jane dark's sugarhigh!

Tempo

Two days before the start of spring in 1951, little more than a month before his death, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook, between the passages later numbered 387 and 388 in the volume On Certainty,

[I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what target I had been ceaselessly aiming at.]

What would it mean if a poet said such a thing?

A l'armes

...and if I find a theory beautiful, am I mistaken?

And if I cry on the IRT while reading Benjamin, are these false tears?

D'eau main

Please note: though I believe this URL will continue to work, as of tomorrow you'll be able to locate jane dark's sugarhigh! at the following address:

www.janedark.com

and the button to the right should route mail (which can also be hand-addressed) to janedark at janedark dot com

Other changes may be in the works, depending on my ambition and schedule. According to the blogs of demi-strangers, I am one of the two "most ambitious poets" and perhaps the "most respected (and most feared) polemicist" in some small corner of blogville; in both cases my opposite number turns out to be Ange Mlinko, and I find this awesome, as I love her. Now you know where to find me times two!

Graphs, Maps, Trees

While I see meaningful use in Kellogg's Cross, particularly when considered as an intertext with Steve Evans' essay on position-taking in the world of poetry; and while I certainly think that one of the functions of Ron Silliman's dichotomy is exactly to ask readers to engage the specificity it lacks—I wonder, since we're adding axes, if there might be another to consider in Kellogg's world, one that would make it three-dimensional. The axis I am imagining is something like FORCE or PROSELYTICS.

For example, in the cross as currrently constituted, we get a "tradition/innovation" axis: per Kellogg, Poetry that, for example, emphasizes its continuity with the past (such as the New Formalist work of poets like Dana Gioia) represents a position close to the “tradition” value-identification. In contrast, avant-garde writing represents a position near the “innovation” value-identification.

Strikingly, though Gioia and Silliman e.g. find themselves at antipodes in this scheme, they have a deep commonality: their shared interest in impressing their own sense of value on the field via their writings, talks, position-takings, jobs, blogs, blurbs, etc. Discursively, they are both proselytizers; Silliman and Gioia would find themselves sitting on the same branch, staring down its full distance to Andrew Joron and Karen Volkman in the great distance.

As for valuing this distinction, one sees both positions rather directly: one might argue that to avoid any aggressive position-taking is by definition a kind of quietude, perhaps even a self-interested straetgy of leaving all bridges unburnt. Or one might argue that positive eclecticism* is the stance of decency, openness, engagement. This debate is of no matter to the current essay, except to note that if one argues either side, one is heading toward Ron and Dana's treehouse.

* I very frequently ask people what kind of music they like. The people who answer that they "like everything" or have "eclectic taste" are uniformly white, cosmopolitan, come from households with above median income, and are college-educated. Everytime someone says this to me, I inquire, "So, like, Garth Brooks? Britney Spears?" And yet, despite their eclecticism, they never, ever turn out to listen to these acts or their ilk. A mystery.

While History Was Sleeping

Here's the beginning of Michiko Kakutani's review of Mao, the Unknown Story:

It has become fashionable to look at Hitler and Stalin as the twin monsters of 20th-century history. Entire volumes (like Alan Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" and Richard Overy's "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia") have examined these two tyrants through the lens of the compare-and-contrast school of history writing, and much ink has been spilled debating which of them was worse - never mind that such debates seem beside the point, indeed offensive, given the fact that both men were responsible for the deaths of millions upon millions of people.

In their new book, "Mao: The Unknown Story," Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make an impassioned case for Mao as the most monstrous tyrant ever. They argue that he was responsible for "well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th-century leader," and they argue that "he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin" in that he envisioned a brain-dead, "completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders."

I will do my best to resist a discussion of what's implicit at the end, wherein Mao's demon apotheosis is secured because, you know, at least Hitler liked art, a distinction as hilarious as it is absurdly inaccurate.

No, it's the beginning of the review that is more amusing in its banality, with its inverted Hammacher-Schlemmer view of evil: Worst. Tyrant. Ever. Order now!

It's the beginning I like better, with its historical lacuna leading shortly to a chasm. For it hasn't always been said in these parts that Hitler and Stalin were the big two; once upon a time, Hitler stood alone atop the pigpile of tyrants: the unopposed, the definition of evil, the popularizer of genocide. This was not so long ago; you or your parents were alive.

And then, at around the time of Michiko Kakutani's birth, it was found that Communism was just as bad as Fascism, that we could annex them both under the term "totalitarianism," and then it turned out that even compared to Hitler (against whom, for a brief while, it had been forbidden to compare anyone), Stalin was pretty bad too...maybe as bad...maybe worse!

Now the two of them have been eclipsed, it seems, as Worst Tyrant Ever. And this shift takes on the seeming of historical knowledge: as the review insists, the authors "drew upon newly available material from secret Chinese and Soviet archives for this volume, and they interviewed hundreds of people, including intimates, colleagues and victims of Mao. That does indeed sound just like what historians do, sort of.

Listen: I'm not here to rank the three Worst Tyrants Ever (all born within 15 years of each other, as it happens; that surely must count as an odd fact in world history). I mean only to ask Michiko Kakutani to do the most basic work of a book reviewer and to point out, as she briefly summarizes the "history" of Worst Tyrants Ever, that these rankings are not universally agreed-upon but projected from the United States; and that, moreover, by some incredibly odd historical hazard, each of the troika has ascended to the throne of Worst Tyrant Ever not at the time of their vilest deeds, nor of their most audacious and visible crimes, but at the exact moment that, whether or not they remain alive, the nation they led has lodged itself as the greatest threat to the United States' international supremacy.

Without debating the merits of dictators, what exactly do we gain by the absence of this fact? Why is this the knowledge that needs to be surpressed? Because history itself haunts modern society like a spectre, someone wrote, pseudo-histories are constructed at every level of consumption of life in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of present frozen time...

County Countdown

10) The Dixie Chicks, 1998-1999. For this lightning span, the Dixie Chicks didn't feel so much like the leading act of their era but the greatest country act of all time, both albums top-to-bottom like the Beatles or Nirvana, not even from the same universe as what surrounded them. What's surprising is how consistently they stayed on message: set again Neo-Trad arrangements, narratives recounting over and over the escape from heartland traditional female domesticity, with its increasingly violent depradations. In that regard, "Wide Open Spaces," "Ready To Run," and the infamous "Goodbye Earl" are the exact same song, set at different moments (pre-wedding, during wedding, and after-wedding). Their lone great original from after this period, "Long Time Gone," completes the cycle; ending with a late-life scene of recovered rural domestic bliss, what's generally passed over about the song is that—given there's no clear indication against assuming the narrator is the same gender as the vocalist, a norm we generally take as given—the recovered domesticity isn't heterosexual. The other surprising thing is how suddenly the period of aesthetic surplus ended, and utterly: done in by creative exhaustion (perhaps) and brutal, organized conservative backlash (certainly), the Dixe Chicks released almost 20 great songs in 19 months and almost none before or after.

9) At least once every Sunday on the American Country Countdown, the host says, with the air of an optimistic, slightly glottal shaman, "music is people coming together." Every week, I think to myself, so's lynching.

8) "As Good As I Once Was," Toby Keith. When Shania perfects her skill at sounding conversational in songs, we suspect it's because she can't sing. When Toby does the same, we suspect it's because he likes talking. It just so happens they're the two towering figures of the post-Garth era, or so I sometimes suppose. Either way, that little melodic thing he does at the "I used to be hell on wheels" middle eight—as if, per the story, it's all he can do to gather his aching sack of bones and take it to the bridge one more time—makes me shake.

7) Sara Evans, 2000-2005. She's been kicking around since '96, but she came into her own (own what? I've always wondered. Well, own fame, own million bucks, whatever) by operating the Culture Machine with brutal simplicity. At exactly the moment no one could have known was the start of the Chick's vanishing, Evans, despite her less gifted vocal manner, released a single so shamelessly Chicks manqué it was practically bold—"Born To Fly"—replicating everything from the melody and harmony arrangements to the theme. Upon successful döppelganging of the Chick's signifiers, she commenced to driving the social stance steadily rightward: keeping the hooks, losing everything that might bother the core audience or frighten the horses. This is a singer, remember, who gives interviews about how she doesn't care to tour because her favorite thing is cooking her hubbie dinner; recall as well that one of her songs begins "When I look at you I see the souls of our unborn children." In short, Evans is George W. Bush's Dixie Chicks—dating the two acts historically is terrifying in its precision. Nonetheless and as always, this doesn't make the music better or worse. She ain't as good as they once was, but for all that's depressingly exemplary and conceptually pathetic about her trajectory and general deal, she's been one of the most reliable Nashpoppers of the Bush era, and you can't take that away from her.

6) "Summer Girl," Jessica Andrews. She got screwed on the release date: end of June, meaning it would be at least September by the time it could gather any momentum, guaranteeing it wouldn't. Drop this in April and it could have been the feelgood s—...aw, you know. I love it anyway, and would if all it had to offer was the first four phrases: "I drive an army jeep, my bumper sticker reads Drink Til He's Cute, that's what I'm gonna do." What the song never wastes its time saying: Hey, other country song about bumper stickers and the army, fuck y'all.

5) "Good Ride Cowboy," Garth Brooks. Garth's elegy for rodeo'n'western star Chris Le Doux may not be as charming as their old duet "Whatcha Gonna Do With A Cowboy?" (not much is) but it is Garth's best song in the rowdy style of the post-Garth era (during which he's made a surprising number of lovely ballads: "You Move Me" and "Belleau Wood" foremost among'em). As an odd historical footnote, it shares with the new Princess Superstar disc a repeated misuse of Nike's slogan—for her a sardonic critique, for him a raucous hilarity, though the loveliest part of this song is how the titular compliment stores its rodeo admiration not in the praise (you gotta say "good ride" to everybody, after all) but in the honorific. Not everyone gets to be a cowboy. Le Doux, by the way, is well worth stopping at the next big truck stop you pass; you can find his tapes right by the register.

4) "XXL," Keith Anderson. An entirely shameless song about being fat; a perfectly by-the-numbers boogie with more gusto in the vocal than anything you'll likely hear this year.

3) "California Girls," Gretchen Wilson. On an album which mainly serves to clarify, for those easily confused by the nature of journalistic first-response teams and their necessary fantasies, that Gretchen Wilson is pretty much like every other three-quarters good countrybilly chick, this is the track that jumps off the disc (along with the Haggard duet). It's short, fast, and seems to imagine that Paris Hilton is from the West Coast. Is this true? I think of her as being New York, but—. Can international jetset stars for whom every third hotel is home, and ubiquity their only salient quality, be said to be from anywhere? Doesn't Paris Hilton make "California" seem like an irrelevant category, an outmoded mechanism for producing a certain kind of seductive vacuity which is now grown in tanks in the back room of the general concept "fame"? Isn't Gretchen's appeal not that she's from wherever the fuck she's from, but that she still believes in regionalism at all? That's hot. Anyway, Gretchen Wilson doesn't like Paris Hilton and has a backhanded compliment for Dolly Parton, which is to say that she has bad taste, except, occasionally, in songs.

2) Kenny Chesney is the worst thing ever. Worst. Thing. Ever.

1) "Redneck Yacht Club," Craig Morgan. Before playing this on Sunday (#2 on ACC), the host played an audio collage of various songs deploying the word "redneck." Strangely, he overlooked Sammmy Kershaw's "Queen of my Double-Wide Trailer," which may be the best of them, not the least because the eponymous love object describes her new beau as "the Charlie Daniels of the torque wrench." Never fear; our hero gets her back, "dang her black heart and her pretty red neck." If Kershaw has any competition, it's this new song, an entry into the microgenre wherein good ol' boys act out their own vivid version of superclassy institutions (I think of Travis Tritt's "Country Club" as the touchstone, though "Friends In Low Places" looms large). The care and surprise with which this song is written are sort of shocking (Ben likes the elegance with odd brand names and details, the way he fits in "15 SPF"; I like the fact that the third line of each verse is designed to have two syllables, each stressed; there's plenty more to love); a good year for drinking songs.

Good News for Brian Warner, Grand Theft Auto et al

The House of Representatives delivered the gun lobby a cherished victory today, overwhelmingly approving a bill to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits by crime victims.

One trusts that this will similarly protect Satan-worshipping rock stars and unrated videogame designers when they're sued for cause regarding suicide pacts, high school shooting sprees, etc etc—and that their lawyers will be equally ready with the nut quote, simply substituting their product's name appropriately, as in:

"Lawsuits seeking to hold the [entertainment] industry responsible for the criminal and unlawful use of its products are brazen attempts to accomplish through litigation what has not been achieved by legislation and the democratic process."

Paper Term

In the midst of heated and compelling debates, in the middle of our life's journey, it's sometimes worth stepping back to clarify terms; I am reminded of this not just via the thoughtful posts by Bachelardette, Franklin et al, but by my Monday night reading group, which is sick with extraordinarily insightful, patient people of varying interests and analyses. My Tuesdays are always about admiring them.

The term I hope to get closer to today is "false consciousness," since it seems to have been used recently in a way that suggests I have it all wrong. Perhaps I can call upon the intranet participating in this recent debate to act here as a distributed reading group, and help clarify.

My understanding is as such: false consciousness is a specific term from the Marxist tradition (though apparently not found in Marx) with two related but distinct uses. Both of them concern the consciousness of a social class. Now it is of course true that one may choose to refute the entire conception of "classes." If so, this wouldn't alter the idea of "false consciousness"; it would simply make it irrelevant. So this note is only relevant to those who use the term; the clarification I seek regarding the term is for those who would like to, you know, do thinking in relation to it.

The first usage as I understand it, associated with Engels, describes the situation when one social class identifies with the interests of another. For example, when people who can't afford private health care vote for tax cuts that will affect their medical coverage, this would an example of this variety of false consciousness.

The second usage is associated more closely with Lukacs (and is perhaps more interesting to literary types because of the relationship it bears to his "Theory of the Novel" and general account of how different literary forms rise to primacy in different historical moments). This use is a specific description of the bourgeoisie's apostrophizing of the singular self, the autonomy of the individual, etc (hence the term "bourgeois individualism"). The argument is that this particular consciousness must suppress at all costs the idea of a social totality, because to confront it would mean recognizing themselves/ourselves not as a bunch of atomized individuals but as a class (and the problems asscoiated thereto). A crude example of this version of false consciousness would be, say, insisting it's your individual choice to drive an SUV, that such a choice is about "freedom." But a general panic around the dangers of "totality" would also be an example.

So in my understanding, the engagement with the idea of a social totality—without being necessarily good or bad, right or wrong—would be the opposite of false consciousness, as the term has developed historically. Do I have this wrong? Thanks for thinking this through with me, you...

[p.s.: the Village Voice's Jessica Winter deploys version one in the current isssue. Oh happenstancy world!]

I said it before I came in the door:

...a semi-hysterical use of the terminological bludgeon “totalitarianism.” This analytically shapeless and elastic term was willfully confused in their analysis with the theoretical category of “totality,” a concept with a rich philosophical past. For Lukacs, for example, “totality” meant simply that there is a framework of contemporary reality provided by the commodity economy that cannot be relativized, even if it isn’t always experienced in exactly the same way by every individual group or individual at all times. Sartre used the philosophical term of “totality” to refer to the way in which “perceptions, instruments and raw materials were linked up and set in relation to each other by the unifying perspective of a project.” By conflating “totality” with “totalitarianism,” the New Philosophers were able to assert than any “totalizing” or systemic analysis, or even any vaguely Utopian thought, carries within it congenitally the seeds of the Gulag. And since any tentative social change produces the Gulag, there is nothing better that can possibly be imagined than the way we are right now.
—May ’68 and its Afterlives, Kristin Ross (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002) 170

Theory Kampf

Hokey smokes! The New York Times online edition today has a piece on W. S. Merwin; discussion of Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery; a review concluding with a paean to fiction and poetry as the greater makers; and a careful consideration of a book based on a baker's dozen of double sestinas. You might conclude they were mad about poetry over there.

Except...no poetry. We get, in order: a memoir; Helen Vendler's latest critical opus; a Walter Kirn novel; and Alice Mattison's sestina-based family romance in which "she has made the scaffolding invisible," meaning it's prose. This is the paper's vaudeville; as ever, poets and the idea of poetry have a pretty decent chance of making it to the Sunday Times' Carnegie Hall, and long as no actual poetry is performed onstage. As long as the book in question is the letters, the journals, the year in Tuscany, the cookbook by or biography of—poetry is a hot ticket.

It would be callow to blame the Times for this. It is, after all, an expresssion of a general cultural paradox; by that light, today's Times is simply a sustained anatomizing of the set of understandings by which "Poetry" has become a category revered only in proportion to its absence. Give people a novel, a film, a memoir that's "lyrical" or "poetic" and the critics will swoon and the blurbs will fly. It means these things are light and lovely. Poems themselves, however, are too heavy to bear.

What I'm interested in today is what seems to ride shotgun with this drama in the Paper of Record. Here's the aforementioned paean in the penultimate sentence of the Kirn review: "Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea," John Updike once observed.

This is a curious position in relation to the very trend in question; why, one might ask, does the paper printing this claim (and celebrating Updike in its Editor's Note) celebrate Vendler's shore-hugging rather than look at a book of poetry? Let's go to that review, by Yale English Dept chair Langdon Hammer: Criticism today is impenetrable and irrelevant, since it is jargon-ridden and no longer interested in literature. Or so people have said. If you hope this second sentence is the beginning of a caveat rather than a simple dodge, you'll be disappointed when no take-backsies follow.

Criticism, at least of a certain kind—the impenetrable jardon-ridden kind, the kind sometimes called "theory"—here takes the role of the exalted/reviled. It appears always in a nimbus of anxiety requiring it be mentioned at the same time it's excluded. That is to say, it takes a structurally identical role to that of poetry. Which leads us gently away from the Gray Lady and toward blogland, where we endeavor to make sense of recent discussions in which poetry and theory are seen as anything but congruent...

Josh linked to an interview with Jules and both cited a Rod Smith poem (which I'll recite here) which perhaps inspired an entry or two by 'Dette though she'd been mulling closely-related issues earlier that cycle. Here's the Smith passage:

Let us pause a moment
to consider the relation
of theory to poetry.

This is what is known as
a dichotomy.

For Josh and Jules this has great appeal, and I can't say I blame them. It's not just the clarity of the argument (and it is an argument, though not one that favors either of its terms—a fact which complicates recent salvos regarding the status of argument in poetry), but how the language works: it's direct, even prosaic (despite line breaks and strong tendency toward six-syllable lines), and we recognize—I think—this tone, this cards-on-the-table discursivity, as one of the developments of emergent poetry over the last couple generations. Moreover, we don't just find it familiar, but often understand it as the product of the very dialectical pressure it describes: a poetic sound that comes from informedness and vivacity pushing againt each other since ths Seventies. So it's eloquent and eloquent at multiple levels, multivalent without elliptical ambiguity: dialectics in a teacup.

The problem is, I just don't believe it. I don't accept its propositional binary, or binaries; I don't really know anything that tells me that theory/poetry is a real oppositional pair, nor informedness/lifeness. Even those who have more polarized preferences seem to accept the pairs, the suppositions: 'Dette's stance, for example, seems more mistrustful of theory, but she accepts the binary and even clarifies it into the form "life/theory."

I admit I have trouble understanding this, since I don't feel competent to tell people when they are or aren't writing about their lives—aren't we always—or when they're acting out of theory or just livin'. If someone writes the sentence "I like Cixous," is that less about their life than "I like my cousin"? If they write "While reading Cixous, I thought about...," is that less lifelike than "After going to the movies with my cousin, I thought about..."?

Meanwhile, the line-worker who votes for the union because she thinks it means better wages, and the one who votes union after reading Gramsci; is one keeping more sets of the books than the other? What if you vote union after hearing that Billy Bragg song: life, or theory?

What if I acquire theoretical knowledge from reading a poem? Is it a lesser poem, not a poem at all? Well, you might respond, define theoretical knowledge. Which is totally fair, excepting only that it's not possible, since we now have to return to the same set of questions: is the belief in unions theoretical knowledge if I got it from Gramsci but not from, I dunno, just thinking, or from my union rep, or Billy Bragg? Is the idea "negative capability" a theory, or not? Is poetry that has it theoretical, or not?

The burden of these definitions isn't really on theorists or poets, but it does fall heavily on anyone who insists that the two can be separated, that there could be, in the lovely terms on offer, "two sets of books." By the way, is this metaphor, which points up how the distinction between theory and life shares the economic distinction between public and private, itself a theory, or not?

CODA

This longish entry has been a bit of a cheat. The criticism Langdon Hammer means, which is also the "theory" of which various blogging poets (and others) speak, isn't anything in general; it's a fairly specific constellation, with a history and an ideology and so on. I'm not sure I'm the one responsible for the generalizing move, where unspecified rejection of largely post-structuralist, sometimes-French, sporadically-Marxist, allegedly-relativist theory becomes an explicit rejection of "theory" in general, never for what it sez, always for the heavy way it sez it. The generalizing move gets made all the time, all over the place, out of laziness, incapacity to render fine distinctions, and because anti-intellectualism is fun. Two concluding notes:

One: the contemporary exclusions of theory and poetry are coterminus and identical acts of anti-intellectual aggression designed to force practioners into the realm of agreeable accessibility; poetry's rejection of "theory" is a balloonist hacking off and jettisoning his own legs in hopes that the reduction in weight will allow him to float back up into the empyrean of dominant culture.

Two: rejection of theory (and the separation of theory from "everyday life" is the main form of this rejection) is, if it has any substance at all, a rejection of specific social and political projects and practices, and should admit to that, rather than pretending to be a simple mistrust of an abstractable kind of thinking.

An Article, An Oddity

This is worth looking at, though it starts with a framing oddity: author Fred Kaplan's pre-conclusion that the problem with Schelling's reasoning as it contributed to escalation of violence in Vietnam is "the brash assumption that neat theories not only reflect the real world but can change it as well, and in ways that can be precisely measured." Perhaps this assumption is indeed always mistaken, though numerous aeronautic engineers, say, would disagree.

Regardless, the first lesson I would be inclined to draw here, from an analytic perspective, is not a general lesson about application of theories, but a specific lesson, to wit: perhaps Schelling's theory sucked, and moreover, perhaps it wasn't inspected carefully before use because it suited the ideological desires of its employers. This is implied in the article, certainly; even argued, perhaps. Contrarily, the initial and regulatory admonition is never justified; it just sits there pretending to be common sense, hoping no one asks it any questions.

More of What You're Funkin' For

Ten MCs (or MC teams) that are patently better than Biggie or Tupac, and ten more that are at least as good, off my dome in 31 seconds:

Rakim, Chuck D, Jay-Z, Missy, Eminem, OutKast, Shock G, Nelly, Ice Cube, Beastie Boys, Too Short, RUN-DMC, Da Brat, Melle Mel, Warren G, The Jaz, Salt & Pepa, Snoop, E-40, Scarface, and Eazy-E to grow on.

Eternal Return to Sender

Booker Prize Goes to Story of Emotional Odyssey, runs the headline in the POR.

Why write the sentence? Is this a surprise, or even a fact, in the sense of something not already given? Doesn't almost every famous literary prize go to an "emotional odyssey" almost ever time? Isn't "emotional odyssey" a kind of shorthand for "the artistic value that we hold in the highest esteem without it rising so high as to become 'elitism'"? Or is it even shorthand? Perhaps it's just all there is to it.

I took my emotion and traveled from island to island, having more and more emotions, and sometimes showing these everpresent and evolving emotions to the people on the islands while I was, you know, trying to get home, where my emotions turned out to want me to go. The world contributed to and witnessed my emotions, for that is the purpose of the world, island after island. In the sea, I was alone with my emotions. and expressing this well turned out to be what great art was. Oh self!, cork in the ocean, you are truly about yourself! And your journey, island to island, heading home, the sea winedark with emotion that has leached from you, oh winedark cork, oh self....

Actually,

...does anybody think that either Tupac or Biggie is really among the twenty greatest MCs?

ARS-One

About this, Ambivalence Reigns Supreme. The regulatory passage runs

When exactly do we know when a poem becomes a "thought," a book of poems an argument?....If there's a solution to this quandary, it lies in treating poetry other than as a vehicle for argument.... [emphasis Bachelardette's]

As a sentiment, this is easy to cheer; poetry should be free as Ronnnie Van Zandt, and unvexed aesthetic autonomy should fill the room like nitrous oxide fills the back of the van, man. As an idea about poetics, however, this wants to do a lot of work it's hard-pressed to do. First of all, a poem becomes a "thought" as soon as it has a word in it; that doesn't seem like much of a philosophical problem. But as for the thornier issue of when a book of poems becomes an argument: who're you asking? Or, more relevantly, who gets to answer?

If the idea is that poets seem, over and over, to gain little and lose much by consciously and conscientiously staging arguments in their books (the political polemic being a leading culprit), then the 'dette, me, and Marjorie Perloff are on the same page and it is perhaps the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. But I'm not sure any poet gets to regulate whether their book gets read argumentatively, because argument is not in fact necessarily a product of intention; the reader gets to read for argument if she likes, or if not, not.

If poetry expresses the poet's linguistic consciousness within its particular social circumstance and historical moment (and I continue to dare you to show me some poetry that doesn't), then the material understood to be present there, whatever the desires of the poet, is the very material in its raw form from which argument can be formed. Moreover, as a poet, I'd much rather have a reader willing to engage poems at that level and intensity, as parts of our world, than passively following the product instructions to frolic in a separate realm of aesthetics. And as a reader, I'd far prefer to live in a world where Kristen Ross reads Rimbaud as a set of claims on how we live, where Kristeva reads Mallarmé for argument and even for political argument, shock! — insightfully, dialectically — no matter how high he runs the l'art pour l'art flag up over the shipwreck.

Kristeva and Mallarmé can both be right, or rather, both position-takings can add to my pleasure as a writer/reader, can enlarge the realm of imaginable desires. I gainsay neither.

What's Good (tarrying with the negative)

Instead of taking cheap shots at Kanye West (and implicitly at Kanye West fans, since what's really annoying isn't his total lack of conviction but the fact that said lukewarm temperature is exactly what makes him a convenient love object for lovers of big beats who wish to be free of almost everything that makes hip-hop a problematic category), can I take a cheap shot at Thomas Bartlett?

I do not know this personage but he writes a column for Salon in which are posted links to songs and videos. So far so good, and as for those who complain that the column's tastes are slanted absurdly toward a post-indie quasi-obscurantist mildly-quirkcore lilywhite taste, well, it is after all a Salon music column: what did you expect, and let me know when Tikkun climbs on the M.O.P. bandwagon. Moreover, I am grateful for every Salon music piece that isn't about Bob Dylan (speaking of which: oh come off it. Eveyone hates Boomers. The thing is, they weren't the conspiratorial force driving Bob Dylan '63, and to confuse Dylan-worship with the aesthetic object of, say, "Masters of War" is drivel. I'm all for blaming Boomers, and what they should be blamed for is clinging to the particular story of "enduring genius" when what they mean is "enduring demographic omnipotence"; or, even more absurd, dreaming the tale of "genius recovered"; one can see why this would be a salutary delusion for a nation of sixty-year olds nervously watching their own world-historical relevance fade in the rear-view, leaving nothing but masturbatory fantasies starring a cherry Mustang and Norah Jones. No, really, after being lost since "the Sixties," you can just get it back and show those whippersnappers how it's done! Dylan's ubiquity, the hysterical celebration of a particular narrative — these things should not be tolerated, we should admit that the last, um, thirty albums are really not up to the snuff that ran out in, I dunno, '67 or '75, we should enjoy the couple good songs since then just like we enjoy the handful of good Elvis songs after Punch the Clock, the couple good Elliott songs after Figure 8. But none of that can really make "Visions of Johanna"" suck, right?)

No, the problem with the column is not its taste. It is that this gentleman (I assume) writes little sentences along with each recommendation and they are the most offensively wooden, hobbled sentences I have encountered in the uneven field of music writing. Here is but a little example: "The video for the title song off of Gretchen Wilson's new album, "All Jacked Up" revels in many things, chief among them the subtle glories of abusing as much alcohol as possible." This isn't inaccurate (who would care?); it's just unpleasant to read. If given just 31 words to mention Gretchen Wilson, surely almost any 31 words are better than this. First off, might we cut it down to 30 by changing "off of" to "off" or "of" or "from," any of which would mean the exact same thing, be less awkward, and free up a word later. But why wouldn't one just write, say, "All Jacked Up," the title-track video for Gretchen Wilson's second release.... I'm not saying this is Proust; it just says the same thing, actually more, with 20% fewer words, saving an ungainly preposition along the way.

So what? Yeah, so what. If it doesn't annoy you to read prose like that, you're just easygoing. Or not a reader. Or expecting to live forever. But I haven't even gotten to my real concern here: the concluding phrase "the subtle glories of abusing as much alcohol as possible." He can't mean it literally; is that...an attempt at irony? Is the entire purpose of the adjective "subtle" just to point up that what's being described is not, in fact, subtle? Doesn't one move past that level of compositional, er, subtlety around sophomore year? But even if you decided that this was to be your move, to bring some flavor to your prose — to be in fact the only thing in the entire passage which is not dully and unpleasantly quasi-informational — even if you decide to go with that, why would you then render it even more inept by saying "abusing"? That word sets the moral tone for the sentence; it serves to make sure that nobody misunderstands that elegant irony-move you just made three words back. Isn't "subtle" — and one-shot irony in general — only interesting, if at all, because the literal meaning that's being implicitly reversed is at least a possibility? Doesn't irony produce whatever slim affective frisson in the reader by posing the literal and contextual meanings of the phrase against each other in a kind of balance which shifts over the course of the passage?

This would annoy me less if I didn't know three dozen talented, interesting, competent and underemployed music writers right now, any one of whom could fake Thomas Bartlett's taste without insulting the reader, the vocation, and the very concept of prose itself.

The Dozens: 12 Things I Think Today

1) Sour candy is the most successful cuisine hoax in the history of the world.

2) That Fallout Boy single is perfectly good, and then some.

3) Fiona Apple should stop embracing her inner Kurt Weill; Calvin Klein kiddieporn pop was, alas, v v better.

4) PS: Kurt Weill, one of the most destructive forces on pop songwriting?

5) Have I mentioned the Freelance Hellraiser remix of "English Summer Rain"?

6) Have I mentioned how distraught I am about "Galang" as soundtrack for a Honda commercial?

7) Fiona's "Shadowboxer" vs. Andy Gibb's "Shadow Dancin'": a fair fight.

8) Animal crackers vs. Animal Collective: not.

9) That one sentence of Kanye West is remarkable not just for its irreducible truth, but because it has exactly what's lacking in every second of his two records: conviction. I mean, of any kind: even Snoop has the passionate conviction that, say, smoking herb is really great, or that it's superb to stay casual.

10) Natasha Bedingfield: climbing my album-of-the-year list.

11) Can someone explain to me the valence of the phrase "all you maggot-smoking fags on Santa Monica Boulevard" in that System of a Down song "Lost In Hollywood"?

12) Does anyone else think that the two running blogs in the Village Voice music section are, whatever their particular merits, basically an economizing scam for management?

Just wondering,

Etc.