This weekend while camping at Mono Lake reading Joanne Kyger's Big Strange Moon in the tent with flashlight. Lots of eggs in it. And parties. I usually don’t like to read diaries, too self aware, but couldn't stop reading it. And then kept saying things after I read it, like Joanne couldn't get a beer in India. Or Joanne likes everything to be split evenly. Or... Talking with Stephanie the other day about conversation she had with someone about flicker accounts and how they only show the parties and not to the usual daily stuff, like yoga or eating breakfast or just reading, and thus make it look like all one’s time is spent at the bar. This book similar to that.

Reading around in modernism and colonialism, jumping from article to article.

Carole Sweeney's "'One of them, but white': the Disappearance of Negro: an Anthology" in Women: a Cultural Review. And also her article "'Le Tour du Monde en Quatre Jours': Empire, Exhibition, and the Surrealist Disorder of Things" in Textual Practice.

Then another article on Negro: an Anthology by M. G. Shanahan, "Visualizing AFrica in Nancy Cunard's Negro: an Anthology" in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. This article is really good at moving between nuanced critique and attentive listing to moments when the anthology is doing some interesting work.

And then this Hal Foster article, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art" in October, that I have memory of reading in the past but not sure when or why. This article is wonderfully didactic. Written in 1985. So much fun.

David Bate's Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Social Dissent. The chapter on the anti-colonial exposition by the surrealists goes over in some detail the support of the communist party for the exposition.

Edward Marx's The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry.

Continuing catch up...

So three of the five books I requested from ILL came in on the same day. And then I have had a week or two to read them. Which I guess is good. I've made it back to reading finally.

I read around in Ian Baucom's Out of Place over the last two weeks but not with enough leisure and so skipped some chapters. I think I will buy this and return to it.

And then plowed through Neferti Tadiar's Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequenes for the New World Order from beginning to end. A strangely easy read.

Both books feel very much under the sway of Jameson in interesting ways, moving through architecture and literature (and film with Tadiar). Tadiar has interesting chapter on the flyover, an overpass that extends over a busy road so the car can escape the congestion of the intersection. Baucom has nice chapter on Victoria Terminus and Kipling (apparently Kipling's father had some role, Baucom says directed "preparations for the 'Oriental' details," in the building of the Victoria Terminus).

And yet very differently written. Baucom's book has very reasoned and highly footnoted scholarship (super small font also). Tadiar's book has a lot to say about feminism as it shows up in the Philippines and yet it is as if feminist criticism from either the Phillipines or the US, and this seems true of other scholarship also, barely existed (she has just a few quotes from work by her colleagues Haraway and de Lauretis). I was interested in this decision and took it as a decision but it did feel like a loss to me in the last chapter on Nora Aunor just because I imagine that this chapter has the potential to do some reshaping of the US feminist writing that is clustered around film.

I was somewhat disorientated by what Tadiar at the end calls her "feminist irony," ("the tone I adopt when speaking about 'prostitution' and 'slavery,' calling the Philippines 'she,'"...). Just because I felt it covered over some difficult issues (when is prostitution something different from slavery? and there was so much time spent on forced prostitution that I kept having to sort through it to get at the economic/immigration issues, etc.). And I kept getting stuck on it when reading it and didn't recognize it as a decision until I came to this passage in the conclusion.

And yet struck at other moments by really moving passages.

Such as this from the beginning of chapter on "Metropolitan Dreams":

I have always experienced Metro Manila as a generally flat city. Ostensibly because of flooding problems, it has no underground transport system, nor do the majority of its houses have basements. With the exception of commercial office buildings, hotels and condominiums, most of its structures are no more than a few stories high. Moreover, there is no single public monument from where a view of the entire metropolis can be seen. As such, most people have no access to an aerial perspective. I, like most residents, maneuver around the city without a mental aerial map (without, even, a sense of North, South, East and West); instead, I get around with images of seriality, that is, routes that I can trace by imagining the flow of adjoining objects on particular pathways. This is the kind of fluency one develops in a congested, view-constricted space like Manila. One might call it imaginary urban tunnelling, except that all the tunnels are aboveground. And when one moves through this saturated space, submerged in the inundation of people and matter, it is like swimming underwater in a shallow metropolitan sea. (p. 77)

Also loved this from the last chapter on "Hope":

It is for this reason that I have argued in this book for cultural criticsm coming under the sway of the non-realist logics guiding and created by the tangential and heretical pursuits of love, happiness, freedom and possibility embodied in these de facto social movements. To get caught up in the unorthodox faithful actions of others, including our own, has been my call. (p. 264)

Good stuff lately...

Two new chapbooks from David Buuck, Ruts and Runts.

I keep wanting to write something about how Peter Weiss The Aesthetics of Resistance is my new all time favorite book. But I don't know where to start and I feel like anything I have to say would be stupid. I am so obsessed with it that I have reverted to childhood reading habits where I did not read last twenty pages of book because I did not want it to be over. And so I let the book sit there, unfinished for some weeks. Then last week went back and read some more towards the end and then stopped again and reread the passages on Dante and Kafka (and my obsession with this book probably comes from the moments when the book talks in great detail about how art and literature shape the mind; these passages are stunning and there is so little else that talks about this stuff in the world). Still have five pages left to read and not sure I will finish. A good plan might be to wait for next volume to come out and then finish one, knowing I have two ahead of me.

I've been reading a lot of stuff in manuscript...

Dodie Bellamy's Academonia. I can't get enough of complaints about the academy. Could not stop reading it. Nice mixture of prickly and sweet.

And then reread Yunte Huang manuscript on Pacific histories.

For Chain links project, an essay, is that the word?, by Matias Faldbakkan on Edward Norton and waspiness that is very disorientating in a good way.

And then unrelated to Chain, a really good essay by Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand on guerrilla poetry and public space.

And forthcoming essay by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber which I'm fascinated by. I've always felt that the academy had a choice between Brecht and Adorno and most lit dept sorts went with Adorno and as a result an activist art practice became viewed as unsophisticated b/c the really sophisticated realized with Adorno that everyone, everything was caught. This essay argues the same result but locates the choice as one between Situationists and the post-68ers and the academy chose the post-68ers and the activists went with the Situationists. This is introduction to forthcoming book from AK press.

Also enjoying Jenny Boully's One Love Affair.

Response to request by editors of special issues of IJCS to do a few paragraphs on what I've been reading in poetry criticism. I might have missed their deadline so not sure it will ever be in print. But here it is...


I’m always trying to figure out what is going on outside the fairly intimate relationship I have with various factions in the U.S. experimental poetry scene. This is a list of some things I’ve read recently that I’ve been moved by and also some of my all time favorites.

I’ve found some of the anthropological writing about poetry in other places really helpful. Steven Feld’s Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression has a wonderful discussion of how birds show up in Kaluli lament and which birds and how they get represented; a whole new world for me on many different fronts. Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in Bedouin Society, and its gender-opposite parallel, Steven Caton’s Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practices in a North Yemeni Tribe both remind of how poetry has a long history and rich tradition of being more than just aesthetics and remains rooted in everyday modes of conversation in some locations. I’ve also found another version of this reminder is in those classic discussions of poetry’s role in political education such as Roque Dalton’s Poetry and Militancy in Latin America, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “How Are Verses Made?,” and Pablo Neruda’s “The Poet’s Obligation.”

Recent literary criticism around poetry that I’ve found transformative would include Brent Hayes Edwards’ The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism and Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization. Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation—this book has a stunningly beautiful beginning—has never stopped being useful and I’ve read it many times because I keep using it in courses. I also find Kamau Brathwaite’s writing about poetry, from his 1984 History of the Voice to his recently self published two volume MR: Magical Realism, unusually transformative and eye opening.

I also keep having this fantasy of teaching to MFA students a course that I imagine titling Writing of the Last 10 Years that is Not About Poetry but that Poets Should be Reading Anyway Because It Might Change What They Are Writing About. That twelve week course as I envision it right now would include: Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters: Convergences: Inventories of the Present, Jared Diamond, Collapse, Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red Times Square Blue, Greg Dening’s Islands and Beaches, Joanna Drucker’s Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, Empire, John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power: the Meaning of Revolution Today, Subcomandante Marcos’s The Word is Our Weapon, Michael Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum, and Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance (ok, I’m cheating a little on this last one which was published in German in 1975 but the translation into English is within the last ten years). The books in this course change for me from week to week.

May's Collective project here. The topic was "the mainstream." Tim Davis assigned it.