jane dark's sugarhigh!

upright

1) regarding Steve Evans' formerly-serialized and soon-to-be-Baffled essay on Poetry Foundation and the apparitions of the fiscal imaginary in contemporary poetry, we note this passage from Ted Kooser's seemingly-unironically-titled The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice For Beginning Poets. Regarding unconventional grammar, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, typographic devices, or "any unusual shape in the way the poem is laid out on the page," the Poet Laureate advises, Don't be afraid to use the following devices, but give them a cost-benefit analysis.

2) If that's is supposed to funny, we'd prefer a somewhat more knowing rube's take on the economics of advice, free melody included! File under "game recognize game."

3) We are particularly bemused by Kooser's concerns about funny-shaped poems; he recommends one squint at a draft so thoroughly that it becomes pure shape, and then measure it as geostructure; is it about to fall over? Or does it stand solid and dependable? This urge to spirit poetry away from the realm of idea, to make it verifiable from the perspective of the craftsman-laborer—to render language as having the same relation to physics as do joists and drywall, columns and roofs—is a powerful one, to be sure. How are poems even to be considered as things if they don't conform to the logic of the most commonly desirable things? And how will we experience ourselves appropriately as virtuous craftsmen and laborers, rather than layabouts and leeches?

4) As one loves the foursquare prairie home, the common thing par excellance, the populist/individualist iteration of the forum and the very ideal of both concrete and abstract stability—one must hate certain kinds of poems as one must hate ruins, for their failure to be things. A ruin is not a negative thing. First it is obviously not a thing.

5) In other notes, have we mentioned the excellence of new hyphy track "18 Dummy," by The Federation? And in general sung the wonders of Rick Rock?

6) If we could actually do anything beyond the abstract realm of the affect worker—if we could actually manufact things—we would make the world a better place, possibly by wildcrafting designer ringtones for our friends. Under current conditions, the economy at the edge of the economy is a place where sweetness pools.

7) Having a big comeback around sugarhigh! world headquarters: "Wichita Lineman," Glen Campbell.

8) The possibility explored in the aforementioned Evans essay is one that is everywhere sullenly disavowed: that turns in poetic style could be explicitly (which is to say, not causally) connected to the styles of political regimes, even if many of the poets involved fancy themselves apolitical or even voted against the incumbent. Moreover, the call from Dana Gioia, Ted Kooser, the doyens of Poetry and the Poetry Foundation, for a return to a well-wrought poetic is not a new cry; surely it resounded in the France of Mallarmé-Dreyfus, the America of Ginsberg-McCarthy. If this moment is haunted, it's not a new ghost. Nor is the naming of the ghost a new fact; here's one appellation, written half-a-centtury ago:

...anything hybrid provokes the strongest rejection. The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it. Hitler's empire put this theorem to the test: The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure the roof rested on columns.

sounds of summer

failed rhyme from last summer: Maos / chaos

proposed rhyme for this summer: economics / monomaniacs

take two aspirin and call Thomas Pynchon

Trying to discover what we'd been up to after three weeks of fairly acute amnesia, we discovered this book: 100 AMERICAN POETS AGAINST THE WAR: A PROTEST ANTHOLOGY, edited, selected, and introducted by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine.

This puzzled us, as we had no recollection of submitting a poem to said project, nor of having heard of said Introductor, and moreover we make a general if unrigorous policy of not being a poet against the war in any official sense. But a little investigation is a fascinating thing. It turns out that the Metropolitan Arts Press publishes three other books in its "Literature" line, each of which is a collection of poems by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine. Continuing on to the only other section of the online catalog, "Art/Architecture Books," one discovers volumes on "New American Architecture" and "New Chicago Architecture," on the writings of Louis Sullivan, and gathering artworks by "the children of Chernobyl."

Needless to say, all these titles are written or edited, selected, and introducted by the estimable and tireless Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine. For those interested in ordering, the email address given is lodged in the UK, though charges for shippping and handling suggest that items will be mailed from North America; meanwhile, the main office is in Athens. We are excited to see our work represented under the aegis of this energetic and relentless personage!

on the train

...between two stations it became known that there was a bird in the car, loose. A bit of hubbub ensued, with everyone talking or half-talking and quarter-exclaiming to the person next to them. Some sounds were bird sounds. A short man with a serious expression who seemed not to speak English well he was the one who caught the bird. He did this as if he did such things every now and then. First he was sitting and then it was in his hands, a pigeon. He sat there holding the pigeon, which grew quiet as the train grew quiet. The man made little expression and mostly looked straight out the window at the tunnel lights as they passed and held the bird with two hands. He held the pigeon with a kind of graceful indifference the pigeon seemed to respect. At the next station when the doors opened he handed it off to an exiting woman without a word; as the new passengers got on, they saw a short man passing a bird to a woman who carried it off the train and onto the platform. We believed she would take it up the escalator and throw it into the town, indeed this seemed exactly as predictable as the whole event would have been difficult to predict.

let's get crunk and be somebody

Recently we've been trying to rhyme "Joe Gross" and "snowglobe," just for the angular decentered feeling; he is, after all, our favorite Fugazi fan, and though we do not care for Fugazi, they are angular and decentered and that's something, plus we love Joe.

We don't find Fugazi terribly moving in the very arena they court movement. At their finest, they achieve the political weight of the fourth best track on any given album by The Coup. Better than nothing, and perhaps as good as one could hope from political musings composed from the position where critique can be freely chosen: the children of Marx and Bretton Woods.

What's most hypnotic about country'n'western, in addition to the melodies and presence of maybe a dozen of the 20 best vocalists in pop music, is its Steadicam point of view. Song after song is told from inside the forces Fugazi rails against from a distance. Even the slightest trifle — say, Toby Keith's latest, "Let's Get Drunk and Be Somebody" — measures out what it means to have a dominated daily life, without that having to be a special topic; it's simply the immanent condition behind every drinking song, and every other song. It's the air. The concision with which "all week long I'm a real nobody" rounds the turn of "Paycheck Friday" and becomes "let's get drunk and be somebody" is as straightforward as one could hope. It doesn't need to be about it, because there's no way not to be about it: the daily life which is at once an experience of and a compensation for the endless extraction of value from bodies.

This is what country shares with mainstream hiphop, which equally succeeds in indifferently alienating liberals for failing to have righteous politics; it's told, unceasingly, from inside what someone called "the tradition of the oppressed." The condition permeates their forms, and their narratives. If a central fact of the condition is that it requires each week to be like last week, the extraction of value perpetuating itself without change, one might suspect that the genre would — indeed, couldn't help but — reflect this quality. And yet people are baffled that the songs provide only the most local variations within an unchanging format, as if that were a shortcoming rather than a description, as if the songs would be more honest art if they expressed the exception rather than the rule.

Barbara Guest (1920-2006)

                    Leaving MODERNITY





               as if the encircled doe






          Medievality and in her hand, also dusted



                                        apparition no less

valentine's day is over

Every day we can agree with Bachelardette is like the day after Valentine's Day (didn't Morrissey say that?) To wit: "how will poets' situations change if the world does not?" Yes, yes. We take this not as plaintive despair but a battle cry.

To radical purists who think poets should stop jockeying for jobs and money and cultural capital that can be converted later into jobs and money: fight for nationalized health care, so poets can afford to get sick while pursuing aesthetic purity! (Alas, at the most empirical level, with decades of data available, it's obvious that voting Democratic helps this not happen. The fight is elsewhere!)

And to anti-elitist populists who think that intractably opaque or "academic" poems have destroyed poetry's market share and that such poetry offers contempt for the struggling citizen without time or energy or educational privilege to engage such art: don't blame poetry! Stand with poetry—fight for a world where life isn't reduced to mere survival!

what it would be

Without haggling over originary dates, it seems to me that rock'n'roll—as a career choice—has been around now for more than fifty years, fewer than sixty. If we assume that the common age of entrance is the usual 18-25, then it is just now becoming meaningful to ask the following question with statistical seriousness: what is the average life expectancy of a rock musician (regardless of whether they died in office)? How does it compare to that of a coal miner, jockey, seamstress?

hidden in plain sight

Our collective sorrow at the decommisoning of Franklin Bruno's blog konvolut m is matched only our delight at such periodic revenances as this. I'm happy to post Franklin's notes on the Michael Haneke film Caché, discussed recently on this site. His entire note below.

—————

Ex-blogger Franklin Bruno here. Jane graciously agreed to host a few additional comments on Cache; these don’t add up to a complete reading, much less an argument, and are not especially meant as responses to Jane's own discussion.

1) One criticism I’ve encountered runs: What, we’re supposed to hold Georges (Auteuil’s character) culpable for his actions as a selfish six-year-old? I think this question is misplaced, at least as a way of dismissing the drama, and especially the political allegory. What the film (and, if Haneke is successful, the viewer) passes judgment on is the “mature” Georges’s incapacity to respond in the present to past events set in motion by his agency – in his name – except with defensiveness, belligerence, and dishonesty. This much is obvious, as is the extension of the charge to Western democracies. A thornier point, perhaps, is that it’s left massively unclear how a more appropriate response would look. But that, as I understand it, is the logic of Haneke’s work. He’s not terribly interested in how his bourgeois characters (or audience) might “put things right”; his brief is to mete out a fated and merited punishment – in this case, a largely psychic one. Asking anything else would be like expecting Sally to reject Harry.

2) Haneke’s not thought of as a witty director, but there’s one bone-dry joke here I haven’t seen mentioned. We think we’re watching a broadcast of Georges’s book-chat show, but when the image breaks up, we see that we’re watching the footage being edited, as Georges fast-forwards over a guest’s discussion of Rimbaud – just as he does with the uneventful surveillance tapes he’s been receiving – while commenting, off-screen, “Too theoretical.” In part, this exemplifies one of Georges's subsidiary crimes – the trivialization of the literary. (Speaking of “howling white space,” think also of the blank-spined mock-books of the show’s set, mirroring the unread – unreadable? – wall of volumes that dominates the central couple’s apartment.) But it’s also a moment of auto-critique: an anticipation of viewers’ potential rejection of the film’s technical-cum-diegetic play. If what one values in an artist is an unwillingness to be outflanked, Haneke is your man.

3) Didactic film-making doesn’t bother me in principle – if it did, how could I have sat through Letter to Jane? – but that’s not to say I accept all of Haneke’s demonstrations. Take the scene above, in which a panicky George and Anne (Binoche) attempting to locate their missing son by phone, while the television, set directly between them, displays violent footage from Iraq and, if I’m remembering correctly, Palestine. I presume this arrangement is meant to exemplify the bourgeoisie’s ability to use their blinkered focus on their private concerns as a means of “tuning out” history. For me, this was one spot where Haneke’s critique felt cheap, in that a concern with one’s immediate family, though not universal, is not at present a characteristic that marks the class in question off from others. This is so even within the film’s own terms -- the combination of filial and social solidarity displayed by its Algerian characters is too tricky to unpack here. More generally, all I mean to suggest is that the problem of partiality – whether directed toward one’s “blood,” or some otherwise constituted set of persons – is more complicated than Haneke allows.

4) In the end, I wish I were more convinced that Haneke’s use of the 1961 FLN protest and subsequent massacre to set his plot in motion deserved to be called “historically situated,” rather than “ripped from the headlines” (in the manner of many Law & Order episodes). Though he means to allegorize collective denial, one can still come away with the sense that everything would have been just dandy for this family had Daddy not done something particularly nasty to a particular Algerian forty-odd years ago. The contrast with Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games , in which another similarly-named bourgeois family are tortured and killed for sport by two amoral youths, is instructive. Notions of motivation and explanation, imperatives of the psychological thriller, are roundly mocked as the tormentors present a variety of incompatible and ultimately irrelevant of both “how they got this way” and why they’ve singled out this couple. The political specificity of Cache is absent in the earlier film, but so is the individualized quality that blunts Haneke’s point: This Georges and Anne have “done nothing,” and that’s enough.

Cheney reverses course

Or perhaps he simply ran out of poor people at whom to shoot.

flarf 2

Despite the various protestations, Dan Hoy's essay must be offering a good deal of satisfaction; if flarf intended in part to provoke, one can only imagine the delight at provoking an 11,000 word essay in Jacket.

poetics metanote: flarf

Jasper* calls for more response to the Hoy essay on Flarf; here at sh!, we have only the briefest:

One must respect his impulse, which is to look for the regulatory forces on supposedly autonomous art in the material sphere. Hoy is, more or less, asking the right kind of question. That said, I'm not clear on the source of the villain that Hoy sets out to slay, which isn't Google but the phantasmic promise of flarf as free and unregulated, autonomously critical art. Did a flarfist ever make such a claim, or has Hoy propped up this straw man merely to run him through?

If, for example, one took as evident that flarf proceeded from the assumption that any cultural production, flarf included, bore the imprint of the daily and dominated world from which it was brought into being, Hoy's essay wouldn't be suddenly false, but immediately irrelevant in the most basic ways. His essay depends, for its very existence, not on the nature of flarf, but partial, imprecise and excessive phrases about flarf themselves wrought of the most conventional poetic meta-language.

That is to say: 11,000+ words to, in effect, review blurbs.

This is a rather old story: a rissentiment about the social whirl of poetry presented as a theoretico-aesthetic analysis. The "news" Hoy presents — material conditions reappear in the cultural product — surely can't be news to any flarfist, even the ones who forgot to go to college and ignored any political analysis of art written after about 1857.

If there's anything new-ish to the action, it's the presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such (thanks to Tom Orange for the conversations regarding this topic). For this, Hoy can't be held entirely responsible; the relative success and insight of recent poetics in making theoretical accounts of itself that are at once persuasive, and relevant to poetics in general, has perhaps produced a certain set of expectations. Certainly there is a rise in general in the sense that poetry is well-accompanied by the author's "poetics," as seen in, for example, the collection edited by Spahr and Rankine (and the follow-up, Sewell and Rankine), or the increasing footage given over to critical writing by the poets in the back of the Norton Anthologies.

This issue — of how responsible poets are, especially those who make some claim on unfamiliarity, for theorizing their own practices — seems worth pondering further. This is true in part for exactly how historicizable an issue it might indeed be; it does seem inseparable from the endless parallel debates about the increasing academicization of poetry and the increasing centrality of the writing workshop.

Last things we'd like to know: what does Craig Dworkin think? What does (sigh) Jackson Mac Low think?

* ps to Jasper: sure, Cixous, but for those of us who can't make it, it's Balibar you want at least as much!

WWMD

Jordan proposes a "new meme"; we're down, way retroactively.

Caché

Not quite sure what to make of Michael Haneke's new film, Caché, seen in a tiny theater, sharing the front row with a party of five or more French persons, who also seemed somewhat nonplussed.

Though it earns its effects, its moments of disturbance, there's also a limit to the strategy of representing national/political struggles through the structure of family relations. The allegory of the fraternal here is far more persuasive than Arnaud Desplechin's awkward Leo, Playing "In the Company of Men," but in the end displays the limits of allegory itself, which implies a decodability that the movie is then compelled to wrestle mightily against.

The film is structured around two things. The first is the word "nothing" (rien), which is repeated incessantly throughout the movie; there's scarcely any question (what's going on, what did you do today, what's wrong, what's the import of that, what caused him to feel that way, etc etc) that can't be answered with this single word. The lite reading (which shows up in several reviews) concerns the failed communication of the aging bourgeois couple, which is somehow either the cause of the final, ambiguous events, or an effect of the presence of the something that can't be said.

But that really won't do, and limns exactly one of the failings of the allegorical structure. On the one hand, domestic fissures can scarcely bee causal; we know this is a story of the return of the repressed, or the collection of unacknowledged debt, and nothing can undo the initial repression or avert its return. On the other, to spend so much attention on the family fallout of the repression is at once cliché and a lowering of the film's national/political stakes, which are not so much screened as supplanted by domestic drama, the Battle of Algiers as retold by The New Yorker's fiction editor.

Indeed, one must largely ignore the marital tension (and that's a lot of ignoring) to find the film particularly powerful, to engage its nothing. Nothing becomes a pit into which all specific meanings are sacrificed only to be reborn as an unsayable something that threatens each character with destruction (regarding this howling white space, one notes that the son Pierrot's school is College lycee Stephane Mallarmé)—a someting that might well be described as history itself (just as one might understand that history itself is making the mysterious videotapes that appear a la Lost Highway; they are shot, to adapt Prof. Louis-Georges Schwartz's formulation, from history's point of view).

Beyond the rien that is not there is the rien that is. The movie depends on the physical aging, beyond the proscenium, of the once-irresistable and irresistably French stars, Daniel Auteuil (actually born in Algiers in 1950) and Juliette Binoche, each of whom here seems thick, slack, sculpted from lardoon. This more than any narrative move or linguistic device gives force to the sense of corrupted entitlement, lost erotism, congealed history. The sense that something has gone horrribly, unsayably wrong with Frenchness itself, with France's capacity to represent itself through romantic pale beauty; and the sense that this collapse must inevitably be captured by history's camera—this tells the story far more powerfully than the banalities of domestic dynamics. The movie might finally have been more effective had it simply montaged chronological clips of the two actors from the 'Seventies through the present, inserting flash shots of bleeding and drowning Algerians during each cut.

kindnesses

Some days, one is happy for any kind word—so we are particularly grateful here at sugarhigh! to be described (it would seem) as "all-or-nothing bloggers." Thanks! Though we wish all best and hope to make common cause with those who, in times of radical crisis, decline radical critique. It's everybody's struggle.

matters of degree

Short version of long post: take your relativism to the moon. Like Martha Stewart, James Frey did it for the money. To let him off the hook because we should be paying attention to worse misdeeds won't fly. Nothing will fly until he admits he did it to get your money, that this is his relation to both truth and art. Truth and art don't get better until we confront that unequivocally. The language of therapy that he and Oprah invoke with equally relentless ease is a perfect description of what such language is for: an alibi for profit. If we're worried that we're going to run out of fury and need to allocate with care, we're not angry enough.

[short addenda for struggling readers: this note isn't in the logical form of premises and conclusions though it's interesting if you need that to engage. To experience e.g. the Frey case as an exception in the realm of language abuse rather than a rule is to play along. We fight out of optimism. ]

on greatness

Having meditated over this issue for quite some time, sugarhigh! remains unable to determine whether Weezer is better than Styx. Does this determination require a world-historical stance toward irony and camp?

serial carnage and the rise of Ron Slate

Steve Evans' five-part (or three, depending on how you measure) analysis of Poetry Magazine's huge bequest and the rise of the Poetry Foundation, to be printed in full in The Baffler, can be found online—in order—here, here, and here. Explicating the social logic that speaks through characters like Dana Gioia and John Barr with such clarity seems exactly what arts journalism could aspire to: historicized art criticism, or material aesthetics.

annular

Though much of the pleasure must take the form of the negative (um, excuse me, did we really make that vague Madonna song the #7 single of the year, Bright Eyes at 34, and manage not to get Ciara's "1, 2 Step" into the top 40? That is some humiliating activity), it's a real pleasure for me to be reminded that reading through the votes, comments, and mini-essays in the annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll makes one of my favorite days of the year, every single year of my adult life. It's like reading the yearbook of the school you never quite went to, from whence you never quite graduated.