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.
Showing posts with label Mainstream vs Avant Garde. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mainstream vs Avant Garde. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 July 2016
Wednesday, 27 July 2016
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
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.
Final part tomorrow.
Tuesday, 26 July 2016
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.
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.
Monday, 25 July 2016
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.
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
===
Part 2 tomorrow.
Part 2 tomorrow.
Monday, 19 March 2012
Umberto Eco on avant-gardism
"Though it is commonly believed that avant-garde artists are out of touch with the human community in which they live, and that traditional art remains in close contact with it, the opposite is true. In fact, only avant-garde artists are capable of establishing a meaningful relationship with the world in which they live.[9]"
-- Umberto Eco, 'Form as Social Commitment', p.142, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (published in Italian in 1962).
Note to page 142:
"9. Actually, the problem is much more complex than it might appear from the generalization I have resorted to here for the sake of theoretical convenience, in order to isolate a particular discourse. What I have defined above--with the exaxmple of Schonberg, an artist who finds himself at the very beginning of a new muscial evolution, at a crucial juncture, and whose validity and good faith are absolutely unimpeachable--is a "model" avant-garde act, the Ur-avant-garde (in which Ur- indicates not just a chronological order but also a logical one). In other words, my argument would be quite simple and indisputable if, in the course of cultural evolution, there had been only one instance of the avant-garde. But, in fact, contemporary culture is a "culture of avant-gardes." How can we explain such a situation? We can no longer make a clear distinction between a rejected tradition and an avant-garde that proposes a new order, because every avant-garde is the negation of a previous avant-garde, which, however, given its relative contemporaneity, cannot yet be considered as a tradition in relation to the avant-garde that is negating it. Hence, the suspicion that a valid act of Ur-avant-garde may often be the stimulus for an avant-garde manner, and that, today, "to be avant-garde" may well be the only way of belonging to a tradition. This situation is often seen as the neocapitalist conversion of artistic rebellion. In other words, the artist is a rebel because the market wants him to be one. Therefore, his rebellion has no real value, since it is only a convention. But on close inspection, it is not difficult to realize that what we are again confronting here, in this "denunciation," is the natural dialectic between invention and manner which has always existed in the history of art. Every time an artist invents a new form that involves a profound change in the vision of the world, he is immediately imitated by a legion of pseudo-artists who borrow the form of his art without, however, understanding its implications. It is precisely because of the inevitability of such a phenomenon, and of its frequency in a civilization such as ours (where things are used up so rapidly and change is so sudden that no novelty is ever new for long) that it is particularly important that every avant-garde action be immediately negated by a newer invention and thus prevented from becoming manner. The combination of these two dialectics produces a constant alternation between apparent innovations, mere mannerist variations on a theme, and real innovations, the negations of these variations. Thus, forms that have been negated by a number of successive avant-gardes often retain a power that the newer ones do not have.
"On the other hand, we should also note that if avant-garde methods are often the swiftest and most direct way of confronting and dismantling a declining artistic situation, they are not the only way. Another exists within the very order that is being negated: parody, the ironic imitation of such an order (Stravinsky's alternative to Schonberg). In other words, a worn out, alienating form of expression can be negated in one of two ways: one can dismantle the modes of communication on which it is based, or one can exorcise them via parody. Parody and irony can thus be seen as viable, subtler alternatives to the more common, revolutionary ardor of the avant-garde. There is also a very dangerous, but plausible, third possibility: one can adopt the communicative forms of a particular system in order to question and challenge that very system--critically use mass media to raise the consciousness on the part of the audience which would only feel negatively provoked by the more destructive and less accessible acts of the avant-garde."
-- Umberto Eco, 'Form as Social Commitment', p.142, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (published in Italian in 1962).
Note to page 142:
"9. Actually, the problem is much more complex than it might appear from the generalization I have resorted to here for the sake of theoretical convenience, in order to isolate a particular discourse. What I have defined above--with the exaxmple of Schonberg, an artist who finds himself at the very beginning of a new muscial evolution, at a crucial juncture, and whose validity and good faith are absolutely unimpeachable--is a "model" avant-garde act, the Ur-avant-garde (in which Ur- indicates not just a chronological order but also a logical one). In other words, my argument would be quite simple and indisputable if, in the course of cultural evolution, there had been only one instance of the avant-garde. But, in fact, contemporary culture is a "culture of avant-gardes." How can we explain such a situation? We can no longer make a clear distinction between a rejected tradition and an avant-garde that proposes a new order, because every avant-garde is the negation of a previous avant-garde, which, however, given its relative contemporaneity, cannot yet be considered as a tradition in relation to the avant-garde that is negating it. Hence, the suspicion that a valid act of Ur-avant-garde may often be the stimulus for an avant-garde manner, and that, today, "to be avant-garde" may well be the only way of belonging to a tradition. This situation is often seen as the neocapitalist conversion of artistic rebellion. In other words, the artist is a rebel because the market wants him to be one. Therefore, his rebellion has no real value, since it is only a convention. But on close inspection, it is not difficult to realize that what we are again confronting here, in this "denunciation," is the natural dialectic between invention and manner which has always existed in the history of art. Every time an artist invents a new form that involves a profound change in the vision of the world, he is immediately imitated by a legion of pseudo-artists who borrow the form of his art without, however, understanding its implications. It is precisely because of the inevitability of such a phenomenon, and of its frequency in a civilization such as ours (where things are used up so rapidly and change is so sudden that no novelty is ever new for long) that it is particularly important that every avant-garde action be immediately negated by a newer invention and thus prevented from becoming manner. The combination of these two dialectics produces a constant alternation between apparent innovations, mere mannerist variations on a theme, and real innovations, the negations of these variations. Thus, forms that have been negated by a number of successive avant-gardes often retain a power that the newer ones do not have.
"On the other hand, we should also note that if avant-garde methods are often the swiftest and most direct way of confronting and dismantling a declining artistic situation, they are not the only way. Another exists within the very order that is being negated: parody, the ironic imitation of such an order (Stravinsky's alternative to Schonberg). In other words, a worn out, alienating form of expression can be negated in one of two ways: one can dismantle the modes of communication on which it is based, or one can exorcise them via parody. Parody and irony can thus be seen as viable, subtler alternatives to the more common, revolutionary ardor of the avant-garde. There is also a very dangerous, but plausible, third possibility: one can adopt the communicative forms of a particular system in order to question and challenge that very system--critically use mass media to raise the consciousness on the part of the audience which would only feel negatively provoked by the more destructive and less accessible acts of the avant-garde."
Saturday, 19 January 2008
Aggressive Interview #1:
Rupert Loydell, Editor, Stride
The 'avant garde', 'experimentalism' in poetry, all that stuff: waste of time, yes?
Not at all. My own inclination would be that the avant-garde is where interesting stuff happens and then in due course filters back into the mainstream. Media and literature are fickle things and what is derided at the time often turns up later to surprise us: see, for instance cut-ups and collage and the 90’s phenomenon of mash-ups in music.
But the people who care about experiments in language, they don't matter, do they, in a wider society?
Who is to say what affects society? I don't know anyone who is out to ‘change the world,’ more that they are interested in language. On a personal level I've learnt that being able to be approachable and talk about my work in plain English wins over audiences.
So who actually matters when it comes to reading poetry? Why?
Anyone who is pushing boundaries. We all need amusing and entertaining, but the things that change the world are films/music/poems/novels that challenge us and make people think. On the poetry front, I for one am tired of shaggy-dog poems with a punch line. I'm far more intrigued by the big projects of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tony Lopez and Charles Olson.
There is an implication in some circles that without experimentation coming from the margins into wider society, society would stagnate. (Well, it's an idea I put forward in classes for debate.) But a common criticism of the avant garde is that it has sometimes (e.g. Eliot, Pound, et al, pre-World War 2, or Mottram, Griffiths, et al, 1970s) taken disproportionate control of mainstream channels in order to promote minority interests, to the detriment of wider readerships. You say, "Who is to say what affects society?" but this is an example of someone taking the reins and controlling. This is bad, yes?
If people understand how language (or paint, or photography, whatever) works then they can understand a wide variety of art forms. Postmodernism suggests linear narratives & histories are an outdated construct and that lots happens simultaneously and in a network. I would agree with this notion.
I would also argue that we live in an age of more and more diversity and smaller and smaller audiences. We can do what we want and probably find an audience for it. I don't know many poets, avant-garde or not, chasing fame and fortune. They, and I count myself in this, simply want their work read – and, in the main, the internet now facilitates that process.
Society and the media manipulate and are manipulated. That seems the way of things to me. I'm inclined towards democratic anarchy and individual responsibility – the latter means I would encourage people to think for themselves and engage with life in the fullest sense, including the arts.
I don't really want to get into a Mottram and Griffiths debate again. I think the Poetry Society saga they were involved in has been blown out of all proportion by both sides. I am on record elsewhere, and am happy to be so again, saying that actually in the late 70s and early 80s the exciting poetry stuff was happening elsewhere in London anyway. I didn't expect the Poetry Society to be relevant or exciting, there was too much improvised music & film, performance poetry, postpunk music, and exciting visual arts and dance/performance theatre going on to worry about damp rooms in Earls Court, or who was controlling the duplicator in the basement.
You say "the avant garde is where the interesting stuff happens", but this is relative. If the “interesting stuff” is only interesting to a minority, then surely it is merely “stuff that interests geeks”? You point out that some stuff does cross over, like cut up and collage techniques, which implies that the geeks get left behind. Do you think geeks deserve more recognition for what they do, or should they continue to work in obscurity and let people with a better understanding of the mainstream carry their ideas across to society? And why?
Who you calling a geek? As I said in my last answer, the world has more and more small networks. I'm happy in my network[s] of readers, colleagues, friends, publishers, students and fellow writers. Human beings all have different tastes, and that's fine.
We all need entertaining at times – so sometimes I watch TV and sometimes I like funny rhyming poetry – but I can't abide people telling me they are writers when they don't understand how language works and what it can do. You don't have to like Jackson Mac Low or Charles Bernstein's poetry, but it's not incomprehensible: if you move beyond content, the poems work in the same ways that mainstream poets do. That is the work is constructed with language, with words, deliberately organised and arranged for the viewer (even if a chance procedure has been used in the writing process).
I always get my students to approach a poem with that in mind, to accept it as finished work the way the author wanted it – and to engage with how it has been made and what it might be doing, then on to content and what it says, and lastly whether or not they like it (which I'm not that interested in anyway; we're usually looking at poems to find out about poems, not the students' tastes).
And to close, a two part question about “shaggy dog poems with a punch line”: Why are you tired of them? And, given the prevalence of this kind of work in current publishing, doesn't this suggest that it has more importance to poetry's readership than you give credit for? [I'm thinking partly of Pound's loathing of 'How to write' manuals, but his feeling that there was something a student of language and writing could learn from them - but what?]
I'm confused that you think marketing and mainstream publishing has anything to do with readership? We all know the 'big' publishers don't sell a lot of poetry books apart from a few authors (Carol Ann Duffy, Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, etc). It's fashion and marketing, and I don't worry about it.
I've played some of those games in the past as a publisher, sometimes to good effect, but basically they absorb a lot of time and effort that can be better used actually publishing work and getting readers. More than ever, with print-on-demand and the internet, and the current state of the mainstream book trade, it's easier than ever to sell books and find readers. However, it's harder than ever to break the financial and fashionable strangleholds of the publishers who cling to the outdated publishing model of warehousing long print runs, and investing huge amounts of money supporting teams of staff and wining & dining competition judges. Those days are gone. Salt and Shearsman prove it – they are currently where the poetry powerhouses are.
As for why I don't like poems that are shaggy dog stories… I don't want to know answers, I want more questions. I don't want to empathise with an author, I want to be told something new. I don't want confession, polemic, opinions, wise thoughts or epiphanies. I think there are more interesting things to be said and more interesting ways to say them. That probably makes me a geek in your reference terms above, but I can honestly say I want poems to challenge, excite, confuse and astound me. Small-minded narrative squibs usually don't do any of that. I like poems I can return to time and time again; that continue to befuddle and confound, amuse and irritate me.
I really do think that works, such as The Waste Land and The Cantos, Berryman's Dream Songs, The Maximus Poems and others, last because they can't be pinned down, however many books get written about them. They continue to intrigue, because of their very ambition, complexity and language. We need more ambitious writers – whether they are revitalising a traditional form (there seems to be a spate of sonneteers around at the moment) or creating their own projects. Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts project is just such an intriguing and ambitious work; Robert Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues project also.
===
Rupert Loydell's latest collection of poetry, An Experiment in Navigation, will be published by Shearsman in April 2008. See also Stride Books, Stride Magazine
Not at all. My own inclination would be that the avant-garde is where interesting stuff happens and then in due course filters back into the mainstream. Media and literature are fickle things and what is derided at the time often turns up later to surprise us: see, for instance cut-ups and collage and the 90’s phenomenon of mash-ups in music.
But the people who care about experiments in language, they don't matter, do they, in a wider society?
Who is to say what affects society? I don't know anyone who is out to ‘change the world,’ more that they are interested in language. On a personal level I've learnt that being able to be approachable and talk about my work in plain English wins over audiences.
So who actually matters when it comes to reading poetry? Why?
Anyone who is pushing boundaries. We all need amusing and entertaining, but the things that change the world are films/music/poems/novels that challenge us and make people think. On the poetry front, I for one am tired of shaggy-dog poems with a punch line. I'm far more intrigued by the big projects of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tony Lopez and Charles Olson.
There is an implication in some circles that without experimentation coming from the margins into wider society, society would stagnate. (Well, it's an idea I put forward in classes for debate.) But a common criticism of the avant garde is that it has sometimes (e.g. Eliot, Pound, et al, pre-World War 2, or Mottram, Griffiths, et al, 1970s) taken disproportionate control of mainstream channels in order to promote minority interests, to the detriment of wider readerships. You say, "Who is to say what affects society?" but this is an example of someone taking the reins and controlling. This is bad, yes?
If people understand how language (or paint, or photography, whatever) works then they can understand a wide variety of art forms. Postmodernism suggests linear narratives & histories are an outdated construct and that lots happens simultaneously and in a network. I would agree with this notion.
I would also argue that we live in an age of more and more diversity and smaller and smaller audiences. We can do what we want and probably find an audience for it. I don't know many poets, avant-garde or not, chasing fame and fortune. They, and I count myself in this, simply want their work read – and, in the main, the internet now facilitates that process.
Society and the media manipulate and are manipulated. That seems the way of things to me. I'm inclined towards democratic anarchy and individual responsibility – the latter means I would encourage people to think for themselves and engage with life in the fullest sense, including the arts.
I don't really want to get into a Mottram and Griffiths debate again. I think the Poetry Society saga they were involved in has been blown out of all proportion by both sides. I am on record elsewhere, and am happy to be so again, saying that actually in the late 70s and early 80s the exciting poetry stuff was happening elsewhere in London anyway. I didn't expect the Poetry Society to be relevant or exciting, there was too much improvised music & film, performance poetry, postpunk music, and exciting visual arts and dance/performance theatre going on to worry about damp rooms in Earls Court, or who was controlling the duplicator in the basement.
You say "the avant garde is where the interesting stuff happens", but this is relative. If the “interesting stuff” is only interesting to a minority, then surely it is merely “stuff that interests geeks”? You point out that some stuff does cross over, like cut up and collage techniques, which implies that the geeks get left behind. Do you think geeks deserve more recognition for what they do, or should they continue to work in obscurity and let people with a better understanding of the mainstream carry their ideas across to society? And why?
Who you calling a geek? As I said in my last answer, the world has more and more small networks. I'm happy in my network[s] of readers, colleagues, friends, publishers, students and fellow writers. Human beings all have different tastes, and that's fine.
We all need entertaining at times – so sometimes I watch TV and sometimes I like funny rhyming poetry – but I can't abide people telling me they are writers when they don't understand how language works and what it can do. You don't have to like Jackson Mac Low or Charles Bernstein's poetry, but it's not incomprehensible: if you move beyond content, the poems work in the same ways that mainstream poets do. That is the work is constructed with language, with words, deliberately organised and arranged for the viewer (even if a chance procedure has been used in the writing process).
I always get my students to approach a poem with that in mind, to accept it as finished work the way the author wanted it – and to engage with how it has been made and what it might be doing, then on to content and what it says, and lastly whether or not they like it (which I'm not that interested in anyway; we're usually looking at poems to find out about poems, not the students' tastes).
And to close, a two part question about “shaggy dog poems with a punch line”: Why are you tired of them? And, given the prevalence of this kind of work in current publishing, doesn't this suggest that it has more importance to poetry's readership than you give credit for? [I'm thinking partly of Pound's loathing of 'How to write' manuals, but his feeling that there was something a student of language and writing could learn from them - but what?]
I'm confused that you think marketing and mainstream publishing has anything to do with readership? We all know the 'big' publishers don't sell a lot of poetry books apart from a few authors (Carol Ann Duffy, Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, etc). It's fashion and marketing, and I don't worry about it.
I've played some of those games in the past as a publisher, sometimes to good effect, but basically they absorb a lot of time and effort that can be better used actually publishing work and getting readers. More than ever, with print-on-demand and the internet, and the current state of the mainstream book trade, it's easier than ever to sell books and find readers. However, it's harder than ever to break the financial and fashionable strangleholds of the publishers who cling to the outdated publishing model of warehousing long print runs, and investing huge amounts of money supporting teams of staff and wining & dining competition judges. Those days are gone. Salt and Shearsman prove it – they are currently where the poetry powerhouses are.
As for why I don't like poems that are shaggy dog stories… I don't want to know answers, I want more questions. I don't want to empathise with an author, I want to be told something new. I don't want confession, polemic, opinions, wise thoughts or epiphanies. I think there are more interesting things to be said and more interesting ways to say them. That probably makes me a geek in your reference terms above, but I can honestly say I want poems to challenge, excite, confuse and astound me. Small-minded narrative squibs usually don't do any of that. I like poems I can return to time and time again; that continue to befuddle and confound, amuse and irritate me.
I really do think that works, such as The Waste Land and The Cantos, Berryman's Dream Songs, The Maximus Poems and others, last because they can't be pinned down, however many books get written about them. They continue to intrigue, because of their very ambition, complexity and language. We need more ambitious writers – whether they are revitalising a traditional form (there seems to be a spate of sonneteers around at the moment) or creating their own projects. Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts project is just such an intriguing and ambitious work; Robert Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues project also.
===
Rupert Loydell's latest collection of poetry, An Experiment in Navigation, will be published by Shearsman in April 2008. See also Stride Books, Stride Magazine
Thursday, 25 October 2007
George Ttoouli - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest (response) (response) (response)
This reminds me of a discussion I had with David Hart about whether (and how) poetry, or any creative writing, could be 'taught'. After batting the ball back and forth a few times, he 'closed' the conversation by responding with a poem. The nerve.
But yes, "directionless breeds demagoguery". At the same time, I'm starting to see the benefits of manifestos, perhaps because of your poem. In a way, you write that poem to the agenda, 'Manifestos are False'. And, as Infernokrusherism also shows, manifestos can be a source of creative output, just as any kind of form can be a release on the imagination.
What I'm getting at here, I think, is that there are good manifesto groups and bad ones. Some are hollow, like the ones that attack, deconstruct other poetries and return only with "we are better, we are the best" without defining why. Meanwhile the poetry produced is not fresh - it relies on a conservative approach to taste. Whereas a positive force - "we will do this" - constructs a new centre and uses the creative energy to produce new poetry. (That's possibly part of the reason centres move: as positive movements grow, they mutate, lose sight of their original focus - the doughnut theory of ideological spread.)
Tom's article celebrates the poetry world changing its marketing tack. Embracing Johhny Greenwood, the internet, modern celebrity. But let's not hope we end up with a thousand Luke Wright cut-outs (i.e. stand up comedians who rhyme). He also argues that "The traditional place of the established poet is academia". Actually, that's a fairly recent phenomenon. Poets go where the work is, traditionally, and recently (past thirty years) that means the exploding Creative Writing industries. Before that, libraries (those scummy insular places where nobody goes), banks (ditto), insurance sales (an insular profession if ever I saw one), medicine (all doctors are self-interested parasites), etc.
It winds me up that people think this is a tradition, when we've barely started to map the impact of having university departments chock with poets. In fact, in ten years time we could see a massive shift towards a reading public better able to decide for themselves what they like, reshaping bestseller lists to some other ends, non-Faber centres. It's still a lump, not a doughnut. Dana Gioia, who put this argument forward most eloquently (I'm being sarcastic) based his attack on a misreading of Virginia Woolf and traces things back to the modernists. Who he blames wholeheartedly for a lack of creative vision of his own.
The mainstream and avant gardist movements that are most established and get the most media coverage as a result have doughnutted (this possibly by default: they need to have been around for long enough that they start to spread from their corners and get noticed, so their centres are turning hollow). Look at Prynne's peers spreading about - John James, Andrew Crozier, Barry MacSweeney, the Pickards. And look also at the mainstream coterie - the New Generation poets of 1994, plus hangers on. They've splintered up, spread out; probably some aren't even on speaking terms by now. The more successful create new bases, or pericentres. The less continue to repeat, rant and hark back to halcyon days of artistic energy. (Or more likely, a mix of the two, depending on their mood.)
Aren't we really talking about the public displays of affection or hatred. The point where someone uses a slot in a journal, or other public space, to moan, bitch, denigrate, in order to secure their place and destablise others'. Tom's article points to "unfair but sometimes justified criticisms that poetry is elitist". Where do these accusations come from and where are they directed?
For example: Neil Astley's wild ranting about "the poetry police" in his spate of public appearances a few years ago (the 'Staying Alive' introduction, the introduction to the catchily titled 'Bloodaxe Poems of the Year: 2003: Celebrating the 25th Birthday of Bloodaxe Books', and his StanZa Festival 2005 lecture). Now, what side of the fence was (is?) Astley actually on?
He attacked shadowy cabals of poets around the country, but rarely named names. He was hardly attacking the avant garde - he, more than anyone, knows the damage his and Bloodaxe's credibility would suffer were he to start laying into poets like JH Prynne. (In fact, hasn't he just released an extended version of the 'Collected'? Maybe we can get a review copy. Or someone can write a review for us.)
Astley's rhetoric at the time was incredibly vehement, but really, didn't take any direct casualties. He indirectly implied that certain lists - Carcanet's, Potts and Herd's, etc. - may have lacked diversity, and favoured experimental, alienating poetry, but anyone with half a brain could do their own research and see that the accusations were distorted, or plain untrue, or too generic to be more than wild ranting at the world. Hence the lack of legal suits following what was essentially polemic.
But what Astley did do was adopt the rhetoric of mainstream and avant garde tribalism, laying into the poetry world's infrastructures, editorial lines/tastes and close-minded attitudes. What Astley did do was mimic the only thing that most largescale media channels tend to care about in poetry - the infighting and divisiveness that makes for a few column inches of scandals. It's like the East Coast/West Coast hiphop ruck. Something that the media latches onto because it's an easy angle to follow. But it's all very '70s, just like the "all poets are academics" line. The ideas are hollow today.
So, Neil Astley, doing what he does anyway: marketing. That's a creative mind at work if ever I saw one - media hijacking, in fact. Frozen lightning off the page. What this highlights for me is the sense that some arguments, some battles within the avant garde/mainstream debates and so on, are very hollow. Whereas others are charged, driven by a positive creative spirit. And a lot of the rhetoric boils down to marketing, because it appears in media spaces that are increasingly geared to PR or marketing. Which doesn't make for a healthy critical atmosphere.
But enough already. (And don't expect a bloody poem out of me either.)
But yes, "directionless breeds demagoguery". At the same time, I'm starting to see the benefits of manifestos, perhaps because of your poem. In a way, you write that poem to the agenda, 'Manifestos are False'. And, as Infernokrusherism also shows, manifestos can be a source of creative output, just as any kind of form can be a release on the imagination.
What I'm getting at here, I think, is that there are good manifesto groups and bad ones. Some are hollow, like the ones that attack, deconstruct other poetries and return only with "we are better, we are the best" without defining why. Meanwhile the poetry produced is not fresh - it relies on a conservative approach to taste. Whereas a positive force - "we will do this" - constructs a new centre and uses the creative energy to produce new poetry. (That's possibly part of the reason centres move: as positive movements grow, they mutate, lose sight of their original focus - the doughnut theory of ideological spread.)
Tom's article celebrates the poetry world changing its marketing tack. Embracing Johhny Greenwood, the internet, modern celebrity. But let's not hope we end up with a thousand Luke Wright cut-outs (i.e. stand up comedians who rhyme). He also argues that "The traditional place of the established poet is academia". Actually, that's a fairly recent phenomenon. Poets go where the work is, traditionally, and recently (past thirty years) that means the exploding Creative Writing industries. Before that, libraries (those scummy insular places where nobody goes), banks (ditto), insurance sales (an insular profession if ever I saw one), medicine (all doctors are self-interested parasites), etc.
It winds me up that people think this is a tradition, when we've barely started to map the impact of having university departments chock with poets. In fact, in ten years time we could see a massive shift towards a reading public better able to decide for themselves what they like, reshaping bestseller lists to some other ends, non-Faber centres. It's still a lump, not a doughnut. Dana Gioia, who put this argument forward most eloquently (I'm being sarcastic) based his attack on a misreading of Virginia Woolf and traces things back to the modernists. Who he blames wholeheartedly for a lack of creative vision of his own.
The mainstream and avant gardist movements that are most established and get the most media coverage as a result have doughnutted (this possibly by default: they need to have been around for long enough that they start to spread from their corners and get noticed, so their centres are turning hollow). Look at Prynne's peers spreading about - John James, Andrew Crozier, Barry MacSweeney, the Pickards. And look also at the mainstream coterie - the New Generation poets of 1994, plus hangers on. They've splintered up, spread out; probably some aren't even on speaking terms by now. The more successful create new bases, or pericentres. The less continue to repeat, rant and hark back to halcyon days of artistic energy. (Or more likely, a mix of the two, depending on their mood.)
Aren't we really talking about the public displays of affection or hatred. The point where someone uses a slot in a journal, or other public space, to moan, bitch, denigrate, in order to secure their place and destablise others'. Tom's article points to "unfair but sometimes justified criticisms that poetry is elitist". Where do these accusations come from and where are they directed?
For example: Neil Astley's wild ranting about "the poetry police" in his spate of public appearances a few years ago (the 'Staying Alive' introduction, the introduction to the catchily titled 'Bloodaxe Poems of the Year: 2003: Celebrating the 25th Birthday of Bloodaxe Books', and his StanZa Festival 2005 lecture). Now, what side of the fence was (is?) Astley actually on?
He attacked shadowy cabals of poets around the country, but rarely named names. He was hardly attacking the avant garde - he, more than anyone, knows the damage his and Bloodaxe's credibility would suffer were he to start laying into poets like JH Prynne. (In fact, hasn't he just released an extended version of the 'Collected'? Maybe we can get a review copy. Or someone can write a review for us.)
Astley's rhetoric at the time was incredibly vehement, but really, didn't take any direct casualties. He indirectly implied that certain lists - Carcanet's, Potts and Herd's, etc. - may have lacked diversity, and favoured experimental, alienating poetry, but anyone with half a brain could do their own research and see that the accusations were distorted, or plain untrue, or too generic to be more than wild ranting at the world. Hence the lack of legal suits following what was essentially polemic.
But what Astley did do was adopt the rhetoric of mainstream and avant garde tribalism, laying into the poetry world's infrastructures, editorial lines/tastes and close-minded attitudes. What Astley did do was mimic the only thing that most largescale media channels tend to care about in poetry - the infighting and divisiveness that makes for a few column inches of scandals. It's like the East Coast/West Coast hiphop ruck. Something that the media latches onto because it's an easy angle to follow. But it's all very '70s, just like the "all poets are academics" line. The ideas are hollow today.
So, Neil Astley, doing what he does anyway: marketing. That's a creative mind at work if ever I saw one - media hijacking, in fact. Frozen lightning off the page. What this highlights for me is the sense that some arguments, some battles within the avant garde/mainstream debates and so on, are very hollow. Whereas others are charged, driven by a positive creative spirit. And a lot of the rhetoric boils down to marketing, because it appears in media spaces that are increasingly geared to PR or marketing. Which doesn't make for a healthy critical atmosphere.
But enough already. (And don't expect a bloody poem out of me either.)
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Simon Turner - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest (response) (response)
Nice comeback. And I think you're perfectly correct that the arguments pertaining to the "nature and meaning of poetry" tend to come to the fore at moments when one is least involved in the process of making, when one is least happy with one's own aesthetic choices. Directionlessness breeds demagoguery, in essence: the creation of a manifesto is so often the need to define a mode of writing - indeed, a mode of being - which does not yet exist. 'Vorticism', of course, never really took off. 'Modernism', a term which evolved organically and stuck, resolutely did take off, and continues sailing through the outer reaches of the galaxy, finding new planets with each curve of its trajectory.
Two addenda: Here you can read an excellent article at Culture Wars by Tom Chivers of pennedinthemargins, which covers much the same ground as my original post, though in a far less melancholic tone.
Below, meanwhile, is a shard of a mock manifesto I made by splicing and rejigging words I'd found from various sources. Make of it what you will:
Manifesto for the False Millennium
page 94
but the Marxists have reduced the poem to a paranoid geometry of suffering. How can we analyse the body in a discontinuous universe? Is the text nothing more than a spoof of nature, a chaos of sexual artifice? Yet still we must persist, recognising the underlying distortions of our readings. It’s time to expel the economy of meaning. Let’s build our writings on emotional concrete, though it seems futile. Let’s freeze lightning and call it a poem. Let the body write the universe as clusters of discontinuous texts. We’ll let the Marxists analyse the underlying “meaning” of our mathematics. Nature persists in its imperfections, its rough instructions. Our ideals reduce the artificial economy to a spoof of its own distortions; chaos is pleasant, after all, like random photographs of paranoid sex. (Observation: the poem, when it contacts us, is like a voice coming through a distorted phone line: rough, sexual, discontinuous.) Switch on the body and the text will write itself. “Meaning” is nothing but the recognition of an underlying emotional futility. There are no ideals in nature. So how might we expel this persistent paranoia? Moreover, how are we to read mathematics in the light of Marxist analysis?
Two addenda: Here you can read an excellent article at Culture Wars by Tom Chivers of pennedinthemargins, which covers much the same ground as my original post, though in a far less melancholic tone.
Below, meanwhile, is a shard of a mock manifesto I made by splicing and rejigging words I'd found from various sources. Make of it what you will:
Manifesto for the False Millennium
page 94
but the Marxists have reduced the poem to a paranoid geometry of suffering. How can we analyse the body in a discontinuous universe? Is the text nothing more than a spoof of nature, a chaos of sexual artifice? Yet still we must persist, recognising the underlying distortions of our readings. It’s time to expel the economy of meaning. Let’s build our writings on emotional concrete, though it seems futile. Let’s freeze lightning and call it a poem. Let the body write the universe as clusters of discontinuous texts. We’ll let the Marxists analyse the underlying “meaning” of our mathematics. Nature persists in its imperfections, its rough instructions. Our ideals reduce the artificial economy to a spoof of its own distortions; chaos is pleasant, after all, like random photographs of paranoid sex. (Observation: the poem, when it contacts us, is like a voice coming through a distorted phone line: rough, sexual, discontinuous.) Switch on the body and the text will write itself. “Meaning” is nothing but the recognition of an underlying emotional futility. There are no ideals in nature. So how might we expel this persistent paranoia? Moreover, how are we to read mathematics in the light of Marxist analysis?
George Ttoouli - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest (response)
Yes, yes, but where does all this posturing come from?
I'm thinking about Lynda Barry's cartoon strip, 'Two Questions', in which her cartoonist persona, hard at the creative act, reminisces fondly about how easy it used to be to create, to enter into the creative flow and enjoy it. And then two questions begin to take over: "Is this good?" and, "Does this suck?"
Barry can't answer these questions. They are unanswerable and eventually she gives up admitting she doesn't know. But this is the point: "To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions, so much is possible. To all the kids who quit drawing... come back!"
Ideology is an adult club. It means: 'We believe we have the answer to what sucks and what's good." The two camps, by deduction, are full of people who have (temporarily?) forgotten the joy of creating poetry. When you've got it, you're doing it, but when you're hung up on the questions of what constitutes good or bad poetry, you're often flailing away in private, producing nothing of merit. The response of many to this is flailing about in public, representing principles of artistic value (not, I stress, 'worth', as the imposition of ideology on creativity is clearly a commodification of the unquantifiable[1]) that are indefensible, but give a sense of community through tribalism.
The hollowness of these values are what probably makes most people despair - readers and the more benign writers of poetry as well. Announcing an artistic manifesto - as the Vorticists prove - is a call to arms as well a way of raising the defenses around a tribe. The media, also, like a good ruck, so they will often latch on, in a minor fashion where poetry is concerned, favouring whichever side is willing to make a bigger fool of themselves in their pages. The extension of this kind of tribalism, through various modes, conceits and also stabilisation within mainstream [2]bastions, is probably worth investigating through the window of anthropological study, as I'm sure it comes in cycles which stack upon the correct traditional Hanoi towers with minor progressive inflections.
But ultimately, "an investigation of the nature and meaning of poetry" when it's based on analysing these self-appointed hierophants (they've been 'vaticinised' like in that godawful opening line of Sean O'Brien's 'Drains' poem), is going to end up biting its own tail because of the inherent emptiness of ideology.
What is interesting is that postmodernist experimentation has managed to parody these ideological movements in order to recapture the childish joy of creativity. For example, the 'Infernokrusher' movement, ("Explosion is the new transgression. Demolition is the new deconstruction") is a context for generating art, rather than a serious group, just as Oulipo isn't really a movement - it's a process for creating work.
__________________________
[1] See Lewis Hyde's The Gift for more detail (yes, I'm a convert, it's a form of ideology for agnostics), or if you're lazy, the opening lines of Robert Graves' The White Goddess, where he describes poetry as having no yardstick by which it can be measured.
[2] When I say mainstream here, I mean ideologies that are accepted widely within marginalised groups as well - for example, the JH Prynne camp is a form of mainstream within the avant garde, despite having only a handful of acolytes within its boundaries and those being of greatly varying styles.
I'm thinking about Lynda Barry's cartoon strip, 'Two Questions', in which her cartoonist persona, hard at the creative act, reminisces fondly about how easy it used to be to create, to enter into the creative flow and enjoy it. And then two questions begin to take over: "Is this good?" and, "Does this suck?"
Barry can't answer these questions. They are unanswerable and eventually she gives up admitting she doesn't know. But this is the point: "To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions, so much is possible. To all the kids who quit drawing... come back!"
Ideology is an adult club. It means: 'We believe we have the answer to what sucks and what's good." The two camps, by deduction, are full of people who have (temporarily?) forgotten the joy of creating poetry. When you've got it, you're doing it, but when you're hung up on the questions of what constitutes good or bad poetry, you're often flailing away in private, producing nothing of merit. The response of many to this is flailing about in public, representing principles of artistic value (not, I stress, 'worth', as the imposition of ideology on creativity is clearly a commodification of the unquantifiable[1]) that are indefensible, but give a sense of community through tribalism.
The hollowness of these values are what probably makes most people despair - readers and the more benign writers of poetry as well. Announcing an artistic manifesto - as the Vorticists prove - is a call to arms as well a way of raising the defenses around a tribe. The media, also, like a good ruck, so they will often latch on, in a minor fashion where poetry is concerned, favouring whichever side is willing to make a bigger fool of themselves in their pages. The extension of this kind of tribalism, through various modes, conceits and also stabilisation within mainstream [2]bastions, is probably worth investigating through the window of anthropological study, as I'm sure it comes in cycles which stack upon the correct traditional Hanoi towers with minor progressive inflections.
But ultimately, "an investigation of the nature and meaning of poetry" when it's based on analysing these self-appointed hierophants (they've been 'vaticinised' like in that godawful opening line of Sean O'Brien's 'Drains' poem), is going to end up biting its own tail because of the inherent emptiness of ideology.
What is interesting is that postmodernist experimentation has managed to parody these ideological movements in order to recapture the childish joy of creativity. For example, the 'Infernokrusher' movement, ("Explosion is the new transgression. Demolition is the new deconstruction") is a context for generating art, rather than a serious group, just as Oulipo isn't really a movement - it's a process for creating work.
__________________________
[1] See Lewis Hyde's The Gift for more detail (yes, I'm a convert, it's a form of ideology for agnostics), or if you're lazy, the opening lines of Robert Graves' The White Goddess, where he describes poetry as having no yardstick by which it can be measured.
[2] When I say mainstream here, I mean ideologies that are accepted widely within marginalised groups as well - for example, the JH Prynne camp is a form of mainstream within the avant garde, despite having only a handful of acolytes within its boundaries and those being of greatly varying styles.
Simon Turner - Come on Guys, Give it a Rest
I was struck recently by a comment in David Jones' collection of prose writings, Epoch and Artist, in which he poured cold water on critical dismissals of abstract art, arguing - persuasively, I think - that abstraction, which Jones takes to be specifically formal in character, i.e. pertaining to questions of compositional balance, tonal characteristics, and so on, is a central component of all visual art, whether abstract or figurative. To reject abstraction out of hand, Jones goes on, is to mis-read, almost wilfully, the direction of modern artistic developments.
The argument in question is taken from a letter Jones wrote to the Listener in 1950, but the views expressed remain pertinent; and whilst the debates surrounding abstract art, and its figurative opposite number, have largely dissipated in recent years, occasionally resurfacing in the form of public spasms over the Young British Artists, or Turner-prize winners whose work involves sheds or animal dung [1], the same argumentative terms have remained a staple, though translated and mutated, within poetry circles. Mainstream commentators have a tendency to occasionally blow off steam about inevitably unnamed 'postmoderns', who are allegedly clogging the universities with dangerous radical ideas, and running 'subversive' literature classes where the entire Western canon is thrown in the rubbish chute in favour of the collected works of JH Prynne (boo, hiss!), which are, of course, treated with an almost god-like reverence [2]. The 'postmoderns' themselves have a tendency to react with quiet dignity, no doubt in private intercut with deep clefts of scorn, though their own polemical reactions to the mainstream are equally visible, in their aesthetic choices rather than their public statements: their places of publication, their shared discourses, their chosen forms and modes of address, all scream 'marginal' from the rooftops.
All this is merely background, however: the crux of the matter is that both ideological camps - and I do truly believe that ideology is at stake here: this is a ruck about the very nature and meaning of poetry in our current socio-economic epoch - seem to be communicating in entirely different languages. In some regards they are, but they share enough of a vocabulary - often revolving around the notion of the aesthetically and ethically correct (sometimes the two are conjoined) - to mean that communication is a possibility, that there might (just might) come a time when the squabbling could be put aside, and everyone could both write and read in an environment where such sectarian politics did not come in to the equation.
One might - more cynically - suggest that such a rapprochement is an impossibility by virtue of the fact that both parties need the mutual antagonism. The mainstreamers can only defend their position - post-Larkin, semi-interesting - if they can persistently raise the spectre of Olson-chewing, Deleuze-spewing barbarians mustering at the gate. The barbarians themselves, meanwhile, might equally be said to thrive upon a narrative in which they are the oppressed and subjugated indigenous populace of some far away land called Experimental Poetry, stomped upon at every turn by the oak-thewed hegemon of the Mainstream Marines. This seems like the most realistic scenario. First of all, both camps are effectively fighting over a ghost - a general poetry readership - which, if it ever existed (and really, there is no evidence to suggest it ever did) no longer does. Moreover, if we take the proliferation of media into account, it becomes impossible to talk about single ideological blocs in some bipartite power struggle. The mainstream is a chimera that we should, frankly, quit whining about all the bloody time: all the energy wasted ranting about the London poetry scene, and how Picador would never publish John James - would John James want to be published by Picador? - would be far better spent writing more and better poems that would blow the mainstream's own rather pedestrian output out of the water. By the same token, the mainstream's bug-bear - a sinister, Prynne-spearheaded cabal of postmodern eggheads lurking in every English department across the country - appears equally illusory: 'postmodernism' cannot be defined in such monolithic terms that it can be used so frequently as an umbrella noun covering a multitude of sins (or virtues, depending on how we read the situation).
The internet, in particular, has unveiled the sheer ridiculousness of the Sharks vs. Jets mentality that seems to dominate certain sectors of the poetry community, revealing as it does a total aesthetic democracy, where any number of styles of writing, from the gentle and Larkinesque to the balls-to-the-wall radicalism of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics or flarf, can find a suitable home. Who edits Poetry Review in any given year is not the be all and end all of our definition of poetry's health; we have to stop using the centre ground as our yardstick. Aside from anything else, the poetry cake that we're all fighting for a share of is too small for such playground politics anyway. Can't we just stop all the fussin' and the feudin'?
_______________________________________
[1] The Daily Mail, as in so many things, is particularly idiotic on this score. Every year they run an 'alternative' Turner prize, where they give an award to a purveyor of 'proper' art - their definition, of course - which is invariably a byword for landscape paintings or portraiture in a god-awful tradition of semi-literate realism, which examples invariably display the visual flair and compositional imagination of a beige turd.
[2] The terms that the mainstream bulldogs use are strangely similar to the aggressive insult 'tenured radicals' which was hurled at survivors of the counter culture on American campuses during the various 'culture wars' that rocked our cousins on the other side of the big drink in the 1990s.
The argument in question is taken from a letter Jones wrote to the Listener in 1950, but the views expressed remain pertinent; and whilst the debates surrounding abstract art, and its figurative opposite number, have largely dissipated in recent years, occasionally resurfacing in the form of public spasms over the Young British Artists, or Turner-prize winners whose work involves sheds or animal dung [1], the same argumentative terms have remained a staple, though translated and mutated, within poetry circles. Mainstream commentators have a tendency to occasionally blow off steam about inevitably unnamed 'postmoderns', who are allegedly clogging the universities with dangerous radical ideas, and running 'subversive' literature classes where the entire Western canon is thrown in the rubbish chute in favour of the collected works of JH Prynne (boo, hiss!), which are, of course, treated with an almost god-like reverence [2]. The 'postmoderns' themselves have a tendency to react with quiet dignity, no doubt in private intercut with deep clefts of scorn, though their own polemical reactions to the mainstream are equally visible, in their aesthetic choices rather than their public statements: their places of publication, their shared discourses, their chosen forms and modes of address, all scream 'marginal' from the rooftops.
All this is merely background, however: the crux of the matter is that both ideological camps - and I do truly believe that ideology is at stake here: this is a ruck about the very nature and meaning of poetry in our current socio-economic epoch - seem to be communicating in entirely different languages. In some regards they are, but they share enough of a vocabulary - often revolving around the notion of the aesthetically and ethically correct (sometimes the two are conjoined) - to mean that communication is a possibility, that there might (just might) come a time when the squabbling could be put aside, and everyone could both write and read in an environment where such sectarian politics did not come in to the equation.
One might - more cynically - suggest that such a rapprochement is an impossibility by virtue of the fact that both parties need the mutual antagonism. The mainstreamers can only defend their position - post-Larkin, semi-interesting - if they can persistently raise the spectre of Olson-chewing, Deleuze-spewing barbarians mustering at the gate. The barbarians themselves, meanwhile, might equally be said to thrive upon a narrative in which they are the oppressed and subjugated indigenous populace of some far away land called Experimental Poetry, stomped upon at every turn by the oak-thewed hegemon of the Mainstream Marines. This seems like the most realistic scenario. First of all, both camps are effectively fighting over a ghost - a general poetry readership - which, if it ever existed (and really, there is no evidence to suggest it ever did) no longer does. Moreover, if we take the proliferation of media into account, it becomes impossible to talk about single ideological blocs in some bipartite power struggle. The mainstream is a chimera that we should, frankly, quit whining about all the bloody time: all the energy wasted ranting about the London poetry scene, and how Picador would never publish John James - would John James want to be published by Picador? - would be far better spent writing more and better poems that would blow the mainstream's own rather pedestrian output out of the water. By the same token, the mainstream's bug-bear - a sinister, Prynne-spearheaded cabal of postmodern eggheads lurking in every English department across the country - appears equally illusory: 'postmodernism' cannot be defined in such monolithic terms that it can be used so frequently as an umbrella noun covering a multitude of sins (or virtues, depending on how we read the situation).
The internet, in particular, has unveiled the sheer ridiculousness of the Sharks vs. Jets mentality that seems to dominate certain sectors of the poetry community, revealing as it does a total aesthetic democracy, where any number of styles of writing, from the gentle and Larkinesque to the balls-to-the-wall radicalism of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics or flarf, can find a suitable home. Who edits Poetry Review in any given year is not the be all and end all of our definition of poetry's health; we have to stop using the centre ground as our yardstick. Aside from anything else, the poetry cake that we're all fighting for a share of is too small for such playground politics anyway. Can't we just stop all the fussin' and the feudin'?
_______________________________________
[1] The Daily Mail, as in so many things, is particularly idiotic on this score. Every year they run an 'alternative' Turner prize, where they give an award to a purveyor of 'proper' art - their definition, of course - which is invariably a byword for landscape paintings or portraiture in a god-awful tradition of semi-literate realism, which examples invariably display the visual flair and compositional imagination of a beige turd.
[2] The terms that the mainstream bulldogs use are strangely similar to the aggressive insult 'tenured radicals' which was hurled at survivors of the counter culture on American campuses during the various 'culture wars' that rocked our cousins on the other side of the big drink in the 1990s.
Monday, 13 August 2007
Simon Turner - What I like about Luke Kennard
What I like about Luke Kennard is the title of his new collection of poems from Salt, The Harbour Beyond the Movie. It has resonances.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his use of repetition. His poem 'The Murderer' contains the word murderer - and the verb forms 'murder', 'murdered', etc - 47 times, to my count. The effect is simultaneously infuriating and hilarious.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his way with simile and metaphor. I like in particular the final line of 'A Pergola of Exceptional Beauty': 'A tower block collapsed in his chest.'
What I like about Luke Kennard, in fact, is often his final - or 'punch' - lines. There are many examples throughout The Harbour Beyond the Movie which are almost as good as the 'tower block' line, but not quite. They are still, however, very good.
What I like about Luke Kennard is the fact that he doesn't really write like any other poet I can think of, which means I can forgo the execrable reviewerspeak shorthand of 'Like Andre Breton wrestling with Billy Collins dressed in a sumo suit, in a vat full of overdosing crabs', or some such nonsense, leaving me with my critical dignity intact.
What I like about Luke Kennard is, whilst his work does not immediately proffer up ready points of comparison with the contemporary poetry scene - which can only be a plus - it does seem indebted to certain strains within American literary postmodernism. I was reminded throughout of Donald Barthelme, a favourite of mine, particularly in prose pieces such as 'Blue Dog' and 'School'. Elsewhere, 'Photographs of the Notebook' reads like a pitch-perfect parody of the literary game playing of Paul Auster, remarkable for its concision and clarity.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his writing's capacity to make me laugh. But it is a bitter laughter, a cruel laughter. The laughter of a misanthropic book blogger with time to kill on a Saturday afternoon. The rain won't stop; I wrote all this in a red notebook I may or may not have stolen from 'Paul Auster'.
What I like about Luke Kennard is the wolf, his finest creation, who spends the prose sequence 'Wolf in Commerce' flirting with communism, moving through capitalism, and culminating in a shift towards 'plutocracy' ('rule by the coldest and furthest away'). Readers of a left wing bent might want to read this as some kind of 'allegory' for the ten years Tony Blair spent in office. I couldn't possibly comment.
What I like about Luke Kennard is the fact that his work has made me rethink my critical method. I am now of the opinion - or perhaps I was of the opinion before, and his work has clarified that opinion for me - that there is no distinction between the formal choices one makes as an artist or writer, and the formal choices one makes as a reviewer. There have recently been many passionate defences of the art of book reviewing, at a time when many newspapers are culling or radically reducing their review sections. These defences have often gone hand in hand with rather more negative criticism of online reviewing, as though there were some rigid hierarchy of opinion, as though print reviewers were gatekeepers, holding back the tide of some putative barbarian invasion from the Internet. This is clearly phooey. There are good reviewers and bad reviewers in cyberspace, just as there are good and bad reviewers in the 'real' world of print journalism: any other interpretation of the situation is rank stupidity. Certainly poetry reviewing in the mainstream press is growing increasingly poor: the books under review display an almost comical degree of aesthetic homogeneity; and the reviews themselves are written in the most uncritical of terms, very much geared towards the consideration of content, of emotional resonances, an approach which tends to leave aside the far more pressing question of whether such work has any value formally, as made work. What is increasingly apparent is that there is a received mode of mainstream reviewing, just as there is a received mode of mainstream imaginative writing. But where mainstream poetry is often vigorous and eloquent in its self-definition (and self-defence), mainstream reviewing is not so self-aware, and is therefore incapable of examining its own processes. Criticism which is written by the whole person, intellect and instinct in total harmony, I propose, must be aware of its own processes, must be willing to take the same formal risks as the work it is evaluating. An earlier attempt at this same article failed in this, and therefore failed outright: it was full of lazy insight and phony eloquence, replete with phrases like 'What this passage manages to achieve - in a remarkably deft and undogmatic way - is to stage all the facets of the debate pertaining to the representation of historical atrocity (pious and phony assertions of the 'death of irony' on the one hand, callous disregard for the loss of human life on the other), whilst remaining unscathed by the ideological excesses of either camp'. It was, in short, written to a formula of academic writing that preexisted the review itself; preexisted, in fact, my reading of Kennard's book, hampering in the process the immediacy of my response.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his brevity. He knows exactly when to stop.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his use of repetition. His poem 'The Murderer' contains the word murderer - and the verb forms 'murder', 'murdered', etc - 47 times, to my count. The effect is simultaneously infuriating and hilarious.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his way with simile and metaphor. I like in particular the final line of 'A Pergola of Exceptional Beauty': 'A tower block collapsed in his chest.'
What I like about Luke Kennard, in fact, is often his final - or 'punch' - lines. There are many examples throughout The Harbour Beyond the Movie which are almost as good as the 'tower block' line, but not quite. They are still, however, very good.
What I like about Luke Kennard is the fact that he doesn't really write like any other poet I can think of, which means I can forgo the execrable reviewerspeak shorthand of 'Like Andre Breton wrestling with Billy Collins dressed in a sumo suit, in a vat full of overdosing crabs', or some such nonsense, leaving me with my critical dignity intact.
What I like about Luke Kennard is, whilst his work does not immediately proffer up ready points of comparison with the contemporary poetry scene - which can only be a plus - it does seem indebted to certain strains within American literary postmodernism. I was reminded throughout of Donald Barthelme, a favourite of mine, particularly in prose pieces such as 'Blue Dog' and 'School'. Elsewhere, 'Photographs of the Notebook' reads like a pitch-perfect parody of the literary game playing of Paul Auster, remarkable for its concision and clarity.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his writing's capacity to make me laugh. But it is a bitter laughter, a cruel laughter. The laughter of a misanthropic book blogger with time to kill on a Saturday afternoon. The rain won't stop; I wrote all this in a red notebook I may or may not have stolen from 'Paul Auster'.
What I like about Luke Kennard is the wolf, his finest creation, who spends the prose sequence 'Wolf in Commerce' flirting with communism, moving through capitalism, and culminating in a shift towards 'plutocracy' ('rule by the coldest and furthest away'). Readers of a left wing bent might want to read this as some kind of 'allegory' for the ten years Tony Blair spent in office. I couldn't possibly comment.
What I like about Luke Kennard is the fact that his work has made me rethink my critical method. I am now of the opinion - or perhaps I was of the opinion before, and his work has clarified that opinion for me - that there is no distinction between the formal choices one makes as an artist or writer, and the formal choices one makes as a reviewer. There have recently been many passionate defences of the art of book reviewing, at a time when many newspapers are culling or radically reducing their review sections. These defences have often gone hand in hand with rather more negative criticism of online reviewing, as though there were some rigid hierarchy of opinion, as though print reviewers were gatekeepers, holding back the tide of some putative barbarian invasion from the Internet. This is clearly phooey. There are good reviewers and bad reviewers in cyberspace, just as there are good and bad reviewers in the 'real' world of print journalism: any other interpretation of the situation is rank stupidity. Certainly poetry reviewing in the mainstream press is growing increasingly poor: the books under review display an almost comical degree of aesthetic homogeneity; and the reviews themselves are written in the most uncritical of terms, very much geared towards the consideration of content, of emotional resonances, an approach which tends to leave aside the far more pressing question of whether such work has any value formally, as made work. What is increasingly apparent is that there is a received mode of mainstream reviewing, just as there is a received mode of mainstream imaginative writing. But where mainstream poetry is often vigorous and eloquent in its self-definition (and self-defence), mainstream reviewing is not so self-aware, and is therefore incapable of examining its own processes. Criticism which is written by the whole person, intellect and instinct in total harmony, I propose, must be aware of its own processes, must be willing to take the same formal risks as the work it is evaluating. An earlier attempt at this same article failed in this, and therefore failed outright: it was full of lazy insight and phony eloquence, replete with phrases like 'What this passage manages to achieve - in a remarkably deft and undogmatic way - is to stage all the facets of the debate pertaining to the representation of historical atrocity (pious and phony assertions of the 'death of irony' on the one hand, callous disregard for the loss of human life on the other), whilst remaining unscathed by the ideological excesses of either camp'. It was, in short, written to a formula of academic writing that preexisted the review itself; preexisted, in fact, my reading of Kennard's book, hampering in the process the immediacy of my response.
What I like about Luke Kennard is his brevity. He knows exactly when to stop.
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
Hidden Forms
I was chatting with someone yesterday who described how he has lately been working with speech recognition software to edit his poetry. He takes one of his old poems and reads it into the computer. The software then invents its own version of the spoken poem as text. He repeats this process until he arrives at something he likes, or can work with.
I put that idea together with this one, from this article over at n+1:
I put that idea together with this one, from this article over at n+1:
Paintings, apart from the very occasional tondo or altarpiece triangle, all start out as rectangles... Its impolite rival and savior is now called postminimalism, but it went by many names: body art, performance art, conceptual art, land art, protest art, process art, anti-art art... Not having been there, we learn about these new art forms from the leftover paraphernalia. Books and museums show us black and white photographs, gallery invites, artists’ statements and manifestos—all of minimal visual interest—and the putatively unrectangular event gets reduced, through a ruse of history, into that very familiar rectangle: the 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of copy paper in a course packet.
It's amazing how unimaginative the process of poetry composition often is. Sitting with paper and pen - often described as the most liberating tools because they're cheap, readily available and can be used in most environments - is the stereotype, the cliché of composition. Strangely, not a lot has changed over the centuries. We've seen phases of oral composition and recital, but that's about it. Poetry on paper, or poetry out of the mouth. Public poetry, such as Gwyneth Lewis' poem for the Wales Millennium Centre, can seem downright experimental in light of the endless trend of paper and pen poets. It's fairly likely, though, that it was composed on a sheet of paper first.
The computer, another kind of paper, was a revolution for writing in some ways. One which many writers seem to reject - any number of them, from Peter Scupham through to A S Byatt, still compose their first drafts in the traditional manner. Those that embrace the technologies delve into the weird like gizmo-addicts - speech recognition software, machine translation tools and text scramblers are bells-and-whistle devices, fast action methods for older techniques of cut ups and language distortion. But the downside of computers is being forced to work within their parameters.
I always get annoyed when a process's limitation, which has been insiduously working upon me, becomes transparent. Some of the new ones are obvious like spelling and grammar checkers. They drive me mad, particularly the automatic capitalisation of new lines (a great, heterogenising act if ever I saw one) - I've heard some creative writing tutors even teach their students how to get rid of it.
It can be used in your favour though. Mario Petrucci used an automatic spellchecker's suggestions on WC Williams' 'This is to say' to make his own poem. Arguably, they bring everyone who can't type or spell competently up to a certain level of mediocrity. It also means they don't bother to read their work through carefully, leading to a neglect of language, perhaps even encouraging laziness. (The rise of blogging may be a sympton of enabling this neglect further.) It also brings people with a bit more deftness down a few pegs, particularly people who aren't so hot with technology and software and find themselves struggling to translate their weird and wonderful page drafts onto a machine.
Cross-platform poetry winds me up. Moving a poem from computer to computer, program to program; even trying to make a poem appear cleanly in blogger without some compromise of layout or font, is an effort beyond what it should be. As one West Indian poet said to me (about the after effects of colonialism on his homeland's language, though it seems relevant), "That's hegemony at work." In response though, poets like Charlie Dark create one-off poems (I think he called them 'dumplings') that he only reads at the particular event he's at and then never again. A kind of theatre improvisation poetry perhaps. It's a rebellion against the infinite array of storage chips, the Google Archiving, the digitisation of life.
Or there's the art-poems, painted straight onto their exhibition surfaces. In Athens during the German occupation, people could be executed for writing grafitti. In that context, a single epsilon, symbolising the Greek work 'eleutheria', or freedom, became challenging, avant garde. A kind of art poetry - the context created the depth of meaning. Banksy-style modern poets perhaps lack the context, but the form of placing your poetry onto walls, into the public domain, is similar, shaping the poet's awareness of audience, the font, the content.
Forms of process can both enliven the imagination and also leave it running in the same hamster wheel as everyone else. I started writing this with a vague sort of optimism at having heard about a new composition and rewriting method. Will it lead to great swatches of charged imagery, or just a fizzle of sparks in a snowstorm? Here at the end, fingers on the keyboard, eyes aching from a day staring at screens, followed by more screen-staring to muster this into the world, paper and pen don't seem so unappealing a recourse.
But at the same time, not much has altered - where is the next advance on the page, or the screen? What other ways do we have to resist? The page is the mainstream when it comes to the tools of the craft. More questions than answers, as usual.
Thursday, 5 April 2007
Simon Turner - Some thoughts on the 'mainstream'
Paul Farley, in September 2006, penned an article in the Guardian Review entitled 'Lines of Resistance', which professed to be a defence of 'mainstream' poetics. Like many such defences, it was actually a thinly disguised attack, and is in a tradition of similar sideswipes, which seem to be making something of a comeback at the moment. The gist of Farley's 'argument' (and it has this in common with other comparable diatribes) is this: 'mainstream' has become a dirty word within poetry circles; the experimentalists have taken hold of the academy, and are preaching a virulent combination of formless poetics and covert Stalinist politics; that 'the modernist century' somehow engendered a 'break between poetry and its readers' (this in spite of the fact that modernism in its most difficult forms is hardly a mass art, so how this could have inculcated a mass exodus of readers is beyond me - the alienation of the 'common reader' from poetry began a long time before modernism. Surely this was a vital component of their discourse on readership and poetry production? Aaaanyway. . .); and so on.
What's interesting, and troubling, about the article - and this is something that Geraldine Monk also noted in her response letter published the following week - is the way it evades the fact that the 'mainstream' is so called because it is the dominant current within modern poetry; it is what most readers read - whether this is because mainstream poetry is more readily available than experimental work is another matter. One might also want to ask where mainstream is a dirty word? On university creative writing courses, perhaps? Not really: St Andrews University, foe example, numbers John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie amongst its teaching staff; Sheffield Hallam's had Sean O'Brien on its payroll, another mainstream attack dog; and Andrew Motion's taught at a number of institutions.
Okay then, the press: except here too the mainstream has much of the control, and where it has occasionally lost power (during the Potts-Herd years at the Poetry Review and Guardian poetry pages) it has, with almost Stalinist ferocity, wrested control back from the enemy. The TLS, the LRB, the de-clawed Poetry Review and Guardian Review, are all distinctly mainstream in their coverage.
Oh, in that case it must be the prizes; the Cambridge collective must have the Forward sewn up. Except, of course, the opposite is the case once again, Neil Astley having pointed towards a Picador-centric bias in the judging system some time ago.
I apologise for this rather heavy-handed irony, but I feel that it's necessary in order to unpick the essentially fraudulent terms of Farley's analysis. Upon even the most perfunctory inspection, the key accusation made in the article - that mainstream poetics are a dying art, and need to be defended against the imagined 'post-modernist' barbarians - is proven to be a lot of hot air. There is, of course, an entirely different agenda at play here, one which Farley attempts to keep behind the curtain; but, sadly, we can still see the shoes. This alleged defence of mainstream values (which seem to be in rude health in spite of Farley's assistance) is in short a bullish assault on 'experimental' poetics (or, rather, experimental poetics as defined by the mainstream, a definition so ill informed that it sees no difference between the popular public poetry of Ginsberg, and the far more rarefied work springing up in the wake of the innovations of the Black Mountain school, the 'British Poetry Revival', and the 'language-centred' poetics of Ron Silliman and co, which to my mind at least represent the dominant inheritances of 'experimentalism' or 'post-avant' poetics on both sides of the Atlantic. Ginsberg's influence, if it persists, can be seen more readily in slam and performance poetries).
Which brings me back to an earlier point: that 'mainstream' when applied to aesthetics is effectively meaningless, as the term only has valency in relation to matters of economic and historical contingency - who is in charge of the big presses, which reviewing organs have the biggest circulation, the class, ethnic and gender make-up of the readership at any given time, etc. The aesthetics of the mainstream will shift according to these dictates; the formula cannot be reversed. That is to say that an aesthetic - whatever that aesthetic is - cannot be mainstream once it has ceased to be the dominant mode of discourse and production. The binary constructed by the mainstream - 'mainstream' vs 'avant garde' is, then, based upon a confusion of categories. The 'avant garde' can lay claim to an aesthetics - one equally dependent upon historical, economic and social contingency, but an aesthetic nonetheless - but the mainstream cannot, or, more correctly, their conflation of aesthetics and economics (of poetry production, and poetry consumption) is deeply misleading. In short, I guess what I'm saying is that when Farley and his mainstream brethren are no longer on top, so to speak, then they will have cause for complaint; but, when that happens, they'll no longer be mainstream, and the terms of the debate will no longer be in their control.
What's interesting, and troubling, about the article - and this is something that Geraldine Monk also noted in her response letter published the following week - is the way it evades the fact that the 'mainstream' is so called because it is the dominant current within modern poetry; it is what most readers read - whether this is because mainstream poetry is more readily available than experimental work is another matter. One might also want to ask where mainstream is a dirty word? On university creative writing courses, perhaps? Not really: St Andrews University, foe example, numbers John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie amongst its teaching staff; Sheffield Hallam's had Sean O'Brien on its payroll, another mainstream attack dog; and Andrew Motion's taught at a number of institutions.
Okay then, the press: except here too the mainstream has much of the control, and where it has occasionally lost power (during the Potts-Herd years at the Poetry Review and Guardian poetry pages) it has, with almost Stalinist ferocity, wrested control back from the enemy. The TLS, the LRB, the de-clawed Poetry Review and Guardian Review, are all distinctly mainstream in their coverage.
Oh, in that case it must be the prizes; the Cambridge collective must have the Forward sewn up. Except, of course, the opposite is the case once again, Neil Astley having pointed towards a Picador-centric bias in the judging system some time ago.
I apologise for this rather heavy-handed irony, but I feel that it's necessary in order to unpick the essentially fraudulent terms of Farley's analysis. Upon even the most perfunctory inspection, the key accusation made in the article - that mainstream poetics are a dying art, and need to be defended against the imagined 'post-modernist' barbarians - is proven to be a lot of hot air. There is, of course, an entirely different agenda at play here, one which Farley attempts to keep behind the curtain; but, sadly, we can still see the shoes. This alleged defence of mainstream values (which seem to be in rude health in spite of Farley's assistance) is in short a bullish assault on 'experimental' poetics (or, rather, experimental poetics as defined by the mainstream, a definition so ill informed that it sees no difference between the popular public poetry of Ginsberg, and the far more rarefied work springing up in the wake of the innovations of the Black Mountain school, the 'British Poetry Revival', and the 'language-centred' poetics of Ron Silliman and co, which to my mind at least represent the dominant inheritances of 'experimentalism' or 'post-avant' poetics on both sides of the Atlantic. Ginsberg's influence, if it persists, can be seen more readily in slam and performance poetries).
Which brings me back to an earlier point: that 'mainstream' when applied to aesthetics is effectively meaningless, as the term only has valency in relation to matters of economic and historical contingency - who is in charge of the big presses, which reviewing organs have the biggest circulation, the class, ethnic and gender make-up of the readership at any given time, etc. The aesthetics of the mainstream will shift according to these dictates; the formula cannot be reversed. That is to say that an aesthetic - whatever that aesthetic is - cannot be mainstream once it has ceased to be the dominant mode of discourse and production. The binary constructed by the mainstream - 'mainstream' vs 'avant garde' is, then, based upon a confusion of categories. The 'avant garde' can lay claim to an aesthetics - one equally dependent upon historical, economic and social contingency, but an aesthetic nonetheless - but the mainstream cannot, or, more correctly, their conflation of aesthetics and economics (of poetry production, and poetry consumption) is deeply misleading. In short, I guess what I'm saying is that when Farley and his mainstream brethren are no longer on top, so to speak, then they will have cause for complaint; but, when that happens, they'll no longer be mainstream, and the terms of the debate will no longer be in their control.
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