I'm not sure I understand war in central america much better after reading Ileana Rodriquez's Women, Guerillas, & Love: Understanding War in Central America. But not a bad read. The title though might be the best part of the book. The title is fantastic.

I'm trying to find stuff by women on literature and political education or culture and political education. And all I find are women complaining about how men got it wrong. Which is true. But interesting that there is are so few positive examples of women talking about the importance of literature to political education or even women writing about the importance of the various sorts of things that we call revolutions. (Everyone turns to Menchu.) I guess has something to do with the times, most of this literature, these movements, happening before feminism really took off. But also wondering what neo-colonialism has to do with it (neo-colonial cultures being so big into political education for obvious reasons and also being so big into masculinity).

And yet still enjoyed reading this. Short chapters were nice. Although lost interest in the in depth reading of the novels (which is usual for me).

This book is so close to Maria Josepfina Saldana-Portillo's The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (read this a few weeks ago) that it made me wonder. Actually I think it is that Saldana-Portillo's book is so close to this book. This one is copyright 1996 (can't tell if it was published in Spanish earlier or not).  Saldana-Portillo is 2003. I think I got the citation for this book from the Saldana-Portillo book.

Made me want to read:
Rogue Dalton's Poor Little Poet that I Was. Is this out in english?
also
They Won't Take Me Alive: Salvadorean Woman in Struggle for National Liberation.
Margaret Randall, Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle

Looking at Dangerous Voices again today as I work on this poem.

p. 126
Women writers, as Schenck observes, seem less willing to make a rupture with their dead, maintaining their relationship to their predecessors beyond the grave by refusing to accept the finality of death. They are also aware that the tears and cries that are their immediate response to loss go beyond the conventions of elegaic poetry but have an undeniable value.

 

Over the last couple of days . . .

David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. A lot of his work feels like a rehashing of basic anarchist ideas. And I always want him to complicate his critique of the academy. I keep thinking oh, I know there are anarchists in the academy and there are people who even if they are not, at least understand what it is. But then I saw him give a talk at UCSC earlier in the year (and he was one of the main reasons that I wanted to go to this Other Globalizations conference) and he was almost I would say hectored at the conference (which is unusual academic conference behavior). His talk wasn't that great at the conference; I think the hectoring audience made him really nervous and he got all flustered. CW, who went with me, wanted to walk out but I told him he should stay to see the academic response to the classic anarchist position but he said he had seen it too many times before and it just made him depressed. So I guess maybe the academy still needs all this basic stuff.

This piece has a little more depth but goes over the basics. The importance of getting rid of borders. The refusal of anthropologists to give any credence to anarchism despite the fact that many study perfectly functioning anachist societies. Etc.

To look up . . .

Paul Virno
Paul Lafarge, The Right to be Lazy
Lauren Leve

Annoyed at the lack of a works cited or footnotes or anything in this Prickly Pear book.

Then I also read Gail Holst-Warhaft's Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature. Allison Cobb had recommended this to me. We were discussing on subpoetics-l the Michael Moore film. She was complaining about it being too individualist and overlooking collective response to the war. And I was agreeing but also saying that I felt that the lamenting women in the film were a sort of chorus. And she mentioned that she had been reading this book. I got it also because I thought it might help me with this stream poem that I keep working on and need to have done soon and it did. I loved the examples. And I loved the historical data on lament, which I didn't know that much about.

In the middle of reading it I developed a fantasy of doing a sort of world forms of poetry course that would be more cultural study than aesthetic study.

This lead me to Steven Feld's  Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. He is hero of mine since he left U of Texas at Austin but more on this book later. I read the first twenty pages and then got caught up in  Ileana Rodriquez's Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America  this afternoon but still not done.  

I've also been working on Charles Altieri's The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects the last few days. I almost always find his work hard going and yet worth the work finally.

There is this passage where he talks about Swann pursuing jealousy "intensifying it and actively attempting to appreciate the intricate shifts in sensibility it creates for a love affair" and I was immediately thrown back to my junior year in college when I was obsessed with this guy who was constantly avoiding me and I spent an entire summer on the couch in Ohio reading all of Remembrance of Things Past and feeling this intense empathy, almost embarrassment, with everyone in it. The emotions that this very long work provoked in me have been something that I have often thought about but have not been able to understand. Suddenly with this book I thought I might be able to think about it more.

He is on to something, that we don't think enough about emotions in our talk about art/literature. And my evidence is that I found each of his close readings (and these close readings of poets like Creeley and Oppen are one of the real pleasures in this book) very strange. So strange that I started to play a game where I would read the poem or look at the painting he was going to discuss and then I would imagine what I might say about it and then read what he wrote with great surprise. So I would look at Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller and think oh yes, a story about class and desire; end of story. And then I would read Altieri and he writes "What the boy registers about being moved becomes visible only in the implication that his body can no longer quite sustain the attitudes it could sustain before this encounter. So rather than locating intentionality in belief, this painting locates it in the boy's sudden sense that his powers to formulate beliefs about himself are sliding away into the hand and out to the sword. Where belief might be, the painting offers only this sense of beliefs now irreducibly inadequate."

But I don't mean strange as a dismissal. I mean that he is reading against the conventions I've been trained in. And thus the getting at something that is often overlooked. And this is something that has the potential to change how we read. The book feels like to me like this analogous moment: the moment when I realized that racism isn't rational, isn't explained by things like economic factors, and that it might only makes sense with some frame that is more complicated, such as psychoanalysis. (I think it was reading Zizek years ago that I got this insight from but I can't remember its history in my brain now.) Or what matters is how this book is arguing that there is something about reading that isn't rational finally and we need a more complicated frame for it.

This morning, Lindsay Waters's Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. I'm sort of interested in how the academy deals with the pressures of changing publication norms. In part because the poetry subculture has already gone through a version of this and not only survived but thrived. And so a lot of this talk often seems alarmist to me. Or sometimes I think it is worries by those at the top of the heap that the heap will level out. Which is pretty much what happened in the poetry publishing world. A book published by Penguin and a book published by Subpress can easily sell the same number of copies. And this levelling out has been overall a good thing for poetry. It has taken poetry back to communities. It has encouraged poetry to be something that is shared among friends. (The bad part has been that has let a sort of myopia overtake the genre but I'm not sure that support from big publishing companies was helping prevent that all that well back in the days of Lowell and Frost and poetry books on the big publishing houses.)
 
But poetry subculture is in many ways the opposite of the academic one. There is not the same huge network of institutional support. There is not the publication pressure. Waters wants to keep the book (which I also want to keep but I also think that it has to be in dialogue with the electronic more than he does; I think electronic publication might be perfect for most academic work since it seems to be so accepting of having such a short shelf life). And also the idea (which I also like and think is what this discussion should be all about). And he is also supportive of that argument that academics shouldn't have to publish (which came up in the PMLA a few years ago). Which I more or less feel mixed about. I'm not convinced that less publishing pressure helps anything. Waters says it will improve quality which I don't think is true; good work happens outside of all this. And I also remember in Hawai`i, which didn't have huge publication pressures, feeling sort of annoyed that colleagues who are smart and have crucial things to say are not getting their ideas out, ideas which I felt I needed to read and see in print and if they were in print they would help us as a department be better or let us have a more complicated discussion about things like anti-colonialism. I felt that their work would matter. In other words, if you think that most academics don't have anything to say, not publishing might be a good idea. But if you think academics have something to say or should have something to say, then you don't want this. And I guess I think some academics have something to say and some don't. And so the answer is more pressure on this (and less thinking about whether publication should be required or not).

After I wrote last post, I went out for a run.
 
And as I ran I thought more about the "I am a child of ___" way of thinking that had bothered me in the Pacific Places, Pacific Histories collection (and which C had felt might be unfair).
 
I began by wondering if I was a child of Chillicothe (the only place I could consider myself a child of; so far I have been an immigrant to Annandale, Buffalo, Manhattan, Albany, Honolulu, Brooklyn, and Oakland...). And I thought in some ways that I was. I do feel that I am an Ohio poet when I have to put place before poet. And I like it a lot when the state sees me as an Ohio poet (and reviews my books in their state library newsletter, etc.). But I just went home for a weekend and just happened to attend high school reunion and really felt strongly the ways in which I am not really a child of Chillicothe anymore (high school football player, now chubby, reminded me when he introduced himself to me as another high school football player and I believed he was the other person; I did not have detailed local knowledge anymore). And I've been trying to write this essay on Chillicothe and the prison industrial complex for years and failing because I feel nervous about writing about Chillicothe when I'm not there anymore.
 
But then I thought well there are all these ways that thinking you are a child of a place can be so positive. It can be the beginning of an environmental and political consciousness for the place. I can be reformatory. It can allow someone from elsewhere to feel that the place matters and deserves protection. It doesn't have to be just a brag. (Although I will not buy a meekness or a humbleness to the word "child" argument; the word makes a heavy biological claim.) What matters is what you do with the claim. Anyone who has taught at UH for years has done something with the claim.
 
Perhaps if I thought more about how I was a child of Chillicothe I might do more work to make it less environmentally fucked up.
 
So then I decided I was wrong and from now on whenever anyone says they are the child of a place I will say "awright!" 
 
(And I'll hold off my mixed reservations about the peace corps for some other time.)

Today Chris Nealon's The Joyous Age. I am going to a Joyous Age party this afternoon. It is a fun read. Prose poems and poems. Somewhat Ashbery style. Or maybe larger than that, somewhat New York School style. I like reading work by friends because you end up getting to think about how the work intersects with the person you know. I love the lines that begin the poem "Ecstasy Shield": "No it's not a condom / Just the second person."
 
Then was caught by this line in "Yours Alone": "To be fair, years of training got me here, long days flexing my thighs atop a worthy steed, and nights repeating the 'u'-sound in 'aucune idee' to give the firmest shape to my confusion--no, nothing in this moment was got for free, not in America, whose children link their arms just once a generation to call their elders fools and then subside into a collective isolation so untraceable in origin, so emulsified, you have to wonder how we made it to the barricades to start with." I think this struck me because I'm feeling stuck in my collective isolation all the time this summer. 
 
Maybe it isn't Ashbery but I'm reading it like I read Ashbery. Mark Wallace used to say that whenever you look at someone's copy of Three Poems you see into someone's soul (ok; he probably didn't say that but that is my read of it). What he said was something more like everyone this profound relationship to it but everyone underlines different parts of it and so each person has a different profound relationship to it and you can see someone's profound relationship to the poem if you just look at how they've underlined it. It is a different profound poem for each different person. I thought this was also in Joyous Age.
 
Then C. called and suggested that maybe I was being too harsh about Pacific Places, Pacific Histories (we'd been discussing it via email). She hasn't read the book yet. But I usually listen to her when she says I'm being too harsh. And I want to look at the book again but I have already taken it back to the library because I had to get it out via ILL. But this set me to thinking about what it means to talk about being closely identified to a place you are not from. And I thought about what sorts of guidelines I would set for myself. And I came up with the usual sorts of things... make it clear you are not from the place; admit you learned from the place but also that your knowledge is different (and thus not necessarily deeper or better) than someone who has been a part of a place from birth and immersed in a family who has been there for generations; don't claim a special ownership knowledge of unique religious and cultural practices; don't speak for the other culture or claim to be an authorized spokesperson; make politics of arrival clear (because most people arrive in these places with a whole colonial apparatus supporting them and shaping their vision; I went to Hawai`i carrying the US's colonial educational apparatus). I think it was this last one that I felt was missing from so many of the essays in the collection.
 
I was also thinking of all this because I was requested to submit a personal essay for a collection of essays coming out on Penguin. I sent in an essay that was about my domestic relationship and also about living in Hawai`i and the complicated politics of that. The editor wrote back first that the essay was too abstract. And then when I asked her what abstract meant she said that she wanted me to remove the political stuff from the essay (she also didn't like the tense in the essay; I had refused to use first person). I don't think I want to do remove the political stuff (the tense change I will entertain) but I'll decide this later.
 
But this also made me wonder some about when writing about places that are not one's own but have changed one in dramatic ways what one has to do and does one have to do it again and again? Does every essay by every haole in the Pacific have to investigate once again how they are necessarily aligned with colonialism or can one just assume this and then get one with the more optimistic story of how the place changed one? My first reaction when the editor asked me to take out the politics of the story of arriving in Hawai`i with my partners was that I would be so embarrassed to write that essay, to write the essay that talks about arriving in Hawai`i and doesn't admit all the problems of arriving in Hawai`i. It would just make Hawai`i into the tropical background of a romance. But that doesn't mean everyone has to make the same decision.
 
So I don't know. Also thought some not only about what sorts of guidelines I would make for myself but also what sort of things I valued about this writing (otherwise why do it if it doesn't matter). And I thought well I really think everyone should be writing/talking to/thinking about everyone else, every place else. So I value the project of cultures engaging with other cultures (one form of which is anthropology). And I say this even as I know this is risky and full of inequalities that make this engagement difficult. But it is never an answer for me to just say, well no one should talk about any other culture, even if the path is fraught with troubles.

Anyway, still lost on this issue. I had hoped it would go away when I left Hawai`i and maybe it will yet. Perhaps if I stop reading about Hawai`i it will go away. Perhaps I keep salting the wound.

Read around in Emer Nolan's James Joyce and Nationalism for this article I'm working on. I skipped some of the chapters on The Dead and only read some of the ones on Ulysses. I was reading it for what it had to say on Finnegans Wake mainly. She has an interesting take on the book. Seems to argue that the book is clearly anti-colonial (she uses post-colonial). And that it couldn't have been written out of any situation except colonialism. But also wonders what it means that the critics can so consistently explain this away. Doesn't really go into all that much the way that modernist language politics, or what reads to us still as moments of language difficulty, have so consistently been read as apolitical and what that tells us about us right now and not about modernism. Instead she sees postmodern as clearly being read as postcolonial, which might be somewhat true and also somewhat not, but lets "us" be on the good side. I keep wondering if this question of critical misreading matters or not. Does it discredit the Wake, or the project of the Wake, if the critics keep reading it wrongly (it isn't even like there are that many critics of Finnegans Wake; it might be least read canonical book of all time; perhaps Stein's Making of the Americans gets second prize)? I like how she takes on the critics though. 
 
Anyway still trying to muck my way through the Finnegans Wake part of this article. I fell off the paper writing wagon. I was trying to jump from article writing wagon to prose writing wagon. And then I fell in the middle. Now trying to get back on article writing wagon and attempt transition again. July sucks I think.

Today read very quickly, almost skimming Tagore's Selected Writings on Literature and Language. I was looking for something that resembled some quotes I had read in Dipesh Chakrabarty's article "Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal." I think the essay I wanted is "Bengali National Literature," which is in this collection but doesn't really say what I wanted it to say (which I think was out of character for Tagore anyway... I wanted something on literature and political education; this is somewhat related but on literature and nation). In the meantime got interested in Tagore's discussion on language politics . He writes a lot on the negotiations between Bengali, English, and Sanskrit. Also became interested in his defenses of folk literatures. He uses wonderful, weird metaphors in his essays. Here is one from an essay called "The True Nature of Literature": "Time's cowshed has its doors open: the cow does not yield any milk, but chews up the plant. That is why that lopped plant of human hope, faith, and love sells today at such a premium in the markets of poesy. The cow, moreover, has to be scrawny, its bones showing, its horns broken, its back full of sores pecked at by crows, its tail loose-knotted and twisted out of shape by the carter. If the author carelessly allows it to be healthy and handsome, it will be branded with the stigma of mid-Victorianism, and driven through the fields of modern literature to its death at the critic's slaughterhouse."  There are a dozen of these sorts of crazy metaphors in each essay.
  
Also in the last few days but didn't get mentioned because I had left the copy at my office the collection Pacific Places, Pacific Histories: Essays in Honor of Robert C. Kiste. E. had recommended it to me. Or had mentioned to me that it was out. It is like many fetschrifts a weird collection of essays. The book opens with an essay by Mac Marshall in which he describes arriving in Hawai`i on a military ship (Navy father) but does not once address the colonization of Hawai`i by that same army. And then in the next paragraph describes his ties to the islands with references to family time shares and his owning land on the Big Island. This sort of sets the scene for the collection. There is a lot of talk by those who are not from the islands about how the islands are so personally important to them which is combined with dismissal at moments of Hawaiian political movements (the collection includes mainly anthropologists and most do their work in other parts of the Pacific which often get seen as more authentic than Hawai`i with its close ties to the US). David Hanlon writes how he is "a child of Wone" and his reasoning seems to be that he spent time there in the Peace Corps. (E. originally pointed this quote out to me.) Stewart Firth, whose anti-nuclear work on the Pacific I have some respect for, has an essay where he more or less dismisses Hawai`i and Hawaiian Studies. Terence Wesley-Smith opens his essay by speaking of his childhood rancor which was caused by his "marginality" as a Protestant in Ireland. At moments the essays feel like train wrecks in progress. It feels like everyone is falling into the obvious dangers of writing about the Pacific when you are not from the Pacific and have entered into it only as an adult, as an academic. There is in general almost no acknowledgement in most of the essays of resistance, to globalization or to colonialism, of any sort and also almost no acknowledgement of any sort of cross-cultural-ness (no James Clifford sort of celebrations). Few political positions are taken or stated. Little questioning of the enterprise of anthropology. But it might just be that anthropology sort of freaks me out (even as I'm not against it; I think everyone needs to study everyone else). I get nervous everytime I hear in this book a story of someone arriving from somewhere else to study and do nothing else and how everyone welcomes them (or eventually does even if not at first).
 
And yet at other moments I was having intense empathy. At a certain point I had to put the book down because it made me miss Hawai`i too much. I kept getting these waves of images of the beach and the water, they were located in my chest but would spread out from there, and I kept getting sadder and sadder.
 
The book isn't all weird, all haole. There are several other interesting essays. Teresia Teaiwa is here with her usual combinaton of complication and curtness. I was fascinated by Brij Lal's, the editor of the collection, descriptions of USP (I love the idea of USP) and Fiji in general (his essay at least seems to acknowledge some of the problems, some lack of knowledge, about Fiji despite his being born there, or perhaps his being born there and yet not Fijian has given him the crucial insight into how little he knows that is more difficult for anthropologists to admit to). Also funny play-essay by Joakim Jojo Peter. And these essays admist the others at least let the book give a picture of some of the complications of writing about place in the Pacific. 

 

I've been lost since the first of July. Doing Chain stuff. And then working on anthology, attending interviews for position that is open here, etc. I feel like the summer is slipping away.

So far, I've read Nicolas Guillen's The Daily Daily. Guillen is an Afro-Cuban poet. This book is a fascinating collage poetry project. It reads very much like Olson or Williams but there seems to be little evidence of influence because Guillen did not read English (or so the introduction tells). The poem, I guess it is a poem, collects a lot of weird historical data on Cuba up to 1958 (year Castro takes power; Guillen was in exile up until then). The poem was published in 1972. The work is very fragmented. Weird advertisements. Funny sonnets. Observations. etc. None of it connected. I found the book in the stacks at Berkeley when I was looking for Man Making Words, Guillen's selected. None of this work appears in the selected. This book is much more interesting to me than the selected poems which I find at moments too easy (but I am always wondering if something gets lost in the translation). I feel like I have suddenly discovered a book I should have known about all along.

Joan Retallack gave me a copy of her essay from the 1940s conference in Orono on Stein, "Wars We Have Seen: Politics and Poethics of Stein in the Forties." One of the best summaries I've seen of Stein's hard to figure out politics in the 40s. I get confused when she starts to distinguish between political statements and poesis. I don't understand why they don't overlap more. And I think I am not so optimistic as she is about the power of poesis. But I always find her work interesting in very dramatic ways. I really enjoy reading it.

Working on Altieri's The Particulars of Rapture. Hope to finish it tomorrow.

Didn't get as much reading done on airplane as I thought I might. But the good news was that I was sleeping all the way there.

On the way back though...

Lee Haring, "Techniques of Creolization" . . . a few useful moments. I like its formal focus.

Sianne Ngai's "Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in 20th Century Aesthetics" which was perfect and I read it right after I had made a note to admit to the unreadability of Finnegans Wake in my paper and found this by Sianne on Making of the Americans...

"few savvy, postmodern readers are likely to admit to being
"bored" by The Making of Americans and perhaps even less likely
to being "shocked" by Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman. By pointing
to what obstructs critical response, however, astonishment and
boredom ask us to ask what ways of responding our culture makes
available to us, and under what conditions. As "dispositions"
which result in a fundamental displacement from secure critical
positions, the shocking and the boring usefully prompt us to
look for new strategies of engagement and to extend the
circumstances under which engagement becomes possible. The
phenomenon of the intersection of these affective dynamics, in
innovative artistic and literary production, will thus be
explored here as a way of expanding our notion of the aesthetic
in general."


Also, Neil Lazarus "Postcolonialsm and the Dilemma of Nationalism: Aijaz Ahmad's Critique of Third-Worldism"... fairly hard hiting on Ahmad's work. helped me think some about his work which I have mixed feelings about.

Finished Brownstein's World on Fire which I thought was very amazing and good. It fails when he brings in quotes (the material both not that interesting and his incoporation of it not that skilled; he wants to talk with others but can't seem to give them any sort of respect that will let them come off as not part of the drudgery of the poem). Very much in the Peter Dale Scott tradition (with its disregard for the aesthetics of poetry; both using the form more to collect information; long conversational lines; placing of self in complicated world politics). This one will stay with me for some time. Despite its moments of troubling sexism (or maybe that is too strong a word, something weird about gender going on here where it gets tied up with his personal relationships so women who reject him end up being part of the evil system with their cell phones, etc.; they just can't see things the way he does; but then no one can--this book is very much rooted in individual experience, very 70s feel to it). And also despite Brownstein's inability to not be pious, even though he keeps admitting to it, sort of. Would like a little more attention to collectivity somewhere. But still, interesting book.

The best I've done lately is just reading around because I've been so anxious.

Read some back issues of New Left Review. Jameson on utopias, etc.

Perhaps most notable of this reading around is an essay by Rod Hernandez in XCP called "Pocho-Che and the Production of a Transnational/Transcultural Poetics." Interesting just because I didn't know anything about this literary movement.

Yesterday read article by Michael Levenson "Does the Waste Land Have a Politics?" Found this very helpful.

The day before read a series of articles on Finnegans Wake...

David Spurr's "Writing in the Wake of Empire"
(which I had read a few weeks ago because I found a different marked copy on my desk but I had no memory of the details. What is this telling me about my reading/about the academic essay?)

Reed Way Dasenbrook's, "Philosophy After Joyce: Derrida and Davidson"

Rosa Maria Bosinelli's, "The European Finnegans Wake Study Group: 1970-71"

Jacob King's "Polyglotism in Rabelais and Finnegans Wake"

Recently read half of Bill Ayers Fugitive Days and it looks like I am unlikely to finish it. Nothing wrong with it but just lost momentum. It is a memoir by Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground. I think I lost momentum because it isn't that well written. Or maybe is too carefully written. I don't know. I've had it on my desk for a few weeks planning to finish it but I seem to not be picking it up each time I want something to read at night when I am too zonked to read the other shit I need to read, which is why I started reading it in the first place. Maybe it just isn't for late night reading.

This morning read a not yet published essay Rob Wilson sent me about Henry Opuakaha'ia, "Henry, Torn From the Stomach." Opuakaha'ia is one of the first, the first?, Hawaiians to come to the east coast of the continent. He studies at Yale. Eventually gets sick and dies. Rob's essay is mainly about naming. I like to read Rob's work because it teaches me a lot about how work gets made through approximation, through ideas that are near each other, and then the trick is to spin this stuff that comes to you in your life into something elaborate and interesting. It isn't that his work isn't researched, but just that it feels as if he lets all sorts of things into it while doing the research. Maybe like sea sponge. The article soaks things up nearby and transforms them.

Going to Chillicothe for the weekend so there is a chance I'll get reading some done on the plane. Or that is my hope.