Alluvial fans in deep space

Yesterday was Rutgersfest. The streets were flooded with drunk college kids. Everyone wanted to have a good time, and from their perspective, it was a bit like a festival. But from an outside (a sober) vantage, there was no atmosphere and we were all in a vacuum. In the bar (my friend wanted to celebrate her new position for 2011 Model Congress), there were a bunch of too-cool-for-graduate-school folks in flannel shirts and some sad middle aged Jersey folks. And that was the alternative to three inch heels and satin tube dresses, a repeat track of hip-hop blasting out of silver and black cars; everyone living out the movie or the music video.

There is something terrifying about self-involvement; if you look around for too long the force of silences in old-time public spaces (now storefronts and human deltas outside of bars) is almost enough to crush you. And then, on the walk down George street home, through the housing projects, a man with his friends violently screamed something out about our being females, and if he could have gone to college he would have raped us–how dare we walk on the sidewalk.

And that’s the state of it. A tuition “rally” three weeks ago where the top number was 75 participants. And who the fuck wants to organize like a bunch of buffoons, anyway? Being underground in this town means having a basement show at a secret location to avoid the noise complaints. And there’s nothing past the loud vibrations and the beer and the hipster-clothes. Being “political” means that you join Tent State, and having a message begins and ends with Che shirts.

At the Press, I see endlessly erudite pieces of scholarship, gotta hand it to ‘em, right? But there’s still a part of me that still says fuck you to erudition on thee history of the Platform Sutra in Chinese culture from 600-1000. There’s a part of me that is ashamed of the split between a life of art and a life of scholarship that so often takes the form of and M.F.A. or a P.h.D.

It all seems like emptiness. It seems like hopelessness; my best friend got kicked out of Starbucks for pamphleting. The cafes are fascists now, too. But more strongly than despair do I feel, with some alien sixth sense, that there are new cracks, new underground currents, the dream of a utopia lives on.

But where? But where?

oh why not!

Was having very fun prep discussions with my friend Sarah who has her orals defense tomorrow- realized that I really must read more Jameson and Althusser. But I knew this.

Anyway, I re-decided and I want to put the owl-dream back up.

I had my strangest dream yet.

I was sitting on the ledge of a window, but I was still inside.
There were branches of a tree with no leaves on them
but owls perched there, instead.
They were little,
but not tiny and they were gentle.
I tipped the nearest one to me;
it dove straight into the ground.
Snowy and brown and black,
gentle little owl–just when I thought
that his beak might smash against the earth it melted softly
into it–
and along landed a more perfect one,
as silently as a late February storm.
Its eyes were wider, blacker,
its form was fuller,
more complete than any sculpture that I know.
I thought it might teach me all
its instincts
and how to glide on the torrent’s flow.
It would not tell me.

All this, without words,
I tipped them all off of their branches that reached out to fill into a globe,
but they none would fly.

More silent, more chasmed eyes tended faintly on the tree–
so I tumbled out of the window just to try
but that was the end of me.

Bullshit Gurus

Have you ever been in extremely close proximity with a bullshit guru, without actually being faced with the event? Well, I have. And if this particular editor’s self-important, petty-bourgeois, quasi-intellectual/artist sophistry weren’t incommensurable enough, there is the “sign”–that is, the cubicle  wall. I can only hear her voice. Last time I was in the office I wrote about four pages in my journal to her, about her. She is always explaining facebook to someone, always relating her many stories that have transpired via its mystic portals. Today, we’re covering online translators and this “hippie artist” in Argentina who is obsessed with her poetry. But of course she can read it herself, she eeks out some hideous phonemes “but anyway, I speak Spanish.” I need to write some of this bullshit guru-dom down.

__

from journal entry– 2/2/2010

I breathe in. The editor in the cubicle has been rambling about her poetry book: 7×7 is 149 pieces. But it’s really only 49 pieces, there is no precision of language. She might try to utilize her connections at such and such publishing. When no one can hear her, she curses the bastard author who dissed her poetry online.

There’s poem about Myrtle with the parasitic twin. There’s her Dominican hip-hop facebook friend who praises her.

and there’s her plethora of cultural Jewish erudition.

She is all peace and love and feeling groovy and loving health food stores when she’s talking to the other cubicles. But when she finds out that someone doesn’t love her 7×7=149, she slams stacks of papers;

“jerk, asshole.”

She smiles in her public voice- of course we have to topple the government through the media–”but I hate communism. There has to be a new way.”

And she’s found it. I smell her cutting cucumbers and beets at her desk– the cubicle boundary is permeable.

Organic. A home-made hat, a finished book of unpublished poetry in her apartment. She can believe in sharing (even if only her files) and being groovy and caring for her owl soul–

I breathe in, I smell 50 cent coffee on my breath.

“I’m starting a new restaurant!” she beams, someone responds. or maybe not. She jests. Fresh fruits, a cutting-board, a new way.

I eat old pretzels that I stole from my roommate.
I’m not a poet, I’m not an editor, I don’t nourish my soul.

She can flit around the publishing house in faux-sari shirts and

explain the etymology of Minerva. She can still be amazed that someone in her building hacked her files. “You know, I just thought I was surrounded by friends.” Communism.

She can imagine that she lives in the new way; the cubicle wall is leaden.

I eat 6/$3 pudding for lunch, potato flakes for dinner, pasta in metallic sauce. Mercury poisoned dolphin in a can of oil.

I am bloated,

hungry,

run miles after dark, sleep deeply,

live the way a bullshit guru
can only talk about
at lunch.

practices, properties, traits

I heard it from a shadow
that I should take a tiny iron stitch-ripper
and carefully explore my insides
until I can finally, finally see if it matches dust
trapped in the sun-slot.

but I know it doesn’t.
I heard it from a shadow that the stitch-ripper
un-sows the smallest seams
that I’d never even felt or seen
painlessly

and I could listen to my stomach
to hear if all the music I inhabit
does the same to me.

I heard it from a shadow
as it passed across my face
in a bursting whisper
that the tiny iron stitch-ripper
might do wonders for my eyes.

It all started at 2pm in Seoul 362 days ago

I think you should all know something about me. I have a pre-myself and a post-myself period. Both epochs are slightly useful but equally flawed: pre-myself was all perception, all observation, the world was a loose connectivity of phenomena that circled around me, unknowable. Post-myself acquired the language to experience what I had felt for a very long time, the means to survey the proximity to the Idea of the Thing without ever touching it. [The outside of the persona and the impossible imagined void of being the persona, the belief from the void of belief.] But of course, I was always myself in these instances; while I may change, the enormity of consumption, of poverty, of false-realities still rattle me to no end. Only now, I’m not perplexed and sad that I can’t rewrite my world into a certain-type-of-film (which I assumed everyone else could do or had no need of doing because they were already secure in their own film-reality); I’m perplexed because I could never enter that world, even before I was myself, and I don’t know how to help others out. My pre/post demonstration does have a point, I promise.

I love taking little trips down the short pike, finding its breaks, finding its intersections, its segues, departures. But there are six hours that can’t be accounted for. [Of course, I could die immediately after posting this and then there'd be the 3-day chunk but I consider that more accounted for than not.] But there’s a rift in the road, something I can’t cross over or get back. There’s tear in the universe and I’m convinced that that’s where my *conversion* is; and I’m more convinced every day that that’s where I am, too.

I wrote ^ and walked away from my computer for a while… I forgot that I had to say goodbye to 2009 and I’m not too thrilled right now, either. Sometimes I get caught up in the moment that I slip out of justly and minutely accounted time. This was the year that I will always remember. This was the year that I began to want to live; I began living (in the very dusty, small capacity that I can).

No, I’ve been wandering around the planet this year six hours out of joint. At least, that’s how I thought it started. Like any of my stories (fiction and non) I’ll begin before the beginning, to get into the mood of things. Two days before my Rutgers-funded trip to Cambodia began, my friend and I looked at our itinerary and found a twelve-hour gap in Korea–twelve hours on New Year’s Day in Korea and no one had figured this out before us. Cut to: Seoul-6am New Year’s morning. Last I recalled in New York, it was somewhere around 11:45pm. We landed, the mountains were purple and pink in 2009′s dewy, 12-degree mist. The bus from Incheon was round, clean, incubatory. But where had my new year gone? It was already there, but it slipped away from me–there was a TV on the bus but it was all in Korean. The letters were round and incubatory, too. There was a long line of condos-it stretched from the airport to the city, most of the windows facing each other. But I could still see the sky and the mountains and the pink orb to the east, gently rising on a day that hadn’t happened.

We had breakfast at a  nice hotel, bread and jam and coffee. We took the subway. But I don’t remember the subway, really. I only remember walking up the stairs into the sunlight, it could have been any city; it was Seoul, South Korea. It was 2pm, it was midnight, it was 2009. That was it. Somewhere my life was compressed and mushed back together again up the stairs. I’ve been trying to find the caution sign in all the photos, I can’t see anything pointing to a rift in the universe. I think I was the only one.

The flight to Cambodia was non-existent. We got off the plane into a building that mocked the worst kind of Disney Cambodia airport. I don’t really want to talk about Cambodia. It was good and bad and I was more bad than good, not because I *did* anything to help or not in the token sense, not because I got drunk and pretended to be an Australian because I was too embarrassed to be an American. (This is stupid, of course, because either way I was totally invading… “helping their economy.” Developing it.)

No, because I realized my world-situation and I realized that no mural-painting in an orphanage in Phnom Phen can change the implicit acceptance, the implicit violence with which I painted it. No four-hour tour in a land-mine museum exempts me from the rich history of ignorance, of cultural relativist bullshit I played in to for nineteen years. No amount of delicately taking pictures of trash pickers in the garbage dump will make me “one of them.” The accepted NGO worker, the joke-feministing activist, the John Smith of the Third New World. I had a situation and it didn’t come printed a manufactured laptop case — express yourself! My worlds could not be separated, from that day onward. The walls and roofs were for the tourists, the tents, the rotting river boats were for the natives.

I get back from Cambodia–I sleep for a few days. I think I was detoxing from all the alcohol. And I started writing my story. The same story I work on today, and probably for the next few years. It had nothing to do with Cambodia (in a negative way, I think it has everything to do with it). But in a more general sense, it was about people entrenched in positions, in non-positions, and knowing nothing about it. To be perfectly frank, it’s about being dumped out into the world as a product, and a failing one at that.

Spring semester- Althusser’s spring. Lenin and ideology sealed the deal, I was in for the long haul. The snow was falling heavily and I sat on a bench in Brower Common for a few hours, leaping back to the opening pages every now and then. It was the first time I had really worked towards something, felt something. But summer was the worst.

I lived in the back of Cook campus. I got it. I read “The Coming Insurrection;” I was alone for the most part. I was almost fired for reading War and Peace. It always rained. I was out of joint with my friends, my boyfriend, my bed, the food I ate, my body. I started reading Lukacs, abandoned him for Althusser again. Abandoned him for youtube videos on social alienation. I could have watched myself. I freaked out and I stopped writing, I stopped reading. I recoiled and felt the warm last efforts of August. Something Big was coming.

Fall semester began. It was the greatest semester I’ve had, yet. It’s all too fresh to condense (I’m sure it’s all there in my ramblings). When I say it was great, I don’t mean emotionally. Emotionally it’s shit to be isolated, to make do with the attenuated thread of communication you have with the outside world. But it all got me to thinking, it got me to writing. I’m doing more now that I’ve ever done. Just ask Me-Ti.

When I isolate the days, one from the next and last, I can never string them right along each other again without losing the capacity of time–I mean, with every pause, there’s something lost. And those six hours, I think it might really be a lifetime.

A quick note before the configuration of bullshit

Excerpt from my journal-

But why do we write this way? [The new blogging format...] What is it about short segments–is it the way large cause that we can’t name or even match all of the faces to all the names that are spun out over each other, again and again? The essay format– the essay writing asserts something in its form that can’t be resolved in its content. The form of the political essay, of the theoretical book, or even the cardboard undergraduate expository essay.

Aside from an end and a beginning, the essay demands an alternative (a positive alternative) that is connected, fluid, and a reflection of the totality. What a modernist lie. Closure. This moment (that we never can catch up with) is a moment of flux, a moment of sporadic recapitulation and reformation. [When I say reformation, I mean a new formation, from something that was completely isolated; this is not some kind of call to write to your Sentaor. Please.] We are in a moment that strains for a sense of fragmented direction–to contain a stupid structuralist analysis of displacement is ridiculous.

Unless of course you’re actually an idiot and only address questions from within an isolated discourse of maniac ideology.

Art as an old and rusty cliched term must locate all the half-alive bits, all of the words or methods that haven’t burned away or caused their last loyalists to commit suicide; it must merge with the old idea of unity. A new idea of unity. Ask me, “why doesn’t anyone care about poetry? it’s so good, there’s good content, there…” Isn’t it long gone because it line length hasn’t captured the post 20th century trauma?

[The 21st century trauma sinks into itself again and again--because we can't explain away this always empty, already fucked up abyss of cynicism or structure or defragmented reality.  Because we can't explain away this trauma that we were born with, into-who can tell the difference? And we don't pay attention to the line length of any old poem, even though we write them anywhere and everywhere, because we don't have the attention span to read them over. We can't pay attention to line length and see "deconstruction" because we were born deconstructed--it doesn't mean anything! you can split it up at the level of a syllable or a level of a paragraph--that trick only really works against the perfect spheres in your eyeballs. Even if we're good at it, we're pretending. And that's why you should be afraid of us.]

It’s a trick that our cynical socialization has doubled back onto us. Forget Shakespeare and Ezra Pound. The former contains a ‘beauty’ that we can’t appreciate because it has been proved to be your god, some result that was. Did you catch that: it. Even if it could have been real–it’s completely false and your reasons for loving it to pieces were wrong. And for the latter–Jesus Christ! how can we read about this? This fragmentation, when our trauma has not been the trauma of inflicted violence, but the bludgeoning of a generation since before the air’d hit our lungs, how can we thread this back together for you?

That bludgeoning that disallows us to process, let alone our capacity to think deeply.

What is it that you mean to say in a book? or in a poem? Isn’t it the truth: a form that staggered out, a bullet wounded cowboy from the bloody sandbox into this moment. That’s never this moment, but a few seconds before it, an asymptotic function in the philosophy of defeat.

And is this still a mystery, the reason for our cynicism?

Upon re-reading:

I feel that my most recent post and my first are, in fact, very intimately connected. 

My overarching question: does new media poetry showcase an erosion of form? In what ways is this aesthetic acheived?
- Place sonnet, free verse, and new media poem side by side; discuss the elements and limits of the universal opposition within a ‘traditional’ context of poetic form.

I feel that this section of the essay will be a very long one, and for good reason. Though I am very anxious about properly undwinding it in such a short number of pages. 

After this detailed explication of Marcuse (perhaps supplemented by other thinkers) I would like to dicuss the possibility of the different poetic forms and how new media poetry attempts to ‘restructure’ or reconfigure the effects that a traditional poem usually sets out in the formal structure of the two-dimensional poem.

…Things are beginning to get a little tricky.

 

It’s been a difficult challenge to find a good sonnet online that’s unpublished. I will appeal to higher sources.

The banal possibilities of new media poetry…?

After a long a treacherous journey from home, place to place, and home again, I began rifling through my quasi-urban family’s library of Marxist aesthetics. In true undergraduate fashion, I flipped from the index of The Aesthetic Dimension (Marcuse) and found instances of poetry within the body of the work.

However, my undergraduate tendencies were overridden by a strong desire to understand the entirety of Marcuse’s passage. Upon further reading, I felt as if I had stumbled over a very large root whose tree I have been struggling to sketch out in the middle of the night:

“The ‘tyranny of form’–in an authentic work a necessity prevails which demands that no line, no sound could be replaced (in the optimal case, which doesn’t exist). This inner necessity (the quality which distinguishes authentic from inauthentic works) is indeed tyranny inasmuch as it suppresses the immediacy of expression. But what is here suppressed is false immediacy: false to the degree which it drags along the unreflected mystified reality.
       In defense of aesthetic form, Brecht notes in 1921:

                I observe that I am beginning to become a classic. Those extreme forced efforts [of expressionism] to spew forth with all means certain (banal or soon to be banal) content! One blames the classics for their service to form and overlooks that it is the form which is the servant here.

Brecht connects the destruction of form with banalization. To be sure, this connection does not do justice to expressionism, much of which was by essential relation between aesthetic form and the estrangement effect: the deliberately formless expression ‘banalizes’ inasmuch as it obliterates the opposition to the established universe of discourse–an opposition which is crystallized in the aesthetic form.”

Now, in addition to my other questions (listed in previous posts) I think I may have stumbled on the biggest trepidation/question of them all, concerning the aesthetic of poetry in the new media form.

Based on Marcuse and Brecht, I wonder if the “opposition to the established universe of discourse” is even further eroded (from free verse, two-dimensional poetry) by new media poetics? Or, does this question essentially sidetrack me: should I focus instead on the possibility of new and evolved form within new media poetry?

To explore this dialectic properly, I will attempt to discuss the following in detail:

A. Assuming that (in the traditional context) new media poetry does have banal possibilities as a genre free of form, I would like to compare three different types of poetry available on the Internet today. 
       1. Sonnet (from a 21st century poet, preferably from a blog)
       2. Free verse two-dimensional page poetry
       3. New media poetry

Although I have the last two, number one will be a new addition to my research. In compiling and processing the differences (if in fact they are ordered in a form of stylistic erosion) of the three forms, I would like to flesh out the specific changes that occur as a work is less opposed from itself. 

B. It will also be necessary to unwind the possibility that these changing genres of poetry are not erosions of the universal opposition, but are instead engaged in entirely separate (or at least, notably separate) modes of opposition. 

This point may relate back to my earlier assertion that critics and scholars should spend less time worrying over the inclusion of new media work into the category of poetry, and more time thinking about the way poetry might change the scape of poetry (to piggy-back off of Benjamin.)

–

I will search around for examples of 21st century sonnets that I feel will serve as a good example. 

Note: I limit my search for online sonnets written/published in 2009 in order to stay within the same ‘pin drop’ of history. 

 

Signing off.