Shotgun Review #5: Loydell's Annunciations

George Ttoouli reviews Rupert Loydell's Dear Mary (Shearsman 2017)

Poetry book - available from Shearsman

Time taken to read: This was my toilet book for a few weeks while I was meeting a deadline. For a week I kept getting stuck on the preface. Then I switched to dipping in randomly, reading a few short pieces in a row or one long piece, to get a sense of the mood, tone, etc. Finally, I read the whole book (exc. preface) in one sitting while listening to ‘Dear Mary’ on repeat – about 52min. I still haven’t finished the preface, not for any fault of the writing, just, well, it’s not poetry.

Time taken to review: 1hr (+ some editing)

Where found: Sent by Shearsman. Possibly for review. It’s hard to tell with Rupert, he’s been sending me things in the post for over a decade. I didn't even give him my new address.[1]

Transparency: Rupert has been a long-standing affiliate for G&P. We’ve published his solo work, some of his collaborations, various bits and pieces. Also that aggressive interview, which is still the most successful in the series, despite being the first attempt. Rupert has also published some of my work at Stride Magazine and smallminded books and also the other one which published the thing he did with Sarah Cave, which they've been talking about on G&P this week. Some might say I’m too close to him, but this is a poetry-only love affair, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think we’ve met face to face since, oh, about 2002, when he told me over a busy restaurant table that I was trying to be ‘too clever’ in my poetry. I’ve always appreciated that honesty and respect him enough to serve the same back.

Time started: 13:15-14:15 to draft + editing

Review:

Anyone wondering where Luke Kennard gets his schtick from could save themselves the bother of digging around and read Rupert Loydell's poetry.[2] Particularly this new book, Dear Mary, just out from Shearsman (April 2017). The hallmarks are all there: the strangely inviting personal voice, the diaristic sense of someone's idiosyncratic life being recorded, a headlong confrontation with religion (tho with less of LK's trademark doubt and self-castigation), and, of course, the wry humour. But where Kennard's humour is the dominant note for a lot of his work - a bass line from which he deviates, much to the disappointment of his audiences, no doubt (stop trying to show range!) - Loydell's poetry carries a less-than-obvious central emotional tone, from which he can go many places. The work isn't pigeonhole-able in the same way.

As a result, it's easier to start with the complexity underwriting this book: the multiply-threaded frame, the sense of a lived experience undigested or filtered for 'meaning.' One of the pieces that most brilliantly encapsulates Dear Mary's range arrives early on, dedicated to David Miller. Starting as if it wants to be a prose review mixed with diary, it shifts to a slim column of images, before returning to a summative prose:

The poet's book has served me well, and has sat literally and conceptually alongside a short book on colour, a re-read novel of occult training and enlightenment, and a fictional exploration of moments when the celestial and human met or even touched.

('"A Process of Discovery"' - the title has quotation marks to denote its origin as a title from Miller).

I didn't check the notes before reading and assumed the book on colour was Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour (which serves as the title of one of Dear Mary's later poems). The notes tell me otherwise - it's not entirely significant however. What's obvious is how well Loydell weaves these aesthetic and personal elements through the book, using journal styles and minimalism and a range of other modes, somehow held together by a deft complexity of tone and emotion.

Colour is the strongest, early feature-of-significance to the poems. Part of the book might be taken as a discourse on painting, on sensory visuals, on the meaning of colour preferences. An early poem ('Lost in Colour') notes, presumably, Loydell's artistic training and how to others he seemed "seduced by colour" - a criticism he wears proudly. (The moment is reminiscent, to me at least, of Robin Blaser sharing Charles Olson's accusation, that Blaser's supposedly rubbish with syntax, in a collection called Syntax.) Of course, the play with voices elsewhere suggests I'm just making a rookie mistake, associating the training with the author's biography, but that's the mode at the beginning: lyrical memoir.

Yet this colour-conversation is where the book's 'realism' or 'interpretability' begins to break down for me. Ostensibly, we're led in the first half of the collection through Loydell's love affair with Italian Renaissance paintings of Mary and the Annunciation, while on holiday in Tuscany. He paints, he swims, he mucks about with colours, he drags his family on long drives to see his favourite paintings in remote churches, only to find the churches closed and no one around to let them in... If you ask me, Loydell must be an insufferable person to go on holiday with.

But this is a projection, a reconstruction. By the mid-point in the book I found myself thinking Loydell's never been to Italy in his life. The whole thing is a set up. All the artists and poets and critics referenced are actually twentieth century or more recent: Francis Bacon, Deborah Turbeville, David Hart, David Toop, David Batchelor (a lot of Davids) - the 'Fra Angelico' is Diane Cole Ahl's, not some 16thC maestro.

The 'aha!' moment for me is in a piece called 'The Pictures Started to Instruct Me': "I wanted all the colours to be present at once. / ... How difficult it becomes when one / tries to get very close to the facts". This is not real representation, but an interrogation of how difficult it is to turn the real world into art. The danger then is that you start to believe these unreal representations more than the world itself.

Moments of real experience in the first half of the collection contribute to a sense of the ridiculousness of artistic living. At the end of the poem for David Miller, the painter-poet gives up for a bit, decides to go for a swim: "A startled lizard runs from the sudden splash." The juxtaposition is somewhat ridiculous because the poem has barely made an attempt to locate the poet spatially in Tuscany. Is he in the sea? A lake? A pool? Where the hell is the lizard and how has the painter-poet even noticed it, if he's jumping into the water? The perspective is all shot through: that's the point: this isn't trying to represent reality. It's interrogating the ease at which we are 'seduced by colour' when we read, or view art.

Which then leads me to the second thread: "a fictional moment when the celestial and the human met or even touched". The 'Mary' of the title is, unobviously, a composite. The notes here reveal the lyrics of Steve Miller's 'Dear Mary' are themselves collaged from the lyrics of several other musicians' songs.[3] So too this Mary, filtering multiple Marys into a composite; they're not really about Mary herself, most of the time, but about the process of hunting down what Mary means, building that picture from multiple sources, making idiosyncratic connections and compiling them into something that seems believable enough to be real, but in fact, like the worlds built in each painting, is just another subjective version of the world, a new world, a world-in-itself.

This sense establishes itself and then, having prepped you through a kind of uncanny accrual of not-quite-right glitches in the matrix, we're offered the first proper discomfort provided by a number of long pieces: 'Shadow Triptych' after Francis Bacon. The three parts are not numbered, and the columns are, in turn, located to the left hand side of the page, the centre and the right, each in straight-edged columns, like the panels of a triptych. The series is in fact a kind of essay, or series of essays. And it's here (and in the later long pieces, particularly 'My Paper Aunt') where the collection's occult influences seem most prevalent.

The essay combines all the threads I've emphasised, but the tone shifts to something unnerving: the tones of Bacon's paintings, the fleshy torture, the sense of darkness inside those faceless jumbles of tendon and muscle. The notes to the poem are a long list of influences, including Bacon's paintings, of course, but also, surprisingly Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase' and, unsurprisingly, E.M. Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the entire 'Shadow Triptych' is a cento, but then, that's the beauty of the whole collection: it never lets you shake off the createdness of its 'world,' and that its 'world' is nothing more than the subjective experiences of just one person, nexused through many other subjectivities. (Nothing more! Hah!)

That said, there's more here than merely listening to someone else's heartbeat-in-language. That's not the point. I started with a comparison to Kennard at the beginning (my association, deployed in expectation (some of) our reader(s) might be familiar), I'll deviate back there now. There are a few poems here that I almost took as sacriligeous. In one, Mary goes online dating while Joseph's out. An angel shows up and "When he disrobed, it was a bit of a shock to see what he'd kept hidden" ('Online Dating Annunciation').

Later, there's 'Alien Annunciation': "according to Mary her pet's barking continued to get louder and louder throughout the visitation." If these had been part of a novella by, say, Colm Toibin, there'd probably have been a witch hunt. Instead, located here, there's a gentility and a kindness - a making senseness to how they form part of the picture of someone trying to make sense of a celestial encounter with the human, the real. The need to make sense, even where it transcends understanding.

These parts are perhaps closest to the aforementioned Kennardian absurdism. Tonally, however, they range out of easy laughter. There's a batch of poems in the second half of the book where humour seems to be the dominant mode, but in context of what's gone before, particular the doomy triptych, it's hard to take them as release or relief.

Or perhaps they're a temporary relief. A bit like the process-driven pieces. A few poems smack of googlisms, lists heavy with repetition and wild juxtaposition, where the ego shines out from the cracks between curated pieces, rather than glowing in the voice-driven language. The more deceptive pieces, the ones where the voice does a very good job of sounding familiar, are the places where I found myself least secure. The process-driven stuff - flarf, Oulipo, those conscious moments of trying to get outside of representational, first person lyric conventions - feels, to me, like it has had its day, especially here, with Dear Mary's unstable eye/I. Those diary pieces, so deceptively inviting, stretch the lyric mode into strange places, finding room to manoeuvre a personal personality within the constraints of very poetry-looking poetry.

Actually, if I had to give you an accurate sense of this book, I'd say, it's a bit like wearing a Rupert-suit for an hour. Yes, really; this is poetry as a record of experience, through and through: lived moments coupled to the reflections on, the long-running tracks of thought to which one person idiosyncratically returns, time and again, coupled to a private journalism, curated through a totalising subjectivity, but one which is always overstretching the rigidity of those boundaries with new perspectives, alternative subjectivities entering through, melding with the pluralist eye/I.

The poems in Dear Mary are knitted from the real experience of a person, filtered through the alembic known as Rupert Loydell and passed on, partial, imperfect, formed into meanings and moments, against which you'll find a flicker of what it means to be not-yourself, for just a moment. If that sounds a little bit Buffalo Bill, well, maybe that's fair enough: it's just the wrong side of understandable to leave me with an uncanny feeling of having been dropped into something too familiar to be knowable.

===

[1] This is a lie, of course, and I should also add, I've had some delightful things in the post from Rupert, including a dozen or more issues from small-minded books.

[2] The fact check elves (OK, read: Rupert) notes that Kennard and Nathan Thompson and Rupert were all associated around Exeter at some point, along with people like Andy Brown (still there) and Alasdair Paterson (not sure if he's still there), latter of whom used to run a reading event, where perhaps they fraternised. The influence is speculation on my part. Also, I've slightly edited the passive aggressive, 'I miss you, Luke' out of the first sentence of the review, for reasons just stated.

[3] My rush job missed the fact that it isn't Steve Miller's song that's collaged, but Rupert's poem of the same title.

Shotgun Review #3: Joris' Agony

George Ttoouli reviews Pierre Joris' The Agony of I.B. (Éditions Phi, 2016)

Drama

Time taken to read: weeks and weeks and weeks
Time taken to review: 2hrs followed by a break of a couple of days, 5min,then another break of about a week, and a final (heavily interrupted) push of approximately 1hr30min. So 3hr30min total.

Where found: I wanted to get to the actual stage performance of this, but it was happening in another country at a time when I couldn’t travel to that country. An attendee to the play acquired a copy for me, so I’ve borrowed that.

Transparency: I encountered Pierre’s A Nomad Poetics a couple of years ago, through academic research. It struck me as the kind of book you have to hide from your supervisor and colleagues because it hovers on the (false) disciplinary boundaries between philosophical poetics and out-and-out poetry, and you don’t want a slap on the wrist.

And then last year, while digitising a stack of cassette recordings of poetry readings from the past 30 years (The Clive Bush Audio Poetry Archive), I listened to a launch of the first volume of Poems for the Millennium in London, as part of the Sub Voicive Poetry series and ended up writing to him (and co-editor Jerome Rothenberg) for permissions to publish the digitised recording.

Permission came after my temporary contract ended (and I don’t think the recording has appeared online because the (poor beleaguered) library team hasn’t the resources to keep up). Pierre and I had a brief exchange and he mentioned the play, or I’d heard about it already, and he told me he’d be there for the opening night in June this year and I said I would go if I could, yadayada.

I couldn’t go, and now it seems unlikely I’ll be able to catch Pierre and Jerome when they’re in the UK in October. I may have some disappointment and guilt I’m working out in writing this, but, well who cares? The main challenge is: it’s a play, wtf am I doing reviewing a play?!

Review:

Really, it would have been easier and a more pleasant experience for me if I’d read the whole thing aloud and jumped around the room into little marked footprints with labels indicating which character I was supposed to be. But no. Instead, I’ve been crawling through the 84 pages of this play like it was written in a foreign language and I’ve only a post-apocalyptic and partially burned dictionary at my side to help.

As one might expect of a multilingual (originally Luxembourgish, now US-based citizen of the world) translator and poet, much of the play is written in a foreign language, though English is the glue that binds. The opening line of the prologue welcomes the audience in English, French and German and the play proceeds to fling fragments of Italian, Spanish and Latin at you, ranging from snippets of the everyday to full blown extracts of poetry. There’s some Dante, a dose of Paul Celan and, of course, poetry by the eponymous I.B. in the title, Ingeborg Bachmann herself.

A brief aside: Éditions Phi, the publisher, have clearly gone about the publication a little too quickly (a bit like this review, perhaps). There are occasional missing words, several spelling mistakes and incorrect punctuation in places. This adds to the sense that the play itself was written with haste (the stage directions also seem to have been added somewhat slapdashedly for the premiere at the Luxembourgish theatre, TNL) and in turn gave me the feeling that there would be a lack of depth, or self-awareness to the play’s construction. So I was uphill struggling against typos.

The title’s 'Agony' caused me problems, all of my own making. I kept confusing what happened to Bachmann with what happened to Clarice Lispector: both women fell asleep with lit cigarettes, but Lispector survived. So, for much of the reading, I was expecting Bachmann to make it through and the play’s focus to be a kind of epiphanic, or mystical realisation about the direction her life has been taking so far, with hallucinatory conversations with past lovers and strange asides into what is fairly obviously a semi-autobiographical novel IB is writing, about a woman called Franza.

The minor difference with Lispector’s case, as that fountain of knowledge Da Internetz informs me, is that Bachmann died a month after being admitted to hospital for burns, possibly from complications caused by her addiction to barbiturates. And Franza – from The Book of Franza, an unfinished novel – recurs with the sense of those unfinished threads all lives leave behind.

Bachmann’s encounters with her former lovers and collaborators – Adolf Opel, Max Frisch, Hans Werner Henze (gay, and a collaborator, though there is much spiritual love there) and Paul Celan – are mostly with hallucinations of these individuals while she is hooked up to life support in Acts II and III. There’s a sense of reckoning, of accountability; the weight of relationships against the weight of her work, her labour. Altogether, the play might be crudely summarised as about legacy. But that’s exactly the kind of reviewing I don’t like doing.

The hardest part to experience in written drama, as with page poetry, is how the language is performed. Much of the dialogue in this play arrives as blocks of text, brief prose poems, or paragraph poems, soliloquies in which each character talks about themselves. Worst of all (and highly deliberate, expertly manipulative), Joris appears to have constructed all the male characters’ personalities through how they impose their needs, ideas and demands on Bachmann – her body and her body of work.

In the opening Prologue, Opel and Maria Teofili debate IB’s life. Opel repeatedly opines how she should have stayed in the desert with him, for that was where she was happiest. Henze, in Act II (the ‘real’ not the hallucinated version of him, in Scene 4), corrects her ideas, her imagination, urging conformity (perhaps with patriarchy, as much as with story tropes). His role seems to be that of editor, but also as a provider of disappointments, a pragmatic, negative force.

When Celan arrives in Act III, Bachmann does try and reach the desert, despite him coaxing her back, away from where she claims she wants to go. On the one hand, he supports her, keeps her moving, to keep her lively; on the other, he seems to steer her around the stage and, without being able to see the tenderness the actors might bring to the performance, I felt there was more than a little deliberate puppeteering at work.

As Celan walks the ghostly presence of IB around the stage in the final act, trying to bring her back to the hospital bed and her ‘real’ body, she resists, trying to take sustenance and independence from reaching the imaginary desert of her imagination. The metaphor, played out spatially and with stage-directed slides of desert imagery, must have been quite striking, but also hard to convey in physical terms as an act of power/control, while also delivering a much more obvious symbolism about the hot and cold natures of the cast’s personalities.

That’s not the point I’m really trying to make. I guess it’s about the controlling elements: Bachmann is a contrarian, seeking independence apparently to the detriment of her own health. She tries to will her independence against ranks of men, no matter how well-meaning they might be, and that, more than the physical pain of being burned, is the real Agony Bachmann undergoes, a lifelong battle.

One of the two other women in the play, Maria Teofili (described as IB’s ex-housekeeper and confidant in the cast list) delivers the message in the prologue, in fact, replying to Adolf Opel:

Oh, shut up, you buffoon. What do you know? Niente, niente! This is the drama of a life lived without love – not without lovers, but without an abiding love to share her dailyness with [anyone] except for her love of writing … you man-writers with your cojones do not know the hole a woman has to fill to feel whole – and words along can’t do it,but words are what she made,every day, words, words,words – they were her babies … A woman without a man is difficult, a woman without children is terrible. (14)

OK. If by the end of that little speech you also found yourself cringing, then we’re on the same page. Teofili isn’t the benevolent voice of female empowerment you might expect: another kind of conformity enters into her language. I’d take this as deliberate, as the play’s attempt to override an easy reading of gender roles, power roles and the tragedy of constraints within which Bachmann tries to find freedom. You could easily take her as crippled by her own behaviour, as a smoker, a drug addict, also, controlled by her own limitations.

And so I’m not sure quite what to think of IB, which may be the point: quit reaching irritably after easy facts and meanings. There’s a Prologue at the start of each Act featuring Teofili and Opel, and in each they debate IB’s life and character. By Act III Teofili’s role is much curtailed, she breaks down (emotionally unable to reason with Opel) and is led off stage by Opel in a way I found short on compassion, leaning more toward condescension. I found the progression to Teofili’s final departure from the stage unsatisfying, given the first Prologue indicating she’d be an important counterweight to the men and even to Bachmann herself. And that’s good enough evidence of Joris working against easy meanings, trends. This ain’t Brecht, Dorothy.

At the level of the line, the play is extremely satisfying. Firstly, the multilingual delivery: I enjoyed this, though I’m about as fluent in German and Italian as I am in rodent idiolects. Alienation isn’t the point, and often characters provide cribs for themselves or for others. Rather than deploying languages from a foundation of privilege, intellect and the setting up of barriers (in the way of high Modernist multilingualism), Joris uses fluidity and linguistic acrobatics as a kind of play and spectacle.

As Henze says in Act II:

Liebste Inge, carissima Inge, meine liebe arme kleine Allergrosste, liebe Pupetta, my darling wagtail, Inge, Ingeborg come aboard, Inge, cara, cara, carissima... (39)

The meaning isn’t the point: those moments where characters quote poetry at each other, their own or that of others’, grounds the intimacy between them. It occurs as much in these ridiculous lists of pet names as anywhere else. In the same scene Henze also calls her “sisterlein, Schwesterlein” (40) and more follow. The language is very much his, but feels entirely personal to his relationship with Bachmann. Each relationship conjured from her hallucinatory, unconscious body carries a unique syntax. By the time Celan and Bachmann are in full flow, the language may as well be operatic:

Ingeborg Bachmann:
Paul, is that you? I thought you had drowned in the transport on the river. I tried to call you back. My voice wasn’t good enough. You never answered. You have been gone too long. But you always come and go as you wish or as you are pushed to do by I know not what. Now you answer because I am calling you with my starvoice, my sidereal voice, a voice no one has ever had. I create your name, I create you with that voice.
[...]
Paul Celan:
You are here with me, oh, Inge. You are waking up, you hear me, Ingeborg! We are all leaving, we are all travelling, but stay with me, we can do this together, finally, maybe, all the travelling, at least the last however many steps, through fire through water, my water extinguishes your fire, your fire dries out my water, these line brought you some fire... (65))

There’s an almost-regularity to the clauses, the length of lines, the rhythm. Moments of syntactical parallelism and, frankly, the sheer melodrama of how they talk to each other, had me imagining an opera rather than a straightforward stage play. These lines seemed to want to be sung at the audience rather than to the other characters within the four-walled prison of the drama.

And this is entirely unique to the relationship they have. It’s as if Bachmann’s contradictions (the deserts of Egypt, the mountains of Austria)  stem from having been many people, but only one person at a time for one lover, in one place. And perhaps that’s the ‘agony’: the multitudes she contains breaking out of her body at the end of her life. But again, that’s too easy.

My last point, which is understandable if you’ve read Joris’ recent interview at Asymptote, or are familiar with his translations: Celan is a scene stealer, once he arrives. His language, the way he leads the action, particularly in the penultimate scene, made me feel like there was a second play hiding behind this one, one that Joris really should attend to. Bachmann seems a means to an end for a brief moment, rather than the protagonist. There’s an emotional attachment and a kind of roundedness – something I found hard to pin down – which I struggled to read into Bachmann’s character. If anything, I found IB agonisingly self-involved at times (there, another agony for you), while Celan seems to stop her wallowing in whatever worlds she was locked into.

Celan is a key figure for Joris’ development and a major influence, by his own accounts. But these irrational moments sometimes dredge up some of the most exciting facets of human relations. Leaving aside the gender politics for a moment: isn’t it great to have someone in your life who can get you out of your own head, occasionally, tell you to cut down on the smoking and drinking, lower your pill-popping habits, go for a walk, get some fresh air, come back to the desk rejuvenated?

But OK, bring back the gender politics and maybe there’s something downright wrong: women have the right to self-destruct as much as men; and to reverse those roles, well: we all need mothers. Perhaps seeing the play onstage would have given me a better sense of how the dynamic played out for Joris, or at least the director (who I haven’t looked up, but I assume Joris had some creative input). That there’s ambiguity on the page is a good sign of the control of the writing, and the play's potential durability. Which is a terrible place to end a review, so I'll add this sentence.

===
Hmm. Going over this one last time, I can see I struggled a lot with the drama - stick to reviewing the shows! But there's also something satisfying in trying to stretch myself and having to struggle a bit. I'm not going to be selective for this series, or give myself an easy ride with the things I review, even if it may make for some choppy writing. But it's still early days...

Letter to/from a young poet (4/4)

NB: Ryan's last email was sent in July 2013, but never arrived! I only read it this week, when I got in touch to finalise the series for G&P. (I guess I win that game of who can reply slowest.)

25/7/13

Dear George,

My sincerest apologies for taking so inappropriately long to respond. Nominally, it's due to the end-of-school-year snowballing followed by graduation obligations followed by the veritable road-show my mother has been taking me on to see every single one of my relatives before I go to work in Korea for a few years.

From a more honest perspective though, it's about not being able to respond to your last question with something I feel is of a quality worth your time. I don't know if it has more to do with my natural inclination to start lots of pieces and never really know how to finish them, or my tendency to overly indulge in the "you deserve a break" mentality after completing something as big as graduating from undergrad (and being still up in the air about going to grad school later on, possibly the end of my formal academic career).

However, I am aware of these personal defects and am attempting to correct them as I hope is manifested (for myself, at least) by this reply in addition to the attached works (which, by the way, don't feel overly obligated to say too much about; I cringe every time I read the ending, but am unsure how to wrap it up).

I will say, though, I feel the sporadic nature of the time I've spent writing since our last correspondence has stilted my literary agility to some degree, and at times I've sat down and felt like I have to learn how to write all over again (although, I suppose if I was a source worth quoting, I'd make some quip about how every new project should make you learn how to write all over again), and to that end I've been trying my hand at a bit more poetry (again, included, mostly for my own good as well).  Anyway, here's to the literary equivalent of a new pair of sneakers and 5k every morning.  

Back to our intellectual property discussion: The firearms printing is wild. As an American, and after the very idea of quality background checks was shot down in Congress (pun possibly intended), I can confidently say you'd be surprised at what the pro-gun community can squeeze into their arsenal (both rhetorically, politically, and literally). Fun fact: the .50 caliber rifle, which is used to immobilize helicopters and lightly armored military vehicles on the battlefield, is legal in forty-nine states. It's the perfect gift for that special someone.

Back to the question of intellectual property, though. What are your thoughts? I've flipped through Common as Air, and I'm relatively torn. Well, not so much torn as feeling both sides are missing the obvious balance needed. The arguments against property rights in the sciences are made very convincingly by Hyde, and there are numerous articles demonstrating the importance of borrowing in the arts from Hip Hop and the Mash-up community to Eliot's literary collages and even back to the theologians of the Renaissance copy-and-pasting from antiquity.

The economics side, of course speaks differently, and says without proper monetary incentives given by the sole proprietorship of an idea, a lot of great minds won't have the time or resources to contribute to those advances, given the opportunity costs. Companies won't fund R&D as heavily if they can't turn that idea for a profit (monopoly profit vs. competitive pricing), and since R&D has a "second-mover advantage" (why make a new device when you can wait for someone else to make one and just do it better) production of these ideas would decrease.

Of course, as an optimist, I have my qualms with the latter view as well; my dynamic human spirit which refuses to submit says that people will be driven to invent and solve despite monetary rewards, but it's hard to say a lot of efficiencies won't be lost in that striving. If I was phoned by the President tomorrow and asked for a solution, I would say the most conservative fix would be to cement rights to the original creators. No bequeathing it to relatives forever, nor to the immortal and eternal corporations, and no allowing people to buy and horde them. Keeps the incentives for production high while minimizing the stifling that occurs without open access. Of course, that plan also probably has a number of pitfalls I'm overlooking.
                   
I also have to thank you so much for your help on the Pearlymussel assignment. There were one or two questions I had overlooked, and looking them up definitely helped during my (light, relatively painless) defense of the report. I would send you a copy, but, uhm, well, between now and my last email, the flash drive it was on became the victim of vehicular dataslaughter and is now embedded in the pavement of Interstate 77 (or wherever the souls of word documents go when they die, if you're of the Phillip K. persuasion).

In addition, that Moore interview is definitely a thrill to read. While yes, a bit wordy, it's some of the best descriptions I've heard of this (crucial) field of study. I'll probably recommend it to those looking for a better explanation of and motivation for the field than my own explanation could have.

I feel the need to clarify my attitude towards the academic study of literature, and apologize for how flippant it came off in my previous email. I was more-so trying to state my own, twenty-something, English minor, musings to be relatively frivolous in relation to the grand scheme of things, particularly the opinion of classifying literature by its nature, content, and style first, and its historical period second as opposed to having these broad and varied understandings of things like "modernism" and "realism."

But again, there's little I can say, or any academic really could do (hence the Salon parody) to change it at this point (assuming, of course, it needs changing, which is admittedly not an entirely justified assumption). And I do suppose in today's society, with its stress on tangible profits and objectively efficient ways of doing things makes it almost too easy to poke fun at the apparent fruitlessness of those sorts of discussions.  But I would agree, it bears a different kind of fruit. A fruit necessary in a writer's complete and nutritious breakfast.

At heart I (would like to think I) am an optimist in cynic's clothing, and I agree far too much that we humans are at the point in development where optimism is the backbone with which positive change can go from limping to sprinting. A brief and last clarification though: writing as a Utopian endeavor, do you mean say it achieves this by deconstructing the rules and formalities we take for granted and shows us how a better society may be constructed from this new form, or that writing portrays reality in such a way as to hone in on the underlying problems which, for whatever reason, we don't see in our day to day lives? Essentially: should writing show us how to make a utopian civilization, or just why we do not live in one?

Again, no rush in replying. Being raised Catholic, my own guilt for not replying sooner is somewhere around thirty to thirty-five Hail Mary's, and if responding to this adds even a bit of stress to your day it would probably reach the appropriate levels for self-flogging. I also heard the summer school went another year. I hope it was as successful! Any more quotables from Peter? (And of course I realize that this email is basically another portfolio on top of the ones you have to grade.) Have you finished your doctoral work? Am I asking too many questions?

Graciously and Apologetically Yours,

Ryan Celley              

===

25/7/2016

Dear Ryan,

Well, it's taken forever to shape this for the blog. And we didn't even get around to finishing up that mini-conversation about Accelerationism we had. (Short answer: they're full of crap.) And then you spring this last email on me! I honestly don't know what happened. I think I was drunk most of July 2013, but that didn't stop me replying earlier that year.

Between then and now, some things have changed in the landscape. We've had an escalation of the plagiarism problem in poetry, coupled with a strange wave of cover versions of songs produced exclusively for the coffee house chain market. And the Black Lives Matter stage in the Civil Rights Movement.

The latest shooting (to go viral) of Charles Kinsey, I feel, calls for the founding of a political lobbying group, the National ToyTruck Association (NTA). Through a combination of political bribes, lobbying, installing candidates in Congress and some good old back-room handshaking I'm fairly sure they could ensure that all citizens worldwide (why stop with 'Murika?) could be granted the right to bear a toy truck at all times.

But seriously, the intellectual property problem. For the past few years I've been immersed in materialism and eco-related stuff and I've come at an anti-capitalist stance from that perspective. Scientists need capitalism; therefore human survival needs capitalism; but capitalism is killing humans and pretty much all life. Go figure.

I don't think I need to explain the contradictions in capitalism to an economics major. Probably you've heard of, read, David Harvey, Thomas Piketty, David Graeber and that other bloke, Karl what's his name. Anyway, I haven't read all their work, no, but I'm aware of the arguments and Naomi Klein has synthesised some of the ideas well enough to make the case for how not just neoliberalism, but capitalism as a whole is a crisis-generating psychopathology.

If you deregulate big pharma, will it have a knock on effect in driving prices down? Or just allow venture capitalist scum to milk as much profit as possible out of it? Or both? And how many lives will be lost in the interim, as the market takes time to self-regulate? I don't think free intellectual property can be addressed by blanket positions, while capitalism is the one-ring-to-rule-modernity.

Academics don't need copyright; academics are salaried and support well enough (I'm going in relative terms by cost of living and national wealth scales - the adjunct market/casualisation, which is essentially a black market in academia, is one of capitalism's essential mechanisms). Academic publishers are also closed-market and should be supported through academia.

The moment you get overlap, however, such as with creative writing departments, academies pressurise literary publishers to give their work away for free. That doesn't work under capitalism. What you have are a series of contradictory markets, attempting to be closed systems and failing. Ultimately, however, both academic and literary industries are operating in a self-hating, self-destructive fashion.

The problem isn't intellectual property, then, from my perspective. The problem is capitalism's regulation of intellectual property. The challenge isn't, 'How do we make intellectual property work under capitalism?' It's, How can we imagine intellectual property without capitalism?'

I want to add that I don't see literary fiction as situated in binary opposition to 'Literature'. Drawing on something M John Harrison once said in conversation, I see 'Literature' as defining the (highly subjective) quality of a text. Any genre of writing can thereby be measured in terms of its quality in relation to other texts. You can have SF 'Literature' and lyrical Realism Literature, and literary fiction Literature. Good writing can exist in any genre; hence no need to chuck out Orwell/Huxley/Atwood/Lessing, etc. 'Literature' with its capital 'L' is a value judgement about what is worth reading.

That 'highly subjective' is key to this discussion. It's a political battle, right for the times. Yes, we need Junot Diaz to provide alternatives. We need feminist presses to address the balance. And then we need (poets) to imagine a way forward that doesn't just create divisions. As Cecilia Vicuña sort of put it, we need a poetics of melting, a poetics that dissolves boundaries. It's a structural problem.

To answer, then, your questions about writing and utopia, well, it's both, and more. Writing delights (escapism), returns us to the world, criticises, satirises, celebrates, curses. The horror and the euphoria. Euphorroria. I don't like binaries, though it takes time to adjust your thinking and the whole idea of good/bad writing (Literature) potentially reinforces that binary of quality (at least under capitalist modernity, or patriarchy, which predates capitalism).

Anyway, this has taken so long, I've changed my stance several times in the past few years and I know this is just a snapshot of an ongoing process. Thinking. Pathways. Tao. In the meantime, I'm working on my wellbeing, which means writing. What I'm striving for most of all, is a routine, space, lifestyle in which I can also write. I don't want to work for money, edit other people's writing, read books, paint the fence or clean the dishes instead of writing. There's always the option to do things as well as writing. Saying doesn't mean doing and I'm off balance at the moment, but working on it.

Bleggers, meanwhile, moved to the Royal College of Art and then retired. He's had a few wacky radio plays out with the BBC (The Impossible Book is still on iPlayer, but you may need a proxy) and a book with Uniform, Kew.Rhone, based on the album. I've not seen him in ages. I should rectify that.

Well done on the Asymptote job, by the way. Totally deserved! Keep writing! Now, I'm off to read the Pierre Joris interview.

Very best,
George

===
Incidentally, I met Ryan on a summer camp thing, where I was teaching creative writing. I seem to remember he wrote a story about people working in a canning factory. I can't remember what they were canning, but that's not really the point. The point is that I can't find any trace of this canning factory story in the work he sent me. I might have imagined it. That happens.

Ryan Celley recently became Outreach Officer for Asymptote. He lives and works in S. Korea. He should write more. He's good at it.

Letters to/from a young writer (3/4)

18/2/2013

Dear George,

I suppose anything you can do I can do better, eh?  But in all seriousness, my apologies for the two month delay. I've been waiting for the nature of a few circumstances to sort themselves out before I respond (one of those being a story I ended up stalling on long enough to move onto something else). 

For instance (additionally), my adviser in the Economics department has finally convinced me looking at the ebook industry at this point is akin to getting trigger happy in a game of charades; something's happening alright, but a study will give the exact same information as just waiting a little bit. As far as that project is concerned now, it seems I'll be looking at the socioeconomic impacts of charter schools.

I would like to thank you for the articles though. The Amazon discussion has been a fascinating story (said with just a tint of cynicism), and we briefly covered it in my Industrial Organization class starting with their suing of Apple for predatory actions and then turning around to do the same with collecting authors. Sigh, Multi-Million Dollar Corporations these days, am I right?

The Environmental Economics project was a bit more cut and dry. An abstract of sorts: The Slabside Pearlymussel, a breed of mussel only found in the Cumberland region (just west of the Great Smokey Mountains) in Tennessee, has disappeared from 80% of the rivers it once occupied, mostly due to pollutants from coal plants and other factories along the waterways. The question: Economically speaking, should it be on the endangered species list? Would the value society gets from saving this species outweigh the cost to the factories changing their practices?

There are three monetary values assigned to the mussel in this case: a biodiversity value (the more species that remain in an ecosystem, the more stable it is, in theory), a replacement value (this breed isn't harvested, but a cousin is to make pearl seeds out of its shell, and should the cousin go extinct, this kind could be used for the same purpose; this number turns out to be minuscule as the cousin is not in any danger), and an indicator-species value (the pollutants causing its population to decline are heavy metals also harmful to humans, so the population acts as a running litmus test).

Additionally, these pollutants are being dumped despite Tennessee laws preventing this given amount of said pollutants, but the government has not actively reprimanded the companies. Making this mussel endangered would give organizations like the Sierra Club and other activist organizations leverage to rope them in, as anyone could sue on behalf of the newly endangered species. ..... That's all a very long way of saying we should protect this species and get the factories to stop polluting.
On to things less science.

Back to the discussion of realism, I guess my confusion essentially stems from differentiating litfic and literature. I suppose in my head, the differentiation is: Literature is a tested 'classic,' a book still receiving considerable demand after its initial stint in the limelight, whenever that might be; literary fiction I find to be the blank slate, the unmarked norm, the Private to Literature's Lieutenant Colonel, and devoid of qualities giving it a discernible category, as one of the genre fiction genres, or postmodern, (an entirely different question I've had of late: if something is written in the literary style of modernism, but is written in the postmodern (or post-postmodern) age, where does it fall? I read through the first few chapters of Zadie Smith's NW while waiting for a friend at a bookstore, and to me it seems distinctly modern in style), or avant-garde, surreal, etc.

Because of this mental filing system, I have to ask "Can literature really push out any qualities?" If it is to push out genre fiction categories then Orwell and Huxley must be removed from the canon immediately, and to push out qualities of Literary Fiction is to pull its foundations out from under it. 
It can, I think, reorganize itself, and that's why I'm inclined to agree with Smith (all critiquing her definition of avant-garde aside, which, by the way, I completely agree with after reading that article and taking a second look).

Once in the confines of capital "L" literature, there is a group of works that contain little other signifiers.  You have the capital "R" Realists, the Utopian/Dystopian fiction, the Romantics and Gothic, but there's a whole slew of works that only fall under period names: the Modernists, the Beats, even some Victorian authors. This is where I feel the concept of lyrical Realism becomes useful rather than a panicky push for market share.

Madame Bovary is considered realist literature, but The Beautiful and the Damned is Modernist, but after reading both this past semester, I couldn't help but feeling: had they been published in the same period, they would be categorized together. They both share the same stylistic qualities, the chief of these being the "lilting musicality" you mentioned (a term I've found apropos on a number of occasions).

Yes, Modernism focuses internally while Realism focuses externally on society, but you can argue the source of Madame Bovary's plight comes from either way, and do the same for Anthony Patch's.  Furthermore, Flaubert works with more flamboyant descriptions than other Realists, say Tolstoy, and some of Fitzgerald's work, along with other Modernists like D.H. Lawrence, don't contain quite the economy or style innovation attributed to other Modernists like Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, etc. 

That's where I think this idea of lyrical Realism could aid literary discussions, as well as give a point of reference in discussing authors like Jefferey Eugenides or Marilynne Robinson (who's doing an open forum at my Uni in March on Gilead, followed by Banville, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aleksander Hemon, and then Nicole Krauss) other than the broad, null, and relatively all-inclusive "Literary Fiction."

Of course, I realize most of this is subjective and nit-picky.  As "Thomas Pynchon" put it (in a spot-on parody piece, hence the quotes around the name [the original post since vanished - GT]: the academic/critical circle jerk, and category dissection means little when getting down to actual writing and actual reading, but as long as the radio's playing I might as well sing a harmony. And you can always let me know when I'm off-key.

Again, I understand there's a lot here, and that you're doing a lot there, and I certain took my sweet time with this, so no rush to response and only address what you feel needs addressing, and I appreciate anything along with your time.

Cheers,
Ryan Celley

===

13/3/2013

Dear Ryan,

Well, looks like the margin is shrinking. I'm supposed to be making my PhD chapter 1 notes intelligible, which seems the perfect opportunity to catch up on the more rewarding store of unreplied-to emails.

Your supervisor is absolutely right about the ebook issue. It's developing so rapidly that it's a little bit redundant to make any claims at this stage. There's a wider debate emerging over copyright, intellectual property, enclosures and so on - Lewis Hyde's Common as Air which I still haven't read.

Saw a crazy story just this morning about a company called DEFCAD, which is being media-tagged as 'Pirate Bay for 3D weapons printing'. The owner, Cody Wilson, uses a combination of very scary survivalist/pro-gun lobby rhetoric with a wider pro-Marxist/socialist rhetoric of decentring 3D blueprinting intellectual property out of corporate hands. Like, WTF?

The mussel abstract sounds fantastic. I'm very much enamoured of Jason W. Moore's theory of world ecology=world economy right now and what you've said speaks straight to that. Problems inherent in only thinking of the economic value of the mussel - even in the environmentalist ambition to sue the fuck out of the corporations ('scuse me French, as they say on Blackadder).

Not sure if I've already mentioned the Millennium Assessment Group's Ecosystems Services report? Again, trying to position the ecological within an economic framework, thinking of biodiversity indicators as part of the 'services' which enable the resource services of food, oil, water, etc. that power structures around agriculture traditionally thinks of as important in land use.

What about the food chain sustained by the mussels? The value in cleaning/filtering, or the threat of absorption of heavy metals and magnification in mammalian and bird predators, which climbs into human diet? Don't get me wrong, it's not about substituting economic frameworks for ecological ones, but that they're one and the same thing.

You should check out things like 'Wall Street is a Way of Organizing Nature' - an interview on Moore's website. He's heavily technical in his language, but also inspirational in how he applies this new methodology to give fresh insight into historical, geographical, colonial and (although he's less good on it) cultural developments.

The litfic/literary debate is a good line of inquiry, at least for writers. The main risk when it goes beyond creative thinking is that it falls too easily in to the trap of marketing. And what you say about literature 'standing the test of time' is an interesting one: much of the stuff we read today as 'classic' sold next to nothing when first published. Kafka (most notably), Eliot, Pound, etc.

Rarely do you get immediate popularity with this stuff. Dickens, arguably, used particular dissemination techniques to reach wide audiences - Shakespeare also. But the cult comes after, primarily. Other writers, like John Clare, come and go in fashion, popular at first, then abandoned for having been popular, then rediscovered much later in a new context.

The danger with talking about what literature can be is that it falls into fixed patterns - look at Bloom's mad attempts at it, which amounts to isolating himself in an ivory tower (population: 1), and opening himself up to all manner of discrediting, counter examples, etc.

Alternatively, I stumbled across an interesting project at a conference recently, about Natsume Soseki's theory of literature. Applying a principle of early psychological study - using rational scientific discourse to understanding the irrationality of storytelling - is a fruitful one, although just one perspective. But he has some kind of formula: f(F), which denotes the smaller idea of intellectual endeavour delivered with the greater idea of emotional impact, as a requisite of literature's quality. All very complex, and probably I didn't understand it fully, but he said something great about something being "like washing blood with blood", which makes me think he knew what he was talking about.

I think you're right with your example of Flaubert/Fitzgerald: the idea of qualifying Literature beyond its most abstract definition (as Soseki attempts), has to be historically contingent. Which is why the study of literature isn't going to disappear any time soon, despite an instrumentalised governmental agenda, or increasing global corporatism.

Sure, you can parody the fruitlessness of that, but isn't that perspective (and the Salon's parody) simply contingent in its own way to the economic rationality of our current society? And isn't literature a way of deconstructing these habits and working out what a better society might look like, even if the best ideas will always be hijacked to speak for power, rather than truth to power?

Creative writing is, for me, a utopian endeavour, couched in the problems Jameson points out, but still, we need optimism more than ever these days. At least writing poetry keeps you from refreshing your share prices on the stock market pages every five minutes, right?

But at heart, if you hadn't guessed it, I'm an imagination-fundamentalist, which in itself has been enabled by the current economic rationalism. Or something. Problems within problems within problems, but unlike capitalism, there's an infinity of imaginative frontiers to exploit, but only limited commodity frontiers before the world eats itself.

More thinking out loud - have you finished that story draft yet?

Best,
George

===
Final part tomorrow.

Letters from/to a young writer (2/4)

13/11/2012

Dear George,

My sincerest apologies for the delay.  Now that I have another four years away from the bumbling back and forth of politics, I'm finally finding some free time.

Thank you again for the response amidst the warzone of a semester it sounds like you're having, though I bet that barn would have eventually needed an interesting design choice or two; I hear even the pearly gates have some graffiti.

I definitely sympathize; college life in the States is a bit different from The Social Network: a little less free time and a little more backstabbing. For the mildly ambitious, that is. The collegiate system is entirely accommodating if the life-goal is just a piece of paper and a few keggers; I on the other hand have set myself up in a situation requiring the production of two in-depth research studies (one for Linguistics and one for Environmental Economics), along with a whole slew of essays and final examinations.  This on top of a weekly op-ed I do for the school paper, my newly appointed position as poetry editor for the university's recently rebooted literary review, and a 15 hour part-time job filling out Excel spreadsheets. I say all this only to show my sympathy though, not to attract any.  I can only imagine how much of a laugh a PhD candidate must get from this sort of to-do list.

While I have made sure to leave time to read, the last few books left on your list (Eugenides, McGregor, and Pamuk) are being used by other classes (most disappointingly Pamuk, after watching the interview you attached), so I am not permitted to check them out of the library until next semester. Rest assured, they will most likely be digested come late Spring.

In the meantime, I've taken to my "Books I've always wanted to read but never had the time for" list, and am currently between The Sound the Fury and On the Road (I completely agree with your misanthrope-caution, so I figured these two would balance quite well). I've also made sure to wread (sometimes I find it nearly impossible not to read something), and I've tried to write down what comes out of it. I, at least, always seem to take for granted the dynamic force a simple act of "writing it down" has on the thought process, understanding, feeling, etc.  It also makes good fodder to throw onto my anonymous stream-of-consciousness-like-blog.

I can't thank you enough for the detailed explanation in response to my inquiry. The counter-article definitely puts Smith's into perspective, and the follow up adds a real-world narrative I was unaware of. Like any good explanation, it triggered at least a dozen spin-off questions, and when I began composing them in this message, I realized most were due to being uninformed rather than being confused, and your workload would probably appreciate it if I found sources elsewhere and rehash them. I would like to start a dialogue around this when you get some free time though, if you don't mind.

I would also ask about some brief future-tense guidance regarding a project I'm looking at next semester. I have to participate in a "senior economics seminar" - essentially a class dedicated to a thesis for my Economics major. I was considering either comparing and contrasting the publishing industry and the recording industry in their respective switches to the digital medium, or the implications of the recent suit over ebook pricing (behind paywall), but I was unsure of either's relevance, present state in discourses, etc.

As mentioned, you don't have to return an articulate and in-depth response at the present (especially given the vagueness of what I just proposed), but I was wondering if you could help point me in the right direction when that time comes.

All the best, as always,
Ryan Celley

===

10/12/2012

Dear Ryan,

First of all, apologies for the month-long delay in replying. I could say get used to it, but hey, it's not personal, it's a lifestyle choice. Also, by the sound of your own workload, I'd be better off welcoming you to the club. As long as the endeavours are spiritually fulfilling, who can blame you?

Dialogue away about lyrical realism, realisms in general! And if you only hear hollow echoes in the digital cavern, remind me and I'll come back to you quicker than if I'm left to my own devices in the shadows. But this isn't part of a coherent discourse, as far as I'm aware - the ideas in discussion have only been around seriously for a decade or so, at least in public presentation. Someone may well be joining the dots, but that hasn't filtered through to me except in the kind of broad and insufficient sweeps by Smith and others.

I'm more interested in your Environmental Economics thing than the ebook thing, by the way. Because they are fundamentally connected, right? Since you wrote, I assume you've heard the big stories about Penguin/Random House. Google things like 'Amazon is trying to kill us' and you'll get some alternative perspectives. But what's the bottom line? Metabolism and commodity production, intangible enclosures acts, intellectual property and the assertion of power structures in digital contexts...

Yeah, man, they're onto us, which is why it's safer to go undercover as a conspiracy theorist, until we can blow the lid on the whole caboodle, but in the meantime, some more reading:

Robert Spencer, Ecocritism in the Colonial Present (free online PDF, possibly)

and

Lewis Hyde's Common as Air

Vive la [something or other]!

Best,
George


===

Part 3 tomorrow.

Letters from/to a young writer (1/4)

5/10/2012

Hey George,

I hope this semester is finding you well. I'll refrain from sprinkling the introduction with too many colloquial necessities that attempt solidarity, as I would be forced to humorously embellish them to assert both my masculine identity and want of not appearing bothersome (but inadvertently revealing personal insecurities). However, I would like to say in a truly truthful and honestly honest fashion that I now, more than ever, appreciate all that you and the other instructors did for us this summer.

I do miss it dearly, from the pure literary immersion, to the unabashed sense of camaraderie, and even an afternoon sitting on the sunny back porch of the Dirty Duck while bashing 50 Shades of Grey. (I had a graduate friend recently try to explain to me that it's art. I hope I don't sound too pretentious if I call him a "poor bastard").

I suppose if that winding sentence is replacing the traditional "How are you?" in a letter, this part would be the "I am fine." Although it was very small, I submitted my first piece: a five hundred word short for NPR's Three Minute Fiction contest. Consequently, I got my first rejection note. Now I can start putting "Writer" on my résumé and touting it at blind dates, right? That's how I assumed it worked (I kid, of course).

It was probably best this be my first rejection, as the prompt was lackluster, and I wasn't incredibly fond of Brad Meltzer (afterward, I went back and re-edited a negative review I did of The Millionaires back in High School, just to show him who's boss). I haven't had enough time to write anything I feel comfortable submitting otherwise, but I have found a very small writing group in their first year on campus, and I have thus realized just how spoiled I was at Warwick. I have also begun volunteering with an after-school program affiliated with the Midlands Center for Expressive Arts to help middle school children write creatively.

I would also like to follow up on a less personal and more academic point. I am currently enrolled in a class on Realism literature, and one day after class I asked my professor about lyrical Realism, to which she responded as having never heard the term. Having only the Zadie Smith article you gave us and a very vague memory of your mentioning it, I was quite useless when she asked what I meant by it.

So I guess my question is simply, what is lyrical Realism? Smith places postmodern authors in opposition to lyrical Realism, but postmodernists are typically seen as opposing modernists, who are in turn seen as opposing realists. Where does lyrical Realism fall, or is it more of a Venn-diagram relationship? Is it a movement, or just a categorization of novels devoid of the self-awareness in post-modernism?

Speaking of post-modernism, I finished Gravity's Rainbow (which I absolutely loved, though getting lunch with one of my favorite professors immediately afterward, David Cowart, probably gave the experience an unfair advantage since he just published another book-length analysis of Pynchon in January of this year), and after doing so I started knocking out titles on your recommended reading list. Right now I'm on American Pastoral, and I can't tell you how helpful and enjoyable the recommendations are so far. Roth and Camus are proving to be good palate cleansers after such a winding puzzle of a novel.

I'm not counting the required reading for my realism class at the moment because, well, I've never really been a fan of Madame Bovary to be honest. I've also been alternating between David Foster Wallace's short stories and Fitzgerald's shorts (the DFW is mostly to hold my own when talking with Professor Cowart about his newest project: the relationship between the Thomas Pynchon/Don Delillo generation and the David Foster Wallace/Chuck Palahniuk generation), and I'm finding the regiment quite pleasing. I've always been a fan of balance. I will say that your list in itself (so far) gives a wide enough spectrum without going into unenjoyable territory. A perfect balance of expansion and familiarity. I can't imagine how coveted a mixtape of yours must be.

I apologize for the tangents, self-deprecation, and continual praise, which must be getting tedious by now. At the very least, I appreciate you getting through my lengthy and impromptu burst of communication.

Forgetfully Yours,
Ryan Celley

===

22/10/2012

Hey Ryan,

Firstly, term/semester: they both suck. I had just about recovered from too many (very enjoyable) commitments over summer, and got back into reading and writing on the PhD, when term started and shot holes into my plans spelling out a big 'fuck you, George' in the barn walls.

That said, I'm not not-writing, I'm merely not putting in as much energy to it as I feel like I want to. This is an endless kind of worry and panic and niggle, but shouldn't be ignored, as it's better to feel like you want to be writing more, than writing lots and feeling like you want to lie on a sofa at home in a dressing gown.

As to being a writer now, yes. Collect those rejections. I don't know if there's a milestone to reach, but one prof who just started teaching with us this year collected 60 and took about 12 years to place his first fiction book. In Turkey however, you only really join the club when you get your first death threat. Go figure - and set your own standards. Personally, I don't call myself a poet (David Morley's on there too, along with many other interesting poets) and for tax reasons call myself an editor, not a writer. Keep reading, then start wreading. (Go on, google it.)

Yes, Zadie Smith's "lyrical Realism". Here, read this first: Garth Risk Hallberg on whether it's really all that exciting. Ostensibly this is a self-professed avant gardist trying to police the boundaries of avant gardism; in other words, it's a lorra ole balox. On the other hand, the aside in the early parts about lyrical Realism points to something else happening subtly in the book media, which in brief:

1. Corporatisation of the trade means an increase in retail, publishing and taxonomies of book markets.

2.  'Literature' (aka wtf?) gets hemmed in and panics and starts pushing out the qualities of 'literary fiction' (as distinct from literature as chalk from cheese) without acknowledging centre/periphery debates, or ideas of taste, preference and the intrusion of the markets into this traditional approach to book publishing.

3. A backlash occurs, mostly spearheaded by writers of what was recently know as 'slipstream' (China Miéville is probably shoulder to shoulder with Toby Litt in this, but also Scarlett Thomas, and any number of others mixing and remixing genre tropes with more serious 'grand', playful or experimental narrative techniques), suggesting that 'literary fiction' is in itself a kind of genre, or has within it trends and characteristics that suggest homogeneity.

When these things come from publishers, it means there's money to be made. When it comes from writers disinvested of direct financial gain, or academics (in this case, Zadie Smith is in the latter camp when she writes essays), then there's a point being made underneath the superficial whining of 'writers hard done by'. Slipstream, for example, got hijacked by publishing, got its own table in Waterstones, and the honourable thing to do (as done by Litt, Miéville, etc.) was to stop using the term and move on - China mentions this in interview somewhere.

(Cut out all the 'Two Paths...' stuff about McCarthy as avant garde - it's unfortunate rubbish; McCarthy's writing, especially Remainder, isn't a patch on Pynchon, Foster Wallace, or, going back a little ways, any of the French Oulipians, symbolists, existentialists et al who influenced him. In British terms, Smith does JG Ballard and Ann Quin and any number of very exciting genre writers - of SF, of fantasy, etc. - a disservice by positioning McCarthy in these terms. But you've read Hallberg's Millions article, or at least the intro, so I'll stop there.)

So, returning to this point about 'litfic', what are its dominant qualities?

A certain lilting musicality to the sentences, which drowns out the sense somewhat, substituting the substance of character, meaning and the whole form=content issue for a kind of narrative trance. Like pouring whiskey down someone's throat while you saw off their souls. This musicality is often called 'lyrical', or 'poetic'.

An approach to realism that, to put it in a blunt, neo-avant knee-jerky kind of way, "Forgets that Joyce's Ulysses ever happened". In this, a struggle arises which has been much documented in literary circles and diaries and interviews and stuff, to do with the subject of 'authenticity'. In fact, this issue of authenticity has become so problematic, you might say that's all Jonathan Frantzen ever writes about. (This is one of the cheekiest statements I've made in a long time.)

Your question sums up quite nicely: "Is it a movement, or just a categorization of novels devoid of the self-awareness in postmodernism?"

Or: It's a set of novels written with a void in them, desperately trying to cohere into a movement (read: guild, lobby group) to protect their pitiful share of the book market.

The issue Smith raises is to do with homogeneity in the industry, and her limited range of references, her 1+1=2 comparative approach, limits what she is saying. In a wider social context you could link this to the growing movement to decentralise ideas of national identity, dialect, etc. in Britain [OMG this statement is so dated now! - GT], which Smith is very much a product of. The BBC didn't allow accented broadcasters until about fifteen years ago, unless they learned 'received pronunciation'.

Anyway, you weren't asking for an essay, though it was an essay question, but hope this is a kind of guidance. Behind the reading list I gave you, you could insert this kind of contextual architecture, but you have to remember it's bullshit. I watched an interesting video interview with Orhan Pamuk recently and he gives a very brief answer to the question of what advice he'd give to aspiring novelists: don't listen to anyone else's advice. Learn to do it yourself. Everything here is just my version of reality/lyrical Realism, so you'll have to work it out yourself. You're reading enough exciting stuff, by the sound of things, that you can look forward to a career in editing at the very least, if you keep at it [Also dated - congrats on the job!]. But remember to keep writing too.

Also, a personal thing: be wary of reading too many alcoholic misogynists/misanthropes. Try and play off the Mailers and the Roths and the Celines and the Hemingways &c. &c. (there are so many of them!) with some antidotal stuff: Stein, Adorno, Ballard, Quin, etc. where the same kind of issues might occur, but handled far more intelligently and generously and humanely, even at their bleakest. Some say (and I understand this) that you learn as a writer to separate out the person from the product. I agree, but you can't separate the person's politics from the literature and moral breadth is as important as technical breadth.

A mixtape from me is nothing like a reading list from me. I have over-cultivated literary breadth at the expense of other art forms. When you're through the books, let me know if you want more - but focus on your studies also; that's important. I imagine all US college study is a bit like what happens in The Social Network, unfortunately, but hey, at least it gives you time to read and write. And wread.

Best,
George

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Part 2 tomorrow.

'lyric urgency' vs. 'stratified histories of place' (Skoulding)

George Ttoouli on Keats vs. Critchley / mystery vs. expression

A new web project by Sophie Mayer kicks off in September, which you'll have to wait for. More details when it launches, but I was skimming through the draft interviews and was struck by a number of poets who claimed to have started writing because of reading Keats – myself included. This got me thinking about inspiration and background. For many it's the poets we encounter in school, often the familiar, white, male curriculum names like Keats and Wordsworth, which decide if we'll chime or not with the wider world of poetry. And of that familiar library, Keats stands out when you're young and impressionable.

Something Zoe Skoulding says in her editorial to the latest Poetry Wales: “Perhaps there are certain kinds of poems that are more easily written in youth, if lyric urgency is considered the ultimate value of the poem. However, age offers something else... a nuanced identification with the stratified histories of place.” Keats has that lyric urgency in abundance, a young poet who speaks to young poetry readers. He chimes, he captures youthful activity, even while his technical skill remains immature at times (though highly advanced for his age, but noticeable more in poems peripheral to his canonised odes and narratives) and his leaping at emotion is often uncomplicated by experience, still fixated on the passions and disillusionments of coming of age.

This led me briefly into wondering about the problems inherent in poets who aren't culturally rooted in British Romanticism, but are curricularised by a British Council-driven literary mould. My recent tastes stem from immersion in more experimental writing, kickstarted by university library shelves, which were stocked by the staunch, brilliant, alternatively-bespectacled perspective of Peter Larkin. (Names like Geoffrey Hill, John James, JH Prynne; Frances Horovitz, Marianne Moore and Lyn Hejinian, which I read randomly, with no sense of connections, movements, history. The gaps in my grasp of aesthetic grouping, in literary inheritance, are still vast.)

A sidenote emerges from this. The curriculum didn't teach me about poetry that is self-conscious about its processes, its intentions, that states within it an aesthetic manifesto. Take Olson's declaration of 'SPACE' in Call Me Ishmael, or (another recent joy to read) Emily Critchley's broadside on his masculine opening of the field (in the Spring 2012 issue of Poetry Wales), 'Some Curious Thing II': “& the extent to which SPACE is constructed in gendered terms is an interesting question / it is always an interesting question to write back the projection of body or SPACE or / urban creatures, who look suddenly cute snuffling round in the trash”. Critchley's subject is, in part, social organisation and social thought, but primarily you get a sense of the theory of space, of poetics, of a particular brand of feminism. The poem doesn't just enact space in its extravagantly long lines, its almost-prose, but discusses that formal tradition of projectivism and gender in theoretical terms. In other words, it 'nuances' itself with a sense of historical positioning, to return to Skoulding's phrase again, with an exposition of source. It joins the river and doesn't pretend it was born a fully formed Sealife Centre. (I've also started watching dolphin documentary The Cove, which is astonishing, upsetting, and points to the political problems in hiding one's roots/sources.)

Keats goes for the jugular of the emotion, not exposing, perhaps not aware of, the concepts feeding his poem. The narrative and imagery carry the meaning; the source of these things is glossed, not the point of the poetry. But the prosody works within formal, conservative lines to convey very subtle enforcements of content; and the content is patriarchal, lusty, laden with the kind of stock fantasies that frankly, a male poet writing today ought to question. (I know, a gross oversimplification, but up to a point very few British canonised poets methodically counter the pentametric conservative social values that make me think of women in corsets and white men killing natives on a tennis lawn).

By contrast, Critchley and Olson, in these particular pieces I've mentioned, work from a structural challenge to the norms of poetic tradition, using the essay form, prosaic lines, a splattergun of page space (yes, that's a technical term), while also incorporating a discussion of their respective counter-approaches as an additive to traditional ideas of a poem's subject. The world is not seen or represented directly, in either series; instead, the camera's focus is on the interaction between ideas about the world and the point where the physical world meets those ideas. (And while Olson still hasn't shuck off that patriarchal stuff, he at least invites a degree of interrogation of his SPACES and now this discussion sounds like it's heading towards latex gloves and stripsearches...)

And I said to myself, mid-ponder, No, self-reflexivity seems a little too irritating, too much a metastatic contagion, with an emphasis on the 'static'. Yes the focus has moved one place along to promote understanding about human perspective, but there's the danger of total detachment from the world. Or something like that. I think I need to unpick that a little, because it doesn't mean either Olson's or Critchley's poetry leaves me cold – far from it. But that when it's mishandled, this technique of exposing one's own processes, one's thinking, one's skeleton, is at risk of losing its reference in the actual world.

Then, in the spirit of this kind of poetry, I started asking where this particular argument comes from. It's from reading Keats, isn't it? It's from being moulded by the kind of poetry that isn't interested in its own processes, in exposing its mechanical operations – what's the phrase from architecture? structural expression? – but instead progresses by a kind of mystery, or worse, mysticism, in how the language comes by its emotive and intellectual qualities. The one or the other should be decided by the purpose of the poem.

At this point I'm purely speculating, but isn't the 'mysterious' approach, as against the 'expressed' one of transparency vs. snobbery? Is there a conflicting political demonstration in which of these directions you choose to take your own poetry? Even 'leftist' poetry can have within it an authoritarian control, a sense of wanting to cover its traces - a condescension towards the reader. And sometimes right-leaning poetry works towards justifying its content with questions and an exposition of process, while also carrying a kind of elitist closure. Keats seems decidedly mysterious when compared to Wordsworth's deeper interrogations of process and the self's relation to environment, for example.

Again, a simplification, as I think this is one of the discussions that Simon and I consistently return to, although the conversation tends to sit on the tails of particular poets who do or don't fulfil our preferences, without travelling much distance into the wider picture. Perhaps that would be stating the obvious too much? But this also seems to be a criticism we've had of one poet we've encountered recently, [name deleted, we may get to this in full], who has the strength of a massive marketing machine behind them, but little discussion of where their poetics comes from. But for now I'll stop where I am and see if anyone has ideas for ways to take this further - reading, ideas, examples, etc.

"a very remarkable collection of trees"

The Editors discuss Nathan Thompson's the arboretum towards the beginning (Shearsman, 2008, £8.95)

GT: Dude,

Seeing how we haven't yet started that review and Nathan sent us that collaborative piece he did with Rupert a few weeks ago, do you think we can get the ball rolling?

How about this for kicks - cos I know you said you had a lot of ideas about word placements and so on - what do you make of the use of the word 'arboretum'? I noticed Luke Kennard also used the word in his first collection a number of times, and a quick google of "exeter arboretum" (exact phrase) came up with this: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/conifers/index.htm. So they both studied at Exeter and they both drew inspiration from the arboretum, would be my fairly educated guess. But what the hell does it symbolise in Nathan's work? A place of safety or diversity? This from the above web link: "The Arboretum was begun by the original owner of Streatham Hall, R. Thornton West, who employed the firm of Veitches of Exeter and London to plant a very remarkable collection of trees."

I like that as a description of Nathan's book: "a very remarkable collection". 'Remarkable' in this instance meaning, for me, that it sets out its own limits in opposition to other poetries (including Luke's, which is remarkable in its own way) with great precision, calling attention to itself, or specific points within its boundaries.

Wotcha,

G

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ST: Hey man.

My first encounter with Nathan's collection was through a slightly hyperactive haze of caffeine and Day Nurse, but thought it was wonderful. As for the question about the arboretum, my own feeling is that it doesn't matter quite what it means in a purely semantic sense. Think of it as a free-roving signifier that means whatever it has to mean at any given moment.

What does interest me is the degree to which Nathan's work is feels like part of a wider trend in recent poetry towards what I would tentatively label the 'Harwoodesque'. There are a few poets - Michael Ayres, Peter Hughes, Ian Davidson - whose work shows the influence of Harwood's elusive style of storytelling, and Nathan's collection is very much part of this set.

(I would hope that these poets are part of an advance guard, who will usher in a new era when Harwood's work is more widely appreciated for what it is: one of the great contributions to 20th century poetry. But that might be too much to ask).

Anyway, in particular, I like the way in which various elements of a wider narrative - the arboretum amongst them - keep drifting in and out of Nathan's poems, so that the reader is left to put the pieces together. The process is strangely collaborative, if that makes any kind of sense. We are not spoon-fed a linear tale, but have to pick our way through the signs and symbols he puts in our path. Much like navigating a wood. Or, indeed, an arboretum.

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GT: Okies.

I thought for a moment you were going to sidestep my question completely with a kind of 'arboretum schmarboretum', but well recovered.

The Harwood point is probably key. I haven't met a poet who didn't like his work (maybe I don't move in circles where those people go, though for circles probably you could read 'sewers'), but the more important point there is the influence he's having. There's something here of the nicest (in tone) parts of Harwood. I get the sense of Nathan building a jigsaw out of several mixed up, partial jigsaws. So yes, rather than inherently meaningful symbols, there are things presented as symbols from which the reader can draw meaning.

(If I had to concede anything positive to postmodernism as a concept, I suppose that would be it. It would be grudgingly conceded, and still won't make me want to use the term as anything but an insult to intelligent critical thought. Sorry, putting the muzzle back on that personality.)

But the nature metaphors - the wood, the arboretum - don't quite stand up for me as analogies for this collection. There's something decidedly not-urban about it, but equally something not-rustic. I guess the part that strikes me most is the cultivated sense of reality. It's as if the narrative voice is always reaching to try and impose (in the nicest possible terms, even when he's burning down every civic edifice in the town) a subjective view of reality.

Nathan's got a good handle on the idea of an unreliable narrator. It reminds me of Bill Pullman's character in 'Lost Highway' - "I like to remember things the way I want to remember them, not how they actually happened." Only there's a fair bit of beauty here, gentleness, mixed in with the darker sides. Perhaps a tone of oblivious violence, or clumsiness might be a better description, mixed in with a zippehdidoodah approach to life. The first image that ever attracted me to his work was, "scattering glass like the slow explosion of surprise fennel" from 'Lilly's Planetarium'. Like smashing a chandelier to make it even sparklier, even though there's a whole room full of people underneath it.

Backatcha.

G

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ST: Yo.

A point that Jonathan Bate makes in The Song of the Earth seems important here: that the form of the pastoral is predicated upon the loss of an imagined Eden. It attempts to sing the praises of nature or the countryside, even as it registers the fact that such a pre-lapsarian condition of unity with nature is always already past. Bate says this much more eloquently, but essentially Arcadia can only ever be discussed - invented, even - from the vantage point of Rome. The idea of nature poetry is a condition of 'high' or 'late' civilization, so there's no real disconnection between the highly cultured and worked nature of Nathan's poems, and the reading of them - metaphorically, at least - through the lens of ecology. But that's a little knotty and pedantic, and doesn't really help to move the discussion on.

Oddly enough, I was thinking of cinema a great deal when reading these poems. Nathan's is an intensely cinematic poetics. By that I do not mean that his work is simply visual - though it does have an impact at the level of the image - but rather that the narrative techniques of cinema (bascially, editing as a narrative tool) are applicable to Nathan's technique. He builds narrative through ellipses and jumps - just as in Eisenstein's theory of montage, disparate images, when juxtaposed, can create a new meaning, a third meaning - rather than leading the reader by the nose. David Lynch is actually quite instructive in this context.

This cinematic quality is present at the level of the smallest building blocks of the poem, too, not just within the bigger (narrative) picture, and Nathan's use of what I would call juxtapositional simile throughout is very interesting (by that, I mean the technique Pound employed in 'In a Station of the Metro': "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough".) In traditional simile, the second image - the 'like' component - is subsidiary to the primary image, and as such is alive only insofar as it is yoked to a dominant 'real' image. In juxtapositional similes, both images share the same degree of weight and significance, and by drawing them together without the glue of 'like', the meaning of both is amplified, without either image being rendered secondary to the other.

Here's a favourite of mine, from 'service': "winter steaming off the corrugated roof singing and rattling a kettle on a ringed hob". There are clearly two distinct events taking place here: it is raining (likely heavily), and someone is making a cup of tea. But the reader, given the absence of 'like', is free to read the images as connected, or as discrete. We are not, importantly, hidebound by the 'like'. The absence of 'like' frees the images and, paradoxically, makes them more real and concrete. Indeed, that feels like one of the great strengths of the collection: the degree to which the real, the objects of the everyday, are brought to the fore, even as they are dislocated and rendered dream-like by Nathan's structural jiggery pokery.

Sorry, that was a little long-winded. Over to you. By the way, why don't you sign off your emails Yours, Ttoouli? If I were you, I would.

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GT: Well, why don't you sign your emails off at all? The temptation for me to put in 'Up Yours, / Ttoouli' would be too great, whoever I was emailing. Even my own mother.

Your point about juxtaposed simile is really important and it won't be unnecessary repetition for me to go through it again in detail. It's a basic building block here which I hadn't yet framed clearly. I've seen that kind of shaping and spacing used in different ways - to capture a sense of whispering (David Morley's Mandelstam Variations), or of waves (Carol Watt's Wrack), but here there's something more quantum about it, forcing the reader to fold two units of sense together, as if they've been spliced to be read simultaneously.

Interesting we were looking at Brian Joseph Davis the other day. Some of that folding springs to mind, particularly the Greatest Hits stuff, where he crams an entire album of songs into one track. Nathan's work is less violent, less about cacophony than, as you say elision and cinematic montage. I'm particularly taken by how this creates multiple meanings, in, say, 'laws of attraction': "sweetening the philistine edges / of your dimly lit ornamental music // I expect the frogs will be at it for some time / winking like ellipses in brilliant prose". There's the immediate juxtaposition of an evening scene, waterway, mating frogs, and the internal scene, the intimate artistic experience.

That leads me to a point about prose techniques deployed here. The middle section especially takes on characterisations - the female love interests, the love rival - the vasectomist - and the arsonist. The way these things recur are like plot threads. Things like the stolen harmonica, aforementioned, show up repeatedly. It's as if the poetry is appealing to the prose reader in me, who attaches sympathies to objects and characters, and desires to know the outcomes to their predicament.

That seems to be the effect of the whole book. It builds sympathy for the narrator's subjective passion for the world, but maintains a kind of delicate longing, aims towards resolution - 'will Petrarch get his Laura?' kind of thing, in lines like, "she is elusive as tinnitus" ('purloining a fritillary') or with the general presence of the arsonist and the vasectomist - destructive or negative voices that have to be overcome in order to reach the love song at the end. Although that in itself implies a strange failure, or reversal: "this will be / the last winter before the graves open / for the Queen of Hearts"; and the last lines, "goodnight my love / I meant it all" seems to ram home the point.

Keats is checked early on in the collection and a helpful signpost, a poet who almost never allowed his subjects to attain their fantasies. Here the fantasy seems attained and then let go of, as if the whole collection has been building a narrative tension, only to turn its back on a resolution: "it's time to click my heels / and go to Kansas". It's like a mild send up of the happy ending, the 'no place like home' of Hollywood. For all the subjectivity, the various plots, played sympathies, defamiliarised representations of reality - i.e. all the brilliant technical displays - there's a flesh and blood heart pumping this stuff along, a genuine sentiment.

Right, will stop there. Back to the grind.

In comradeship,

G

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ST: I don't sign off my emails because whenever I use my name, Satan gets a little bit more of my soul. It's in the contract I signed, which is why I is as clevva as I is, and stuff.

There's not much I can really add to your last round of comments - they got to the heart of the matter succinctly and eloquently - but I would add that in many regards, Nathan's focus upon the processes of subjectivity (I noticed this most of all in a poem entitled 'projection digressions', which is kind of an internalised account of a train ride along the coast) places him much more within the sphere of classical modernism rather than that of its upstart offspring postmodernism. Your comment concerning the genuine sentiment underlying Nathan's work ties in with this: underlying the poems, too, is the assumption that the self is a given - fractured, certainly, and often at war with itself, unsure of its motives, but definitely there, in some form or another throughout.

If I could add anything, it would relate to the matter of humour, which neither of us have hit upon as yet, and which I would see as vital to the essential humanity of Nathan's writing. It's a hazy, woozy, absurdist kind of humour, more akin to Guy Maddin or Jacques Tati, but it is humour nevertheless. Most overt in this regard is 'casting calls are almost complete', which runs in its entirety:

the black cat in the arboretum is to be played by a black cat

because out of all the applicants she was by far the most beautiful

There's a wonderfully deadpan tone to this that I love, and it recurs at other moments too ("you know it's been good when / 'all night' is closed"). There is, of course, a natural affinity between poetry and comedy: both rely upon the subversion of expectations; both often relish the joy and excitement of language for it's own sake; both rely upon leaps of logic - comedy with the unexpected punchline, poetry with metaphor and simile - that rope together disparate realities to create a new unity: the gag, or the image. Both are, most importantly of all, essentially impervious to analysis: however much you pick apart lines like "He may have ocean madness, but that's no excuse for ocean rudeness" (Futurama) or "The spruces rough in the distant glitter / / Of the January sun" (Wallace Stevens, 'The Snow Man'), they'll never fully give up their secrets. They simply are. That's why we keep on reading, I guess, however jaded we get, because there's always something to surprise us. Nathan's work certainly fits the bill.

Right, shall we try and trim this into a cogent review?

S
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GT: Nah, sod it. I'll just lop off the subject headers, chop it together and bung it up.

You can order the arboretum towards the beginning from Shearsman Books. You can read some of Nathan's work at Gists & Piths.