jane dark's sugarhigh!

welcome message

Hello. It is possible you have arrived here from the corp-blog of Sasha Frere-Jones, who has very kindly linked to this venue. If so, we should mention at least three things.

Regular readers can go back to tapping fingers, waiting for Michael Clayton review or thoughts on new Nickelback single. "I'll have the quesadilla. "

1) Sasha is a real inspiration; his own non-corporate site is the blog I've had bookmarked longer than any other, because he is a smooth operator and clever and insightful and cares, and is at least sometimes not a punch-puller, which puts him ahead of really most people who make a living from writing about culture for the publics.

2) We're not sure we fit much of that description ourselves, except for "cares." We are not sure what we do here. We think all the time about movies and poetry and pop music, because we like to; and all the time about politics and history, because there's no thinking that could happen outside those paul walls anyway.

3) Maroon 5 do not actually sound "a bit like Hall and Oates with a heavy Stevie Wonder fixation" nor are they "sneakily good at what they do." That might be a more plausible series of thoughts if it described Jamiroquai, except that the Jamiroquais are looking far (far, far!) up at Hall'n'Oates, and at their best were maybe "surprisingly half-decent." Maroon 5, conversely, is a sneakily awful Jamiroquai tribute band.

notes from all over-esque

§ An unlikely-but-welcome source for Kelis remix mp3s: Franklin Bruno. In case you hadn't heard, Mr. Bruno has of late switched blogs from semiprivate Imagined Slights to semipublic nervous unto thirst, in what seems to be a sort of experiment in the fate of the diaristic and the materiality of the fantasy audience.

§ I challenge you: Michiko Kakutani's review of the new Thomas Pynchon novel seems calculated to clarify the enduring fog of her dislikes into an incisive moment, a hat in the ring of Best Insult Review Ever. The opening graf:

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

Study questions: When did Michiko ever argue in favor of the "rewardingly complex"? Also, who here thinks Michiko really ever took a Quaalude? (Maybe back when it was Mandrax; anyway, tell your copy editor that brand names take a capital letter near the start.) The review itself, naturally, reads like a the sort of imitation of a Dale Peck review that a dogged but ungainly fan of that hatchet man's might...well, you get the idea. We have no judgment of its judgment, having not read the novel under review; however, such is scarcely necessary to point out that the review's stance that Mason & Dixon is Pynchon's masterwork puts the opinions expressed therein within a particular frame to which the term "contrarian" can't quite do justice. "Dumb" seems closer, or the less wieldy "still panicky about modernism." Such dumb panic leads to its share of howlers, inevitably: "The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces." Linger over that for a moment, won't you? If you find something odd about "drawn" and "plastic chess pieces," that may be a mixed metaphor you're sensing. They don't look like chess pieces, after all. Now, we here at sugarhigh! would have at least hoped that someone — family dog? Quaalude dealer? — would have noted, pre-publication, a passage that appears just three paragraphs earlier. In a flurry of insults familiar from the books sections of third-tier college papers worldwide, Kakutani has already proclaimed that, while Pynchon's novels usually treat characters "merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons." So you mean they're not chess pieces? But you said....! Ooh the surgical virtuosity — and they say the drugs don't work anymore. A truly vicious review will have to achieve more clarity than this, one fears; it feels less like a hit piece than a condensation of decades of Kakutani's ambient hostility and cultural anxiety into, well, a poorly-written instance of ambient hostility and cultural anxiety. Not less foggy, just less of it.

§ Conversely: anyone and everyone can get a free subscription to the latest print-at-work literary micro-omnibus (omni-microbus?), The New-York Ghost, with the greatest of ease, by visiting here. The most recent issue starts with the paranoid rantings of some New Yorker who feels certain his life has been pirated away into a character in the season's literary succes d'estime, pardon our French. Highly regarded.

the fragile

More frequently than seems imaginable, one hears people — poets, even — denounce literary critics with a grounding in political economy as so many rigid Party men ("the good Joe in browns," was it?); ditto the urge to equivocate deconstruction with moral relativism, with its apparently inevitable slide toward fascism, yawn. We distantly remember this game from Intro to Empty Rhetoric: "1, 2, 3 Hitler," it was called. Since there's no sane analogy between dictators and theorists, we might assume the purveyors of such are drooling morons, hoping for whatever charge they imagine is to be gotten from shouting "Stalin!" or "Hitler!" in a crowded auditorium.

And yet, how much fear it must require even to pretend that people who make accounts of things are the source of your domination! It's a fear that must in some way be respected, or at least grasped for its compelling hysteria: as when a long-bound man turns his fury on the person trying (perhaps futilely) to strike off his shackles and shrieks, "Stop hitting me!" Or as when someone with a mortgage they can't quite afford, and a job at which they keep staying late, decides to decry utopian thinking, knee-jerk Marxism, and etc.

We can all agree that almost all the attempts to counter power, by ideas or other means, are doomed to fail. Nonetheless, to fantasize them as your oppression, to lash out at them, is little but a clinging at the pant-leg of your actual boss, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of capital...

the instruction manual: cut'n'paste poetics blogwar

A: You say your art fights the power but in fact it's complicity itself.

B: Hey man, you're an authoritarian — this whole "my way is the way" thing is indefensible. It's part of a discredited history. Stalinist! There are many ways, and we're all in this together; let's all just respect that.

A: Um, yeah, good intentions — except that there are differences in the world, there is betrayal and deception, everyone thinks they're down and that's sort of a problem; what makes you think you're magically righteous, and who does that your beautiful inclusion really serve?

B: Who are you to decide, though?

A: I won't play "Show your credentials." Here are my credentials!

B: Neither will I. Here are mine! Also, despite your credentials, you're an asshole!

A: That's ad hominem, you sellout bastard!

B: Everyone's a sellout in this world, so that's not worth mentioning. By the way, you're a sellout too! Radical chic! And you drink!

exeunt omnes

"meanwhile, i'm stiiilllll thinking"

Isn't there a risk that this line of reasoning serves to suggest that poets lacking a dedicated knowledge of the empirical bases of their own critique therefore court the self-deluded fate of style without true criticality?

Hmm, where have we heard that before?

house for mr. is-was

We are sympathetic with what we take to be our fair colleague's basic desire found herein: that, if one is to be thinking about something, it's better to know extensive and intensive stuff about it. An informed critic...etc, whether it be regarding literature or political economy.

Nonetheless: hmm. We would no more gloss "bourgeois," e.g., as a term of "19th century sociology" than we would gloss "Oedipal" as a term of 20th century psychoanalysis. While these may be the moments in which the idea has been most revelatorily described, the human relations expressed by the terms have been with us quite a while longer — and still obtain. As of this moment, here in this world, "bourgeois" is no more a nostalgia or an archaicism than is, say, "poverty," or "empire." But we are sympathetic again with the desire to put the idea in the past.

What would it mean to suggest, in France in 1785, that a peasant ought have knowledge of statecraft to speak about the King, about the condition and experience of being his subject — an experience that permeated daily life? We should certainly imagine that any subject of the King would be both entitled (har har) and qualified to express her opinion on the matter, and even to take up arms to change conditions; surely a theorized knowledge of Machiavelli's texts wasn't required?

And finally, what of those who do the endless discursive work in service of capitalist chic — which is to say, almost everyone, almost every day? One suspects they too lack the appropriate technical knowledge — yet this ignorance goes unremarked and unregistered, as does most such ignorance in support of domination. Do they need less rhetorical policing?

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.

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.

sitekeeping

Some updates: sugarhigh! has added a link to the new blog formed by Laura Moriarty, A Tonalist Notes; some other urls have been updated. A new section of links has been added, to non-poetry blogs that I read (and that are updated regularly). Almost all the poems linked in the "Read Poems By" section are new; there is also a new download, of the Juliana Spahr chapbook "Gentle Now Don't Add To Heartache." Hope you are dry where you are.