jane dark's sugarhigh!

notes on the new(s)

You will note that the style of this entry is stolen from the deeply pleasing mystery-rag that is The New-York Ghost¶To include more than four poetry titles in The Grey Goose's list of the year's 100 Notable Books would fly so thoroughly in the face of their audience's reading practices as to seem polemical. And there's a logic to the fact that the youngest poet included is a spry 62; no one in that world knows what to make of contemporary poetry; choosing already-canonical figures is a to-hand solution. The dissonance, finally, comes from the distance between this latter banality and the fact that the editors must — must — be aware that, if they themselves made a list of 40 books of poems they loved and recognized as significant (limiting themselves to original collections by 20th Century American poets), which they wouldn't have any trouble doing, they would shortly discover that the vast majority of these books were written by poets in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Ginsberg was 29 when he wroteHowl; its inclusion this year is the perfect myth, in the Levi-Straussian sense of an imaginary solution to real contradictions. It at once recognizes the way that much poetry that matters to us comes as a sort of shock or breakthrough rather than a consolidation, while opening the gateways only to figures who've been culturally validated. This, not "poetry" or "taste" as such, is the real horizon of the list, the discontinuity within its apparently smooth ideological gleam.¶In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films of which Gus Van Sant's Psycho was only the best-distributed; the form finds its zenith in the loving recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark by three adolescent boys, a story the rights of which have now been acquired by Hollywood). Such films have a massive head start in finding a place in the cluttered imagespace of the average American, while being simultaneously more cost-effective to produce and market. They are pre-imagined and pre-sold. Might we think of the United States' domino-theory global hedge action to be a sort of franchise, involving little more than cosmetic changes and an updating of the plot to seem relevant to current events? Might we indeed expect to start seeing shot-by-shot recreations of wars?¶Elsewhere our friend Herr Dinglö directs us to this almost incomprehensibly satisfying passage in a recent article on Beirut: “We have no work. We have nothing else to do, so we came to overthrow the government.”¶

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.

a scanner darkly

In the recent annals of Squigglevision, A Scanner Darkly falls between that anthology of monologues for hipsters auditioning for grad school, A Waking Life, and heroic trifle Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.

The squiggles, one assumes, are meant to indicate the unstable reality of both the addict and the subject of certain technologies the book envisions — two categories that overlap almost entirely, herein. Well, that's what paranoia does: it makes unities, and in that regard the visual strategy, which posits both a surface coherence and its falseness, seems justified.

But it's also up to something else: making an equivalent to the shaky intensity of Phil Dick's writing, which scarcely qualifies as elegant but never relents from its tremulous comedies of describing a world it's certain is a hoax. Dick's too freaked out to be boring, and the film goes for this effect. Alas, the film can't quite manage it.

The majority of Dick adaptations (Total Recall, most obviously) take the central conceit of a book or story and make merry with it, much to the annoyance of purists. And yet, watching Scanner, one understand that choice — this, a relatively faithful translation, must stew around in its inability to render Dick's textual twigginess into an equivalently charged visual field. No tragedy, certainly; the film's interesting enough, its surmise as timely as ever, its strangely-unearned elegiac finale still nonetheless redolent for a certain substantial portion of the crowd. It remains, nonetheless, a kind of half-failure of visual thinking — in classic slacker fashion, it doesn't lack the courage of its convictions but the ambition to see them past the horizon of the medium-cool idea.

the illusionist

The kind of film that gives literariness a worse name, The Illusionist was once a Steven Millhauser story. Now it's a period piece in which fin-de-siecle Vienna is inexplicably denoted by marginally teutonized British accents, the audible sign that Ed Norton, Paul Giammati and Rufus Sewell are Acting (Jessica Biel settles for Great Plains British, both more and less annoying); the Shakespearean allusions reveal the script's self-aware intelligence; and the stilted, awkward pacing of each scene indicates both seriousness and historicity. If one imagined a film that was nothing more nor less than a set of signs referring back to its own quality, it might look a lot like this one — especially if you added a closing Usual Suspects-type montage in which the detective, having been led about by the beard for two hours, suddenly twigs to the entire array of clues in a swirling montage so as to understand "the plot," ostensibly by way of standing in for the audience members who, contrarily, got all that shit an hour ago and are wondering what time it is, whether this film is a particularly cruel explanation of the idea that "you have to suffer for art," and whatever became of the Rufus Sewell of Dark City.

special to binky urban

A careful reading of the bestseller lists reveals, if one can make it past the Dan Brown titles, a marginally more enlightened moneymaker: books designed to make liberal types feel like they've had a meaningful encounter with the unfortunate peoples with whom we are in conflict. One could express one's dissatisfaction with the US imperial program via a brisk saturday march (perhaps carrying a placard)‚ penning a poem with fully ethical content, or staying at home to make one's way through The Kite Runner or Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Given the market for this kind of textual commerce with the recently, currently, or soon-to-be bombed Other, we would not hesitate to start filling in the gaps, especially if we were, say, Syrian. Insofar as this particular niche market seems fond of the fine arts, comparative religions, and gritty local color ("compassionate cosmopolitanism," anyone? Can we get a show on 'NPR already? What's the hold-up? etc.), we suggest a book titled something to the effect of Caravaggio in Damascus, in which Syrian painter Yousef Abdelke returns to his family home both to attend his childhood love's funeral, and to arrange a showing of Caravaggio's depiction of St. Paul's conversion, a nationally-anticipated event opposed by the non-Christian ministry, and requiring intrigues interrupted by the outbreak of the Israel-Lebanon war...

walk, drift, etc.

Last week, the estimable Lisa Robertson happened upon the recent reissue of Michele Bernstein's Tous les chevaux du roi and, by way of her temporary online journal, translated a couple passages just for fun and our good fortune, starting with this three-way chat:

—What do you do anyways? I don’t really know .
—Reification, Gilles replied.
—It’s serious work, I added.
—Yes, he said.
—I see, Carole said with admiration. It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of papers on a big table.
—No, Gilles said. I walk. Principally I walk.

Bernstein's roman a clef of early Situationist history, mostly of her relationship with Guy Debord (to whom she was funder, wife, and procuress), has never been translated — in English, on par with funeral orations of Bossuet, the book is notable for its absence.

And yet the book contains one of the most-famous and most-translated passages in French literature since Baudelaire. In 1966, students at the University of Strasbourg put out two pamphlets that would play a substantial role of the chain of history leading directly to the events of May '68. The latter was called "On the Poverty of Student Life." The former, "The Return of the Durutti Column," was a celebrated early example of what would eventually make Jim Behrle's blog possible: comic strips with new text written into the bubbles, blanks and balloons.

Somewhere in the middle of the comic, two cowboys (Pancho and Cisco) have a conversation on horseback — the very conversation from Bernstein that Lisa Robertson first translates. In the intervening forty years, the passage has appeared in English over and over, every time the Debord or the SI program is up for discussion (most notably the Greil Marcus article for Artforum, "The Cowboy Philosopher" and his following book, Lipstick Traces). Rod Smith quotes it in this interview. It's the last line of the bilingual French/English poem mentioned in this note by Juliana Spahr. And so on — the language is everywhere, including in the name of the Factory records band Durutti Column.

But what language? Robertston, in her translation, has made a quite peculiar (if not entirely unprecedented) choice to translate the celebrated punchline, Non, je me promène. Principalement je me promène, as "I walk. Principally I walk." This gets much of the line's self-ironizing tenor just right, after the big build-up about reification and the weightiness of theory — its deflationary quality, and its reminder that philosophy must be lived in the quotidian, not applied from above.

Still, it's an oddly flatfooted choice. This phrase is not meant simply to deflate theory, but to redirect it. Se promener is not the easy way to say "to walk," after all (marcher), though it does have that secondary meaning. It also has the flippant sense one hears in English when telling someone to buzz off, "go take a walk." Still, the choice by Bernstein is surely meant to invoke the Surrealist tradition ("the perpetual promenade in the midst of forbidden zones," as Breton decribed it in 1930). It must also have to do with SI practices — and, as surely as they recommended détournement of comic strips, their other program was the dérive, the drift through the city as a critical act. Given that there's no verb form of dérive, se promener is often taken as such. Indeed, the most-common translation of the last line, by far, is "I drift. Mainly I drift."

But that isn't quite perfect either — there are only imperfect translations. Robertson's version is useful because it makes this clear (in addition to looping the passage back to her own title). What does it mean to propose, as a fundamental activity, an action for which there is no verb? To what extent does the historical pressure of this passage — the way in which it exists un- and overtranslated at the same time, celebrated and unknown, presabsent — index the extent to which a new language is needed, not for infinitely subtle parsing, but for the most basic considerations? It is here that poetry and philosophy pass closest to each other...

when i'm sixtyfive/strike another match

A good day to note the most notable thing about Bob Dylan's Chronicles. As the capstone on the edifice of the official Dylan narrative of genius recovered, the book is suposed to function as an example of his restored capacity to be insightful, ludic, witty and great.

How thoroughly it tracks the other story! The book, though presumably written "at one time," is astoundingly inconsistent — but the inconsistency is perfectly clear. The pieces concerning the early sixties are superb and charming, filled with off-kilter descriptions, lucid evocations, a steady stream of little revelations, and detailed recollections that seem able to illuminate what it is that we already know.

The parts concering the late sixties are less suffused in splendors of haphazard dailiness, but replace that with ferocity and splenetic willfulness -- sometimes a self-serving falsity that itself makes for great set-pieces — an inimitable sharpness buoyed by intensely interior refusal.

The rest is awful.

Nothing is more awful than the endless passage before and during his trip to New Orleans to record Oh Mercy, a seemingly endless sludgy meander spiked with howling clichés as, like the most pitiful hack bio, he goes thorugh the songs one by one, recounting how he thought them up and what they're really about, man. Amazingly, several of the songs just came to him, all at once! Wow! And the only potentially interesting digression, in which he feels revivified by an odd, forgotten picking style, devolves into dull, quasi-mystical ranting.

This, in stop-action, recounts the story of Dylan's genius in a way we recognize far better, stripped of the narcissistic Boomer fantasy of brilliance regained. It was there in 1960, it was there in different form in 1968, and it wasn't there after 1975. It didn't come back. His vision failed (as it must, as it must). His monstrous self-regard became ordinary. He stopped seeing the world in intereresting ways; he stopped feeling about the world in intense forms: the songs weren't so good any more. If the book supports any historical account, alas, it's this one — all too clearly. It's all over now, babies blues.

edge of seventeen

Near-needless to say, here at sugarhigh!, we are interested in why this article needs to say "hourly workers" in the first sentence. It does limn the social basis of the dismay over Kaavya; perhaps we could all agree that copying over other books isn't a crime, were all copyists paid an equal wage.

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.

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. ]

which side are you on?

The debate about James Frey and J.T. Leroy seems to divide between two positions: on the one hand, some find it worth pursuing that things represented as true about the author's life are false, casting a pall of disingenuity or indeed dishonesty over the enterprise; on the other, some note that in each case it's a literary production we're talking about, wherein truth is in the experience the text conveys, about which (potentially hypocritical) games of literary gotcha have little to say. To put it in old-fashioned terms, there's the author-based and text-based responses, facing off.

(It's worth noting the substantial irony that the text-based position, which in these last decades has been understood as an idea of the theoretical margins (often described as "postmodern") — indexed to the Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" and understood to privilege the reader (and, in a dominating synechdoche, the critic) over the author — is now employed by the very nexus it supposedly banished, and which otherwise profits from the production of authors. This is particularly piquant in the case of "James Frey," as the producers known variously as James Frey, Oprah Winfrey, and The Publisher scramble in all-but-identical words to assure us that the fringey text-based understanding is in fact at the very center of common sense.)

Predictably, author-based/text-based proves an insufficient antithesis (and not just because Doubleday has modeled for us in the purest terms that sublation is the methodology of capital just as much as it is the methodology of history itself; see previous paragraph). The division between the two positions, insofar as it might be imagined at all, is contingent — in particular, contingent on qualities of readership and the text both. All this hubbub is a story about the nature of the readership istelf, and what it consumes; as long as the drive obtains to extract some kind of "real-world" value from literature — and this includes not just the self-help virtues of Frey's memoir but the self-congratulatory encounter with the seamier side of "life" vended mercilessly by Leroy, a pleasure which defines faux-populist hipster narcissism and is the enabling ideology of gentrification — the crudest mechanisms for opening a route between the page and daily life will hold sway, and the crudest among these are the explicit and implicit claims on "real life" which "Frey" and ""Leroy" proffered at every turn.

And yet. Among the things that will not finally suffice, a critique of readership ideologies takes its place as well. Surely another reason that people feel betrayed and ripped off by the demolishing of authorial integrity in both cases is exactly because the authority of that position was so necessary for the books. That is to say, neither Frey nor Leroy can lay legitimate claim to a text-based understanding because neither could produce texts that suffer such engagement. To put it bluntly — and here's what the hand-wringing responses shy away from, even as they claim to have smelled a rat all along — readers are led to a need for the author's truth-value because that's about all that's on offer: the only folks with a right to I-told-you-so are those who noted all along that both Frey and Leroy are terrible prose writers; neither could build a truth out of text no matter what had or had not befallen them otherwise.