Monday, February 12, 2007
I know that some people are going to cringe to hear this note’s topic sentence, so let’s just be blunt about it. We can come back and address the collateral damage after:
Fifty years from now, when people are writing without irony of “the classics of flarf,” one of the works that will turn up on that relatively short list will be Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson.
The book has just been released by Zasterle Press, so recently in fact that it doesn’t yet show up either on the Zasterle website, nor that of Small Press Distribution, where eventually you will be able to buy it.
The idea that flarf, which Gary Sullivan once characterized as
A quality of intentional or unintentional "flarfiness." A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. "Not okay."
should have “classics” is, by itself, problematic. The whole notion of a “classic” “awfulness” ought to be oxymoronic even if one were to associate it with the somewhat older notions of kitsch or camp. But when I think of kitsch, say, I think of some social institution on the order of the Lawrence Welk Show, the 1950s TV bandleader whose sense of the polka drained the music of its ethnic heritage, substituting a treacly version of super-Americanism. Flarf, by its character, goes against that grain, raising its forms to the level of conscious while, in most cases, both loving & attacking them at the same time.
Magee’s choice of Emily Dickinson is a case in point. Magee notes in his forward that he seeks to
disrupt some of the pieties around Emily Dickinson’s work that I don’t believe have served her poems very well. (As an example, I would note the rarely mentioned fact that Emily Dickinson is one of the funniest poets ever.)
Whitman & Dickinson share an outsider’s perspective on what was already a submissive & imitative Anglophiliac literary establishment by the end of the Civil War, but where, when the descendants of that establishment claim Whitman for their own today, they simply look like fools, Dickinson’s own social isolation permitted her work to be mediated by that same establishment. That she is, grammatically at least, the most disruptive & fragmentary poet of the 19th century – Blake, Lautréamont & Rimbaud have nothing on her – has often been smoothed over by School of Quietude “heirs,”¹ at least until Susan Howe reclaimed the poet in all her rawness. It’s not an accident that Magee’s title points directly at Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, nor that he acknowledges her by name in his foreword.
Magee’s description of his methodology deserves to be noted:
The poems in this book were written during an intensive period of reading and writing in 2003 and 2004. I was curious as to whether I could, using some of Emily Dickinson’s forms, evoke in my own readership that combination of shock, bewilderment, excitement, pleasure (a process of dis-orientation and re-orientation) that I imagined Dickinson’s earliest readers must have felt when reading her work. I was cognizant of the fact that
In picking Angie rather than, say, Emily Dickinson, “a sort of Zelig figure in American popular culture,” Magee is picking not only the former lover of Frank Sinatra & actress in over 130 films & TV shows, but also a creature as self-made in her own way as was the poet. Angeline Brown –
I had a hunch that searching her name would throw up an unending stream of interesting Googled material. Whatever voices emerged from this procedure were, to my mind, pure “flarf”….
Here, just to test this, is “087”:
To Die For — an idea — is Rather
Vegas to Flea
Let’s not — Devolve into Conjecture —
Sea-change on me.
The president hasn’t “Entered the Image” —
Achilles assumed when hid,
Himself among Women Puzzling questions
An old Yearning with His dad —
Jon Bon Jovi is
Classic deadbeat showing
Up — occasionally —
In Order — to beat — up His mother
Version — “to fully” —
This is where it gets interesting. Magee’s poems replicate the start-stop stutter step movement central to
As a project, My Angie Dickinson also rubs up against the notorious vessel model of communications, the linguistic equivalent of intelligent design. In this telling, poems functionally are molds into which content is then poured. But as with the poem above, what results constantly refutes the theory itself. The materiality of these snatches – “’too fully’” indeed – push back with as much resistance as Vegas or Flea.Throughout, one catches Magee’s own deft hand & sense of wit, as with “082”:
An “added” — Pleasure —
Tinsel Girl remembered —
Feathers
His “menacing peril” —
The overall result is not that far away from something like Charles Bernstein’s Nude Formalism: brilliant, hilarious, deeply conceived, completely serious, with more twists than a pretzel factory, well written, but still thoroughly flarf. Just for good measure, My Angie Dickinson is also the most ambitious production, design wise, Zasterle has yet attempted. This book is a joy.
¹ To the degree that one poet I know used to claim you could read all of her poems aloud to the tune of The Yellow Rose of
Concentrating on the disembodied text of a computer sorting mechanism produces the kind of writing you see in My Angie Dickinson. Googling and random association produce random structure and random meaning. It's like being stuck with the letters you get in a Scrabble hand--you can't "express" yourself very well when you have no control over the material you're given to work with.
Could a robot write a poem? Probably.
After I'm gone, I'd hope that someone stumbling upon something I'd written would get a sense of what the person who wrote it thought, cared about, and felt. That hoary old conceit is doubtless passe these days. Worrying about this is also passe.
Making silkscreen images of Campbell's soup cans didn't make the soup cans any more interesting than they were to begin with; in fact, probably less so, since the "art-making" appropriation of them (as image) really had less legitimacy qua content than their original designer possessed. The real Angie Dickinson is really more interesting than the Flarf poems about her.
Or is the lack of meaning supposed to be superior to the thing itself. Negative dialectics?
xxxjimmy
xxxjimmy
xxxjimmy
http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/p/pay-it-forward.shtml
I'm not sure that's especially dangerous. As always, I conclude that the merits of Google-sculpted poems have nothing to do with the sources. I'm sure I'm nitpicking but its a bit like the very idea of "viewing the world through a TV" no matter how many channels its got. You look at a TV, not through it, as everyone knows. Similarly, you don't look through a Google-sculpted poem to view what the poet's searches "literally" found. You just look at the poem.
Ron, you should try reading Dickinson. She's fantastic.
"AT-ness" versus "THROUGH-ness" --
an interesting concept, but only a concept. Can you define this difference? I'm not sure you could.
Opacity versus translucence. It seems to me that opacity only permits an appreciation of the surface narrative--i.e., Lucy and Ricky doing what they're doing--versus our "reading it" as a dialogue (translucence) between the actor-couple and their "real" lives as a married couple living in Southern California, a dialogue between the script writers and the audience. Many times famous actors and performers would "visit" the couple on the show, and their "real" selves were to some extent "naked" as opposed to being written in as imaginary characters. Their "real" selves would be translucent--they'd be crossing over into translucence.
This is weird.
I used to think back in my Iowa days that Galway Kinnell was creating an imaginary persona for himself in his poems, which was "like" his real self, but also more idealized and conflicted. He tended to dramatize his life in ways that would make him seem more heroic. Then, as his career progressed, he had to encorporate these dramatized visions of himself into his continuing story of himself. I think in a way many SoQ poets end up doing this--especially those whose confessional program begins in earnest. Louise Gluck also comes to mind. Michael Ryan, who lives and teaches down there in San Diego where Rae Armantrout is (I think), too.
It's not about opacity and translucence. It's about presentation and representation. TV does not represent anything elsewhere. It is a physical object that is present in your living room (or wherever). Like any other physical object, you make sense of it by comparing it to other objects. You don't use it as a view-of-things-at-a-distance.
In the same way, Flarf does not represent the internet sources it uses as material.
Not sure you're any clearer in your amplification than you were initially. What's the difference between "presentation" and "representation"? You've just used different words, but the meanings are no clearer.
A television--cathode ray tube--projects images--as a radio projects sound. Radio has a slightly "flatter" effect, but it's also more dimensional because it requires that we imagine the space it refers to, rather than "present" it. Radio is inherently more suggestive and participatory, for this reason.
A TV is certainly a "thing" --physical object, with a front, a back, a power source, legs, guts, "face". But when it's on, we're looking "into" it, just as we do at a (large) movie screen. To suggest that nothing is happening when we watch it, or that there are no distinguishing characteristics between one "program" and another is silly. It is certainly true--as McLuhan might say--that watching television has certain qualitative guidelines, that we tend to enter an "alpha"-like state, especially when tired or bored by what is being represented. But the pioneers of television broadcasting created the paradigm within which programming evolved, just as computer program inventors created "Windows". The "content" didn't exist apart from their vehicles, and there is nothing inevitable about how they work. Content is not irrelevant, though it may be squashed by the power of the programming frame(s). Much has been written about the progressively shortening attention span of modern media populations. That's certainly the result of the quick-switch character of contemporary television programming, and the development of TV "clickers". Going back through the history of television "programs" I'm struck by the stereotypical quality of certains kinds of concepts over time--the further away we get from them, the more homogenous they become, in relief.
I'd like you to explain how it is that TV "doesn't represent anything elsewhere." Certainly the battle scenes, and the aftermath of roadside bombings, in Iraq, are OF and ABOUT that place. In other words, scenes projected via TV are no less OF and ABOUT it than a newspaper story describing these events would be. On the contrary, showing dead and injured bodies in color, on the evening news, has a particularly vivid and powerful effect. They're enormously powerful. The television at the foot of the bed, or in front of the livingroom couch, transcends its physical presence and becomes the vehicle for endless variation upon the exploration of "reality".
It's been a long time since I have watched TV news. But I'm not sure I know less "about" the war in Iraq than someone who has been watching CNN regularly for the last two years. You use the familiar undeniable example of the mediated horrors of war, which we (for some reason) have moral obligation to be moved by emotionally, i.e., not to deconstruct as someone trying to make us feel a particular way (not feel it "about" anything, mind you: just feel that way).
I don't recognize that obligation. ("Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?" as Ginsberg put it.) I still say my analogy holds: CNN's coverage (or whatever coverage) is a constructed, physical, painted (in shifting colors) object that has much less to do with what is going on in Iraq than what is going on in New York and Washington D.C. The news is as much "about" Iraq as Happy Days was about family life in the 1950s. There is no reason to approach the TV as a passive "alpha-state" (if I understand what you mean.) Certainly, that state is no model for how to read poems.
A presentation is a picture. Just a picture. A distribution of colour (in the case of TV). It works or does not depending on what is going its immediate surroundings (your life). A representation is a picture OF something, like Iraq. I simply don't grant the premise that the TV is a picture OF anything. It is an autonomous presentation that is not bound representationally by (does not "stand for") anything that is happening "on the ground" anywhere. It is not constrained by reality, as anyone who has attended an event that was subsequently "covered" in the news knows.
Best,
Thomas
tao lin
Incontrovertible accessability contorts our epistemological sense, cleaving rationality, hemorrhaging certainty. Exclusive of containment, flarf ups it own ante towards supererogation, dumping leftovers. So the page, stranded in total abstraction, surrenders its chastity in favor of conjugation. All these little squirts interact and squiggle before our unbelieving eyes.
________
Thomas: I think you're just following McCluhan straight into the darkroom. You've mystified the media to a degree that you seem not to trust your own eyes.
It is true that the media--in the Heisenbergian sense (i.e. observer effect)--effects what it touches, and that news in fact is a "player" in the real world. But that doesn't make what is shown "unreal" either. It isn't true that the individual experience "inside" reality is objectively different from what occurs as recorded by a device (such as security camera). The subjective interior described in Proust and Joyce can have its own narrative, which is its own "reality", but the reality of media is not hermetic. It tells a story, but the visual images made through candid recordation are not simply "fictions". What you're describing is a kind of paranoia, a position that would permit you to reject every representation as ultimately skewed or faked. That's a peculiar bias to have, and one that severely limits your access to information.
You just seem to have a problem with TV. That's understandable, but...
if there were someone you trusted implicity (say a clone of yourself) who had his own TV network (a one-man show) and went to Iraq and transmitted his reportage back to you sitting in your chair watching your television, would you still say it bore no relation to the reality "over there"?
Eddie
Curtis: it's not paranoia if you leave it alone. TV has simply shown itself (to me) as a very unreliable source of information. What is "represents" is a fog of confusion (these days, a fog of war). I have, and trust, many other sources of information.
It's a bit like learning that someone is a habitual liar (or simply not very good at describing what happens) and you stop taking his word for things. As long as you confine your scepticism to this one (demonstrably) unreliable source, paranoia isn't an issue.
I will grant that TV images are "not simply fictions", however. They are, let us say, highly complex fictions and part of their complexity lies in their not being wholly divorced from reality. Their connections to it, however, are for all intents and purposes arbitrary. In almost the same context, Norman Mailer talked about "an elaborated fiction whose bewildering interplay of real and false detail must devil the mass into a progressively more imperfect apperception of reality".
It is precisely because I don't one day want to lose confidence in my eyes that I don't look at the world through a TV. Every now and then, I look at a TV and sometimes even enjoy the patterns it makes. I simply don't let those patterns stand for things that I know something about from other, more reliable, sources.
I approach poems in the same way. They are not, on this view, "about" emotions (one option), neither mine nor anyone else's, and especially not the poet's. They are, however, presentations of emotion. Some are better than others.
1.
As with the tools we need
to discern it,
the effects of reification
we brilliantly throw off,
into the personal-universal flux
comprising
the appropriation processes
of reification itself—
driven perhaps out of a
popular language’s healthy
subliminal imperatives, the
deeply conditioned reflex arc
of identity-construction’s need
to self-verify,
self-validate,
and self-evaluate
on any sort of objective terms
available, that are
actualized for us by a sort of
ecstatic consensus, in the
intimate feel we have
for mediation
that we relate to our
fondest ideational conceits,
contrived in constructs
that, at first, at least
seem objectified,
then are
genuinely reified
from a logical catharsis
leveraging physical survival
into evermore engineered choices,
from creature comfort
to ergonomics,
to a successful working relationship
with things
bracketing social survival terms
and a logistics of machining,
in place of the human project,
especially in the context of the
self-liquidation imperatives that such
advanced industrial forces of alienation
institute with thrilling contrasts
in the nerve-meter of the social order—
our own complicity
coming over us
happily as a bouncing ball
most likely as a psychic lurch
that then simply normalizes
into a seemingly healthy impulse
for a relief of some sort
from that mortifying feeling
in the existence
of an inner life.
2.
We find that we have already
been working on a problem
that is—objectively speaking—
no longer about consciousness, at all;
which already had us
second-guessing itself, anyway,
a few years back,
when the objects of thought
turned on thought itself,
upstaging its knowing
with all this marvelous
technological presence
holding everything
we know is real,
near enough to us
to free us
from the responsibility
of containing its language
or having to see it
for what it is
so we could now
find ourselves, in
it’s seeing us for what we are:
no longer alienated, ahem,
so to speak.
3.
We are now for them,
the default objects
of the fun we thought
they were for us.
Our purely operational
sense of self we share,
as in
how we work—
as in
how we tick
as in
how now
we are
ticking down
to that more and more
and evermore
of us, expressed
in oh so many zeros.
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