Friday- April 9, 2010 1:30 p.m.-4:00 p.m. Room 110 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level F198. Immigrant Poetry: Aesthetics of Displacement. (Gene Tanta, Jenny Boully, Johannes Goransson, Ramona Uritescu-Lombard, Andrei Guruianu, Uche Nduka) We will discuss the relations between formal innovation and biographical politics. More specifically, immigrant American poets such as Waldrop, Simic, and Dinh challenge the meaning of innovation through their word choices, visible racial markers, or audible accent. Do poets still want to surprise? What does making it new mean to immigrant poets? How do the industrial, technological, and informational revolutions influence the citizen's ethical responsibility and the poet's aesthetic power?
I'm of course going to talk about the figure of the immigrant as kitsch, as trash, as bad taste, as "problematic", as fetish, as inauthentic, as deserving to be punched in the face. I will in fact lead a kind of tacky Swedish folk dance that will culminate in "the kissing of the immigrant" (played by me, of course, poorly, with exagerated hand gestures and grimaces, and with too much make-up, which will undoubtedly smear from all the saliva). It will hurt badly on the elbows. I will discuss my heritage, unfortunately not a literary lineage a la Silliman but a lineup of spazzy, pale bodies. I will use breathalyzers and tweezers. But as the description suggests, I will be responsible about it all. My paper is called "The Kissing Disease." It's about the glory of the suburbs. Like I said it's about the fake bodies that pile up in poetry.
I'm teaching this seminar on "Modern American Poetry" this semester and it's been a while since I taught a class like this - ultra canonical, historical etc. But it's a really interesting activity - to read through the whole heap again.
It seems my take on Modern American Poetry seems to become increasingly tied up in Pound - he's there in Olson, sure, but also all over Berryman's dreamsongs (Pound asked Berryman to write the intro to his book, but rejected it for being too scholarly); and his anxieties (about decadence, necrophilia, degenerates, kitsch) are all over 20th century American poetry (either for or against, or some more interesting take on it). Likewise Olson's influence on Official Experimental Verse Culture cannot be underestimated: "objectism" and "projective verse," the emphasis on eliminating wastefulness ("one perception must follow" etc), the anti-kitsch rhetoric.
Also, of course my views of the poets change. Despite his ideas (which I find absolutely ugh), Olson is a fantastic poet. Moore just gets better and better. We read Moore next after Williams, and she totally overwhelms Williams for me (but not for my students); I mean I don't even remember reading him because she's so much more interesting (of course I never liked Williams much). And of course Berryman is so much more interesting than Lowell - though they have that theatricality, blackface, dramatic monologue (Browning) thing in common.
Queer and Gurlesque are not Mutually Exclusive Terms!
Ana is insisting that I think queer and Gurlesque poetics are mutually exclusive terms. I do not. Not at all.
I initially said: "Queer poetics turn away from the pathology of the hetero, and that is a very excellent thing. Gurlesque poetics embrace and interrogate the pathology."
I assume a queer person can perform in either of these modes, Gurlesque or queer, both of which are available to them. The presence of queers and bis in the anthology is evidence of this.
Unlike Ana, perhaps, I do not assume a queer person can only perform in one mode.
"Her violent images, the "spasmodic" rhythms Higginson deplored, and the sheer volume of her output show that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into the body. She turned an explosive sickness into well-aimed art: scenes with "Revolver" and "Gun". Contained in her own domestic order, protected by her father and sister, Dickinson saved herself from the anarchy of her condition and put it to use."
This makes total sense to me - both in the sense of "spasmodic" rhythms and "syncope" (Clement). I've got to read this whole biography.
About a decade ago Arielle noticed (as did I) a set of emerging tendencies in younger female poets who were very interested in using high artifice and formal exaggeration to unsettle gender norms, often by toying with the male gaze.
This is a very limited description, of course. The anthology itself is a larger description. The anthology is only one of many possible descriptions of the Gurlesque.
* * *
Amy, I think you and Ana have misunderstood what I initially meant by “embrace.” By embrace, I mean a very specific, physical embrace. The embrace of the cock. Of a field of cocks. As a performative mode.
One can do this whether one is queer or straight, as evidenced by the anthology.
That is certainly not all the Gurlesque is. But it’s kicking around in there pretty hard.
You have a problem with all the cock in the book. One can/should have a problem with it.
You were initially saying you felt there was no queer subjectivity in the book. Then you started claiming that there were no queers.
Given that there are queers, bis, and straights in the book, it makes me think you are missing a very specific performance of queer in the book. I think this is totally valid.
But I will say it again: my sense is that the Gurlesque is about queering heterosexuality.
My sense of this is intentionally provisional. I’m open to anything anyone else wants to say.
But our discussion also raises the question of who gets to call queer. Who can say what/who gets called queer and what does not. I personally find this a very rich and useful discussion. One that is long overdue, particularly in feminist circles.
Danielle’s comments about Brenda S. also raise the question of mobile sexuality, of people who sexually identify as one thing at one point in their lives and then later as something else. Who have morphed chronologically between one identity and another. Who may continue to morph. A number of such people are represented in the anthology.
* * *
Gurlesque is an inherently unstable term, and I have no interest in further stabilizing it or in defining who can and can be "in" it. It's not a movement. It’s a fraught nest of questions, even more than it’s a fraught nest of claims. Thanks, Amy and Ana, for bringing yours to the table.
Not Everyone in the Gurlesque Anthology Is Straight!
I want to clear up a misconception several people seem to have about the Gurlesque anthology: not all of the poets and visual artists in the Gurlesque anthology are straight. That's a fact.
I've hesitated to say this because I don't want to start making lists of who fucks who, but I do want to point this out.
There is a lot of cock-on-cunt action in the anthology, yes, but then again, the Gurlesque is very much about enacting the pathology of the hetero. Making it spasm.
The Gurlesque is about queering heterosexuality via a very specific set of aesthetic strategies.
The Gurlesque anthology is not intended as a catch-all for all queerings; it is a consolidation of female poets who, via the grotesque, artifice and camp, girly kitsch, and burlesque performance, etc. engage the pathology of heterosexuality by toying with the male gaze.
The crucial criterion for inclusion in the anthology was the poet’s engagement with these specific strategies on the page. A high premium was put on the use of artifice and formal exaggeration.
Queer poetics turn away from the pathology of the hetero, and that is a very excellent thing. Gurlesque poetics embrace and interrogate the pathology. This gesture also has its own political power.
My introduction to the anthology, which elaborates on the Gurlesque’s relationship to female grotesque, artifice and camp, girly kitsch, and burlesque performance, will be published online in Jacket very shortly. Curious parties can read all about it there.
The scope of the Gurlesque anthology is, as several people have suggested, quite focused. It is not meant to take account of all modes of gender performance or to suggest that one mode is in any way more vital than others.
For me, the Gurlesque is a fairly specific aesthetic sensibility, and the poetry in the anthology is illustrative of this sensibility.
I have previously referred to the Gurlesque as queering heterosexuality. The anthology is trying to identify a new category of gender identity that is neither heterosexual nor homosexual.
The Gurlesque is as much indebted to queer theory and culture as it is to subaltern studies and the historical avant-garde (and the book is framed as such).
Gurlesque poets subvert gender stereotypes by performing them, but this tactic is nothing new. Many subaltern groups have done exactly this. What is perhaps new, though, is the emergence of an aesthetic sensibility that suggests an alternative way of performing gender, one that is neither heterosexual nor homosexual.
[Here's an excerpt from an essay Joyelle and I wrote about "The Shining" for a German book on Kubrick that will be out this fall:]
Dark Matter: A Shining Art Crime by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson
1. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is not just a film: it is a performance of which the film is a mere documentation, a relic. The filming took place all inside a soundstage in England, using elaborate sets. The snow was salt. The camera men wore stilts with little boy’s shoes, like the actors in Genet’s The Balcony, representing the stilts worn by the actors in Greek tragedies. It was 110 degrees. The air was saturated with gasoline fumes. The cameramen had to wear gas masks as they chased after the little boy. There were antennae in the walls. Instead of using illusory walls, Kubrick built up a maze of actual rooms. The illusion is perfect. It must be the Real Thing.
2. It is Art, the greatest crime, the greatest threat against the American Work Ethic. Throughout the movie there is a tension between work and play. Throughout American history, Work has allowed terrible murders: Eden had to be worked into productivity and in the process we had to kill the Native Americans and enslave the African-Americans. For white people “indentured servitude” was dressed up as “seeking your fortune.” This is how we became Americans.
3. This history is evoked in the film from the very beginning. In the interview that begins the movie, we are told that Native Americans violently resisted the building of the hotel and that their attacks were repelled. The hotel is America.
4. Art is the great scandal in this phantasmagoria of Work Ethics. It threatens the entire social order with its excessive jouissance, its utter uselessness. It chokes the Child, to quote Sir Walter Raleigh (an artist in colonizer drag, who died for his prison writing and his uselessness.)
5. In The Shining, the moment of revelation, the moment when the viewer is informed that Jack is nuts, that he’s a sham, that his aims are perverse is when Shelley Duvall finds the “novel” he’s been writing: it is just the same words written over and over “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It is as if all the mayhem he has engendered, all his mad grimaces and odd statements could be looked past, but his novel cannot be looked past. Art is both a useless nothing and that which cannot be ignored.
6. Yet the novel Jack has written could easily be seen as a conceptual artwork. The obsessive detournment of Ben Franklin’s maxim to moderation.
7. Politically correct analyses of The Shining tend to interpret Jack as the Patriarch, the Purveyor of Colonialism. We see in him the Artist who scandalizes America. Through his obsessive art, his obsessive behavior, he denaturalizes the hotel – shows that the hotel is not a real home, but a hotel, an obsessive maze of rooms, the obsessive pattern on the floor that participates in the same form as Jack’s obsessive novel.
...
10. The dynamics were repeated in another movie that ran into trouble because of its excess of meaning, its unruliness: David Lynch’s TV show Twin Peaks. This show also featured the endless maze-like hotel (“The Great Northern”), which was doubled in the demonic “Black Lodge,” a paradoxically very “red room” (echoing the child’s repeated warning of “red rum” in The Shining) with very similar, very repetitive patterns as in Kubrick’s hotel. As in Kubrick’s hotel, ghosts live in a hotel in the American West. Like in Kubrick’s film, the spirits seem to precede the onset of America of the Great Work Ethic and Genocide. It is as if in both cases the Native American dead were sublimated into strange hotels guests in America.
...
18. “Stanley, meanwhile, watched the deteriorating video pictures from outside the set, like a wrathful Nielson family suddenly given absolute power over the programming. The faster we had to move, the worse it got. I sometimes thought wistfully of breaking an ankle in the salt. It required enormous force to pull the camera around the turns and a degree of luck to find the right path while essentially looking backward. In addition, we were all acutely aware of the danger of fire and how difficult it would be to get out of the maze if the lights went out, with real smoke and burning Styrofoam - a genuine nightmare!” –Garrett Brown, “The Steadicam and The Shining.”
19. It seems patently obvious that Jack is Stanley, but while Jack doesn’t survive the film, Kubrick does. If Jack doesn’t succeed in remaking the nuclear family as a bunch of perverted, murderous artists, Kubrick subsumes the whole Nielson family into his perverse and patriarchal person, at the same time recasting his crew as his art-making demons.
... the boy genius tried to tell me how to keep my columns straight - a lecture on symmetry, the catchwords don't talk to me i said. i'm busy clarifying your mistakes, the universe conceived as a filthy cunt hates your diagrams - you left out women, so you really fucked it Pathetic little kid...
"A lot of our thinking on vision is guided by three axioms that were introduced in the 1960s and '70s and consolidated in teh 1980s. They are that the look is violent, that images are ideologically mystifying, and that politically engaged artists and theorists must expose this violence and undo this mystification. I have never been comfortable with this account of vision or of art..." - Kaja Silverman (in an interview with George Baker in Art Forum, February 2010)
I would add to that the kind of discussion Silverman is talking about - though often insightful - tend to make the "image" something much more stable than how I think of it, much more stable than the "spasms" of the works I brought up in the Lady Gaga post below. To me the spasms suggest something of the mobility of the image.
I was interested in reading Kate Durbin's comment to the last Gaga-post, saying that Gaga had supposedly set out to alter Beyonce's image with the video:
"It seems critical that it is Beyonce who is having the intense spasms in the hotel room and not Gaga, since Beyonce is the one, pop culturally, who has the more fixed image (also, the racialized image). Gaga said the video was supposed to change the way that people viewed Beyonce, and that is not a video about Gaga."
I'm just going to re-iterate something that Kate implies here. The conventional way of looking at the "image" is as something inherently stabilizing, fixing; and with this view, the conventional approach to undoing someone's "image" is to reveal the "real" person "beneath" the image, usually a more complex, more sexual (what has been repressed to create the stable image is of course the old unconscious) self, just as boring.
But Gaga's attempt to ruin Beyonce's "fixed image" is to approach the image itself, to approach Beyonce as image, to insert spasms into that image, to find the movement in the supposed stability of the image. That is, not to attempt to undo the image, but to focus on the medium of the image; to treat her even *more* as image. I think that's pretty interesting.
(Maybe James can put in some stuff about Deleuze's ideas about film.)
Mia, who makes what she calls “lowbrow and horror art,” is also highly convulsive, lots of slash and splash. I’m drawn to her spastic hand, the hand that compulsively overwrites historical photographs and paintings. The hand that can barely contain the energy of its assaults.
I’d never heard of Lady Gaga when I named my book Maximum Gaga, but the overlap pleases me immensely: the grotesque costumage, the spasms and gender-bending, the acute female violence.
[I started to write this post yesterday and then I posted it and then I revoked it because I wanted to add to it. It's basically a response to Max asking why I liked the Lady Gaga video.]
One of my most *influential artistic experiences* was going to see Jean Genet's "The Screens" at the Guthrie Theater in 1989. Here's a good analysis by Don Schewey, written for the Village Voice. That performance totally blew me away; and I've been pretty much plagiarizing it ever since. I found that review above because I was trying to find a clip of that performance, but I can't seem to find it anywhere - even though the entire Nirvana show I blacked out/through in 1992 is on youtube!.
And that's not unrelated. This post will have a lot to do with Catherine Clement's idea of *syncope* (warning: I used this quote in my post about My Own Private Idaho a while back):
“Surprisingly, this glaring weakness contains a raging force. This frustration is creative; from its disorders, unknown energies are often born… the world in which I have lived until now idolized power and force, muscle and health, vigor and lucidity. Syncope opens onto a universe of weakness and tricks; it leads to new rebellions."
*
The reason I was looking for a clip about the Genet performance was actually because I wanted to use it as a way to explain why I like that new Lady Gaga/Beyonce video. Throughout The Screens, the main character, the thief Said (played by a guy who was in the TV show Fame, which struck me as very interesting at the time) moved in this intensively spazzy way. I loved the exaggerrated costumes and I loved the story and the stage etc, but what stuck with me most of all was the spasmodic way Said moved, even as he carried his bride through the desert (the "ugliest woman in the world").
And toward the end of the gaga/beyonce video, that spazziness is evoked, especially at the end.
Costumes + spasmodic movements. I'm absolutely into that.
There's no reason for Beyonce and Lady Gaga to kill everyone in the diner. No reason for the video to keep going. Beyonce should kill the boyfriend and that's it. Instead they kill everyone. Make everyone vomitup. And it doesn't end there. Then they go into a big dance number. It's supposed to be over but it continues.
It's in that aftermath state, after the video/movie is supposed to have ended, that Beyonce goes all spazzy.
Look at around 8:00-815. Things begin to get incredibly spastic. The interesting thing about that is that Beyonce and Gaga poison the diner-eaters, but the singers are the ones that go spastic. The poisoning vomit-fest is presented in an ultra-montage of poisoned people convulsing. That montage then comes back in to interrupt up the dancing, and then the dancing gets spasmic, and then we go to Beyonce in that motel room going totally spazzy. It's as if the montage is equated with death spasms; as if this montage energy then invades the two main characters, who become less and less natural (compare Beyonce's spasms in the hotel room to the much more naturalistic dancing of Gaga in the prison; two heterotopias no less).
In his book The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro writes about Kathryn Bigelow's "Blue Steel": "Blue Steel exhibits a flagrant, salutary disregard for normative standards of plausibility. It displays a logic of contamination and repetition, rather than one of linear, psychological causality."
This video seems to move according to an extreme sense of "contamination and repetition."
Gaga accompanies her poisoning fantasy with German text, which of course leads me back to last week's post about Plath and Lady Lazarus, another text that utilizes montage-effects to evoke an un-dead energy (and, notably, a gender-inflected revenge fantasy of mass murder).
Like in Plath/Grahn, the spastic motion has to do with imagery. And more specifically the cinematic and more specifically the cinematic body. Shaviro: "Images are condemned because they are bodies without souls, or forms without bodies. They are flat and insubstantial, devoid of interiority and substance, unable to express anything beyond themselves."
*
When I was about 8 or 9 I went to the hospital and I couldn't eat the food and I grew weak and while walking over to the x-rays I collapsed, fainted and the nurse carried me in her arms. This, as I note in my entrance wound/pageant (forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky) is how I invented erotics. It was beautiful. They heaped me up on the x-ray machine and it buzzed away while I had visions of doctors in gas masks.
*
In Lukas Moodysson's "A Hole In My Heart" the main characters fuck and pass out and vomit and eat etc over and over. The title suggests an old fashioned epiphany but it's instead a medical condition. The constant crisis as a nervous condition. A crisis that won't be survived. That will just be repeated. The spazzing out won't be contained in the well-made text. It's the effect of an excessive text. A shit-and-puke text. The movie moves toward a "real story" by evoking their inner traumas etc, but that movement is always overwhelmed by the grotesque spectacle of their bodies. The "narrator" on a meta-level is fittingly the gothic teenage-son who harbors his own violent fantasies in the next room (rooms seem important to this spastic body).
Something about the unwieldiness of the film goes into the bodies convulsing in the porno room. This perhaps goes back to the Genet play which is 6 hours long. Almost un-producible. It's as if the spasmodic movements (and here, this is about the actor/director more than Genet, but who cares) were a result of the un-producible play, an unhealthy play; the play that won't stop, generating this frazzled energy.
* Another Swedish artist, Aase Berg, from "Mork Materia" (Dark Matter, in other words "syncope"):
"Beneath the shell crawls, beneath the shell crawls a frenzied and orgiastic bulimia. To eat into the meat puke beloved and be eaten into the meat puke beloved in merciless bloodthrobbing meat's helpless return... It's not death it is the edge folds down the visor we will tear loose the dark mass from each other's outer halo crack apart and close eyes move toward the glaciality Ivo climbs me away and I down beneath the surface shoal of song fish between the pillars I form submarine feel the violations of the flesh but do not emit any warning signals..." ("4.5 In Reactor)
Here a poem infected with montage-twitches: words and sentence-parts are cut and pasted together into an unsutured mess of bodies and words and sentences.
*
And going back to my post about Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath, it's of course a very cinematic body. But it's the cinematic body gone bad, the bad cut, the twitchy cut. The way Lady Lazarus is montaged after she's been dragged out of the sack (in fact Berg's poem alludes to, or better, reworks Lady Lazarus, I'll write a post on that later). Or in Kenneth Anger's occult "performance" in "Invocation to My Demon Brother":
According to the myth, Bobby Beauseuleil (sp?), the main actor of "Invocation" got into a tiff with Anger and (with the help of Charlie Manson no less) destroyed the film. And supposedly, Anger re-assembled the movie from leftover clippings in his cutting room. A kind of Frankenstein text in the very medium (see Leonard Davis on Frankensteinfor more insight about this).
*
From Kate's Delirious Hem manifesto:
"Say there is subversive power in the abject surrender of possession. The teenage girl’s body can be culturally uncontrollable in its unnatural movements, defying laws of god, state & the natural order. From levitation, vomiting gold coins, and inappropriate noises—speaking in tongues, barks, grunts, and mocking imitations of a male voice. Merge that with the anarchy of rapid bodily changes, a wild libido, death-glorifying fashions (fashion by its very nature is a celebration of the body’s fall from glory—I will be buried to decay like Marchesa Luisa Casati, along with my lace), and occasional self-induced starvation (a la Catherine of Sienna & Anneliese Michel), and you have a grotesquely gorgeous panic body, disrupting culture by over-literalizing its ideals, turning itself into a corporeal embrace and critique, an alarm bell and a sonata screaming in skin, tits, black painted eyes and lips....Say all good art—bad girl teen poetry included—is a fraud... Say the boundary between “life” and “art” is mocked in performance, whether a performative text (see Helene Cixous), a parade of unnatural fashions (high school halls become the theater), or a false fit of demonic possession."
*
Joyelle's homage to Judy Garland in "Summerstock":
"The figure of an accounting is obviously central to the model of expenditure vs. capitalism built up in Bataille, and it's a nice fit with what we're here to discuss today: story-making. The making of an account. The accounting. Should the accounts be measured? Should the balance hold? I think they should take the form to destruction and beyond. Mine will be poorly made, willful, death-leaning. Spend, spend, spend. This does not mean it will be drab, minimal; but maximal, desiccated, well dressed for death. I like archaic things which have already failed or are not destined to survive, failure to thrive, shrift instead of thrift, a shrivening, a mourning, the lack of sturdiness that pertains to minor genres, the eructations they engender instead of children."
The spastic movement is an uneconomical movement. Wasteful in the Bataille-ean sense. It is not form as an "extension of content" or the "wellwrought urn." These images were not earned because they were not images, they were spasms.
I suppose the spasm has something to do with: "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all" (Andre Breton, 1928).
*
And of course you can see the dynamic of spasmodic body and enclosed room here:
The enclosed to me suggests the way the spasms move against the strictures of form (the room echoing the now archaic idea of the film "frame").
*
I'm starving. I just taught a class on Charles Olson, in which the energy must be accounted for, in which form must be an extension of content, in which once perception MUST follow another. It's very economic. We're back to Ron's solid structures and visions of rigorous mastery.
*
Anyways, these are just some thoughts I had while thinking about Genet and Lady Gaga.
* PS Joyelle says to turn on the Anger and listen to the Mick Jagger soundtrack while watching the Telephone video. It's pretty awesome.
[I got these poems from the Realpoetik list-serve today. I like them quite a bit: at first the small lines, the nouns suggest they're going to be imagist poems; but they seem to be about the twitchiness of "images" in poetry, how images are never images in poetry (they are text): "the mutation of the eye." Mostly I think of T.S. as writing these wild, ungainly O'Hara-influenced poems, but these seem up to something quite different with the tight compression.]
‘SLEEP POURS IN…’
Sleep pours in on the Polish hills, an arm grabs a golden stamp.
A squirrel dies in a bag. A cricket flies over a clearing.
We know where the sword of the brave is from. The mutation of the eye is the secret.
FOUNTAIN
The lion, which falls on its face, bends the little girl. Red blood spurts.
‘THE GAME IS DEATH…’
The game is death. Husk before death. In euphoria there are the blackest flowers.
‘YOU ARE MY ANGEL’
You are my angel. Mouth strewn with chalk. I am the servant of the ritual. Intact. White mushrooms in a white field. In a plain of fire. I walk on gold dust.
*
Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry. "Fountain," "'The game is death...'" and "'You are my angel'" from Sonet o Mleku (Sonnet on Milk), 63, 30, and 26, respectively.
Tomaž Šalamun has published more than 37 books of poetry in Slovenia and 11 books in English. His many honors include the Preseren Fund Prize, a visiting Fulbright to Columbia University, and a fellowship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He also has served as Cultural Attaché to the Slovenian Consulate in New York. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages around the world. Woods and Chalices, translated by Brian Henry, appeared from Harcourt in 2008.
Brian Henry's sixth book, Wings Without Birds, will appear from Salt Publishing in April 2010.
[I started to write this post yesterday and then I posted it and then I revoked it because I wanted to add to it. It's basically a response to Max asking why I liked the Lady Gaga video.]
One of my most *influential artistic experiences* was going to see Jean Genet's "The Screens" at the Guthrie Theater in 1989. Here's a good analysis by Don Schewey, written for the Village Voice. That performance totally blew me away; and I've been pretty much plagiarizing it ever since. I found that review above because I was trying to find a clip of that performance, but I can't seem to find it anywhere - even though the entire Nirvana show I blacked out/through in 1992 is on youtube!.
And that's not unrelated. This post will have a lot to do with Catherine Clement's idea of *syncope* (warning: I used this quote in my post about My Own Private Idaho a while back):
“Surprisingly, this glaring weakness contains a raging force. This frustration is creative; from its disorders, unknown energies are often born… the world in which I have lived until now idolized power and force, muscle and health, vigor and lucidity. Syncope opens onto a universe of weakness and tricks; it leads to new rebellions."
*
The reason I was looking for a clip about the Genet performance was actually because I wanted to use it as a way to explain why I like that new Lady Gaga/Beyonce video. Throughout The Screens, the main character, the thief Said (played by a guy who was in the TV show Fame, which struck me as very interesting at the time) moved in this intensively spazzy way. I loved the exaggerrated costumes and I loved the story and the stage etc, but what stuck with me most of all was the spasmodic way Said moved, even as he carried his bride through the desert (the "ugliest woman in the world").
And toward the end of the gaga/beyonce video, that spazziness is evoked, especially at the end.
Costumes + spasmodic movements. I'm absolutely into that.
There's no reason for Beyonce and Lady Gaga to kill everyone in the diner. No reason for the video to keep going. Beyonce should kill the boyfriend and that's it. Instead they kill everyone. Make everyone vomitup. And it doesn't end there. Then they go into a big dance number. It's supposed to be over but it continues.
It's in that aftermath state, after the video/movie is supposed to have ended, that Beyonce goes all spazzy.
Look at around 8:00-815. Things begin to get incredibly spastic. The interesting thing about that is that Beyonce and Gaga poison the diner-eaters, but the singers are the ones that go spastic. The poisoning vomit-fest is presented in an ultra-montage of poisoned people convulsing. That montage then comes back in to interrupt up the dancing, and then the dancing gets spasmic, and then we go to Beyonce in that motel room going totally spazzy. It's as if the montage is equated with death spasms; as if this montage energy then invades the two main characters, who become less and less natural (compare Beyonce's spasms in the hotel room to the much more naturalistic dancing of Gaga in the prison; two heterotopias no less).
In his book The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro writes about Kathryn Bigelow's "Blue Steel": "Blue Steel exhibits a flagrant, salutary disregard for normative standards of plausibility. It displays a logic of contamination and repetition, rather than one of linear, psychological causality."
This video seems to move according to an extreme sense of "contamination and repetition."
Gaga accompanies her poisoning fantasy with German text, which of course leads me back to last week's post about Plath and Lady Lazarus, another text that utilizes montage-effects to evoke an un-dead energy (and, notably, a gender-inflected revenge fantasy of mass murder).
Like in Plath/Grahn, the spastic motion has to do with imagery. And more specifically the cinematic and more specifically the cinematic body. Shaviro: "Images are condemned because they are bodies without souls, or forms without bodies. They are flat and insubstantial, devoid of interiority and substance, unable to express anything beyond themselves."
*
When I was about 8 or 9 I went to the hospital and I couldn't eat the food and I grew weak and while walking over to the x-rays I collapsed, fainted and the nurse carried me in her arms. This, as I note in my entrance wound/pageant (forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky) is how I invented erotics. It was beautiful. They heaped me up on the x-ray machine and it buzzed away while I had visions of doctors in gas masks.
*
In Lukas Moodysson's "A Hole In My Heart" the main characters fuck and pass out and vomit and eat etc over and over. The title suggests an old fashioned epiphany but it's instead a medical condition. The constant crisis as a nervous condition. A crisis that won't be survived. That will just be repeated. The spazzing out won't be contained in the well-made text. It's the effect of an excessive text. A shit-and-puke text. The movie moves toward a "real story" by evoking their inner traumas etc, but that movement is always overwhelmed by the grotesque spectacle of their bodies. The "narrator" on a meta-level is fittingly the gothic teenage-son who harbors his own violent fantasies in the next room (rooms seem important to this spastic body).
Something about the unwieldiness of the film goes into the bodies convulsing in the porno room. This perhaps goes back to the Genet play which is 6 hours long. Almost un-producible. It's as if the spasmodic movements (and here, this is about the actor/director more than Genet, but who cares) were a result of the un-producible play, an unhealthy play; the play that won't stop, generating this frazzled energy.
* Another Swedish artist, Aase Berg, from "Mork Materia" (Dark Matter, in other words "syncope"):
"Beneath the shell crawls, beneath the shell crawls a frenzied and orgiastic bulimia. To eat into the meat puke beloved and be eaten into the meat puke beloved in merciless bloodthrobbing meat's helpless return... It's not death it is the edge folds down the visor we will tear loose the dark mass from each other's outer halo crack apart and close eyes move toward the glaciality Ivo climbs me away and I down beneath the surface shoal of song fish between the pillars I form submarine feel the violations of the flesh but do not emit any warning signals..." ("4.5 In Reactor)
Here a poem infected with montage-twitches: words and sentence-parts are cut and pasted together into an unsutured mess of bodies and words and sentences.
*
And going back to my post about Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath, it's of course a very cinematic body. But it's the cinematic body gone bad, the bad cut, the twitchy cut. The way Lady Lazarus is montaged after she's been dragged out of the sack (in fact Berg's poem alludes to, or better, reworks Lady Lazarus, I'll write a post on that later). Or in Kenneth Anger's occult "performance" in "Invocation to My Demon Brother":
According to the myth, Bobby Beauseuleil (sp?), the main actor of "Invocation" got into a tiff with Anger and (with the help of Charlie Manson no less) destroyed the film. And supposedly, Anger re-assembled the movie from leftover clippings in his cutting room. A kind of Frankenstein text in the very medium (see Leonard Davis on Frankensteinfor more insight about this).
*
From Kate's Delirious Hem manifesto:
"Say there is subversive power in the abject surrender of possession. The teenage girl’s body can be culturally uncontrollable in its unnatural movements, defying laws of god, state & the natural order. From levitation, vomiting gold coins, and inappropriate noises—speaking in tongues, barks, grunts, and mocking imitations of a male voice. Merge that with the anarchy of rapid bodily changes, a wild libido, death-glorifying fashions (fashion by its very nature is a celebration of the body’s fall from glory—I will be buried to decay like Marchesa Luisa Casati, along with my lace), and occasional self-induced starvation (a la Catherine of Sienna & Anneliese Michel), and you have a grotesquely gorgeous panic body, disrupting culture by over-literalizing its ideals, turning itself into a corporeal embrace and critique, an alarm bell and a sonata screaming in skin, tits, black painted eyes and lips....Say all good art—bad girl teen poetry included—is a fraud... Say the boundary between “life” and “art” is mocked in performance, whether a performative text (see Helene Cixous), a parade of unnatural fashions (high school halls become the theater), or a false fit of demonic possession."
*
Joyelle's homage to Judy Garland in "Summerstock":
"The figure of an accounting is obviously central to the model of expenditure vs. capitalism built up in Bataille, and it's a nice fit with what we're here to discuss today: story-making. The making of an account. The accounting. Should the accounts be measured? Should the balance hold? I think they should take the form to destruction and beyond. Mine will be poorly made, willful, death-leaning. Spend, spend, spend. This does not mean it will be drab, minimal; but maximal, desiccated, well dressed for death. I like archaic things which have already failed or are not destined to survive, failure to thrive, shrift instead of thrift, a shrivening, a mourning, the lack of sturdiness that pertains to minor genres, the eructations they engender instead of children."
The spastic movement is an uneconomical movement. Wasteful in the Bataille-ean sense. It is not form as an "extension of content" or the "wellwrought urn." These images were not earned because they were not images, they were spasms.
I suppose the spasm has something to do with: "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all" (Andre Breton, 1928).
*
And of course you can see the dynamic of spasmodic body and enclosed room here:
The enclosed to me suggests the way the spasms move against the strictures of form (the room echoing the now archaic idea of the film "frame").
*
I'm starving. I just taught a class on Charles Olson, in which the energy must be accounted for, in which form must be an extension of content, in which once perception MUST follow another. It's very economic. We're back to Ron's solid structures and visions of rigorous mastery.
*
Anyways, these are just some thoughts I had while thinking about Genet and Lady Gaga.
I recently saw Catherine Breillat’s brilliant new version of the Bluebeard story, entitled “Bluebeard,” and I thought that it was one of her best films yet. The story has two levels--on one, we see a subtle and beautifully shot version of the fairytale, and in the other we watch two young sisters in more or less modern times romp through a forbidden attic, with the younger sister (named Catherine) eventually tormenting her older sister by reading the Bluebeard story. Interestingly, though, the modern story is not set up as a frame for the fairytale: instead, the Bluebeard story both begins and ends the film. And by doing so the two stories are given equal weight, with the fairytale seeming every bit as real as the realist narrative. There is also some fascinating blending between the two narratives. The two sisters in the fairytale echo the two in the modern story, with one being impetuous, defiant, and red-haired, and the other being contemplative and sensitive and dark-haired. And yet Breillat undercuts this a bit in one sequence where the red-haired child in the modern story suddenly becomes the dark-haired teenager in the fairytale--and right at a pivotal moment in the film too.
I’ve read a few different takes on the ending, none of them wholly satisfying. (I won’t go into detail about it, except to say that it is one of those few surprise endings that really is a surprise.) In her review of the film in Cineaste, Maria Garcia suggests that it has to do with Breillat’s sense that it is easier for girls and women to triumphant in fairytales than in the real world, and while I think she makes a good point, I also think the very fact Breillat gives these two narratives such equal weight implies that she is trying examine how the world of the imagination actually works, with the gorgeously disturbing final image implying that the imagination has powers over even such things as death and terror. The plainchant music that plays during this scene implies such an almost religious sense of the imaginative powers. (Breillat is sometimes compared to Genet, and the final scene of “Bluebeard” really does show how much the two have in common.)
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“Romance” and “Anatomy of Hell” remain my two favorite Breillat films, though, and the reason I like them has less to do with their ideas about gender (which at times are somewhat pretentious, with certain grandiose notions of Woman and Man going unquestioned) and more to do with the ghostly, borderline monastic atmosphere in those movies. The bareness of some of the rooms echoes the lack of expression on the actor’s faces. There’s an element of Beckett and Bergman about some of her work: she strips things down to make them more visceral.
Something that doesn’t get mentioned often about her films is that their color schemes frequently have a washed-out aspect, with an emphasis on grays and whites and browns, and walls are frequently bare, with maybe a single picture or crucifix on them. When red does appear, as in the famous menstrual blood scenes in “Anatomy of Hell,” it tends to be a shocking red, an unreal red (somewhat like the weirdly fake color of the blood in “Taxi Driver”). I agree with those critics who say that her dialogue--at least as it is presented in subtitles--tends to be stiff, and that her actors are frequently leaden. But those aspects somehow make sense in Breillat's universe. All of her characters are puppets, playthings of the gods (whether those gods be desire or rage or terror), and their leadenness makes them seem perpetually traumatized by that fact. They have the edgy calmness of people that have been shell-shocked…
I was teaching Borges's "The Aleph" in my fiction writing class this week and it made me think that maybe my critique of pervading ideas of community and its fear of "the wax museum," and on the other hand my own embrace of the wax museum as a model of community is perhaps just Foucault's good old idea of heterotopia.
But I think it has more to do with what Daniel Tiffany in his latest book, Infidel Poetics, represents with nightclubs and thieves latin - ie moments that forge - in the words of the Latour quotes I gave a couple of days ago - networks with unlike entities. Ie translation becomes the social, the moment of community.
[I am thinking about Kate Durbin's book for a review I am writing, but I wanted to post some tangential ideas I've been having - about violence and consumption in art, about the body and some other stuff. Unfortunately I am incredibly low on available time, so I am going to pose these ideas incredibly incrementally. Part of this incremental process begane with Joyelle's manifesto that I posted yesterday. I will also refer to Kate Durbin essay about teenage girl possession and Kate Zambreno's blogposts about female violence and consumption as artistic reception, and maybe Max Ernst's "The Hundred Headless Woman" (which Lars von Trier would naturally remake as "Hundred Headless Women"); basically some thoughts I had as I was thinking what to write in a review of Kate's book, Ravenous Audience. I thought I would post this poem by Judy Grahn first. In part I started thinking about this poem's relationship to Kate's book because Kate has poems about Monroe, and in part because it seems to me a revision of Plath's "Lady Lazarus":]
I Have Come to Claim Marilyn Monroe's Body By Judy Grahn (published in 1970)
I have come to claim Marilyn Monroe’s body for the sake of my own dig it up hand it over cram it in this paper sack hubba hubba hubba Look at those luscious long brown bones that wide and crusty pelvis ha ha oh she wanted so much to be serious
but she’ll never stop smiling now has she lost her mind
Marilyn be serious - they’re taking your picture, and they’re taking the pictures of eight young women in New York City who murdered themselves for being pretty by the same method as you the very next day after you! I have claimed their bodies too, they smile up out of my paper sack like brainless Cinderellas.
the reporters are furious, they are asking me questions what right does a woman have to Marilyn Monroe’s body? and what am I doing for lunch? They think I mean to eat you. Their teeth are lurid and they want to pose me, leaning on the shovel, nude. Dont squint. But when one of the reporters comes too close I beat him, bust his camera with your long smooth thigh and with your lovely knuckle bone I break his eye.
Long ago you wanted to write poems Be serious, Marilyn I am going to take you in this paper sack around the world, and write on it: —the poems of Marilyn Monroe— Dedicated to all princes, the male poets who were so sorry to see you go, before they had a crack at you. They wept for you and also they wanted to stuff you while you still had a little meat left in useful places but they were too slow.
Now I shall take them my paper sack and we shall act out a poem together: “How would you like to see Marilyn Monroe, in action, smiling, and without her clothes?” We shall wait long enough to see them make familiar faces and then I shall beat them with your skull. hubba. hubba. hubba. hubba. hubba. Marilyn be serious today I have come to claim your body for my own.
*
This seems to be a pretty overt revision of Plath's "Lady Lazarus. But instead of being dug up by doctors (artists), Grahn's speaker is the one who digs up the Lady-Lazarus-like Marilyn Monroe. In Grahn's poem the poet takes Plath's internalized violence and relationship to looking/images of feminity and strikes back, literally, using Monroe's oogled corpse to physically hit the cameramen, those purveyors of voyeuristic images. (Though I can't help but feel that she's not just violent against the cameramen but also against the corpse.).
The references to Lady Lazarus are pretty obvious: the paper sack, the smiling woman (being made into an image), the connection between image and death, the image-woman being dug out of the grave, the hospital reference, the use of off-language ("hubba hubba").
Something that brings all of these texts together seems to be the idea of consumption, and more specifically the relationship of images (Art) and consumption, and the relationship of consumption to death, and the relationship of possession to death.
In Plath, we've got the "peanut-crunching crowd" who "shoves in" to see the "striptease" of the "smiling woman"; and I could never read that without hearing "bone-crunching crowd" - the audience is eating Lady Lazarus. They are a "ravenous audience" to bring in Kate D's book title. But of course, in the end, she will rise up like a ghost and "eat men like air."
In Grahn's poem, the cameramen are nervous that the speaker is going to "eat" Marilyn Monroe; but at the same time it's the cameramen's teeth that are "lurid," suggesting they are going to consume the speaker by photographing her. If this poem was totally simplistic, she would just resist this, but she recognizes some of the power and does post with a shovel, like a fashion shoot (of a necrophiliac!). It's only when the cameramen get too close, that she beats them up. And when she does beat them up - in a very B-movie act of ultra-violence - she uses the image, the icon of Monroe's body to do so. Further more, why does she *really* want to do with Monroe's body? What does it mean to "claim" it? It seems the cameramen are perhaps to some degree correct: perhaps she is consuming it.
Both Plath's and Grahn's poems engage with the dynamics of the image/possession/looking: the image/art is used to disempower/kill but also to empower(but not in a cheesy feel-good way; empower through death and violence, through visual fascination). A lot of literature seem anxious about thinking about reading as consuming, we want to maintain a sensible distance. Both of these poems seem to both critique aesthetification and realize the power of art that is consumed, that consumes - and we're back to expenditure, dead women and Joyelle's manifesto (see below). And of course we're back to ghosts and B-movies and being haunted and EA Poe.
I was going to set up a link to the blog of Monica Mody, a brilliant writer who's graduating from our MFA program this spring. But then I thought, I should give a little introduction to her work and thinking while I was at it. So I asked her to give me a bio, an artistic statement and a piece of writing to put here as a way of introduction.
Here's her bio: Monica Mody is about to complete her MFA in poetry from the University of Notre Dame. She was born in Ranchi (India), trained as a lawyer, shifted to Delhi, and fell for poetry. In between, she edited domestic violence resource guides and travel guides, organized human rights film festivals and a poetry in performance series, and lost a cat or two.
Here's an artistic statement: "Writing is for me a vertiginous, distended, nebulous, and exhausting process which may involve discomfort, embarrassment or failure. All of these, I'm convinced, are good for poetry which is an entirely expendable art. It is unproductive, superfluous, and dispensable. Which is why, if you want to write poems, you cannot afford not to expend yourself. Poets must be lavish, even reckless. This generosity must extend to the writing, reading, and to their communities of poetry. They must be generous with the unknown; they must also be critically engaged with other texts as well as with contexts: lived, mediated, and theoretical."
Here's an introduction to her longer work, "Kali Pani":
"Kala Pani" means "black water" in Hindustani - what the Indian oceans were once called, since there was a strict prohibition on Hindus crossing the seas. It makes you think about all that is supposed to be lost when you leave home. But Kala Pani was also the name of a colonial-era prison in the Andamans, to which the British sentenced "hardened" freedom fighters and political prisoners. So this piece dwells in a pretty bleak space. It has six world travelers on an island of sorts, who have either been left there by the new government or are in voluntary exile. In the best traveler-tradition, they tell marvelous stories to each other, either to pass time, or because they have no other option. A lot of their stories are about two characters, but these don't appear in this excerpt. (Another excerpt from this work will be appearing soon in LIES/ISLE.)
Excerpt:
SECOND WORLD TRAVELLER Once it so happened that the new government sent off teams of curators to different corners of the world. Their object was to collect statistics about star-billed trees, trees with grain in hollows or wind in roots, trees that waited at the edge of desert for raw footsteps. Bittersweet trees. Curators were briefed that all such extant trees would be added to the new government's official collection. If a tree, measured, turned out too
Clamorous to fit the museum, a more sophisticated way to moisten it was to be found. A most satisfactory most hardly moss of solidarity. Not all the curators agreed with this pastoral which they considered a selfish preoccupation of the new government. But the new government controlled all technologies of power which made it imperative that they submit to its rationality.
THE RATIONAL PRESIDENT (radio voice) We have gathered today to celebrate trees with star billing. These trees represent five millennia of humankind's collective aspirations, and it is but appropriate that we gift them to the museum of the new world. We will lovingly track and displace them and lovingly collect or moisten them. We will love the new world. It is due to the generosity of friends and benefactors that the new government could organize the bureaucracy, the complicity, the compromises, the ideological cooption, the cooperation, the rapacity and the ethical rationalization necessary for this farsighted program, and to them we will confer appropriate rewards. Our desire is to keep everyone in the new world happy.
FIRST WORLD TRAVELLER The curators returned with summary catalogues describing 29 or 92 million bittersweet trees. Each catalogue provided not only a compact illustrated listing of the trees, but also brief comments by curators that explained how each tree was proposed to be collected or moistened. These catalogues were ceremonially handed over to the Society for Just Plunder which launched systematic invasions in which bittersweet trees were hacked, stripped, and stifled. A few trees of monumental significance made it to the back of trucks, gagged and trussed, after the Department of Diplomacy intervened. The museum of the new government waited for the trucks, waist-deep in gelatinous expectation: its own secretions.
SECOND WORLD TRAVELLER Gangs of tree lovers tried to mislead the Society by pasting cheap calendar reproductions on the trees, and some of them might have succeeded but all information about them is still in a secret archive somewhere. The tender minded tree minded might have washed the trees with their rainclear saliva. The tree minded might have tried to hijack some of the trucks. Some trees were commandeered by forces of the market and surfaced, years later, disoriented. Some were locked up and indicted.
FIRST WORLD TRAVELLER Once the Society had crossed off a tree it planted a surveillance camera on the scene. The new government’s propaganda machine hooked up to the media machine and broadcast homage to the surveillance cameras. Soon, some citizens believed that the cameras had far-reaching benefits and they were safe and happy in the new world.
THE RATIONAL PRESIDENT (radio voice) A play on the word “tree” is certainly possible and our team of experts has come to the conclusion that bittersweet trees, as a species, must be carved in hacking motions or transplanted to a conflict-free zone so that they don’t affect YOUR chances of survival.
[I'm working on a longer piece about Consumption in Art, Plath, Kate Durbin etc, that I will post later today, but in the meantime I just realized that the best response to Ron Silliman's dismissal of certain new poetries (unnamed by Ron) as "Fashionism" (as opposed to his morally responsible "structure") is Joyelle's essay that was in a Fence a while back. The things I write later about Kate and Plath and Judy Grahn will have everything to do with this essay:]
Joyelle McSweeney "Expenditure: Or, why I'm going to die'trying"
1) My non-realist writing is exhausting. It exhausts the sentences. It has no good measure. It starts out formal (interested in genre) but it distends form and makes it sag.
2) When Bataille analyzes society, he divides it into two parts: the productive part, and then "the second part, represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity [ . . . ]-all these represent the activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves." '
3) Ladies and gentlemen, we live in primitive circumstances. There are wars of attrition going on all over this planet that have no end in sight, wars which regardless of their recent dates of inception seem immemorial. In place of "immemorial" let's try "expiration date." It's time for the showstopper that brings down the house.
4) Bataille says "the term poetry [ . . . ] can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore closer to that of sacrifice. "' By sacrifice he means a loss unto extinction; sacrifice produces sacred objects. Furthermore, "in particular, the success of Christianity must be explained by [ . . . I the Son of God's ignominious crucifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation."'
5) Or, put another way, there's no success like failure.
6) Some have said that Roberto Bolafio's work, with its many missing, absent, or disappeared artists, thematizes the failure of art to intervene in and alter history, to prevent coups, to make anything happen, but I think his formlessness and archival quality makes a history on art's terms. In the final passage of Amulet, dead bodies extend all the way to the South Pole and back, a parody of a utopian vision that would stretch further; the dead bodies in the fourth part of 2666 dishevel the narrative and even the ability of the genre-here now-to assemble itself. The bodies amount to just carnage and dread of more carnage. Boring, boring dread.
7) I often talk of my work in terms of form but what the form frames is something else that gapes away from it-in the final fornm of my sci-fi novel Flet the protagonist becomes an archaeopteryx rotting In the desert and that's how the entire second half of the plot is "resolved," or, decomposed in a decomposing artwork that involutes and becomes darkly and toxically capacious. Like the women of Juarez, it can die and die and die.
8) The figure of an accounting is obviously central to the model of expenditure vs. capitalism built up in Bataille, and it's a nice fit with what we're here to discuss today: story-making. The making of an account. The accounting. Should the accounts be measured? Should the balance hold? I think they should take the form to destruction and beyond. Mine will be poorly made, willful, death-leaning. Spend, spend, spend. This does not mean it will be drab, minimal; but maximal, desiccated, well dressed for death. I like archaic things which have already failed or are not destined to survive, failure to thrive, shrift instead of thrift, a shrivening, a mourning, the lack of sturdiness that pertains to minor genres, the eructations they engender instead of children. As Baudelaire writes of the Dandy: "Whether these men are nicknamed exquisites, incroyables, beaux, lions or dan- dies, they all spring from the same womb; they all partake of the same charac- teristic quality of opposition and revolt [ . . . ]Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is just beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, politically, and financially ill at ease, but are all rich in a native energy, may conceive of the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter as it will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow. "" -and he goes on to give as examples the Dandyism of the "savage" tribes of North America.
10) And they all spread from the same womb, the same womb or entrails, and their high fashion, their cloaks and adorned, bulletproof ghost shirts, cover over it until it can't. Which brings us to the topic of camp. And particularly to the figure of Judy Garland, once the girl next store'who always seemed to be singing from beyond the grave, as if her flesh would really melt from her voice at any minute, her body weight and its untidy expenditures the matter of constant biographizing. In the wholesome Sumrnev Stock, the film with which the whole notion of "putting on a show in the barn" reaches its apotheosis, Garland- the-farm-girl stops the show by shedding her overalls and performing a sexy, terrifying, Weimar-inspired cabaret number in only a man's jacket, fedora, and hat. She sings Forget your troubles, come tm get happy You better chase all your cares away. Shout alleluia, come on get happy, Get ready for the Judgment Day. This ghoulish hymn to death-in-life is all the more ghoulish for its context-like revolution, it stops the show by maxing it out. Like revolutionary violence, it stops the clock. Death and life touch there. In "real life," Judy fled the set for an eight-week Dexedrine purge midway through the production. She literally stopped the show and remade it in her own artificial image. Moreover, her incarnation of Weimar sensibilities opens an aperture from the awe-shucks splitting onto an earlier and patently ghoulish time. Death-in-life applies not just to the lyrics of the song, which in their manic inability to arrive at the promised land suspend the "we" in a feverish, plagued inbetweenness-but in its aesthetic ventriloquism of the Weimar period, the decadence that was the recto of the Holocaust's verso.
14) Which is all to say: I may be writing a maximal, dandified, camp, illgendered, millenarian text, for the sentences run on past health to death, a region in which the most blasphemous rituals take place, and they require an undo attention to style, flair, garments, gestures rather than actions and plot, descriptions only of things that never were, an uncanny, transporting voice not tied to any body, around which flesh accrues and decomposes, a text that does not choose life but might acquire it alongside death.
"The traditional view of language contends that translation is a decadent act since it corrupts the pure 'innocence' [Footnote: See George Steiner, After Babel. "Innocence" is a term Steiner uses to suggest the original uncorrupted status of the original language] of the original language. This widely accepted view has its roots in Greek thought and religious traditions. For instance, Herder believed that when a text guards itself from all translations it retains its vital innocence. This exemplifies the long-standing religious and mystical perspective George Steiner refers to as 'seeking to protect the holy texts from traduction.' The mystical text seeks to protect itself from translation by inscribing itself as irreducibly singular. Like Rousseau's account of the 'origin of languages', the mystical is situated in an essentially undivided point of linguistic 'innocence.'"
[Amir Ali Nojoumian, "Translation: Decadence or Survival of the Original?"]
Here are a couple of quotes from Bruno Latour's *Reassembling the Social* that I find evocative. They were sent to me by a media theorist in response to my recent posts about lineage, community etc:
"The sense of belonging has entered a crisis. But to register this feeling of crisis and to follow these new connections, another notion of the social has to be devised. It has to be much wider than what is usually called by that name,yet strictly limited to the tracing of new associations and to the designing of their assemblages. This is the reason why I am going to define the social not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling." (7)
"So far, I have insisted mostly on the difference between "social" as in 'social ties' and 'social' as in 'associations' - bearing in mind that the second meaning is closer to the original etymology. I have argued that most often in social sciences, 'social' designates a type of link: it's taken as the name of a specific domain, a sort of material like straw, mud, string, wood or steel... For Action-Network Theory, as we now understand, the definition of the term is different: it doesn't designate a domain of reality or some partiuclar item, but rather is the name of a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrollment. It is an association between entities which are in no way recognizeable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together... Thus social,for Action Network Theory, is the name of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers together into new shapes." (65)
“Lady Gaga is, quite literally, a spectacle of American pop music and fame culture. Since August 2008, which witnessed the release of her debut album The Fame, her presence has flooded both American and world culture-scapes. While her music has certainly garnered great chunks of pop culture’s fleeting and finicky attention, it is her persona that has secured the most lasting fascination and discussion. Lady Gaga is much more than the singer of catchy pop songs such as “Just Dance” and “Poker Face”: she is a performance artist that never sets aside her performance. And her project? – To deconstruct the very pop culture that creates and worships her, and to explore and make problematic the hackneyed image of the pop icon while flourishing in the clichéd role itself.” –M, Only Words to Play With
Fame Factory: Critical Writings and Art about Lady Gaga is a new technological breed of journal that intends to take seriously the brazenly unserious shock pop phenomenon and fame monster known as Lady Gaga.
Submit:
Critical Work (any format; any length) and Art (Creative Writings, Visual Art, Music, etc.), or any combination thereof, that intelligently interacts with the pop cultural manifestation that is Lady Gaga.
We are also interested in critical writings on the web that already exist, so please call these to our attention if you come across them.
Those who follow Gaga know that she moves as the speed of pop, which is far faster than the speed of critique; therefore, we have chosen the blogger format for now to allow us to keep pace with Gaga. We encourage pieces that are immediate (for example, critical responses to her newest performances, interviews, and music videos), though we are also eager for your more thought-over works as well. If your work is accepted, expect it to be published quickly--likely within a day or two of acceptance. You should also expect to interact with others in the comment boxes of the blog; permitting the peanut-crunching crowd of monsters to further the conversation's evolution.
Our goal is to eventually create a book of the best works on this site, both in technological and physical form, possibly in collaboration with the Haus of Gaga.
I should perhaps give some context: It's obviously a murder mystery. It's the old Hitchcockian "wrong man" who has to find the real killer scenario. Only he's not really in jail, he's in something more like a hospital (full of strange nurses and pro-life protesters), and another inmate is the "expresident" who regales him with tales of his sexual exploits and exploitations and genocidal cravings and then tricks the narrator into trying to kill "Father Voice-Over" who annoys the expresident with his announcements over the PA system. The problem with the novel is that I got kind of lost in the sexual and political pageantry of it all and I end up ending the story before he even gets out of jail/hospital. It ends when he gets out.
Right now I'm writing the sequel which is moving much much faster. He escapes jail, hitchhikes across the country with an acting troupe who puts on morality tales in smalltowns, gets to LA to find the real killer, gets help from a couple of teenage girls who more or less only speak Godard quotes and a maker of wasteful machines and his wife who takes messages Cocteau-style from the radio and his daughter who plays strange games. Then the plague hits LA Defoe-style and then he finds the killer. And that's the end of the second section.
The story has some things in common with the video for "Telephone" with Lady Gaga and Beyonce.
Here's a related thing, a scene from my pageant (forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press); the character is named Trauma and this is one of his monologues. It's in the most recent issue of jubilat.
Trauma:
In the Rampant State, nobody understands how to clean the ganglia. Nobody knows how to thread it, how to abuse it, how to interrogate prisoners with it. In the Rampant State all the torture devices involve drowning or lynching. The General wants to lynch all the black male bodies with moths. He uses obvious innuendoes, to make sure his base understands him, but he cannot say it openly. To do so would be to offend the refined tastes of his base. If anybody accuses him of racism, he replies that the accusers are "playing the race card." I am playing the race card with a revolver pointing to my head. The revolver has an autonomic system. It is loaded with two silver bullets: one for my black brain and one for my insect nerve.
Corman, Bucket of Blood (Iconophilia and Iconophobia)
A while back I criticized the movie "Synecdoche, NY" for participating in what I might call the iconophobia of the wax museum, an anti-kitsch syndrome I've traced to the nostalgia for a kind of primeval sense of community of authentic relations.
But I'm changing my view of "Synechdoche, NY". In difference to the anti-kitsch discussions in contemporary poetry, the movie is positively iconophillic. I still think about some of the images: the guy brushing his ex-wife's toilet as a kind of ersatz sex, the actress acting the main guy's role giving him directions in his earpiece, the miniatures of the ex-wife's relationship, the daughter's stripper dance, the cheesy tattoo coming alive on the daughter's body as she's dying. It may be a film whose allegorical message is that images/art is dangerous and threatens to ruin the real, authentic relations between people, but the iconophilia of the piece certainly undermines any such simplistic readings.
(Maybe this was pretty obvious to everyone but me. Perhaps I was watching the movie with the wrong glasses. Perhaps I am my own best/worst case study in the failure of this kind of reading.)
In this it has a lot in common with pretty much all of Edgar Allen Poe's brilliant stories about women being killed as they are made into art (there are any number of these, and of course these were written for mass consumption, and of course Americans tend to read them as kitsch, I think he's a great writer, which is a sign I have not yet earned total assimilation). And the movie I watched on Wednesday night, Roger Corman's "Bucket of Blood" from 1959.
This movie presents all the hallmarks of the wax museum fear in super-perfect setting of a beatnik cafe. The movie begins with the Uber-Beatnik proclaiming the deadness of people who are not artists and expressing his opposition to the deadness of "graham crackers" (ie kitsch). He importantly begings the film by saying "There is nothing but art." Life is art. However, he doesn't grasp the possibly fatal consequences of this statement. Nor does he seem to realize the contradictions involved in this sentiment, but that's the contradiction this film explores.
A little later, the feminine, weird busby admiringly quotes the passage back to the poet, and the poet is taken aback. He explains to his friends that he doesn't memorize his poems, in fact he doesn't write down his poems because he doesn't want to repeat himself; to repeat oneself is death. This doesn't stop the busboy from repeating the line later to a bourgeois couple who's come to tourist-gawk at the beatniks. Their reaction is: :"Oh,you must be an artist!" From the very start, the movie sets up this attraction/repulsion of repetition, of artifice; the threat of art is that it may destroy the authentic. For one person, the blurring between art and life means spontaneity in both; for the other, it means the artificialization of life. (We're back to the Ranciere quote about kitsch being the blurring of art and life.)
The great thing about the setting is that the cafe, supposed icon of "community" authenticity, is already turning into an art show, wax museum of sorts. It is full of beats who perform the roles as beats, narcs who look for drug dealers, and tourists who come to look at the beats who are really narcs looking for the real beats who are supposedly drug dealers. Everybody's an actor in this show!
Drugs here seems to be the secret agent behind the plot. And drugs seem to play a similar role as aesteticism: it creates a scene, a role, a costume. It even aesteticizesour senses, makes the world more like art, more like a wax museum. Not surprisingly, it's the real druggies who - complete in uniforms (tellingly army hats) - are the ones who offer the bourgeois couple a tourist tour of the counter culture.
The busby accidentally kills his landlady's cat and to cover up his crime by turning the cat into a clay sculpture (by simply covering it in clay, leaving in the knife, all ultra-Poe). This finally makes the busboy into an artist. Suddenly he's acclaimed at the cafe and bourgeois art enthusiasts want to buy his art. Unfortunately, one new fan gives him some heroin, and one of the narcs witnesses this. In a freak-out moment the busboy kills the narc with a frying pan. And what does he do? He turns the narc into his latest artwork, a life-size man with a split skull. Art isn't perhaps life but death.
The problem is of course how to avoid artist block. To do so, the busboy kills a beautiful woman and turns not just the woman but the act of strangling her into a statue (she's naked on a chair, having a scarf around her neck, visibly being strangled). Ultimately, the beat cafe stages a whole show of the busboy's artwork. Unfortunately the clay starts coming off,and the woman the busboy is in love with is horrified, especially when he then offers to turn her into artwork, thus immortal. Well, there's a big chase scene which ends with the busboy hanging himself as the final artwork ("Hanging Man" - suggesting some kind of intertext with Eliot).
This is another example of a movie that is about the deathiness of artifice, the opposition between real community and performances, but that totally undermines this simplistic message with just he awesome kitschy imagery. And in that tension between the moral and the image, the tenor and the vehicle, is a much more interesting take on art.
And it's of course totally essential that the Uber-Beat is very macho (with beard, muscular) while the busboy is very feminine, impotent, with the posture of a chronic masturbator. He freaks out when approached by a woman suitor. He's the "soft surrealist," the violent femme.
*
Recently someone informed me that Eve Sedgwick had already in the early 90s come up with a more detailed, nuanced reading of the kind of binarism I have been reading in Silliman's rigor-vs-softness rhetoric in her book "The Epistemology of the Closet." Here's a list of binaries associated guided by hetero-homo:
"I'll ague that the now chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual definition has affected our culture through its ineffacable marking partiuclary of the categories..."
A lot of these binaries seem to be played out in the film as well.
What makes the poetry discussion interesting to me is the way it works on secrecy/initiation and public/private. A secret community is interesting. I'm obviously not anti-community as some people on the Net have suggested.
* One might also read this as a kind of Lacanian parable: the real is not the community but the trauma that has to be symbolized, turned into art in order for the symbolic order to function.
* There's one more thing that intrigues me about the movie and that's the relationship of the busboy's titles and the title of the movie,Bucket of Blood. The busboy gives his work very factual titles, "Dead Cat" etc. But Corman names his film, not "Film about Death and Art" but "Bucket of Blood," referring in part to a very gruesome image in the film and in part metaphorically to the film as a whole. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I thought it was worth noting.
What I like about Gretchen Henderson's comments is that she brings in Bakhtin's ideas of monoglossia and heteroglossia. Monoglossia is of course an illusion that must be maintained against the forces of heteroglossia. That is where the lyric poem tends to function: to maintain the illusion of language purity, authenticity.
It is this authenticity that modern art/poetry/culture has used to define itself; and it is kitsch it has defined itself against. Modern art is authentic; the inauthentic is kitsch. Kitsch is generally associated with mass-produced items (and in fact the term is created in a response to mass production, to the excess it creates). However, it's not a stable term (lots of things can be kitsch), it's a way of dismissing things (not just mass-produced items) as "cheap" or inauthentic. In Greenberg (and many others) kitsch is associated with crossing borders, with the foreign, with the "seductive." For Greenberg (and Bobby Baird pointed this out as well on this blog) kitsch also included the loss of the autonomous artwork.
It struck me as strange that Lily objected to being called an "Asian-American" writer and just wanted to be "American." But behind that dislike is perhaps the sense that the hyphen has been turned into a kitsch item, something not quite high culture, something that lets the social into the pristine realm of the authentic.
I like Lily's quote from Bergvall: "For many bicultural artists and writers, the processes of identity and of writing acquisition go hand in hand with aspects of cultural belonging and the way this articulates their lived body and speaking voice. When the writer’s cultural and social body accommodates two or three languages and/or cultures, their inscriptive narratives and poetics are necessarily at a break from a monolingual textual body-type and a nationally defined writing culture. It is often accompanied by a propensity towards open-forms and mixed genres, remains dubious and questioning of defining terms, can be resistant of exile or immigrant narratives and their inward longing for a traditionalist past where identities are firmly locked in place, rather than in play."
It seems important here that the traditional "immigrant narratives" are about looking back etc - they are kitsch. This kitsch idea of immigrant hides the more interesting idea that Bergvall forwards, the violence that is not hyphenated. And I think the traditional idea of immigrant narratives covers up the way immigrant language denaturalizes "the native", makes the native strange, shows the illusoriness of the "monoglossic" (this is of course why I object to Ron Silliman objecting to foreigners translating foreign literature - he distrusts their lack of native "ear" - I distrust his idea of native).
I wrote a book called Pilot in which I tried to write an "immigrant" narrative that would entail the violence of languages and bodies that are involved in immigration. It's based on translations in various directions (from english to english to swedish to english etc), resulting - I hope - in a kind of immigrant-like language, an always foreign, inauthentic language. When I read it (I can only speak for myself) out loud the result is a kind of artificial language that sounds perhaps made on archaic recording equipment or perhaps spoken by an immigrant. The source texts were things like birthing manuals, poems (Dickinson, Scalapino etc) and Cronenberg's "Videodrome" (an already foreign sounding neologism, a movie that is very video, a story about seeing one's girlfriend on a broadcast of her death), and the Internet. Pilot is of course someone flying from one place to another,but it's also the pilot episode of a show. What's interesting about the pilot episode (for example the Twin Peaks pilot episode) is that it's the origin of the story, but it seems mostly to be slightly off, things haven't been worked out yet, actors are different, the script is a little different. It's both origin and fake copy.
I would also add that queer theory has influenced me a great deal in my thinking about foreigness and kitsch.
[I was writing a letter to someone who had expressed interest in my translation of Johan Jönson's Collobert Orbital (Displaced Press, 2009), and then I ended up writing a little history of recent Swedish-American poetry relations in 1990s-2000s, including also references to Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg and You go the words by Gunnar Björling. I think one way this history is interesting is the way it shows the limitations of the strict community confines, and the severe reductiveness of Silliman-like monolingual lineages. Perhaps translation inherently opens up a "third way" in Michael Theune's definition of that phrase.]
[Anyway, Language-related poets have been very interested in getting their work translated to Swedish, going over there for readings set up by OEI etc, so I hope they will want to grapple with Collobert Orbital, which is Sweden in many ways writing back.]
About Johan Jönson’s Collobert Orbital: .... Johan’s text is in many ways a "re-translation" of Norma Cole's translation of Collobert's diaries (Litmus Press), translating it into his own severely restricted language, and also his life (he used to work as a feces-remover at a hospital).
Johan is an interesting poet. A working class guy who was early on heralded as a bright young promise in the late 80s; then his work grew increasingly obscene and constrained (an odd combination); and in the 90s he was more or less exiled from the poetry world. Instead he wrote performance pieces for an incredibly obscene Artaud/Muller-inspired performance troop in northern Sweden (Teatermaskinen), publishing his texts as pamphlets that were eventually gathered up as I krigsmaskinen (In the war machine, they dealt largely with the war in Yugoslavia).
At this point he was in many ways “rediscovered” by Aase Berg, a young poet who had gone from being a member of the radical avant-garde group the Stockholm Surrealists Group to an incredibly popular and influential young poet. The big press Bonnier very briefly let her edit its flagship journal BLM, and she used it in part to bring Johan into prominence. I’ve translated her work too, so I included one of those books. She also has an interesting tie-in for American poetry: as you can perhaps tell, there’s a big shift in her work from the extreme Bataille-influenced early surrealist prose poems to the highly charged, extremely translation-infused poems that follow (particularly Transfer Fat, which is based largely on “translations” of string theory, sci-fi films and other materials, a text that seems to “transfer” the “fat” of signifiers/signified in a continuous movement). Anyway, a big part of that shift had to do with Berg’s interest in American poetry, particularly Susan Howe, who was then just being translated into Swedish.
Since then, Johan has become one of the central poet of OEI, a journal and publishing house founded by Jesper Olsson, a Swedish scholar who spent years in the 1990s studying with Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo and who was inspired by Charles’s emphasis on do-it-yourself publishing. In the years since he came back from Buffalo, Jesper has made OEI into a major influence on contemporary Swedish poetry. [You can also read the work of OEI poet Ida Börjel, published in a special issue of Chain devoted to Scandinavian conceptual writing]
Another figure whose reputation has risen over the past 20 years is Gunnar Björling, whose book You go the words my press published in translation some years ago. Björling was a Finland-Swedish Dadaist who began writing strange, erasure-based poems in the 1920s but whose work had been largely ignored/marginalized until the 1990s. He’s frequently been called “the Gertrude Stein” of Scandinavia for exactly this reason. Anselm Hollo once wrote to me that he thought that with “Transfer Fat” Aase Berg became the first Swedish poet writing “in the wake of Björling.” But it seems his influence is really strong right now for the first time...
[Since this is a brief history it is necessarily simplistic in its own ways, especially since I'm writing about a topic that the addressee hardly can be expected to know anything about.]
[I received this comment below from Ana Božičević. I thought the comment was really insightful so I'm reposting it as an entry.]
[This is about as good of a response I can imagine to Ron Silliman who again today tried to dismiss the noisy immigrant by arguing that I want to "wish away history." Actually, it's that I think Ron's "lineages" are ignoring history and that his model of "structure" is a terribly archaic model.]
[In "The Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Clement Greenberg - whose ideas I think Ron and a lot of "contemporary" American poetry has been influenced by - argues that one of the things kitsch does is cross national borders, wrecking "folk culture" in the process. And isn't the prevalent valorization of "community" in "contemporary" American poetry so often (not always Craig PS!!) based on a dream of the small town, the folk culture, the pre-modern, monolingual, pre-immigrant village?]
[The English language: There is a lot of talk about how English is the most agile language because it has so many influences. I think this is a way to cover up the fact that the English language opens up a very kitschy space: where the colonies(the rest of the world) reworks the imperial language.]
A commenter wondered how theory-allied poetry examining pop-cultural kitsch & using "girly" tropes can have any sort of relevance outside its own narrow American context. Who "gets" gurlesque and how does it break new ground - didn't female surrealists already mow that lawn? But things get interesting when kitsch consumables (be they Rockers Ken http://www.toplessrobot.com/BarbieRockersKen.jpg or Matryoshka dolls) cross borders and become relics of a childhood's political climate -- eg in the case of the USSR, or of former Yugoslavia (my birthland). Fetishized in the collective memory are a whole Atlantis of kitschy products that are no longer produced and exist as brand names and jingles only. They have even been collected in a Lexicon of Yu-Mythology (http://www.leksikon-yu-mitologije.net/).
Their existence is totally disruptive to (or, if the bottom line demands, commodified by) the emergent neocapitalist national ideologies of ex-Yu countries. What does it mean for these products/words/concepts to be examined from the vantage point of an immigrant, whose whole body, bearing the "made in Yu" stamp, is another such kitsch object? The immigrant's English and even hisher "othered" attempts at translation into English, too full of foreign is-ness to be pleasing to that lineage-conscious American ear, are totally allied with kitsch. This seems so obvious. Johannes, I really look forward to how you develop this idea. It's kind of crucial to me that you do, even.
