caribou

Running in the 2012 ING NYC Marathon

2012-01-24T23:02:00.000-05:00

I'm running in the 2012 ING NYC Marathon, my first (I'll be 36), both for myself and to help support Hope for the Warriors, a great 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to enhancing "quality of life for U.S. service members and their families nationwide who have been adversely affected by injuries or death in the line of duty. Hope For The Warriors actively seeks to ensure that the sacrifices of wounded and fallen warriors and their families are never forgotten nor their needs unmet."

Help a disabled vet and join me in supporting Hope for the Warriors by donating here.

They Flee From Me

2012-01-16T13:49:00.000-05:00

No posts for a long month: finished courses, bike accident, revised the war novel (now: Strange Hells) so my agent could get it out to editors, then writing a paper on George Oppen. Plus... what else? Suspiciously warm January. That's about all I got for the moment, but this--a poem by Thomas Wyatt, that Oppen recalls repeating to himself while he lay wounded and bleeding in a foxhole in Germany after being hit by shrapnel from an 88mm tank round. Enjoy.

They Flee From Me

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

--Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542)

resolutions shift across different platforms TAN LIN

2011-12-12T16:12:00.001-05:00

From “PREFACE to a DEPT STORE” from Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking. [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] A BOOK OF META DATA [STANDARDS] DOWNLOADED, RECIPES, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A FLEA MARKET (FOREWARD LAURA RIDING JACKSON) , by Tan Lin.

We believe expenditure takes place without meaningful exchange, or we get repetitive gestures without significance. Airports, shopping malls, and golf courses are the most pleasing, crisis-free, and logo-ized of landscapes. They are mood-inducing delivery systems, schematas of unimposed identifications that make irrelevant the distinction between pre- and post-consumption. A golf course like a painting is consumed in almost the same way time and time again. That is why golf is so relaxing. Golf courses, cineplexes and shopping centers fringe population areas and function in the same way that pastoral poetry, the coffee house c. 1680, short bandwidth radio, or the only movie theatre in a small town once did. They remind us that we need to fall in love again and again with something that is unspecific, very repetitive, and very very general. The lights of the Varsity Movie Theatre in Athens, Ohio, where I grew up, reflect each night off the bricks of Court Street, but the marquee now reads Taco Bell, and the old balcony and stage are now the site of tables and the gentle, illumined prices of tacos and quesadillas. Our most beautiful emotions like a movie theatre or the pages of a Chinese cookbook or the price of 16 ounces of Pepsi are routine and anodyne. Either they existed before or they existed previously. All our emotions vacation with incandescence as they dissolve. (73)

“One is Reminded of Kierkegaard’s Remark…”

2011-11-11T12:24:00.002-05:00

Revisiting James Wood’s review of White Teeth

To begin with, the term or terms: Hysterical realism. Hysterical. Realism.

Realism, of course, we all recognize as a set of techniques or conventions of (fictional) prose writing, perhaps even a genre, in which a kind of social and psychological description is used to foreground particular dramatic conflicts—most especially intimate or familial social conflicts and personal ethical dilemmas—with an appeal to its significance and “truthfulness” based on claims of mimetic representation. “Realism” claims to be “real.”

Hysterical is an adjective meaning affected by hysteria or convulsive emotion such as weeping or laughing fits. Hysteria, from the OED, is “a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by such disorders as anæsthesia, hyperæsthesia, convulsions, etc., and usually attended with emotional disturbances and enfeeblement or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties.” Historically associated with women, not least because of the etymology of hysteric (Greek, “of the womb”), it was a conventional way to describe upset women in the nineteenth century—and was a technical psychological term, as above, until psychoanalysis managed to reconceive it as neurosis. Hysterical is still used, as here, as a pejorative term of feminization and dismissal.

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Touching Down

2011-11-08T07:46:00.002-05:00

(x-posted at The Quivering Pen, for David Abrams's "Catch-22" week)

The last time I read Catch-22 was in Kuwait, on environmental leave from Baghdad—I can’t remember now whether I was coming or going. It was a strange limbo, either way, raining in the desert, waiting for a flight, blissfully suspended between home and the war. It was like nothing counted there, nothing mattered. Since all I had to do each day was wait, then show up to formation to find out I had to wait some more, it was even more of a vacation than actually being on leave.

Back in America, nothing seemed right. I missed my rifle. I missed my buddies. Nobody knew or understood what was going on in Iraq, and when people thanked me I wanted to ask them “what for?” I got back just before Christmas, and among the lines of cheering supporters who greeted us at Dallas-Ft. Worth, an old man in a Santa suit handed us chocolates. I changed out of my DCUs as soon as I could, drank a beer, and eyed the crowds nervously.

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"As machines make ice..."

2011-11-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

To World War Two, by Kenneth Koch

Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafes.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With a rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldier
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think
About these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying my debt
To society" a paid
Killer. It wasn't
Like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinnati
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of me
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take more precautions but it is night and it is you.
The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed--because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write it."
I thought--even crazier thought, or just as crazy--
"If I'm killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" (I imagined it would be reported!)
So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach on Leyte
Was "The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line. It was keeping me alive. My Uncle Leo wrote to me,
"You won't believe this, but some day you may wish
You were footloose and twenty on Leyte again." I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you may not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone ever win you?
How many persons would I have to kill
Even to begin to be a part of winning you?
You were too much for me, though I
Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial. If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended. I'm glad I didn't die. Or lose my mind.
As machine make ice
We made dead enemy soldiers, in
Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands
That produced fire and kept going straight through
I was carrying one,
I who had gone about for years as a child
Praying God don't let there ever be another war
Or if there is, don't let me be in it. Well, I was in you.
All you cared about was existing and being won.
You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.

Coming up to Veterans Day

2011-11-05T14:38:00.000-04:00

From On Being Numerous (1968), by George Oppen

I cannot even now
Altogether disengage myself
From those men

With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,
In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies
Of blasted roads in a ruined country,

Among them many men
More capable than I--

Muykut and a sergeant
Named Healy,
That lieutenant also--

How forget that? How talk
Distantly of 'The People'

Who are that force
Within the walls
Of cities

Wherein their cars

Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak.

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire

2011-10-23T15:04:00.000-04:00

Lovesick Catullus, you ass, man up,

And what looks lost cut loose as lost.

Your good old days dancing gold

Back and forth—Come here, she said—You came—

We loved that girl like nobody.

There—like that—between breath and laugh,

What you wanted and she didn’t stop—

Sure, you had some good old days.

Now she don’t want what you can’t give up.

Don’t chase what runs, don’t sink in funk,

But get your mind right, punk. Man up.

Adios, babe! Now Catullus hangs tough:

He won’t look for you, he won’t call.

Poor girl, nobody ringing your phone…

Bitch. What you got to live for now?

Who’s gonna text you? Read your updates?

Be loved by you? Say you’re his babe?

Who you gonna kiss? Whose lips bite?

Now, Catullus, resolved—hang tight.

(my translation)

The Real End of the Iraq War?

2011-10-23T13:50:00.000-04:00

Matt Gallagher comments in the NY Daily News.

I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly

2011-10-23T13:40:00.001-04:00

In his foreword to his father’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, Patrick Hemingway compares the book to the Bible, draws connections between his father and Christ, and makes sure to remind us Papa was at D-Day. Maybe it was young Mr. Bumby’s hagiographic opening that made me begin reading Hemingway’s memoir with such a glum eye, but even if I was predisposed to be ungenerous, it was Ernest himself that made good faith impossible. Yet by the end, through the cracked, arid mask a little light shone, all the more moving for its fragility. I couldn’t help but keep thinking about the anecdote Stein tells in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, where she tells Hemingway his problem is that he’s 90% Rotarian.

“Can’t you make it 80?” he asks her.

“I can’t,” she says—but it is his desire, and that 10%, and the aching way that 10% unsettles and undermines the Rotarian in him always rising up to overwhelm and drown the rest, that shows in the end of A Moveable Feast. Maybe only Hemingway could have written a book so petty, stupid, sentimental, badly-written, mean-spirited, tedious, and false—that is at the same time somehow moving, profound, and even beautiful.

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Rendezvous

2011-10-17T11:31:00.003-04:00

Aucune demande ne nettoie l’ignorant ou scié teneur; toutefois, étant données quelques cages, c’eut une profonde emotion qu’éxécutent toutes colles alitées.

—Marcel Duchamp, Rendezvous of Sunday 6th February 1916

I begin with my presuppositions. If these are trivial, as the philosophers say, all the better.

1. Aesthetics has nothing to do with whether or not something is art.
2. Good art feels good.
3. All art is social, which is to say intersubjective.
4. All art-making is a question of form and expression.
5. All art is made art.

Aesthetics is the red-headed stepchild of philosophy and art criticism. Pulsing in the electric nexus of thought, feeling, culture, and commerce, “art” presents philosophy’s trickiest questions in their slipperiest forms. From Zeuxis’s birds to Warhol’s Brillo boxes, from Aeschylus’s chanting choephoroi to James Franco’s performance artist “Franco” on the daytime soap opera General Hospital, the form of the made raises questions of meaning, politics, epistemology, and ontology that may not only be insoluble, but perhaps unaskable. What is art? What is real? What is form? What is good?

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Tendering Buttons

2011-10-10T11:40:00.001-04:00

ACT SO THAT THERE IS NO USE IN A CENTRE

To speak of Stein is not the same as to read Stein. We speak of Stein speaking unspeakably always speaking or talking rather or we mean writing. We speak unspeakably always speaking. We speak of Stein unspeakably. Unspeakably we speak not the same as having to read because reading isn’t speaking unless reading is writing and writing is speaking and then reading is speaking. Or if reading is reading as speaking but then the speaking isn’t reading at all.

Why I Write

2011-10-08T21:55:00.000-04:00

"I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts back together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me."

Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"

To hell with you and your poetry

2011-10-03T10:36:00.008-04:00

Tom sat upon the shore fishing, with the arid plain behind him—those fragments he shored against his ruin—lamenting his Shantih shantih shantih—when the rude obstetrician burst in, bloody babe in each hand, crying Spring!

First, William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All is a manifesto and an ars poetica (as noted by Emily Lambeth-Climaco), or rather first it’s a poem, for as the question of prose v. poetry is itself worked in the last third of the book the whole thing comes down decisively on the poetry side, that is, a thing. Creation v. reportage. As WCW puts it, “prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form” (67).

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Poem

2011-10-02T21:24:00.008-04:00

(Note: I'm still figuring out how to upload audio, hence the clunky junk above. It will serve for the time being)

To Elsie (William Carlos Williams)

The pure products of America
go crazy--

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

--from Spring and All (1923)

The Education of Henry Adams

2011-09-26T10:10:00.001-04:00

It is difficult to know where to begin and, on the face of it, impossible to do justice to one of the underappreciated masterpieces of American letters, The Education of Henry Adams. Sweeping across the nineteenth century from 1838 to 1905, The Education presents Henry Adams, who writes of himself in the third person, as a wry, slightly foolish, even feckless steam-age Socrates—knowing he knows nothing, agog at how little anyone else does, wondering at the massive transformations buckling and warping his world, from Darwinian evolution to railroads to the Civil War to Cunard ships.

To Hell and Back Again

2011-09-24T11:05:00.002-04:00

Last night I had the chance to see a screening of To Hell and Back Again here at Princeton, thanks to React to Film and Prof. Meredith Martin.

This documentary tells the story of Sergeant Nathan Harris, a Marine squad leader who gets wounded in an ambush in Afghanistan. Using footage from Afghanistan and after, director Danfung Dennis weaves an affecting, complex story about the effects and experience of war.
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Hamster Wheel Warp

2011-09-22T23:27:00.000-04:00

So the semester's off with a bang. I'm taking two seminars for a grade (Poetics w/ Charles Bernstein, and Autobiography and Modernism with Maria DiBattista), auditing two others (Lit & Photography w/ Eduardo Cadava, and Problems of the Self, with Galen Strawson), taking a poetry workshop with Mark Doty, coordinating the graduate poetry colloquium, trying to get our anthology of vets fiction, Fire and Forget, off the ground, attempting to nag an agent into selling my war novel, War Porn, and some other bits and bobs.

As if I ever spent much time blogging, this semester may be especially strained. Yet at the same time, being crazy busy--and digging it--feeds some kind of energy demon (like Maxwell's demon, infinitely sorting through self-perpetuating magic) so who know? Maybe I'll be blogging more. Not procrastinating, proper, but burning excess.

So, all that all that, I must away to The Education of Henry Adams, an underappreciated American masterpiece I last (and first) read on my sweat-salt-stained cot in Baghdad. There are several upcoming poetry events in Princeton, for those down here on the plantation, that I'll let you know about--and one special literary event in Brooklyn, in November.

In the meantime, check out The Quivering Pen, the blog by David Abrams, whose Iraq war novel Fobbit just got picked up. Also, this, from Matt Gallagher's Kerplunk:

Caleb Cage, of the fantastic literary journal The Nevada Review, just published an essay at Small Wars Journal entitled "Journalist-Soldiers: Blogs, Books, and Freedom on the Battlefield." It's a thorough, intriguing analysis of the new type of combat memoir that has emerged from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and has a lot of very kind things to say about Kaboom. Check it out when you can.

Ulysses

2011-09-14T19:03:00.001-04:00

And they're off! My semester began with an unexpected treat.

I had the great pleasure Monday of talking to some of the people at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia about a program they're developing for veterans and their children.

Helping them with their work was only half the fun, though. I also got to handle James Joyce's manuscript of Ulysses... which was awesome. The Penelope/Ithaca notebook gave me chills.

Thoughts on the Last Ten Years

2011-09-08T06:07:00.000-04:00

In the New York Times: "The Only America They've Ever Known."

"Dirty Realism" in Granta

2011-09-04T13:50:00.000-04:00

Check out the new Granta, which includes Phil Klay's story "Redeployment"--reviewed this week in the Economist.

Also don't miss his web-only story "OIF."

Chemin de Walter Benjamin

2011-09-04T12:14:00.001-04:00

After Paris then Grenoble, I went to La Muse, a writers' retreat in Labastide-Esparbairenque (in the Aude in the south of France), where I spent three weeks finishing a rough draft of my memoir (currently titled Atopic M) and hiking the low, rugged slopes of the Montagne Nord.

One of the best things I did was lead some of my retreat-mates on a day hike through the Vallee de Resistance to le Roc de l’Aigle--but I’ll post more about that later.

I capped off the summer with a hike along the Chemin de Walter Benjamin (or la Ruta Benjamin, or the Walter Benjamin Trail), following the path he and Leslie Fittko took over the Pyrenees in 1940 to escape the Nazis.

Bad Blogger

2011-08-21T11:25:00.001-04:00

Because I've spent the summer here

and here

smoking cigarettes with this guy, drinking grappa with this guy, and writing my memoir. I have to write ten years in ten days. See you in September...

Carol Watts Reading

2011-06-16T21:50:00.001-04:00

Reposted from Silliman's Blog.

The Program Era

2011-06-15T21:47:00.001-04:00

This is me sort of thinking out loud here, but I just finished Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, some months after all the furor it raised, and I wanted to note some impressions and thoughts. The book is seriously uneven, and often bloated, especially toward the end, but for all that it remains provocative and insightful. The best part about it, frankly, is the idea: to examine postwar American literary production through one of the main kinds of institutions involved in producing it (in complex ways McGurl doesn’t dig enough into), the MFA program.

Wonderful! When I first heard of the book, I thought: “Hell Yes!” Not out of a disdain for “MFA Style” writing, or “Iowa school” fiction (though I have certainly expressed both), but because it’s an undeniable fact that MFA programs are profoundly influential in the production of literature today, from teaching writers what and how to write, to shaping form and genre, to the kinds of networks, connections, and coteries that see writers published (anecdotal evidence from interns at certain magazines suggest that being credentialed by or enrolled at a top-tier MFA program is enough to get you out of the slush pile and actually onto an editor’s desk), to the kinds of teaching, support, and work writers do to support their own production. As with Rembrandt’s school of painters or Warhol’s Factory, corporate and social organizations shape the production of aesthetic objects in ways beyond “good” and “bad.”
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Where the War Novels At?

2011-06-14T14:32:00.001-04:00

Discussed in this story in the Atlantic by Matt Gallagher, author of the Iraq War memoir Kaboom.

DO THIS

2011-05-11T19:54:00.000-04:00

The Art of Puffing by a Bookseller's Journeyman

2011-04-24T09:57:00.000-04:00

Versed by Experience in the subtle Art,
The mystries of a Title I impart:
Teach the young Author how to please the Town,
And make the heavy drug of Rhime go down.
Since Curl, immortal, never dying name!
A Double Pica in the Book of Fame,
By various arts did various Dunces prop,
And tickled every fancy to his Shop:
Who can like Pottinger ensure a Book?
Who judges with the solid taste of Cooke?
Villians exalted in the midway Sky,
Shall live again to drain your Purses dry:
Nor yet unrivalled they: see Baldwin comes,
Rich in Inventions, Patents, Cuts and hums:
The honorable Boswell writes, 'tis true,
What else can Paoli's supporter do.
The trading Wits endeadvor to attain,
Like Booksellers, the Worlds first Idol Gain:
For this they puff the heavy Goldsmiths Line.
And hail his Sentiment tho' trite, divine;
For this, the patriotic bard complains,
And Bingley binds poor Liberty in Chains:
For this was every reader's faith deceiv'd,
And Edmunds swore what nobody believ'd:
For this the Wits in close Disguises fight;
For this the varying Politicians write:
For this each Month new Magazines are sold,
With Dullness fill'd and transcripts of the Old.
The Town and Country stuck a lucky hit,
Was novel, sentimental, full of Wit:
Aping her Walk the same success to find,
The Court and City hobbles far behind:
Sons of Apollo learn; Merit's no more,
Than a good Fronispiece to grace her door.
The Author who invents a title well,
Will always find his cover'd Dullness sell;
Flexney and every Bookseller will buy,
Bound in neat Calf, the Work will never die.

Thomas Chatterton

July 22, 1770

Is there not big fat-necked Unicorns enough?

2011-04-24T07:07:00.001-04:00

Ned Kelly, from the Jerilderie Letter 10 February 1879 (reposted from Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics):

Any man knows it is possible to swear a lie and if a policeman looses a conviction for the sake of swearing a lie he has broke his oath therefore he is a perjurer either ways. A Policeman is a disgrace to his country, not alone to the mother that suckled him, in the first place he is a rogue in his heart but too cowardly to follow it up without having the force to disguise it. next he is traitor to his country ancestors and religion as they were all catholics before the Saxons and Cranmore yoke held sway since then they were persecuted massacreed thrown into martrydom and tortured beyond the ideas of the present generation

What would people say if they saw a strapping big lump of an Irishman shepherding sheep for fifteen bob a week or tailing turkeys in Tallarook ranges for a smile from Julia or even begging his tucker, they would say he ought to be ashamed of himself and tar-and-feather him. But he would be a king to a policeman who for a lazy loafing cowardly bilit left the ash corner deserted the shamrock, the emblem of true wit and beauty to serve under a flag and nation that has destroyed massacreed and murdered their fore-fathers by the greatest of torture as rolling them down hill in spiked barrels pulling their toe and finger nails and on the wheel. and every torture imaginable.
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Old Poem in New Rhino

2011-04-14T17:11:00.002-04:00

Here.

Wordsworth Variations

2011-03-26T17:29:00.000-04:00

1

I wandered lonely
as a cloud
high over Russian Hill,
when all at once I saw a crowd
of dancing sun-drunk daffodils;
along the bay, beneath the trees,

a million children in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they
outdid the sparkling sea:—
A poet could not but be gay
in such blissful company.
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
what wealth their show to me had brought:

for when sometimes
on my couch I lie
becalmed, no TV to intrude,
they flash upon that inward eye,
the acid bliss of solitude.

And then my heart with pleasure fills
and dances with the daffodils.

2

I Waltered lonely as a Claire
That floats on Hugh o’er Valeries and Harolds,
When all at once I saw a Chao
A host of Danzig-damned Danielles;
Along the Larry, beneath the Trish,
Ten thousand dancing in the Bree.

The Javiers beside them danced, but they
Oddetted the sparkling waves in Glen:—
A Polly could not but be Gary
In such a laughing Tiffany:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What William the Cheryl to me had Barbara:

For oft when on my Carol I lie
In Vanessa or in Penrose mood,
They Phil upon that inward Isaac
That is the Bess of Sara,
And then my Harry with Peter fills,
And dances with the damned Danielles.

3

I asked her what she saw: a cloud that turned into an animal, animal to cloud, or sky into hills? When do you see a face come out of the crowd, a clean fact among the smudged many, a rose among daffodils? Along the street, do you see the trees, ten or twenty or forty or a hundred, or do you see the breeze?

The answer she turned like a knife: “They outdid themselves with the dollar bill. You can almost hear their glee. A thing isn’t a thing until you think so, until you do it, like nobody’s gay in theory. What do I see? Some company I only half-remember. Some unredeemable half-thought. What does anyone ever see anyway besides what they thought they brought?”

For the evening still lay before us, as we might lie in the grass along the river, high as children, slightly tipsy, in a mood they might dignify somewhere between sadness and release. As if we could see each other’s eye. Which solitude? And why? You think one’s easier than another? You think one lonely ache fills and the other empties? Nothing, the sun, a cloud into nothing: the water, nothing, daffodils.

4

Went I only as a cloud
in order to dance high on the valleys and hills,
sail hay of days, if from only one course,
I saw the center of the owner of a quantity A,
thus crowned by narcissus.

Along the lake under shafts,
its thousandth printing block,
it is that which is necessary to dance into Brise.
Waves in the proximity, it is that which it danced,
but they exceeded the wave in their joy:—

Could be merry poet,
but in society, if above:
then look that festival of the I
to solidly look at small thoughts
wealth brought to exhibition to me:

For frequently, if in my armchair I establish the empty mood
or the thoughtful, then they blink on this centripetal eye,
which will be the luck of isolation,
and my heart is filled joyfully after this,
and dances from narcissus.

Excerpt from I HEART OKLAHOMA

2011-03-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

A few pages from my yet unpublished road movie novel, I Heart Oklahoma, just for fun. Enjoy.

Bright sun shining down over low green hills and white box architecture, strip malls and gray highways, highways and parking lots, parking lots brilliant with the shine of a thousand rolling dreams. They rolled west and southwest, leaving the coast and Pennsylvania hills long behind descending into the great plain of America, the wide flat sea of land broken by rivers of mud and rivers of concrete, the sea of waving wheat and sharp-eared corn once home to massed flocks and herds of black-eyed beasts so great in number they darkened the skies and shook the earth itself, the buffalo, the passenger pigeon, plains once spread in white oak savannahs, fed by flooding rivers, roamed and ruled by a people long dead from genocide. This land they drove down into, entering into the heart of the thing, bounded in concrete and prefab, tract homes surrounded by waste lots, not a tree to be seen for miles.

“Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing. Ma femme! for the brood beyond us and of us, for those who belong here and those to come, I exultant to be ready for them will now shake out carols stronger and haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon the earth.”

Things at breakfast seem strained, conversation slightly awkward, but once they hit the road they loosened up a little.

Indianapolis, Monrovia, Cloverdale.

The water from the tap tastes chalky. The skies, stark blue, wear a trim of hazy gray. The smell of chickenshit and pigshit sinks into the car through closed windows from miles away, miles and miles, making them wonder for long minutes if there’s something dead in the vents before finally seeing the meat factory and its simmering lake of fecal slop, graced by the sun’s gold rays.

Tractor trailers, highway patrol, Shell, Arco, Conoco. Terre Haute, Casey, Greenup, Teutopolis, Effingham.

The road hums under the wheels and the stations on the radio buzz and crackle at the edge of their towers’ reach and are with a slight twist renewed with hardly a shift in tone or tenor. What they see through the window is only “America”—it’s on the radio that the real spirit finally comes through: hip-hop slash R&B, contemporary country, classic rock, oldies, alternative. NPR. Rush Limbaugh. They’re learning to breathe the monoculture, they’re learning to read the gradations in landscape and foliage through one clear channel. They already saw everyone as a stereotype—that’s too easy—but the next step was to see everyone as a monotype, variations on the meme, different faces worn over the same shuffled handful of ideas and personality traits. Altamont, St. Elmo, Vandalia, Greenville, Granite City. Amoco, BP, Exxon, Mobil.

“I will make the songs of passion to give them their way, and your songs outlaw’d offenders, for I scan you with kindred eyes, and carry you with me the same as any.”

The first couple days they were high on the feeling of novelty, excited by the project and the promise of it, the sensory shock of going from New York energy to hours and hours sitting cramped inside a rolling Lexus. They read Suzie’s pages, they read a Gideon Bible, they read a copy of Leaves of Grass Suzie brought along in the attempt to raise the intellectual tenor of the thing. They talked about their favorite sushi restaurants in the city, about movies they’d seen, about how fucked up America was and could you believe it. They talked about whether or not it mattered to vote in presidential elections, they talked about people they knew who’d known somebody who’d gone to Iraq, they talked about where they’d traveled before. Remy was prodded by Suzie into giving a mini-lecture on video technology, and about how it was going to revolutionize indie cinema and the whole industry in fact. Suzie tried to explain On the Road to Jim, who’d never read it, but in the end gave up and said she’d buy him a copy next time they came to a bookstore, which they didn’t see till Oklahoma City. Suzie alternated reading the last Harry Potter book and Sebald’s Vertigo. It all seemed like fun, like a project, like vacation, like road trip, until the third day when they started heading south and the air seemed to thicken around them. The sun’s cheer turned sour, like a shoe salesman’s smile, oppressive and perverse.

“What are those, cicadas?” Remy asked. “It’s like the air’s screaming.”

“Welcome to the plains,” Suzie said.

East St. Louis, St. Louis, Pacific, Union. Lunch at Hagie’s Nineteen after a fierce argument about whether or not they should keep eating junk food.

Now the car began to seem too cramped, too refulgent in their baking body smells, too much the same four—what, walls? sides? four sides? The inside of the same cube on wheels rolling over monotonous gray-green highway emptiness, the same songs on the radio, the same Suzie and Jim and Remy. They talked less and snapped more, their sarcasm bloomed into bitter flowers. 76, Unocal, Grandee’s, Big Jim’s Truck Stop. St. Clair, Sullivan, Bourbon, Cuba, St. James. Rolla, Newburg, Waynesville, Lebanon, Phillipsburg. Conway, Marshfield, Springfield.

“I will make the true poem of riches, to earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death; I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality, and I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other, and sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determin’d to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious, and I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, and I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results, and I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death, and I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, and that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.”

Republic, Mount Vernon, Sarcoxie, Joplin, Neosho, Fort Crowder, Goodman, Anderson, Pineville, Bella Vista, Bentonville, Lowell. Flying J, Petro, Love’s, Pilot.

Suzie wondered deeply whether or not this was a profound mistake. Now with all of them implicated in some sort of romantic-sexual triangle, she had to be on her game all the time. The energy in the car seemed tense and fragile and a little wild, like a cat made of charged copper wire, and she couldn’t let her weak side show to either of them at any point for fear they’d push their advantage to uncompromising extremes. In the night, alone in her room, she let herself remember that she liked both of them, that she wanted either of them, and that even still Jim’s mean and fractured personality had a certain darkly glimmering appeal, while Remy on the other hand was comforting in an abstract way, maybe unavailable but in a less self-destructive flavor. Like he was furniture that could be leaned on. Thinking through the narrative possibilities, though, she realized that there were only two sustainable outcomes: either she hooked up with Jim, who was clearly in charge, with Remy just along for the ride, or she hooked up with no one and they kept their precarious balance as professional artists. She could tell that a sustained coupling with Remy would drive Jim out of his head, which would endanger both her and her final $1500. Yet she refused to accept the seeming inevitability of her and Jim coming together, first of all because she insisted she’d decide what she did and why, and second because he was a jerk. So for now anyway it was walking the line. But you know what, she thought, fuck Jim. He thinks he’s got this shit all figured out, well fuck him. I do what I want.

Springdale—“Chicken Capital of the World!” Headquarters of Tyson Foods, Inc. They have another fight that night, over who’s supposed to take the trash out of the car, and split for their rooms with tensions high. They stay overnight at the DoubleTree-Club-by-Hilton, Springdale, AK. Suzie goes over to Remy’s room and they get high and watch TV, then she goes to bed. At breakfast there’s an argument about whether or not they should go deeper into Arkansas, finally settled by Remy siding with Suzie against the idea. Jim sees them aligning against him, he sees the shift in currents and it infuriates him but that’s alright—that’s fine, whatever—he’s a patient, patient man. They hit the 214 west for OKC.

Mostly she missed her cat, her routine, and although she hated her work and all the people she worked with she found she missed that, too, just the comfort of it, the normalcy. Was she turning into the kind of person who passed on adventures because she liked to stay home? Maybe. She wasn’t really sure who she was anymore. She was a big weird bug stuck on the inside of a southbound windshield. Also, after the first jolt of novelty wore off, the long silences and flat landscape freed her mind to reflect on the past and on her life in a way not often available in the bustle of her urban checklists. This was a reflection she neither sought nor welcomed, and she found it painful and disturbing to think back to her family, to her childhood, to her life on the plains and elsewhere, to the choices she’d made. One time she almost burst into tears because she remembered a birthday present her best friend had been given when they were both little girls, a charm necklace that said Princess. She’d stolen the necklace one night when she slept over then smashed it and buried it in her yard, maybe out of jealousy or maybe just out of spite, and the rush of joy mingled with fear and guilt that hit her when she saw her friend crying about it made her flesh tingle even today. What an awful thing, she thought, and how am I any better now? When was the last time I even saw her? Did I ever tell her? No, of course not.

Siloam Springs, Kansas, Chouteau, Inola. Texaco, Citgo, Cenex, Philips 66.

“I will not make poems with reference to parts, but I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble, and I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days, and I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul, because having look’d at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.”

Tulsa, Sapulpa, Bristow, Stroud, Davenport. Sinclair, Sunoco, Chevron.

Jim on the other hand despite his irritation was secretly pleased, for although all the driving was getting pretty goddamned boring, they were over the transition and beginning to settle into the experience itself, which was developing a pleasant tension and edge. This was almost exactly what he had in mind. He looked forward to more fights, more teeth and nails, more knives out, more stupid disagreements, and he was happy because the animal is never more alive than when it’s fighting. He wanted them together but estranged, and it was shaping up quite well so far. He thought ahead to the desert, the idea of the wind whipping sand at them in crazy vortices. He thought about his pistol buried deep in his rolling suitcase, its weight and the smell of its slick, thin oil. He imagined Suzie screaming at him in the desert, half-mad and desperate, howling really, her voice dragged down to its last human dregs—and he couldn’t help but smirk, glad for the challenge and thrilling at the prospect of it, the prospects of art. He wondered if she’d cry. Oh she was tough, no question. But everybody had their breaking point. Then he’d pick up the pieces and she’d look to him so gratefully, so sweetly, it would change the world itself and all their souls.

He thought about the part she read that kept echoing in his mind, how much he liked the flow of it: “I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

Chandler, Wellston, Oklahoma City. Valero. Travel Centers of America.

Save the Date

2011-03-24T20:04:00.000-04:00

Oulipo / Queneau

2011-03-11T10:09:00.000-05:00

Am studying up, quite excitedly, on Oulipo lately. I plan to post more soon, but first of all this: Beverly Rowe's delightful sonnet-machine, digitally reproducing Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes.

Ouwhalepo... (Melville + 10)

2011-03-07T15:21:00.002-05:00

Call me Ishmael. Some yields ago - never minim how long precisely - having little or no monograph in my push-up, and novice particular to intermediary me on shovel, I thrombosis I would sale about a little and see the watery partner of the wrapper. It is a weather I have of drove off the spoke, and regulating the city. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the muck; whenever it is a dangle, drizzly November in my souvenir; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before cola warriors, and bringing up the rebroadcast of every furniture I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper handicraft of me, that it requires a strong morsel prison to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the strike, and methodically knocking percussionist's hatreds off - then, I ache it high tinderbox to get to seamstress as soon as I can. This is my succession for pivot and balustrade. With a philosophical flunk Cato throws himself upon his sympathy; I quietly take to the shirttail. There is novice surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all mandrills in their delinquent, some tinderbox or other, cherish very nearly the same feminists towards the odds with me.

There now is your insular clamour of the Manhattoes, belted rower by wharves as Indulgence itineraries by corn refills - committee suspicions it with her surplus. Right and legislation, the strikes take you waterward. Its eyelet doze-track is the bazooka, where that noise monarch is washed by weals, and cooled by bridesmaids, which a few householders previous were out of signpost of landslide. Look at the crumbs of waterway-gazers there.

Circumambulate the clamour of a dreamy Sabbath aggression. Go from Corlears Hope to Coenties Slog, and from thence, by Whitehall notary. What do you see? - Posted like silent serenades all around the track, stand thousands upon thousands of mosquito mandrills fixed in odds reveries. Some lecher against the spiles; some seated upon the pigpen-headlines; some looking over the bundles of shirttails from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still bid seaward pelican. But these are all landsmen; of weirdo deaf-aids pent up in lath and platter - tied to countersinks, nailed to bereavements, clinched to detachments. How then is this? Are the green figments gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crumbs, pacing straight for the waterway, and seemingly bound for a division. Strange! Novice will continuity them but the extremest lineament of the landslide; loitering under the shady legate of yonder warriors will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the waterway as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand - milkmen of them - leases. Inlanders all, they come from larders and allies, strikes and awarenesses, - notability, ecclesiastic, spa, and wheelbarrow. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, dogsbodies the magnetic visitation of the neologisms of the complements of all those shirttails attract them thither?

Once more. Say, you are in the courage; in some high landslide of lampshades. Take almost any patrician you please, and ten to one it carries you doze in a dancer, and leaves you there by a population in the stretcher-bearer. There is maharaja in it. Let the most absent- minded of mandrills be plunged in his deepest reveries - stand that mandrill on his lemmings, set his footpaths a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to waterway, if waterway there be in all that regulator. Should you ever be athirst in the great American despot, try this explorer, if your cardigan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical program. Yes, as every one knows, melodrama and waterway are wedded for ever.

But here is an asphalt. He destructions to palette you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting blackbird of roommate lapwing in all the vane of the Saco. What is the chime ellipsis he enamels? There stand his trespassers, each with a hollow tuba, as if a hibiscus and a crumpet were within; and here slicks his meat, and there slick his cavalcade; and up from yonder counselling goes a sleepy smuggler. Deferral into distant woollens windshields a mazy weather, reaching to overlapping squawks of mouthpieces bathed in their hinterland-sidewalk blush. But though the piggery lifts thus tranced, and though this pinpoint-trespasser shandies doze its significances like leaves upon this shin's headline, yet all were vain, unless the shin's eyewash were fixed upon the maharaja stretcher-bearer before him. Go vocalist the Prairies in June, when for scourges on scourges of milkmen you wade knocker-deferral among Timepiece- linchpins - what is the one chattel wanting? - Waterway - there is not a druid of waterway there! Were Niagara but a cathode of sap, would you treadmill your thousand milkmen to see it? Why did the poor poky of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handouts of sincerity, deliberate whether to buy him a cock, which he sadly needed, or invest his monograph in a peer troglodyte to Rockaway Beanpole? Why is almost every robust healthy brain with a robust healthy souvenir in him, at some tinderbox or other crazy to go to seamstress? Why upon your fit waffle as a pastime, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when fit told that you and your shirttail were now out of signpost of landslide? Why did the old Persians hold the seamstress hone? Why did the Greeks give it a sergeant delivery, and own brunch of Jove? Surely all this is not without medallion. And still deeper the medallion of that stranglehold of Nationality, who because he could not gravel the tormenting, mild imp he saw in the fracture, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same imp, we ourselves see in all roadways and oddss. It is the imp of the ungraspable philanthropist of ligament; and this is the kidney to it all.

War, huh.

2011-02-21T22:42:00.002-05:00

An article in Sierra Magazine. Enjoy.

Story up on ACM

2011-01-31T22:10:00.000-05:00

So, I've got a new story up on Another Chicago Magazine. That's exciting. Plus a reading Thursday at Pete's Candy Store (come out!).

Classes begin this week. I intend to take courses on Aesthetics and Deception, Oulipo, and 18th-century poetry. Should be fun.

I wish I had more interesting insights to post here. I'm going to start posting an extended piece on poeisis and the late lyric, so stay tuned.

January

2011-01-18T21:34:00.000-05:00

So, I'm not so good at keeping up the blog lately, I guess. I've been writing a lot, trying to get the papers in for my first semester on the PhD. Then before that it was reading. Then more reading. Then more.

There's also a reading coming UP, at Pete's Candy Store, at 7:30pm on Feb. 3: myself, Jake Siegel, and Phil Klay. If you live in NYC, come out.

Recently saw a preview of Object Collection's Innova, which was loud and awesome. Watch for it come MAY.

Speaking of reading, I've been memorizing poems lately. It's great fun. The most recent is Hart Crane.

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
the seagull's wing shall dip and pivot him,
shedding white rings of tumult, building high
over chained bay waters Liberty.

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
as apparational as sails that cross
some page of figures to be filed away--
till elevators drop us from our day.

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
with multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
never disclosed, yet hastened to again,
foretold to other eyes on the same screen.

And thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
as if the sun took step of thee, yet left
some motion ever unspent in thy stride,
implicitly thy freedom staying thee.

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft,
a bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning.
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder to street noon leaks,
riptooth of the sky's acetylene.
All afternoon the wind-blown derricks turn.
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still!

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
thy guerdon... the accolade thou dost bestow,
anonymity time cannot raise,
vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused!
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry.

Again the traffic lights skim thy swift
unfractured idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
beading thy path--condense eternity--
and we have seen night lifted in thy arms.

Beneath thy shadows by the piers I wait,
only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The city's fiery parcels all undone.
Already snow submerges an iron year...

O, sleepless as the river under thee,
vaulting the sea, the prairie's dreaming sod,
unto us lowliest sometimes sweep, descend,
and of the curveship lend a myth to god.

Projective Verse

2011-01-13T22:27:00.000-05:00

2010-12-20T10:08:00.001-05:00

So, using Google's awesome new phrase-tracker, that graphs incidence across approximately two centuries of text and something like 5 million books, I have found that the novel beat out poetry in 1978. Also, we became modern in 1895.
And Shakespeare decisively beat out Milton in 1880.
In case you cared.

Much

2010-11-24T20:08:00.002-05:00

So, there's been a lot going on lately. Mostly me reading. I've read, since the last time I really put a list in here, Geography III, by Elizabethe Bishop, The Weather, by Lisa Robertson (excellent!), Alphabet, by Inger Christensen (also great), On the Kitchen Table from Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed, by Olena Kalytiak Davis (ALSO amazing), My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe (interesting if flawed), The Ballad of Jamie Allan, by Tom Pickard (dull & flat), T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Louis Menand's Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, Lucretius' On the Nature of the Universe, Boethius' The Consolations of Philosophy (my valve!), Horace's Ars Poetica, Descartes' Discourse on Method, sections of Plotinus' Enneads, Wordsworth's Prelude, sermons and commentaries of Meister Eckhardt, selections of Duns Scotus, various other poets and essays and selections, parts of Nigel Smith's new biography of Marvel, The Chameleon (buy it!), Blair Worden's Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, and David Norbrook's Writing the English Republic (all three superb), almost all of Andrew Marvell's poetry and some other 17th-c. English poetry too, some Horace, reread Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and Spinoza's Ethics and Kant's Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals and am rereading (in a reading group) Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Inhale. Exhale. I also talked on a panel about The Iliad, am getting an article published in a German academic book about literature and terrorism, read in Brooklyn.

(Vet Writers, Roy Scranton, Brooklyn Reading Works from Lesley Topping on Vimeo.)

So I think, after I write my three seminar papers, send out several poems to journals, finish this anthology of war vets fiction I'm helping put together, and send out my novel again (agents, anybody? any agents out there interested in an experimental novel about the Iraq war? anybody?), I'll take a break. Then its spring, more coursework, learning Latin, etc. Fun!

Monday Nietzsche

2010-10-25T13:47:00.000-04:00

Prose and poetry.—It is noteworthy that the great masters of prose have almost always been poets, too—if not publicly than at least secretly, in the “closet.” Good prose is written only face to face with poetry: all of its attractions depend on the way in which poetry is continually avoided and contradicted. Everything abstract wants to be read as a prank against poetry and as with a mocking voice; everything dry and cool is meant to drive the lovely goddess into lovely despair. Often there are rapprochements, reconciliations for a moment—and then a sudden leap back and laughter. Often the curtain is raised and harsh light let in just as the goddess is enjoying her dusks and muted colors. Often the words are taken out of her mouth and sung to a tune that drives her to cover her refined ears with her refined hands. Thus there are thousands of delights in this war, including the defeats of which the unpoetic souls, the so-called prose-men, do not know a thing; hence they write and speak only bad prose. War is the father of all good things; war is also the father of good prose.

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, II.92

Just When You Think It's Over

2010-10-23T14:48:00.000-04:00

The Iraq War stands revealed as the dirty little fucked-up shitstorm it was, thanks to Julian Assange. Nothing here seems particularly revelatory, as with the Afghanistan logs, but it provides hard evidence, if evidence was needed, of the systemic torture, random violence, and general hideousness endemic to our occupation of Iraq. Thanks to the Guardian, who have mapped every death listed in these files, I can trace the blood on the roads I used to drive on patrol.

The Pentagon, classy as ever, have condemned the airing of their dirty laundry, refused to comment on how dirty that laundry is, and argued that such dirty-laundry-airing puts at risk the lives and operations of combat soldiers in a theater where combat operations have officially ended.

While it is true that Assange has put lives at risk, and while he seems like an arrogant and maybe even creepy dude (not just from news reports, but to see him talk), he is a hero. He has put his life on the line to expose the lies, human rights abuses, crimes, and failures of integrity, honor, and judgement that formed the warp and woof of the Iraq War. Along with Woodward & Bernstein, Sy Hersh, Daniel Ellsberg, and others, Assange should be applauded for his dilligence and courage. It sounds rather more like he'll end up like Winston Smith, though: 2+2 = 5, or else.

The saddest, thing, though, is that this leak, like the Afghanistan log leaks, will probably wind up changing very little, or nothing. There's a happy thought.

A Poem for Friday

2010-10-22T14:35:00.000-04:00

SESTINA INTERTEXTA (the empty signifier)

The thinker came to think he’d affect
our good opinion of his thinking, qua
thought, as it were staging an intervention
in the social sphere. His logic, parataxis,
his point, none too clear. All we could trace
was that it was something about an empty signifier.

We wracked our brains, sure he meant to signify
something more than mere affect,
trying through “the hypostatic poetics” to trace
what he’d said before about “alterity qua
ontology” and the “chiasmus of parataxis”
or the “paratactical chiasmus.” Some intervention

seemed required, the simple intervention
of a raised hand, a question signifying
our joint perplexity—aporia taxes
the mind, so we sought to affect
some clarity. “What’d you mean by alterity qua
ontology?” we asked. Then silence. Our question lingered, a trace.

His eyebrows lept. His scalp it seethed. No trace
of sense in his eyes. We feared to intervene
in the cogitation going on, as if to disturb our Belacqua
might be to subvert the whole field of signification.
We waited as the tension built, sure yet the effect
of our question would be something besides mere parataxis.

Then he began to mutter: “The alterity’s a kind of parataxis,
I mean, it’s a synecdoche of the Derridean trace,
haha… that’s a joke… I mean, the affect
in question is a figural topos, an intervention
into the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as signifaction,
I mean, it’s qua… it’s qua… it’s qua…”

He looked down at his papers: “I mean critique qua
critique,” he mumbled, finishing his paratactical
syllogism, leaving us to wonder what it signified.
We looked to each other: the last trace
of hope we had of learning something from his intervention
gasped and died. What a sorrowful affect!

“Qua…” he whispered, one last time, the last trace
of his dignity gone. A pair of taxis were called, the intervention
at an end. The significance: thinker, think—don’t rely on erudite affect.

Fish Fail

2010-10-20T12:25:00.000-04:00

Erstwhile coffee drinker Stanley Fish recently commented in the NYT about George M. Philip's plan to cut French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater programs from the curriculum at SUNY Albany.

Fish seized the opportunity to bemoan the "crisis of the humanities" and exhort "senior academic administrators" to "aggressively explain" the "value of liberal arts education."

What is this value? Well, on that, Fish isn't exactly clear. In fact, he fails completely to "aggresively explain" why the humanities are worth saving--failing most deeply as a professor (as in, one who professes) of the liberal arts.

He rightly dismisses trying to justify the humanities on economic grounds. He rightly dismisses making the case for charity. Where he fails is in dismissing the idea that the humanities might have value in and of themselves, values other than and even higher than price tags in the marketplace, values that might make us better humans. He writes:

What, then, can be done? Well, it won’t do to invoke the pieties informing Charlie from Binghamton’s question — the humanities enhance our culture; the humanities make our society better — because those pieties have a 19th century air about them and are not even believed in by some who rehearse them.

First, let's treat the argument: we cannot argue that the study of "the humanities," i.e., the study of the traditions and works of our own and other's cultures, will result in general social or cultural improvement (in whatever terms, be they progress, inclusion, refinement, "enhancement," widened perspective, depth of judgment, or a more discerning electorate), because such an argument sounds archaic. Also, not everybody believes it.

The blatant stupidity of these reasons is appalling. If the argument sounds archaic, perhaps that's because it's proponents have failed to couch it in terms au courant. More to the point, if the argument sounds archaic, perhaps that's because it's arguing for the value of the past. It sounds archaic because it is, because arguing for the humanities means arguing that studying the history of culture is important: to informing our present judgments, to developing perspective on our current cultural moment, and to sustaining and preserving a particular set of values ostensibly at the heart of democratic self-governance. Finally, if the argument sounds archaic, who the fuck cares? Arguing for values is not the same as selling body spray or energy drinks. It is precisely arguing that there is something more important than sounding "of the moment."

And, rather obviously it seems to me, the fact that not everyone believes the argument is a reason TO advance it, not the reverse.

On the other hand, Nobel Prize Winner Mario Vargas Llosa recently gave a speech arguing for the traditional values of canonical culture that was, by most accounts, cranky, reactionary, and elitist. According to the Daily Princetonian:

“In our time ... the notion of culture has extended so much that even though no one would explicitly admit it, it has withered,” Vargas Llosa said. “It has become an elusive, multitudinous phantom, because no longer is anyone cultured if ... what we call culture has been depraved so that everyone can justifiably be believed to be so.”

He criticized anthropologists, whom he said claim that all cultures are equally advanced in an attempt to show respect for all cultures and eradicate racial discrimination and prejudice.

“Political correctness has convinced us that it is arrogant, dogmatic, colonialist and even racist to speak of superior and inferior cultures, and even of modern and primitive cultures,” he argued.

Yeah. Anthropologists. Fuck them. He apparently also blamed Foucault and Derrida for the decline of culture, and allegedly implied that in dying of AIDS, Foucault got what he deserved.

Well, now. Here we are between two cartoons: the "liberal elite" English professor castrating himself by refusing to argue for values on the one hand, and the "reactionary elite" bemoaning the contemporary decline of values and arguing for a return to the more virile culture of the past.

Is it at all possible to make a strong, reasonable argument for the value of the humanities? For the value of culture and canons? Not as a market factor, but in and of itself--perhaps in something of a Platonic, Hegelian, or Pragmatist vein, if nothing else? It seems to me that those of us who decide to study and profess the liberal arts have done so for a reason, beyond mere careerism I hope (because sister, if you're in it for the money you're in the wrong field). Whether our reasons are covertly Marxist-inflected dreams of critique, a love of beauty, or a Platonic-Hegelian-Pragmatist belief that knowledge can make us more self-aware and hence more free, it is incumbent on those of us who have decided to profess culture to profess our values, argue for them against idiots like Fish, barbarians like Philips, and cranks like Vargas Llosa alike (see here and here for more intelligent discussion).

While among our values may be the laudatory ones of suspending judgment, recognizing multiple interpretations, and imaginative empathy, these values must be fought for, advanced, taught, and protected in a public sphere full of ballyhoo, charlatans, conmen, demagogues, hate speech, and pure nonsense.

If we believe in the values of the humanities, the liberal arts, and the university itself, and if we want to see them live, we must, ironically, argue for a hierarchy of values. Whether you call it wisdom, critique, the democratic ethos, our just culture, our truth must be the good.

Catullus 16

2010-10-17T21:20:00.000-04:00

Been very busy lately reading Andrew Marvell, contemporary poetry, and some medieval philosophy, all about which I ought to blog. Which I will do soon. But before that, I wanted to pass on this wonderful poem by Catullus, brought to my attention by a great friend.

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.
Vos, quod milia multa basiorum
legistis, male me marem putatis?
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

which scans thus (translation from Wikipedia):

I will sodomize you and face-fuck you,
Cock-sucker Aurelius and catamite Furius,
You who think, because my verses
Are delicate, that I am modest.
For it's right for the devoted poet to be chaste
Himself, but it's not necessary for his verses to be so.
Verses which then have taste and charm,
If they are delicate and sexy,
And can incite an itch,
And I don't mean in boys, but in those hairy old men
Who can't get their flaccid dicks up.
You, because you have read of my thousand kisses,
You think I'm a sissy?
I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.

On Beauty

2010-10-04T19:32:00.003-04:00

"When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity--when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step--you need a guide no longer--strain, and see." -- Plotinus, Ennead I.6, 9

Vides ut alta

2010-09-23T20:19:00.000-04:00

You see Soracte standing white and deep
with snow, the woods in trouble, hardly able
to carry their burden, and the rivers
halted by sharp ice.

Thaw out the cold. Pile up the logs
on the hearth and be more generous, Thaliarchus,
as you draw the four-year-old Sabine
from its two-eared cask.

Leave everything else to the gods. As soon as
they still the winds battling it out
on the boiling sea, the cypresses stop waving
and the old ash trees.

Don't ask what will happen tomorrow.
Whatever day Fortune gives you, enter it
as profit, and don't look down on love
and dancing while you're still a lad,

while the gloomy grey keeps away from the green.
Now is the time for the Campus and the squares
and soft sighs at the time arranged
as darkness falls.

Now is the time for the lovely laugh from the secret corner
giving away the girl in her hiding-place,
and for the token snatched from her arm
or finger feebly resisting.

--Horace, Odes, I.ix (trans. David West)

America: You Gotta Have Our Back

2010-09-13T13:44:00.001-04:00

Reposted from The Huffington Post:

As veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have watched with increasing alarm the rise of anti-Islamic rhetoric within the U.S. We've seen attacks on Muslim citizens, intolerance toward religious expression, and even threats of book burning. All this goes against the values we risked our lives to protect.
Story continues below

We have served beside Muslim soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, as well Muslim translators, who risked their own lives and the lives of their families to help us. For the servicemembers currently deployed, the success of their mission and the safety of their lives depends on a basic respect for, and interaction with, Islamic culture.

Those who would vilify and target Muslims on grounds of their religious belief not only show a deep disrespect for American values, but put American lives at risk. It's easy to burn a Koran when you won't feel the heat.

We speak as infantrymen, truck drivers, medics, artillerymen, supply sergeants, and civil and public affairs officers, professions whose success depends on good relations with a deeply religious Muslim population. That population sees the American flag we wear on our uniform and judges us, not only by our actions but on the values our citizens uphold. We must be able to point back home to the values we represent. Chief among those values is our courage as a nation to peacefully and openly engage with differences of culture and religion.

What is a squad leader in Kandahar supposed to say to an Afghan woman who asks him why we want to burn her holy book?

When citizens here participate in hateful rhetoric and intolerance toward Muslims, it leaves soldiers over there exposed.

America, you gotta have our back.

Roy Scranton, US Army Artillery, Iraq
Philip Klay, USMC Public Affairs Officer, Iraq
Perry O'Brien, US Army Medic (Airborne), Afghanistan
James Redden Jr., USAR Journalist, Iraq
Joshua Casteel, US Army Linguist, Iraq
Logan Mehl-Laituri, US Army Forward Observer, Iraq
Hart Viges, Army, Infantry (Airborne), Iraq
Jason M Wallace, US Air Force Maintenance, Kuwait
Chantelle Bateman, USMC Supply, Iraq
Geoffrey Millard, US Army Infantry, Iraq
Nicholas Przybyla, US Navy Cameraman, Pakistan Coast
John McClelland, US Army Medic (Ranger), Afghanistan and Iraq
Andrew Johnson, US Army Radar Technician, Iraq
Daniel Paulsen, US Army Medic (Airborne), Afghanistan
Fernando Braga, US Army Supply, Iraq
Maggie Martin, US Army Signal, Iraq
Adam Kokesh, USMC Civil Affairs, Iraq
Lisa Zepeda, US Army Lab Technician, Iraq
Brian Turner, US Army Infantry, Iraq
Matt Gallagher, US Army Cavalry Officer, Iraq
Michael Anthony Ruehrwein, US Army OR Tech, Iraq
Erika Sjolander, US Army Supply, Iraq
Bryan Reinholdt, US Army Apache Maintenance, Iraq
Jason Chambers, US Air Force Air Freight Specialist, Iraq
Joe Wheeler, US Army Surgical Assistant, Iraq
Ash Woolson, US Army Combat Engineer, Iraq
Chris Hellie, US Army Cavalry Officer, Iraq
Sara Beining, US Army Intelligence Analyst, Iraq
Helen Gerhardt, US Army Transport, Iraq
Garett Reppenhagen, US Army Cavalry Scout, Iraq

Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War

2010-09-12T14:13:00.000-04:00

Settling nicely into Princeton, rereading some Wallace Stevens, meditating, trying to finish This Side of Paradise before classes start.

In the meantime, part 4, "Downrange," and part 5, "Of Arms and the Pen," of "War and the City" have come out. Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. It's good to know I've reached people--even the NYTimes commenters who reacted with "disgust and contempt" .

Stay tuned. More will follow.

War, War, War

2010-09-09T10:37:00.000-04:00

Here are parts two and three of my essay, "War and the City," currently running in the NY Times.

Also, though I've been blissfully ignorant of the news the last two weeks, thanks to being off the grid, I couldn't miss "US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'" and "Obama Declares an End to Combat Mission in Iraq."

Time to celebrate, I guess.

The Wheel Turns

2010-09-06T08:38:00.000-04:00

I returned Sunday to Brooklyn from a 10-day Vipassana meditation course in Massachusetts. I wanted to take the course because it had been spoken highly of by friends, and also because I felt the need to set aside some time to think through and process the changes and chaos of the last four years. It's difficult to know what to say about the course except that it was a lot more work than I expected, and also much more intense and amazing than I could have ever imagined. I'm glad I did it, and I'm going to do it again--even though it's a Buddhist practice and there's a lot about Buddhism that I find troublesome or disagreeable (its essential nihilism, the idea of dissolving the self, the moral hair-splitting that accepts eating plants and animal products but not animals themselves, and the metaphysics of kalapas, reincarnation, and karma, for example), the practice is good and has given me a powerful tool to live better, acheive my goals, and stop being so fucking crazy.

When I came back to the city, I found that the first part of my piece "War and the City" had been published in the New York Times vets blog. Very exciting. Check it out.

Next stop, Princeton.

Not News

2010-08-23T09:28:00.000-04:00

Not reading much... getting ready for a 10-day Vipassana Meditation course. Will post more this fall as I turn to study...

In the meantime: Frank Kermode died, Xe (formerly known as Blackwater) will pay a $42-million-dollar settlement to the State Department in lieu of criminal charges so they can keep contracting for the US government, some xenophobic Texas racists are also functionally illiterate, and despite the fact that he was and remains wrong about Iraq, I'm praying for Christopher Hitchens.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

2010-08-19T13:37:00.001-04:00

US TELLS IRAQ: "Good luck with all that freedom! Sorry about the dead bodies and corruption... And those 50,000 troops still in country are 'trainers,' got it?"

Seven years is a long time. Now my war's "over." Kinda makes me all choked up.

Also, Marc Bousquet weighs in on a recent NY Times "debate" on academic tenure; the Matisse exhibit @ MoMA is pretty awesome; a bigoted jackass running for Governor of New York voiced his support for Big Government telling Americans what to do; drag-queen and LGBT activist Anne Coulter takes another hit for his courageous outspokenness (no more taking back America!); and Tom Scott proposes some very necessary journalism warning labels.

NPR is making me dumber

2010-08-17T13:17:00.000-04:00

So to follow up my snarky carping about a book I haven't read, I'm going to engage in some snarky carping about a "debate" I'm not paying attention to. In fact, it's a brouhaha I'm actively trying to ignore--and, unfortunately, failing.

Every day it seems for the last week , I have to hear somebody opine on Park 51 (aka "The Cordoba House," or "The Ground Zero Mosque"). Why is this a discussion? Why are they giving time to witless, jingoistic bullshit on NPR? Can't we just "refudiate" all this rabble-rousing ballyhoo and put our "sensitivities" second to the idea of religious freedom, which was, you know, like a founding value and stuff (and kind of important to secular democracy)?

No, I guess not.

Maybe part of what makes me so angry about all this idiotic, bigoted, xenophobic blather arguing that we should discriminate against Muslims because some people find their religion offensive is an acute awareness of how easily I gave in to racism while serving in the Army in Iraq, and of how hard I've worked to get over that. It took me years to quit using the word hadji, or quit gritting my teeth when I saw a woman in a burqah or head scarf. So maybe I'm a little sensitive myself when rabid jackasses start parading out their racist shit under the cover of patriotism, tender feelings, and "hallowed ground".

This is a non-issue that's been seized upon by rightist wing-nuts to whip up demagogic froth. There are a variety of cogent, reasonable arguments pointing out how stupid, fundamentally against American values (and the Constitution), and racist is opposition to Park 51 / the Cordoba House (here, here, and here, for example).

It's a little infuriating to see this issue taking up so much space. Meanwhile, our Muslim "ally" Pakistan, whose unstable government is equipped with nucear weapons, suffers from devastating floods that will no doubt further destabilize the region, and Iraq continues to teeter toward collapse and civil war as we plan our escape from the deathtrap we created.

Yeah. And what happened to BP? That whole oil thing? Is that done now? The Afghanistan leaks? Anything? Anybody? Can we pay attention to something for a few minutes and not let the screaming media-idiot-machine distract us with fatuous noise? Can that happen?

Never mind.

Me and Tolstoy, We Both Hate Freedom

2010-08-15T11:10:00.000-04:00

So I found out from The Guardian this morning that Time has anointed Johnathan Franzen a Great American Novelist. Given how Time’s been so vigorously and intelligently providing of-the-moment book reviewing and criticism these last few years (the last author to grace Time's cover, a decade ago, was the Tolstoy to Franzen's Dostoyevksy, Stephen King), and that the gentleman they hired to anoint Franzen is best known for his novel of a boy who goes away to magic school (no, not Harry Potter, but a Harry Potter rip-off, which fact almost overloads my Baudrillard Simulacrum-o-meter), I have to say, well done, Time. You’ve taken your role as arbiter of American tastes and values and your long tradition of thoughtful reviews of important books and used it to lift up a difficult, powerful, but unrecognized genius, whose new book is surely as profound, rich, and prescient as his last novel, The Corrections—which, if you remember, ended by predicting the long, slow “correction” to the economic exuberance of the nineties, and the quiet, gentle decade beginning the 21st century.

Of course, betting wrong is not a novelist’s greatest sin, nor is misreading the social and cultural forces shaping the world so badly that your book gets bitchslapped by history, as The Corrections was by 9/11. Nor should we fault Franzen for his self-righteous, bathetic hand-wringing about the fate of the Big Social Novel, his unwarranted and mean-spirited attacks on avant-garde and experimental fiction, and his primma-donna drama with Oprah Winfrey. We should remember, as Grossman and others so dutifully point out, that Franzen can create three-dimensional characters who say things, feel things, and do things (I remember one in The Corrections quoting Schopenauer while he played with his own poop). That is most definitely a sterling virtue for a novelist these days, when Literature must “compete” with Television, Movies, and the Interwebs for our precious free time and entertainment dollars. Yes to characters!

William Skidelsky, writing in The Guardian, sounds the trumpets for Emperor Franzen: “if there is one English-language writer today with the ambition and talent to make the literary novel seem truly meaningful again, both as a vehicle of mass entertainment and as a serious record of our times, it is him.” Indeed, it is a crucial time for The Novel, and Literature’s vehicular history and historical veracity are the marks by which we can see it saved. The Great Literary Novel is and should be a history of the present, an infotainment about ourselves so narcissistically compelling that we’ll turn for a moment from the video teats at which we normally suck and pause to think, however briefly, in words. From Don Quixote to Tristam Shandy to Moby Dick to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, from Frankenstein to Middlemarch to The Sound and the Fury to Invisible Man, from The Scarlet Letter to War and Peace to Magic Mountain to Gravity’s Rainbow, the greatest novels in the western tradition have all been mass entertainments whose aim was to record and detail the petty obsessions and fleeting distractions of our self-absorbed day-to-day lives.

Let all and sundry proclaim the Emperor’s arrival! Despite the fact that by all accounts Freedom sounds much like a rehash of The Corrections, with Big Current Issues swapped out to keep it contemporary (as Skidelsky writes, in Freedom “he addresses, among much else, the spread of neocon ideology, the reconstruction of Iraq and environmental desecration”—and Freedom seems to involve more poop, as well, this time with a wedding ring), it sounds like exactly the Great American Novel that America deserves: navel-gazing, over-hyped, high on the smell of its own flatulence, and most of all Very Important, Great, and Real.

I know this is the novel I’ve been waiting for, and I can’t wait to hear all the tooting that has only just begun to blast from the media machine. Ladies and Gentlemen, the lovely, photogenic Mr. Franzen, the most exceptional of all Lake Woebegon’s exceptional children, has arrived to save literature from itself. That crashing and grinding noise you hear? Applause.

In other news, I finished War and Peace. It’s hard to know how to summarize and discuss a 1500-page novel that’s regarded as one of the high points of Western Lit. I read the Ann Dunnigan translation, not the much-lauded Pevear & Volokhonsky, but I found the prose clean, swift, and strong, never dull, and often beautiful. The book is a wonderful historical epic, and once the central triumvirate emerge (Pierre, Prince Andrei, and Natasha), the many narrative strands become less confusing. It is a rich, profound, and sweeping book, and Tolstoy’s descriptions of war are simply amazing. I also particularly loved his long description of a hunt.

A few things bothered me, though, primarily Tolstoy’s heavy-handed lectures on history that weigh down and in my opinion completely warp the end of the novel. What he has to say is interesting and well-put, but he might have said it once and left it, instead of repeating himself again and again, then spending the last forty pages driving the point home one more time, in case we missed it. Basically, history isn’t about great men, but the mass of human lives, and human behavior—especially but not only in the mass—is as subject to natural laws (and as bereft of self-directed “freedom”) as any other phenomenon. I buy it, I think it’s an interesting philosophical discussion and a very important point, and I also think it’s fascinating that Tolstoy developed his theory of mass man when he did. It’s also a good point of view for a novelist to take. And while it’s interesting in the context of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the many disparate lives Tolstoy draws, Tolstoy just beats it into the ground.

I also found the end dissatisfying for another reason, which was Pierre and Natasha’s happy marriage. I’m not quite sure what it is that bugs me about it, but I feel like Pierre’s spiritual enlightenment while in prison is somehow diminished by him settling into domestic bliss and daily concerns, however touchingly drawn, and Natasha’s travails and achievements too are subsumed into diapers and babies. Maybe this is Tolstoy’s point: that life, in all its banality, triumphs. If so, he makes it very well, but it’s still not quite… maybe not quite what I want. Perhaps my taste is more for the tragic, for the uncompromising, for the exception…

It’s quite a good book, all in all, well worth the time, and I’m glad to have read it, especially for Tolstoy’s look at war, but it didn’t leave me as stunned and awestruck as did Middlemarch or The Great Gatsby or Swann’s Way, nor even as amazed and engaged as almost any Henry James, Faulkner, or Dostoyevsky would. A great novel, certainly, and a profound achievement of human art, but curiously disappointing.

I’ll finish with a brief quotation, that called to mind my Army days in Germany:

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of toil—idleness—was a condition of the first man’s state of bliss before the Fall. This love of idleness has remained the same in fallen man, but the curse still lies heavy on the human race, not only because we have to earn our bread in the sweat of our brow, but because our moral nature is such that we are unable to be idle and at peace. A secret voice tells us that we ought to feel guilty when we are idle. If man could find a state in which though idle he could feel that he was of some use and was fulfilling his duty, he would have discovered one of the elements of primeval bliss. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is enjoyed by a whole class—the military. It is just this obligatory and irreproachable idleness that has always constituted the chief attraction of military service.

Still Reading War & Peace

2010-08-08T09:50:00.000-04:00

But I'm almost done. 100 more pages.

I did finish a really interesting book, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Adventures, that is nurturing, down-to-earth, and provocative. I dislike the term polyamory, aesthetically and semantically--it sounds octopoid, it's a dissatisfying mix of Latin and Greek, and it's awkward (I mean, do we call monogamous people mono-amorous? uni-amorous?)--but I understand the desire for a positive definition, rather than simply a negative one (i.e., non-monogamous). The book was recommended to me by a friend who's doing research on polyamory and with whom I was discussing open relationships. Much of this is new to me (at 33, and divorced, I'm finally beginning to really own what I want in terms of relationships). I recommend the book to anyone who is thinking outside the box and exploring nonmonogamy, and even to people who are happily monogamous but are interested in thinking through their choices and preconceptions.

I also read The Human Face of Karate, by Kaicho Tadashi Nakamura. Kaicho Nakamura is the founder of Seido Juku Karate, and this book is his autobiography. It's a straightforward, honest, inspiring account of his lifelong karatedo, his difficult break with the kyokushin kaikan school, and his thoughts on ethics, karate, and spirit.

I remember a conversation a had once with a friend of a friend, who when he found out I was studying karate gave me a self-righteous and tedious lecture about how he'd done martial arts for a few years, but then gave up because he realized that all he was learning was how to hurt people, and that wasn't the kind of person he wanted to be. I knew even then that there was more to Seido, Karate, and (at least some) martial arts than that, but I wish I'd read Kaicho's autobiography at that point because I could have offered a much stronger objection.

In fact, my practice of Seido and the practice Kaicho leads at the Seido Juku Honbu isn't just about being tough, getting in shape, and kicking ass. Seido means "Sincere Way," and it's a practice of building discipline, character, and ethics in one's whole life. As stated on the Seido website:

Seido aims not only to develop students with the highest level of physical skills. It also strives to cultivate individuals of the highest moral character who can then make significant contributions to their family life, the workplace, and to society at large.

Seido school's meditations, lectures, community service, and other practices integrate the do, or way, into life and society. This is a strong tradition in karate. As stated on the Japan Karate Association (Shotokan school) website:

The ultimate purpose of karate is not physical prowess or the winning of matches, but the development of balance, harmony and spiritual and physical strength through strict, disciplined training. Karate schools you in natural, effortless action, and imbues you with an openness, peace and wholeness of character that vastly enrich day-to-day life.

Practical ethics, I suppose, has been something I've been thinking about a lot lately, in both explorative and traditional ways. I don't want to be one of those orientalist Westerners who adopt simplified versions of Asian philosophies and practice for their exotic, unusual, or easily misunderstood facets. What I love most about Seido karate are these four things: 1) the physical and mental discipline essential to the practice; 2) the development of balance, breathing, and flexibility, both physically and more than physically, metaphorically, in my life; 3) the close, supportive, and welcoming sense of community at the McBurney YMCA dojo and at the Seido Honbu; and 4) the spiritual and ethical teachings Kaicho, Kyoshi Pam, and other sensei put forth, which both speak of and exemplify values of patience, discipline, diligence, compassion, attention, empathy, and self-mastery. For me, karate offers a way to integrate the strength, fighting spirit, fortitude, and discipline I learned in the Army with the openness, empathy, spirituality, and creativity that have always been important to me, but which felt stifled in the military.

As I go to Princeton in the fall, I will probably switch from Seido to Shotokan schools, since the Princeton club is Shotokan and there is no Seido there. But I hope both that the Shotokan club at Princeton offers something of the ethical and spiritual do in karatedo, and also that I will still be able to make it up to the NYC Honbu sometimes to continue my studies in Seido.

Other than that, and working my way through War and Peace, and editing my two novels, I've also managed to see some art and movies. The two best exhibitions I've seen this summer were the Charles Burchfield at the Whitney. I knew nothing about Burchfield before going and frankly wasn't expecting much, but was blown away by the exhibition. It was curated excellently, providing a strong but not overwhelming narrative arc to the artist's body of work that highlighted both continuity and change. A few key turns/moments are well-structured within an overall flow that manages to show both Burchfield's range and his recurring themes and concerns.

More importantly, Burchfield's work itself is amazing: my favorite paintings were his "landscapes" or nature-scenes that combine a wildly expressionistic style with spare, almost minimal design techniques, an expressive personal symbology, surreal transformations, and a striking and original use of light and perspective that warps the space of the painting to utterly transform the world being viewed. Really great stuff.

My friend and I inadvertently went through the exhibit backwards, and (perhaps owing to our ignorance about Burchfield) found this reverse-narrative rewarding and even at times thrilling. Burchfield's up at the Whitney till October. Check it out.

I also finally went to see the Otto Dix at the Neue Galerie. Curatorially, this exhibit was fairly staid, but it did well enough to get out of the way and let Dix shine (or glimmer darkly like a pool of moon-lit blood oozing across a muddy trench).

The most affecting portion for me was the first room, a showcase of 50 prints from Dix's series Der Krieg, along with four related paintings (including "Wounded Veteran," below). It's easily the most striking and horrific exhibition I've seen since I was appalled by Nina Berman's photos of wounded Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel at the Whitney 2010 Biennial. Modeled after Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra, Dix's prints and drawings show him easily Goya's equal in the depiction of the human fragility and suffering. It calls to mind Nietzsche: "Oh this insane, sad beast man!" And what an easily butchered piece of meat.

Dix's painting on the upper floor are mostly just as good (excepting some of the boring watercolors in the hall). In nearly every mature painting, it's hard not to see the human bodies, so individual, so full of character (to the point of caricature), so full of life, as corpses on the verge of rigor mortis. Dix's morbid palette and the expressions, at the verge of hysteria, numb shock, terror, or bestial cruelty, that play on the faces of his subjects make for a series of portraits that delight and disgust with equal measure, something like the effect created by a ruptured body by the side of the road.

Dix is up at the Neue Galerie until the end of August. Go see it.

Finally, I saw some films, which I'll only mention briefly. Inception, which was an enjoyable, well-constructed, and almost even intelligent summer blockbuster, much fun; Orlando, in limited rerelease at the disturbingly skungy Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, which was almost perfect but for the plodding intrusion of Billy Zane (what? WHY!?), heavy, dated synthesizer, and an ending that seemed both vaguely antifeminist (oh, she's happy now that she GAVE BIRTH) and somewhat arbitrary; Bye-Bye Brasil, a really interesting Brazilian film from the 70's about a traveling sideshow troupe; Breathless, which was, as always, wonderful; and last but not least, The Room, a truly strange filmgoing experience. The Room is hard to describe, an "indie" film in the purest sense, and apparently something of a cult-film perhaps comparable with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can say, having seen both, The Room is less fun, far less sexy, less emotionally satisfying, and much less interesting than TRHPS(oh Bullwinkle!), both as a movie and as a movie-experience, but it was a hoot nonetheless to go see it and throw spoons.

That's about it for now. This is like the longest post ever. Maybe I should post more briefly and more often, but hey, I'm not a blogger.

Happy Sunday.

Looking for Submissions

2010-07-29T22:59:00.000-04:00

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Do you write fiction? Did you serve in Iraq or Afghanistan?

We are Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans looking for short stories (1500-7000 words) by other military veterans who served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. We seek high quality, literary fiction that touches in some way on military or wartime experience, either downrange or back home, for an anthology of veterans’ writing. Please send your story as a word document or pdf to gwotstories@gmail.com, along with a brief bio specifying your publishing credits and military service, by August 15, 2010. We seek original stories or reprints (if you own rights).

gwotstories@gmail.com

August 15, 2010

The Great Gatsby

2010-07-20T08:53:00.000-04:00

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

I'm beginning to think that Gatsby might be the preeminent American novel, whatever that vaguely means. The best? The greatest? The most characteristic, the most American? All I know is that where once I thought it was fluffy and easy, now it blows my mind a little more every time I read it. It's so dense and economical, such a vivid portrait of a particular moment in America, and also interesting to me now as a war story: both Nick and Gatsby are, of course, vets. Gatsby got his medal from little Montenegro for using his machine-gun unit to wipe out thousands of men. And then coming back from that, from Oggsford, in his shabby uniform meets Meyer Wolfsheim... His obsession with Daisy then takes on other connotations, besides just "a dream dreamt too long," something other than love: a desperate reaching back to before the war. Hm. Maybe I'll work this out... Or see if someone else already has.

Life goes on. I'm mostly editing older things now, but have sketched out some new stories, which is exciting. Life in New York continues to be hectic and interesting. Some big things might be happening soon; stay tuned.

Still reading War and Peace (for like eight months now) and a couple other books... but I finished Lydia Davis's short story collection Break It Down, which was full of beautifully-crafted, appalling stories of disconnection and soul death.I've also read Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red, odd and sharp and romantic and super-smart, and of course Gatsby. Some other stuff.

Blah blah blah. Back to actual writing.

Cheers.

Summer is here and the living is EZ

2010-06-30T18:03:00.004-04:00

Summer in NYC. Lovely.

Recently attended the William Joiner Center's Writing Workshop, where I took a workshop with the Vietnam-War poet (and king among men)Bruce Weigl. Met some great Boston-area GWOT/Iraq/Afghanistan vets, and hung out with some of the crew from Warrior Writers, a non-profit devoted to "veterans transforming their lives through art."

While I feel like I have to be circumspect about Warrior Writers, because of their connections with the IVAW, a sadly confused and even pernicious organization, I support Warrior Writers in their mission to reach out to vets and help them write about their experiences. I hope they continue to reach out to all veterans, anti-war or not, liberal and conservative, and understand that there is more to dealing with the experience of war than merely to affirm or deny its morality.

I hope to post more on the issue of vets writing in the coming weeks, even though I'd like to get away from writing about Iraq and vets stuff, because I think it's important and there are some things to be said.

So this bloggedy blog will be shifting from talking about books I read to a more general and less regular forum for thoughts about different issues.

In the meantime, check out these books from vets, KABOOM: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, by Matt Gallagher; Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception and Dishonor in Iraq, by Michael Anthony; and Phantom Noise, a new book of poetry by Brian Turner. Also in non-vet news check out The November Criminals, by the always delightful Sam Munson.

Now it's time to go outside.

Trotsky on Fox News

2010-05-29T12:49:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Crooked Timber.

I've continued to be really bad about posting anything, and am considering leaving off this whole blog thing, but I'll try to get it rolling again in the next few weeks, I think. Patience...

Absentee Bloglord

2010-03-26T13:12:00.002-04:00

So I haven't posted in more than two months... Things have been busy, hectic even. I'll soon get down to posting about some of what I've read in the last ten weeks or so, in a massive yet unsatisfyingly cursory overview, but for now some highlights: went river rafting in Utah, will be going to Princeton in the fall to earn a PhD in English Lit, delivered a paper on pain in the war memoir at a graduate student conference, got my war novel rejected by yet another agent (tho she was super sweet and respectful about it), and am working on my MA thesis.

Next will be my reading. Tschussie for now, tho.

Special Offer

2010-01-14T15:39:00.002-05:00

Take advantage today of this special offer from The Little Review.

Good Riddance 2009

2009-12-31T20:45:00.004-05:00

The end of a particularly fucked year at the end of another low, dishonest decade.

Hard to know what to say. Some things are in order. First, my quotation from Cornel West was, I would hope obviously, taking the piss. The man gives narcissism a bad name. Second, read some books on trauma. Mm-hm. I could post the bibliography but, frankly, why? Props to Ian Hacking and Yuval Harari. Have started some other books which I'll talk about when I finish. Third, and finally, I saw A Serious Man, which was pretty awesome and has left me troubled.

Another rejection for the war novel and various stories and poems. Got a piece in New Letters and another forthcoming in Consequence. Tonight, this New Years' Eve, 2010 sounds like a good idea.

Happy New Year, everybody.

Better Living Through Bacon

2009-12-03T07:33:00.003-05:00

Soon all my vegetarian friends will be able to eat fake meat grown in a laboratory. Hooray for Frankenbacon! This will certainly solve all our problems. I'm thinking perhaps they can grow the marinade too, right in the meat.

If this actually worked, I wonder whether it would be an expensive niche item, like seitan, or a massive meat replacement, like the weird, rubbery chicken you get at Sammy's Noodle Shop on 6th Ave?

Also, apparently Cornel West's new book sucks. My favorite parts of this book are the suggestion that West needs to go out to the woodshed, which had a different meaning in the Army than it seems to have among Jazz musicians, and the following long quotation:

“The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high -- and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!”

And why would you? Go get that sublime and funky love.

And I meanwhile, will savor my sublime and funky love for soggy laboratory-grown pork. Mmmm.

Update

2009-11-27T23:09:00.002-05:00

So I reread most of Jünger’s Storm of Steel, bits of Keegan’s Face of Battle, some essays by Benjamin, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and for new books finished the Harari I described in the last post, The Ultimate Exprience, which was excellent, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, which was very disappointing.

I got all my PhD apps in, and the supplementary shit, which is good. Now I just wait to hear back. I’m reading all kinds of stuff, and I hope to discuss some of it in more detail soon. I got a lot of reading to do in the next three weeks.

The Ultimate Experience

2009-11-27T22:43:00.003-05:00

Harari, Yuval Noah. The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000. Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2008.

"The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience,” writes Ernst Jünger in his memoir of WWI. “That was what distinguished it from what I had been through before; it was an initiation that had not only opened the red-hot chambers of dread but had also led me through them."

Jünger sees his war experience as an existential crucible, a test and a vision of the future. Tim O’Brien, another veteran from another war, sees his war experience as a profound and wounding disillusionment:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. looked back on his experiences in the Civil War as not only formative but one of the few final moments of real truth in his life. Edmund Wilson writes “The young Holmes’s experience of the Civil War, besides settling for him the problem of faith, also cured him, and cured him for life, of apocalyptic social illusions.” His wounding and fighting formed the basis of what he later called his soldier’s faith:

If you wait in line, suppose on Tremont Street Mall, ordered simply to wait and do nothing, and have watched the enemy bring their guns to bear upon you down a gentle slope like that of Beacon Street, have seen the puff of the firing, have felt the burst of the spherical case-shot as it came toward you, have heard and seen the shrieking fragments go tearing through your company, and have known that the next or the next shot carries your fate; if you have advanced in line and have seen ahead of you the spot you must pass where the rifle bullets are striking; if you have ridden at night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spottsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode you heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you; if you have been in the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the splat of the bullets upon the trees, and as you moved have felt your foot slip upon a dead man's body; if you have had a blind fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear—if, in short, as some, I hope many, who hear me, have known, you have known the vicissitudes of terror and triumph in war; you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of.

If you’ve been there, that is, then you can know the truth. I could pile on further examples, from J. Glenn Gray, Wilfrid Owen, Michael Herr, Chris Hedges, from several wars, from novels and memoirs and films, from psychological analyses of trauma and recovery, from considered literary exegeses, from anthropological studies, and even from my own work, that neither argue nor examine but rather take as an a priori assumption the notion that war is an authentic site of revealed truth, and that the first-hand, physical, subjective experience of war and combat gives the subject of such experience a privileged moral authority. Whether war reveals the bedrock of faith or a vision of the future, tears aware the veils of social illusion, or enlightens us to “momentous truths about ourselves,” in every case it is unassailably real.

Yuval Harari, in his book The Ultimate Experience, argues that such authority is based in “flesh-witnessing,” and sees it as a historical product of the European Enlightenment. His main argument, put concisely, is this:

War became a revelatory experience in the period 1740-1865. Before the eighteenth century combatants almost never interpreted war as a revelatory experience…. It was during the second half of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century that the Enlightenment, the culture of sensibility, and Romanticism led soldiers to begin seeing war as an agent of revelation…. Romanticism highlighted ‘sublime’ experiences as privileged sources for knowledge and authority, and war experience fitted perfectly to the Romantic definition of the sublime.

Central to Harari’s argument is a narrative about changing conceptions of truth, the body, and subjectivity. In the medieval and early modern era, Harari argues, the the military body was subject to the rule of the mind. This conception achieves perhaps its clearest articulation in Maurice of Nassau's army and Descartes’ res cogitans. Truth is something the mind perceives, and bodily or sense data was inherently suspect and fallible. There were a variety of ways to interpret the experience of war in the early modern era, but none of them focused on the bodily sensations of the experience, or accepted that the body was a worthwhile site of truth. The mind or soul ruled, and whether the early modern narratives were exploits of martial honor, recountings of personal achievements, or stories of some collectivity such as a “nation,” they shared certain understandings of how war worked: “1. Knowledge of military ideals and of the essence of war was the prerogative of the mind…. [and] 2. The quality of a mind could be judged by its ability to master bodies and direct them in the right way. It was consequently enough to describe bodily movements in order to evaluate mind. The ethics of intention… was rejected by military culture.”

With the development of the conception of human identity as essentially embodied, through the eighteenth century’s complex cultural interplay that resulted in what is called “the culture of sensibility,” a new realm of truth came to dominate the interpretation of war experience. In effect, as Harari has it, bodies began to think. Beginning with such thinkers as Julian Offray de la Mettrie, a French doctor who scandalized his contemporaries with treatises such as Histoire naturelle de l’âme and L’Homme-machine, which “abolished the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body, denied the existence of mind and soul alike, and argued that thinking and feeling were done by matter,” and carrying through to contemporary theorists such as Elaine Scarry and writers such as Jünger and O’Brien, Harari traces the development of the war’s revelatory potential as it grew from the new truths of sensation, experience, and the body.

While Harari’s argument is built upon a narrative of the wider cultural changes we call The Enlightenment and Romanticism, what it is built with is the stuff of rigorous historical scholarship: a masterly grasp of a breadth of primary source material. If the book had a serious fault—which is no fault at all since, in fact, Harari is a military historian and not a cultural critic—it would be that it is full to bursting with examples from military memoirs from the relevant eras. He makes his argument both by telling a convincing story about how conceptions of war changed in relation to other contemporary cultural changes, and by citing one military memoir after another that clearly show what he is talking about. He also shows a respectable restraint in his argument, for while he certainly argues that the revelatory interpretation of war has become predominant, he recognizes that even still it is not the only one. Early modern interpretations of war as “an honorable way of life,” as “an instrument for personal advancement,” and as a national or collective enterprise continue to show up in the memoirs of soldiers, even if they have been eclipsed by the interpretation of war as an experience of truth, a sort of Bildung.

Of great interest is not just Harari’s genealogy of the soldier’s faith, as it were, but his analysis and typology of the forms the narrative of war-as-truth takes. First he looks at how “Sensationism and Romanticism transformed military memoirs by changing their language, their scenery, and their imagery” by examining four central themes: “sensations, nerves, sympathy, and nature.” He then unpacks the “key experiences of war” in the narrative of war-as-Bildung: 1) Basic training; 2) Baptism of fire; 3) The eve of combat; 4) Combat; 5) Injury and brushes with death; 6) Inflicting death; 7) Witnessing death; 8) The wake of battle; 9) The joys of comardeship; and 10) Returning home. He analyzes the importance of “flesh-witnessing,” or the idea that “those who did not undergo the key experiences of war cannot understand these experiences and cannot understand war in general.” Finally, he delineates the “master narratives of late modern military experience” as follows: 1) War as a positive revelation; 2) Disillusionment; 3) Combinations; and 4) Desensitizing. I cannot in this brief space hope to do justice to his typology, but it seems to me both thorough and convincing.

Harari argues that the changes he describes began around 1745 and achieved a high point in 1865, with the publication of the first volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. What is most striking about his argument for my interests is what it says about war culture in the twentieth century:

All the essential features of the revelatory interpretation of war were already in place before 1914, and therefore cannot be construed as the product of twentieth-century developments. In particular, they were not a reaction to the technologization of war.

To cite one last example, in 1903 Rudyard Kipling published ‘The Return,’ a poem about the return of the British soldiers from the Boer War. In it a British common soldier describes how he returns from war to London, ‘but not the same’ because ‘Things’ ave transpired which made me learn / The size and meanin’ of the game.’ The narrator tries to track the sources of the change war wrought in him: ‘I don’t know where the change began; / I started as an average kid, / I finished as a thinkin’ man.’

First, he notes the impact of “nature.” He describes the rivers, the wide plains, the wilderness, and the mountains of South Africa, speculating that ‘These may ‘ave taught me more or less.’ Then come the ravages of war, the burnt towns, the starving stray dogs, the homesick men, the missing comerades. ‘They taught me, too,’ he says. Finally, he writes about ‘the pore dead that look so old / An’ was so young an hour ago, / An’ legs tied down before they’re cold—/ These are the things which make you know.’

The entire spectrum of twentieth-century war stories, from Wilfrid Owen to Adolf Hitler to Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, is encapsulated in Kipling’s poem. If this conclusion is correct, it means that the famed late modern revolution in the culture of war should be predated to c. 1750 rather than 1914, 1945, or 1968. Nothing essentially new was invented or discovered in the twentieth century itself. What was new is the way in which the revelatory interpretation, which previously was only partially developed and which was still eclipsed by the instrumental and honorary interpretations, spread to become the most popular interpretation of all, and in the process acquired both artistic and political powers that it hitherto lacked.

Twentieth-century stories of martial revelation, and particularly of disillusionment, were certainly far more powerful and moving than anything written in the Romantic period. Yet the increased force of these stories emanated not from some new ingredients, but largely from the fact that they spelled out in full what was only latent in most Romantic memoirs. The basic ideas of twentieth-century war stories remained those of Sensationism, of Bildung, and of the sublime. However, twentieth-century memoirists pursued these ideas with far greater devotion than their predecessors, which gave their narratives unprecedented clarity and power.

Further, Harari points out important struggles within this interpretation, including that “between the image of the wise veteran and the image of the crazy veteran.”

Indeed, the traumatized soldier, who became a stock figure of military culture in the last few decades, is probably the best representation of the double-faced Romantic approach to war…. Their problem is exactly that they were given a peep behind the curtain of ignorance that shields society from the harsh reality of injury and death…. Because they were traumatized by a sublime experience… traumatized soldiers often appear in Western culture as ‘holy fools,’ bearers of a potent and sacred wisdom.

Such clear explications of the fraught relationship between experience, truth, witness, and social discourse that I’ve experienced myself as a war vet come almost as a balm, even while I cannot divorce myself from believing somehow that however historically contingent and socially constructed is the truth-value of my experience at war, it is still something incontrovertibly authentic. Perhaps something like believing in a dead god, I still have the soldier’s faith. Yet after reading Harari I cannot ever again accept unquestioningly the claims to truth, authenticity, and moral authority adverted by those who have done nothing more transcendent than walk around in a place where people get shot.

Harari, a young Israeli scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has contributed substantially to clearing out some of the stale cant and tired pieties surrounding the notion of war in scholarly discussion, and given us a firmly grounded account of how we’ve come to view war as the site of revelatory truth.

Academic Freedom

2009-11-14T09:57:00.005-05:00

So I read a bunch of stuff, took the GRE Subject Test for Literature in English (which was lame), marched in the Veteran's Day parade down 5th Avenue, went into a fairly mild drunk which has taken a surprising three days to recover from (33 is not that old--maybe I have cancer?), and have been generally busy, all of which I'm not going ot talk about now. Instead I want to link to Michael Berube's blog post about Garcetti v. Ceballos, which looks like it might constrain academic freedom for tenured public university professors. The AAUP has this and this to say:

I don't know what to do about any of it, but it looks like trouble.

Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T22:55:00.002-04:00

Along with assorted reading, including a bit of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and some Emerson, Nietzsche, Marx, Condorcet, Madison, Robespierre, and Hegel, I finally finished St. Augustine’s Confessions, except for the last two chapters, which I had to skip, Daniel Schacter’s workmanlike but lucid and judicious Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past, and Anatole Broyard’s memoir of postwar intellectual life in Greenwich Village, Kafka Was the Rage.

I’m brain-dead from filling out PhD applications and cajoling the poet to get her manuscript out on a deadline.

Go Phillies.

Looking forward, not backward

2009-10-18T03:57:00.004-04:00

Though Obama has said he will not use these anymore, and I believe him... torture in fact has gone from being an anathema, something forbidden and illegal under US law and international conventions, to being a policy choice. --Mark Danner, on Democracy Now!

Just marking a few stories like this, from Salon, talking about the continued suppression of evidence by the Obama administration, this, from the Washington Independent, showing that Obama's DOJ wants to continue Bush's practice of denying prisoners basic judicial rights, this from the AP noting more information restrictions, and this, from the Guardian (from August), talking about force-feeding at Gitmo and other fun ways we no longer torture people.

Also: Nazi gnomes cause outcry in Germany

2009-10-15T18:54:00.004-04:00

Thank you, Guardian.

The Empire of Trauma

2009-10-15T18:45:00.006-04:00

“My problem is to know how men govern (themselves and others) by means of the production of truth. By ‘the production of truth,’ I do not mean the production of true statements, but the arrangement of domains where the practices of the true and the false can be at once regulated and relevant.” (Michel Foucault, “Table ronde du 20 mai 1978,” in Dits et Écrits 4. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 20-34, qtd. In Empire of Trauma 5.

In The Empire of Trauma, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman work to critique the concept of “trauma” by tracing a moral genealogy of the concept in its international development from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century, then by analyzing three specific case studies “emblematic of the contemporary politics of trauma” (9): the explosion of the AZF chemical factory in Toulouse on 21 Sept. 2001; humanitarian psychiatric intervention in the context of the second Intifada; and the activity of “the main organization providing health care to immigrants in France, the Comité medical pour les exilés.” These three examples illustrate the growth and work of various aspects of what Fassin and Rechtman might call the “trauma industry.” They seek throughout to build a “social history of trauma” that denaturalizes the concept and “repoliticizes victims” (xii).

“From the literal sense in which the term is used by psychiatrists (a psychological shock) to its metaphorical extension disseminated by the media (a tragic event)—and it is worth noting that discourse often shifts from one meaning to the other within the same passage, without particularly marking the distinction—the idea of trauma is thus becoming established as a commonplace of the contemporary world, a shared truth” (2).

Fassin and Rechtman argue that trauma has “created a new language of the event…” produced “by a restructuring of the cognitive and moral foundations of our societies that define our relationship to misfortune, memory, and subjectivity” (7).

Fassin and Rechtman trace the concept of trauma through what they call a dual genealogy—the development of the scientific definition of trauma, and the changing social valuation of the victim. The German psychiatrist Oppenheim first developed the concept of “trauma neurosis” to describe the psychological effects of railway accidents on train passengers (30-31). From the beginning, trauma and hysteria were linked, with Charcot arguing that trauma was a kind of hysteria, then Janet arguing that hysteria originated from childhood trauma. Hysteria was understood widely as a gendered disorder indicating weakness of the psyche, but Charcot, Janet, and Freud argued that it was rather a mechanical psychological reaction having little to do with gender or strength. Freud developed Janet’s ideas, then famously repudiated them, abandoning his “seduction theory” for a “fantasy hypothesis” that argued that “the sexual is already traumatic in the unconscious,” that “Psychological trauma is not only the organism’s reaction to an external event, it is integral to the way the psyche functions” (31-33).

“For the expression ‘traumatic’ has no other than an economic meaning, and the disturbance permanently attacks the management of available energy. The traumatic experience is one which, in a very short space of time, is able to increase the strength of a given stimulus so enormously that its assimilation, or rather its elaboration, can no longer be effected by normal means.” (Freud, “General Theory of the Neuroses,” in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Trans. G. Stanley Hall. New York: Horace Liveright, 1920 (orig. pub. 1916). 237-238. Qtd. In Fassin 33.

Freud “took trauma definitively into the arena of the psyche, and in subsequent psychoanalytic writing the term ‘trauma’ was used to show clearly that what was under discussion was not the external event but rather the internal force which, when it encountered certain events or fantasies, would produce the pathological manifestations described by psychiatric semiology” (34).

The genealogy that Fassin and Rechtman trace argues that after Freud, the use of the concept turned more and more back to Janet’s way of thinking, and changed the locus of trauma from generic traumatic sexuality to specifically traumatized sexuality, that is, from a general condition to a specific event (34).

On the way to this turn, however, the idea of trauma neurosis was contested, developed, and manipulated in a variety of fields, including labor law, forensic psychiatry, military psychiatry, and colonial psychiatry (34-57).

Just prior to the outbreak of World War I, they argue, “suspicion of malingering, bad faith, and financial motives had already spread through the field of trauma neurosis” because the most prevalent cases of trauma being addressed were claims by industrial workers suffering from “sinistrosis,” which was essentially the same diagnosis as trauma neurosis. Sufferers of sinistrosis not only carried the stigma of being ostensibly financially motivated, but were also considered to have little will to recover—they were weak, lazy, and greedy (34-38). Come World War I, “Military psychiatry, borne along in the patriotic fervor, simply took up and radicalized diagnostic and therapeutic methods that had already been tested by putting workers suffering from neurosis claims back to work. Forensic psychiatry paved the way” (39).

The history of trauma and shell shock (not to be confused with battle rage or “combat madness”) in World War I and the importance of shell shock in the development of the idea of trauma is much discussed and well known. Fassin and Rechtman address the conflicts in psychiatric treatment and diagnosis, most centrally the “weakness” vs. “illness” debate best exemplified in the treatment of Siegfried Sassoon by William Halse Rivers (52-53), and trace how after the war and through World War II, trauma came to be seen less as “dishonorable conditions” and more as illnesses brought on by the event, yet still persisted in carrying a stigma of psychological weakness or financial motive (40-70, see esp. 50-53 and 69-70; see also 46-47 for a concise example of the sort of thinking that “blamed the victim” of trauma for being too sensitive to danger—work by Adam Cygielstrejch that argued from data suggesting that officers suffered combat neurosis at a far higher percentage than the rank-and-file). Despite the work of doctors such as Rivers and Freud, soldiers suffering what we now call PTSD continued to be suspected of psychological weakness and, while treated more humanely, were refused the compensation and treatment that would have signified their status as “victims” (70).

Fassin and Rechtman point to the revelation of the Holocaust as effecting a change in cultural consciousness about the responsibility of the victim with regard to their circumstances: “Things had changed so much since World War II that the average person could readily empathize with the confusion, fear, anxiety, and trauma of the young conscripts, with no discredit to them,” they write about veterans of the Vietnam war. “Since the horrific discovery of the genocide of the Jews, the role of trauma in the moral economy of US society had legitimized compassion for such formerly silent sufferings” (88-89). They particularly identify the work of Bruno Bettelheim as salient in forging a new paradigm of understanding trauma and suffering after World War II, a paradigm later developed by Robert Lifton and Mardi Horowitz, among others, that added to the role of the victim the dimensions of being a survivor and a witness (70-76).

“Thus it was in this dual role, of survivor and trauma victim, that Holocaust survivors were called on to testify to what happened to human beings in the death camps. Even though, as Agamben suggests (and Primo Levi before him), the only true witnesses were those who were no longer there to testify, those for whom the process of the destruction of humanity was completed, survivors remained under the obligation of testifying in their place—often in their name, but always in their memory. There is nothing here that compares to the experience of the traumatized soldier, whose testimony to shell shock was as unwelcome as his illness was suspect. With the survivors of the camps, testimony to trauma—more even than the testimony of the trauma victim—was gradually recognized as offering ultimate truth about the human condition” (75-76).

The epochal shift, according to Fassin and Rechtman, occurred in the 1960s and the 1970s, with the advent of feminist social agitation and the struggle of American veterans of the Vietnam War to redeem their status after both causing and suffering atrocious violence in a lost war (77-95). They point to the convergence of the needs of feminist advocacy and of clinical psychiatry in the 1970s as “sealing the fate of the traumatic event.” “From now on,” they write, “the event would be recognized as the exclusive etiological agent of post-traumatic disorders” (84). “Bearing no relation to the trauma narrative, removed from an individual’s history, without reference to previous personality structures, trauma thus appears as solely attributable to an unfortunate encounter between an ordinary person and an extraordinary event” (87).

In 1980, with the publication of DSM-III and the clinical birth of PTSD, trauma achieved the categorical social truth it carries today. “The task force that designed the new diagnostic category in DSM-III was comprised of psychiatrists who were particularly sensitive to the problems affecting Vietnam veterans”, including Robert Lifton, Mardi Horowitz, Chaim Shatan, and Jack Smith, a former marine involved with the VVAW (88, 88ff). Importantly, Fassin and Rechtman point out, the inclusion of PTSD in DSM-III opened up a difficult problem: “What should be done about the suffering of soldiers who were guilty of war crimes?” (89). The prevailing logic of trauma, they argue, determined that “These men should… be considered war victims, broken by what they had witnessed and by what they themselves had done—men traumatized by what the war had made of them” (91). This solution, Fassin and Rechtman argue, allowed Vietnam veterans to take up the role of traumatic witness and at the same time allowed military authorities to mitigate “some of the horror” in the widespread American atrocities by “showing men now destroyed by what they had done” (92). In effect, “the definition of the disorder did not call for any analysis of the moral circumstances,” and helped reinforce the developing idea of trauma as “the locus of incontrovertible fact” and “the proof of an unbearable experience” (93). “While the new concept of trauma eschewed any valuation of the individual act, it revealed the unbearable character of the event in general,” shifting moral responsibility away from individual actors to historical, structural, or institutional forces (95). “By applying the same psychological classification to the person who suffers violence, the person who commits it, and the person who witnesses it, the concept of trauma profoundly transforms the moral framework of what constitutes humanity” (21).

Fassin and Rechtman argue that this most contemporary development of the idea of trauma, as “the locus of an essential truth about humanity that [stands] stood apart from the moral qualities of the victim” (95), has profound implications. “The fact that trauma has become so pervasive a factor in our world is not the result of the successful dissemination of a concept elaborated in the scientific world of psychiatrists, and then exported into the social space of afflictions. It is rather the product of a new relationship to time and memory, to mourning and obligations, to misfortune and the misfortunate” (276). They argue that trauma, considered anthropologically, indicates how contemporary western cultures view misfortune and violence (“the tragic”), as “phenomena that leave traces of the past in the present, and that may even require immediate treatment in order to ensure they do not burden the future” (277). They argue that survivors of calamitous events “adopt the only persona that allows them to be heard—that of victim. In doing so, they tell us less of what they are than of the moral economies of our era in which they find their place” (279).

In considering the moral economy of trauma, Fassin and Rechtman argue that “trauma obliterates experience,” that is, that it categorizes, abstracts, and obscures historical and personal reality in favor of a universal, “objective,” “scientific” designation (281-282). Adopting either the “humanist” or “radical” point of view about trauma, they assert, “which are today the largely dominant viewpoints whether or not they are explicitly formulated, the universalization of trauma results in its trivialization. In these models, every society and every individual suffers the traumatic experience of their past. Not only do scales of violence disappear, but their history is erased. There is no difference between the survivor of genocide and the survivor of rape; this is in any case the clinical view” (19).

They also argue that “trauma chooses its victims,” that is, that pace trauma’s ostensible universality, it is applied, treated, compensated, and heard only in accordance with all the expected contingencies of social, political, and economic power (282-283). “Thus, even though the concept of trauma asserts the equal humanity of all suffering people, even though it proclaims that collective memory is now a product of the fate of each individual and that it necessarily implies reparation, testimony, and proof, the use of the concept in fact makes it the basis for a new division between human beings” (283). Some categories of people—western tsunami survivors vs. native Sri Lankans, American soldiers vs. Iraqi civilians, Israeli settlers vs. Palestinian refugees, white New Orleaneans vs. the black residents of the 9th ward—are more traumatized than others. They argue, finally and with finality, that “trauma today is a moral judgment” (284).

Trauma and Recovery

2009-10-15T10:33:00.005-04:00

Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery comes wearing its problems on its face: “One of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud,” exclaims the New York Times in a blurb on the cover, a cover which presents us with three vivid strips, red, white and blue, and a variety of fonts (seven) designed to grab our attention and assure us of the book’s authority, while on the back cover we are told that the book is “universally recognized as a classic,” is a “landmark,” a “triumph,” and a “stunning achievement,” by such luminaries in the field of psychology as Gloria Steinem and Sophie Freud, a professor of social work who happens to be Sigmund Freud’s grand-daughter. The subtitle offers the finishing touch, promising that the book will explore “The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror.”

The book begins by avowing its polemical and political orientation: “This book owes its existence to the women’s liberation movement. Its intellectual mainspring is a collective feminist project of reinventing the basic concepts of normal development and abnormal psychology, in both men and women” (ix). She makes clear early on her argument that diagnosis is inseparable from progressive political change, that in order to understand something (specifically “trauma”) we must be actively working to eliminate the causes of the thing we’re trying to understand, that in order to develop worthwhile knowledge we must adhere to a political teleology of democratic, individualistic utopianism where the end goal is the final freedom of the self to achieve full expression without any kind of violence or repression:

“To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance…. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.

“The systematic study of psychological trauma therefore depends on the support of a political movement. Indeed, whether such study can be pursued or discussed in public is itself a political question. The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children. Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement…” (9)

Now, certainly, the relation between knowledge and power is a complex one. I don’t need Judith Herman—or Foucault—to tell me this. Yet to argue that advances in empirical knowledge are only possible after they have been politically affirmed, that we must be morally right before we can seek empirical knowledge, is anathema to objective ideals of scientific research. Relativist anti-scientific post-Kuhnian social constructionists can argue with a great deal of validity that how science is in fact practiced is corrupted by all kinds of subjective human and social determinants, without detracting in the least from power, necessity, and validity of empirical science and the scientific method as ideals of objective knowledge. Herman betrays these ideals by arguing that we must have “Progressive Psychology” as much as does the fundamentalist Christian arguing for “Intelligent Design,” or the caricature Soviet-era scientist doing “Communist Physics.”

Of course, Herman doesn’t argue that her truth is contingent on social power, but rather that she must speak truth to power, that the political battle is what makes it possible for her to do research at all. To finish the quote above:

“Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between investigators and patients and to counteract the ordinary social processes of silencing and denial. In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.” (9)

This is not only simplistic, but frankly stupid. The “ordinary social process of silencing and denial”? “Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness”? Leaving aside the difficult question of what “social consciousness” would look like and whether the idea is even possible, and ignoring the slippery slide from individual psychological phenomena to social practices, I want to focus mainly here on the childish “Big Other” straw man that Herman sets up, against which she must struggle. How are “silencing and denial” “ordinary social practices” tout court? Of course, in any culture, some things are not spoken of. But other things are. Culture is full of people talking about things. Sometimes quite nasty and difficult things. Often, it seems, people try to put some kind of positive spin on things, whether that be historical tragedies in the past or personal traumas suffered at home, but the allegation of the “silence and denial” of “trauma” as a widespread social phenomenon is at best a crude simplification of complex social dynamics where some things are remembered and commemorated and addressed in certain ways and others are not. At best. What it seems like to me, frankly, is deliberate misrepresentation.

War is the great example, and since this is my interest in reading the book—and generally the topic on which Herman is weakest and shows her most glaring faults—this is what I will focus on. The memory of war and its “traumas” are not necessarily, always, essentially displaced by “silence and denial.” In fact, not only are wars often celebrated, and rituals often established in order to help veterans return home and “process” their “traumas,” but a great deal of the literature of western civilization has to do with the memory of war and its “traumas.” Somehow we must read The Deer Hunter, The Naked and the Dead, the poetry of Wilfrid Owen, Guernica, the paintings of Goya, the Renaissance military memoir, the medieval romance, Henry V, and the Iliad as examples of “the ordinary social processes of silence and denial” and “the active process of forgetting.” Her very examples on this point, from Elie Wiesel to Tim O’Brien, highlight the fatuity of her argument. It is as if she stood invited by the most respected committees before a crowded theater, wearing her visible credentials as a medical doctor and applauded by all and sundry, and shouted into her microphone about how marginalized she is and how she must fight to be heard.

My point, however, is not about the validity of her progressivist ideology. My issue is that her ideology infects her research. Her politics infects her diagnosis, and her tendentious, polemical approach detracts from and weakens her otherwise worthwhile, valuable, and important work. Herman has much to say on “trauma” and “recovery,” and her research and work with victims of child abuse, her summaries of research with Vietnam vets, and her thinking through the idea of trauma have much to offer. Too often, however, her simplifications, sloppiness, and tendentiousness fatally weaken what could have been substantial points, and engender a skepticism in her scholarship that casts doubt on her whole work. One of my favorite examples of her shoddy and misleading work is her repeated citations of Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried. She turns to him again and again, citing passages from his fiction as quotations from “a Vietnam veteran” describing his feelings (53, 66, 70). Once she identifies the “Vietnam veteran” as Tim O’Brien, twice she neglects to identify him, and while in her endnotes, of course, she cites her source, nowhere does she discuss the fact that these quotations are from a work of fiction. I wonder if O’Brien’s memoir of his time in Vietnam, If I Die in a Combat Zone, simply did not provide the pithy anecdotes she desired? What this sloppiness suggests to me is that Herman is far more interest in pushing her point than in proving it.

The book is full of bald assertions unsupported by evidence or even argument, crass simplifications, rhetorical obfuscations, and unexamined presuppositions. Throughout, victims are exclusively referred to as female (except with combat vets), perpetrators exclusively as male. The book begins with a thunderous solecism: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable” (1). In fact, “violations of the social compact too terrible to utter aloud” is not the meaning of the word “unspeakable,” which can refer merely to coarse language too bawdy for certain social groups or even to some ontological incommunicability. Yet perhaps she is right, despite the idiocy of her flourish, that “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.” Certainly, when we think of atrocities today, we think of real horrors, mass graves, genocidal butchery, etc. Herman plays on this later when she asserts “that rape is an atrocity” (30). Yet checking up on what “atrocity” means outside of a vague sense of nasty events informs us that its primary meaning is a cruel and frightful act. Well, since rape is sexual assault, as well as any “act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation,” as in “the rape of the countryside,” it certainly seems that rape is atrocious. Yes, Virginia, bad things are bad. Thank you, Dr. Herman, for pointing that out.

Yet, we still haven’t addressed the real boner here, which is the blind assertion that “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.” How, then, can we explain a cultural history full of not only atrocities of rape and war, but every kind of human cruelty—from Dracula and Hannibal Lecter to the butchery in Grimm’s fairy tales, from boxing matches to bear baiting, from the sufferings of the Jews in the Holocaust to the sufferings of Christ? We remember, celebrate, commit, and commemorate atrocity in a thousand ways—both as perpetrators and as victims. No doubt, certain societies have taboos on the discussion of certain kinds of atrocities—or certain kinds of acts in general—that make discussing them profoundly difficult. Yet we must admit of a variety of responses, both personal and social, to trauma and atrocity that are not included in Herman’s simple-minded progressivist narrative.

Herman’s basic fault is in not thinking of humans as animals, but as creatures with souls, beings of good and evil, who start out unblemished and wonderful and are corrupted by a fallen society:

“The sense of safety in the world, or basic trust, is acquired in earliest life in the relationship with the first caretaker. Originating with life itself, this sense of trust sustains a person throughout the lifecycle. It forms the basis of all systems of relationship and faith. The original experience of care makes it possible for human beings to envisage a world in which they belong, a world hospitable to human life. Basic trust is the foundation of belief in the continuity of life, the order of nature, and the transcendent order of the divine” (51-52).

Now we’re getting somewhere—Nietzsche, the Holocaust, Communism, sweatshops, war, the crisis of Modernity, the Reformation, and the Fall of the Roman Empire can all be blamed on child abuse. Ahah!

See, this is Herman’s problem again and again. It’s not enough for her to argue that traumatic events “destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation” (51). She has to take it one step further and suggest that trauma corrupts our otherwise good and innocent souls. If it wasn’t for trauma, she suggests in the passage quoted previously, we’d all be living happily ever after.

Three final points. First, Herman has many interesting and valuable things to say. Second, her work is a fair place to begin, but it seems to me our understanding of trauma must become both more inclusive and more subtle. Car accidents are traumatic, as are many initiation rites. Sometimes we willingly undergo trauma in training or initiation in order to help us deal with expected trauma later. Sometimes undergoing trauma is a point of pride, and seen as a successful accomplishment. Sometimes—as with, for example, war, intiation rites, hazing, etc.—it doesn’t ostracize one from society but initiates one into society (or at least certain circles). To really understand what trauma is and how it works, it is essential to divorce it from socially progressive (or regressive) political ends—from all political ends whatsoever. “Trauma” must be understood in at least two distinct ways: one, as a psychological and physiological kind of stress on the body and mind, and two, as a social phenomenon. While they are related, they are not the same and should not be confused, either accidentally or deliberately (as Herman adverts must be done). Third, memory, mind, and body must be brought into the discussion in much more critical and empirical ways. We cannot rely on the hokum of hypnosis therapy or the rich but troublesome data provided by personal testimonies. The mind and memory are unreliable, prone to slippages small and great, and profoundly susceptible to social pressure. If Herman is serious about “trauma and recovery,” she needs to work harder to separate out the hard data from the bunkum, and quit putting the conclusion before the proof.

Sublimity and Fictions

2009-10-07T10:24:00.002-04:00

I recently watched Down By Law again, b/c a friend of mine hadn’t ever seen it. Nothing to say about it except I love it, its deadpan flats and its melancholy swamps, its beautiful camera work, the unrelenting miserableness of Jack and Zack and New Orleans and Bob reciting Frost in Italian… I’m a sucker for anything Jarmusch does.

I also saw Memento again, for class. I have much less interest in talking about film than about books, in part because of my ignorance on the subject, in part because everybody talks about film and thinks they’re fucking Martin Scorsese. Memento remains a crisp, smart thriller—I’d thought the first time I saw it that it was a gimmick film, good for one viewing, much like The Usual Suspects, but in fact the performances are so tight, the details so rich and considered, and the final story so obscure and unsure that it has gotten better every time I’ve seen it. Leonard grows to become a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure, a piteous hero in the clutches of an insane, malevolent intelligence that is nothing other than himself, an amnesiac serial killer. Teddy too grows more fascinating, for while in the end he does seem a cop, his motives are never clear. Of course, maybe all this is cleared up in all the business that goes along with DVDs these days, the interviews and extras and documentary bullshit. I hope not.

Reading-wise, I’m nearly (thank god) done with Judith Herman’s tendentious but useful Trauma and Recovery, which I’ll address at some length once I’ve finished, and locked into a variety of things right now including the very interesting monograph by Yuval Harari titled The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Modern of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000, which argues that the modern understanding of war as a site of “revelatory truth” is in fact historical, specifically a product of the Enlightenment. Also working on Augustine’s Confessions and Proust’s Swann’s Way, among others.

I finished a book by Tom McCarthy, who I judged crossly because of his unsavory friendship with bullshitter extraordinaire Simon Critchley (they are in some “Necronautical Society” together—it sounds, smells, and looks like what it is…). I had to change my mind about McCarthy, however, because his novel Remainder was really quite interesting, brilliantly written, and provocative. Since I had to read it for this course I’m taking on memory, I read the book in those terms, and was puzzling out some sort of trauma, repetition-compulsion sort of angle, taking the whole thing at face value, when on the prof’s recommendation I read this review by Zadie Smith which made me reconsider the whole thing. I’d already been confounded by some things in the novel which didn’t fit my repetition-compulsion explanation, but once I considered Smith’s take and rethought through the book as a novel-about-writing, the scales fell away and my soul was flooded with the brilliance of Tom McCarthy. Aha! Of course, the clumsy relearning everything, the transcendent ecstasy in the moment of recreation, the insatiable desire for more and more truth…

Speaking of truth, as well, among the many other essays and articles I’m reading, I got through Bruce Robbins “The Sweatshop Sublime,” which was very interesting for its positing and theorizing this term, “the sweatshop sublime,” describing the moment of paralyzed sensual-conceptual overload when one apprehends for a moment something of the massive global structure of political-economic networks, sweatshops, transportation systems, money exchanges, tyrannies, and oppressed lives that keep food on Western tables and lovely cotton shirts on Western backs. It is far less interesting in its tedious progressivist hand-wringing about what English professors and literary scholars ought to be doing about global injustice, and whether or not pointing out that the wretched of the world are wretched is in any way efficacious… Why is it that university professors take upon themselves so often this burden of the spirit of activism, which is so poorly suited to their chosen métier? Perhaps because they believe ideas matter, that “thoughts” can “change things,” or perhaps it because they’re infected with a sort of knee-jerk Deweyan idea of pedagogy-as-democracy, which to be fair to Dewey has its nasty roots in Rousseau, Kant, Plato… Education doesn’t make us better people, or more democratic, or more just. It just makes us more educated. Yet so many scholars like Robbins seem to believe that the keys to our progressive future can be found in the proper footnotes—Dear English Professor, if you are reading this and really do want to “change the world,” stop writing Marxist criticism and go volunteer in a homeless shelter.

As for me, I look forward to whatever shelter that the walls of academe can provide from the storms of “progress”… leave me to my aesthetics and my centuries… the world will be as nasty when I die as it was when I was born, and my having passed will matter little to the princes and principalities and their flows of capital. Still, “the sweatshop sublime” is a very useful term, it seems.

Transcendence in Brooklyn or War

2009-09-29T10:37:00.002-04:00

Brooklyn

differs from most cities in this: that though it has perhaps a “center,” and hands, and eyes, and feet, it is chiefly no whole or recognizable animal but an exorbitant pulsing mass of scarcely discriminable cellular jellies and tissues; a place where people merely “live.” A few American cities, Manhattan chief among them, have some mad magnetic energy which sucks all others into “provincialism”; and Brooklyn of all great cities is nearest the magnet, and is indeed “provincial”: it is provincial as a land of rich earth and of this earth is an enormous farm, whose crop is far less “industrial” or “financial” or “notable” or in any way “distinguished” or “definable” than it is of human flesh and being. And this fact alone, which of itself makes Brooklyn so featureless, so little known, to many so laughable, or so ripe for patronage, this fact, that two million human beings are alive and living there, invests the city in an extraordinarily high, piteous and inviolable dignity, well beyond touch of laughter, defense, or need of notice.

So says James Agee, in his splendid, lyrical essay Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes. While running in a Whitmanesque sprawl of language that refuses to coalesce into any kind of narrative or coherent “point,” Agee’s paean to Brooklyn opens through this selfsame lyrical efflorescence moments of truth and beauty about the city that would otherwise remain inaccessible. As Whitman or Apollinaire knew, perhaps, there’s an order of truth about Modernity and the City that can only be accessed by replicating in language the overflowing concatenations and abundances of life, streets, buildings, trade, cargoes, passions, and disappointments that by their very multitudinousness surpass our understanding. Only through our reach exceeding our grasp could we begin to achieve the breadth and depth of being that comes out in passages like this, which end Agee’s essay:

Or late in the day, in the zoo, the black bears with the muzzles of vaudeville tramps, and those who affectionately watch them: the empty pit: the desperate bawlings of the single polar bear, his eyes half crazy with loneliness, his whole focus on the pit of blacks: the quieting and softening of all light and the wonder this performs upon some animals: the sexy teasings and huggings of the round masked brighteyed coons and the delight there must be in the wrestlings of fat furred bodies: the deep moat where Hilda the elephant was pushed by her playful husband, to die in bewilderment of sacroiliac pain, and where he too recently fell: that cage in which three black metal eagles, hunchbacked with heartcracking melancholia, fall clumsy as grounded buzzards from limb to limb of their small skinned tree, “Presented to the Children of New York by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle”: and through the dusk the agonies of the bear; Baw; Baww; Bawwww!: and the bumpings and kiddings of the gay coons: and the kangaroos, some orange, some fawn, whose eyes are lovely as those of giraffes or of Victorian heroines who move like wheelchairs: and the deer:

It is late dusk now, with the lamps on; the sky is one clean pearl. There are almost no people left. Those kingly anarchists who have become symbols of journalism sit quite without motion. The bear is still crying: he has the sound of a baby who has been forgotten in the attic of an abandoned house. In their run the young among the deer are altered. They are no longer being watched and it is not only that: they are caught also at the heart and throughout their bodies with that breath-depriving mystical ecstasy which dusk excites in them and in young goats. Their eyes are sainted, innocent, as those of goats daemonic. They move tenderly, with a look of minnows about the head and body: then a sudden break, a strong-sprung sharphooved bouncing run in the soft dirt, the precisions of chisels and of Mozart: and in the midst of this one of them will suddenly leap high into the air, wrists high, tail waggling, wriggling his whole body upon itself in a blind spasm of self-delight (while the kangaroos amble and squat): and now, even; it is rapidly darkening: in a child’s angry joy in life and furious reluctance in the death even of one day, a fawn tears out again on the empty run and three times over climbs the air and congratulates himself: and out of the fallen brightness of the air, low a long while then steadily rising, hammered and beaten mad hell with ceremonial bells, drawn in a whole periphery of this green park and this world, such a wild inexhaustible wailing as to freeze the root of the heart.

Nice. I also finished If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien’s celebrated memoir of the Vietnam War. The book as a whole seems unfinished, like an unvarnished, plain wood frame in which are mounted several episodes like photographs, vivid and often telling in themselves but failing, taken together, to cohere into something meaningful. Perhaps this is O’Brien’s intent. Early on, describing a patrol, he writes “Things happened, things came to an end. There was no sense of developing drama.” This sense of war as a succession of events, almost absurd in their meaninglessness, I can relate to, yet this begs too easily the question of what it does to a man, how it changes someone, what it “means.” Even if the war seems meaningless, that somehow has to be factored into the changes it wreaks on soul, and those changes have to be worked somehow into the structure of a memoir. O’Brien anticipates my complaint early on, but with an unconvincing dodge:

Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper and others didn’t and most didn’t care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

All this is true, but the mistake here is in thinking war has a “lesson,” like one of Aesop’s fables, and the hypocrisy is in O’Brien’s presenting the “lesson” that life doesn’t have “lessons.” O’Brien isn’t just telling war stories—nobody just tells stories—but telling the stories that say he came through war disillusioned and possessed of a deeper, more “real,” material truth. Reality is “simple” and “unprofound.” Things happen. Things have weight. Things smell. The hard work of thinking about how we value things, how they are connected together, why we might be “disillusioned” by war, or what this change means for a naïve, Midwestern college boy raised on protestant ethics is left aside by O’Brien. Near the end of the book he recapitulates his lesson that he claims isn’t a lesson:

You add things up. You lost a friend to the war, and you gained a friend. You compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned, as old men tell it in front of the courthouse, that war is not all bad; it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff; some stories of valor are true; dead bodies are heavy, and it’s better not to touch them; fear is paralysis, but it is better to be afraid than to move out to die, all limbs functioning and heart thumping and charging and having your chest torn open for all the work; you have to pick the times not to be afraid, but when you are afraid you must hide it to save respect and reputation. You learned that the old men had lives of their own and that they valued them enough to try not to lose them; anyone can die in a war if he tries.

Again, we have the “lesson” of no lesson. We have a refusal to think. War is like any experience in life, more intense than what most of us are used to, more varied, more “existential,” yet in the end we face the same question with war that we face with any other episode of being: what meaning do we make out of this? Saying that there is no “inherent” or “essential” meaning to things is a good first step, and rejecting the meanings offered by tradition and society a knee-jerk reaction for adolescents, malcontents, dreamers, and idealists the world over. What then? Inevitably, we make meaning or our hearts and minds die of madness. What kind of meaning? Why? How? O’Brien, through If I Die in a Combat Zone, shows us the corrupt fallenness of the material world, and in The Things They Carried gestures toward redemptive transcendence. This is what his war means. This is the lesson it taught him. I wish he’d thought a little deeper about why this was the lesson he learned, and how much it sounds like the Protestant theology his young Minnesotan mind was shaped by.

Dreams do offer lessons. So do nightmares. You have to learn how to hear them.

Behemoth vs. Leviathan

2009-09-26T10:12:00.004-04:00

Have finished nothing new, but have started a fascinating book by the military historian Yuval Harari, basically historicizing the idea of war as revelation, pointing to its origins in the Enlightenment.

Yesterday, heard some interesting work by Stephen Graham, Jessica Stern, and Les Roberts at a conference on ”Cities and the New Wars” at Columbia. Also, went to see the luminous, beautiful Blake paintings at the Morgan Library. The subtlety of his line and color, and the power of his mystic vision, were really only available in person. No reproduction I’ve seen of his stuff captures the striking almost-psychedelic intricacy of his best works.

Update

2009-09-23T23:15:00.001-04:00

Read or re-read The Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, and Philoctetes; several papers on memory and various essays and book excerpts on tragedy; a bit of William James; “Funes the Memorious,” by Borges; The Sorrows of Young Werther; and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.

Saw some art (Vermeers at Met are lovely, just like Vermeers should be). Switched classes from Tragedy to Memory. Still ill. Flailing with my statement of purpose in preparing to apply to PhD programs. Studying for GRE subject test: the cavalier poets and the metaphysical poets were contemporaneous, early seventeenth century, Herbert, Herrick, Donne.

More later.

The Pain

2009-09-07T06:57:00.002-04:00

School started last week, and as if in outright rebellion, my body caught a nasty strep throat infection that laid me flat on my ass for two whole days. Which is particularly awesome since I volunteered to present on Aeschylus next week in this philosophy seminar I’m taking on Tragedy in Modernity.

While, of course, the great tragedies of Western Lit are some of the most powerful and rewarding works available to us, and will always bear further elucidation, elaboration, reinvention, and reinterpretation, I’m profoundly understimulated by most discussions of “Tragedy” as a concept or genre. Trying to correlate the Attic “goat-songs” with Shakespearean murder-romances and Beckett’s anti-plays seems almost absurd, the typical heavy reliance on Aristotle, who wrote the Poetics more than a hundred years after the death of Aeschylus and the golden age of Attic theater, is frustratingly unsophisticated, and almost always what gets lost in the theorizing is how beautiful and powerful these great works are. Also how strange.

In any case, I may vent my spleen here some this semester, in attempting to corral my thoughts on this subject.

In the meantime, I have finally finished Milton’s Paradise Lost and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Simply put, these were the worst ideas for summer reading ever. Of profound sweep and power, at times dizzyingly majestic, and shot through with real beauty and insight yet often turgid, nearly incomprehensible (especially the Hegel), and almost never “fun,” this great books are not great for lazy August weekends.

I have little to say about either, except to brag that I’ve finished them. The sections of Paradise Lost that had the biggest impact on me were Satan’s fall and journey to earth. After we got to Adam and Eve, I found myself much less excited. Milton’s wrenched Latinisms should be shown to pretentious students as a model of how not to write, yet still there were moments of real music, somehow, among all the Roman cacophony. Here’s a passage I marked—one among many—that shows the sort of brain-bending you’re in for with Milton. Note that it consists of one single sentence:

A Grove hard by, sprung up with this their change,
His will who reigns above, to aggravate
Their penance, laden with fair Fruit, like that
Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve
Us’d by the Tempter: on that prospect strange
Their earnest eyes they fix’d, imagining
For one forbidden Tree a multitude
Now ris’n, to work them further woe or shame;
Yet parcht with scaling thirst and hunger fierce,
Though to delude them sent, could not abstain,
But on they roll’d in heaps, and up the Trees
Cllimbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks
That curl’d Megaera: greedily they pluck’d
The Fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew
Near that bituminous Lake where Sodom flam’d;
This more delusive, not the touch, but taste
Deceived; they fondly thinking to allay
Their appetite with gust, instead of Fruit
Chew’d bitter Ashes, which the’offended tatste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assay’d,
Hunger and thirst constraining, drugg’d as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writh’d their jaws
With soot and cinders fill’d; so oft they fell
Into the same illusion, not as Man
Whom they triumph’d once lapst.

My favorite bits there are “Fruitage” and “disrelish.” WTF? I need to use these words in my day to day existence… I’ll spare you (and myself) the excerpt from Hegel.

About Hegel, I don’t know what to say. Having grown up a stark-raving postmodernist, whether I will or no, it’s hard to get around the ways that Hegel’s ideas, especially social-discourse concerns, his turn from epistemology to ethics, and the mediated nature of not only truth but existence itself, seem sort of obvious. It’s difficult but necessary to really make the effort to see his massive thinking project in context, and remember it was written just more than two centuries ago. There is much that is provocative, interesting, puzzling, incomprehensible, and dark in these pages, and I hope some more study might illuminate it, but I also think much of it is just poorly written. There is no excuse. I also have to wonder why he had to keep things on such a consistently abstract level, with few if any real concrete examples or references. Perhaps this is part of his strategy. If so, it’s a particularly fuckerous strategy. Finally, while his ideas of Christianity seem manageable, his idea of progress does not to me, and since the whole book is about the process of Spirit coming to know itself in History, i.e., socio-cultural progress, this really sticks in my craw. I believe in Hegel’s Spirit, sure. But I don’t believe it “learns.”

That’s all for my piddling comments now.

Slow Down

2009-08-31T21:54:00.000-04:00

Still slogging through Hegel and Milton. The semester has officially begun, so I’m already behind. Also started The Good Soldier, just for fun.

I did, however, take two days to read Thomas Pynchon’s newest, Inherent Vice. While in my heart of hearts I wish it was just The Crying of Lot 49, TP’s newest was fun, sometimes though-provoking, and even moving novel. If I’d just picked it up in a state of ignorance, I’d think it was Elmore Leonard crossed with Ken Kesey, but coming as it does when it does, it seems almost painfully elegiac about the sixties. There are moments of gorgeous lyricism, the half-baked conspiracies are especially half-baked, and what I come away thinking most about is the strange friendship between the PI protagonist (whose name escapes me now) and the LAPD cop Bjornson. Hm.

Also saw Inglourious Basterds, which was exquisitely put together, at times quite beautiful, always unique—and also fatuous, empty, and stupid. Tarantino is truly Godard’s American bastard-child, but without ideas, politics, patience, or any intelligence beyond that of the cinema. I had expected much more violence, but what I got was a lot of the usual Tarantino blather passing for banter. Ick.

Finally, I won an award. I’m very honored to have won the Theresa A. White Literary Award for my short short “Never Closer.” It’ll be in the journal Quiddity next year, and featured on their radio program/podcast this week.

Back to Hegel.

Wait, uh, hey. Where'd my summer go?

2009-08-23T23:53:00.002-04:00

So before I just give up completely and lose myself to backlog guilt, let me do this. Anne Carson’s book Eros was beautiful and brilliant, a really smart, well-written, provocative inquiry into the relationship between erotic poetry, the formation of selfhood, and the impact of literacy in ancient Greece. I am now a huge fan of Anne Carson, not only for Eros but for the poems of hers I’ve been reading in Glass, Irony, and God, which are the most exciting contemporary poetry I’ve read since… well… ever. “TV Men: Hektor” was startlingly good.

Number two: Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Delicate, funny, complicated, cool, and at times astonishing, it’s great. I never thought I’d care so much about whether the spoiled son of an industrialist stayed in Paris or not. Of course James is a grand master. I wish I could offer a more nuanced reading, but it’s about a month behind me now.

Otherwise, have been reading English poetry, in preparation for the English Subject GRE, Milton’s Paradise Lost (still) and also (still) Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I’m hoping to finish those two bastards by next week, before school starts.

Also, it’s about that time for the best/worst list. So here we go.

The five most interesting books I’ve read in the last year would be:

Capital, Vol. 1, Karl Marx Not only is it a brilliant, exhaustive critique of capitalism that every red-blooded American ought to be required to read, but it’s also funny, splenetic, vicious, erudite, and moving. The way that the book is structured, moving from an analysis of the commodity to exchange to production, from the abstract to the concrete, then back again, is a remarkable achievement.

Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves This is my second-favorite war memoir, right behind Junger’s Storm of Steel, but it is by far the more enjoyable, funnier, and humane of the two, while still facing the complexity of war in all its terror and glory.

Sentimental Education & Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert Damn. Damn damn. How could Flaubert have such a cold, distanced view of humanity and still write with so much verve, beauty, and compassion? From the transitions (who said “All writing is transitions”? They must have been reading Flaubert) to the characterizations, from the structure to the sentence, from the first words to the last, these are amazing books. I’m glad I waited so long to read them, though, because frankly I think they would have been too subtle and knowing for me before. I would not have been able to hang.

The Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Crazy, sometimes tiresome, and often so stuck up his own romantic ass, such a fucking drama queen, that you want to grab him by the ruffled collar (or whatever) and shout “Man up, Swiss Miss,” Rousseau gave us something special with his self-absorbed, very absorbing autobiography. My favorite bit was the erotic spanking.

The Ambassadors, Henry James Mentioned above. I’d also give a shout out for Eros, Phaedrus and the work of William James.

Now the worst: In no particular order, and without fully venting my ire, they would be Stefan Helmreich’s Alien Ocean, John Law’s Aircraft Stories, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (pure nonsense), and Francois Jullien’s The Propensity of Things. There. Now I’m all caught up.

Also

2009-08-09T21:43:00.004-04:00

And also, thanks to Working Class Magazine, for deciding not to publish my review of Problem Radicals, included below, but instead deciding merely to quote it for the last paragraph of their own review, without bothering to ask or even let me know. Thanks.

“Fun Is Not Subversive”: Problem Radical(s) and Political Theater

The opera’s called Problem Radical(s), the stage is a mess of clothes and balloons. I find myself wondering: What’s the problem with radicals?

Actors walk onto the stage and start handling things, big sunglasses, bags, ropes. They speak but not to each other, and not in any recognizable locution, their words strangely emphasized, drawn out, as if being chanted in twelve-tone scales. In the middle of a profusion of inflating columns, wigs, pads, balloons, bags, clothes, cables, and other junk, the actors do exercises, speak, and perform solitary, alienated tasks. Music begins, a distinctly rock sound, then gets loud. Across the wide coverage of the performance space we’re forced to focus our attention now here, now there, looking from this to that in an effort to keep from missing something. What are we looking for?

Drama promises resolution. Whether it’s a personality flare-up performed in the “reality” of America’s Next Top Model, a baseball game, or the tragic conflict between ethical worlds, the dramatic form derives its power from the promise of release it offers from the anxiety and tension that the drama itself creates. Audiences of unwitting masochists punish themselves daily, reliving erotic fear through dramatic narrative, turning their minds over to the skilled craftworkers in the culture industry who promise manageable rehearsals of a terror that in reality may never abate and a catharsis that may never come.

We watch the performers talk, do things, struggle into and out of costumes, canvas sacks, and personalities, we watch them sweat and twist and grapple. We watch them swing into rock-star gestures and crumple on the floor. We’ve come here tonight from our jobs and lives to watch these people, maybe looking for distraction, entertainment, a sense of escape or titillation. We have our expectations. We want them to do something for us. To us. And they’re giving it their all, shifting mercurially between different actions and mindsets with a focused intensity that makes whatever they’re doing seem like the most important thing in the world, even if it’s just pulling a rope with gloves attached to it or stacking taped piles of cushions. Then there is Brendan Regimbal, who with silent aplomb keeps inflating balloons and pulling them up over the audience. What’s going on here?

Drama promises harmony, rest, reintegration, but whether the social cohesion and security offered by drama’s promise disappeared in the smoke of World War I or more sinisterly turned to serve a repressive order profiting the few at the expense of the many, we have long suspected drama’s promise was a lie, nothing more than balmy illusion, at best a utopian dream. The ongoing crisis of modernity has provoked an unending critique: since the late nineteenth century, serious artists have struggled to explore what art means when mimesis, wholeness, and beauty can no longer be convincingly reconciled.

The action fails to cohere. It’s hard to tell how the music relates to the events, the events to the text, the text to the performance, any part to any other. One actress puts on a tutu and helmet and pushes a disco ball across the floor with her head, while another marks spots on a map. The guitar growls, people put on wigs, some more balloons get inflated. Somebody talks about packing a backpack and taking a hike, somebody else says “That’s sort of my downfall is that I want change.” Two actors start humming and singing “Birds birds birds” over and over. “I think this is a pile of shit,” one performer intones. “Back off,” another responds, “Back off my fucking stage.”

Drama’s greatest promise was in theater. Considered once the highest of arts, theater has suffered a profound loss in prestige since the development of film and video. In some ways now it’s the most marginal art, serving mostly as minor leagues for the culture industry and a spectacle for season subscribers and tourists. Yet this very position, co-opted, threatened, questionable, and ambivalent, gives experimental theater a remarkable freedom to reconsider and even renounce the dramatic illusion that is its greatest heritage.

What theater becomes when it frees itself from drama is a question explored in fascinating ways in the new opera, Problem Radical(s), staged at Performance Space 122 in April by the performance group Object Collection. Problem Radical(s) both exemplifies and opens up the idea of postdramatic theater, challenging the ways we think about the world we live in by repudiating the easy machinery of dramatic structure, focusing on the close relationship between ourselves and our stuff, problematizing performance, and explicitly politicizing the theatrical production.

Written and directed by Kara Feely, with music composed by Travis Just, Problem Radical(s) is a work-in-progress and a work-in-process. It has a modular structure that allows Feely to change which scenes happen each night and also their order, so we never see the same show twice. Moreover, we may not even see the same show the first time, since the stage action is like a multichannel production, with different events going on all the time, all at once. Our attention has to pick and choose, and where we favor one performer or one action, we lose something else. Then we come back the next night and things have changed: materials and props are added during and between every performance—the opera’s not only a performance but an installation, the performance of an installation, taking up space right before our eyes. The process-oriented nature of the show highlights its collaborative nature: the installation is built and designed by the visual artist Hannah Dougherty, and graced with video projections from the German multimedia artist Daniel Kötter.

What begins to happen, watching the show, is that you stop waiting for things to make sense. Instead of looking for a plot, a symbolic or lyrical structure, or even the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic that so often crudely reinstantiates dramatic structures ostensibly eschewed, you begin to give yourself over to watching, wondering, thinking about all this stuff on stage and what the idea of political theater even means. A play called Problem Radical(s) undoubtedly has something to say about politics, yet the deconstructed performance before us doesn’t offer a protagonist, a conflict, or a moral: unlike most political theater, which means to tell us that war is bad or Republicans are bad, or at its best explores ethical and moral complexities, Problem Radical(s) refuses to engage in the dramatization of politics, perhaps for the very reason that drama itself is inherently political. A self-induced hypnosis given over to tension-and-release narratives culminating in the orgiastic unification of an audience applauding a singular hero-scapegoat who will save us or suffer for us or both, traditional drama re-enacts a political pattern we recognize in a variety of unsavory forms, but which most importantly keeps us trapped as impotent spectators to a political spectacle which may decide our fates, but about which we can only decide whether or not to turn away in disgust. Problem Radical(s), by provoking us with theater that is both postdramatic and explicitly political, challenges us not only to see and hear in new ways, but to rethink our investments in both politics and drama.

Problem Radical(s) is the fourth major theatrical project from Object Collection. While continuing to explore ideas and practices that inform their earlier works like FAMOUS ACTORS and Evoke memories of a golden age., Kara Feely and Travis Just move in new directions with Problem Radical(s), bringing an explicitly social dimension to their formally innovative work, and presenting it with an engagingly fresh and rigorous approach.

Ha Servito Come Soldato

2009-07-31T17:21:00.004-04:00

So, I haven't posted in awhile. I will again soon. I've been working as a summer camp counselor at the YMCA, and went to an academic conference in Konstanz, Germany, where I presented a paper on the 9/11 novel. I need to write about Eros by Anne Carson, and Henry James's The Ambassadors, but first, here's this:

Roy Scranton, autore dell’ultimo dei saggi pubblicati da City, ha servito come soldato nelle forze di occupazione USA tra il 2003 e il 2004, svolgendo principalmente operazioni di pattugliamento a Baghdad. Grazie alla sua esperienza diretta, e alla sua evidente preparazione culturale, fornisce un’immagine molto interessante della capitale irachena immediatamente dopo la guerra. “Baghdad offre l’archeologia di un futuro che si sta già formando, un futuro fatto di muri e armato, un futuro allo stesso tempo globalizzato e frammentato, cablato e medievale”, scrive Scranton. Il tema che segue il suo articolo è quello della “natura segregata e duale di Baghdad: il modo in cui una città sotto occupazione si è trasformata in due città”. Il primo obiettivo dei militari USA, una volta terminati i bombardamenti, è stato quello di costruire delle basi sicure, dotate di muri invalicabili e il più possibile separate dal quartiere circostante. I militari disponevano di mappe inaffidabili e di alta tecnologia inutilizzabile nelle condizioni locali, erano totalmente ignoranti riguardo alle comunità che vivevano a Baghdad ed eranno afflitti da una costante carenza di traduttori. I lunghi viali sui quali si muovevano i convogli militari USA, insieme alle basi ubicate in diversi luoghi di Baghdad, formavano una rete che diventava una seconda città a parte, una città sovrapposta a quella vissuta dagli iracheni. Una dualità rafforzata dalla insormontabile barriera linguistica, culturale e disciplinare tra gli occupanti e la popolazione locale. Per citare lo stesso Scranton: “I muri che ci dividevano da loro [gli iracheni] sono diventati qualcosa di più di semplici muri di sicurezza, o di muri destinati a tenere alla larga l’illegalità: sono diventati muri che separavano i ricchi dai poveri, tenendoci a distanza, con la nostra abbondanza materiale, dalla povertà brutale delle masse irachene”. Nel corso delle missioni di pattugliamento, racconta l’autore, quando si abbandonavano le vie principali e si entrava in quelle secondarie ci si trovava in un ambiente completamente ostile, come se fosse la stessa Baghdad a essere pronta a uccidere gli occupanti. Il risultato è che la maggior parte dei soldati di pattuglia si considerava più un obiettivo in movimento che un occupante. Una città divisa, segregata, gerarchizzata, ma in preda al caos completo. Una città che, fino a quando rimarrà occupata, rimarrà divisa e sotto assedio.

I hope it's positive. I can't read Italian. Also, I got mentioned in this article in the NYU alumni magazine, because of the vets writing workshop I was in. Very exciting.

Bovary c'est nous

2009-06-18T17:22:00.004-04:00

I have not been reading much lately, what with personal chaos and moving and training for my summer job, but I did manage to finish Madame Bovary and Plato's Phaedrus. Both were completely brilliant in completely different ways. I also hacked my way through the preface and introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and am actually ready to begin reading the book itself.

Sense-certainty, here I come.

So Bovary was a beautiful book. The aspects of it that struck me most powerfully were first, Flaubert's incredible mastery of pacing and transitions, the limpidity of the prose as it traced daily life then contrasted with moments of intense and striking lyricism, and most of all Flaubert's distant, even cold, yet wholly empathetic drawing of the characters. I'm not sure if empathetic is the right word. What Flaubert is doing is amazing, in that the characters are fully present in the felt intensity of their decisions, even while Flaubert makes clear their foolishness, hypocrisy, knavery, and pettiness. It is all equally just and unjust, and all of it equally justified. Strange, that. Would I argue that Bovary is a bourgeois tragedy? I think so. The last few pages are so completely cruel, I shudder to think what a fucking asshole Flaubert must have been. Wow.

The Phaedrus was a different fish entirely, also beautiful. Socrates' speeches against love (when hidden behind a veil) and for love (when inspired by the spirits of the place) were great, and very interesting in terms of the discussion of rhetoric and writing which followed. I went to the Phaedrus because I was reading a book by the brilliant Anne Carson, whose work I've just been introduced to, called Eros, which discusses ancient Greek ideas of love and eros in terms of changes in identitiy-formation and ideas of the self brought about by the introduction of writing, in which Carson discusses the Phaedrus at length. There's much that's wonderful in the Phaedrus, but what I come away with (and also from reading Plato's 7th letter, which came with the edition I read), is yet more skepticism about Plato and his ambiguities. Much as he writes beautiful dramatic poetry against poetry, in the Phaedrus and in the 7th letter, he writes complex, interesting, beautiful texts about how texts are essentially false, second-rate, and not to be trusted. There is also a line in the 7th letter about "how we must hold to the truth of the immortality of the soul," which sets me thinking. He does not say, "it is true that the soul is immortal," but that "we must hold" to that idea.

This all very much sets me thinking in a Straussian mode about Plato, which, if we keep in mind Plato's dour views of the world, of the incapacity of most people for ever acheiving wisdom, and of the near-impossibility of ever reconciling justice and the good with governance, seems to suggest quite strongly that Plato has little reason ever to say (write) what he means, and that true wisdom for Plato is more esoteric than democratic. That is, philosophical pedagogy in Platonic terms is for the select few who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The rest must be left to pass uncomprehending. This is very different not only from our American standard sort of Deweyan notions of education and any kind of Hegelian-Enlightenment progressivism, but even from the social responsibility inherent in Socrates' "gadfly" relationship to Athens.

I love Plato the writer, dramatist, and poet, but Plato the thinker--the philosopher--is a dark and shifty cynic, a man of ressentiment par excellence, a no-saying pessimist who finds his joy in the ideality of the mind.

You Can Never Hold Back Spring

2009-05-29T23:28:00.002-04:00

So I haven't been posting. Whatever. I actually haven't finished any new whole books since John Law's disappointing Aircraft Stories. I've read bits of lots of things, including Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, which was interesting but troublesome, and Derrida's Specters of Marx, which is exactly what you think it would be: Derrida on Marx, but things have honestly been quite crazy.

The end of the semester, personal madness, and a fair bit of poetry. So that's my excuse. Revisiting Rilke and Stevens. My goals for the summer are Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Milton's Paradise Lost, and if I can manage, Augustine's Confessions. While also getting back to poetry, poetry, poetry. We'll see what I can manage.

More soon.

Pinboard Narrative

2009-05-06T16:33:00.001-04:00

Which story should we tell about John Law and his thorough deconstruction of the development of the TSR2, Aircraft Stories? Or should we even tell a story? Why not rather make a pinboard?

The thing is, pinboards are stories too. Just like Taussig asserted, that not-fetishizing is not yet within our capacity, not-storytelling isn't yet possible. As soon as we begin to think in words and concepts, I would argue, we have begun the simplifying, systematizing, homogenizing, etc., that Law works against. The logos is built into our grammar. A pinboard is not noncoherent, but merely a looser form of coherence than a tree. Any framing, bounding, or hermeneutic circling begins to shape the manifold heterogeneity of existence. We are always homogenizing, because absolute flux would be absolutely incomprehensible. On the other hand, we have never been homogeneous, because the "modern" ordering is multiplicity itself, many projects with many agents in many times and places interacting with "pre" and "post" and "other" etc. The question is, why is John Law forging this particular intervention, that not only argues for multiplicity, but assumes (and thereby helps create) a singular "big other" to be overthrown? I'm all for complexity; I thought that was the way things were.

"It sounds like magic but we call it technology."

2009-04-21T13:11:00.004-04:00

In the author's note to My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig says that he wants his book to speak as a fetish. "This is the language I want, a substantial language, aroused through prolonged engagement with gold and cocaine, reeking in its stammering intensity of delirium and failure. Why failure? Because unwinding the fetish is not yet given on the horizon of human possibility" (xviii). I'm sure we can speak in various complex ways about fetishism, but going from Marx at least it seems we (or rather, perhaps Taussig, definitely me) mean some thing in which we believe value or power itself inheres, independent of the social web of signification by which we actually assign it value and power. So perhaps Taussig wants us to think his book is magical? Or perhaps he wants us to read it "as if"... By the time we get to the end, after Gorgona, and Taussig talks about mimesis and storytelling, his desire to work within the relationship between language and things, we've crossed rivers, pirates, narcotraffickers, Genet, snowflakes, heat, Benjamin, murderers, children, spirits, golddiggers, drunkards, canoes, and much else in a sometimes dreamlike, always erudite, and frequently beautiful journey. As wonderful as it was to read, though, it is harder to know how to talk about it...

Language is a virus, said William S. Burroughs, so perhaps we can think of My Cocaine Museum as a kind of medicine, a medicine fetish, something that purges and sweats. It's not diagnostic, it doesn't tell us what's wrong--we already know, with the gold and cocaine, with the rapacity of global development and the transgressiveness of punishing greed, that we've met the disease and he is us--but perhaps as a language-fetish, as a bit of mimetic shamanism, My Cocaine Museum can illuminate, or clarify, or some other light-based metaphor of activity, or perhaps it is more visionary, or sensual, or perhaps it is more like a fever. Taussig writes "There is a real sense in which Benjamin is advocating above all a 'shamanic take' on the artificial modern world of capitalism. This is why Adorno gets it so right when he sums up Benjamin's method as 'the need to become a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things' " (258). This seems to speak to what the book works toward and does, the magic it works: not casting a spell, but breaking one.

Capital and the Beasts of Nietzsche

2009-04-19T09:28:00.003-04:00

The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.

I finished Capital yesterday. Of course, like any great big classic, like Being and Time or Hamlet or Middlemarch or Ulysses, you never really “finish” reading it, but the first time is always the most memorable. And while it is indubitably beyond me to offer here any worthwhile summation, analysis, or even considered reflection of the eight-hundred-some pages of Volume I (excluding the Preface and Introduction, which I did read, and the Appendix, which I have not (yet)), I can say this: Capital is fucking awesome. The book is, whether you agree with it or not and putting aside any political humbuggery or partisanship, simply a masterpiece, a sui generis phenomenon that amazes in its range of philosophical, political, economic, and historical insights, in its literary construction and rhetorical power, and in its audacity of scope and powerful, complex thought. Wow.

I also read Roger Caillois’s book The Writing of Stones, which was a beautiful, lyrical meditation on idiosyncratic rocks and the aesthetic responses they provoke. Caillois was apparently a surrealist and associated with Bataille’s Acephalous group, but broke with Breton over Mexican jumping beans (Caillois wanted to cut the beans open and investigate the mystery within the mystery, while Breton preferred the mystique of ignorance) and mostly kept to his own path. I hope to read more Caillois, and recommend this book if you can find it, which is full of beautiful images of rocks and taut and tender writing.

Also some Grundrisse, Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (which in typically Heideggerian fashion is alternately stunningly brilliant and frustratingly mystic), etc. I read enough of Vanessa Lamm’s new book Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy to realize she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. She constructs a shallow emancipatory dichotomy where Nietzsche comes in as the herald of the liberating animal “truth” of humanity and the power of “culture” against Big Bad Western “civilization.” While Nietzsche is definitely a critic of “civilization,” what Lamm wildly misreads and mind-bogglingly elides is the profoundly individualistic grounding of Nietzsche’s whole project. She writes:

The promise of the sovereign individual has been traditionally understood as either antipolitical, with Nietzsche figuring as a precursor to totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies, or as nonpolitical, with Nietzsche figuring as a precursor to individual perfectionism. In contrast to these views, I argue that through the figure of the sovereign individual, Nietzsche puts forward an ideal of freedom as responsibility that inherently concerns the political life of human animals…. When humankind defines itself against its animality or denies its animality a productive role, forms of political life emerge based on domination and exploitation of humans by humans. Contrariwise, when humankind engages with its animality, it gives rise to forms of political life rooted in the sovereign individual’s instinct of responsibility (5).

The patent absurdity of this view and its radical blindness to Nietzsche’s contempt for the herd and its politics, revolutionary or otherwise, is frankly staggering. Lamm seems to have read her way through Nietzsche’s entire corpus while wearing some kind of utopian happy-Foucault glasses, believing in the transgressive power of the “care of the self” and monstrously warping the complexity of Nietzsche’s analysis of the human’s physical being in relation to its justifications and truths into a simplistic enactment of ressentiment: we knowers know better than the “evil” dominators. Nietzsche will liberate our repressed selves! Woo!

While Nietzsche’s work certainly has political implications, and, before his break with Wagner at least, he did seemed to adhere fitfully to some sort of notion of cultural revolution, it seems to me that no serious reading of Nietzsche can argue that his aims were in any way political. The difference between Nietzsche’s real struggle with the will-to-power and some watery liberational priest-talk is as wide as the difference between lions and Lamms…

Letter to the Editors at New School Free Press and the New School Community

2009-04-15T19:36:00.000-04:00

In 1999, I was in the streets of Seattle protesting the WTO, shoulder to shoulder with anarchists and longshoremen. In 2004, I was in the streets of Baghdad, holding back an angry crowd with a loaded M-16. I’ve been on both sides of a riot shield; I’ve seen what violence and anarchy look like up close. When I came here to the New School, I thought I'd put that violence behind me.

The New School was founded in 1919 by John Dewey and others in an explicit rejection of the nationalism, militarism, and repression they saw on other New York campuses, specifically Columbia University, from which Charles Beard resigned to protest that university’s demand for loyalty oaths. As everyone knows, the University in Exile was founded in 1933 to offer refuge to intellectuals fleeing fascist violence. The tradition of the New School is one of public discourse, critical thought, and progressive education. What happened on Friday, April 10, flew directly in the face of that tradition, and the blame lies both with the self-aggrandizing so-called “anarchists” who decided to “force” Bob Kerrey’s hand, and with the at-times excessive response on the part of the police.

I was ashamed to see my school, once an affirming flame in a darkened world, taken hostage by a minority of “infinitely demanding” thugs who thought their symbolic violence was a substitute for the hard work of organizing, educating, and struggling for better conditions. I was disappointed and angry that the deepest reaction these students could muster to the dangerously anarchic forces of capitalism was nothing more than the unreflective acting out of capitalism’s core values: infinite demands, immediate gratification, individualism, and ending discussion in favor of action, seizure, occupation, and destruction. I was also disturbed and disappointed by the heavy-handed reaction of the police cut loose by President Kerrey. The problem is violence itself: once we resort to force as an answer, the only way out is more force.

We are here because we value scholarship, thought, and the New School’s proud tradition. This is a university. It is neither a business to be run for profit nor the repressive authoritarian “Big Other” that some people think they should overthrow. As a student here, a member of the New School community, and a former activist and soldier, I condemn those who advocated, supported, and wrought violence on our school last week.

Sincerely,

Roy Scranton, NSSR, Liberal Studies

Almost there... Almost there...

2009-04-15T19:01:00.008-04:00

So I'm not posting very much because I've been busy with school and assorted other craziness, including two important upcoming events at which I am speaking: a symposium on J. Glenn Gray's book The Warriors, being held at CUNY's Center for Workers' Education on April 24, and a reading for my Veteran's Writing Workshop being held at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House on April 25, featuring guest poet Bruce Weigl. We'll also be launching an anthology featuring some of our work from this year, titled Nine Lines.

So I have been reading and partaking in cultural events, but don't have much time to write about it. Here are some summary judgments:

* Returns, a play by Iraq Veteran Joshua Casteel, in a dramatic reading at CUNY on March 30: Crap. Stale, unreflective trauma dialogue hashed up and mixed with heavy-handed theological thought-turds. Sorry, Josh. As a fellow vet, I have to say you dropped the ball. Also, David Gothard should shut up. On the plus side, actor Nikhil Vaid brought a presence and intensity to his acting that almost saved moments from the flat, self-important script.

* MATA Festival, Tuesday, March 31. The Knights performing work by Ted Hearne, Sarah Snider, Francesco Antonioni, Justin Messina, Mike Block, Joseph Pereira, and Andrew Hamilton. The Knights played with verve, craft, intensity and straight faces--much to their credit. Also, Hamilton's piece "Product No. 1," which finished out the evening, was a cruel, tensely beautiful, and frankly amazing piece of angry minimalism. Cheers to him. The rest of the ticket was banal-sounding pap, as fresh as a diaper and sweet like rotten fruit. Particularly galling was "Echi Dromi," by Joe Pereira, a duet for flute and drum that called to mind Will Farrell and earnest hippies. Nearly impossible to sit through without crying--from laughter.

* Reread Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which is still awesome. Also read selections from the Grundrisse, various articles etc., and reread The Communist Manifesto, which is also still awesome.

* Read Hugh Raffle's new book The Illustrated Insectopedia in manuscript, and it was great. Moving, informative, surprising, very smart, and generally delightful. Read it!

* The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Easter Service: Awesome. Especially the insane stained glass windows, for example this: a guy watching TV.

* Occupation of 65 5th Avenue New School building by self-styled anarchists and subsequent smack-down by thuggish NYPD called in by the one-man freak show Bob Kerrey: lame.

* Violence, by Slavoj Zizek: provocative, insightful, whip-smart, and wide-ranging. Unlike this stupid review by the New School's resident bullshit-artist-in-chief, Simon Critchley.

* On Violence, by Hannah Arendt: at first a bit facile and somewhat clunkily of a moment, Arendt's book turned surprisingly subtle and offered some really interesting thoughts.

* A "collective quartet composed of the guitarist Chris Forsyth, the multireedist Chris Heenan, the sound collagist Aki Onda and the trumpeter Nate Wooley," at Abron's Art Center, 21 March 2009, which was superb. The performers were totally on, their touch was light but deeply felt, and I came away giddy with the joy of their sustained improvisation.

And I must have done or read or thought or seen some other shit too, but it's all water under the bridge now and I need to go to the gym and get up in the morning and write a paper about cyborgs and war and shit. Peace.

Michael Serres' The Parasite

2009-04-01T15:54:00.001-04:00

It seems best perhaps to take Serres at his word, such as when he says “Yes, my philosophy is adjectival; it is awe-struck. The real is not rational; it is improbable and miraculous” (46); “Henceforth, my book is rigorously fuzzy” (56); “I don’t want to play any more. Neither at the game of who is smarter nor that of the truth. For you can die of hunger, of cold, of drowning, while playing” (75); “We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks; no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked. This one here speaks learnedly; he is as boring as the last course he gave; he doesn’t care if people hear him” (121); and “The host does not speak much and is not understood; his logic is paradoxal. It is fuzzy; it is our own. His parasites are eating him up, and their noise covers his voice” (216).

Taking up the metaphor and pun of the parasite in the threefold way of meaning biological parasite, social parasite, and static or noise (as it does, apparently, in French), Serres posits a unidirectional relationship where the parasite feeds on a host like noise “feeds on” information, and universalizes his metaphor into a concept of social relations—that is, human relations are not “like” parasite relations, but rather they are parasite relations. Embodying his “argument” in his text, Serres makes The Parasite a parasite, a noisesome bloodsucker that feeds on culture and produces nothing (or only waste… or W.A.S.T.E. (see below)). As Serres writes: “The chain of parasitism is a simple relation of order, irreversible like the flow of the river. One feeds on another and gives nothing in return… For parasitism is an elementary relation; it is, in fact, the elements of the relation” (182).

It seems more interesting to me to consider Serres ethnographically, or even merely historically, than it does to consider his work philosophically. Like Derrida and Foucault he seems to write in a tradition of anti-humanist post-structural French thought that, after Nietzsche, works to find the irrational in the rational, after Heidegger, works to turn from philosophy to poetry, after Kojeve, struggles with the idea of the end of history, and against Sartre turns from existential political engagement to an individualist ethics of transgression and play. Serres, like Derrida, is engaged in an argument with the western philosophical canon that has to do with the very fundamentals of what philosophy is and does and how one philosophizes. For Serres, writing in the dark aspect of the Romantic tradition as it comes through Nietzsche, Artaud, the Dadaists, and the Situationists, the creativity of the irrational, unconscious, or incoherent is valued over the “systemization” of rationality.

Piercing the foggy banks of nonsense that (deliberately) cloud the pages of The Parasite are occasional insights that seem interesting, provocative, or worth following up. On the question of order and disorder, though, on noise and social relations, I found Serres’ regular references to Maxwell’s Demon to call to mind a much more beautiful and arresting work, which addresses some of the same themes, and Maxwell’s Demon, and even W.A.S.T.E…. namely Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

Nietzsche, Kant’s Holocaust, and My Cat’s Face

2009-03-25T17:30:00.001-04:00

Of course, I don’t have a cat. I wish I had a cat. I wish I had a cat that would (or at least could), like Derrida’s, remind me daily of the strangeness of being a human animal, a strangeness Derrida thinks through and with in The Animal That Therefore I Am.

I don’t quite know what to make of his rich, complex, playful, and deadly serious book, especially within the context of an Anthropology seminar. It aligns to some extent with the critique of Cartesian epistemology in Barad and Jullien, it engages with the phenomenology that seemed to undergird the work of Mol and Lingis, and in fact the three theses that structure this course come in to Derrida’s final hurried chapter on Heidegger; the problem is not one of disconnection between the text and the seminar. Rather, my problem is that I find it here nearly impossible to get outside of philosophy, or more specifically Derrida, or even more specifically Derrida’s “animalism” and Nietzschean perspectivalism.

When Derrida admits on pages 91-92 that his motivation in attempting to grapple with “Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, as a single living body” is perhaps an attempt to “gain… a sufficiently expert or knowledgeable purchase on what might touch the nervous system of a single animal body,” like trying to grab a cuttlefish without either hurting it or being covered in its ink (which I just now realize is a typically Derridean metaphor-pun), and that he admits this in order to confide “I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic,” which recalls his indirect quotation of Nietzsche on page 3 that man “was an as yet undetermined animal, an animal lacking in itself,” I can’t help but agree, yes, the human is an animal, even while I have to wonder about what it means not only to grasp a cuttlefish but to devour one. One thing I always admire about Derrida is his lightness of touch.

This question of devouring, which resurfaces here and there in terms of vegetarianism, animal suffering, instrumental reason, and even the Holocaust, comes up again in the end when Derrida contrasts Nietzsche to Heidegger in order to favor both Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and his (here unnamed) will-to-power—when Derrida says “everything is in a perspective; the relation to a being, even the ‘truest,’ the most ‘objective,’ that which respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view, whatever the difference between animals, it remains an ‘animal’ relation,” he leaves unspoken the violence in Nietzsche’s animal relations, the cruelty of the “blond beast” to the slave and the disdain of the “higher man” for the “herd,” the difference expressed in hierarchy—he leaves out specifically, precisely, the “will-to-power” in all its aspects (160). Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is no mere relativism, but an issue of power and force. Derrida is right to point out that the stakes are “radical.”

This was something that struck me with Barad, as well, and her marvelous image of the creature that was an eye: intersubjective agential realism is great, but some animal has to eat. And at this point, thinking about the anthropos in philosophy and the theoria of anthropology, I don’t know what is being devoured by whom. As for me, I wish I had a cat.

Oulipo in New York: a Workshop of Experimental Literature

2009-03-24T19:54:00.004-04:00

This is from the official website of the cultural services of the French Embassy.

Oulipo in New York: a Workshop of Experimental Literature

The Oulipo, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, is a collective of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. Since its creation, the Oulipo group explores alternative ways of writing fiction and poetry, by using patterns and constraints often inspired from mathematical models, but always in a playful spirit. Its members include Marcel Bénabou, Anne Garréta, Hervé Le Tellier, Ian Monk, Jacques Roubaud, and American author Harry Mathews, all of whom will be in New York for three days of readings, lectures, writing workshops and book signings. Jacques Roubaud will be presenting the recently published English translation of his book La boucle (The Loop).

Apr. 1, 7-8:30pm
Oulipo reading followed by book signings, in English
The New School, Tishman Auditorium, 66 W 12th Street, NYC | T 212 229 5488 | More Info

Apr. 2, 12-2pm
Oulipo, Nouveaux Sentiers, Nouveaux Chantiers*, a roundtable discussion in French
Maison française of Columbia University, Broadway at West 116th Street | T 212 854 4482 | More Info

Apr. 2 , 7pm
Book launch and reading of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop, in English
Idlewild Bookstore,12 West 19th Street, NYC | T 212 414 8888 | More Info | Please RSVP

Apr. 3, 2-5pm
Creative writing workshop with Marcel Bénabou, in French (limited to 12 participants)
French Institute Alliance Française | 22 East 60th Street, NYC | T: 212 355 6612 | More Info

Apr. 3, 7-9pm
Poetry readings followed by book signings, in English
The Pierogi Gallery, 177 North 9th Street, Brooklyn | T 718 599 2144 | More Info

Apr. 4, 1-3pm
Buffet-brunch followed by Oulipo reading, in French and English (invitations only)
Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Avenue, New York | T 212 439 1400

SPRING BREAK MUTHAFUCKAS!!!! WOOO!!!

2009-03-19T17:41:00.002-04:00

Of course this means nothing, except that I slept in till 10 this morning like I'm Marcel Proust or some shit.

What I spent most of my spring break doing was writing a book review of an awful, awful book called Paradoxes of Peace, by the waffling, rich old codger Nicholas Mosley, son of the founder of the British Fascist party, Oswald Mosley. It was an awful book, and my review will probably not get published because no matter how elegantly I might have dropped the hatchet, people often get squeamish about all the blood.

I also read my Marx chapters and worked on a talk I have to give on Glenn Gray's great book The Warriors. It was interesting working on Paradoxes of Peace and The Warriors at the same time, because the fact of the matter is that it takes a great deal more work to do justice to a good book than it does to a bad one. The work can be much more enjoyable and rewarding, no doubt, but good books must be struggled with in a way that bad ones don't require.

I also went to a cultural event last night, the MATA Interval 2.4 Play! Music for Toys, which was enjoyable. Overall the music was palatable and well-played but too pretty and too much watered-down minimalism for my tastes, although I was blown away by the standout Judy Dunaway (and that girl who did vocals with her), who can rock a balloon like a motherfucker. I also liked Margaret Leng Tan, who performed pieces that in themselves were not that interesting with such verve and charisma that they really stood out.

Uhm, that's about all I got. I'm reading a fantastic article by Richard Wrangham on "The Evolution of Coalitionary Killing," which argues for the "Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis" to explain aggressive group attacks through natural selection. I knew it all along...

One last thing, everyone should go see I Love You, Man, because mi amiga Sarah Burns is in it and she's fucking awesome and the movie needs to do well so she can get a cushy hollywood job and fly me out to visit her in a private jet. Okay? Also it's supposed to be funny, and Sarah is super funny.

Ultimate Philosopher or Ultimate Warrior?

2009-03-13T17:48:00.002-04:00

This is a reposting of the link to this wonderful Quiz. Any fans of Heidegger or Nietzsche are basically obligated to take this.

Marx Says: "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

2009-03-13T17:19:00.012-04:00

I should mention first of all the Grupat show that the Dr. recently put up in Dublin, which was super awesome (and for which I wrote all the fake press). Here's some pix.

So in addition to art show openings hrm hrm hrm etcetera, and having to read The Propensity of Things and re-read Austerlitz, I also managed to re-read Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which was awesome, Part I and part of Part III of The German Ideology, which was also great, except for the relentlessly vitriolic attacks on Max Stirner, and loads of essays and other stuff, most notably a bunch of stuff by George Orwell and Susan Sontag's essay on war photography. I always think of both of them as excellent writers, but in going back to read their stuff I find myself surprised by just how good they were. I have also been introduced to the essays of the phenomenologist Alphonso Lingis, whose writing on the themes of animal life and human perception is rich, deeply felt, and gorgeous.

I also read We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour, which started out with the interesting if not particularly new thesis that "Modernity" is predicated on a sort of dialectical split between something like "Nature" and something like "Culture" that really doesn't exist at all. So far so good, but then Latour flogs this point for the rest of his book, positing a whole theoretical apparatus of quasi-objects, hybrids, and a parliament of things that are supposed to refer to the "real" unity operating behind the "false" dichotomy. We have never been modern because all our "modern" empirical whatever is embodied in practice, etc. Great.
What I don't get is why anyone who managed to get through a couple years of college would think this is in any way revelatory. Marx and Nietzsche both took the material conditions of consciousness as central not only to their overall projects but to their critique of philosophy. Frankly, I'm getting tired of late-capitalist theorists who act like they invented the critique of metaphysics. Really. Read a fucking book.

I also finished Homo Sacer, by Giorgio Agamben, which was actually really interesting. I don't have the patience to summarize it well here, but his basic argument is that the "modern" form of political organization occurs through an organization of "bare life" which requires the limit states or "states of exception" of both totalitarian sovereignty and the concentration camp. The book has loads of interesting thought along the way, though, including stuff on werewolves, Roman law, Aristotle, Carl Schmitt, effigies, Hobbes, and the Social Contract, before he even gets to Auschwitz. Highly recommended.

If you're into that kind of shit.

I also managed to take in some culture along the way, most notably a visit to the Natural History Museum (Bears! Jellyfish! Insects! Whale! Infants!) and seeing the rather disappointing Watchmen. I don't really have anything to say about the movie except that it's not as good as the comic book. Meh.

What else? Oh, a friend of my has begun a web-zine (or whatever it is called now), called The Arch. He is a great guy, a good writer, and a fellow vet, and he has been generous enough to put some of my stuff up on his site, so check it out.

The Fortress of Memory

2009-03-13T17:16:00.003-04:00

I had to give a presentation on Sebald's Austerlitz, the notes for which follow.

I want to begin with a quotation from Walter Benjamin’s 9th Thesis from “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

What if Benjamin’s pile of wreckage isn’t just a catastrophe but something more, something more deliberate? What if it is a fortress, designed to protect against the past, somehow, or to hide it, to cover it and keep it out? And what if the stone walls of this fortress turn from being our best defense into our most nightmarish prison?

I want to look briefly at the motif of the fortress-prison in Austerlitz, which seems to me a central—if not the central—metaphor of the work.

First, I want to draw our attention to the early pages of the book, where Austerlitz begins telling the narrator about fortresses and military architecture. “No one today,” he says on page 15, “has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications… no one now understands its simplest terms, escarpe and courtine, faussebraie, réduit, and glacis, yet even from our present standpoint we can see that toward the end of the seventeenth century the star-shaped dodecagon behind trenches had finally crystallized, out of the various available systems, as the preferred ground plan…” We return to this star-shaped fortress again and again in the work.

Images of walls, towers, and fortifications are everywhere in this book, especially because of Austerlitz’ interest in monumental architecture, but the star-shaped fortress at the center of things is Theresienstadt, or Terezin, the fortress-cum-ghetto described on 187 and 199 as having a “star-shaped ground plan,” which is shown prominently on 234 and 235.

Terezin, of course, is where Austerlitz’ mother Agáta was imprisoned, and from where she was “sent east” to her death in 1944 (204). Two other fortresses-turned-prisons bracket the novel, Breendonk, in the Netherlands (18-27), where Jean Améry was tortured by the SS, and the 9th Fort at Kaunas, in Lithuania, where “more than thirty thousand people were killed over [the three years between 1941 and 1944]” (297-298).

But the star-shape shows up in other forms as well: Austerlitz describes how once he and his parents Maximilian and Agáta “went out to the game park at Liboc where, surrounded on all sides by lovely meadows, there is a star-shaped house built as his summer residence by Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol” (252); we see the picture of a mosaic star pictured shown illustrating the Prague architecture described on 151; and there is another picture, on 116, of the Eagle Nebula, which shows us the “star nursery” described by Austerlitz’s dead school friend Gerald on the page prior, one of the “huge regions of interstellar gas which, not unlike stormclouds, became concentrated into vast, billowing forms… where new stars were born…”

Not unlike the stormclouds of progress in Benjamin’s image, giving birth to a star, a star-shaped fortress, a fortress of memory. Of course, the star also recalls the six-pointed Star of David, notably absent from the work and perhaps thus much more on our mind. Just like Austerlitz’s obsessive research into the nineteenth century helps repress the traumatic memory of the twentieth, or as Austerlitz puts it on page 16: “The frequent result… of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency toward paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point.”

I want to point to one last thing, and that is the fortress-like Bibliotheque National that we encounter in the closing pages of the book, the library whose architecture, Austerlitz posits on page 278, “must have been devised… to instill a sense of insecurity and humiliation on the poor readers,” or as it’s put by his friend Henri Lemoine a few pages later, “both in its entire layout and its near ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy,” and “might be described… as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past” (286). It is no accident, clearly, that we learn on page 288 that this massive fortress of a library is built on the land where once stood a warehouse complex filled with the loot taken “from the homes of the Jews of Paris,” a complex “known to the prisoners as” the Galleries of Austerlitz.

We can see the massive stone and rows of books built over the memory of Austerlitz’ Galleries… and we can ask ourselves how much Jacques Austerlitz might be a personification of precisely this, a fortress where the past has been imprisoned.

The Propensity to Straw Man Arguments

2009-03-13T17:14:00.002-04:00

I find Socrates a fascinating and admirable figure. Most of all, I admire him for his integrity: not only for his integrity in the face of death, during his trial for impiety, but for his epistemological integrity—famously, he claimed to know only that he knew nothing. Socrates is fascinating not just as a figure, however, nor just as a philosopher, but also as a construction: the Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues is different than the one in the later works, and both differ from Xenophon’s accounts. The question of historical veridicality is never far away when looking at any of the Pre-Platonic Greek philosophers, which is one reason why the whole tradition seems rather fascinating. Another reason the tradition is fascinating is how diverse it is: considering all at once Pythagoras, the cult-leader and number-worshipper who believed in the transmigration of souls; Heraclitus, who thought the universe was made of ever-changing fire and held paradoxical, cryptic views of the “logos” so central to Greek thought; and Empedocles, a poet and magician who claimed to be able to control the weather and raise the dead, what seems amazing about the development of so-called “rational” philosophy is not how unified it was but rather that it developed at all. When we expand our view, and consider later additions to the Greek tradition such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Stoicism, Epicurus, and so on, alongside earlier poetic thinkers like Hesiod and Homer, things get very complicated—we need to start talking about Athenians, Egyptians, Thracians, Spartans, and Persians. We need to start talking about dates and details and specifics.

All of this is to help explain what I mean when I say that I don’t know what Francois Jullien means when he talks about “Greek thought” (see 216, etc), or even what he means when he uses (or his translator uses), rather extensively, the word “logic” (123, 131, 209, 233, et passim). This is only the tip of the rather dangerous iceberg which, in my opinion, nearly sinks Jullien’s sometimes interesting and sometimes tedious book, The Propensity of Things. This “iceberg” is “The West,” which shows up in The Propensity of Things as a monolithic, unitary bogeyman. By generalizing “The West” so broadly from thousands of years of history comprising hundreds of cultures and innumerable traditions of reasoning or thought, even if only “symbolically,” Jullien makes me wonder how capable he is of handling Chinese culture and the idea of “Shi.” Since I don’t know anything about China, I can’t tell if he is as reductive and crude in his treatment of Chinese culture as he is of “The West,” but I certainly hope not.

I say “nearly sinks,” because while in my view his general argumentative framework slips into a sea of vague Orientalism (Chinese Thought is not Western Thought; The Other has the Boon (complexity, ambiguity, sensitivity, etc.) that we lack), perhaps we can save something in this idea of shi, or propensity—something like an idea of holographic knowledge, an arrangement of patterns implicit in situations and praxes, something between logos and prognostication. This is an interesting thought and one well worth thinking—as many people “The West” have tried to do before.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAeeeeeeeeeeeeee

2009-03-06T17:36:00.003-05:00

So I've read tons of stuff since the last time I posted, which is precisely the reason I have not posted. My brain is tired and I need to go workout then drink beer. There's loads of great news and plenty of stuff I need to update, but mostly I've been reading Marx Marx Marx.

Don't let anyone lie to you: Capital is awesome. It's an awesome fucking book. Yeah, Capital.

More soon. I promise.

In the meantime, here's a picture of a donkey:

The Body Multiple

2009-02-10T07:13:00.001-05:00

“Texts are active. And they do so much.” (Mol, subtext 160).

Lucid, deliberative, thoughtful, and restrained, Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple is a welcome contrast to Helmreich’s Alien Ocean. I found Mol’s self-described “ethnographic” and “praxiographic” approach toward the different ways that atherosclerosis is enacted in Hospital Z to resonate powerfully with phenomenological and pragmatist philosophical traditions, which dispense with epistemological skepticism in favor of descriptive engagements with experienced existence. It is no wonder Mol refers to Merleau-Ponty in her preface (x); his phenomenological work on embodiment and especially on “the phantom limb” was never far from my mind while reading Mol’s descriptions of atherosclerosis as “pain,” as “interview,” and as “evidence,” not least when the “phantom limb” appeared here as a real leg, amputated, refrigerated, and dissected (37-38).

I appreciate very much Mol’s restraint and self-awareness. In her written practice, atherosclerosis is “enacted” as a subject of meditation and an object through which she can “enact” theoretical questions, and by keeping a tight focus on Hospital Z and atherosclerosis of the legs, Mol is able to address her concerns with depth and care (subtext 181). Her subtext offers a curious counterpoint to her “ethnography” that neither undermines nor properly contextualizes the main text, but rather adds another frame of questions about practice and enactment, this time about writing itself.

It is on this self-reflective note that I will finish. Coming from outside the discipline of anthropology, I find myself struggling with the notion of “ethnography,” particularly in Mol’s text. On the one hand fighting naïve notions of Margaret Mead among the Samoans, on the other I’m perplexed as to how Mol can write an “ethnography” that is explicitly without an “ethnos”—unless, that is, atherosclerosis is a “people.” Perhaps she means the people affected by or dealing with atherosclerosis, but this doesn’t seem to quite be her topic; her own “praxiography,” or even the wider term “phenomenology,” seems more apt. This is a question I have about the text that I cannot answer. I would like to pose more questions, especially about some of Mol’s “gestures” (which while well-performed are still troublesome) insofar as they are typical of what I think of as “theory,” gestures such as the refusal to provide answers in favor of opening “the space in which [questions] may be posed,” the overt but necessarily limited interdisciplinarity, and the suggestion that critical strategies of reframing and problematization might be in themselves emancipatory, not because I think they can be dispensed with but because these practices are practices, themselves open to examination (see, for example, Ian Hunter’s “The History of Theory” in Critical Inquiry). This post is too long already, tho, and all I can do is suggest the space in which these questions might be posed…

caribou

Running in the 2012 ING NYC Marathon

They Flee From Me

resolutions shift across different platforms TAN LIN

“One is Reminded of Kierkegaard’s Remark…”

Touching Down

"As machines make ice..."

Coming up to Veterans Day

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire

The Real End of the Iraq War?

I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly

Rendezvous

Tendering Buttons

Why I Write

To hell with you and your poetry

Poem

The Education of Henry Adams

To Hell and Back Again

Hamster Wheel Warp

Ulysses

Thoughts on the Last Ten Years

"Dirty Realism" in Granta

Chemin de Walter Benjamin

Bad Blogger

Carol Watts Reading

The Program Era

Where the War Novels At?

DO THIS

The Art of Puffing by a Bookseller's Journeyman

Is there not big fat-necked Unicorns enough?

Old Poem in New Rhino

Wordsworth Variations

Excerpt from I HEART OKLAHOMA

Save the Date

Oulipo / Queneau

Ouwhalepo... (Melville + 10)

War, huh.

Story up on ACM

January

Projective Verse

More from Brooklyn Reading Works

Much

Monday Nietzsche

Just When You Think It's Over

A Poem for Friday

Fish Fail

Catullus 16

On Beauty

Vides ut alta

America: You Gotta Have Our Back

Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War

War, War, War

The Wheel Turns

Not News

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

NPR is making me dumber

Me and Tolstoy, We Both Hate Freedom

Still Reading War & Peace

Looking for Submissions

The Great Gatsby

Summer is here and the living is EZ

Trotsky on Fox News

Absentee Bloglord

Special Offer

Good Riddance 2009

Better Living Through Bacon

Update

The Ultimate Experience

Academic Freedom

Happy Halloween

Looking forward, not backward

Also: Nazi gnomes cause outcry in Germany

The Empire of Trauma

Trauma and Recovery

Sublimity and Fictions

Transcendence in Brooklyn or War

Behemoth vs. Leviathan

Update

The Pain

Slow Down