On airplane to Chillicothe, I reread Michael Amnasan's Beyond the Safety of Dreams a book which continually weirds me out and yet I felt compelled to reread it. One of few books about class and poetry scene and yet I find myself so annoyed at how it makes that classic mistake of assuming that talking about class is an excuse for whining about class and about how one isn't liked or appreciated by people of other classes. Almost no attention to class mobility in the US or what it means to be working class in the most prosperous nation in a time of great prosperity.
While in Chillicothe, finished Reda Bensmaia's Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb. Read like the series of articles that it is.
Began Mark Sanders' Complicities: the Intellectual and Apartheid.
On airplane from Chillicothe, with 5 hour lay over in Chicago, made it through Sonny Barger's Hell's Angel: the Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club (which I bought quickly at bookstore on way to airport with the excuse that it is about Oakland) and on dvd the Battle of Algiers. Had classic moment in Chicago aiport where I thought I had headphones in but had them in the mic outlet and so was actually blasting out French movie into the public space and didn't realize it for about half an hour (instead wondering why headphones were not working all that well).
May 17, 2005
Marjorie Perloff, The Vienna Paradox: a Memoir. Relentless insistence on complicating everything--identity, culture, class. This might be the best book I've read by her. It also dodges a lot of the usual traps of the academic memoir by insistingly refusing to figure her self or her family as marginal. Or innocent. I read it compulsively because I was so fascinated by it.
Perloff has been so complicated around identity poetries. Or dismissive? I can't decide if much of her work is complicated or dismissive. Or both. But it was interesting to see her dealing with her identity. And thus her arguments felt less assaultive. More like a primer on how to do the memoir without falling into the I'm all innocent trap. I felt like I also might understand her refusal of identity poetries more than I had in the past.
I keep meaning to write on Fred Moten book which I finally finished. And then I went back and photocopied all the paragraphs I had marked and cut them out and taped them into my quote notebook a few weeks ago. (My new compulsive process for note taking for essay writing.) Ended up with about six pages of quotes because I so loved the book and want to steal all of it. I feel I could just keep saying that I loved it forever. But I think the reason I loved it is that it is so wonderfully associationally written. And so smart. And so clearly explains that avant garde practice is something that intersects with identity, especially African American identity. But mainly I just loved to read about how he reads. Which is as a fan. A sort of fan of the weird and things that don't fit easily into conventions. Somehow when reading the book I felt freed. I guess I felt freed from all those assumptions that the avant garde has nothing to say about anything, much less identity, especially black identity. Why this would feel so personally freeing I can't answer.
Perloff has been so complicated around identity poetries. Or dismissive? I can't decide if much of her work is complicated or dismissive. Or both. But it was interesting to see her dealing with her identity. And thus her arguments felt less assaultive. More like a primer on how to do the memoir without falling into the I'm all innocent trap. I felt like I also might understand her refusal of identity poetries more than I had in the past.
I keep meaning to write on Fred Moten book which I finally finished. And then I went back and photocopied all the paragraphs I had marked and cut them out and taped them into my quote notebook a few weeks ago. (My new compulsive process for note taking for essay writing.) Ended up with about six pages of quotes because I so loved the book and want to steal all of it. I feel I could just keep saying that I loved it forever. But I think the reason I loved it is that it is so wonderfully associationally written. And so smart. And so clearly explains that avant garde practice is something that intersects with identity, especially African American identity. But mainly I just loved to read about how he reads. Which is as a fan. A sort of fan of the weird and things that don't fit easily into conventions. Somehow when reading the book I felt freed. I guess I felt freed from all those assumptions that the avant garde has nothing to say about anything, much less identity, especially black identity. Why this would feel so personally freeing I can't answer.
May 09, 2005
May 08, 2005
This weekend, Anarchism Now conference at UCSC. Nice talk by John Holloway.
Read Guy Debord's Panegyric last week. I assume it is a parodic memoir? Either that or totally pretentious and insane. Not sure I know enough to figure out which but it made me laugh a lot. Has very little information in it that is not quotation. The first sentence is so full of possibility: "All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles." Then the next paragraph begins with either the parody or the meglomania... "Clausewitz, at the beginning of his history of the campaign of 1815, gives this summary of his method: 'In every strategical critique, the essential thing is to put oneself exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that is often very difficult.'" Etc.
Today skimmed quickly through Chana Kronfeld's On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamic. Cynthia loaned it to me because she thought it was similar to work I am trying to do. It is. And it was helpful. About Jewish modernism and its internationalism. I confess I skipped some of the readings of individual poets/poems.
Read Guy Debord's Panegyric last week. I assume it is a parodic memoir? Either that or totally pretentious and insane. Not sure I know enough to figure out which but it made me laugh a lot. Has very little information in it that is not quotation. The first sentence is so full of possibility: "All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles." Then the next paragraph begins with either the parody or the meglomania... "Clausewitz, at the beginning of his history of the campaign of 1815, gives this summary of his method: 'In every strategical critique, the essential thing is to put oneself exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that is often very difficult.'" Etc.
Today skimmed quickly through Chana Kronfeld's On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamic. Cynthia loaned it to me because she thought it was similar to work I am trying to do. It is. And it was helpful. About Jewish modernism and its internationalism. I confess I skipped some of the readings of individual poets/poems.
Catherine Daly, Locket.
Oh yikes. A reader. So I went back and reread The Thorn the other day. And then tried to find my copy of Orientalism which is somewhere in the garage right now and who knows in which box (unlike LRSN I do not have inventory of the contents of each box in my life; alas). And then tried to rethink LRSN's work.
My first thought was to think about Lisa Jarnot's terrorism poems. Which seem to be treading on similar territory as the LRSN poems. What makes the Jarnot poems so striking/scary/great is that the I becomes the terrorist.
At first I thought the LRSN poems about Osama Bin Laden are not doing this; they aren't about "our" intimacy with "elsewhere" (and again, I want to read Gary's book as about that "our" intimacy with global culture). Then I thought the word about in that sentence should be the one in scare quotes. Their presence in the book suggests that they have an aboutness that matters? And so I think I can't really answer this question about orientalism in the The Thorn because I am having trouble figuring out so far what the stories are doing in The Thorn beyond a reading of them as the meat eating flower promised on the back cover. Or the poking thorn. The other culture (double square quotes?) that enters and requires thought? Complicated thought? Which would mean not orientalist thought?
Oh yikes. A reader. So I went back and reread The Thorn the other day. And then tried to find my copy of Orientalism which is somewhere in the garage right now and who knows in which box (unlike LRSN I do not have inventory of the contents of each box in my life; alas). And then tried to rethink LRSN's work.
My first thought was to think about Lisa Jarnot's terrorism poems. Which seem to be treading on similar territory as the LRSN poems. What makes the Jarnot poems so striking/scary/great is that the I becomes the terrorist.
At first I thought the LRSN poems about Osama Bin Laden are not doing this; they aren't about "our" intimacy with "elsewhere" (and again, I want to read Gary's book as about that "our" intimacy with global culture). Then I thought the word about in that sentence should be the one in scare quotes. Their presence in the book suggests that they have an aboutness that matters? And so I think I can't really answer this question about orientalism in the The Thorn because I am having trouble figuring out so far what the stories are doing in The Thorn beyond a reading of them as the meat eating flower promised on the back cover. Or the poking thorn. The other culture (double square quotes?) that enters and requires thought? Complicated thought? Which would mean not orientalist thought?
May 01, 2005
David Larsen, The Thorn. Mixture of freakishly nonsensical and right on the mark. It has the potential to be a book that poets are cultishly devoted to.
Gary Sullivan, Elsewhere. Also graphic. I think I adore it. Sullivan always has wonderful image sense. The images move from capitalist classics (the black mommy cat with the kitten in her mouth; the milky boy) to the more specifically weird (a woman with a being coming out of her back, its tongue licking a cup someone/thing is holding out to it). The use of capitalist classic images reminds me a lot of some of LRSN's work. But Elsewhere also raises all those issues of what happens when you deal with "elsewhere"s. The book collects phrases in English and images that Sullivan saw while in Japan.
I wonder how many people would see this as straight up orientalism? How many academics trained in the cultural studies of the 90s would complain? I was thinking of this story that Ann Vickery told me about how she did a paper on some work by Leslie Scalapino and talked some about how it avoided an orientalizing (I can't remember the details) and how all the people at the conference were like no.
It all comes back to that how can one talk about elsewhere issue without falling into all the traps. Because the answer is not to not talk about it.
So while I think that many could say that Elsewhere walks close to aren't those japanese people cute/crazy. That its respect of weirdness keeps it backing away from this. Also, because Japan is such a specific global/economically dominant place right now, it is hard to say that the book is perpetuating classic cliches about Japanese-ness. It might be more about global culture finally.
Laynie Brown, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory.
Jennifer Moxley, Often Capital. The earlier poems. Interesting to see the politics question so to the front.
Also . . .
Celia Lowe, "Between Human and Wild Profusion: Cultures of Science, Nation, and Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago."
Gary Sullivan, Elsewhere. Also graphic. I think I adore it. Sullivan always has wonderful image sense. The images move from capitalist classics (the black mommy cat with the kitten in her mouth; the milky boy) to the more specifically weird (a woman with a being coming out of her back, its tongue licking a cup someone/thing is holding out to it). The use of capitalist classic images reminds me a lot of some of LRSN's work. But Elsewhere also raises all those issues of what happens when you deal with "elsewhere"s. The book collects phrases in English and images that Sullivan saw while in Japan.
I wonder how many people would see this as straight up orientalism? How many academics trained in the cultural studies of the 90s would complain? I was thinking of this story that Ann Vickery told me about how she did a paper on some work by Leslie Scalapino and talked some about how it avoided an orientalizing (I can't remember the details) and how all the people at the conference were like no.
It all comes back to that how can one talk about elsewhere issue without falling into all the traps. Because the answer is not to not talk about it.
So while I think that many could say that Elsewhere walks close to aren't those japanese people cute/crazy. That its respect of weirdness keeps it backing away from this. Also, because Japan is such a specific global/economically dominant place right now, it is hard to say that the book is perpetuating classic cliches about Japanese-ness. It might be more about global culture finally.
Laynie Brown, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory.
Jennifer Moxley, Often Capital. The earlier poems. Interesting to see the politics question so to the front.
Also . . .
Celia Lowe, "Between Human and Wild Profusion: Cultures of Science, Nation, and Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago."
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