdetermined relationship as our end goal. Life, then, becomes an exercise in the unification of fragments; our activities are oriented toward making these fragments into a whole, which whole is represented by the ever-elusive relationship, which is of course modeled on the heteronormative family structure, and, VIOLA! You're totally screwed.

And how easy it is to fail at this! We are more or less doomed to defeat here; yet so many people persist in believing that they are not whole, successful, fulfilled people unless they have completed the puzzle of "being with someone." You thought that the idea that men and women are failures unless they are married was archaic? But it's all around us!

Now, I am not saying anything that schizoanalysis hasn't said before. Still, I think it bears looking into how this family romance can rain havoc on the life of a single young gal. I have, in the past few years, had the pleasure of dating several very nice men. I loved one or two of them, yet my relationships with them resembled "real," or "good" relationships the least. I'm not excusing some of the fucked up things these guys did; I am, however, nonetheless uncomfortable with the number of times I was told that I "deserved better" from a relationship. This posits an ideal relationship in which I do not believe but that I am unfortunately still assumed to be unsuccessfully striving toward. I mean, if my end goal had been to get married and have kids and a 401K, yes, these relationships were failures. But what if there was no end goal? What if these relationships provided me with some moments, hours, and days of happiness in the continuum of my life? What if we look at relationships as moments to be lived, as different occurrences of intimacies instead of as a narrative that leads to a predetermined end? More plainly, I don't want to sacrifice too much of my life by treating it as something that needs to be "gotten past" to get to the next point, which is "success." These relationships can't be counted as failures simply because they didn't "get me somewhere." Nor would I call them "learning experiences," as though they were some kind of training for the real thing.

Although if it were that simple to simply "re-ideologize" a bad relationship into a good one, we wouldn't be having this (one-sided) conversation. These relationships were also plenty bad in real, palpable, immediate ways. And hence, I am not in them anymore. But they weren't just practice for the big one, either.

The "family romance" of a teleologically directed narrative indeed interferes in my more casual dating life as well. I have had the pleasure of dating a couple of wonderful guys in recent years, but these dates never became relationships. It was not because of any flaws in the respective men, nor, in this case, was it because of any flaws in me. It was simply that these otherwise great guys made the mistake of thinking that they knew me far too quickly; they seemed to assume that they knew what "women" wanted, and then behaved toward me as though they were following a script that they had bought from the writers of "Sex and the City." That is to say, they forgot they were on a date with ME and instead substituted "a woman" for "this woman here." Variously, these guys did things like spending an hour with me and then telling me that "I made them happy"; calling WAY TOO MUCH; assuming familiarities that didn't exist, like telling me that I was "smart" or "not like other girls" (you could maybe assume these things if you had known me for months, but not hours); ignoring me when I told them I was somewhat uncomfortable with relationships, choosing to believe instead that I simply needed to be "persuaded." Now, how many of you are thinking "What is she doing complaining about these guys when it's clear that she's just not mature enough/ready for a relationship?" My point exactly. I don't especially appreciate my feelings and convictions being treated as symptoms that need to be overcome. At that point I begin to feel suffocated and disappeared, like my actual self has been swallowed by the idea of a relationship.

But this is all too easy to do when we assume that we are all traveling toward the same goal: to be one half of a successfully formed "whole." Of course, anyone could point out the obvious here: I am spending most of my time reading, alone, and singing classic rock songs to Kristine's cat. Uh, is there something wrong with that? My biological clock is ticking? Not so much. "Getting married" is not a goal, although a lot of people think it is. What they might not be considering is that a wedding is their real goal; I don't ever want to have a relationship so that I can get married. Because what if I am not "whole" then (and so many, many people aren't, and it's a devastating realization)? I want to get married because I can't NOT get married. I want a relationship that is based on wanting as many moments as possible with someone because his presence makes my life a nicer place, a relationship that is part of my entire life, not its diagnostic marker. So, for now at least, none is fine.

Please discuss.

i want you

2006-06-14T21:33:00.000-04:00

consider the lobster. when i could have one, i never wanted one. now, though, i am seriously considering how badly i really need that major organ. i want a lobster (or six). not the kind i can order at a restaurant for $50, but the kind that i pull out of the ocean, steam, and then direct to my plate.

maybe with some mussels also. and fiddleheads. and lots of melted butter. and blueberry muffins. and corn. and then, pie.

this is not allegorical. as my sister-in-law would say, i am having a lobster freak-out.

and #2

2006-06-13T12:07:00.000-04:00

"No one forgave him this, whereas Freud got full pardon. Reich was the first to attempt to make the analytic machine and the revolutionary machine function together. In the end, he only had his own desiring-machines, his paranoiac, miraculous, and celibate boxes, with metallic inner walls lined with cotton and wool."

(thanks Deleuze and Guattari)

alternate title for my blog #1

2006-06-13T11:59:00.000-04:00

"another anchorite who knows the train times"

talking points

2006-06-06T13:12:00.000-04:00

1. the impending opening of our local branch of IKEA:

of course i have to weigh in on IKEA. that's not to say, however, that i am going to use this opportunity to critique capitalism by way of this swedish-design megalith. quite the opposite. i like IKEA as much as, if not more than, the next guy. the company provides high quality, attractive goods that are genuinely affordable. that is, the company says they are affordable, and, lo and behold, they are. from what i understand, IKEA's labor practices are decent as well: no sweat-shop labor, employees paid above living wages, great benefits and childcare policies. it seems that a corporation can indeed prosper by doing, more or less, the right thing. i plan to shop at my nearby IKEA as soon as, and as frequently as, possible.

but: i recently heard an ad on the radio announcing IKEA Canton's grand opening on june 7. this advertisement informed -- nay encouraged -- shoppers that they could begin to line up at the store a full 48 hours before its opening. who would do this? who needs furniture this badly? it's not concert tickets, people. nobody, and i mean nobody, needs home furnishings more than i do (come to my apartment and see for yourself the relative lack of such essential things as beds and places to sit; also, adequate lighting; and the long awaited luxury item: a foot stool!), but there is no way that i am spending 2 days lined up in a fucking parking lot off I-275. i have lived for this long without the foot stool; it's not going to kill me to wait a few more days.

but: god forbid IKEA should run out of foot-stools or futon covers. what we have here is the faulty scarcity principle upon which modern shopping (and, of course, the long and tortured history of capitalism itself) relies. do these would-be shoppers actually think that if they are not one of the first shoppers in the door, IKEA is going to RUN OUT of furniture? or that they must somehow be the first to get one of IKEA's mass-produced products in order to prove that they are not copy-catting the neighbors? welcome back to the 3rd grade. hint: if you are buying furniture at IKEA in the first place, you would do well to give up any illusion of your own originality before someone gets hurt.

this whole "lining up at IKEA" thing becomes more fascinating the more i think about it. you know, i might just drive over there myself and ask those people if they are OUT OF THEIR GODDAMN MINDS.

2006-06-06T11:00:00.000-04:00

And though I am aware that Paris is, apparently, totally over, here's an enormous archive of photographs from the Siege and the Paris Commune:

http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/siege/index.html

Just the abundance of images, even though some are, frankly, less than exciting, makes me want to DO something with them. There is a section devoted to documenting the writing on the backs of these photographs; I have always been fascinated by the idea of how what is on the BACK of photographs might crystallize these fragments of an archive into dialectical images. Kristine has actually done me one (much) better to do work on this; I propose that we make something from this archive, as perhaps Olson would have suggested. Or, better yet, What Would Walter Benjamin Do?

Even better, the archive is in special collections at Northwestern: road trip.

2006-06-06T10:54:00.000-04:00

I have never been especially "into" Charles Olson, but maybe I should be. Check out Ben Friedlander's recent address to a mob of Olsonites:

http://olsonnow.blogspot.com/2006/05/benjamin-friedlandercharles-olson-now.html

Talking point #2 seems especially apt.

money money money money

2006-06-04T11:26:00.000-04:00

shockingly, this is not another blog post about How Much I Need Some.

Having been encouraged to do so by several friends, I recently read Barbara Ehrenreich's _Nickled and Dimed_. The book, subtitled "On (Not) Getting by In America," chronicles Ehrenreich's immersive investigation of America's "working poor." The book's most important work, I think, is detailing the exploitative mechanisms that produce the -- pardon my french -- completely fucked class of people that our government optimistically terms "working poor." That a staggering proportion of Americans are forced to live, day-to-day, in what amounts to an economic chinese finger trap is shameful, to say the least. The "American Dream" is a lie, and our society is essentially sacrificing an enormous segment of the population in order to cover that up; according to Ehrenreich's book, and I believe this, it is categorically impossible to come from nothing and to make a live-able life for oneself. That is to say, in practice, jobs like waitressing, housecleaning, retail sales, and telemarketing do not pay people enough to survive -- they may, in theory, but when realities like security deposits, car payments, childcare, and healthcare are factored in, America has basically created a situation wherein the floor is always sliding out from beneath those who do most of the jobs we have come to take for granted. But in order to rectify the situation, the government and business owners of America would have to admit that the very things on which they have been basing their policies for most of the existence of our nation are profoundly broken. And that it is, by and large, the societal intangibles -- non-traditional family structures, self-created communities, "alternative" legalities, and I would even extend this to include gangs and the mob -- are the sustaining structures of our nation.

This is, of course, a fascinating discovery. Take, for example, Steven Shaviro's perfectly reasoned passage on what we might call "post-Marxist" -- by which I am designating, basically, Deleuzian -- economics:

"Marx says that the very development of capitalist relations unleashes forces — for instance, possibilities of widespread material abundance, as well as collective modes of organization — that those same relations need to repress in order to perpetuate themselves. So, as capitalism develops, it is literally bursting at the seams: it needs to control and push back the very things that it makes possible. It needs to reimpose scarcity, and privatize what is inherently common and public. This stress is a dialectical contradiction, and its result is crisis: and ideally, for Marx, crisis is the point of leverage at which revolutionary change can occur, destroying capitalist property relations and replacing them with a common, or communist, system that is much more in accordance with the abundance that capitalist relations themselves inadvertently produced.

Now, there is something overly mechanical here about how the Hegelian dialectic neatly inverts itself, so that a contradiction directly leads to its own solution on a higher level. And in fact, of course, things haven’t happened this way. Capitalism today is not threatened by crisis; indeed, crisis is the tool it uses to renew itself. The “dialectic” by which a contradiction is resolved on a higher level is entirely absorbed within capitalism itself. When the “contradictions” of what I like to call FKW (the Fordist/Keynesian/welfare-stateist system) caused trouble in the 1960s and 1970s, the result was not to trouble the capitalist system, but precisely to allow capital to regenerate itself on high-tech, neoliberal lines. (This was the case whether we refer to social movements and to stagflation in the “advanced” western countries, to stagnation in the “socialist” bloc, or to anti-colonialist struggles and subsequent nation-building in the Third World).

In this situation, contradiction and negativity have become rather sterile resources for change, I think. Deleuze’s notion of the virtual allows for a wider range of resources. Instead of a dialectic, Deleuze (and Guattari) propose a vision of how capitalism simultaneously unleashes and regulates fluxes of energy and matter, of desires and subjects and objects. Both the relations of production and the forces of production are here seen as involving multiplicity, i.e. more dimensions than would be the case in an orthodox Hegelian account. Instead of a teleological dialectic, we get what Althusser would call “overderminations.” Capitalism is both a multiplying force and a homogenizing force; it cannot repress and exploit without expropriating actually-existing creativity; it assumes an “outside” that it constantly seeks to repress, but cannot do without. There is no dialectic here to guarantee antagonism; but that is because antagonism is precisely what needs to be produced. And this is where practice can be renewed, experimented with, and invented; precisely because it has been unshackled from the narrow constraints of the dialectic."

Thanks, Steve. I would simply add to that: "What he said."

Yet I don't find Ehrenreich entirely convincing. As is, I guess, to be expected of any journalistic enterprise in which the investigative reporter inserts herself, Ehrenreich doesn't manage to leave her class politics at the door. For one thing, the advantages that she cannot help but enjoy would make this impossible, and would likewise render her work completely disingenuous. Ehrenreich has, however, managed to make herself seem even more disingenuous by her constant reminders of how she deals with her bourgeois guilt by "saving" certain of her friends and co-workers. It's not that she transferred her security deposit into the name of a transient waitress in Key West so that the woman could overcome this crucial obstacle in securing housing that I have a problem with. It's that she reminds us of these kind of acts in a way that begins to seem relentless. The "big story" becomes less about America's working poor and more about a large-scale assuaging of bourgeois guilt. I mean, now that I know how exploitative corporate housecleaning agencies are, I will be sure I don't use one. And I will always offer my housecleaners a glass of water. Too many readers will be satisfied, per Ehrenreich's instructions, it seems, with such a solution.

Ehrenreich also managed to pick three areas in which she could do her experiment relatively unimpeded by such real-world concerns as crime, pollution, and cost of living. She chooses Key West, her hometown; Portland, Maine; and the Minneapolis suburbs. She rejects other locations because of her allergies and the areas' relative lacks of affordable housing. In so doing, Ehrenreich misses an opportunity to accurately present the REAL working poor and also, in many cases, to discover the non-official systems of support that sustain these communities. Instead of considering how non-traditional families and living arrangements might create the conditions for some kinds of success, she instead uses these situations as examples of how downtrodden her "colleagues" are. When women live with their mothers or sisters or boyfriends' mothers, they are painted as examples of failure to attain the Western (bourgeois) standard of living. When a hard-working housecleaner refuses to take time off following an injury, Ehrenreich displays her liberalism by chiding herself for assuming that the woman could take a break: "How do I know, maybe her husband beats her if she misses work." Would Ehrenreich have made this assumption about a doctor, a professor, or even, say, an aerobics instructor? In the end, Ehrenreich perpetuates more stereotypes than she destroys, all in the service of her own bourgeois ideals. Ick.

As you can imagine, I found one of her most greivous errors to be in her characterization of the state of Maine. She "chose Maine for its whiteness"; while this "demographic albinism" makes Maine a less than desirable "place to settle in for the long haul," the author thinks it will make her infiltration of the lower class less suspicious. Well, thank god for that. I don't think that reasoning holds up, since, for one thing, Ehrenreich spends most of the rest of her time in Maine rigorously trying to differentiate herself from her fellow white-people. Her "noble" attempts to defend her co-workers from their tyrranical boss? Not so noble considering that a) she doesn't need the job, and b) they don't want to be defended (but, ah, they don't know what's best for them). So all this "sticking up for the underdog" really serves to do is mark Ehrenreich as "not them." When she attends a church service on a Saturday night (because there is nothing better to do in Portland on a late summer weekend night, for free ?!?), she notes that besides a few people of color, the congregation is "tragically hillbilly." So, in addition to providing her with an opportunity to once again excise her liberal guilt by taking cheap shots at white people, Ehrenreich has also tragically misunderstood the demographics of her chosen state. I am generally the last person to leap to the defense of white people, but come on. Try telling the enormous populations of Penobscots and French-Canadians in Maine that their state lacks diversity and hence deserves to be termed "hillbilly." Ehrenreich clearly prefers the kind of racial difference she can see. At least she can reliably use that kind as a class marker. Being from Maine, I will gladly admit that the state is overwhelmingly -- and often uncomfortably -- white. But to "choose" a state for its "whiteness" and then denigrate said state for being white -- and, likewise, to embark on the project of "being poor" (and white) and then to denigrate those who are poor and white -- makes this reader wonder where the author's race politics really lie.

So, on the whole, I was dismayed by this book. But on the other hand, there are lots of clues within the work about how we might go about the always-questionable job of representation. One way to ensure that you will fail at this, I think, is to attempt to somehow make representation less questionable. The kind of documentary journalism Ehrenreich engages in here would have benefitted from a problematized politics of representation, and not the kind that is problematized so that it can then be neatly solved. As it stands, that seems the objective of _Nickeled and Dimed_, even as the author continually reminds us -- because she still feels guilty, even after trying SO HARD not to -- that she has not found such a solution. Try looking in someone else's class politics, lady.

2006-06-01T11:41:00.000-04:00

so this morning i got up to do the dreaded job of paying my bills.

when i was finished -- and penniless, mind you -- i checked my mail, hoping against hope that maybe my dad had sensed my poverty and sent me an unexpected check.

what i received was, in fact, a letter from my landlord informing me that my rent is being raised.

as kristine would say: why, god, why?

2006-05-24T16:30:00.000-04:00

this is hilarious.

what men really think about dating

2006-05-24T09:10:00.000-04:00

some of you may know that one of my greatest pleasures in life is trashy magazines. no offense to these magazines is intended, since what i mean by "trashy" includes everything from the Enquirer to the New Yorker. basically, anything that's not a scholarly journal. and i love them all.

yesterday, i read this in "Marie-Claire," part of a feature about what men really think about dating and sex. it's hilarious:

"I have my first date with Vicki, whom I met online. I see dating as a necessary evil, but it helps you learn about yourself, so I do it. My goal is to find someone intelligent, classy, funny, and sexy as hell. So I'm pleased when I meet Vicki, because it turns out she's really hot. I take her to Red Lobster. When our food comes, things get interesting; Vicki doesn't hold her fork and knife right when she eats. The fact that I have to teach her how to use utensils completely turns me off. Call me a snob or bourgeios, but I can't be with someone who has no concept of dining etiquette. I won't be calling her again." -- Jovaughn, 23, "model."

First of all, Jovaughn: wow. are you EVER a douchebag.

you took Vicki to Red Lobster and then denigrated her for not having good manners !?! she probably got the impression that since you were taking her to Red Lobster, she didn't NEED to use her manners.

but moreover: as soon as you take a woman to Red Lobster on a first date, you forfeit the right of first refusal. my guess is that she was TRYING to put you off so as to avaoid the whole awkward climbing-out-the-bathroom-window thing. so don't worry about calling her again; she probably changed her number. in fact, you're lucky she didn't punch you.

call me a snob or bourgeois (which i am guessing you'd actually take as a compliment), but i would never "be with someone" who took me to Red Lobster on our first date.

ladies, discuss.

2006-05-16T12:21:00.000-04:00

I encourage you to dig Tony Lopez's (British) take on avant-garde/language vs conservative poetics. One thing that I got out of Lopez's short piece was a confirmation of the fact that the very existence of poetics is evidence of precisely the LACK of threat posed by what Silliman calls the School of Quietude, all the while re-affirming the cultural/political efficacy of an avant-garde, n'est pas?

http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/4/tony.html

hey now

2006-05-16T11:30:00.000-04:00

So, you know, I have always thought that my blog just wasn't self-centered enough. Like I need, maybe, more about me and less about who the fuck cares on this blog.

I am, of course, joking. I already talk exclusively about myself on this blog and I find that I only want to talk about myself MORE. And since I will never be famous enough to take the Proust questionnaire in the back of *Vanity Fair,* I'm going to take this one from *Jacket* instead and treat myself to a bit of a Warhol. I'm not sure if the questionnaire was intended for taking, but that very confusion signals a metacritical moment that I cannot help but take part in.

The original questionnaire can be found here:

http://jacketmagazine.com/28/berkson-q.html

I encourage you to treat yourself right and indulge.

Sophie Calle and Grégoire Bouillier

Questionnaire

Translation by Bill Berkson
then answered by Harry Mathews,
then answered by Andrei Codrescu,
with thanks to Constance Lewallen and Harry Mathews, and with a brief note on Proust.

When did you last die?
-- With each and every bad first date.

What gets you out of bed in the morning?
-- The promise of coffee. Today, a very vocal cat.

What became of your childhood dreams?
-- They moved to the suburbs and bought a Range Rover.

What sets you apart from from everyone else?
-- Precisely nothing.

What is missing from your life?
-- A stainless steel Bodum French press pot.

Do you think that everyone can be an artist?
-- Sure.

Where do you come from?
-- Maine.

Do you find your lot an enviable one?
-- Obviously, since I really only want for a coffee pot.

What have you given up?
-- Giving things up.

What do you do with your money?
-- My what?

What household task gives you the most trouble?
-- Putting things away: laundry, clean dishes, silverware. I can clean these things but I can't bring myself to put them away.

What are your favorite pleasures?
-- Magazines, cooking, wine, cupcakes, squeezing.

What would you like to receive for your birthday?
-- A stainless steel Bodum French Press pot.

Cite three living artists whom you detest.
-- No way. Unless they are, in fact, dead, there's always a chance that they'll end up on the search committee I'm interviewing with.

What do you stick up for?
-- Babies. Worth noting: not the same thing as "fetuses."

What are you capable of refusing?
-- Not much. For now, marriage.

What is the most fragile part of your body?
-- 3 way tie: the skin on my chest, my self-confidence, and my poor teeth.

What has love made you capable of doing?
-- Getting from Michigan to Maine in a terrible blizzard; Jager shots; forgetting myself in ways both bad and good.

What do other people reproach you for?
-- My taste in men; my spending habits; inability to stick up for myself; inability NOT to stick up for myself.

What does art do for you?
-- Makes me poor.

Write your epitaph.
-- "It wasn't THAT bad."

In what form would you like to return?
-- As Ben Harper's guitar.

YOUR turn.

2006-05-16T11:27:00.000-04:00

Everyone should be required to teach an intro lit class while they are preparing for their QEs. It really requires you, if I may speak plainly, to get your shit straight vis-a-vis the trajectory of a given field.

foucault is famous

2006-05-14T20:43:00.000-04:00

the series finale of the "West Wing" managed to show the cover of -- i believe it was -- _Discipline and Punish_ not once but twice as it was removed from President Bartlett's shelf.

good for you, Foucault.

Lilac's Back!

2006-05-14T16:25:00.000-04:00

And, god love her, she's as crazy as ever.

The above is of course a reference to the ongoing "Lilac Debacle" on Silliman's blog. And please note, I use the word "crazy" advisedly; that is, given my own contentious relationship to emotional balance (in the form of panic attacks and chronic, debilitating insomnia) I don't take that label lightly. I am well aware of all the overdetermined connotations it entails. However, when one crosses the line from instability or emotional difficulty into manic, compulsive, paranoid-anti-semitic ranting, one runs the risk of losing my sympathy REAL FAST.

Lilac, I'm looking in your direction here.

Because while there are a fair number of garden-variety weirdos lurking around Silliman's blog, Lilac's particular brand of crazy is beginning to seriously impinge on the well-being of Silliman's comment fields -- if not Silliman himself. Ron, man, I'm sorry you have to deal with this. The difference here is that the weirdos are just that: likeably weird, enthusiastic conversationalists. What's not to like? Besides, you can always direct your browser elsewhere. Lilac, though, is not in control. She seems to obsessively read Silliman's blog and interrupts ongoing conversations to call Ron -- and his commentors -- "Zionist" racists. And her own blogs are largely devoted to conversations with herself that re-cap Silliman's wrongdoings and narrate what she imagines is his perpetually expanding conspiracy against her. Did I mention that it's a "Zionist" conspiracy? It really seems that she cannot stop herself. And that's unsettling, to say the least. Ignore her and she'll go away? Unlikely, and, even so, since when are we ignoring crazy facism-promoting "poets"? It's simply disturbing to know she's out there.

Here's my version of what went down, in the interest of fairness (since when am I fair? since now.): Lilac referred to a poet featured on Silliman's blog as "exotic." Moreover, she stated that the woman's poetry was far less compelling than her "exotic" looks. Now, I think that it's a little reactionary to brand this comment "racist." Her gender politics are far more egregious; since when do we accept that women can devalue other women's work based on looks? Still, the whole thing could have ended there, had Lilac not felt compelled to then go ahead and PROVE that she's racist. Lilac told the blogsphere about how she knows many "minority" women whom she employs to clean her house so that she is able to do her "important" work. She then regaled us with the fact that she indeed knows a "Phillipina" (the "exotic" ethnicity in question) who cleans her friend's house. Aside from her endemic misspelling of Filipina, is this beginning to stink to anyone else yet? Lilac managed, perhaps due to her inability to control her interactions with others, to convince us of her bad race and gender politics in one fell swoop. I won't attribute bad class politics to her too, since if I could afford it I would sure as hell have some help cleaning around here -- given that the person I employed was willingly employed as such and not being exploited, etc, etc. Because I don't like cleaning. So I'll skip that part of the argument. But one day, when I have a real job and a real paycheck, I will also not refer to my subcontracting cleaner as "my Phillipina cleaning lady." You get the idea.

At some point, Silliman pointed out -- I'm not sure why -- that Lilac is an "Anglo woman living as a Muslim" in Lebanon. I'd guess that this was primarily for context, or because he foresaw what might come next: Lilac's assertion that she was being persecuted because, and I quote, "Ron is Jewish" (maybe Silliman was also trying to somehow explain Lilac's manic side-rant about KS Mohammad's secretly being a bin-Laden, which I STILL can't figure out...). Leaving aside her problematic assumption of Silliman's ethnicity (he is, in fact, and Episcopalian or something, but who cares?), Lilac essentially showed all her cards at that point. Manic, compulsive and paranoid, meet anti-semitism. I wouldn't want to play against Lilac in a game of Risk, if you know what I'm saying. But all this old news is merely context for my point, which is this: Lilac has not stopped; she has in fact amped it up enough so that her charges against Ron and his ilk now include "Zionism." Thankfully, she's overseas, because what we have here is the kind of person who begs for a restraining order. And why do I care? Well, as one commentor said: "I thought Lilac sed she wuz leavin? Nothing worse than a huffy fuck-you followed by hanging around in the hallways for another quarter. Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, meet Lilac. She's a Muslim living as a Muslim in who the fuck cares." I mean to suggest that, by hanging around in the hallway, Lilac is totally impinging on people's rights to unharassed discourse. And it's fucking creepy. And Ron, along with his whole wacky-blog-family, shouldn't have to feel creeped out in their own home. Because when you can't be sure that you can go about your daily business unmolested by someone else's unreasonable hatred, you start to feel a bit violated, and at some point you're not really going about your business "freely" anymore.

It's unlikely that this fate will ever befall Silliman's blog. Still, I had to get that off my chest. Lilac's creepy, is all I'm saying. You hear that, Lilac? Get some help, sister.

Okay. Now can we talk about School of Quietude? I'm embarassed to say that until recently, I didn't know what this term meant. Now I am waiting to see if anyone else wants to do something more interesting with SoQ than just argue about it.

I'll get back to you on this one.

from the cupcake bread line

2006-05-09T23:25:00.000-04:00

the picture of cupcakes on jessica's blog reminds me.

i love cupcakes.

this weekend, when Caesy and I were strolling about town waiting for baby-sister news, I decided that maybe we should get some cupcakes. you know, as a treat... for me, mostly, but i happen to know that most 2-year-olds like cupcakes too.

so we went into this bakery. there, on the counter, sat these enormous chocolate cupcakes covered with about five pounds of icing. wow.

me: "do you have any other cupcakes?"

bakery lady: "do you have a problem with these cupcakes?"

me: "no, they're beautiful, i just wonder if you have anything... smaller?"

bakery lady: "something wrong with my cupcakes?"

now, Casey likes sweets as much as any toddler, but she has not yet discovered chocolate, and i have gotten the impression that her parents would like to keep it that way. plus, you really only give a 2-year-old a chocolate cupcake the size of her head if you *want* her to have a meltdown. i wasn't born yesterday.

me: "i just thought maybe you'd have something that wasn't chocolate, in the back. i don't like her to have chocolate."

note that Casey has been sitting, silent smiling, and compliant, in her stroller the entire time.

bakery lady: "maybe your spoiled child needs to learn to be happy with what she's offered."

me: "are we not *paying* for the cupcakes?"

bakery lady: "it's about time for her to learn that she needs to take what's given to her."

for a minute, this wasn't about a five dollar cupcake in Birmingham. oh, no. we were back in the bread lines of moscow, in all their glory. so i packed up my ration cards and took my surrogate spoiled brat for pie at the diner next door.

i'm updating my blogroll soon

2006-05-09T23:24:00.000-04:00

i swear. it's on my to-do-list.

except that it's, like, towards the bottom.

a whole new sarah

2006-05-07T11:56:00.000-04:00

my good friends Tricia and Rob have a new baby named Sarah.

she was born yesterday, May 6th, while I was giving their 2-year-old, Casey, her nighttime bath. Casey and i spent yesterday celebrating "big sister day," which includes activities like shopping, playing at the playground, going out to lunch, and watching Dora the Explorer.

oh, and buying balloons. that was the most important part. "big sister day" also includes Eating A Lot of Candy, or At Least More Than You Normally Get To, because my feeling is that when you are 2 years old and your life is about to be turned upside down by a tiny, wrinkled, squawking interloper who hogs all the attention, lollipops (pronounced "yahdipots") might help soften the blow.

even though i did absolutely nothing of importance to this event, i still feel proud and honored to be somehow included in such an incredible happening. i remember how good life can be. so, thanks for having a new baby, Rob and Trish. well done, baby Sarah.

leafy limbswish

2006-05-04T00:20:00.000-04:00

let's get serious for a minute.

about prostitutes. (alternate title: see, I do work!)

“Leafy Limbswish; Limpid Thoroughfare”
The Boulevards, the Baroness, and the Otherhow of Benjamin’s Prostitute

And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning…. People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her…. For it was beginning.
Virginia Woolf

Information sheet question: “Does she enjoy having her photograph taken and posing for them?”
Rachel Blau DuPlessis

In his essay “The Voids of Berlin,” Andreas Huyssen reminds readers that “the trope of the city as book or text has existed as long as we have had a modern city literature.” That is, he goes on to suggest, there is nothing inherently new about reading the city. Yet it is still crucial to contemporary narrative theory to ask, with Dianne Chisholm: “How does the city function as a vision of collective memory when official history dominates image production?” In this paper, I will argue for a re-imagination of the figure of the prostitute in the work of Walter Benjamin as an understanding of how narrative can figure the city to produce what Chisholm calls “critical countermemory” (“CM” 197). More specifically, I will suggest a reading based on Benjamin’s repeated imaginings of “prostitutes in doorways,” which figure the prostitutes at the thresholds of public sexuality and the domestic interior. Here, these women of the night figure as indexes of desire in late capitalism and thus support an avant-garde urban topography based in the erotics of countermemory; we can read Benjamin’s prostitutes as perhaps a “conceptual bridge back from ‘now time’ to a new narrativity,” as agents of “the creative intensity of the erotic and the political as a double awakening.” Of the possibilities of reading an agent at the threshold, Benjamin writes: “I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic center… but all the more with the many entrances leading to the interior…. These entrances I call primal acquaintances… so many entrances to the maze.” Benjamin’s entrances, read through the figure of the prostitute, mark the “profane limit of bourgeois decency,” where embodied desire cuts across the modern city as a “nomadic assemblage” of radical sexual resignification.

What is at stake here is a re-imagining of the prostitute that resists what Chisholm calls “the recuperation of sexual outlawry by a politics of representation” (“OM” 171). Instead of “colluding with the mechanisms of legitimization which aestheticize and neutralize” radical sexuality, it is necessary to find, in the figure of the prostitute “a final front against rationalization and embourgeoisment” (“OM” 195). I mean for this paper to be an exploration of the possibilities of resignification as a strategy that replaces “reverse discourse and other foibles of ressentiment” with a mobilized Benjaminian feminism that works within the Passagenwerk’s “entry-way” poetics of contiguity to deploy this poetics in the figure of the prostitute (ibid.). Benjamin opened this figure in “Berlin Chronicle”:
There is no doubt, at any rate, that a feeling of crossing the threshold of one’s class for the first time has a part in the almost unequaled fascination of publicly accosting a whore on the street. At the beginning, however, this was a crossing of frontiers not only social but topographical, in the sense that whole networks of streets were opened up under the auspices of prostitution. But is it really a crossing, is it not, rather, an obstinate and voluptuous hovering on the brink, a hesitation…. But the places are countless in the great cities where one stands on the edge of the void, and the whores in the doorways of tenement blocks and on the less sonorous asphalt of railway platforms are like the household goddesses of this cult of nothingness. (“BC” 11; emphasis added)

Revisionist Modernism insists, as I do, on reading Benjamin’s texts as “deployed” in the Foucauldian sense, wherein, according to Eva Geulen: “Emphasizing the kind of intimacy and clearly erotically overdetermined relationship that binds sexuality to image and image to sexuality in Benjamin’s writing surely catapults the discussion out of the confines of Benjamin scholarship and into the highly contested arena of debates over the relationship of discourses and gender, images and bodies.” To read Benjamin’s texts as eroticized illuminates the entry-ways and passages as moments of what Geulen considers “the site of Benjamin’s challenge to feminism, which has for the most part avoided the true scope of the gender problematic in Benjamin by restricting its investigations to safely identifiable motifs of (presumably) determinate gender, such as the lesbian and the prostitute” (168). Resignifying Benjamin’s prostitute would amount to a realization of the erotics of Benjamin’s texts as “a moment of discursivization that emerges in the diversification, disruption, and pluralization of sexuality and gender” in both the content and construction of the texts (ibid.).

The figure of the prostitute, then, can be deployed in and by Benjamin’s work as a figure of “countermemory,” itself a Foucauldian term, defined as “a competing narrative of the past composed of memories that exceed official public history.” Countermemory, for Foucault, is a way to “remember having been,” wherein intimacy “becomes a shared history as much as a shared space; internalized as behavior patterns through its integration into memorial narratives of pleasure, intimacy becomes the basis for a collective futurity” (11). While Foucault’s countermemory is specifically queer, and is a function of urban gay males, I would argue that narratives of sexual outlawry can and do produce countermemory in similar ways that are crucially aligned with eroticized materialist history. More to the point, countermemory creates “moments of discursivization” that confront the normalizing “sexualization of discourse” that seems to hold sway over desire (Geulen 168). Benjamin’s Passagenwerk “Invents techniques of remembrance… bound up with objects of the past still traceable to the present”; his “city of memory,” mapped by the prostitute, “harbors erotic fantasies at the thresholds of life and death, antiquity and modernity, propriety and delinquency, and transgression and prostitution” (“CM” 198;200). The situation of the prostitute at the threshold or limit of bourgeois decency should, as the Passagenwerk demonstrates, be read as a simultaneously discontinuous and contiguous index of desire that “affects the story of calling history to remembrance”; here, feminism can read the prostitute’s situation as an opening of the multi-directional historicity of Benjaminian contiguity that allows for discursive intervention (“CM” 214).

In the Passagenwerk, Benjamin writes: “We have grown very poor in threshold experiences.” The statement comes from one of the passages that comprises “Convolut O,” which is titled “Prostitution, Gambling.” In what follows, Benjamin makes clear his idea of the threshold, seeming even to anticipate later criticisms of his treatment of the prostitute: “It is not only from the thresholds of these gates of imagination that lovers and friends like to draw their energies; it is from thresholds in general. Prostitutes, however, love the thresholds of these gates of dream. – The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to overlook these senses” (494). I would argue that this passage confounds simplistic readings of the prostitute as “both seller and commodity in one”; likewise, the metaphors of “penetration” that saturate, to greater and lesser extents, feminist readings of the figures in Benjamin’s city, would find themselves troubled. If the threshold is a “zone” of the type constructed by the Passagenwerk, we could argue, along with Judith Butler, that the construction of the figure of the prostitute is no longer simply a matter of “constructivism, but neither is it essentialism.” Geulen notes that the saturation of Benjamin’s texts with “the imagery of gendered eroticism” informs “the political materialism of his thought that is, after all, concerned with ‘bodies that matter’”(Geulen 162). In Bodies That Matter, Butler writes: “For there is an ‘outside’… but this is not an absolute ‘outside,’ an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside,’ it is that which can only be thought – when it can – in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders” (8; emphasis added). “Construction,” Butler concludes, “must mean more than such a simple reversal of terms,” a foible of ressentiment; in turn, as Sue Best writes, “penetration is thus no longer possible” (Butler 9).

Put far more simply, the deployment of the prostitute as an agent of countermemory mobilizes her arrest as “trope.” This “new and disturbing articulation” of textual erotics via countermemory “cuts into the sequence” of representation (“CM” 213). Historical sequence, like a signifying chain, determines the relative immobilization of gendered representations. “Experienced in sequence,” Chisholm writes, “history appears continuous,” as does signification (ibid.). Radical sexuality “cuts into the sequence,” across it, with mobilized, eroticized narratives. In The Pink Guitar, Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls this cutting “Rupture”: “To refuse the question asked. To break through the languages of both question and answer. To activate all the elements of normal telling beyond normal telling.” DuPlessis’s countermemory as activization “beyond normal telling” points to the avant-garde potentialities of the kind of Benjaminian feminism that I am proposing here.

jimmy

2006-05-02T22:35:00.000-04:00

naw.

my ON DEMAND's free, bitch. you're just the added bonus to, like, Blow Out and Big Love.

we have an injured rabbit also

2006-04-27T21:01:00.000-04:00

last night i awoke in a panic, absolutley convinced that it was my immediate task to explain Revisionist Modernism in terms of rabbits. you know, there must be a way to resignify the narrative of postmodernism using rabbits. i mean, of course.

now, awake, i can make a relatively coherent statement about Revisionist Modernism. it starts with "privileging the crisis of representation." right?

well, yeah. but trying telling that to the rabbits.

not funny

2006-04-26T11:48:00.000-04:00

when did it get so cold again?

did somebody turn michigan into maine without telling me?

seriously, guys. not funny.

meet the parents

2006-04-25T22:35:00.000-04:00

i've been thinking about my parents a lot lately. thanks in part to the end-of-semester stress, i miss those crazies, even though they usually drive me crazy. in my family, we consider this a positive attribute. anyway, i have often been told that i favor niether of my parents, but that i look, instead, like the unlikely but exact 50/50 genetic reproduction of them. literally, like mixing red and blue to produce purple.

here's my mom, on the right, with her friend Pris. my mother is a book antiquarian. i guess that's like a geriatric specialist for books. she buys, sells, researches, and restores old books. she also works in the library on wednesday nights. her best friend is my aunt Pat. she takes one of her cats with her when she visits my grandparents 3 times a week. she can stop a child from throwing a temper tantrum better than anyone i know, although curiously she often has the opposite effect on me.

say hello to my dad. he used to be a photographer, then he produced documentaries, and now he directs commercials, public service announcements, and corporate/industrial films. in this picture he's napping on his couch with frenchy, who used to be my cat. my dad spends a lot of time ministering to his cats, taking walks, and planning trips. he also enjoys gardening and keeps a spotless house. he loves that couch as if it were a member of the family. he has been smoke-free for over a year. he goes to bed ridiculously early.

conclusion: not only do i look like an equal amount of each parent, but also i am a literature grad student who studies documentary, particularly photo and video narratives, and who enjoys napping, small children, a clean house, and trips. diagnosis ? as i suspected. i have, in fact, become my parents (at so young an age ?!?).

the end is nigh

2006-04-25T12:39:00.000-04:00

it's definitely the end of the semester. all my pens are systematically running out of ink. as if in protest.

things that are smooth

2006-04-24T12:17:00.000-04:00

over the past year, it has become increasingly clear to me that i often attempt to express anxiety by ironing.

if i am really anxious, i will also use starch.

for example, before my trip to Germany last fall, I compulsively ironed and starched every item that went into my suitcase. during fall term finals, my iron was not permitted to cool off for 2 weeks straight.

so, okay, i have a feeling that the obvious psychoanalytic conclusion finds me projecting my desire to eradicate wrinkles and to make things smooth. also, i associate ironing with my dad - he's supernaturally good at it - and my dad is a notably calm and calming person. the way he irons is almost an art. it's also superfluous, since he's so good at folding laundry that he rarely needs to press.

of course, there may be some issues with aging at work here, too.

i have also recently discovered Shashi's method for wrinkle control (if not anxiety removal): "I steam." now that's interesting. Shashi's outfits are the sartorial equivalent of my dad's demeanor - preternaturally wrinkle-free. so what does that mean? and further, does Shashi own a steamer or does he simply, but expertly, employ the "hanging clothes in the shower" trick?

can you see how these questions might be very important to my psyche ?

interruption

2006-04-23T15:44:00.000-04:00

the fundamental device of all structuring.

nothing keeps you grounded like taking a break from paper-writing to plunge your elderly neighbor's toilet.

yes, you heard me. let that sit for a minute.

just when you begin to think that the work might be your undoing, and there you are flailing around inside your head, the world intervenes.

helen: "if i knew the clog was closer to the surface, i'd just reach in there and clear it out with my hand."

me: "helen, listen. i don't care how tempted you may be. do not ever reach into your toilet drain."

if you'll allow a little self promotion, i did get the clog cleared. it took 20 minutes, and it was, frankly, a bit messy, but i got the job done.

helen: "turn it on! see if it works!" and then the sweet sound of the flush.

not so much writing a paper right now

2006-04-22T16:36:00.000-04:00

#1
chickens: roast them upside down.

#2
rewards: watching Jimmy's "Can't Get a Date" on VH1 OnDemand later.

#3
bigger rewards: going to an island in my friend erik's lobsterboat to pick raspberries and/or eat a picnic, a picnic that may consist of things like lobsters and clams roasted in seaweed, with sian and taran and madryn, in august.

#4
possibilites: archives.

#5
and with a thunderstorm like yours, i'd be insecure too: librarian gesture.

#6
an embarassment of riches: my friends.

(please note archaic use of "embarassment"= "profusion," "bounty," "more than i could have imagined.")

a lot

2006-04-22T10:22:00.000-04:00

Oh, Foucault.

"How does it happen that the human subject makes [itself] into an object of possible knowledge, through what forms of rationality, through what historical necessities, and at what price? My question is this: How much does it cost the subject to be able to tell the truth about itself?"

From "How Much Does it Cost to Tell the Truth?"

The Times on Times Square

2006-04-21T09:19:00.000-04:00

ahoy, gang ! check this out:

http://www.nytimes.com/specials/ts/home/contact.html

consider this

2006-04-20T12:31:00.000-04:00

what i am saying is that this:

is the footwear equivalent of this:

n'est pas ???

spring footwear update

2006-04-20T10:20:00.000-04:00

some of you may remember my rant against uggs at the start of winter.

and some of you, who, despite my best efforts to the contrary do not consider me the center of your universe, may not.

it's spring! break out what i consider to be the most hideous footwear fashion crime of all time:

the kitten heel flip flop.

i ask you all to look deeply within yourselves to find the place where, despite what trend-mongers might tell you, you know that this "shoe" is completely, totally, and unquestionably wrong.

there's this

2006-04-18T15:21:00.000-04:00

jumping up and down thing that i do when i have finished something. i'm doing it right now.

and then i think "Oh. *Great*! This goes on *forever*."

Ladies Who Blog

2006-04-15T10:05:00.000-04:00

i SHOULD be writing papers right now, but i couldn't resist having my say about the current "where's the love for female bloggers" controversy. it's an interesting discussion not because it's going to lead us to some kind of blogsphere sexual revolution but because of the tendencies it points to within the poetry and poetics world.

like this: blurbs.

blurbing has become a poetics "subculture" on par with blogging. a poet produces a new work and then requests blurbs from friends and neighbors, in order to lend the book some kind of "legitimacy" in the market. i do not mean this in the strictly economic sense. i mean it in the social/reproductive sense. the blurbs themselves tend to be reformulations of the work being blurbed within the discourse of each blurb-er's poetics. that is, a poet writes a blurb for a book that directly reproduces his/her own legitimacy by way of the new work. i don't think that's an accident, which is to say, it's no one's "fault." that is simply the function of blurbs. what this function represents, however, is the tendency in poetics to follow -- one could even say, to BE -- an inherently sexist, heteronormative structural kind of development. in fact, i think that it is poor form to lay this all at the feet of the Language Poets; to do so, as some do, to call the Language (and post-Language) poets "sexist," would be to limit ideas about authorship to a definitively non-Language model of genealogy and influence. that is, this is a model of infinite regression. Language Poets didn't invent it; i would argue that it arose as a response to the threats posed by their work.

so. with each new work produced, blurbs allow other -- usually more established -- poets to reproduce themselves. new work is then the "child" of influence and tradition, but not because the work itself necessarily wants to be. instead, because what the work already is (as a work) would be illegitimate if its parents didn't claim parentage. this structure then reflects back onto poetry as a whole, dragging all of its patriarchal inflections along with it. and that, my friends, is what a lot of us call poetics.

am i saying that all poets want is "legitimacy?" no. but i am saying that we all want legitimacy, to some extent, in that we want our work to be in the conversation.

i am thinking, also, of Kathy Acker blurbing her own book with a proclamation that it was all lies.

speaking of Kathy Acker, who famously "love[d] to fuck" and was "totally bored," we can also "do" poetics. take, for example, books like Joe LeSueur's _Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara_, in which the author reflects on his memories of the social situations that he took part in that may or may not have produced certain of O'Hara's poems. i also recently read Samuel Delany's account, in _1984_ of Ted Berrigan's funeral. both works had in common a kind of materialist history of social poetics, wherein the work is reinvested with the kind of mobilized representations that a reproductive model would like to arrest, perhaps, for the sake of our "national future."

we should all be concerned with reproductive politics. and so, to blogging. might it be that lady bloggers tend to have, as Josh Corey cautiously proposed, more integrated, holistic blogs that combine poetry, theory, and the everyday NOT because we are women but because we do not wish to reproduce a poetics that is structurally patriarchal? this not necessarily due to any ideology, per se, but arising instead out of a structural position that is inherently problematic for us to occupy? it's not lost on me that the examples i cited above are more-or-less "queer" texts; texts like these do significant work in "unworking" (thanks Michael) the family romance of poetics. maybe lady bloggers do this too, because, to some extent, we can't NOT do it. straight guys can do it too: look, for example, at Jim Behrle (who is a total douchebag, by the way), or at Ben Friedlander's early 1990s intervention in the Poetics List, chronicled in _Simulcast_. sure, these examples have little in common with the work of the lady bloggers i am thinking of, but the ends are similar.

i mean, might it be so simple as saying that lady bloggers represent the right to have contact without reproduction, which, if you think of reproduction in political terms, as a mechanism by way of which the family romance produces cultural fictions of unity, is also a project that could be called "queer"? does poetics need to be a community defined by a secure unity, regardless of the costs of constructing that fiction? and, am i maybe marginalizing lady bloggers when i make this argument?

consider this: "This is the vision I see beneath the tiniest gesture of wiping one's lips after a meal or observing a traffic light."

60-something

2006-04-11T23:29:00.000-04:00

it's officially that point in the semester when i no longer look forward to going to bed; instead of the gift of sleep, those hours just represent a huge block of time when i am not getting anything done.

i actually wake up feeling GUILTY.

x-rays from hell

2006-04-09T22:33:00.000-04:00

On AIDS, art, the everyday, and the collision of public and private, David Wojnarowicz:

"To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-invented world. The government has the job of maintaining the day to day illusion of the ONE TRIBE NATION. Each public disclosure of a private reality becomes something of a magnet that can attract others with a similar frame of reference; thus each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE TRIBE NATION; it lifts the curtains for a brief peek and reveals the possible existence of literally millions of tribe, the term GENERAL PUBLIC disintegrates. If GENERAL PUBLIC disintegrates, what happens next is the possibility of an X-RAY OF CIVILIZATION, an examination of its foundations. To turn our private grief at the loss of friends, family, lovers and strangers into something public would serve as another powerful dismantling tool. It would dispel the notion that this virus has a sexual orientation or the notion that the government and medical community has done very much to ease the spread or advance,ment of this disease."

we're here, we're Ruddys, get used to it

2006-04-04T10:58:00.000-04:00

In Samuel Delaney's _Times Square Red, Times Square Blue_, the author describes a bar in Times Square called "Ruddy's." A jazz bar in its current incarnation, Ruddy's had, as of 1997, begun attracting a more "upscale" clientele.

Although Delany doesn't name Ruddy's as specifically a "gay" bar, I like to think that, like Ruddys themselves, it's an ally.

And I should mention here that the bar is probably named for the REAL Ruddys, i.e., those who are Irish, as opposed to the Russian Ruddys, who used to be Rudovskys, and of whom I am one.

Still, had I known of the existence of this bar, you better believe I would have been in there demanding my free drink.

There is, also, a part of me that wishes that Ruddy's WAS a gay bar, a fact that I could, if I were so inclined, leverage against my more conservative relatives for, like, eternity. And I would probably have enjoyed that free drink even more.

in defense of pretentiousness

2006-03-31T18:23:00.000-05:00

i haven't been too into blogging lately. i have been angry about a lot of things, and i want to prevent my blog from becoming nothing more than an outlet for my rancor. despite what some of you think, i don't enjoy being angry. so i have been trying to channel my anger more productively, as my therapist might say. although he also agrees that my outrage at so much of the idiocy i must suffer is justified.

still. who likes being mad?

today the summery weather had some kind of a strange effect on my attitude. it reminded me of one of my favorite memories from grad school, a memory of an event that happened on a day a lot like this. but i am getting ahead of myself.

all week i have wanted to say something about pretentiousness. like the changing of the seasons, it is with predictable regularity that a number of graduate students express their outrage at what they perceive as pretense among their fellow students. unfailingly, these graduate students assume that they are the first to have to suffer such insult and they proceed to offer their dissatisfaction to the community at large, thinking, perhaps, that they have uncovered some secret of academia, the secret shame of our universities, and now it may be snuffed out so that they can continue their studies unimpeded by such tomfoolery. either that, or they think that they have finally figured out the secret to making the people who are smarter than they are look bad.

well, graduate students of the world, i have news: we're pretentious.

in the same way that this complaint is nothing new, the ability of the rest of us to see it for what it is - an expression of insecurity - is long-practiced. because, for one thing, many of us have tried this one. and we realized that, as intellectuals, criticizing other intellectuals for being too intellectual is a good way to make sure that nobody ever listens to you again.

and that's because, when one argues this, one is not really saying anything. it's like criticizing supermodels for being vapid. we use jargon? well, yeah. we're learning the vocabulary of theory and criticism. in any specialized field, there is a specialized vocabulary. some folks call it a "discourse," and, predictably, one's success in this field depends upon one's ability to master it. we're pretentious? in this case, meaning that we "pretend" to know things that we don't, this charge is also a precisly the point. that's how humans learn. just as graduate school exists to model the profession for us while we engage in the training necessary to undertake a career in scholarship, so we are not expected to emerge, fully formed, as scholars on our graduation day. remember the "old" logic of students as empty vessels, the one that we so vehemently disavow in our progressive pedagogical training? remember it? same idea.

a large part of what we do is based on the functions of communication within social systems, that is, discourse and narrative. if learning about this didn't entail being inside that discourse and sometimes straining, even breaking, the narrative, none of us would be here. so what's your complaint again? should we throw up our hands when we read, say, Adorno, and say "this doesn't make sense," or dumb it down in some disingenuous attempt to expose difficult texts as nothing more than trickery? to the end of what? being liberated? fidning the "truth"? has the ridiculousness of this path become clear yet?

instead, as i often tell my students, we should slowly lower our hands and ask "how can i make sense of this?" or "what kind of sense does this make?"

3 years ago, at the end of my first year in graduate school, a group of us proposed an English Department flag football challenge. We had 4 shared offices, and we split into teams based on office affiliation; 103 and 105 Neville Hall was to battle 107 and 109 Neville Hall. Since all but one person from 107 pussed out, a few professors and my boyfriend at the time - Josh - stepped in to play with my team, 109. Dr. Laura Cowan represented for the NPF; Professor Dick Brucher brought the Shakespearians; Pat Burnes, our esteemed head of Composition volunteered all 5 feet of her 60+year-old self. Laura's husband - who turned out to be a valuable player, showed up with their 2 young sons. Every corner of literary studies took its place on the field.

poetics was noticeably absent, Steve Evans and Ben Friedlander having cited the absence of football as one of the main reasons why they got into poetry in the first place.

what does this have to do with anything? well, pale, pasty, weak English grad students aren't generally strong football players. nor do we traditionally know anything about the game. we decided to take to the field to do something that we knew would be a farce. we were collectively, communally. and humorously expressing our weakness, highligting our inadequacy, and getting it all out in the open.

our team lost, despite such stellar plays as the "windowless monad," the "negative dialectic," and "difference." Brooke cracked a rib; Josh broke his nose. Deb Levine showed up with gatorade and beer. Stefani Bardin took pictures. Justin from 105 sacked professor Cowan, a move that ended with both of them lying flat on the field, crippled by laughter. never was the charge of "pretentiousness" levelled again. how could it be? we were all a bunch of shameless idiots, and we all knew it.

with that, i propose a game of flag football, english department style, on the Wayne State field. 10th floor versus 9th. we'll bring the pretentious jargon; you guys bring the beer.

both sides of the gun

2006-03-26T15:50:00.000-05:00

oh, ben harper.

you had me at track one.

64

2006-03-18T15:29:00.000-05:00

i am in the bathroom brushing my hair.

through the floor, i can hear my downstairs neighbor throwing up in the bathroom directly below me.

happy day-after-st.patrick's-day, neighbor! can i offer you a jello-shot?

itchy and scratchy

2006-03-16T13:40:00.000-05:00

i'd like to thank the women who made the wine "for women" for giving me hives.

listen, i know you didn't mean to do it. and your wine was quite good. i enjoyed drinking it. but after the first glass, i started to get a little scratchy and red around the neck. since we were talking about school, and since the anxiety wrought by school frequently gives me hives, i initially attributed this outbreak to my well documented allergy to stress.

well, not so much. school-hives usually limit themselves to my body. whence the itchy redness spreads to my face, i know i'm dealing with a real allergy. that's where the wine comes in. i don't love having an itchy, swollen face. so i won't be drinking this wine again. no offense.

worst part is, i can't take anti-histamines. my body doesn't do them; in fact, benadryl makes me hallucinate. the last time i took it for hives, i thought that my apartment walls were composing ambient techno for my enjoyment. not such a bad hallucination, but still. any deviation from straight-up lucidity is too much for this girl.

so i have to sit it out, which is a shame because i have border's coupons that need to be used today on books i need to buy. so if you see me at border's on woodward and maple later: it's not contagious.

i know

2006-03-15T23:46:00.000-05:00

listen, i know i'm a little late to the gate on this, but :

if i could be like this, i wouldn't want to be new.

69 (part deux)

2006-03-14T19:58:00.000-05:00

dear those-of-you-who-found-my-blog-by-googling- "69";

you're suckers.

love,
sarah

ps i bet you could find some really good porn by googling "head."

67

2006-03-14T13:04:00.000-05:00

has anyone else noticed how difficult it is to google H.D. ? in the end, you have to reconvert her to Hilda Doolittle, which seems, a) kind of self- defeating and b) a little violent

google won't accept the "." but try it without the "." its all high-def, all the time.

i'm beginning to wonder if this is some kind of anti-flarfist conspiracy. or some kind of indication that flarf was, like, totally historically prefigured... Kasey Mohammad, i'm looking in your direction....

(which you won't know unless you google yourself... this is turning into some kind of a mad anxiety-inducing cluster-flarf... i think i need a xanax...)

68

2006-03-12T17:56:00.000-05:00

3 things in life that are very satisfying:

a new shower curtain

a new toothbrush

a new vacuum, one that's red.

archival

2006-03-08T22:51:00.000-05:00

all this talking about berrigan and murmurs and revisionist avant-gardes has got me thinking about the way i take, title, and archive my photographs.

a beginning set, titled, maybe:

"Sundown. Manifesto. Color and cognizance."

(self portrait with john and ethan in the bathroom at central park west/2005)

(brooke at the lake house, maine/2004)

(casey at dinnertime in royal oak/2005)

(alex on julie's birthday in orono/2004)

(darren at gilbert street, orono/2004)

"there is no such thing as a breakdown"

2006-03-07T18:42:00.000-05:00

(ryan listening in ithaca/ 2005)

Berrigan:

XXVIII

"to gentle, pleasant strains
just homely enough
to be beautiful
in the dark neighborhoods of my own sad youth
i fall in love. once
seven thousand feet over one green schoolboy summer
i dug two hundred graves,
laughing, 'Put away your books! Who shall speak of us
when we are gone? Let them wear scarves
in the once a day snow, crying in the kitchen
of my heart!' O my love, I will weep a less bitter truth,
till other times, making a minor repair,
a breath of cool rain in those streets
clinging together with slightly detached air."

Berrigan and Woolf:

(LXVI and "A Room of One's Own")

"it was summer. We were there. And THERE WAS NO
MONEY. you are like...
skyscrapers veering away
(Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes)
a B-29 plunging to Ploesti
sailboat scudding thru quivering seas
trembling velvet red in the shimmering afternoon
darkness of sea
(The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers)
The sea which is cool and green
The sea which is dark, cool, and green
I am closing my window. Tears silence the wind.
'they'll pick us off like sittin' ducks'
(At any rate, it is a structure leaving a shape on the mind's eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia at Constantinople)
Sundown. Manifesto. Color and cognizance.
Then to cleave to a cast-off emotion,
(For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups are washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie)
(clarity! clarity!) a semblance of motion, omniscience"

Woolf:

11-12

"It was as if someone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk. And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very distant from these; but different. Everything was different. meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who were many and young,some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendent, the legitimate heir of the other, Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only- here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. yes, that was it - the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could."

69

2006-03-07T18:07:00.000-05:00

more from the continuing accident that is my life....

All I Really Wanted Was Indian Food

But thanks to a water main break at American Masala, the next thing I knew I was at a sushi restaurant in the suburbs.

I ordered a lot of sushi, thinking that, if I didn't finish it, I'd take it home and eat it later. The waitress asked me if I would really be able to finish it all, and when I assured her that I could handle it, she replied "OK. That's good, the baby needs it."

For a second I looked around for "the baby." Then I realized what she meant.

This was one of the first points of etiquette that I remember my mother teaching me. One day in 1980, when I was 5, my mother and I were headed over to "Holly's Hair Barn" to get our hair done. I remember we were getting Princess Di cuts. In the car, my mother said to me: "I think Holly might be expecting, but I'm not sure. I don't want to ask her, because if it's just that she's gained weight, it will be really embarassing. You should never say that a woman is pregnant unless you are sure, because she may just be fat, and that's rude." Holly was, in fact, expecting, and the Hair Barn closed shortly thereafter.

Let me repeat : You should never say that a woman is pregnant unless you are sure, because she may just be fat, and that's rude.

If a 5-year-old knows this, shouldn't everyone ? At any rate, I tipped her well, by 1980 standards.

tales from high maintenance

2006-03-06T17:39:00.000-05:00

yes, friends. even in the world of grad school there is still room for vanity.

some highlights from my recent adventures in grooming (which, sadly, did not include highlights):

- never purchase new bath products when you have a cold. you cannot smell anything when you have a cold. three days later, you might realize that your new shampoo smells like Nair. i'm just saying, is all.

- eyebrow waxing was cut in my recent budget revisions. it seemed a small sacrifice until i woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, and SAW my eyebrows. which needed to be combed. time to start rolling those pennies.

- last night, my skinny friend Trish informed me that we would be spending a lot of time at the pool this summer. de-lightful! but here's the rub: Trish is 7 months pregnant, which means that she will be delivering right before bathing-suit season. the possibility (okay, probability) that i will be sitting at the pool next to a woman who has recently given birth AND who looks better in a bathing suit than i do is, well, frankly distressing.

it is now officially time to get my slug-ass in gear. i have so many limitations when it comes to exercising that i have had to think really hard to find something that i can do. for one thing, i'm clumsy. so nothing that requires balance. also, i have zero patience or endurance, so no jogging. i think sneakers are really uncomfortable. whatever it is, i have to be able to study while i am doing it; it needs to be cheap; it can't take up a lot of space; it must be done at home. so no gym, no treadmill, no exercise bike, no bow-flex, no nordic-trac. and did i mention that i'm totally lazy?

ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you: the medicine ball. it's round. it's soft. it's unlikely that i can hurt myself with it. it weighs six pounds. it costs $7.99. and i can roll a ball as well as any 2-year-old.

stay tuned for tomorrow, when i will surely be complaining about the medicine-ball-related injury that i have somehow sustained.

70

2006-03-04T13:35:00.000-05:00

welcome home, small pink sock!

i will wear you today!

what a relief to know that chaos' reign in my home has come to an end.

jello, bitches

2006-03-01T23:23:00.000-05:00

i really need to clarify:

just because 2 out of the 3 (maybe 4, since Jill didn't weigh in, but she didn't eat any Jello either) people in a given classroom allegedly are rumoured to be from upper-middle-class upbringings doesn't make the like or dislike of Jello a class issue.

my mother, for example, likes Jello very much. and if you looked up "upper middle class" in the dictionary, there might be a picture that looked like this:

(oh and as an added bonus, my handsome and wonderful brother, Jamie, the partial reason why I am so dissatisfied with men - nobody measures up.)

Louisville Trilogy

2006-02-26T22:33:00.000-05:00

Louisville 20th Century Literature and Culture Conference, post-game re-cap.

I. old friends i had the pleasure of catching up with:

- Ben Shockey, from UC Santa Barbara (and UMaine)
- Brian Peters, Champlain Regional College (and the SCT)
- Tony Brinkley and Sara Speidel, University of Maine

thanks for helping me remember that there is also friendship in what we do

II. i feel smarter. i had the pleasure of sharing a panel with Andrew Schroeder, from UWisconsin, Oshkosh, who gave a great paper on the critical history of democratic media activism and theory. I really enjoyed the paper, and the ensuing discussion after we had presented was lively and interesting. i was glad that we were able to contribute to a panel that inspired such thought. also, saw Andrew in the elevator at the hotel with his adorable baby daughter; as you all may know, i'm a huge fan of babies. well done, Andrew.

more generally, it felt satisfying and stimulating to be a part of the larger conversation. although very tired, i feel newly invigorated and excited to do work. this can only be a good thing. thanks, Louisville.

III. some suggestions to my peers in the field:

- can we stop talking about "the patriarchy" and "the binary opposition" and "the gaze" yet? the co-opting and institutionalization of these kind of terms, indicative as they are of a really limited kind of academic identity (and academically conceived identity), causes me to cringe at their use.

for real: the "the" moment - indeed, the "moment" moment - is over. let's stop invoking the "the" as some kind of indicator of critical distance that we can use to gain supposed "authority." i feel like this strategy might be leading to our irrelevance, and i don't much like the thought. i'll try if you will.

- enough with the following: "transforming gender," "matter" as a noun/verb pun, "the economy of whatever," "speaking of" as pun, "(post) (ex) (en) (inter) - 'the' parenthesis." the list could go on.

may i suggest a title made up entirely of pretentious neologisms: "Hypermodern Survival and the Postphotographic Surface" ?

you know you love it....

- lastly, can we all agree to not write about "Fight Club" anymore ? the book, the movie, the concept : old, boring, done. excuse me, but you're stepping on my degree. i mean, whatever made anyone think that a Brad Pitt movie was worthy of theoretical investigation - let alone ten years' worth of theoretical investigation - is beyond me. in any of its manifestations, "Fight Club" does not, nor has it ever had, anything interesting to say about commodity culture, homosexuality/homosociality, violence, revolution, "capitalism and schizophrenia," or anything "postmodern."

the movie used one Pixies song really well, and that is the only thing about this cultural phenomenon that was ever even remotely compelling.

so can we stop talking about it now?

that goes for class discussion as well.

wow, i feel better. carry on.

71

2006-02-26T22:24:00.000-05:00

dear small, pink sock:

please come back. your mate misses you, and i miss you too. you were always one of my favorites (and no, i don't say that to *all* the socks; for example: itchy sock with snowflake pattern, stay gone. see if i care).

where could you be ? i eagerly await our re-acquaintance.

praying for your safe return,

mama

72

2006-02-20T19:15:00.000-05:00

5 words:
Special. Two. Hour. Wife. Swap.

And one happy, happy me.

Happy Birthday...

2006-02-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

Dad:

my Dad turns 60 (er, 46) today. this is a picture of him in one of his favorite places.

please join me in wishing "happy birthday" to one very cool guy.

73

2006-02-19T13:29:00.000-05:00

Dear Adorno;
I have been reading Deleuze and Guattari all morning. How am I supposed to make the transition to my assigned reading in _Aesthetic Theory_? I am totally afraid that my head is going to explode.

-- Am I a Monad or a Rhizome in Detroit

Dear AIaMoaRiD-
Not to worry. Nothing is going to explode. But this is a tough one. You might want to consider my critique of psychoanalysis, wherein I propose the inadequacy of "pleasure principle"-like scenarios, in which "the negative element is held to be nothing more than the mark of that process of repression that obviously goes into the artwork." So this is how, you know,

"The psychologism of aesthetic interpretation easily agrees with the philistine view of the artwork as harmoniously quieting antagonisms, a dream image of a better life, unconcerned with the misery from which this image is wrested."

Yawn. Underdetermined psycholanalytical interest renders art totally boring. Can I suggest disinterestedness as a dialectical position from which the enervation of art may emerge as a kind of Bersanian ironic distancing?

"For disinterestedness immanently reproduces - and transforms - interest. In the false world all [greek word] is false. For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art."

Yes, desire. And you know, I'm sorry about the gap left by the untranslated Greek word. I think this contributes to my paratactical style, where, according to my translator, Robert Hullot-Kentor:

"Every transition must be a transition in the object itself if it is not to unhinge the text. Thus the text is deprived of a major technique for building on what has been, or of explicitly organizing itself toward what will be, developed elsewhere; and it cannot take the sting out of repetition by acknowledging it. Instead, Adorno is constantly compelled to start anew saying what has already been said. The text produces a need for repetition that is its innermost antagonist. Thus Adorno throughout repeatedly restates major motifs: that the artwork is a monad, that it is a social microcosm, that society is most intensely active in an artwork where it is most remote from society."

I guess you could say that my text "falls back on itself." But no matter what you have read prior to _Aesthetic Theory_, you ought to keep this idea of transition in mind. I promise you it will help keep your head in one piece.

Thanks for writing. By the way, some guy named Jonathan called. He wanted me to remind you that you also have a lot of reading to do for his class, and you might want to, like, get on that.

Love,
Adorno

(see pages 8, 12,13, and xvii for more)

74

2006-02-19T12:40:00.000-05:00

"From the Garden of Theodor Adorno":

"the fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality."

(found: somewhere on the internet)

75

2006-02-19T09:44:00.000-05:00

You have questions. Adorno has answers.

Dear Adorno;
What's up with the vexed relationship between pedagogical theory and its practical application ? I mean, the more progressive composition theory I study, the harder it is for me to actually teach freshman comp. Is this situation inherently problematic or is it just me?

-- A Little Nostalgic for the Days of the Five Paragraph Essay

Dear A Little;
Please, call me Weisengrund. First of all, quit it with the nostalgia. I assure you, it won't get you where you need to go. But do consider this:

"Valid [composition] today is polarized into, on the one hand, an unassuaged and inconsolable expressivity that rejects every last trace of conciliation and becomes autonomous construction; and, on the other, the expressionlessness of construction that expresses the dawning powerlessness of expression."

That is to say that within the university, I think that the revolution wished by composition theory cannot possibly find praxis. Its political means are fetishized as ends, thereby disguising that the process takes place within oppressive labor relations determined, ultimately, by a kind of bourgeois solipsism. Remember:

"The violence done to the material imitates the violence that issued from the material and that endures in its resistance to form. The subjective domination of the act of forming is not imposed on irrelevant materials but is read out of them...."

I'm with Walter on this; the crisis of composition instruction may be partially assuaged by avant-garde documentary studies, to the extent that documentary studies likewise experiences these violences and takes part in the bringing about of the crisis.

Hope this helps!
Love,
Adorno

(p.s. the quotations are from pages 43 and 50 of my text _Aesthetic Theory_)

76

2006-02-18T13:49:00.000-05:00

i think my (temporary) cat is trying to tell me something.

she's systematically disassmbeling a stack of books on my desk.

her methodology:

sits or lies on "The Transmission of Affect." Try not to be so literal, Lulu.

earlier i was startled out of my reading by the sound of a book sliding off the stack and hitting the desk: Shklovsky.

just now, "Style and Difference" met the same fate.

a John Asbery volume teeters precariously on the edge, nudged ever closer by a small orange paw. Lulu, where is this going?

77 (not a bad vintage)

2006-02-15T23:17:00.000-05:00

Shashi (may I call you Shashidar?):

non-performative, with my best boy and my best bunny:

78 (not so much)

2006-02-15T22:33:00.000-05:00

p.s.

take that!

proud of my friend, who is a great poet and who walks me to my car in the scary garage > asshole-ry

79 (a number i've always been fond of)

2006-02-15T17:18:00.000-05:00

From Joelsin:

An excerpt from "Authored in Conversation: Tubingen 2005"

"Everyone pays their own bill—all go Dutch in Deutschland. The euro coins have made it so that servers carry a black leather pouch with a huge pocket for loose change and slots for bills—10% is the tip, or round up to the nearest bill; all prices are set this way: € 9,40, say for dinner.

The superstructure is the _expression of the infrastructure […] the collective, from the first, expresses the condition of its life. These find their _expression in the dream and their interpretation in the waking (PW 392).

I tip—awake—around 20% the whole time I’m there.

Windows are outside of the frame; ashtray and lighter on the sill outside; they were often left open, even in the winter.

One friend of mine burned nothing but books. […] Wooden buildings were dismantled and burned. Big buildings devoured small ones (Shklovsky, Knight’s Move 13).

Bad pop music—that plays on a turntable—made in the seventies by the Germans under the influence of Giorgio Moroder, but none of it that good, is coming back.

The clash between word and gesture […] “Take your places” (Shklovsky 102-6).

A rigorous distinction between historical responsibility and societal guilt: “we [the current German generation, currently being voiced by Johanna, who gave me a room for free] don’t want anymore to hear about the ‘poor Jews.’ Often I see menorahs in windows—it is Johanna who tells me these folks probably aren’t Jewish, only succumbing to guilt.

[I]f the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and by what means (Benjamin, Reflections 300).

The strasse—‘little street,’ both narrow and short.

The city became a book in my hands (Benjamin, Selected Writings 477).

The longestrasse—‘long, short street.’

The thing splits into its reflections and opposites (Shklovsky 74)."

(I'll publish more if he'll let me).

80

2006-02-15T09:10:00.000-05:00

Shashidar, this is in part what you requested. I'll try to formulate more thoughts specifically regarding the film sometime soon.

Preface.

As many of you know, one of my interests is the documentary narrative. I plan to focus on some aspect of avant-garde documentary in my larger project. Last night I finally watched the much-lauded, Oscar-winning “Born Into Brothels.” The children who make up this film are beautiful and gifted and have been born into vile circumstances that will most certainly kill them. The photographs they took, after being given cameras by the film’s director, were both stunning and heartbreaking. The vividly colored scenes of prostitutes screaming profanities at each other and beating these children made me claustrophobic and nauseous. This part of the movie “worked.”

The problem? I think this part of the movie was incidental. That is, it only served to support the director’s desire to portray herself as “savior.” The film, in its entirety, invited viewers to read the children’s manipulated preciousness as a reflection of the director. So I hated the movie. Zana Briski should be ashamed of herself. I went to bed considering how I would re-make “Born Into Brothels.” And now, as usual, I am hatching a new documentary project in my mind.

The Point.

How do I read the Passengen-Werk ?

It is first necessary to conceive of Benjamin’s work simultaneously as a body and as a non-totality. One does not have to “know Benjamin” to do so, although I think it helps. The individual passages in the Arcades Project form what Cohen might call an “uncanny lineage,” to be differentiated from a genealogical lineage by their position as dialectical images. Cohen writes of Nadja: “Breton’s narrator associates his uncanny sensations with contemporary aspects of the site where the obscure past persists in disfigured form” (98). Many of the fragments either came out of or made up Benjamin’s “other” works, which turn out, then, not to be so “other.” But is it necessary to know this in order to read the Passengen? It seems like the uncanny lineage of the work is not only outward-pointing; it is also contained within each fragment. For example, in “Convolute J: Baudelaire”: “The Lesbians – a painting by Courbet.” (240). This fragment is not rendered meaningless to a reader unfamiliar with Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire or unfamiliar with Baudelaire’s fascination with lesbians. Even if completely decontextualized, the fragment can’t be effectively decontextualized because it is a dialectical image. As such, the dialectical image is both a site and a moment, because as a text, it takes place in a lived reality that is also the text. Writes Buck-Morss: “To read reality like a text is to recognize their difference,” to which I would add, so that the reader may experience a kind of productive dialectical disorientation (SBM 240).

So far, this is a lot of jargon. Buck-Morss asks: “ Why is the Arcades project not merely an arbitrary, aesthetic representation of the nineteenth century, a political allegory that appropriates theological themes for Marxist ends?” (ibid.) I would argue that the recognition of the difference between reality and text led to Benjamin’s “uncanny” joining of the two – again, counterintuitive in much the same way that I argued in my previous post – by “superimposing” them, as Buck-Morss writes, “with the result that the project’s fragments are bewilderingly overdetermined” (SBM 53). Instead of using history as a frame that would relieve much of the pressure of overdetermination laid upon the fragments, Benjamin uses overdetermination to “bring the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion” (Reflections 182; see previous post). Buck-Morss explains Benjamin’s method like this: “In the Passengen-Werk Benjamin was committed to a graphic, concrete representation of truth, in which historical images made visible the philosophical ideas. In them, history cut through the core of truth without providing a totalizing frame. Benjamin understood these ideas as ‘discontinuous.’ As a result, the same conceptual elements appear in several images, in such varying configurations that their meanings cannot be fixed in the abstract. Similarly, the images themselves cannot be strung together into a coherent, non-contradictory picture of the whole” (SBM 55). Or, as Benjamin quotes Adorno in “Convolute I: The Interior, the Trace”: “The ordering of things in the dwelling-space is called ‘arrangement.’ Historically illusory objects are arranged in it as the semblance of unchangeable nature” (220).

I am sort of accepting “truth” as an unproblematic term here. I shouldn’t, but I have other work to do.

The Point, Two.

Or, What is It About the Arcades Project, Anyway?

To start, Cohen on Breton points toward my fledgling conception of avant-garde documentary media: “With the introduction of an objective dimension into the subject, the possibility exists that the boundary between subject and object will crumble in the direction of contingency rather than recuperation” (MC 67). Huh. This in mind, look at how Breton problematizes the “standard documentary photograph” by introducing within it the difference of reality and text in the same way that Benjamin produces the logic of the Passengen-Werk: “While in a standard documentary photo Breton’s portrait would illustrate the sentence [ “I envy…”] to which it is juxtaposed, Breton constructs this sentence in such a way that he problematizes establishing a one-to-one correspondence between photograph and the textual passage whose extraliterary existence it documents” (MC 69). In so doing, Breton superimposes, rather than juxtaposes, reality and text in an “uncanny,” “bewilderingly overdetermined” way.

Benjamin’s overdetermined fragments, the superimposed images of dialectic at a standstill, are then “juxtaposed” according to the “modern-day rhythm” of film: “The tendency in this work is to banish ‘development’ from the image of history down to the last detail, and to represent Becoming in sensation and in tradition through dialectical dismemberment, as a constellation of Being” (SBM 250). To which I would add, “what?” I do think that this speaks to the logic of materialist historiography as a rejection of a one-to-one correspondence between text and reality in favor of a conception of both on intersecting axes of lived duration. But I could be wrong.

I will let Susan Buck-Morss sum up for me. The following passage is where I find the beginning of my own project’s intersection with the Arcades project: “Was it possible, despite capitalist form, to subvert these cultural apparatuses from within? The effect of technology on both work and leisure in the modern metropolis had been to shatter experience into fragments, and journalistic style reflected the fragmentation. Could montage as the formal principle of the new technology be used to recreate an experiential world so that it provided a coherence of vision necessary for philosophical reflection? And more, could the metropolis of consumption, the high-ground of bourgeois-capitalist culture, be transformed from a world of mystifying enchantment into one of both metaphysical and political illumination?” And to Buck-Morss’s questions, I would answer: yes, yes, and yes. But in a way that Benjamin himself might anticipate, this is, in large part, still waiting to be completed; likewise it is a much more complicated project than filming oneself giving cameras to the children of prostitutes. I don’t cast myself, in this configuration, as the savior of documentary, nor do I cast Benjamin there. It’s just that I have this feeling that the relationship between the fragments and the body – of whatever kind – is still productively uncanny.

Benjamin in love

2006-02-14T22:22:00.000-05:00

For today:

"Ordnance:
I had arrived in Riga to visit a woman friend. Her house, the town, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me; no one knew me. For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame darted; each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and every streetcar came toward me like a fire engine. For she might have stepped out of the gateway, around the corner, been sitting in the streetcar. But of the two of us, I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I would have gone up like a powder keg."

And:

"The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope."

81

2006-02-11T17:02:00.000-05:00

the guilt is finally too much.
i need to confess:

i don't really care about the Olympics. at all. and i'm not sorry.

(also, i really like blink 182. i am hoping you're all so enraged at my ambivalence toward the Olympics that you'll let this one slide by)

82

2006-02-11T12:34:00.000-05:00

A propos: "Jesus Christ This Is Long"

File also under: "Graduate School is Not Easy."

“If the smoke from the tip of my cigarette and the ink from the nib of my pen flowed with equal ease, I should be in the Arcadia of my dissertation.”

I have been having an email discussion over the past few days with my friend Sian about a film she made 15 or so years ago and which I just showed my 1020 class. It’s a short, experimental documentary (surprise!) about…ummm… well so, okay, it really can’t be conceived of as a totality (but it won several awards, including an Emmy, so it was somehow institutionally legitimated). I showed it to my class in hopes that both the themes and the construction would help us make some connections between telling stories with words and telling stories with images. The film is constructed, Sian says, like a coiled spring, which I am still having difficulty with; it tells the story of how children use fairy tales to build their world (“for a child, the whole world is home”) , and then as we grow up, slowly “awakening” from this ability (in order to have some concept of history and contextualization), the fairy tale as “home” seems to disappear, only to reappear fragmented in a collection of urban artifacts, which we then engage with in a variety of ways. I guess that the structure of the film follows this submerging and reemerging of “home”; the oft repeated soundtrack intones : “This is the key to the kingdom. In the kingdom there is a city. In the city there is a town. In the town there is a street. In the street there is a lane. In the lane there lies a house. In the house there is a room. In the room there is a bed. On the bed there is a basket. A basket of flowers.” And back out again.

Part of my comments to her were that the film seems to rush at me like a soft but insistent wind from down a long passageway. And for some reason, the almost imperceptible tinkling of glass, or chimes, or something, is the same sound I hear when I read the Passengen. Well, Sian doesn’t know from Benjamin, so she found this kind of unhelpful. Still, I think that this must somehow connect to what Kristine had to say about a) the significance of childhood to Benjamin and b) some kind of non-textual, non-visual understandings of his work. Obviously, the soft but insistent wind speaks to the beating of the wings of the angel of history down the glass covered passages of the Arcades. But that’s just me. But, at the same time,exactly, that’s just me, standing there (which I actually have, once or twice – but it’s not entirely necessary). So what does this have to do with anything?

I’m glad you asked. This brings me to the part that should have been my post last week, to which I have given the working title:

“What is It about Benjamin, Anyway?”

Last week in class, I started with this quote from “One Way Street”: “And in the denaturing of things -– a denaturing with which, emulating human decay, they punish humanity – the country itself conspires. It gnaws at us like the things, and the German Spring that never comes is only one of countless related phenomena of decomposing German nature. Here one lives as if the weight of the column of air that everyone supports had suddenly, against all laws, in these regions become perceptible” (454).I guess there are (at least) two things here. One, why Germany? Let’s go with the obvious, shall we? It was Benjamin’s childhood home, the location of his earliest “fairy tales.” I had tried, in class, to address the question (posed not altogether well in Pym’s “Benjamin at the Border”) of how we might explain the lack of exteriority that Pym claims led Benjamin to NOT escape the Nazis when he could/should have. Now I don’t know about this. But, secondly, I want to suggest that the “becoming perceptible” (and I mean that in the least Groszian way possible – at this point) of the weight if a column of air IN GERMANY points to a configuration that is a suggestion of how to read Benjamin. That is, exteriority has to be conceived of as an exteriority to the body, upon which, in Benjamin’s case, was materially and historically located in Germany (even when it was also in Paris or in Moscow) but, in the sense of the dialectic of location that Buck-Morss explains so well, could not be completely separated from the movement of Benjamin’s own body through different locations in his history.

Hence the importance of “One Way Street.” Not because it exists in a genealogy, but because it makes explicit the lived dialectic that produces Benjamin’s work. So my terming it a “baby Arcades Project” was both totally wrong and productively not wrong. As Buck-Morss notes, Benjamin meant for the Passengen to contain a “fiendish intensification” of the “profane motifs” in “One Way Street” (SBM 20). Intensification, to me, points back toward the kind of resplendent echo that ties bodily, lived experiences to theoretical work not so much allegorically – which would, then, lead to a “One Way Street” begat “Arcades” kind of genealogy – but, rather, as – yes – a kind of spring. So perhaps when I said “baby Arcades,” I ought to have said something about childhood? And perhaps B’s works can, and should be read in part aurally, as resonations of each other? And that they are somehow likewise coiled like a spring? Buck-Morss helpfully points out that “Benjamin’s interpretations of literary texts have been described critically as only allegories for his own lived experiences. The matter may well be the reverse, that Benjamin perceived his own life emblematically, as an allegory for social reality, and sensed keenly that no individual could live a resolved or affirmative existence in a social world that was neither” (SBM 31-32). I would add to that, could not produce a narrative of that world that was resolved or total.

Okay, so, “One Way Street.” Fragments that imagine walking down a street, and in that street there is a lane, etc etc, and on that bed there lies a basket. A basket of flowers. Benjamin’s own reflections on German economics, on Paris, on criticism, are set alongside and are indeed inseparable from his longing for Asja Lacis. Why didn’t Benjamin leave Europe for Palestine or America? In large part, because of Asja Lacis. He did indeed refuse a kind of exteriority, but not the kind that Pym accuses him of refusing. And it was indeed a kind of extra-European exteriority that Benjamin refused, but again it was not, I believe, as Pym envisioned it. Benjamin may have refused a separation of his work from his lived, bodily experience as it took place – undeniably – in Europe. Buck-Morss: “The “liberation of vitality that he experienced as a philosopher , a writer, and a human being clearly was her doing, and for anyone who has known the creative intensity of the erotic and the political as a double awakening, wherein work and passion are not separate corners of life but fused intensely into one, the decisive significance of their relationship will come as no surprise” (SBM 21).

And this in fact seems counterintuitive to so much that I have learned about theory. In order to avoid allegorizing the lives of individual authors in their texts, maybe I have, to some extent, thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Because what about the lived experience of which that text was wholly and materially a part? Benjamin’s contribution to revisionist theories of the avant-garde may be just that, and may in turn be why – partly unconsciously – he is so wholly, bodily, completely a part of my project. Criticism, writes Benjamin in “OWS,” “is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society” (476). To this I would connect Benjamin’s work on the Surrealists, as well as to my own desire to figure a way to re-theorize avant-garde documentary media. “To turn the threatening future into a fulfilled ‘now,’” writes Benjamin, “is a work of bodily presence of mind” (483). And you know, now that you mention it, this sounds Queer to me (but that’s another intervention…still…); the Surrealists, according to Benjamin, “are the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom” (Reflections 189). He goes on to pretty much forecast my dissertation, and this is the (partial) answer to “What is It about Benjamin, Anyway?” : “Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself….For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands” (R 192).

Which brings me back to: what might this sound like? Maybe like the slight tinkling of wind rushing down the glass corridors of the Arcades. Maybe like the jangling Baroness’s “leafy limbswish.” Maybe like a chorus of children whispering “this is the key to the kingdom.” Probably not like “In tenement blocks, [where] there is a music of such deathly sad wantonness that one cannot believe it is intended for the player: it is music for the furnished rooms, where on Sundays someone sits amid thoughts that are soon garnished with these notes, like a bowl of overripe fruit with withered leaves” (“OWS” 469). (I have a friend who once very accurately likened the experience of clinical depression to “Williamsburg, Brooklyn on a Sunday afternoon in November, and you haven’t finished your homework.”) I have more to say next week, and in my presentation next month, about the “furnished rooms.” For now, I will end by offering what I think is a fundamentally aural, and wholly embodied, orientation in Benjamin’s criticism, his reflection – via his own body, and his desire for Asja Lacis – on Breton and Nadja: “…the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys… on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips?” (R 182).

83

2006-02-10T18:23:00.000-05:00

Today, as I was reading about the Arcades Project --

with the inimitable Roxanne sitting in my lap
in an enormous armchair and playing patty-cake

-- there's got to be something to that, I thought, right ?

(then spent some time looking for hair gel because R now has enough hair to make a mohawk - luckily for all involved, i didn't find any)

And Jacalyn, seeing as it had to have been a weird "Imitation of Life" moment on some level, it made me very happy to realize that those few minutes will always be a few minutes when two daughters weren't getting hurt by the world at all. I loved your post, by the way.

84

2006-02-10T18:16:00.000-05:00

oh, students.

this is a part of a student response paper relating to an experimental film we watched in class. i hope that the writer has some idea how great this is, even with the grammatical errors. i haven't read such an example of really true, pure, voice from one of my students in a long time.

"Detroit is the city in which I grew up... A town is smaller than a city. The street identifies a smaller connection. I live between Puritan and Six Mile. This can really divide a person... There is a Six and a Seven Mile gang... I think of lane as the main street, which is Lawton. 16803 is the address to my yard. My bed is in my room, which is a representation of me. The flower is symbolic to a person. The flower brings out the characteristics of the bed. This is one way to recognize the home in which I live in."

"this is one way to recognize the home in which i live in [sic]" : makes me want to cry.

and not in the way that student papers USUALLY make me want to cry.

85

2006-02-09T23:17:00.000-05:00

dispatch from Detroit, Paris of the midwest:

also, i am working on what i think about the following:

1. flarf

2. my composition syllabus

3. the left margin and its relationship to genealogy and lyric

4. but wait. i really like lyric.

87

2006-02-08T10:31:00.000-05:00

Sharon, to my hypothetical wayward student:

"Dropping this class is the only viable option; welcome to the desert of the real."

88

2006-02-07T16:16:00.000-05:00

one bad coat.

scene: gas station at the intersection of Woodward and Palmer, exterior, day. winter.

homeless man: "that is one baaaaad coat!"
me: "thank you."

(the coat in question is a brown tweed Comme des Garcons "deconstructed" trenchcoat which i received as a gift under what i now understand to be highly dubious circumstances. definitely worth more than anything else i currently or ever will own.)

homeless man: "no, that is one baaaaad coat. how long have you had it?"
me: "uh, a couple of years."
homeless man: (shaking head) "it's baaaaad, miss. real bad."

(initially pleased that this man and i shared a common love of fashion, i soon realized that to him, "deconstruction" as fashion looked pretty much the same as "really beat up." and so, in this situation, "baaaad" did not mean "cool." it meant "time to get a new coat.")

i short, somebody payed thousands of dollars for a jacket that a homeless man advised me to get rid of.
likewise, i'd be interested in his revisionist account of the avant-garde.

89

2006-02-06T01:49:00.000-05:00

white noise:

first significant snow in Detroit so far this winter. i live at a fairly busy intersection and keep my shades down most of the time, but i have recently discovered that i have a pavlovian response to the following "snow sounds":

1. the thick sound of cold, dry wind blowing snow against my windows

2. the "beep beep beep" of a plow backing up

i find these sounds remarkably comforting, i think because when i was growing up in maine these were the sounds of "no school." if i heard snow blowing against my windows during the night, there was at least a 50% chance of getting, at rock bottom, a 90 minute delay. if i heard the plow backing up outside in the middle of the night, i was most certainly sleeping in.

90

2006-02-02T22:11:00.000-05:00

Solid is the ceiling over my head:

"nor does the wild tempest rage the whole year long; for thee, too, trust me, there will be springtime yet."

- Lluis Marco i Dachs

91

2006-02-01T23:18:00.000-05:00

i want to be:

lee miller by man ray

92

2006-02-01T22:24:00.000-05:00

pay attention to this. very close attention.

Viktor Shklovsky, from "Knight's Move":

"Like air with raindrops, life is permeated with other lives, other worlds.
One wheel is turning and intersecting with another wheel. The machine is working in another machine.
This cannot be, yet it is. You know it yourself.
Twisted into another world, my wife lies there and sleeps, not knowing that I have committed an offense in a third world.

Our life is being woven on a strange loom. The threads in it crisscross.

When the fabric is taken from the loom, we see something strange: not the fabric and not something resembling a bridge and not something resembling an airplane, but a wheel working where there is already a wheel working at a different angle, like life, pierced by other lives, like air pierced by rain.

Perhaps our life itself is like rain piercing another life.

Solid is the ceiling over my head."

Shhhh... now you must say something in order to close the frame.

(photo: nick kilroy)

93

2006-02-01T17:07:00.000-05:00

De-reifying documentary: the fotopis’ and “objectless art.”

‘Malevich’s use of the word "bespredmetnoe" here may be interpreted as a means to the deobjectification of aesthetics, that is, of art objects. This twist on the meaning of "bespredmetnyi" is facilitated by an ambiguity implicit in the word itself: Malevich slides from one sense of the root "predmet" – “representational subject matter” – to another – “a physical object.” Once Malevich made the transition from “subjectless” abstraction to “objectless” art, cinema…provided the conditions for what Adorno refers to as “de-reified activity…." “The artists …will also create a portrait of Lenin in the future,” which [Malevich] claimed “will convince the Leninist and he will accept it as a real fact….[The image] rises above the materialist plan of the action.”’ (181)

fotopis’ – a neologism, “photo-writing”; tactile, affective, laying hands on the document.

(From Tupitsyn, Margarita. “ After Vitebsk: El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich, 1924-1929.”)

ninety-fat

2006-01-29T13:50:00.000-05:00

many of you know of the anguish i have been experiencing lately over my recent increase in girth.

things have taken a similar turn for my cat.

frenchy (aliases: miles, licky, westerly, francois) moved in with my parents about 2 years ago, so that he could spend some of his life not living in a tiny apartment and so that he could have a yard to play in. also my parents are shameless cat-spoilers, whereas, although i love him dearly, i tended to treat the frenchman more or less like furniture.

he was always a small cat, having been abandoned as a kitten, and even full grown he weighed in at about 6 pounds.

of late, frenchy has more than doubled in weight. he looks like he ate himself. frenchy is the marlon brando of cats.

according to my mother, he eats ceaselessly (now, i have seen her FEED HIM FROM THE TABLE, but we won't stoop to the blame game here), and because of his obesity he has developed sleep apnea and now snores as well. my mother has started taking him on car trips with her because it's the only way to keep him away from the food bowl.

finally, she has decided to seek medical intervention. and frenchy, it seems, may need to go away for a while. we'll find out tomorrow.

(the above picture is from frenchy's pre-brando days; i couldn't bear to humiliate him by posting a recent photo)

94

2006-01-27T20:44:00.000-05:00

"Petersburg During the Blockade" notwithstanding, how funny is Shklovsky?

"When Mayakovsky steps on your foot and starts shouting, it's hard not to hear him."

he-he-he-he....

95

2006-01-27T12:18:00.000-05:00

Amelia Jones: She Giveth, and then She Taketh Away.

I’d like to thank Amelia Jones for introducing me to Elsa Baroness von Freytag- Loringhoven last week. In her short piece from The Dada Seminars, Jones convincingly presented the Baroness and her “oversexualized self-performances” as somehow working to collapse the distance of signification by repeating her relationship to the modern object-fetish as “too close.” This introduction of a logic of “too close” to be used as a tool for treating history, the body, and signification in revisionist accounts of the avant-garde seems to me both appealing and appealingly problematic.

So you can imagine my disappointment when Jones herself fails to use this tool. Her book-length examination of the Baroness is bereft of “too close.” Instead, Jones offers readers neurasthenia, the blasé aesthete, the détraqué (“ragpicker”), and feces. In so doing, she manages to misread Benjamin, Baudelaire, Djuna Barnes, and even the Baroness herself in one fell swoop. And this is but a partial list of her abuses. I would argue, as I began to in class, that the above theoretical apparatus could be replaced with the dialectical relation of “too close” and “ennui.” While Jones seems to have some kind of chip on her shoulder regarding Charles Baudelaire, to perhaps let him introduce “ennui” would allow her to skip a forced, tiring, and ultimately wrong reading of the flaneur (whom she equates, not entirely correctly, with the dandy). Via Baudelaire and Rimbaud, a working concept of ennui looks something like an overdetermined boredom or numbness caused by the excessive shocks of modernity. It is thus the opposite of the grotesque “too close” which also contains in it as its cause that same “too close.” Ennui gestures toward bodily immersion instead of the removal of the body that seems to set it up for Jones’ misreading of neurasthenia. It is, maybe, over-enchantment; Jones could here avoid the binaries that ultimately ruin her gendered reading and render her concept of “lived Dada” suspect. She could also use the Baroness’ body in a more interesting way than “it smells like shit.”

Jones’ endemic misreading eventually leads her to argue that the Baroness was the model for, and can thus be equated with, Robin Vote in Barnes’ Nightwood. And I really feel like Jones didn’t start out intending this; more likely, her forced and overwrought readings got her to the point where she had to make this assertion: “the Baroness, as model for Robin Vote, is precisely such an abject, queer figure or détraqué: she can be viewed… in her stench, in her overt sexual displays…. a ragpicker and department-store thief” (189). But Robin Vote is a somnambulist, a sleepwalker, imbued with irrationality, yes, but more a figure of ennui than of neurasthenic (stinking, abject) display. It is Barnes’ Doctor who stinks, who lies in bed wearing a stained nightdress and the remains of cheap make-up, who is arrested for “cruising,” and whose room is a monument to abjection, who embodies the qualities Jones attributes to the Baroness and then somehow links to Robin. Robin’s “promenades” are not at all like the Baroness’.

But in keeping with her tradition of non-readings, Jones presents Elsa’s poem “Ostentatious,” and then proceeds to read it, well, literally:

Vivid fall’s
Bugle sky–
Castle cloud’s
Leafy limbswish –
Westward:
Saxaphone day’s steelblast galaxy –
Eastward:
Big she-moon’s cheekflushed travesty
Agog
Ultramarine venues limpid thoroughfare.

Okay, so, yeah, there is walking going on here. But what if we read the images and words dissolving into sounds (as they do) not as a narration of oversexualized self-performance but as the enchantment of the Baroness’ sexual body with the ruins of the city? Like a “limpid thoroughfare,” the moving body swallows manifold images and transforms shocks into a “cheekflushed” sexual wish using the pairing of “too close” and ennui. The revised and embodied history that this would allow for is much less limited than Jones’, and sounds to me more like Dickerman’s read of Schwitter’s Merz, wherein “the monument, emblem of the collective and of history, is swallowed by the interior.”

97

2006-01-23T13:10:00.000-05:00

ephemera, part one-billion:

in shower this morning, decided i need an "in-shower" to-do list. there is just so much to take care of in the shower. when did i become such a victim of bath-product capitalism? my shower is so filled with paraphrenilia, utensils, and product that there's barely room for little old me. whereas for my Dad, bathing is him, some flowing water, and a single bar of soap. maybe some hand lotion when he gets out. and he is one of the best-groomed and nicest-smelling people I know.

chocolate on pillowcase again this morning. i am so guilty.

spent some time this morning trading crock-pot recipes on-line. when did THIS happen? remember when i used to be cool? remember? remember? although if they could see me, most of the other recipe traders probably wouldn't feed their families anything i suggested. optional garnish: xanax, anyone?

so now i'm heading out to do errands. on list: bar soap, white chocolate, mom-jeans.

99

2006-01-18T12:18:00.000-05:00

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again
and interesting, and modern

(Frank O'Hara)

100

2006-01-14T14:05:00.000-05:00

"You know when you've found it,
There's something I've learned
'Cause you feel it when they take it away."

Damien Rice

100 breaths

2006-01-14T13:47:00.000-05:00

it's hard to organize all the things i am thinking about to make some kind of sense on this blog.

no shit, you're thinking.

frequently, and for similar reasons, i have trouble falling asleep. when this happens, i try counting backwards from 100. the logic is that this process breaks the overdetermined monolith of sleep down into steps, or units, of one number each, one breath per number. each is encountered, and subsequently overcome, in its turn. and, unlike counting forward, this process is not completely automatic. i have to think, if minimally, about what number comes next, and then i assign it a role in helping me get to sleep.

one number, one breath, one thought, emptying myself into rest.

from one-hundred to zero, the monolith of self opening onto a single smooth surface, one page, the flows (if you will) deterritorialized, uncounting my day.

thank you, Hardt and Negri

2006-01-07T14:04:00.000-05:00

for finally explaining Darstellung and Forschung to me.

this has gone on for far too long.

hand of ben enters frame

2006-01-03T14:30:00.000-05:00

this supercool photo was taken by my equally cool and talented friend ben.

among ben's many talents:
galaxy-wide prominence
possessed of the hand of god
raucous bass-playing
founder and director of the Camden International Film Festival

(okay, so this was a plug. because it's hard to create links when running blogger on a mac, i encourage you to reference my del.icio.us links to check out the film festival)

so this is the new year...

2006-01-03T12:39:00.000-05:00

and the birds of detroit are really confused. i think they think it's spring.

Alice Munro:

"It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once and a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there."

this modern life, part one

2005-12-20T10:34:00.000-05:00

in which "they" can put a man on the moon, so why, no matter what i do, do i still have all this gray hair?

and furthermore: why does a trip to the garage to get my battery checked YESTERDAY end with someone replacing some part of my car door 24 hours later and still no word on the battery?

why won't my coffee stay hot?

why am i so ungrateful that i seem to forget that at least i have hair, and a car, and coffee?

thanks for calling

2005-12-18T11:04:00.000-05:00

"As Vic Chesnutt suggests on 'Girls Say,' women have lots of different stock lines when talking to the opposite sex, but men always end up with just one: 'Why you wanna be a bitch?'"

the joan baez conspiracy

2005-12-17T10:56:00.000-05:00

i mentioned below that the joan baez christmas album constituted an integral part of my childhood christmas experience.

in a similar vein, it has also long been to blame for my dad's christmas misery.

for as long as i can remember, we owned "noel" on LP. when the LP format became obsolete, i suspect that my dad secretly hoped that "noel" would quietly accompany it into oblivion.

instead, my mother simply replaced it with a cassette. when cassettes became obsolete, i can only imagine that my dad harbored a similar hope for "noel."

this time, i replaced the cassette with a cd given to me by my hippie friends ben and cheryl, who bought it and then found it intolerable. wow, my dad must have thought, even hippies hate this album. but my mother and i are tenacious that way. our joan baez christmas album has survived several media incarnations. we're not giving it up now.

i happen to know that, given the advent of the ipod, a certain dad is hatching a certain plan to supplant "noel" by way of new technology once again. my dad is an extremely intelligent individual. but with all due respect, dad:

i am one step ahead of you.

a christmas without irony

2005-12-14T14:17:00.000-05:00

so now i am sitting here wondering why christmas according to the Pogues, from a land where the only Christmas miracle is Shane MacGowan's continuing existence, is so totally bringing me down. i decided to make a concerted effort to wrest the image of "christmas eve in the drunk tank" from my mind by revisiting some of my old favorites. first, i downloaded a few songs. then, i played them back at "ashamed" volume, gradually increasing that volume in increments until i find myself at this moment, sitting at my desk listening to Wham! at full volume.

with no trace of irony, mind you.

isn't "Last Christmas" a great song? isn't it?

i remember being about 8 years old, listening to this song over and over on my (enormous) walkman and imagining how i would one day take part in the great and glamorous euro-style christmas celebration that Wham was offering me. how i aspired, as a child, to spend the holidays at some glitzy resort in the swiss alps, drinking champagne and decorating the tree and ministering to poor George Michael's guilty feet. there would be sleigh-rides and shoulder-pads aplenty. (it may be evident to you by now that had i been born a boy, i would most certainly have been gay, and, unbeknowst to me at the time, much more likely to capture George Michael's heart). but i think that all this romanticizing of euro-trash was only fully realized with the emergence of what has become my favorite christmas tune:

"Do They Know It's Christmas?" by BandAid. Leaving aside the decidedly tepid lyrics and the fact that i'm guessing, no, they didn't know it was christmas in ethiopia, like, ever, this song is a true classic. for me, the apex of glamour was, and still is, to be honest, the british pop-star circa 1984. listening to this song today make me shiver. all my old favorites are there: boy george! bono! simon lebon!simon lebon! and all those taylors from duran duran! and nick rhodes! sting, before he sold out! sara and karen from bananarama! the thickly-brogued lads from big country! BIG COUNTRY! george michael! david bowie! the guy from spandau ballet! a bunch of people with british accents too thick to decipher! i do not, however, think that shane macgowan was present.

and Bob Geldof. thank you, Bob Geldof, thank you. then when they break into that "feed the world" chorus, so heartfelt, so sparkly, so non-american... i watched the video as though scrutinizing evidence. and now i wonder: how did my vision of the world start as a 9-year-old idolizing good-doing british pop-stars and descend in the ensuing 21 years to consist of "you're a drunk, you're a punk, you're an old slut on junk"? a mere decade ago my life's dream was to somehow get to london or st moritz and pad around cheerfully on plush white carpet offering simon lebon more eggnog, all the while clad in calvin klein jeans and blue eyeshadow, conspicuosly highlighted hair in a jaunty side-ponytail.

it could be worse, i suppose. look where boy george ended up.

a side note: my other music-induced childhood christmas fantasy? thanks to joan baez and her christmas album, which entered my life via my mom's record player circa "the beginning of time," i also envisioned the ideal christmas to take place in an isolated farmhouse somewhere (probably the black forest, now that i think about it) where my family and i did things like baked cookies with white icing, fed the animals in the barn, and made igloo-lanterns out of snow. i would have been accessorizing with a fur muff, no doubt.

although i have grown to love the cardboard creche. (whispered, in voice of George Michael: "merry christmas.")

ithaca is sad

2005-12-14T13:01:00.000-05:00

more photoproof of my 2005 "pathos" world tour.
coming soon to blog near you.

merry christmas in red-and-green ryans

suggested soundtrack: The Pogues' "Fairytale of New York."

altogether now: "it was christmas eve...."

ick

2005-12-09T21:33:00.000-05:00

i think i have the bird/dog/cat/squirrel flu.

symptoms:
-appetite for foods that are exclusively yellow (and, funny enough, squishy, which is even funnier if...). for example: banana pudding, macaroni and cheese, bread and butter, eggs, tangerine juice.
-head-in-fishbowl-syndrome, frustrating enough to cause experiencer to actually wish that head would detach from body.
-scheming to move tv to bedroom so as not to have to move to watch "Law and Order."
-inability to tend to final papers and projects (this is very serious).
-irrational wanting of my mommy.
-sleeping 12-15 hours a day (this coming from an insomniac - a major feat).

if there is a god, please let me wake up tomorrow rid of this illness.

s.o.s.

indeed, shashi

2005-12-08T08:47:00.000-05:00

allow me to present my two candidates for "cutest nephew"

Taran:

and Madryn:

my superpower:

2005-12-07T17:53:00.000-05:00

putting things away in my apartment and never being able to find them again.

firewire cable? chewable flintstones vitamins? who knows?

considering that my apartment is utterly bereft of clutter, the ability to lose things like this really is quite a feat. in fact, if i could get back every moment i have ever spent thinking "if i were a size 9 knitting needle (firewire cable, checkbook...) where would i be?" i could write the great american novel.

and it would be called "When I Went on Vacation I Put My Laptop in a Drawer and When I Got Home a Week Later it Took Me 2 Hours to Find It."