After the Small Press Traffic HOW(ever) event, Beverly Dahlen sent an email to all the participants and quoted Stephen Schwartz on Frances Jaffer. Dahlen highlighted Schwartz's comments about Jaffer and HOW(ever):
"A Chronicle review of the latter volume described her as ``one of a number of feminist poets whose questions about language remain largely unanswered but rigorously investigated.'
[Jaffer]served as an editor of HOWever, a major journal of innovative women's writing. She was especially interested in the work of such female poets as HD and Marianne Moore."
You can find the full obituary here.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/Chronicle/a/1999/01/30/MN81680.DTL#ixzz1azbApgly
10.17.2011
Camille Roy's "Theory" from HOW(ever) 1988
Theory
Theory.
The theory states that the perfect sentence can be made to
disappear by following a set of rules backwards. The theory
is a jar, and the sentence is a fluid which can be poured out. It
is part of your job to duplicate the theory indefinitely.
With practice, duplication becomes entrenched, like lifting weights.
Breast-high partitions cover the linoleum floor, creating a
maze through which workers stroll and softly talk. At either
end of the vast warehouse are sealed rooms whose roaring
ventilation systems cool the computers. You are allowed in
these rooms, because you wear a special identification badge.
Between the computer rooms stretch two rows of windows,
that face twin lines of young olive trees whose leaves are
covered with fine greyish hair. Beyond these trees the work-
ers go to sleep and have sex.
You receive a letter from a man you haven't seen in years. "I
think of you fondly" he writes, and tells you about his wife
Melody and her recent miscarriage. You remember with pleas-
ure a pair of soft sandals and the notes he used to leave on
your pillow. The notes have fallen out of the journal you
stored them in, or the journal has disappeared.
"It's happened already," you complain to a co-worker. "First I was a young
girl and now I'm a 'woman with a past'."
Your response time slows. For the first time you experience fa-
tigue because the literal size of your understanding has in-
creased, and other workers have begun to line up with ques-
tions. The answer to the latest question requires a flow of
logic outside your control. You close your eyes and your under-
standing settles over the problem like a falling tissue. A sul-
len crack reveals itself, a niche of wrongness. You announce
your discovery, and the questioner goes away.
You are lying side by side when she lays a hand on your sore
breast. "You enjoy leaving me in the lurch," you complain.
"No I don't," she says. As you lie quietly askew there is
something tropical about your half-hold on sleep. Finally she
says, "Tell me you never want to see me again."
You say "I never want to see you again."
"Don't say that." Her voice is so small you can hardly imag-
ine her lips moving in the dark.
You pass a nil index to a routine which causes it to indiscriminately gobble
up the symbol table. You watch, drinking tea with milk and sugar, as a ser-
ies of fatal and non-fatal errors occur.
The grated parmesan is as soft as flour, and radiant on a
white saucer. This happens whenever she abandons you and
the hours go by in which you could have had her. You feel
lit up, uncontained. On the street bodies which fix your desire
dissolve past the hard edge of your eye. Everyone looks hol-
low. The background is a vivisectionist, a series of lacerating
points in a fluid. Laminating.
Sometimes the work demands great agility and you feel you are twisting
and shaking while remaining mute. You and another worker do this
in front of one another, a demonstration of technique, as you have
learned the facts intimately and can now walk upon them. There is
a tangle of questions all over the floor, stepped upon. In the corner
of the cubicle lies a briefcase, and upon it is a blueprint with one
corner ripped. Therein lies a solution, you think. The engineer folds
up her eyebrows and walks away with the briefcase.
Working Notes, Camille Roy:
I wrote this piece from notes in my journal composed on the one-hour commute down Interstate 280 to and from work. That time is nothing time, a period before & after transformation by work, a period of silence, dissociation, minor playfulness on the page. What happens at this border truly doesn't "matter," because it doesn't occupy "time."
But down there, where I am an engineer in the suburbs, I feel I have to not only speak a different language but become one. I am translated. The notes I take in the commuter van are the notes of a woman becoming a different language. Further, my work involves computer languages, which themselves are a sort of translation between a formal logic, expressed in sentences, phrases, paragraphs, and a computer performing tasks. But what is left over, surplus, both unwanted and autonomous, is the sexual. Eroticism as a non-reducible term (or ghost? in a [missing text]
See the poem in HOW(ever) here:
Theory.
The theory states that the perfect sentence can be made to
disappear by following a set of rules backwards. The theory
is a jar, and the sentence is a fluid which can be poured out. It
is part of your job to duplicate the theory indefinitely.
With practice, duplication becomes entrenched, like lifting weights.
Breast-high partitions cover the linoleum floor, creating a
maze through which workers stroll and softly talk. At either
end of the vast warehouse are sealed rooms whose roaring
ventilation systems cool the computers. You are allowed in
these rooms, because you wear a special identification badge.
Between the computer rooms stretch two rows of windows,
that face twin lines of young olive trees whose leaves are
covered with fine greyish hair. Beyond these trees the work-
ers go to sleep and have sex.
You receive a letter from a man you haven't seen in years. "I
think of you fondly" he writes, and tells you about his wife
Melody and her recent miscarriage. You remember with pleas-
ure a pair of soft sandals and the notes he used to leave on
your pillow. The notes have fallen out of the journal you
stored them in, or the journal has disappeared.
"It's happened already," you complain to a co-worker. "First I was a young
girl and now I'm a 'woman with a past'."
Your response time slows. For the first time you experience fa-
tigue because the literal size of your understanding has in-
creased, and other workers have begun to line up with ques-
tions. The answer to the latest question requires a flow of
logic outside your control. You close your eyes and your under-
standing settles over the problem like a falling tissue. A sul-
len crack reveals itself, a niche of wrongness. You announce
your discovery, and the questioner goes away.
You are lying side by side when she lays a hand on your sore
breast. "You enjoy leaving me in the lurch," you complain.
"No I don't," she says. As you lie quietly askew there is
something tropical about your half-hold on sleep. Finally she
says, "Tell me you never want to see me again."
You say "I never want to see you again."
"Don't say that." Her voice is so small you can hardly imag-
ine her lips moving in the dark.
You pass a nil index to a routine which causes it to indiscriminately gobble
up the symbol table. You watch, drinking tea with milk and sugar, as a ser-
ies of fatal and non-fatal errors occur.
The grated parmesan is as soft as flour, and radiant on a
white saucer. This happens whenever she abandons you and
the hours go by in which you could have had her. You feel
lit up, uncontained. On the street bodies which fix your desire
dissolve past the hard edge of your eye. Everyone looks hol-
low. The background is a vivisectionist, a series of lacerating
points in a fluid. Laminating.
Sometimes the work demands great agility and you feel you are twisting
and shaking while remaining mute. You and another worker do this
in front of one another, a demonstration of technique, as you have
learned the facts intimately and can now walk upon them. There is
a tangle of questions all over the floor, stepped upon. In the corner
of the cubicle lies a briefcase, and upon it is a blueprint with one
corner ripped. Therein lies a solution, you think. The engineer folds
up her eyebrows and walks away with the briefcase.
Working Notes, Camille Roy:
I wrote this piece from notes in my journal composed on the one-hour commute down Interstate 280 to and from work. That time is nothing time, a period before & after transformation by work, a period of silence, dissociation, minor playfulness on the page. What happens at this border truly doesn't "matter," because it doesn't occupy "time."
But down there, where I am an engineer in the suburbs, I feel I have to not only speak a different language but become one. I am translated. The notes I take in the commuter van are the notes of a woman becoming a different language. Further, my work involves computer languages, which themselves are a sort of translation between a formal logic, expressed in sentences, phrases, paragraphs, and a computer performing tasks. But what is left over, surplus, both unwanted and autonomous, is the sexual. Eroticism as a non-reducible term (or ghost? in a [missing text]
See the poem in HOW(ever) here:
Fictions, a poem by Robin Tremblay-McGaw from HOW(ever) 1989
fictions
this time he's leaving her teetering
in a skiff pushing
off into mist lake
sounds other world
her scarf
trails in the water of her own boat
a woman leaning her hair
washes lilies leaving
a scarred surface silent
after you he plunges in below
the surface is gutsy enough to
swim beneath the raft
barnacle covered can
grazes his back at the spine a fish
frightens him with its sudden
appearance while bodies cannonball by him
he's tan and you can see
the outline of him beneath the
flimsy barrier of swim trunks
reef she thinks
hot summer boy black curls
press into her as they dance
she leaps into grass
another boy she steals into the twilight
for us the boy (was he really
a boy wasn't he) hung
himself from the oak
in his parents' frontyard the school
bus passed and we all saw him only
a white sheet covered
body but we saw and then
the erasing he kisses
a girl in jail puts
another boy's cock in his
mouth she paints her nails
yellow with a marker he
bicycles everyday to
work his mother fixes cheeseburgers a quart of milk
in his ear a woman whispers push off
from the shoreline he tells
his mother old man P__'s gravestone
moves a little on its base each
year he says he's marked
the change himself it is
morning tufts of hair curl into his ears
the press of fluid on his bladder forces him
from the bed across the cool
wood floor to the bathroom a
lizard slips over
the flagstone in another country an elderly
woman has her tea smears
her pink ice lipstick on the cup her
white cloth napkin her hand on
the mirror when she leans too
close lean close comes to him and
fishing is the order of the day sunstroke
breaststroke her thighs expanding
and then snapping shut venus flytrap
infectious ivy spreads over them and they
are fixed for certain one spot
where anyone can see can
point with ease comfort something
that is known a tree
in the wind creaks only
which one is it they move
together just as you get your I'm
sitting on this bridge
no way for him to get
past me somehow he appears on the other
bank water trickling and trees
bursting in the wind she
thinks they're real
Working Notes, Robin Tremblay-McGaw:
I'm interested in the disallowed. Experience, dream, memory, time, vision, lies overlap. become indistinguishable. part of the text. of our lives. suspension in. a state between sleep, wakefulness. other. a mystery. the desire to write/explore. the ineffable brings me the page.
from HOW(ever) Vol. 5 No. 3 April 1989
 |
| Robin Tremblay-McGaw photo by Camille Roy |
fictions
this time he's leaving her teetering
in a skiff pushing
off into mist lake
sounds other world
her scarf
trails in the water of her own boat
a woman leaning her hair
washes lilies leaving
a scarred surface silent
after you he plunges in below
the surface is gutsy enough to
swim beneath the raft
barnacle covered can
grazes his back at the spine a fish
frightens him with its sudden
appearance while bodies cannonball by him
he's tan and you can see
the outline of him beneath the
flimsy barrier of swim trunks
reef she thinks
hot summer boy black curls
press into her as they dance
she leaps into grass
another boy she steals into the twilight
for us the boy (was he really
a boy wasn't he) hung
himself from the oak
in his parents' frontyard the school
bus passed and we all saw him only
a white sheet covered
body but we saw and then
the erasing he kisses
a girl in jail puts
another boy's cock in his
mouth she paints her nails
yellow with a marker he
bicycles everyday to
work his mother fixes cheeseburgers a quart of milk
in his ear a woman whispers push off
from the shoreline he tells
his mother old man P__'s gravestone
moves a little on its base each
year he says he's marked
the change himself it is
morning tufts of hair curl into his ears
the press of fluid on his bladder forces him
from the bed across the cool
wood floor to the bathroom a
lizard slips over
the flagstone in another country an elderly
woman has her tea smears
her pink ice lipstick on the cup her
white cloth napkin her hand on
the mirror when she leans too
close lean close comes to him and
fishing is the order of the day sunstroke
breaststroke her thighs expanding
and then snapping shut venus flytrap
infectious ivy spreads over them and they
are fixed for certain one spot
where anyone can see can
point with ease comfort something
that is known a tree
in the wind creaks only
which one is it they move
together just as you get your I'm
sitting on this bridge
no way for him to get
past me somehow he appears on the other
bank water trickling and trees
bursting in the wind she
thinks they're real
Working Notes, Robin Tremblay-McGaw:
I'm interested in the disallowed. Experience, dream, memory, time, vision, lies overlap. become indistinguishable. part of the text. of our lives. suspension in. a state between sleep, wakefulness. other. a mystery. the desire to write/explore. the ineffable brings me the page.
from HOW(ever) Vol. 5 No. 3 April 1989
10.04.2011
Brashear, Bernheimer and Sonbert at Small Press Traffic
On Sunday September 16th SPT had its first Fall 2011 event in our new space at ATA on Valencia. We are so thrilled to be collaborating with these folks. Many events will happen at ATA on Sundays at 5pm though we will continue to have some events at CCA’s Timken Hall.
Our opening day couldn’t have happened in a more vibrant way. ATA’s theater was nearly full. Jim Brashear inaugurated the season with a sound piece. He stood at the front of the room and began talking into a microphone as if by way of introduction. But soon, audience members became aware that other sounds were emerging from elsewhere. Music from other spaces in the building contributed an aleatory element to the performance. At first, I wasn’t sure what was Jim’s work and what was ambient sound from busy Valencia Street outside.
This “not knowing” actually activated some panic for me. I worried about the unfolding of the piece, how it related to all the sound around it. But then, it became clear that Jim’s in-person improvisation was in conversation with that emergent and increasingly audible timeline of sound, and I was relieved. Of course, it isn’t uncommon for certain performance pieces to begin without the performer marking the beginning. The audience understands retrospectively that the piece has begun and so in some strange way there is no beginning or there is indeed a very clear commencement but it is lost to us since we didn’t know to look or listen for it until later. I found the piece engaging. Jim’s rich, sonorous voice, accompanied by the timeline of sound filled ATA. I was conscious of my body immersed in the space and sound and of the fact there were other bodies in the room. Invisible to us, sound waves moved around us, bounced off us, made a sonic network of us all.
I asked Jim if he wanted to include some information about his piece here on the blog as a number of people were interested and how he did what he did. Here it is, ever so graciously provided:
I've done a couple of versions of this elsewhere, and each time the looks of surprise make it worth the effort. When you're using technology for performance (particularly for sound, I think), everyone seems poised for the beginning, for the ON button to be pressed, for the needle to drop. My particular program (Kyma) allows me to circumvent that convention so that the seemingly impromptu (or rather, improvised) speech at the beginning is pulled forward into the performance and blurs the boundaries between, so that you're always looking back, or listening back, over your shoulder in time, wondering
how you arrived inside the field of sound. This does include a familiar performance art intention of emphasizing the everyday, pedestrian quality of performance, but also an attempt to activate the musical qualities of even the most seemingly non-musical speech (and could that be a potential definition of "sound poetry?). The structure of the program gives me the option (among many) of fading in the effects very slowly, because the whole project exists on a timeline, the same software metaphor found in most audio and video programs, in which the user arranges events that a cursor passes over in real time and activates them. My particular arrangement of them focuses as much control and modulation as possible on the voice, so that every vocal gesture is amplified to more dramatic levels. Speaking might already be musical, but why not bring out as much of its music as possible?
--Jim Brashear
“At this moment when anything can happen, narrative is at its most fascinatinog. (In my own films I generally try to include an image of a forward motin on train tracks in which several lines converge but cut before any actual track or direction is taken—it’s a metaphor for possibilities open.)"
“In my last completed work, A Woman’s Touch (1983), which lasts 23 minutes, there is a given and then a series of qualifications, almost like a Theme and Variations. The initial set is a number of images of women involved in solitary action. All is presented positively, benignly, almost too complacently: women at work, at play, constructing, striving, succeeding—a paean to their independence.”
Sonbert goes on to explain that in the end, the film closes this way: “The lines of the driveway converge in a path that leads to the door. The lines of the driveway converge in a path that leads to the house: but it is a cul-de-sac, a dead end. The man does have the last word. All the independence that the women in the film have throughout evinced, and as well the straining towards home and domesticity, here both converge in a narrative summation of tying together the threads within a devastating conclusive context.”
It is interesting to me that it is not the conclusion of the film that I recall. What remains for me is some of those images of the many women, among them, Johanna Drucker, Carla Harryman, Anne Waldman, Melissa Reilley. In some of the shots, their faces and bodies are radiant with pleasure and a kind of joy.
Here are some links to things online about Sonbert and his films.
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/SonbertL.html
Warren Sonbert's Films by Jon Gartenberg
Brief Candles: The Films of Warren Sonbert
 |
| Jim Brashear with art from ATA photo by Camille Roy |
Our opening day couldn’t have happened in a more vibrant way. ATA’s theater was nearly full. Jim Brashear inaugurated the season with a sound piece. He stood at the front of the room and began talking into a microphone as if by way of introduction. But soon, audience members became aware that other sounds were emerging from elsewhere. Music from other spaces in the building contributed an aleatory element to the performance. At first, I wasn’t sure what was Jim’s work and what was ambient sound from busy Valencia Street outside.
This “not knowing” actually activated some panic for me. I worried about the unfolding of the piece, how it related to all the sound around it. But then, it became clear that Jim’s in-person improvisation was in conversation with that emergent and increasingly audible timeline of sound, and I was relieved. Of course, it isn’t uncommon for certain performance pieces to begin without the performer marking the beginning. The audience understands retrospectively that the piece has begun and so in some strange way there is no beginning or there is indeed a very clear commencement but it is lost to us since we didn’t know to look or listen for it until later. I found the piece engaging. Jim’s rich, sonorous voice, accompanied by the timeline of sound filled ATA. I was conscious of my body immersed in the space and sound and of the fact there were other bodies in the room. Invisible to us, sound waves moved around us, bounced off us, made a sonic network of us all.
I asked Jim if he wanted to include some information about his piece here on the blog as a number of people were interested and how he did what he did. Here it is, ever so graciously provided:
I've done a couple of versions of this elsewhere, and each time the looks of surprise make it worth the effort. When you're using technology for performance (particularly for sound, I think), everyone seems poised for the beginning, for the ON button to be pressed, for the needle to drop. My particular program (Kyma) allows me to circumvent that convention so that the seemingly impromptu (or rather, improvised) speech at the beginning is pulled forward into the performance and blurs the boundaries between, so that you're always looking back, or listening back, over your shoulder in time, wondering
how you arrived inside the field of sound. This does include a familiar performance art intention of emphasizing the everyday, pedestrian quality of performance, but also an attempt to activate the musical qualities of even the most seemingly non-musical speech (and could that be a potential definition of "sound poetry?). The structure of the program gives me the option (among many) of fading in the effects very slowly, because the whole project exists on a timeline, the same software metaphor found in most audio and video programs, in which the user arranges events that a cursor passes over in real time and activates them. My particular arrangement of them focuses as much control and modulation as possible on the voice, so that every vocal gesture is amplified to more dramatic levels. Speaking might already be musical, but why not bring out as much of its music as possible?
--Jim Brashear
 |
| Montage from Sonbert films photo from Bright Lights Film Journal |
By way of introduction to the showing of Warren Sonbert’s 1983 film A Woman’s Touch, Alan Bernheimer gave a brief and wholly interesting talk about Sonbert and his films. Alan said that Sonbert was an artist who, to an enviable degree, integrated his daily life and artistic practice. In fact his daily life provided the materials for his art. Sonbert’s films have been shown around the world and were included in 6 Whitney Biennial events. Wherever he showed his films, he also shot footage. Born in New York, Sonbert studied film at NYU and was very much influenced by Warhol, Rene Ricard, and Gerard Malanga. He came to San Francisco some time in the 1970s. Sonbert was prolific, making many films and writing extensively on film and other matters. A Woman’s Touch is a silent black and white visual pleasure; Alan told us it is an homage to Hitchcock’s Marnie. Oddly, some years ago, I read Sonbert’s piece “Narrative Concerns” in the Poetics Journal special issue on narrative before I had ever seen any of his films. They are hard to come by and have not been digitized. Alan generously provided copies of Sonbert’s Poetics Journal piece for the audience members. Here’s a few excerpts:
 |
| Alan Bernheimer photo by Camille Roy |
“The strengths of narrative as well entail its limitations. On one level narrative could be defined as the eventual resolution of all elements introduced. This classical balance is always satisfying: when the various strands are climactically tied together. But this also implies a grounding that may often enough be deadening”
“At this moment when anything can happen, narrative is at its most fascinatinog. (In my own films I generally try to include an image of a forward motin on train tracks in which several lines converge but cut before any actual track or direction is taken—it’s a metaphor for possibilities open.)"
“In my last completed work, A Woman’s Touch (1983), which lasts 23 minutes, there is a given and then a series of qualifications, almost like a Theme and Variations. The initial set is a number of images of women involved in solitary action. All is presented positively, benignly, almost too complacently: women at work, at play, constructing, striving, succeeding—a paean to their independence.”
Sonbert goes on to explain that in the end, the film closes this way: “The lines of the driveway converge in a path that leads to the door. The lines of the driveway converge in a path that leads to the house: but it is a cul-de-sac, a dead end. The man does have the last word. All the independence that the women in the film have throughout evinced, and as well the straining towards home and domesticity, here both converge in a narrative summation of tying together the threads within a devastating conclusive context.”
It is interesting to me that it is not the conclusion of the film that I recall. What remains for me is some of those images of the many women, among them, Johanna Drucker, Carla Harryman, Anne Waldman, Melissa Reilley. In some of the shots, their faces and bodies are radiant with pleasure and a kind of joy.
 |
| Melissa Reilley photo by Camille Roy |
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/SonbertL.html
Warren Sonbert's Films by Jon Gartenberg
Brief Candles: The Films of Warren Sonbert
10.01.2011
Wrong Love by Litia Perta
I heard Litia read this piece last August and I was green with envy; I asked her to share it here, and graciously, she agreed.
Wrong Love
for Sam M.
So, I have been thinking lately about the relationship between loving and writing—and about the relation of both of these movements that I think of as creative ventures to the experience of failure. I keep returning to the etymology of the word writing—a strange word, one not related to the Latin scribere (from whence we derive our script, scribe, inscription, description).
Writing, the word itself, arrives to us through Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Norse, tribal languages, and it means literally to draw the figure of something by carving it out, to form an outline by cutting into the surface of something, to score or mark through the gutting movement of making an incision.
To carve, to cut, to incise.
The early movement of writing engaged knives as the ancestors to our pens. And something in this brings much to my mind of loving—an experience that also carves itself into being, making a mark that cuts deeply so it may seem, at first, indelible. But like marks carved in ancient stone that must have seemed at first so clear, as soon as these lines are forged they open themselves to the dulling, softening, fading of time, perhaps one day (after many storms) to be smoothed over all together, to disappear.
There is a moment in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red when the red‐winged monster Geryon’s whole body forms “one arch of a cry—upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.”
Wrong love. Thinking of this phrase as having many skins, the top one, surely, is the idea that the love between two people, or the love that one person has for another, can be bad or wrong or ill‐fated which maybe just means that it doesn’t last, or causes pain, or doesn’t make room for a person to live conventionally. But I wonder, of all these things, are these bad? And this has made me wonder whether wrong and bad can actually be said to be commensurate or whether we are in fact thinking through two very different qualities. What lasts? What causes no pain? What is lost when we live conventionally? This led me to think of the many ways in which being wrong can move a person both toward her own depth as well as, perhaps one day, towards a notion of what might be right.
As I sat to write this piece, a second skin of the phrase caught my attention and that was the notion of love itself as a mover through the world, alighting on certain heads, certain moments, perhaps herself trying to find a stable ground on which to rest. So she lands somewhere, thinking it looks good and finds quickly that she was wrong, wrong love, that the ground there was not stable, that she could not set down roots, much as she may have tried. Wrong love here not of a person or of two people but of the quality of wandering love herself, simply looking for a safe place to be, thinking she’s found one, and being wrong.
What has all this to do with knowing, and with writing—and what to do with failing? Seems like everything and again, being wrong seems the only path—at least the only path I have ever known—toward learning.
When I was twenty years old, I was obliged to write a senior thesis in order to graduate from college. I spent the weeks of spring break alone on my campus wandering through the strange landscapes of my mind to eventually produce 160 pages of text that I thought, initially, opened up a new kind of epistemology, a new kind of working inside language around nothingness and negation, a new way of being in words.
My two advisers were old men. Lovely men. One was stiff and tight and white haired and slim and elegant and lived in New York and stood when we met in his office and often pointed his finger to the sky when he made a point. The other shuffled when he walked and wore a straggly gray pony-tail, had grown up in Berkeley, wore turquoise rings, and his tweed jackets were enormous to fit over his ever-widening body. He wore spectacles and spoke rarely and had in his eye the most kindred glinty mischief spark I had at that point ever seen. I trusted both of them as guides and knew that somehow their oppositional qualities would balance out so that my work would be even-keeled and strong.
One morning, in the middle of writing my conclusion, I had a moment that was the opposite of blindness--the kind of moment where the universe cracks open and breathtaking light is let in, a kind of light that, for me, actually hurts. I saw that the entire path I had been on was wrong--that my idea didn't work, that my theory was crumbling beneath me and all I could think, with this new found sight, was that I was surprised it had taken so long to realise. I cried like a child and had no other recourse but to turn it all in anyway.
I was given honours for my thesis, was commended in all the ways my college allowed. Privately, this made me angry, I thought of it as consolation, a way in which they could acknowledge that I had worked so hard and failed.
When I met my two advisers, the pointy and the vast, in the soft gray basement of the philosophy building, they asked me how I felt about my work. I cried fresh tears. And told them, shamefacedly, that I saw now--that I realised--what they must have realised all along: that I was wrong.
The vast one smiled wide, and the pointy one shifted to his toe tips and they both agreed with me--and then welcomed me to the project of philosophy.
This early lesson is one that in love I am still learning. That it need not last or feel good or be right. But that even wrong love, perhaps only wrong love, can lead to knowing.
Wrong Love
for Sam M.
So, I have been thinking lately about the relationship between loving and writing—and about the relation of both of these movements that I think of as creative ventures to the experience of failure. I keep returning to the etymology of the word writing—a strange word, one not related to the Latin scribere (from whence we derive our script, scribe, inscription, description).
Writing, the word itself, arrives to us through Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Norse, tribal languages, and it means literally to draw the figure of something by carving it out, to form an outline by cutting into the surface of something, to score or mark through the gutting movement of making an incision.
To carve, to cut, to incise.
The early movement of writing engaged knives as the ancestors to our pens. And something in this brings much to my mind of loving—an experience that also carves itself into being, making a mark that cuts deeply so it may seem, at first, indelible. But like marks carved in ancient stone that must have seemed at first so clear, as soon as these lines are forged they open themselves to the dulling, softening, fading of time, perhaps one day (after many storms) to be smoothed over all together, to disappear.
There is a moment in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red when the red‐winged monster Geryon’s whole body forms “one arch of a cry—upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.”
Wrong love. Thinking of this phrase as having many skins, the top one, surely, is the idea that the love between two people, or the love that one person has for another, can be bad or wrong or ill‐fated which maybe just means that it doesn’t last, or causes pain, or doesn’t make room for a person to live conventionally. But I wonder, of all these things, are these bad? And this has made me wonder whether wrong and bad can actually be said to be commensurate or whether we are in fact thinking through two very different qualities. What lasts? What causes no pain? What is lost when we live conventionally? This led me to think of the many ways in which being wrong can move a person both toward her own depth as well as, perhaps one day, towards a notion of what might be right.
As I sat to write this piece, a second skin of the phrase caught my attention and that was the notion of love itself as a mover through the world, alighting on certain heads, certain moments, perhaps herself trying to find a stable ground on which to rest. So she lands somewhere, thinking it looks good and finds quickly that she was wrong, wrong love, that the ground there was not stable, that she could not set down roots, much as she may have tried. Wrong love here not of a person or of two people but of the quality of wandering love herself, simply looking for a safe place to be, thinking she’s found one, and being wrong.
What has all this to do with knowing, and with writing—and what to do with failing? Seems like everything and again, being wrong seems the only path—at least the only path I have ever known—toward learning.
When I was twenty years old, I was obliged to write a senior thesis in order to graduate from college. I spent the weeks of spring break alone on my campus wandering through the strange landscapes of my mind to eventually produce 160 pages of text that I thought, initially, opened up a new kind of epistemology, a new kind of working inside language around nothingness and negation, a new way of being in words.
My two advisers were old men. Lovely men. One was stiff and tight and white haired and slim and elegant and lived in New York and stood when we met in his office and often pointed his finger to the sky when he made a point. The other shuffled when he walked and wore a straggly gray pony-tail, had grown up in Berkeley, wore turquoise rings, and his tweed jackets were enormous to fit over his ever-widening body. He wore spectacles and spoke rarely and had in his eye the most kindred glinty mischief spark I had at that point ever seen. I trusted both of them as guides and knew that somehow their oppositional qualities would balance out so that my work would be even-keeled and strong.
One morning, in the middle of writing my conclusion, I had a moment that was the opposite of blindness--the kind of moment where the universe cracks open and breathtaking light is let in, a kind of light that, for me, actually hurts. I saw that the entire path I had been on was wrong--that my idea didn't work, that my theory was crumbling beneath me and all I could think, with this new found sight, was that I was surprised it had taken so long to realise. I cried like a child and had no other recourse but to turn it all in anyway.
I was given honours for my thesis, was commended in all the ways my college allowed. Privately, this made me angry, I thought of it as consolation, a way in which they could acknowledge that I had worked so hard and failed.
When I met my two advisers, the pointy and the vast, in the soft gray basement of the philosophy building, they asked me how I felt about my work. I cried fresh tears. And told them, shamefacedly, that I saw now--that I realised--what they must have realised all along: that I was wrong.
The vast one smiled wide, and the pointy one shifted to his toe tips and they both agreed with me--and then welcomed me to the project of philosophy.
This early lesson is one that in love I am still learning. That it need not last or feel good or be right. But that even wrong love, perhaps only wrong love, can lead to knowing.
Litia Perta is a writer and a teacher currently living in Brooklyn. She emerged from UC Berkeley's doctoral program in Rhetoric exhausted but unscathed and has been processing her institutional training ever since. She is interested in transformation and in collaborating with others to develop ways (both pedagogical and spiritual) to support the transformations we came here to live through.
9.08.2011
Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist
We spent the long Labor Day weekend on the western shore of Lake Tahoe. I plunged into its icy waters everyday for four days in a row. Even after 15 years of returning to the lake, I never tire of the view and the many hues of blue it flashes.
For lots of different reasons, I tend to keep some pretty firm walls between different parts of my life, but I revel in how Bellamy and most New Narrative writers mess with these walls and what they have to do with writing.
Bellamy is unafraid to parade and take apart what Sianne Ngai has called "ugly feelings." She names their gendered/political frameworks:
Bellamy's book is full of a wide array of references to writing, the writing community, to other writers, artists, film-makers, musicians, and an array of Hollywood films, to spirituality, meditation, the death of Bellamy's mother, academic interview committees, Buddhist sex scandals, Ambien, Culver City hotel stays, and more. I love that this book includes a whole host of images, some taken by Bellamy and others snatched from elsewhere (like the one above).
Here's one of my favorite passages:
Hotel Retreat Day 6
You gotta love the middle, WARNING: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE tag, and its lame attempt at a comforting afterthought: ALL FABRIC CAN BURN. Like they're trying to convince you that this nightgown isn't particularly flammable—it's more of an existential thing, more like every time you go to bed you're in danger of combusting into yet another Anima Sola, running through the night, heartbroken over the buddhist, engulfed in tonguey orange flames. She must have bought her nightgown at Nordstrom Rack too (100).
The Buddhist begins with its title all in capitals on the cover but by the time the book closes, the buddhist has shrunk to all lower case. The book begins with engorgement and ends post-sex, "with printed love" (145). But, it takes awhile to get there. Throughout the book, Bellamy suggests that she will stop writing about the buddhist, as here:
...that's what it feels like with the buddhist, those final musculature contractions of a dead thing. I'm tired of writing about him. Back in the early days of New Narrative, when we were all wanting to be in one another's work, I complained to Kevin, why don't you write about me, and Kevin said he didn't write about me because writing was an exorcism, and he didn't want to exorcise me. Writing about the buddhist here has been a sort of exorcism, but the time for that has passed--no more soap opera narrative for this blog, time to return to random bleeps of experience and observation (39).
But of course, he keeps turning up, however much he is denied and/or newly buried:
"The unhooking from the buddhist now feels complete; I'm ready to open the door and step out into the rays of my sunlit future" (49).
"I wish I could erase the buddhist from my consciousness, I'm sick of thinking about him, but my writing brought him into my life, and it seems he's going to stay there in spirit, if not in flesh, until the writing's through with him" (56).
"So, I'm saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here" (71).
"Based on this blog, I'm sure it sounds like I talk about him all the time, but I don't. I was feeling melancholy about the whole situation today--and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I've shaken--like the eternal return, it comes back again and again, its quality essentially unchanged. When the longing strikes, I get this romantic sense that the buddhist is feeling it as well..." (104).
Bellamy is aware of this constant return, of course, and works it as much as it works her. She includes in the book a section in which Colter Jacobsen, artist, friend and publisher of the buddhist, remarks upon this recurrence:
Colter added:
I thought of you when i read this [a quote from Proust]...I hope I wasn't insensitive when I said that i like the constant return in the blog of the buddhist. It was also meant to be an observation that while you are editing the buddhist blog, it also seems to be growing....I think it is brave and vulnerable....I think people appreciate this because we can so relate to it; there's always someone in our life whose relationship was left unresolved and complicated and so much time is spent weighing what happened...till it becomes almost and abstraction. (129).
I think Bellamy's constant return to the buddhist makes for a kind of abjection that is uncomfortable for the reader. Our identification with it might not be uncomplicated; or we might deny any identification with it. There's something particularly interesting to me in this display and working with and in this space of abjection; it is all about discomfort, distances, contagion. It seems to be the source of writing, writing as intense content but also intensive formal practice and investigation, abjection and writing that both undoes and remakes a person and a person's work.
Here are some other selections from the book:
Of course it ended badly. Recently I tried to smooth things over with The Buddhist. It was disastrous. Bradford Nordeen on my efforts: 'Aren't these awful experiences best when they're funneled into the work so that heartache is turned into a piece, made productive? That piece is written (and lovely) so why on earth would you get back into the sandbox?" Bradford's referring to the 1000-word story/memoir I recently completed called "The Buddhist," a piece so obscene it makes my soul blush. 1000 words sounds right; I have no desire to write any more "real" writing about him. I enjoyed working with brevity--layering subtlety into such a raunchy, blatant blip. I even created a character arc for the protagonist, just like they do in real fiction. The "now" takes place within a few minutes, but the content extends and swirls way out, the now being like the eye of a tornado, and everything else racing around that. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how personal or vulnerable my subject matter, at a certain point in writing it all boils down to formal concerns, I become this slightly mad biologist panting to herself as I pin a butterfly, alive and writhing, to a cardboard background. Of course I'm thinking of Nabokov here. Is 1000 words and a community who's been entertained for 5 months worth the pain? And, yes, there was pleasure as well. It was like being in a cult, a strange narcissistic Buddhist sex cult. I wouldn't have passed it up for the world (34).
Throughout I've tried to use my babbling about loss and betrayal as an opportunity to refine and promote a political/aesthetic position (49).
...after poopooing divisions, I made a distinction between blog writing and Real Writing. That's a hard one, for I don't know what I'm doing here, why I'm putting all this energy into these posts. I think of poets who speak of their 'writing practice,' meaning it's all part of the process; they don't separate out precious, discrete poems as real work and letters and journals as lesser work. Thus the fetishization of George Oppen's daybooks for example. I've always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets' insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they're such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny? My posts are too slight, too femmy, too sloppy (I'm a compulsive reviser), too easy. So Rainer's right: I'm conflicted (73).
This section follows a passage Bellamy quotes from Helen Molesworth's "Me, You, Us: Eva Hesse's Early Paintings." Bellamy writes:
Art writing doesn't get much better than this--Molesworth's willingness to engage in such a personal, intimate relationship with Hesse's work, while never losing her analytic eye. This idea of the image looking back feels key here. It's as if the effort made to create a work invests the work with its own personhood--an otherly personhood that stares back at its creator, a stare fed by the psychic bleeding of the creator, that results both in relief and a slap of the uncanny. If the work doesn't stare back at you, you haven't invested enough energy in it. The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion. I don't know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling (80-81).
Dear Potential Readers out there: This books looks back and it is calling to you!
An additional pleasure this year included gobbling up Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist from Publication Studio. The book begins with a bang--the details of which I will leave you to discover for yourselves--as it unleashes its garrulous alchemy, turning Bellamy's blog posts on the fireworks and subsequent fallout from a relationship with "the buddhist" into a book that pushes all kinds of literary/aesthetic/social boundaries, all the while maintaining a running commentary/meditation of and on its coming-into-being. Boundaries and how they get pushed around, wadded up, shoved aside, pierced, pummeled, and sometimes, maintained, are always central to Bellamy's writing.
Bellamy is unafraid to parade and take apart what Sianne Ngai has called "ugly feelings." She names their gendered/political frameworks:
This is what I was getting at in my post on public display and operatic suffering--an in-your-face owning of one's own vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don't see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power. To deny behaviors and experiences gendered as weak or "feminine" is not feminist or queer, it's heteronormative to the hilt. Like Kathy Acker, I long to quiver and terrify in the same gasp (35).
 |
| Image from Belladodie website. Bellamy googled "operatic suffering" and this is the first image that came up. (I love that all the participants appear to be women!) |
Bellamy's book is full of a wide array of references to writing, the writing community, to other writers, artists, film-makers, musicians, and an array of Hollywood films, to spirituality, meditation, the death of Bellamy's mother, academic interview committees, Buddhist sex scandals, Ambien, Culver City hotel stays, and more. I love that this book includes a whole host of images, some taken by Bellamy and others snatched from elsewhere (like the one above).
Here's one of my favorite passages:
Hotel Retreat Day 6
The nightgown I brought with me is getting funky so I bought another one at the Nordstrom Rack at the Howard Hughes Center. Being a Princess and the Pea type person, I cut out the tags so they wouldn't scratch my delicate nature as I slept.
The Buddhist begins with its title all in capitals on the cover but by the time the book closes, the buddhist has shrunk to all lower case. The book begins with engorgement and ends post-sex, "with printed love" (145). But, it takes awhile to get there. Throughout the book, Bellamy suggests that she will stop writing about the buddhist, as here:
...that's what it feels like with the buddhist, those final musculature contractions of a dead thing. I'm tired of writing about him. Back in the early days of New Narrative, when we were all wanting to be in one another's work, I complained to Kevin, why don't you write about me, and Kevin said he didn't write about me because writing was an exorcism, and he didn't want to exorcise me. Writing about the buddhist here has been a sort of exorcism, but the time for that has passed--no more soap opera narrative for this blog, time to return to random bleeps of experience and observation (39).
But of course, he keeps turning up, however much he is denied and/or newly buried:
"The unhooking from the buddhist now feels complete; I'm ready to open the door and step out into the rays of my sunlit future" (49).
"I wish I could erase the buddhist from my consciousness, I'm sick of thinking about him, but my writing brought him into my life, and it seems he's going to stay there in spirit, if not in flesh, until the writing's through with him" (56).
"So, I'm saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here" (71).
"Based on this blog, I'm sure it sounds like I talk about him all the time, but I don't. I was feeling melancholy about the whole situation today--and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I've shaken--like the eternal return, it comes back again and again, its quality essentially unchanged. When the longing strikes, I get this romantic sense that the buddhist is feeling it as well..." (104).
Bellamy is aware of this constant return, of course, and works it as much as it works her. She includes in the book a section in which Colter Jacobsen, artist, friend and publisher of the buddhist, remarks upon this recurrence:
Colter added:
I thought of you when i read this [a quote from Proust]...I hope I wasn't insensitive when I said that i like the constant return in the blog of the buddhist. It was also meant to be an observation that while you are editing the buddhist blog, it also seems to be growing....I think it is brave and vulnerable....I think people appreciate this because we can so relate to it; there's always someone in our life whose relationship was left unresolved and complicated and so much time is spent weighing what happened...till it becomes almost and abstraction. (129).
I think Bellamy's constant return to the buddhist makes for a kind of abjection that is uncomfortable for the reader. Our identification with it might not be uncomplicated; or we might deny any identification with it. There's something particularly interesting to me in this display and working with and in this space of abjection; it is all about discomfort, distances, contagion. It seems to be the source of writing, writing as intense content but also intensive formal practice and investigation, abjection and writing that both undoes and remakes a person and a person's work.
Here are some other selections from the book:
Of course it ended badly. Recently I tried to smooth things over with The Buddhist. It was disastrous. Bradford Nordeen on my efforts: 'Aren't these awful experiences best when they're funneled into the work so that heartache is turned into a piece, made productive? That piece is written (and lovely) so why on earth would you get back into the sandbox?" Bradford's referring to the 1000-word story/memoir I recently completed called "The Buddhist," a piece so obscene it makes my soul blush. 1000 words sounds right; I have no desire to write any more "real" writing about him. I enjoyed working with brevity--layering subtlety into such a raunchy, blatant blip. I even created a character arc for the protagonist, just like they do in real fiction. The "now" takes place within a few minutes, but the content extends and swirls way out, the now being like the eye of a tornado, and everything else racing around that. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how personal or vulnerable my subject matter, at a certain point in writing it all boils down to formal concerns, I become this slightly mad biologist panting to herself as I pin a butterfly, alive and writhing, to a cardboard background. Of course I'm thinking of Nabokov here. Is 1000 words and a community who's been entertained for 5 months worth the pain? And, yes, there was pleasure as well. It was like being in a cult, a strange narcissistic Buddhist sex cult. I wouldn't have passed it up for the world (34).
Throughout I've tried to use my babbling about loss and betrayal as an opportunity to refine and promote a political/aesthetic position (49).
...after poopooing divisions, I made a distinction between blog writing and Real Writing. That's a hard one, for I don't know what I'm doing here, why I'm putting all this energy into these posts. I think of poets who speak of their 'writing practice,' meaning it's all part of the process; they don't separate out precious, discrete poems as real work and letters and journals as lesser work. Thus the fetishization of George Oppen's daybooks for example. I've always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets' insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they're such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny? My posts are too slight, too femmy, too sloppy (I'm a compulsive reviser), too easy. So Rainer's right: I'm conflicted (73).
This section follows a passage Bellamy quotes from Helen Molesworth's "Me, You, Us: Eva Hesse's Early Paintings." Bellamy writes:
Art writing doesn't get much better than this--Molesworth's willingness to engage in such a personal, intimate relationship with Hesse's work, while never losing her analytic eye. This idea of the image looking back feels key here. It's as if the effort made to create a work invests the work with its own personhood--an otherly personhood that stares back at its creator, a stare fed by the psychic bleeding of the creator, that results both in relief and a slap of the uncanny. If the work doesn't stare back at you, you haven't invested enough energy in it. The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion. I don't know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling (80-81).
Dear Potential Readers out there: This books looks back and it is calling to you!
8.03.2011
Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brandon Brown in the Condensary Reading Series
Saturday night, after work at the library and after working through confusing carpooling plans, Camille Roy and I practically flew across the Bay Bridge, traffic having wondrously evaporated; We missed our exit, but were back on track in a moment, arriving in Oakland for the Condensary Reading Series, hosted by Jack Frost and Zack Tuck, just as it was beginning. The house was jam-packed. Brandon Brown read first though I hesitate to call what Brandon does reading. It is more of a performance. As an audience member, you're always a little unanchored, never quite sure where the performance begins or ends, or when Brandon is improvising, or when he's reading what's on the page. His references traverse a whole array of sources--Greek texts, pop culture, politics, the body, sex, appetite, hip hop, poetry, the personal. This is all part of the pleasure of Brandon's writing, writing that Camille described as juicy, or was it, tasty? It is great stuff, raw and intricate, bawdy and scatological, high pitched and searing.
Here's a bit of what Brandon read:
STAR WARS
Ugh, I would never go to Burning Man in a million
years. You guys have fun with that one. The window
for my going to Burning Man shut tight
in 1983 when I turned five and my cerebral system started
sloughing off the gilt pillars of progress.
Given the Tarkovsky-shot brain death I’ve suffered
since, I don’t need to fiddle mushrooms under a Pepsi
sign in Nevada. What little pop sensibility still fires
bursts via pre-Homeric river-rhythm mimic.
My performance reviews just barely adequate. My chapbooks
barely streaming across the scarred surface of a heaving prosthesis.
I’m talking about the Internet, and I’m referring to Burning Man. Okay,
I’ll go to Burning Man. So I can blaze in an incendiary nostalgic
anti-Jacobinism, since Burning Man is a nationalist display of
saturated mores. You know how that band Crass made flyers in 1978 that read Germany got Baader-Meinhof, England got punk? If I wasn’t busy packing the back of the Saab with psilocybin and Ciroc I’d bend over a Xerox, engrave the relevant apodosis: America got Star Wars. Both Burning Man and Star Wars express something fundamentally true about our culture ,which is that given the choice between collective activity ensuring the lessening of worldwide violence in the name of equalite, we’d rather burn one and wallow in the most gloriously degraded archetypal representations of such violence history has ever considered. Germany got an organized cell of native revolutionaries determined to stage a protest which would induce true trauma to the ruling classes and still engage the sympathy of the ruled. England’s poor and wayward bourgeois youth faced a literal crisis, a bifurcation by which cultural choice was demanded between fealty to the party of order or insurrectionary semiotic praxis. In the United States, if you were white and loaded and could tear yourself away from listening to Fleetwood Mac’s catastrophic LP Rumors for three hours you were most likely either watching Star Wars or waiting in line to watch Star Wars. I know you think this is an empty and raunchy satire. Actually, like every other white and wealthy person born between 1958 and now I’m deeply, disarmingly, madly in love with Star Wars. Rumors too.
PIGS
I would never hold hands with a pig.
But as a vitamin-deprived crackerlet,
my rearers were obsessed with a symbolic
play in which the little stubs hanging off
my palms were pigs. Doing typical pig shit too.
Going to the market. Gumming roast beef.
Slurping trash out of a trough like it was lamb
kidneys in shallot sauce. I’m not above seasoning
my own shapeless chemical dinners with a
little pork product. Inhaling sodium ennui glutamate.
Listening to the lachrymose squeals of an angered
Kardashian, luving its peal across the bereft
orchard of my machinery. But I am going to
call a pig a fucking pig. This blonde Franz-type
stalks the halls of my office building.
He nods up with his whole cleft so I can see
the breezy blonde hairs inside his snout shake.
Sparkling honky eyes. He licks his lips
spying spine. Hot lard for a cold
baton. Wild boars still roam the woods
of Marin, but in the streets of Athens
all you can see are pigs. Saying something sort of
shitty to a garbage collector. I got a ticket for smoking
on campus and the pig thanked me, handing
over carbon copy. Smudging my enduring
dermal affability. I grabbed his tail and pulled
it Botox taut. That’s not
compost staining the wrinkles in my fingers, pig.
It’s what degrades this beautiful salt-lick
I put clothes on every day: white but pig-hating,
full of lovable rancor. It smells a little yesterday.
Backdated fish. Big potato. What goes
in the garbage. Cognac for pigs.
Following Brandon's raucous reading, Jocelyn Saidenberg began hers by saying that after Brandon's performance, she felt like the "straight man," though she is neither. The work Jocelyn read from is new; in "Silent Resistance," she writes through/with Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, attempting to occupy that "impossible subject position" that is Bartleby's. We heard several sections from this new project and the writing throughout is precise, the syntax elastic, abject, and exquisite. I look forward to reading more from this tantalizing project.
Silent Resistance
On the Dead Letter Branch, or, Sheep
At dusk, the gray zone of my disappearance, drugged by a still unknown drug, the hour that mourns the loss of day, cast down, but I go, neither melancholic nor stupid, I am the dawn, faceless possibility, impersonal, slipping beyond my form into the dazzling light of a world that says “no” to depth. At this moment, this dusk that is dawn, I am named as such, named as one. I had been given notice, as all subordinate clerks, myself named one, were given notice. After scores of years of reading through undeliverable correspondence, no one more suited to this avocation than I, vested with that authority to open and read the dead letters, I am to be removed. Not a rumor, not whispered speculation, is yet my sudden removal, due to an incoming administration, all posts, save the ex-clergy, are being removed. I would have rather to have declined their offer, but they have already asked that my keys be returned. I am the most trustworthy dead letter man handling the dead letters, yet I am to be removed, most likely today.
I was hired for my ability to decipher handwriting. To sound out the correct intention, to sleuth a destination. Stiejt Kanedeka means State of Connecticut. I could smell it. The rest we fed to the flames. Faithfully I have sorted through them, lived through them, the unreceived, prone and silent, I have worked, burned cart loads yearly. By nature and misfortune, prone to a pallid hopelessness. Within I have found rings, infolded in paper—the finger it was meant for molders in a grave. I have found bank notes, sent as swift charity to whom it would not relieve, who nor eats nor hungers anymore. I have read pardon for those who died despairing, hope for those who died unhoping, good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. I have read just enough, nor more than necessary. A business so fitted to me. I have sorted the mail of the bereft, errands of life who speed yet faster to death. My surrogate hand unsealing, tender and mild and serene, continually. Now suddenly, I am to be removed from circulation. This my home, my eternal dusk, invaded only by shadows, I am cast out. Where, as formless, who, as unrecognizable, when, am I capable of such exit, how to break the bonds of such weariness, tiredness, this silent disaster, a figure without form. This event will have happened. I repeat: I am to leave my post in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. I am to leave as if possible to publish myself, even as an anonymous dead letter man, as an instinct, unformed and atmospheric, as if I come or go from without, as if this could be thought, formed. I am as weather shadow cloud, and as weather shadow cloud, I depart.
 |
| photo by Camille Roy |
Here's a bit of what Brandon read:
STAR WARS
Ugh, I would never go to Burning Man in a million
years. You guys have fun with that one. The window
for my going to Burning Man shut tight
in 1983 when I turned five and my cerebral system started
sloughing off the gilt pillars of progress.
Given the Tarkovsky-shot brain death I’ve suffered
since, I don’t need to fiddle mushrooms under a Pepsi
sign in Nevada. What little pop sensibility still fires
bursts via pre-Homeric river-rhythm mimic.
My performance reviews just barely adequate. My chapbooks
barely streaming across the scarred surface of a heaving prosthesis.
I’m talking about the Internet, and I’m referring to Burning Man. Okay,
I’ll go to Burning Man. So I can blaze in an incendiary nostalgic
anti-Jacobinism, since Burning Man is a nationalist display of
saturated mores. You know how that band Crass made flyers in 1978 that read Germany got Baader-Meinhof, England got punk? If I wasn’t busy packing the back of the Saab with psilocybin and Ciroc I’d bend over a Xerox, engrave the relevant apodosis: America got Star Wars. Both Burning Man and Star Wars express something fundamentally true about our culture ,which is that given the choice between collective activity ensuring the lessening of worldwide violence in the name of equalite, we’d rather burn one and wallow in the most gloriously degraded archetypal representations of such violence history has ever considered. Germany got an organized cell of native revolutionaries determined to stage a protest which would induce true trauma to the ruling classes and still engage the sympathy of the ruled. England’s poor and wayward bourgeois youth faced a literal crisis, a bifurcation by which cultural choice was demanded between fealty to the party of order or insurrectionary semiotic praxis. In the United States, if you were white and loaded and could tear yourself away from listening to Fleetwood Mac’s catastrophic LP Rumors for three hours you were most likely either watching Star Wars or waiting in line to watch Star Wars. I know you think this is an empty and raunchy satire. Actually, like every other white and wealthy person born between 1958 and now I’m deeply, disarmingly, madly in love with Star Wars. Rumors too.
PIGS
I would never hold hands with a pig.
But as a vitamin-deprived crackerlet,
my rearers were obsessed with a symbolic
play in which the little stubs hanging off
my palms were pigs. Doing typical pig shit too.
Going to the market. Gumming roast beef.
Slurping trash out of a trough like it was lamb
kidneys in shallot sauce. I’m not above seasoning
my own shapeless chemical dinners with a
little pork product. Inhaling sodium ennui glutamate.
Listening to the lachrymose squeals of an angered
Kardashian, luving its peal across the bereft
orchard of my machinery. But I am going to
call a pig a fucking pig. This blonde Franz-type
stalks the halls of my office building.
He nods up with his whole cleft so I can see
the breezy blonde hairs inside his snout shake.
Sparkling honky eyes. He licks his lips
spying spine. Hot lard for a cold
baton. Wild boars still roam the woods
of Marin, but in the streets of Athens
all you can see are pigs. Saying something sort of
shitty to a garbage collector. I got a ticket for smoking
on campus and the pig thanked me, handing
over carbon copy. Smudging my enduring
dermal affability. I grabbed his tail and pulled
it Botox taut. That’s not
compost staining the wrinkles in my fingers, pig.
It’s what degrades this beautiful salt-lick
I put clothes on every day: white but pig-hating,
full of lovable rancor. It smells a little yesterday.
Backdated fish. Big potato. What goes
in the garbage. Cognac for pigs.
 |
| photo courtesy of Camille Roy |
Following Brandon's raucous reading, Jocelyn Saidenberg began hers by saying that after Brandon's performance, she felt like the "straight man," though she is neither. The work Jocelyn read from is new; in "Silent Resistance," she writes through/with Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, attempting to occupy that "impossible subject position" that is Bartleby's. We heard several sections from this new project and the writing throughout is precise, the syntax elastic, abject, and exquisite. I look forward to reading more from this tantalizing project.
Silent Resistance
On the Dead Letter Branch, or, Sheep
At dusk, the gray zone of my disappearance, drugged by a still unknown drug, the hour that mourns the loss of day, cast down, but I go, neither melancholic nor stupid, I am the dawn, faceless possibility, impersonal, slipping beyond my form into the dazzling light of a world that says “no” to depth. At this moment, this dusk that is dawn, I am named as such, named as one. I had been given notice, as all subordinate clerks, myself named one, were given notice. After scores of years of reading through undeliverable correspondence, no one more suited to this avocation than I, vested with that authority to open and read the dead letters, I am to be removed. Not a rumor, not whispered speculation, is yet my sudden removal, due to an incoming administration, all posts, save the ex-clergy, are being removed. I would have rather to have declined their offer, but they have already asked that my keys be returned. I am the most trustworthy dead letter man handling the dead letters, yet I am to be removed, most likely today.
I was hired for my ability to decipher handwriting. To sound out the correct intention, to sleuth a destination. Stiejt Kanedeka means State of Connecticut. I could smell it. The rest we fed to the flames. Faithfully I have sorted through them, lived through them, the unreceived, prone and silent, I have worked, burned cart loads yearly. By nature and misfortune, prone to a pallid hopelessness. Within I have found rings, infolded in paper—the finger it was meant for molders in a grave. I have found bank notes, sent as swift charity to whom it would not relieve, who nor eats nor hungers anymore. I have read pardon for those who died despairing, hope for those who died unhoping, good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. I have read just enough, nor more than necessary. A business so fitted to me. I have sorted the mail of the bereft, errands of life who speed yet faster to death. My surrogate hand unsealing, tender and mild and serene, continually. Now suddenly, I am to be removed from circulation. This my home, my eternal dusk, invaded only by shadows, I am cast out. Where, as formless, who, as unrecognizable, when, am I capable of such exit, how to break the bonds of such weariness, tiredness, this silent disaster, a figure without form. This event will have happened. I repeat: I am to leave my post in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. I am to leave as if possible to publish myself, even as an anonymous dead letter man, as an instinct, unformed and atmospheric, as if I come or go from without, as if this could be thought, formed. I am as weather shadow cloud, and as weather shadow cloud, I depart.
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