Friday, April 29, 2005
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
On the Edge of the Mayan World: Stone Vases from the Ulua Valley, Honduras
I saw a show by that name at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in late February 1993. The show consisted of about fifty objects, largely vases, made out of a translucent pink stone called travertine.
The funny part about the show was the writing on the wall said that these people had no artistic tradition of their own and that they developed one between 850-950 AD in order to trade their work with the neighboring Mayans.
To what extent is poetry a cultural artifact invented to trade with a stronger culture?
Ron Silliman in his blog is always arguing against the School of Quietude that tries to ape British cultural life and he insists that we ought to have something of our own.
But the question of where art comes from (what kind of motivations incite its creation?) and also to whom is it traded and for what -- seems to be overlooked. It seems to me that Silliman wants poetry to be an entirely internal affair, something that the poet makes for herself without regard for others.
The catalogue of the Ulua show may have provided me with a model of an art that was based on exchange value but Amy Scott, the Assistant Archivist at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, has just informed me that the catalogue for the show was never printed or at least that it can't be found. It was indeed a rather small show but I remember at the time being told that no catalogue had been printed but that one was forthcoming. The pieces were not uniformly lovely -- many seemed awkward, as if they were only aping the Mayans.
Isn't all art a trade in stereotypes? Even at the level of the letter it must be based on a uniform code.
I saw a show by that name at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in late February 1993. The show consisted of about fifty objects, largely vases, made out of a translucent pink stone called travertine.
The funny part about the show was the writing on the wall said that these people had no artistic tradition of their own and that they developed one between 850-950 AD in order to trade their work with the neighboring Mayans.
To what extent is poetry a cultural artifact invented to trade with a stronger culture?
Ron Silliman in his blog is always arguing against the School of Quietude that tries to ape British cultural life and he insists that we ought to have something of our own.
But the question of where art comes from (what kind of motivations incite its creation?) and also to whom is it traded and for what -- seems to be overlooked. It seems to me that Silliman wants poetry to be an entirely internal affair, something that the poet makes for herself without regard for others.
The catalogue of the Ulua show may have provided me with a model of an art that was based on exchange value but Amy Scott, the Assistant Archivist at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, has just informed me that the catalogue for the show was never printed or at least that it can't be found. It was indeed a rather small show but I remember at the time being told that no catalogue had been printed but that one was forthcoming. The pieces were not uniformly lovely -- many seemed awkward, as if they were only aping the Mayans.
Isn't all art a trade in stereotypes? Even at the level of the letter it must be based on a uniform code.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
SET THEORY: LUTHERANS, SURREALISTS
Sixty million Lutherans world-wide. Plus all the lapsed Lutherans who maintain the ethos in spite of themselves.
But how many surrealists? In terms of the classical number there were probably never more than 200 within France under Breton's appellation. Then there were "surrealist groups" in another forty countries. So maybe there were a total of 5000 altogether. Of those I don't think any attended any kind of church much less a Lutheran church.
In which case I probably should think of myself as a Lutheran first, and a surrealist second. Can one be both things at the same time? Can one truly mix these emulsives? If so for how long?
Art has to be made by mixing two or more belief systems into an explosive compound if it is to be made at all.
This is why there isn't any art in one-belief cultures. After a while people just start to live in one-belief cultures as if there isn't any need for art. Art is a need of the confused, the jumbled, the half-crazy, the mixed-up.
This is why it largely takes place in coastal areas that are permeable by other belief-systems. It also takes place in large cities where mixture is the rule. Wherever there is zealotry there is no art. Confusion and the laughter that it brings, the sense of nonsense, is crucial, and is the kiss that comes as a curse, or vice versa.
Sixty million Lutherans world-wide. Plus all the lapsed Lutherans who maintain the ethos in spite of themselves.
But how many surrealists? In terms of the classical number there were probably never more than 200 within France under Breton's appellation. Then there were "surrealist groups" in another forty countries. So maybe there were a total of 5000 altogether. Of those I don't think any attended any kind of church much less a Lutheran church.
In which case I probably should think of myself as a Lutheran first, and a surrealist second. Can one be both things at the same time? Can one truly mix these emulsives? If so for how long?
Art has to be made by mixing two or more belief systems into an explosive compound if it is to be made at all.
This is why there isn't any art in one-belief cultures. After a while people just start to live in one-belief cultures as if there isn't any need for art. Art is a need of the confused, the jumbled, the half-crazy, the mixed-up.
This is why it largely takes place in coastal areas that are permeable by other belief-systems. It also takes place in large cities where mixture is the rule. Wherever there is zealotry there is no art. Confusion and the laughter that it brings, the sense of nonsense, is crucial, and is the kiss that comes as a curse, or vice versa.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Saturday, April 16, 2005
AMAZON'S NEW FEATURE
There's a new feature at Amazon.com. Not only can you look inside the book, but now they tell you about statistically improbable phrases and list them, and offer a bizarre kind of concrete poem that they call a concordance which lists the frequency of terms in the books.
I looked up one of Quine's books and the words, "Numbers, sentences, logic, and apple," among others appeared.
In Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex you get the word Woman in huge letters, and man much smaller, and then self, and history.
You can basically read the books prevailing themes through this weird new map they've created. Only a few of their books have been indexed accordingly. My book on Corso has been thus done in this fashion -- the word humor figures prominently as does surrealism, but my other books haven't. It's a neat little feature! Check it out.
There's a new feature at Amazon.com. Not only can you look inside the book, but now they tell you about statistically improbable phrases and list them, and offer a bizarre kind of concrete poem that they call a concordance which lists the frequency of terms in the books.
I looked up one of Quine's books and the words, "Numbers, sentences, logic, and apple," among others appeared.
In Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex you get the word Woman in huge letters, and man much smaller, and then self, and history.
You can basically read the books prevailing themes through this weird new map they've created. Only a few of their books have been indexed accordingly. My book on Corso has been thus done in this fashion -- the word humor figures prominently as does surrealism, but my other books haven't. It's a neat little feature! Check it out.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Woodstock has a common green
In the summer drummers drum on it
& tie-dyed bearded Bohemians congregate
The bookstore is filled with Chomsky
Breadstores sell high-fiber muffins
& boutiques offer Tibetan garments
You can get hand-squeezed juice
& a Tarot card reading with incense
One senses that the outward show of Woodstock
Hides a flimsy psychology
And that an inward disaster is taking place
Cooperstown is 50 minutes in the other direction
Quieter
It offers a baseball museum
A quiet bookstore with good finds (academic titles)
Some sandwich & pizza shops
Inside of Cooperstown the light the Reformers knew is still lit
There's nothing much you can point to
A few churches I've never been in
A few bakeries selling over-refined sugar cookies
A handsome red brick harmony in the buildings with their tall white columns out front
Asked to choose between the unruffled exterior of Cooperstown
And the goofy playfulness of Woodstock I suddenly remember Corso's adage:
When in doubt choose both
Why should every town be built on one model?
Why should every person have the same beliefs?
Why should every poet write in sonnets or in limericks or in blank verse?
It's Spring!
Let every flower bloom
April 16, 2005
Woodstock has a common green
In the summer drummers drum on it
& tie-dyed bearded Bohemians congregate
The bookstore is filled with Chomsky
Breadstores sell high-fiber muffins
& boutiques offer Tibetan garments
You can get hand-squeezed juice
& a Tarot card reading with incense
One senses that the outward show of Woodstock
Hides a flimsy psychology
And that an inward disaster is taking place
Cooperstown is 50 minutes in the other direction
Quieter
It offers a baseball museum
A quiet bookstore with good finds (academic titles)
Some sandwich & pizza shops
Inside of Cooperstown the light the Reformers knew is still lit
There's nothing much you can point to
A few churches I've never been in
A few bakeries selling over-refined sugar cookies
A handsome red brick harmony in the buildings with their tall white columns out front
Asked to choose between the unruffled exterior of Cooperstown
And the goofy playfulness of Woodstock I suddenly remember Corso's adage:
When in doubt choose both
Why should every town be built on one model?
Why should every person have the same beliefs?
Why should every poet write in sonnets or in limericks or in blank verse?
It's Spring!
Let every flower bloom
April 16, 2005
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
MONADS
In a short book called Lyotard and the Inhuman by Stuart Sims which I picked up off the sale table at Harvard Books in Cambridge last weekend I found an unsettling description of monads.
First, I want to preface this by saying that of all the postmodernist theorists that I've studied Lyotard is probably the closest to my thought. Originally I didn't distinguish between he and Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, etc., but slowly I came to appreciate Lyotard's turn toward the idea and ideal of a liberal democracy with Christian underpinnings. Whereas many postmodernists remained quite entranced by Hegel and Marx, Lyotard turned in another direction. Kant, Leibniz, Wittgenstein.
Stuart Sims argues that in the book the Inhuman, Lyotard argues against cyberspace and against cybernetic intrusion into human life. The term "monad" stems from Leibniz. I haven't studied Leibniz carefully. The term seems to mean something like "a little world of its own." And Lyotard takes it apparently as a bad thing. He argues that capitalism comes to be a monad, as does cybernetic simulation of life. A monad thus is "a self-contained entity oblivious to everything except its own interests" (Sims 12).
And this is where I wanted to extend the term to political parties, including the Green party. They tend to magnify any truth that serves their interests in complete disregard for the Truth itself. The urge to spread, like capital, and to destroy anything that stands in the way of that spread. It's endemic to religious denominations, to intellectual dominations (feminism, Marxism, even postmodernism itself). Perhaps one could see family life at its worst (the Mafia clans, or Manson's Family) as having this capitalist structure. But of course just as bad is Marxist "party" affiliation, or belonging to a specific fraternity or sorority, or to a company with a brand name, or to a certain school of poetics.
Every monad begins as a liberation story (i.e., feminism, ethnic studies, the KKK) but ends with a ferocious and belligerent attempt to destroy those aspects of the human race that don't accord with its interests, and to extend those interests becomes the only goal of any such organization.
Sims' book mostly is directed against Donna Haraway's Cyborg revelation. Lyotard is not looking to create a uniformity in the name of a monad but is instead arguing for the protection of difference including gender difference. Unlike many who are trying to find a common denominator and to universalize under its name Lyotard wants to point out irremediable differends, to advance the spirit of antitheticality, and in some funny way his revolution seems to go with the idea of checks and balances -- that the monadic nature of different institutions should be arranged so as to guarantee a maximum of endless strife in the name of limited peace.
In a short book called Lyotard and the Inhuman by Stuart Sims which I picked up off the sale table at Harvard Books in Cambridge last weekend I found an unsettling description of monads.
First, I want to preface this by saying that of all the postmodernist theorists that I've studied Lyotard is probably the closest to my thought. Originally I didn't distinguish between he and Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, etc., but slowly I came to appreciate Lyotard's turn toward the idea and ideal of a liberal democracy with Christian underpinnings. Whereas many postmodernists remained quite entranced by Hegel and Marx, Lyotard turned in another direction. Kant, Leibniz, Wittgenstein.
Stuart Sims argues that in the book the Inhuman, Lyotard argues against cyberspace and against cybernetic intrusion into human life. The term "monad" stems from Leibniz. I haven't studied Leibniz carefully. The term seems to mean something like "a little world of its own." And Lyotard takes it apparently as a bad thing. He argues that capitalism comes to be a monad, as does cybernetic simulation of life. A monad thus is "a self-contained entity oblivious to everything except its own interests" (Sims 12).
And this is where I wanted to extend the term to political parties, including the Green party. They tend to magnify any truth that serves their interests in complete disregard for the Truth itself. The urge to spread, like capital, and to destroy anything that stands in the way of that spread. It's endemic to religious denominations, to intellectual dominations (feminism, Marxism, even postmodernism itself). Perhaps one could see family life at its worst (the Mafia clans, or Manson's Family) as having this capitalist structure. But of course just as bad is Marxist "party" affiliation, or belonging to a specific fraternity or sorority, or to a company with a brand name, or to a certain school of poetics.
Every monad begins as a liberation story (i.e., feminism, ethnic studies, the KKK) but ends with a ferocious and belligerent attempt to destroy those aspects of the human race that don't accord with its interests, and to extend those interests becomes the only goal of any such organization.
Sims' book mostly is directed against Donna Haraway's Cyborg revelation. Lyotard is not looking to create a uniformity in the name of a monad but is instead arguing for the protection of difference including gender difference. Unlike many who are trying to find a common denominator and to universalize under its name Lyotard wants to point out irremediable differends, to advance the spirit of antitheticality, and in some funny way his revolution seems to go with the idea of checks and balances -- that the monadic nature of different institutions should be arranged so as to guarantee a maximum of endless strife in the name of limited peace.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
JULIAN'S ASLEEP
Riikka went to Maija's w/ Tristan
The trees are mostly brown now
Although dots of green remain on Federal Hill #3
Rikka going along the Andes Road will find it beautiful
I'm at home with precious Julian
We played with his green ball
He threw it and smiled
But he seemed lackluster so at 10:15 I began to rock him
He snuggled against my chest and closed his eyes
At 10:20 he was fast asleep so I laid him in his crib
He turned over and slept with one knee under his chest
With golden hair and baby softness he sleeps
I want to read Icelandic Sagas
& the Beauty of the Infinite, by David Bentley Hart
It's quiet -- the clock ticks
Silliman's blog is about how he resents the New Brutalists
Language is being run out by wily new entrepreneurs
Lutheran surrealism remains aloof
Like a vulture waiting for the spoils
October 26, 2004
NB -- [sorry for the lag between composition and post. I never have any idea when I write something if it has any interest at the moment and I usually have to wait to see. At any rate I am totally against any form of spontaneity whatsoever and feel that it should be forbidden.]
Riikka went to Maija's w/ Tristan
The trees are mostly brown now
Although dots of green remain on Federal Hill #3
Rikka going along the Andes Road will find it beautiful
I'm at home with precious Julian
We played with his green ball
He threw it and smiled
But he seemed lackluster so at 10:15 I began to rock him
He snuggled against my chest and closed his eyes
At 10:20 he was fast asleep so I laid him in his crib
He turned over and slept with one knee under his chest
With golden hair and baby softness he sleeps
I want to read Icelandic Sagas
& the Beauty of the Infinite, by David Bentley Hart
It's quiet -- the clock ticks
Silliman's blog is about how he resents the New Brutalists
Language is being run out by wily new entrepreneurs
Lutheran surrealism remains aloof
Like a vulture waiting for the spoils
October 26, 2004
NB -- [sorry for the lag between composition and post. I never have any idea when I write something if it has any interest at the moment and I usually have to wait to see. At any rate I am totally against any form of spontaneity whatsoever and feel that it should be forbidden.]
Thursday, April 07, 2005
FINISHED
My job when I went back to graduate school was to figure out how to write a book to defend Corso and Codrescu. Having done that I feel that a major turnabout in my life has been reached. That is that I have accomplished something I set out to do ever so long ago. To understand and to defend an American surrealist tradition that I saw was being neglected and that only I could properly defend.
Are there other poets in the American idiom as important as Corso and Codrescu and who are writing exclusively from within the surrealist tradition, or at least with a very strong sense of dialoguing with and within that tradition?
Someone might argue Lamantia. But I've always found that there was a lack of structure and aesthetic thought in his poems. There is also the problem of humor. A major component of surrealism at its conception was humor (for Freud dreams and humor functioned in a similar way in terms of releasing the id). Corso and Codrescu are quite endlessly playful and interesting and have much to do with this release of the id via humor.
The new book Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America (McFarland 2005) is the culmination of seven years hard labor. There is an overview of Codrescu's career in poetry, radio, essays, and the historical novel followed by five interviews with Codrescu conducted over a twenty year period, a complete bibliography, a ten page segment by a Romanian writer who discusses Codrescu from that perspective, and of course an index.
The book is $29.95. Because he's pretty well-known you could order it through a local library and they are bound to get it. Codrescu is in Jerusalem this morning walking around and his feet hurt due to the cobblestones. Later on this week he'll be back in his old haunt of Romania. I'm hoping the book will get translated into Romanian!
I just burned the roof of my mouth with some hot sandwich called a vegetable paneer. A bit of melacholy has been thereby caused. I also feel sad that the Codrescu book is done and sitting on my desk. I worked on it so hard and so long. Now I don't know what to do with myself. I have a kind of post-partem feeling. I really should celebrate, but I don't know how to do that. Perhaps I should walk over to the health food store and drink a juiced ice tea and enjoy the noise that all the birds are making this spring day in the Catskills. The juiced tea will cool the roof of my mouth, too.
My job when I went back to graduate school was to figure out how to write a book to defend Corso and Codrescu. Having done that I feel that a major turnabout in my life has been reached. That is that I have accomplished something I set out to do ever so long ago. To understand and to defend an American surrealist tradition that I saw was being neglected and that only I could properly defend.
Are there other poets in the American idiom as important as Corso and Codrescu and who are writing exclusively from within the surrealist tradition, or at least with a very strong sense of dialoguing with and within that tradition?
Someone might argue Lamantia. But I've always found that there was a lack of structure and aesthetic thought in his poems. There is also the problem of humor. A major component of surrealism at its conception was humor (for Freud dreams and humor functioned in a similar way in terms of releasing the id). Corso and Codrescu are quite endlessly playful and interesting and have much to do with this release of the id via humor.
The new book Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America (McFarland 2005) is the culmination of seven years hard labor. There is an overview of Codrescu's career in poetry, radio, essays, and the historical novel followed by five interviews with Codrescu conducted over a twenty year period, a complete bibliography, a ten page segment by a Romanian writer who discusses Codrescu from that perspective, and of course an index.
The book is $29.95. Because he's pretty well-known you could order it through a local library and they are bound to get it. Codrescu is in Jerusalem this morning walking around and his feet hurt due to the cobblestones. Later on this week he'll be back in his old haunt of Romania. I'm hoping the book will get translated into Romanian!
I just burned the roof of my mouth with some hot sandwich called a vegetable paneer. A bit of melacholy has been thereby caused. I also feel sad that the Codrescu book is done and sitting on my desk. I worked on it so hard and so long. Now I don't know what to do with myself. I have a kind of post-partem feeling. I really should celebrate, but I don't know how to do that. Perhaps I should walk over to the health food store and drink a juiced ice tea and enjoy the noise that all the birds are making this spring day in the Catskills. The juiced tea will cool the roof of my mouth, too.
Monday, April 04, 2005
DEATHS
This last week it seems that death has had its share of publicity. First there was the Terri Schiavo case. My office mate was quite interested in it. She talked about poisoning and the cremation, for instance. I never got interested in that case. Then the Pope died. And in between the two my new friend Robert Creeley died. Creeley was an unknown to me as recently as seven years ago. In a correspondence with Anselm Hollo I admitted I didn't know who he was and Hollo flipped. So I got Creeley's books out of a Finnish library and slowly started doing my homework.
At first the only poem I liked was one about a bird on a lawn.
Then it turned out that Codrescu was mad at me for not knowing Creeley's work better. So I read the biography by Tom Clark, and then read through Creeley's criticism. Turns out he liked Gregory Corso. So I sent him my book on Corso and Creeley responded quite positively. This was just two years ago. After that, a whole correspondance with about ten letters back and forth, plus I had published one of his poems and had begun to interview him and a friendship was developing.
It was going pretty strong when he suddenly died. So, this poem --
Creeley's Dead
Robert Creeley's dead
He'd written me over the last 2 years
To thank me for the Corso book
To praise my Soupault translation
To say he liked me
Then he up & died
Before I could get a blurb out of him
March 30, 2005
This last week it seems that death has had its share of publicity. First there was the Terri Schiavo case. My office mate was quite interested in it. She talked about poisoning and the cremation, for instance. I never got interested in that case. Then the Pope died. And in between the two my new friend Robert Creeley died. Creeley was an unknown to me as recently as seven years ago. In a correspondence with Anselm Hollo I admitted I didn't know who he was and Hollo flipped. So I got Creeley's books out of a Finnish library and slowly started doing my homework.
At first the only poem I liked was one about a bird on a lawn.
Then it turned out that Codrescu was mad at me for not knowing Creeley's work better. So I read the biography by Tom Clark, and then read through Creeley's criticism. Turns out he liked Gregory Corso. So I sent him my book on Corso and Creeley responded quite positively. This was just two years ago. After that, a whole correspondance with about ten letters back and forth, plus I had published one of his poems and had begun to interview him and a friendship was developing.
It was going pretty strong when he suddenly died. So, this poem --
Creeley's Dead
Robert Creeley's dead
He'd written me over the last 2 years
To thank me for the Corso book
To praise my Soupault translation
To say he liked me
Then he up & died
Before I could get a blurb out of him
March 30, 2005
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
