derailed commodity

2004-03-12T16:32:00.000-05:00

"We, conscious of the justness of that confusion of tongues [at Babel], recognize the fragmentary as a characteristic of all human striving in its truth and realize that it is precisely this that distinguishes it from the infinite coherence of Nature, that an individual's wealth consists precisely in his power of fragmentary extravagance, and that the producer's enjoyment is also that of the receiver, not the laborious and meticulous execution, nor the protracted apprehension of this execution, but rather the production and enjoyment of that gleaming transience for which the producer contains something more than the completed effort, since it is the appearance of the Idea, and which for the recipient too, contains a surplus, seeing that its fulguration awakens his own productivity--since all this, I say, is contrary to our Society's penchant (and since, indeed, even the period just read could well be regarded as a disquiting attack upon the interjectory style in which the idea breaks out but without breaking through, a style which in our Society is accorded official status), then, having called attention to the fact hat my conduct still cannot be called rebellious, seeing that the bond holding this period together is so loose that the intermediary clauses stand out in a sufficiently aphoristic and arbitrary manner, I shall merely call to mind that my style has made an attempt to appear what it is not--revolutionary."

--Soren Kierkegaard, Either Or: A Fragment of Life. trans. Alistair Hannay. New York: Penguin, 1992.

This is Kierkegaard speaking under the aesthete pseudonym "A" in "Ancient Tragedy's Reflection in The Modern;" In my more skeptical moments, I've entertained the idea of making it the epigraph for the thesis.

2004-03-08T00:14:00.000-05:00

"All the leisure time which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings."
---James Joyce, Portrait of An Artist as A Young Man

2004-03-03T18:59:00.000-05:00

Fascinating comments connecting the nostalgia for debate (of which my lengthy post the other day is surely a, perhaps mild, example) and Debord's Society of Spectacle on fait accompli

Nick's final questions,

Can I wonder aloud if this argument and debate method of exchanging
knowledge and inducing change, discovering truth,
and uncovering greatness is totally bankrupt?
What might replace it? What could replace it?

beautifully frame what is at stake, i think. It is interesting to think about the idea of the debate (especially considered in the context of the shrewdly DNC orchestrated primary election season recently witnessed) as being a sort of spectacle (see my previous comments on the "prurient" interest of those observing a blog/listserv fight), especially since I tend to think of "the debate" in the best sense of the word, as a sort of anti-spectacle--an arena for contesting value in which the parties involved actively participate (I like Charles Berstein's suggestion that a poetry reading could also be thought of as a sort of anti-spectacle--you can't go to a poetry reading to "be entertained;" it's not an arresting experience, but a potentially engaging experience). I find it interesting that the recently attempt by the last active members of the buffalo listserv to revive it didn't call for a debate or a discussion, but a "fight"--in my mind fights are what happens at the point where engaging discourse becomes arresting; there is no longer anything that the observer of the dialogue could take from it other than its status as spectacle.

I am still troubled by the fact that, on the blogs, it seems very difficult to have a sustained interchange in which there is clearly something "at stake," and maybe this is a belief in a sort of dialectical understanding of knowledge that's time may be gone. Despite this qualm, i am very much interested by the idea of blogs as a system of signal response interchange that operates like a network (as opposed to linear/dialectical) model (as I take Nick's comments on signal-response to be suggesting).

A final thought. I reread a great Roland Barthes essay called "Saussure, the Sign, Democracy" (in "The Semiotic Challenge;" trans. Howard, CA UP, '94) in which Barthes discusses the curious parallels between (and near simultaneous emergence of) Saussurean linguistics, democracy, and a financial world that abandoned the gold standard in favor of a system of exchange value. Speaking very crudely, we can draw parallels between all these phenomenon and the emergence of the pluralistic (network) model of exchange about poetics that occurs (has the potential to occur?) on the blogs: there is no positivist "norm" by which to discuss poetics, "the relation to the signified (to gold) [to an aesthetic norm] being uncertain, fragile, the whole system (of language, of currency) [of poetic discussion] is stabilized by the behavior of the signifiers among themselves..." (154; my brackets)

Despite the positive/democratic connotations of this parallel, theories that posit language as a system that operates via the play and difference of signifiers, not via a more stable relationship between the signifier and the signified (still being rudimentary here...) have always induced a great deal of skepticism in me, even though to a large extent I buy into them...Barthes reads a similar anxiety in Saussure:

"There is another Saussure...this Saussure already hears modernity in the phonic and semantic swarming of archaic verses: then, no more [social] contract, no more clarity, no more analogy, no more value: the order of the signified is replaced by teh gold of the signifier, a metal no longer monetary but poetic. We know how much such hearing troubled, even maddened, Saussure, who seems to have seen his entire life pass between the anxiety of the lost signified and the terrifying return of the pure signifier." (156)

The reference to poetry here opens up a whole vast new issue that i don't have time to wade into, but i think the basic analogy i'd like to draw may already be self evident. The anxiety people are feeling about the network of interchange, as opposed to the dialectic of debate, that occurs on the blogs is very similar to the sort of anxiety one might feel when approaching a poem that highlights its own materiality (poeticitiy): one can't help but mourn the loss of the stability presented by a text (or a form of aesthetic discourse) with pretensions towards the normative, but on the other hand awed by the unstable but dynamic system of multivalent reference that is energized by its freedom from positivist standards.

2004-02-24T13:08:00.000-05:00

Considering another angry vote for Nader. Tell me why I shouldn't.

2004-02-24T02:31:00.000-05:00

Howdy folks. I'm really hitting the thesis hard this week, but stay tuned to Derailed Commodity over the next couple of weeks for my two cents on Foreman's "King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe" and some musings on sex(ual politics?) in the poetry of John Godfrey. It's gonna be wild.

A quick thesis preview. The neologism "paratext": on the one hand, so annoyingly jargony. On the other, what a great term to describe the poetics (meaning the actual material poetic statements criticism etc) of the language poets. On the one hand, they're texts that are metalinguistic--the prefix "para-" shares with "meta-" the meaning "beyond" (paranormal). On the other, they are texts that vigorously assert that they're not metatextual/prescribing poetic practice at all, but instead an alternative way to voice the critique that the poetry (the "primary texts" in an old fashioned vocabulary) is (supposedly?) asserting on its own--thus invoking the alternative meaning of "para-," "beside." The whole tension (paradox?) is embodied right there in one nifty term.

2004-02-18T23:31:00.000-05:00

Also, feeling guilty about my caustic post about Dean dropping out. I am really and truly (what a disgusting phrase) sad about it--sad about seeing Kerry and his focus-group stump speech towing the populist line long enough to get the nomination, at which point he'll move things right back to a Clintonian centrist line that will be just wishy washy enough to allow GW to compete with him even as the country goes to shit. I can't believe he has had the audacity to lift Dean's anti-special interest rhetoric when he's more beholden to the lobbies than any other senator. As for Edwards, I can't believe the media hasn't jumped on the fact that the vast majority of his campaign funds come from a single special interest--the trial lawyers.

I still believe Howard Dean was the smartest man in the race, and the man with the best values--it's too bad he didn't have anyone in that campaign that could help him become 'presidential.' His fast, conversational style of speaking made him seem like an average Joe to us in NYC or to the folks in Vermont, but made him sound like a bumbling but cocky New England asshole to everyone else.

2004-02-16T21:57:00.000-05:00

As the Dean Campaign crashes and burns, I find it really funny that a few months ago I posted on this blog that I thought I was being overly pragmatic/compromising my lefty values by becoming involved with a (really, seriously, contrary to popular belief) fairly centrist candidate. It's good to know I'm an abject romantic even in my moments of pragmatism.

2004-02-16T04:39:00.000-05:00

Derailed Commodity is tentatively back online--with the caveat that in some sense I feel like I was doing it all wrong before. We'll see what happens. I was sick, home, working for Howard Dean in Iowa (sob), and then just disillusioned with blogging. This post is a way to try and work through that last problem. So anyway. Away we go.

Been thinking about what would happen if I was suddenly (and honestly?) very confrontational about art/writing, but at the same time questioning the faux confrontational nature of the net, the ridiculous angst of the listserv troll.

It seems to me that in some ways, the current embrace of pluralism, or perhaps more realistically, the unwillingness to voice confrontational (normative? Provisionally normative, if that’s possible?) opinions in public discourse has the effect of acting as a sort of fixer on the scene--in a particularly confrontational metaphor, the current poetry scene seems to me a lot like so many niche cable tv channels who've found their market share and have found that the easiest way to hold on to that chunk of cultural capital is to make sure any newcomers on the scene either fit themselves into one of the pre-existing categories or get out of the way.

Literary bulletin Boards, listservs, and now blogging communities, fascinate me because on the one hand they are a space for discourse that are democratic in a unique way--the amazing leveling effect of the anonymity of cyberspace. But, but--I think that line of thinking is predicated upon the idea that the internet allows for a disembodiment of thought from context in a sort of Rawlsian move that would allow for a conversation untainted by the speakers' positions.

Of course this isn't how it works out in reality--being confrontational is the fast track to internet obscurity--think about the poetics listserv. On the blogs, saying anything confrontational tends to bring down a wave of derision, a confrontational post isn't dialogue, it's a 'flame,' a personal attack--not to say there aren't a lot of personal attacks thinly disguised as artistic arguments floating around out there.

No one ever pays attention to outspoken people on the blogs. The most intelligent bloggers are either those who are almost universally positive, or alternatively avoid polemic in favor of irony and pastiche as a means of critique—a critique which is always only proscriptive instead of productive. When a “flame war” (why is it that term seems so ridiculous to me) gets started, people start paying attention, not because they want to see what the person has to say, but because their prurient interest wants to have a good laugh at people making themselves ridiculous duking it out the old fashioned way.

THE ARISTOCRATS OF THE POST-AVANT POETRY WORLD no longer maintain their position by othering poets of a particular school or ideology, but instead by othering anyone who rocks the boat by having enough conviction in their own position or aesthetic. The mood that governs the New York scene now is not one of democratic openness but is something more like the salons of Stendhal’s Paris—high irony and boredom rule the day at the expense of open discussion, dynamism, poetry.

But now, just because of who I am, I’m already backing off of my own polemic—I feel its something that needs to be said but I can’t say it without admitting that I’m wrestling with it myself, and I already feel my internal ironist laughing. I’ve deeply admired the arguments of Nick Piombino against the infighting that could potentially paralyze the cultural left, and I agree with Charles Bernstein that ultimately we should aim for a literary pluralism that would reject the balkanizing process of canonization.

But canonization is a reality—the literary history currently in vogue has, for example, put Stein and Zukofsky on the syllabus of the 20th Century poetry lecture here at Columbia at the expense of Allen Ginsberg and Alice Notley, a fact that would surely trouble many of the poets who began championing Stein and Zukofsky in the first place. Even as the Language poets quietly insist on the provisional nature of their own paratextual output, they are read as the final step in a dialectical progression by the vast majority of their readers.

SO WHAT NOW?

I’m fascinated by trying to find out what happened in the 70s when the Language Poets in New York “broke” from the St. Mark’s poets. It’s something that really saddens me in some ways because the poets I’ve learned the most from lie on both sides of that “divide” if it can even be called that anymore. The Language Poets (maybe that should be in quotations too) defined themselves against the St. Mark’s scene not only through new institutions (Roof, the Segue Series etc) but through a paratextual community that facilitated a poetic output that remains inspiring and empowering. But as that paratextual discussion moves away from polemic and towards self-caricature, irony, indifference, but most notably disdain of conviction and sincerity, one has to wonder if what is happening is not a sudden embrace of pluralism, but rather a nifty act of self-effacement that would end American literary history with the language poets on top by turning the ideology of the last identified movement into an unassailable (provisional) phantom.

People on both ‘sides’ still talk about the split between the St. Mark’s/New York School crew and the Language poets with a certain amount of mean-spiritedness and bitterness that makes me think that the polemicism at that point was to a certain extent counterproductive. But on the other hand, I can’t help but wish for a new context for discussion about poetics in which

“whatever it is

that we take to be what we judge ourselves by

when we have a conversation

& we say

that’s fucked and that’s not

whatever we go by in that sense”

is more important.

What do you think?

2003-11-28T19:32:00.000-05:00

mmm. My apolgies to my meager audience. Been sick and otherwise occupied layin out the Columbia Review--which should be off to the printer by next wednesday (cross my fingers). I also wrote a long post on Kristen Prevallet's talk "On Elegy" but blogger mysteriously erased it and i don't feel like reproducing it. Instead, here's an exerpt from a recent email to my friend oliver; it's a bit of a rant, but kind of fun. Enjoy.

...What else. Writing is going decently;
got a new poem attatched below that riffs off some favorite quotes of mine
spliced together in weird ways with some other random collage material so
that it al comes out in a randomly conversational way...i dunno, see what
you think. St. Mark's is still fun, tho i had to miss a couple of times due
to the asthma cough/cold combo. Working up a manuscript for that chapbook
contest Creeley's judging...getting a little anxious about it, still at the
point where i really start to dislike the work i did even just a year ago,
ya know, with a few exceptions...hard to get 25 pgs of stuff together...
Last night when i was becoming a little too paranoid reading Dostoevsky i started On
The Road again (ha)...i was thinking about how weird it is that i still
think of Kerouac--and really Ginsberg too in some ways--as such a compelling
model, ya know? What a big cliche and ultimately a dude who was so
misguided in so many ways. But then this moment in American history has so
much in common with his...there's been this cooption of everything American
by the right, coupled with an academic left/artistic avant-garde thats all
but given up on the idea of the American. As a writer i feel like one of
the most valuable things i could do is write toward, or thru, the America
that is not an idea but a commitment to a public sphere that refuses to be
defined; teleological, in the way that the right tries to make it. It's
interesting to think about how Kerouac was able to do that...thru a fiction
that was sort of vaguely populist but also inaccesible (in some of it's
manifestations~Visions of Cody, Desolation Angels) in a sort of way that
turned off both his popular and critical audience, but at the same time connected to Jazz in an astounding way--I think Kerouac, like all the best writers who write on and thru Jazz (Clark Coolidge especially) understood it not only as something that could influence his prosody (as the most boring "Jazz poets" do) but also as something that could serve as a model for a sort of entirely new sort of (smuh!) epistemology, a new way of reading and appropriating the old, and a new way of writing and acting in the present...

Poetry is so much about those questions of audience...when the pen goes to
paper, who is it speaking to and who is it speaking for? Intersting to
categorize poets in that way...for some the interlocutor seems so consistent
thruout their whole project--for others it seems like every poem is probing
the quiet for a new ear. I don't know where i stand on this--i think too
many of my poems are written to my self(ves) as an attempt to start over, to
redefine, to find some ground to stand on, etc etc--but i really like poets
that seem to speak, maybe, even, sure, to confess, to an other that seems
very close. Not that i think that poets traditionally considered
"confessional" (Plath Lowell et al) really do that--speaking, as they do,
thru a form so invested in tradition--to me any real act of confession is a
sort of act of construction, its me telling you how i bring form to all
these "materials...strewn along the ground" as Emerson says.

Ack, enough of all that. Do you ever get the feeling, talking about such
things, that what you're saying is just a pastiche of things you've heard
before? Maybe its an inevitability of talking about talking.

2003-11-18T01:06:00.000-05:00

Still sick and unproductive. Trying to write on Turgenev again (this time an essay). I did get tipped off by the poetics list about this freakish little show that the House Committee on Education and the Workforce put on recently--it's time to write some letters--check out this
press release
Here's my favorite part: "Post-colonial theory was founded by Columbia University professor of comparative literature, Edward Said. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power," continued [Dr. Stanley] Kurtz [of the neocon Hoover Institute]."
And how great is it that the dude's name is Kurtz?

2003-11-14T18:42:00.000-05:00

Has irony ever done anything for anyone except insulate their conscience from the consequences of their own actions? Why am i suddenly sounding so Yeatsian?

2003-11-13T19:35:00.000-05:00

Wondering how other people spend time alone. Am I more productive? Less productive? How much staring at the wall goes on in your world?

2003-11-12T16:27:00.000-05:00

Looking at my blog today (a weird habit i have--i spend hours reading myself, even tho i sort of hate it--sort of like mirrors in restaurants--) and thinking how it's sort of reminded me of a poem Tom Kelly had in last falls' review called "Convictions," which he wrote by flipping through Bartlett's quotations and inserting some musings of his own, here's one of the latter:

"I feel treacherous.
I am making most of this up, and I'm making myself look like a pretty good guy."

Show me a blog that's not a little bit self-indulgent, and i'll show ya a used car i'd like to sell ya.

2003-11-12T05:19:00.000-05:00

Everyone go see TIMBER!
at theluckycat.com @ 245 grand street [between driggs and roebling]
tonight (wed) at 8

2003-11-12T05:17:00.000-05:00

Sick; up too late (early). Been trying to write a poem starting with a line by Turgenev: "Now let me flop back into my natural element." We'll see how it goes (it's the end of a high brow flying fish metaphor, but how great is it on it's own?). Reading Delillo's White Noise, it's funny; I love all the making fun of academics.

A pensive night. Something to do with all the tea and soup.

2003-11-09T13:32:00.000-05:00

Argh the blog has been neglected for a weekend of craziness. But, some interesting happenings...Saw Lee Ann Brown and Eileen Myles read at Barnard Thursday night,

HEARING LEE ANN READ MAKES ME UNCOMFORTABLE

but that's why i love it. I think it has to do with the whole Southern thing, how close all the hymns and songs and cadences are to home, for me...it's just such a crazy and original thing to do for a Southern expat (as it were) in New York to go back to all that material, both the forms and the social struggles that still define the South, and appropriate it for a very sophisticated body of work. When I first encountered Lee Ann's work i definitely liked the more disjunctive stuff and thought of the more directly narrative political stuff as not so interesting--but i think Lee Ann's work fits together so beautifully not as some overdetermined artistic project, but instead as "that great mud intelligence & feeling" (T Berrigan) that artistic praxis can be, in the best sense of that rather annoying word. When Lee Ann reads a ballad about civil rights to the melody of a Methodist hymn and then turns right around and reads a disjunctive short-lined poem for Tom Raworth, it becomes clear that for her, radical form is not some sort of ideological experiment, but an important part of "getting said what must be said." (WCW)

Hearing Eileen Myles for the first time was great too. I think i've pilfered almost as much from her prosody as I have Creeley's. I love Creeley's stutters, but I also love the sense of speed projected by Myles's short lines--they retain that multivalence you can get with short lines that are sort of autonomous phrases, but they move you right down to next line at the same time...i dunno. In any case, i didn't speak with her...no money for a book, and i can never think of a good excuse to talk to poets when that happens (sigh).

More fun with Jai Alai Saturday. Working on a series of erasures of archived emails, which has been fun. Brian and Jordan both gave good readings at Segue, and I had fun having a drink and checking out my new Gillian Welch CD (amazing!)with wee James.

Plotting a January road trip out west with my friend Oliver. I may be the roadie/driver/manager for his extremely lo-fi indie rock/folk scene solo tour. Sounds just impossible enough to be fun.

2003-11-06T00:08:00.000-05:00

I slept thru my internship @ the poetry project this morning (why am i such a tool?) because my alarm didn't go off. I think. In any case i didn't hear it. I was woken up by Cori Copp at 12:45. Sigh.

I am now writing a paper on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I have no idea what to say, and i always have something to say. Tre depressing.

I went to Michael Golston's seminar where Charles Bernstein was visiting. I asked too many questions like a big goon as usual. I'm always put off by the people who ask too many questions in lectures but i've come to realize in my 20th century poetry classes i am probably "that guy." And then when i ask questions that are at all loaded i feel like i'm being a heckler or confrontational in a juvenile sort of way--or maybe that's just how i feel like i get treated--but i'm not trying to be that way--maybe i'm just really paranoid. There comes a point when you have to be willing to take yourself at least somewhat seriously, i suppose.

In any case, here's some of the more interesting questions i asked(a summary from memory not a transcript), i'd try to reproduce some of Bernstein's answers but i don't want to misrepresent him and I don't have time right now--maybe i'll talk about it later. Still asking the same questions, for the most part, anyway.

1) Flipping through L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, looking at your essays compared to the essays like, say, Coolidge's reading of Eigner or Grenier's reading of Creeley (in Open Letter)...it seems to me that yours, for all their formal innovation do rely much more on a sort of direct exposition...in past interviews you've described this tendency towards clarity and logic as "Erring on the side of power." In Charles Bernstein's "academy of the future" would all "exposition" look more like those Coolidge or Grenier pieces?

2) I liked the chapter in Daniel Kane's new book about Language Poetry in relation to the St. Mark's Scene, partly because nobody seems to talk about that very much these days--looking back on it, how do you see your writing then as identifying with, or identifying itself against, that poetic community?

3) You seem to be making two claims here [in a discussion about "Thought's Measure"]--the first being that language is the material basis of thought, and the second being that thought is mediated through language...to what extent do you see your project [justifying a politics of poetic form] as predicated on the former, stronger claim?

4) This discussion [on politics and poetic form] is interesting to me in the context of the previous discussion [on Language Poetry as less interested in the "Lifestyle Element" than St. Mark's poets]...because, altho i understand Language Poetry's critique of a silly/sad sort of bohemianism that was happening at that time...isn't a poetry can theoretically change "a form of life" necessarily a poetry connected in some direct way to "lifestyle"?

[this is obviously a poorly worded version of a question i've been asking, here and elsewhere, for a long time--i never seem to be able to frame it right, even when i'm thinking about the answer myself--hard to explain--didn't get the sort of answer i was looking for this time, either]

overnout

2003-11-05T00:50:00.000-05:00

Dunno if I'll be able to make it, but check out Stay Fucked at the Knitting Factory tomorrow (Wed) at 7; should be a good time

2003-11-04T03:37:00.000-05:00

I don't want a girlfriend; I want a partner in crime.

2003-11-02T14:17:00.000-05:00

22 years old today. (not very exciting, i have to admit)

Went to Jai Alai for Autocrats aka Brian's workshop yesterday. Good times. I'm sorta obsessed with that Tom Phillips book "A Humument" now. After that wild times were had at Yogi's and Tom's. Manhattan is too beautiful right now to leave for the rest of the weekend, i think.

Feeling rather vague.

2003-10-31T16:48:00.000-05:00

Got up early (noon) went to Hungarian Pastry Shop, wrote a poem, walked to the Met to see the new El Greco exhibit. I still don't know if i get El Greco. I will never think about Pollock (especially the early work) in the same way again after seeing his El Greco sketches. Also spent some serious time with "Washington Crossing The Delaware," it's the first time i've looked at it since I've seen the Larry Rivers painting of the same name--really affected me very deeply in some way that's hard to articulate--reading the former thru the latter--i dunno.

Life in general is wild and exacerbating in ways that i'd rather not talk about. Yeasssss.

2003-10-31T12:15:00.000-05:00

Saw Bernstein and A. Berrigan last night at the new school. I don't like Bernstein's poem "Thank You For Saying Thank You" very much, it's too obvious a self parody to be very interesting i guess. The long one Bernstein read I do like, but i've heard it several times already. I really liked Anselm's new poems, and "To A Broken Surface" from Zero Star Hotel has been a favorite for a while.

2003-10-29T22:04:00.000-05:00

I'm glad i'm not the only one who thinks The Strokes kinda blow. (Thanks to Equanimity for the link)

2003-10-28T02:32:00.000-05:00

Reading Paterson all the way thru for some desperate-ish reason. Far and away, I love WCW more than any of the other American modernist poets, I think. So much more grounded in the ordinary, i guess.

2003-10-27T02:58:00.000-05:00

Costume parties are never as good as they seem when yr deciding to go to one.

I've been fairly worthless all weekend--trying desperately to find a focus, in more ways than one.

2003-10-24T17:49:00.000-04:00

I'm reading one of those horribly condescending science books for the layman called "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker, at Michael Golston's urging. It still hasn't sold me on it's case against linguistic determinism yet, but definitely making me think more about the issue--as Golston asked me, what happens to claims about the political efficacy of poetry if you abandon the (antiquated?) Wittgensteinian claim that Bernstein makes in "Thought's Measure," "Language is the material of both thinking and writing"?

This is a huge question for avant-garde poetics and one which i think could lead to an important reevaluation of the politics of poetic form--Bernstein's claim seems somewhat radical, but it is actually one of the gospel truths that underlies a number of leftist interpretive modes--where would a more nuanced evaluation of the connection between thought and language lead us? Perhaps in a more discursive poetic direction? How dependent is Bernstein's poetics on the "language as thought" model?

Poking thru a number of things to try and find some answers, including Chomsky (Donny, you are out of your element!). Gonna make a trip back to the old Cognitive Psych department as well. More to follow...

2003-10-23T02:10:00.000-04:00

The Eliott Smith marathon is still running at WBAR (Speaking of fucked up. Trying not to think too hard about it honestly; what an amazing songwriter to have lost)

2003-10-23T01:54:00.000-04:00

Everyone go read Nick's comments on Vallejo and then go and read Trilce; it will fuck you up for at least three months.

2003-10-23T01:43:00.000-04:00

My tastes in country music have been becoming progressively trashier, but i sort of don't mind. Right now i'm reading Stephen Fredman's Poet's Prose and listening to Alan Jackson's Greatest Hits. He (Fredman) has an interesting claim that American poetry is necessarily a poetry in crisis, always having to justify its own project. Jackson is not burdened by any such anxiety:

Chasin that neon rainbow
Livin that honky tonk dream
Cause all i ever wanted
Was to pick this gui-tar and sing

"Thus I spend my days,
waiting for my friends to die"...

2003-10-21T00:54:00.000-04:00

"After nine centuries have passed in my lifetime, when I am no longer beware of the dog stars, with my communion of lead wafers behind me, I am glad to have your ear. It pains the planet Earth to hear your lies, and were it but for the man who comes along eventually and throws you in jail, the sun would leave the whole iced-over shebang as a calling card. When was the last time you passed on a secret specific to sighs and gasps, a pleasure so exquisite you identify yourself by the memory of it?" --John Godfrey, from "Identifying Marks" (Midnight on Your Left)

Feeling Godfreyesque; in a good way.

2003-10-20T00:07:00.000-04:00

Ahhhhh the reading is over. I get so nervous about events i organize; its way more pressure then just reading in many ways. But we had a great event! Thanks to everyone who came and everyone who read! Everyone who knows Logan Kass needs to ask him to see his long poem "Reproduction Has Changed." I was fairly happy with my reading but reading always reminds me of what an art it is in some ways, being a good reader/performer. Not that i really want my stuff to be "performative" in a theatrical (pedantic?) sense. But still. People say i read too fast.

GRATUITOUS ENIGMATIC WITTGENSTEIN REFERENCE FOR THE MONTH

Should poetry, like Wittgenstein's philosophy "lead words home?" Should it do more? Less? Why is it that those three words seem to mean so much to me?

2003-10-17T22:11:00.000-04:00

ALEX'S WEEK IN READING (a highlight reel)

(Such a passage, posting concepts together that point in so many untaken directions, may, I know, be distracting, I post them, beyond orientation for myself, for readers who have a certain taste in signs[...])

Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Living Batch Press, 1989)

from "The Week Falls Apart"

Men in twisted suits wind stragglers into their mist
Everyone's looking for an egg
Fallen bees are spotted on the plain
Men twist over the drain pile and strangle suitors in their mitts
Careful at approach, they kill bees, I hear
They zap them from proclamatory range
The range you can yell from, so you yell,

Wednesday's disembodied.

from Cori Copp's Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite (Open 24 Hours, 2003)

I was once more forced to admire the way in which everything fits together with a sleepwalker's precision: the desire of most people for a comfortable life, their tendency to believe the speakers on raised platforms and the men in white coats; the addiction to harmony and the fear of contradiction of the many seem to correspond to the arrogance and hunger for power, the dedication to profit, unscrupulous inquisitiveness, and self-infatuation of the few. So what was it that didn't add up in this equation?

Christa Wolf, Accident: A Day's News trans. Schwarzbauer and Takvorian (Chicago UP 2001)

Sometimes it feels like Wittgenstein has written the armature of the century in his quicksand notebooks.

Clark Coolidge, Words (in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry ed. Hoover)

"My lady," he said, "let me be!
I have no desire to love you.
I've served the king for a long time;
I don't want to betray my faith to him.
Never, for you or for your love,
will I do anything to harm my lord."
The queen got angry;
in her wrath, she insulted him:
"Lanval," she said, "I am sure
you don't care for such pleasure;
people have often told me
that you have no interest in women.
You have fine looking boys
with whom you enjoy yourself. [...]
"Lady," he said, "of that activity
I know nothing [...]"

Lanval, Marie de France (12th Century Breton) in The Longman Anthology of British Lit. volume 1A

2003-10-16T17:03:00.000-04:00

"The interest on the part of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets in conceptualizing the poetic process as part of their poetic practice has always impressed and energized me."
--From Nick Piombino's Interview with Lewis Lacook on Sidereality

This is a very precise way of saying something i've been trying to articulate for a long time about what i take from Language Poetry.

2003-10-14T14:31:00.000-04:00

Busying myself with publicizing the reading, reading stuff i'm not horribly interested in etc. Went to the Barbara Guest thing at St. Mark's last night--i really liked the poem on Miro that James Sherry read, as well as the later "talk" poems read by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge--i hope the latter get published soon.

I saw Kill Bill--I really don't know what to think of it. It's all about the highly sexualized girl on girl violence--but what i can't figure out if its trying to make its audience feel creeped out by their role as voyeurs, or just gleefully showing them their fantasy expressed in the most extreme (and intoxicating) visual terms possible. A lot of people would point to Tarantino's use of highly stylized violence etc and say that he's trying to make you uncomfortable--and their were certainly some stomach turning scenes in this flick, but i would say the general trajectory of the film is one that moves from representations of violence that make you feel sick towards one that are beautiful in that Kurusawa kind of way. By the end of the film i had stopped wanting to cover my eyes; I was horrified by the first image of a man beating the pregnant protagonist; I was mesmorized with the image of the antagonist's scalp flying off of her exposed brain and landing in the snow of a zen garden in the final combat scene.

Not to be a snob, but I think the film's enormous box-office success should be enough to convince critics that Tarantino isn't doing anything but providing the ultimate object for America's hungry male gaze.

2003-10-11T17:14:00.000-04:00

Still don't have very much time on my hands--I have been reading Schuyler's "Freely Espousing," its the first time i've spent a considerable amount of time with his work--i like it a lot--some how it avoids being overly serious without using irony, which I appreciate. I think i like him for the same reasons i like Ceravalo. The title poem is especially great. Also read Cori Copp's new chapbook--also great, everyone should come see her and Nick Piombino @ BPC on Sat. the 18th at 4 pm.

2003-10-09T02:56:00.000-04:00

Been bogged down writing a paper on Balzac, helping out at the project, drinking and pontificating with friends until 7 AM, blah blah blah.

I enjoyed the McCaffrey reading, altho I was shocked at how much his style had changed since Panopticon and Carnival, the only two of his works I've really looked at. The longer piece he read last had several Language-poet-inside-jokes in it--it seems like a lot of people are doing this lately--it sort of bores me. Just say no to witticisms about Wittgenstein.

I'm organizing a last minute poetry reading on Sunday the 19th 3-5 due to a cancellation at Bowery--tentatively featuring Logan Kass, Simona Schneider, Lindsay Edgecombe, (Davey Volner? Katya Apekina?) and myself. Be there or be as square as a clever Derrida reference.

2003-10-05T21:24:00.000-04:00

Reconsidering a few of the thoughts I was going over in the last two entries...
for instance, perhaps "decontextualized" isn't the best way to describe the sort of disembodied nature of poetic communities on the web...i dunno. Still thinking about it.

I have a ton of reading to do. I really want to read all of Emerson's essays (I haven't) but i can't find time.

2003-10-03T17:52:00.000-04:00

...continued.
I see there's a link to my blog on fait accompli that starts off "get a horse!" so i think i better finish things up before things get wild. (This sort of instantaneous exchange is what makes the internet great tho, you see).

So anyway. Before I pick up where my idealistic rhetorical question left off, let me just say that my first paragraph wasn't meant to imply that i don't think poems on the internet are of any value, but simply that the new medium, with its massive amount of information available at any one time, may lend itself to a reading method that's more ambient than attentive, if that makes sense. I remember Bernstein, in his seminar, encouraging us to experiment in experiencing language poetry thru ambient listening--turn on Lyn Hejinian while yr making dinner or something--why not ambient reading, while yr multitasking on yr PC? I'm not saying my inattentiveness in scanning people's blog poetry is neccesarily a bad thing--altho i do explore some potential problems with the decontextualized nature of digital poetic communties as i continue.

So. Back to the idealistic question. As a 21 year old who student i'm in a pretty convenient place to ask these questions, i'm well aware, but, putting this fact aside, my argument definitely has a sort of utopian tone that anyone with very serious Marxist leanings would take issue with. Without getting into a very long discussion of Marxism and agency (admittedly a discussion i am not well-equipped to have), I guess i'll just briefly say that I am very struck by the idea that radical poetic form is an important means of critiquing hegemony, but i do not believe the social responsibility of a poet should stop there, by any stretch of the imagination. I still have some vague faith in the idea of the avant-garde as it was originally conceived--as a progressive artistic vanguard of individuals involved in a correspondingly progressive social movement. Impossible? Maybe. But impossible in the right way.

Gotta go--i'd love for someone to take me to task on this

2003-10-03T14:57:00.000-04:00

I have a horrible confession: I almost never read a whole poem if it appears on a blog, or even in an online magazine. I think some of the only poems that i've read very intently over a considerable amount of time on a blog were Brian's "skids" poems because I heard him read some of them at the BPC first.
I scan, pick up lines here and there, notice things i like--but its almost like a totally different process to reading a poem in a book. Is this just a quirk of my personality or is this symptomatic of something inherent about the medium? There was a great article in Spin last month by a columnist whose name I can't recall--arguing that the process of downloading tunes on the internet (the process of viewing poetry on the internet?) would change the nature of music forever because you weren't investing limited resources in an artist, the process of downloading (the act of visiting a blog?) becomes more important than the actual music--so people's musical tastes become more ecclectic, but there is no loyalty to a particular movement or style at all--the music you had was totally seperated from anything else having to do with yr lifestyle.

I think it's easy to see that a similar thing happening to poetry--the online poetic and paratextual community goes far beyond Language Poetry's derision of the importance of "The lifestyle element" (that phrase always seemed absurd to me) and allows readers and writers to know each other's work without knowing anything else about them.

Oppositional poetic communities of the 20th century, organized spatially instead of digitally, were collaborators not only in terms of poetics, but in terms of their form of life--I use Wittgenstein's term because it seems to have so much more potency than the yuppyish "lifestyle." I understand (post) Language Poetry's critique of Bohemianism, and ultimately we can only consider the experiments in alternative community (even that phrase seems ostentatious) enacted by Black Mountain or St. Mark's as noble failures.

But what does it mean to have an oppositional poetic community that does not in some way attempt to incorporate that project within a form of life that would also include an active oppositional politics, and a work life that, at the very least, refused to participate directly in the corporate power structure?

To be continued...

2003-10-02T14:40:00.000-04:00

Raworth's Ace is terrific!!!

A more complete reading to follow soon.

2003-10-02T03:03:00.000-04:00

I've just finished reading the Vanderborg thing on Bernstein in Paratextual Communities--it was interesting, really started mining a lot of the territory that I'm interested in--I thought I'd jot down a few rough trajectories of things she points out that are interesting for those thinking about genre in Bernstein's paratexts.

Vanderborg does a great job of interrogating Bernstein's idea of "ideolect" writing-- "ideologically informed nonstandard language practice" (Bernstein, My Way, 117) by saying "the very idea of the ideolect, arguably, necessitates some complementary exegesis about the author's project. The ultimate ideolect becomes incomprehensible to anyone but the writer, a point that Bernstein concedes...when he describes Australian author Javant Biarujia inventing his own Taneraic language and writing poetry in it" (Vanderborg 99).

Interrogating Bernstein's praxis thru this concept of the ideolect suddenly gave me an easy entry point into discussing my problems with Bernstein's latest formulations for (para)textual oppositionality--is it too much too ask for an "ideologically inform[ing] nonstandard language practice"? As Vanderborg points out (but doesn't really run with), under the ideolect model, ideology and nonstandard language practice are set at odds by virtue of a relationship in which one acts upon (informs) the other.

If we are to maintain poetic practice "as a contested arena of judgment, perception, and value where artworks and essays operate not as adjudicators of fixed principles but as probes for meaning, prods of thought" (My Way 11) then I think we have to abandon the idea of "ideologically informed" poetic practice in favor a concept of an entire body of writing, poetic, expository and everything inbetween, as embodied ideological practice. In some of his moods, most notably in that essay in contents dream "The Academy in Peril," Bernstein seems to want to move in this direction. In an essay like "The Revenge of The Poet Critic", however, his poetic, (or antiabsorbtive, if you like) moments seem to function more as superfluous examples than as a functioning part of the text--(data fabricated for a foregone conclusion? not quite).

Once I was talking to John Godfrey, and he told me a story about Ted Berrigan, who Godfrey had bumped into in a park or something, reading a book written by a poet neither of them thought very highly of. Godfrey asked him why he was reading such a lousy author, and Berrigan said "because this is a great poem." Then Godfrey said something amazing--something like "Ted didn't reify poetry, he lived it." In a lot of ways, this is the model for writing I admire and believe in the most--no one could say that John Godfrey and Ted Berrigan are (were) not political engaged (tho one could certainly take issue with some aspects of Berrigan's politics), yet both of their poetries are not ideologically informed in the way that Bernstein's poetry most definitely is.

But then, something in me still believes that Bernstein's essays have done more than simply win him a larger readership than a great but relatively obscure poet like Godfrey. I know for me personally they've opened up amazing new ways of reading, and I think Bernstein is right in noting the power intrensic in critical (perhaps all expository) discourse, and the importance of not ceding that power to people we don't agree with (Content's Dream 447). Bernstein, however, in his gleefully self conscious way, is always skating on the thin ice that seperates those who opposes the status quo within a given discursive framework, and those who are absorbed by that status quo.

Please pardon my late night, charmingly unedited (untactful?) prose. I have to get up at 9:30 tomorrow to discuss Sydney's apology of poetry (smuh!). If anyone needs full citations for the stuff listed here, email me.

2003-10-01T19:54:00.000-04:00

A ridiculously busy week--i'm worried its a sign of things to come. The best moment so far would of had to have been Miles rolling into the poetry project at 11:30 with bloodshot eyes and the shakes only to pronounce "goooood morning gentlemen! Sorry I'm late! I didn't sleep a single hour last night!" sounding completely and unironically cheerful.

I'm reading Vanderborg's Paratextual Communities at the moment--a more complete update on that to come. Also just got a copy of Raworth's "Ace"--ah the perks of the poetry project intern.

2003-09-29T22:56:00.000-04:00

Spending hours writing a silly friendster collage poem. Its such a weird cyber space for language--people get so funny their, usually in the section where you write about yr friends--not the boring cliches usually found in people's profiles.

2003-09-28T16:01:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking lately about the overwhelming power of humor as a means of social control--there's no fear like the fear of being made fun of, seeming ridiculous, etc. And I feel it in myself, sometimes, when someone tries to do something really wacky at a reading, or in a magazine, or whatever--i appreciate the impulse behind, say, crazy revolutionary rhetoric in a magazine, but I can't help but want to laugh. But then i also want to say that oftentimes innovative forms (in whatever media) are still able to overcome that social constraint of the ridiculous, you know, "constantly risking absurdity and death," etc. etc.

Anyway, I think the self-knowing kind of humor in the work of Koch, Bernstein (in some of his moods), even occasionally Bruce Andrews (it sounds crazy but think about it), risk stifling any sort of revolutionary impulse by simply reinforcing a connection between innovative form and the ridiculous--i dunno.

2003-09-28T15:48:00.000-04:00

In the process of reading Michael Golston's articles in preperation for meeting him to work on my thesis. His thing on Clark Coolidge is good, for the obsessed. Also trying to find a copy of Susan Vanderborg's Paratextual Communities, but can't find it for less than 30 bucks anywhere, and some asshole grad student has had the library copy for a looooong time.

2003-09-27T00:27:00.000-04:00

Bought The Moldy Peaches' self titled-album. It's great; Promise Ring meets Cat Power kind of thing.

2003-09-26T23:30:00.000-04:00

I have fallen before the crushing force of another technological juggernaut: Friendster. Good lord, but its so addictive.

2003-09-26T02:26:00.000-04:00

Edward Said died yesterday. I never thought about it until now, but what an incredible loss--tho i've at times been at odds with his theory and pedagogical techniques, he was a public intellectual, in every sense of that term, when so many scholars are comfortable within the insular world of professional criticism.
I attended the memorial vigil in front of Philosophy Hall, and what an amazing group of people were there, holding candles, left behind--from Spivak to Arac--a remarkable group of intellectuals. Said had such an amazing ability to engage with humanism and postmodernism simultaneously--not a project most contempoary scholars are willing to engage with.

Edward Said

2003-09-24T03:20:00.000-04:00

For me, the feeling I experience when, reading an academic article, I come across the jargoned platitude that provides an easy explanation for some phenomenon but precludes an opprotunity for something original to be said, is one of the most depressing things ever. It's all the worse because i know that i do the same thing, and that perhaps the whole idea of academic discourse depends on the acceptance of such things. For every idea that an academic challenges, she or he takes 100 others on faith.

2003-09-23T17:39:00.000-04:00

Just read Tom Clark's Late Returns for no reason. I dunno exactly why Berrigan remains such a compelling model for me.

2003-09-23T17:36:00.000-04:00

I just saw a dog on 113th st. that looked exactly like that thing from The Never Ending Story

2003-09-23T00:41:00.000-04:00

Once, last year, i went to french roast intending to read the complete poems of Emily Dickinson in one sitting--i left at 5:30 in the morning about 2/3 of the way thru them--i think the waitress thought i was really weird, she felt sorry for me and brought me free coffee. I don't know what makes me think of it now, except that i think i'm in the sort of mood that would allow me to do it again. Instead i'm stuck here reading balzac (boo) and listening to Tom Waits (yeah).

2003-09-23T00:34:00.000-04:00

Sometimes i think this poem captures everything that i love about Berrigan's sonnets in one single sonnet
Buddha on The Bounty

2003-09-23T00:29:00.000-04:00

I've been perusing the other random blogs every time i go thru the blogger home page--they're all so depressing.

2003-09-21T20:53:00.000-04:00

Another day that has made me seriously consider moving back to Alaska.

2003-09-21T14:53:00.000-04:00

A weekend of craziness and people and not much in the way of interesting reading--the columbia english major requires three pre 1800 classes but no theory or 20th century (go figure) so i'm slogging thru medieval lit at barnard and 16th century lit at columbia. The only good that's come of it so far is a newfound love of Thomas Wyatt.

2003-09-19T14:40:00.000-04:00

Writing a lot instead of blogging--a good thing. Trying to get something together for the psa chapbook contest that Creeley is judging. Also, went to see Stay Fucked @ Local, they're really good right now--check out their website: stay fucked

2003-09-17T18:39:00.000-04:00

Walked all night last night with karan and logan, buzzed and restless, to times square--haven't really slept much all week--closed down night cafe the night before for no good reason--Manhattan feels so beat these days.

2003-09-17T02:23:00.000-04:00

The epc doesn't have a John Godfrey page! (?!?!)

2003-09-16T23:59:00.000-04:00

Also thinking about how great minimalism is, but i think it's a passing fancy

2003-09-16T23:57:00.000-04:00

Thinking about blogging lately, but also thinking about how i have this bizarre tendency to latch on to an analysis of any medium i want to speak in, instead of actuallly saying anything

2003-09-15T23:05:00.000-04:00

Fie, for the
impenetrable certainty
just isn’t my thing
so I say to the quixotic
trekkies of the word,
beware, beware this
sepulcrulacrum morbidology
eschpousing morbled syncroments
trundling twixt Holy Burbanities
blurbling hydiocrities,
requesting another glass of red

2003-09-15T22:48:00.000-04:00

That fireworks thing scared the shit out of me, what's worse, i forgot to go to the park to see it (!?)

2003-09-15T16:01:00.000-04:00

I wonder if blogging culture will, on the long term, breakdown or simply reinforce the distanced observer/object model for reading poems. I'm slightly unhappy with the poems blog coupled with a chatty poetics blog model for doing things. The chatty blogs i like the most are the ones that venture outside of gossipy poetics as much as possible, and occasionally include moments that verge on poetry.

2003-09-15T15:07:00.000-04:00

I miss Cooper Landing

2003-09-15T10:30:00.000-04:00

Check out the thread on editing in Free Space Comix for an interesting discussion on Bernstein's prose.

2003-09-15T00:48:00.000-04:00

...how funny it looks, in this context. I guess the real question for me now becomes, am i going to produce a perfectly jargoned syntaxed topical thesis for them or something more original? Blah.

2003-09-15T00:31:00.000-04:00

Against my better judgement, I'm going to post my thesis proposal, just because it's all i've been thinking about over the last 24 hours, so i might as well share.

Charles Bernstein is a cultural figure who moves fluidly between the institutions of avant-garde poetry and professional cultural criticism, bringing a poetic touch to his theory and a theoretical touch to his poetry, and sometimes makes it unclear whether any distinction can be drawn between the two, much to the chagrin of his critics in the world of professional scholarship and poets of the “official verse culture” alike. Bernstein’s writing juxtaposes the theoretical vocabulary and logical progression of professional criticism with the irreverent diction and playful syntactical acrobatics of the avant-garde American poetic tradition, often times within the same piece of writing. Although the last 5 years have seen several articles addressing Bernstein’s status as an oppositional figure within the university system, few critics have addressed directly the possible consequences of Bernstein’s formal attack on professionalized critical discourse, instead choosing to focus on his writing that can be easily identified as poetry (oftentimes read through the exegesis of his most conventional critical prose).
I would like to use my senior essay as an opportunity to examine Bernstein’s genre-bending texts in order to question Bernstein’s claim that “such formulations can provide models of ideological critique more radical than otherwise available.” More specifically, I will focus on Bernstein’s most recent writing, for two reasons. Firstly, because the genre-bending tendencies in Bernstein’s work have become more pronounced as he has become more prominent in the academic world. His two most recent books, the companion volumes My Way: Speeches and Poems and with strings: poems [sic], function together as Bernstein’s most focused formal and ideological attack on the linguistic conventions that define the theory praxis dichotomy in contemporary literary scholarship and poetic production. Secondly, Bernstein’s engagement with the surprisingly high profile “Poets Against The War” movement has provided an interesting context through which to consider the political effects of Bernstein’s political and theoretical writing; he produced several texts for various anti-war readings (now available through The Poetics List from SUNY Buffalo) that are not easily classifiable by genre.
One of the things I would hope to achieve with this reading would be to put Bernstein’s attack of the conventions of professional academic discourse into dialogue with the broader discussion among leftist intellectuals on the possibility of oppositionality within the increasingly professionalized field of cultural criticism. Too many critical engagements with Bernstein have simply dismissed Bernstein’s position within the academy as a cooption, or shrugged it off as a benign inevitability. In my essay I hope to offer a more thorough consideration of Bernstein’s position as an oppositional writer who is also a member of a profession, albeit a highly untraditional member.

2003-09-14T17:56:00.000-04:00

POSTPOSTMODERN FORTUNE COOKIE #1

The distance between sophist and shaman is shorter than you could possibly imagine, texual grasshopper.

2003-09-13T16:14:00.000-04:00

"I was talking to a friend of mine about this the other day: that country life as I knew it might really be a thing of the past and when music people today, performers and fans alike, talk about being "country," they don't mean they know or even care about the land and the life it sustains and regulates. They're talking about choices--a way to look, a group to belong to, a kind of music to call their own. Which begs a question: Is there anything behind the symbols of modern "country," or are the symbols themselves the whole story? Are the hats, the boots, the pickup trucks, and the honky-tonking poses all that's left of a disintegrating culture? Back in Arkansas, a way of life produced a certain kind of music. Does a certain kind of music now produce a way of life? Maybe that's okay. I don't know." --Johnny Cash

Cash by Johnny Cash should be required reading for American Poets.

2003-09-13T13:32:00.000-04:00

Trying to prepare a thesis proposal on the relationship between bernstein's critical prose (theory?) and poetry, and the role of all his weird writing that lies somewhere in between. Feeling vaguely apathetic about it~i think i chose this as a topic because i knew there was such a wealth of material about bernstein already, but nothing specifically focused on the consequences of his formal attack on professional literary discourse~but the uniformity of the readings of all lang po, maybe even especially bernstein, is astounding. Scholars smugly denounce the preeminence of the interpretive depth model of reading poetry, only to go on to quote bernstein's poetics in order to find meaning in those texts~is a writing praxis that involves an opaque poetry coupled with a very accessible (accessible for literary professionals, anyway) metadiscourse (and really, isn't it that) ever going to do anything to, you know, expose/foreground language's materiality? (And isn't that project itself becoming rather tired after 20+ years?)

I understand the attempt, especially in essays like "What's Art Got to Do With It" to map out a model for some kind of genuinely immanent model for reading but do bernstein's critical readings really live up to that model?

I'm also reading Bruce Robbins "Secular Vocations" which is an interesting defense of professionalism from a much more traditional sort of leftist intellectual~an interesting contrast to all this, not sure how that will figure into my thinking about this project tho~we'll see.

All rough notes, vague trades, dialectic mimetics; take it all with a grain of salt

In other news, I signed up to volunteer for dean's campaign. I feel pragmatism slowly rearing it's depressing head. What a muddled metaphor, but apt, in this case. I felt vaguely dirty after voting green in the last election. Sigh.

2003-09-12T23:00:00.000-04:00

"The attempt of leftist intellectuals to pretend that the avant-garde is serving the wretched of the earth by fighting free of the merely beautiful is a hopeless attempt to make the special needs of the intellectual and the social needs of the community coincide." --Richard Rorty
~does this bother anyone else? I think i've thought about this quote every day this week. Something to do with the culture shock of returning to all the new york affectations from whatever it was that seemed so real about alaska.

2003-09-12T19:33:00.000-04:00

Currently reading the McGann and Altieri pieces in Politics and Poetic value and wondering why

2003-09-12T19:23:00.000-04:00

Into the belly of the blogging beast! A word on my seemingly ridiculous marxist title: Derailed Commodity Stores are a weird phenomenon of my midwestern/southern youth that sold weird shit that for some reason was taken off freight trains.