Words, words, words!

Camille Paglia at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands — ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.”

Yes, Camille. There are no people more put-together and successful in the modern economy than visual artists and jazz musicians. She wants to re-energize trade education, and I'm behind her on that. This is the kind of foolishness that only a university professor could propound.

like a beautiful woman

Frank Kermode on falling in love with poetry from The Telegraph:

“You may begin by admiring certain discrete poems or even certain lines, but when he goes deep into your mind many things that did not consciously impress you arrive in the more occult part of the memory and establish themselves, eventually, as the real secret and enchanting things while the obvious attractions, which are more or less available to everybody, come to seem superficial.”

Now that's a heroic couplet.

Lorin Stein on the ‘Freedom’ Effect

from The Atlantic Monthly:

“But already, in the first mini-backlash against the book—or really, against the all the attention it's received — we hear it implied that fiction should restrict itself to entertainment or fade into obscurity: that critics should spend more time celebrating mass-market novels because they're what the people "actually" want. This fake populism pretends to speak for women (as if women weren't the overwhelming consumers of serious fiction, whether written by women or men). Really it's the logic of the Hollywood blockbuster machine.

Unfortunately, you find the same logic at work all over publishing today. Without a complex network of local bookstores and local reviewers, more and more houses see the blockbuster as their only viable business plan. They spend vast amounts signing up and promoting books that seem written to spec. That model is great if you're publishing mysteries, or vampire books, or chick lit, or books about Founding Fathers. A good formula, well executed, can be a beautiful (and profitable) thing.

But for literary fiction, the fiction of discovery, formulas are death. In my 12 years at FSG, we saw publishers lose millions every season trying to corner the market on the Big New (preferably Young) Literary Sensation. Meanwhile really tricky, idiosyncratic writers — Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, Elif Batuman, Richard Price, Sam Lipsyte, Roberto Bolano, James Wood, Hans Keilson — confounded even the most charitable expectations of the chains, and went through one printing after another. Now Franzen seems poised to do the same thing on a much, much bigger scale.”

I'm not sure that Franzen's Freedom sounds like much in the way of discovery, tho — but, then again, I haven't read it so I can't say.

From This Passage

from Dan Green's blog The Reading Experience:

“[. . .] his critical readings nevertheless implicitly assert the importance of informed criticism, the existence of some readers who through skill with the ‘codes’ always associated with attentive reading can help other readers overcome the limitations of their inherited codes and approach poetry in a more rewarding way.”

You might never guess that Dan is writing about arch-pomoservative Ron Silliman here.

The Matter With Twenty-Somethings

This feels familiar. . .

There is such a thing as the blindly uncritical self. It is immune to irony and reflection. It refuses to change, even in order to adapt. The blindly uncritical self projects its own anxieties out on the rest of the world and then blames the world for their existence. The blindly uncritical self believes its values are the only real values; that its view is the only possible view; that its feelings are the only valid feelings. It takes many forms, like Lucifer. Needless to say, I hate the blindly uncritical self, and it is on full display in this New York Times Magazine article entitled, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” Robin Henig tries to work out what is wrong with all of us. It's about time someone finally got around to it!

In the first part of the article, comedic media representations of people in their twenties are [mis]taken to be evidence of our actual society and five reasonably arbitrary events — “completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child” — are marked as the definition of “adulthood,” itself a malleable social construction. People in their twenties are compared to a recording device, nonsensically, and are excoriated for not achieving these arbitrary goals as quickly as (you may have guessed this) the Baby Boomers did.

Greatest Generation? No.

Clearly if we have re-aligned our priorities, something is wrong with us. If the Baby Boomers — when in this mode, surely the culture's most blindly uncritical self — scheduled their lives according to a certain plan, then this is the only right way to live one's life. Any deviation is deviant. Any new plan is an entirely new development. And foremost in that schedule, according to Henig: we must be married; we must produce grandchildren. If we don't couple and copulate quickly, society will collapse. I guess. She's actually not really clear on that point.

I can say with some assurance that we'd all like to be financially independent and whatnot, but that seems unlikely. Thanks, mom and dad!

Slate Magazine has some reasonable responses to the article. (Except the governmental policy question spurred by the author's daughter, who should really have been disqualified from the discussion.) Dan Check writes, “This felt like an article by boomers, for boomers.” But, of course, it's their world. We just live in it. Quite literally. The world that exists is emphatically not the product of people in their twenties — this world is the product of decades of decisions by the generation who now bemoans their consequences, and seems to blame everyone but themselves.

Thank goodness — thank goodness! — one true adult finally had the good sense to turn a careful eye toward . . . criticizing their children.

Wow. Not avoiding a painful truth at all. Not in the slightest.

Of course material and societal changes affect the rhythms of one's life, as well as definitions of adulthood. That does not make these changes negative. We are not “lost.” Young people today are not perfect, but they are neither more nor less noble than any other generation. Blindly mimicking the course our parents took will not serve us well for a future that absolutely will not resemble the lives of the Baby Boomer generation.

Wtf?

As a sidebar: I am fairly appalled that Teach for America is held up in the beginning of this essay as a wrong turn or some avoidance of commitment. Because teaching in poor communities is a waste of time? Because working to change America for the better isn't “adult” enough? There are all these overgrown children making hundreds of thousands of dollars by playing football with the stock market — and Henig picks on Teach for America. Not because of the organization's flaws, but because those people aren't home popping out babies. Whose priorities are out of whack here?

I'm Sorry, Did I Interrupt You?

Fawcett & the NAP

Sir Nicholas Serota Makes
an Acquisitions Decision
by Charles Thomson

At his blog, “Squandermania,” Don Share has offered a few interesting passages from the new critical biography of Robin Blaser, written by Stan Persky and Brian Fawcett. In the critical portion of the book is a lengthy discussion of the famed New American Poets anthology, which Don excerpts at some length. Fawcett writes:

“The deep thinkers of the New American Poetry thought that the enterprise of postmodernism was about the extension of private consciousness and thus an occasion for writing about poetry. In the real world, postmodernism has been about the superimposition of economic and fiscal models upon all human activities and the substitution of commodity consumption for meaning and for human solidarity. In this error, the bright lights of the New American Poetry were monumentally self-serving, and their errors seeded my generation with a self-absorption and arrogance that runs so deep only a tiny minority of us to this day recognizes the humiliation of what has transpired in the shift over the last thirty years from political and cultural models based on democracy and equality of opportunity to an oligarchy of Darwinian entrepreneurs modeling all human activities on the marketplace.”

It is, to say the least, a bold claim regarding a whole array of poets whose only common thread is their inclusion in that anthology or under that “literary movement,” and even more broadly about the worldview of all subsequent writers and artists. Don emphasizes that these de-contextualized quotes are somewhat misleading. I'll have to get a copy of the book. I do think there is something to Steven Fama's point that this argument “raises in me the question of whether [Fawcett is] displacing his anger at his own inability to find his creative way.”

It seems to me that Fawcett is drawing the apparent substance of his thesis from Fredric Jameson's critique in Postmodernism; at least he wants that to be the gloss. Except, in this version, the commodification of the self is a result of the withdrawal of the artist from the public forum, and the past contains “cultural models based on democracy and equality of opportunity” where the modern era contains “an oligarchy of Darwinian entrepreneurs modeling all human activities on the marketplace.” He divides the “real world” from the realm of artists and writers, and the democratic past from our degraded free-market present (tho that “present” has lasted for four decades). It could be that these divisions are exaggerated in the passage quoted. However, this argument is not the Jamesonian thesis, although it does at first seem to be.

I agree with Fawcett that there exists “the humiliation of what has transpired in the shift over the last thirty years.” It is very much on display in this passage: on one hand, a feeling that the past was much superior; on the other, a deep-seated guilt over the failure of writers / artists / elites to halt our cultural erosion. Each of these tropes can be found strongly in cultural artifacts since at least 1980 (across the socio-political spectrum), from Reagan's campaign platform to “Buddy Holly” and “I Love the 90s.” But these tropes are neurotic self-impositions, adhering to no historical reality. These feelings of guilt and nostalgia stem from, I think, the ethical reverberations of the Second World War and the Holocaust — an anxiety whether the rest of this century could find the same type of meaning and, in some sense, clarity of purpose (i.e. the final scene of “Saving Private Ryan”). Recall the pre-fab responses to 9/11 in the same language that's used to frame the Second World War.

The narrative of cultural decline is strong. It has material effects on society through the market. And certainly it influences today's artists. But it isn't really accurate historically: the decades before the New American Poets were not significantly better (see the wonderful rant, “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy”); there has not been a decline. Many of our challenges are different than they were at the time of the New American Poets, while some remain the same. We wrestle with the same very human issues: of ethics, justice, economics; democracy, security, peace; race, gender, society.

Perhaps it is the case that American poetry has been concerned too much with interiority and been too self-regarding over the last fifty years. I would probably say that the best-lauded poets over that time were too deeply engaged in that interiority for my taste. But I couldn't rail against any widespread decline, much less pinpoint a movement or influence that caused it. If we find that there were not as many great poets as we would have liked — well, that's the essence of what it is to be great, isn't it?

On Ditching the Target Registry

As many of you know, I'm getting married next year to a wonderful, kind, intelligent and beautiful woman named Katy. We signed up for a generic wedding website because people are hopefully coming from all over the world to share the day with us, and we wanted to make things as easy as possible in terms of travel, accommodation, and of course the registry. It's all very streamlined. Among a few others, we signed up for the Target registry online. We even added a dozen or so items.

Unfortunately, Katy and I recently discovered that Target (as well as Best Buy) make large campaign contributions to candidates who wish to deny people the right to be married. I am to understand that the company's reasons are purely economic, that their campaign contributions are a business decision. But, that's just not good enough for me. It rings hollow, much like the arguments in favor of this lawful iniquity. Every person is equal to every other under the law regardless of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. Any two people should have the right to be married to one another, to be as happy in their lives together as Katy and I are / will be.

The opposition to gay marriage is nothing but Jim Crow in another guise.

If Target and Best Buy want to support some candidate's economic policies, that is entirely their prerogative. However, removing this particular bigotry from their political platform should be an absolute precondition before any company will donate our money to them — but my money will not go to those candidates. As always, the power to change a company's policy lies in our wallets.

Katy and I simply cannot conscience funneling money to such a company, certainly not via our wedding registry. This was an easy call. Target got the boot.

(Nota Bene: Our marriage church has performed gay weddings for decades, long before the law was behind them. And somehow, some how, society has resisted collapse. Religion-based arguments don't hold a lot of water with us.)

Would have liked

to begin my interviews with the National Book Critics Circle and then Anna Clark both with the exclamation,  “Ah, bathos!”

These are the regrets that fill up my day.

Interview with Don Delillo

from The Guardian

“DeLillo has devoted his writing to the shadow side of American life, painting a dysfunctional freaks' gallery of the wrecked (David Bell in Americana), the sick (Bill Gray in Mao II), the mad (Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra) and the suicidal (Eric Packer in Cosmopolis). In White Noise, the protagonist, Jack, who teaches Hitler studies, riffs hilariously on death and mass murder. It is said that DeLillo used to keep two files on his writing table, labelled "Art" and "Terror". In Mao II, he writes: "I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory." On some readings, his characters occupy this no-man's-land. His vision has been described as "paranoid" in the sense that it connects everything about his society.”

We Watched Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries”

So you get to enjoy this.

Second That: On Matching Reviewers to Books

Michael Dirda on working at the Book World, from Critical Mass

“My favorite part of being at Book World lay in matching reviewers to books. Elmore Leonard confessed that he was tired of being asked to review gritty crime novels, so I talked him into writing about the latest Anita Brookner. To my surprise, Angela Carter didn't much like Gabriel Gárcia Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, nor did the very young David Foster Wallace care for Clive Barker. With help from our secretary Ednamae Storti, I tracked down a retired Boston University history professor named Warren Ault to review two books about T. E. Lawrence. He and Lawrence had made brass rubbings together at Oxford. Alas, the professor died quietly in his sleep the night before his review appeared. Ault was 102. But he had seen his piece in proof.”

Interview with Gabriel Gudding

from an interview with Nancy Reddy at Devil's Lake

GG: “I think it good to remember that poetry business in great part is a system of entraining attention. The debate that exists between the two camps you mention is a pseudo debate, one that was cynically fabricated. The purpose of that debate, and in fact the purpose of most literary movements, is to create what Adorno would have called a false need –- a manufactured sense of lack around which an economy of attention can operate. Such movements are strategic modalities whose goal is to accrue cultural capital. They don't in themselves have anything intrinsically to do with experimental writing. They are instead excrescences of show culture, manufactured spectacle. The debate between those two camps is manufactured, as were the camps themselves, with a cynical eye toward poetry-news making over poetry making. When critiqued on precisely this point, those involved in these false debates make gestures to show that their positions are merely ironic and mimetic of the already false nature of all aesthetic valuation. The upshot is that the participants in these fields gain value and attention precisely because of their own ethical emptiness—by both those not in on the supposed joke and those who feed the joke in order to benefit themselves. And there are sociological reasons, laid out nicely by Pierre Bourdieu, why certain kinds of art function this way. Bourdieu shows that such struggles for capital in the field of cultural production tend to become so intense that socially relevant and ethically momentous content is removed from the art in the struggle to distinguish itself. In a very basic ethical sense, then, these debates have nothing to do with "experiment" or even with writing. They are instead ethically empty and cynical methods of accruing cultural capital. They do however serve as an instructive example as to how orthodox art will feign its own unorthodoxy, will feign a vibrancy, as a means of acquiring capital.

So, it's easy to succeed in the field of poetry. The problem is doing so in a way that is not disgusting. My sense is that if those of us who really care about experiment and writing as a means of ethically engaging our world are to stop manufacturing false needs through poetry, we'll need to cease treating poetry as both a kind of country music (a methodology of musical nostalgia) on the one hand and a hipster cage fight on the other (pick latest post-avant movement) and embrace instead a basic attitude: just as Stoics like Epictetus felt that any philosophy that did not teach someone how to live her life in a flourishing and ethical way was useless, so also is any poetry that doesn't do this useless.”

on the Táin Bó Cúailnge

“The Tain is as odd and complicated and seemingly contradictory as the ancient people it represents, and like most fans of its bloody-minded, sarcastic world, I’ve read a bunch of translations over the decades. Ciaran Carson’s is the only one of them that actually beats Thomas Kinsella’s version for liveliness and readability – no small feat, since Kinsella’s book is also brilliant. This is of course the story of Queen Medb of Connacht, whose burning desire to steal the fabled Brown Bull of Cuailnge leads to a full-fledged war-party invading Ulster, which is defended by the lone teen-dream hero Cu Chulainn, who regularly protests that he’s a peaceful young man, that he has no wish to kill anybody – and yet who racks up a body-count far surpassing that of Achilles and almost entering Samson-territory. Cu Chulainn has vaguely supernatural strength, and he’s certainly cunning, and when the battle-rage overtakes him, he’s a virtual avatar of destruction [. . .]”

— from Stevereads, an Open Letters Monthly blog

D.A. Powell @ Bookworm

The marvelous poet D.A. Powell was interviewed recently at Bookworm, a public radio show based in Santa Monica. “I fight so hard to keep control of my emotions in my life, or, not to control them, but to experience them in a way that feels genuine,” he tells Michael Silverblatt.

You can find my notes (here and then here, in two parts) on Powell's poem “corydon & alexis, redux” right at The Wooden Spoon. You can also read my review of his most recent collection, Chronic, at The Critical Flame, where I write:

‘In the course of just three collections — Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails — D.A. Powell has proven himself to be one of the most exciting and enjoyable American poets writing today. His work is readily distinguishable on the page, before reading a single syllable, by its long lines, lack of capitalization, and idiosyncratic punctuation. These formal elements, while at once making him immanently recognizable out of the monotone of modern poetry, are also among the least engaging aspects of his poems. The emotional and intellectual strength of Powell’s work is founded, to a large extent, on his flourishing lyric control and on the brilliant collisions among his cabal of source material: Powell has drawn from the Gospel of Mark, the 1991 film Hook, Alexander Pushkin, Santa Claus, the Boy Scouts, and Lipps, Inc. It defies even the term “etcetera.” ’

Quoted on Silliman's Blog

Usually when I get mentioned by Ron Silliman, it isn't good — although he might be surprised by how much we agree on some things (besides the point) — but today I was quoted in A Representative Sampling of Emails support of shutting down his comment boxes:

“Good call turning off the comments. Will probably draw criticism. Stick to it.”

Everyone has been talking about the loss of Silliman's comments boxes. The decision was instigated by a post over at Jessica Smith's blog on the toxic environment that comment Trolls breed in the poetry community, and its effect on her personally. I hadn't really planned on adding to the conversation, but I was tickled that Ron included me in his email round-up.

I'm not against comment boxes on blogs in principle. There is still a comment section here at the Spoon. In fact, I'd argue that comments are at the very heart of what a blog is. But cultivating a meaningful conversation in these comment sections is incredibly difficult. Very few ever turn up any insight. It's so easy to mis-read each other in a comment thread, where everyone is writing with a different orientation. People use tones of voice, coy or sarcastic or ironic, that do not translate through the screen in most cases and cause major disruption. And then of course there are the Trolls, hardly aware of their own pathetic state.

For a blog that gets as much traffic as Ron Silliman's does, comment moderation must be a beast. And even so, the comment threads are usually a mess — a wasteland of egos and pain, a Colosseum of intellect and trolls. But his site has also moved beyond comments in some ways. It is a point of reference, not a space for discussion. It definitely remains personal (he doesn't even have guest posts as far as I can recall), but, for all his picadillos, Ron runs a pretty professional site over there.

What's the line between a blog where comments are appropriate, and a site where they aren't? Oh hell, I'm not sure. There will be lots of distinctions, especially since it's still an evolving medium. The Critical Flame has no comment sections because I think that comment boxes encourage unconsidered reactions, and that is not what we're about. Ron's site will be a point of first reference for many people entering the poetry community today, so maybe it's better not to invite the worst elements of the community to be their introduction. This will definitely make his readers consider what they want to say, and give them an opportunity for reflection and balance, before they respond — elsewhere. That is not a bad thing.

Interviewed at the Isak Blog

from the interview at Isak, by Anna Clark

Anna Clark: Anything else you want to add?

DEP: Allowing me to speak open-ended may be a mistake. There is so much I'd like to add: to encourage people to think deeply, challenge themselves, care too much, be active in their communities, be honest about their failings and strengths, be humble in their judgments and opinions, be bold in their chances and declarations, remember the length of history before and behind them — but most of it has nothing to do with The Critical Flame or literary culture, or if so only tangentially.

--

That was the last question, but the whole interview was like this.

My [Very] Funny Valentine

Over at her recently-revived blog, Peas & Carrots, The Beautiful Girl writes about catching the wedding madness  and having to be talked down off a ledge of quilts by yours truly:

‘All of this brings me back to the very early days of our engagement and my very first foray in Martha. In this particular issue, the magazine reported on a new guest book trend. Brides and grooms would collect fabrics from their past — pieces of your school uniform or your grandmother's wedding dress, for example — and collect them for the wedding day. On said day, guests would write messages on these squares of fabric, collected by both families. Following the wedding, the bride would sew these patches into a wedding quilt, which, natch, would become an immediate family heirloom passed down through the generations.

Naturally, I needed to do this. How unique, how different, how thoroughly us! Never mind that I can't even sew a button, Martha had suggested (nay, demanded!) it, and besides we had to do this for our children and their children and what would they do if it turned out we were just to lazy or lacked the sewing skills to complete this special, handcrafted, unique wedding quilt/ guestbook?!???

Fortunately, D talked me down from the edge.

Our children do not need this quilt, and neither, really, do we. I still think it's a cool idea, for those who quilt, if any of you out there are busy searching for meaningful scraps of fabric. But, I'm also here to tell you that your wedding does not need to be unique. Every detail does not have to speak to your relationship in new and compelling ways. Guests do not need to be hit with the immediate feeling that this is "so you" the moment they step in to your reception. In fact, your guests don't even need to remember any of the details of your wedding twenty years later. That's okay.

Of course, this is, in part, a missive to myself (are you listening, Katy?). Ours is a relatively small wedding, but, due to the challenges of trans-Atlantic families, it's still true that some people who attend this wedding will never have met D before that day. A large number of those attending couldn't claim to know both of us well. We want people to leave that day feeling closer to us, and, yes, knowing us a little better. We want to have shared something of ourselves and our relationship with them. But, no one benefits from someone like me frantically purchasing a sewing machine or, I would argue, anyone stressing about the endless possibilities for wedding napkins.’

Arcade Fire Inspires

If you haven't seen Arcade Fire in concert, I can't recommend it highly enough. I don't go to shows frequently any more, for a whole variety of reasons, but after seeing clips of the band circulated by my friends, I couldn't pass up an opportunity. On Sunday night, they lived up to every unreasonably high expectation. Go see them.

The band are also deeply committed to supporting Haiti (where founding member Régine Chassagne was born), even before the earthquake but especially now. I know many of you felt strongly about the crisis there, and were able to donate in the aftermath of the quake.

Obviously, this kind of devastation does not just disappear. Arcade Fire donated a portion of their show in Boston to Partners in Health in Haiti. If you want to partner with the band in their support of Haiti, you can buy this t-shirt: all proceeds go to PiH for Haitian aid. It is still much needed.

Or, you can donate to Partners in Health online.

“Gourmand”

Stephen Sturgeon
(photo courtesy of Dave Murray)

by Stephen Sturgeon,
from Open Letters Monthly

I tasted each inch of the earth.
I did not like it but I did it.
There were extravagant flavors,
Gobi, Horse Track, Lava Field, London . . .

People saw a starving criminal
and mildly kicked me, or flicked me crumbs,
while I etched a new map of the world
inside my roving mouth.


Read the rest at Open Letters Monthly!