Films 2012

1. Welcome to the Dollhouse
2. Happiness
3. Our Idiot Brother
4. Storytelling
5. Palindromes
6. Colombiana
7. The Ides of March
8. Valkyrie
9. Terri
10. War Games
11. The Longest Day
12. Strange Fruit
13. J. Edgar
14. Easy A
15. The Social Network

Books 2012

Complete Reads
1. J.G. Ballard—Crash
2. Kate Zambreno—Green Girl (Emergency)
3. Ariana Reines—Mercury (Fence)
4. Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, & Kenneth L. Pike—Rhetoric: Discovery and Change
5. Aase Berg trans. Johannes Görannson—Transfer Fat (Forsla Fett) (Ugly Duckling)
6. Dodie Bellamy—Barf Manifesto (Ugly Duckling)
7. Steve Roggenbuck—Crunk Juice
8. Kristy Odelius/Tim Yu—Kiss the Stranger (Corollary)
9. Sean Kilpatrick—fuckscapes (Blue Square/Mud Luscious)

Partial Reads (Read Around In)
1. Cheshire Calhoun, ed.—Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers
2. Judith Halberstam—The Queer Art of Failure
3. Judith Halberstam—Skin Shows

I'm Still Here Raises Questions About Genre

Cinéma vérité, experimental film, or work of conceptual art, I'm Still Here interrogates fame, especially fame for people, like Joaquin Phoenix, who have been in the limelight most of their lives. While many critics panned the film being a hoax, questioned director Casey Affleck's ethics in documenting the loathsome depths of Phoenix's meltdown, or disliked the faux-cinéma-vérité style, the film exploits different genres in order to out-tabloidize the celebrity cult/ure that is an American obsession.

Like Richard Linklater's Slacker, I'm Still Here plays to me like a traditional film in which the action bleeds out of Hollywood sound stages and into the real world films are meant to represent. The premise of the film is to interrogate the bifurcation of Joaquin Phoenix's self-hood by doing what celebrity culture does anyway and branding his personage into a character or even simply an image that everyone can recongnize. In order for the film to work, Phoenix and the film's other actors have to stick to the basic premises of Joaquin Phoenix's crisis and transformation into the rapper JP. By employing this improvisatory premise instead of a traditional script, everyone who has a stake in celebrity culture becomes part of the film.

Take, for example, the now-iconic Letterman scene. This scene allows viewers to engage two distinct characterizations of Phoenix by the repeating this cultural happening in a different, recontextualized medium. Phoenix's celebrity character on the real airing of the Letterman show is subtly different from Phoenix's celebrity character in the film I'm Still Here. Talk shows invite viewers to be outsider participants in a celebrity culture that is externalized from their live. Viewers see a glimpse of celebrities lives through the genre of these talk shows, which creates a stock image or character that viewers identify as Celebrity (This is what a Celebrity is; this is what a Celebrity is like). Films, unlike talk shows and other Celebrity-making genres, are asking us to suspend disbelief and identify with the characters in them, which permits viewers a different context or vantage point from which to view this particular celebrity, Phoenix, who through this conceptual narrative is working to shatter his Celebrity self. The scene following the Letterman appearance where Phoenix has a moment of clarity among the shrubbery exhibits the different characterizations. Viewers have a more sympathetic insider's perspective into this shattering when it is viewed through film's narrative, rather than the voyeuristic pleasures that they might experience when Celebrity is exposed as a public spectacle on talk shows or on tabloid TV.

Subtly employing genre in this way is akin to using viewer empathy to kill off the Celebrity Phoenix by reminding viewers that Celebrity includes (and often overshadows) a plethora of selves. Seeing I'm Still Here in close proximity to Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, I notice that many of the scenes in the two movies could be interchangeable (strippers, prostitutes, press junkets, etc.). The difference between the two films is that Phoenix seeks to extract himself from his life as an actor, an artist who pretends to be someone else and is subsequently remade by culture into a commodity, by becoming the rapper JP, an endeavor that appears to offer artistic freedom and creative control, until he realizes via P Diddy that hip-hop is an industry that is controlled as much as film. In Somewhere, Johnny simply realizes he hates the trappings of his celebrity life and simply drives off and then walks off, appearing to leave it all behind, which is just a different non-solution to the problem of being made into a non-being by celebrity cult/ure.

I'm Still Here is a film that upsets viewers and critics alike because it breaks the expectations of genre and blends them. Just like the kerfluffle over James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces when it turned out not to be completely autobiographical, I'm Still Here straddles the dividing line between documentation of reality and fictional film, which puts viewers ill-at-ease. It does not permit us to take voyeurstic pleasure in a celebrity's meltdown; we are compelled to empathize with Phoenix. If this cannot be done, the film is then written off as a hoax, a scheme, a game, a counterfeit because it is easier to do that than to dwell within the film's complex handling of a self who became a character that we, as characters, helped to author.

Two Stupid Articles

In the past two days, I have had the misfortune of reading two of the stupidest articles I have ever come across. The first article on ChristWire is a conservative Christian defamation of homosexuality called "'Power Bottoming,'  The Most Disturbing Trend in American Homosexuality," linked from Lucas de Lima's interrogation of the lyric poet as "power bottom" (which was quite interesting). The article by Stephenson Billings, which I refuse to link to, is one of the most sexist and racist bits of claptrap I've ever read, urging its readership to "educate ourselves" vigilantly about "the horrors of homosexuality." I couldn't believe that an article full of such hate-mongering could exist.

The other article, "The 'Education' Mantra" by Thomas Sowell in the National Review, a right-wing political magazine, is a classically argued diatribe against the "soft" education that is promulgated by the American educational system's allegiance to "soft subjects" (read: humanities). Of course, the hard subjects are the hard sciences. In Sowell's conceit, the humanities are akin to "baton twirling" while the hard subjects, like nuclear physics, lead to an easy-to-control but economically viable population that contributes to industry. Humanities education leads to the anarchic goals of an over-educated, un- or underemployed populace responsible for revolutions and civil unrest or worse, genocides.

Of course, Sowell's xenophobic hypocrisy is evident when he generalizes that American students do not line up to take hard classes, and the advanced degrees in those subjects are more likely to be earned by "foreign students." In Sowell's argument, his soft (read: uncited) fact doesn't reflect on the quality or competitive nature of the American higher education system in both soft and hard fields of inquiry but rather on the ineptitude of the education system as a whole, which doesn't train students to be equipped to learn those subjects. It also implicitly indicts contemporary Americans as not being willing to challenge themselves in education, failing to recognize that it is policy makers and economists like Sowell who, setting up the system from the outside, are creating a system based on the perceived value homogeneity rather than authentic, boundary-breaking achievement.

I would continue a rebuttal of both pieces, but the thought of giving them any more consideration makes me nauseous.

death, inc.

I WORK FOR DEATH WHO PAYS IN LIFE-NUGGETS A KIND OF SICK-BUT-SUSTAINABLE MINIMUM WAGE USED IN THE CORPORATION'S ADVERTISING SCHEME TO BRAND DEATH, INC. AS GREEN WHICH IT HONESTLY IS.

From Being Constructed to Construing a Corpus: A Brief Reflection on David Foster Wallace as Mythic Destroyer

At the DFW reading celebrating the publication of The Pale King at Babbitt's Books in Normal, Illinois on Friday night, I really understood the heaviness of his loss for the first time. Since he spent nearly a decade teaching at Illinois State University and is from Central Illinois, there is a devotion to him in these parts among former students and colleagues and friends that is both cult-ish and disembodied. He literally haunts these people more than he haunts this place. I can feel through their warm, clammy despair, even almost three years after his loss, the pressure of the longing that brushing with his genius (and I am not one to bandy about that term) created between these people and DFW.

DFW's disembodied presence reminds me of the figure Hard Rock in the Etheridge Knight poem "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane." Hard Rock was the baddest badass in prison, bearing the other black inmates up in a racist system, but after he is lobotomized, he is deprived of that swagger: "He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things / We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do." The poem makes me feel the irremediable heaviness of Hard Rock's loss, as his role simply cannot be filled by another. Even though Hard Rock is still alive, he is not his old self, and the density of the emptiness is so deep as to seem a singularity, an event from which no escape may be found.

Like Hard Rock, DFW was the baddest badass in the pomo-fiction game but at what cost? The Pale King, as a textual body, now lurks like the lobotomized Hard Rock, zapped of the embodied possibility that the mythologically stylized DFW represented with his now-vanished, unfinished genius stuffed into a rich but excessively unfinished corpus.

Even in his absence, the pressure of the loss of his genius is enormous and palpable, warping the way those left behind view the world, like straying too close to a black hole. People need(ed) that genius (our addiction to the product of his addiction and depression), and it was taken away (place blame where you must). Those who were close to him either grieve by unfailingly immortalizing his memory or parasitically crawl inside the corpus to feed (see Jonathan Franzen's careerist, self-absorbed, post-Oprah's Book Club turn for an example of the latter, critiquing DFW's self-absorption and careerism in a twisted version of "anything you can do I can do better" here (warning, you have to Like The New Yorker on Facebook to (I feel so dirty) read it) ).

DFW's corpus is a record of the fear of being constructed, created, made to exist, in any capacity, for any duration. If you are something to someone, anyone, even an anonymous anyone anywhere, or worse, everything to someone, and/or worse still, enlightened enough to make this realization and feel that pressure, which on any level is immense when it is dwelt within, even for nanoseconds, what can be done to alleviate it? And how life-numbingly guilty you must feel to exist at all, when your existence is brought so far to the fore, so close to the brim of the self, so chokingly all-encompassing it is to be needed like that and understand an iota of that need. That kind of guilt can only be compounded by the knowledge that it is self-created, constructed from one's own interest(s) (writing and thinking) and the burning need to do what makes humans human, act on the burningest of self-interested needs, which is the only thing that hints at joy beyond the materialities of existence and beyond the hollowness that is false sacrifice in service to an unpopulated, distorting, and vast exterior nothingness.

International Herb Beauty Pageant Results

In the recent International Herb Beauty Pageant, sage was voted "Most Beautiful Herb." Parsley took the award for "Herbal Congeniality." Sexy Italian basil won "Most Photogenic" over coriander. Sassy capers shocked the world by defeating tarragon in the "Best Swimsuit" competition. Rosemary edged out thyme for "Earthiest Herb." Star anise is "Most Artistic," a surprising upset to gain an award cannabis has dominated for decades. Fugly cumin leaves, however, get "Most Likely to Have Friends Pay Someone to Date You."

Review in the New Poets/Artists

My review of Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler is in the latest issue of Poets/Artists. Buy it here. Read the issue for free here.

Political Fragment of the Day

I lament the absence of an ethical imperative in favor of base competition for ideological subjugation and/or contrarianism between political parties. Obama had already been jarred awake, totally alone and naked, from his dream of nonpartisan progress before he even put on his pajamas, settled in, or fell asleep to dream it.

On Activism and the Book

I have been shopping for a book large enough to fit inside of for some time. I am collaborating with a book artist who can excavate the book’s interior so that I may live inside, albeit in a cramped, cocoon-like space of acid-free pages and nontoxic binding glue. I have chosen to put my body into a book for literacy advocacy, once I learned the government planned to cut literacy education. I have always wanted to wager my body, my life for a cause. And this seems a worthy one, and one on the home front to boot.

Additionally, I have also had a lifelong interest in the idea that the body is a text, which seemed counterintuitive to me when I first heard such a statement proclaimed during my days at university. I have always thought that difficult and abstract theoretical concepts are best explained through being concretized. This is a large part of my desire to be forever joined with a book. That, and I am really hot to use the awful pun “Do you read me?” with my wife or someone else who comes to view the book-human hybrid. I’m having a hard time typing right now because I’m laughing so hard just thinking of how stupid that groaner of a pun will be after a while!

I left a little note for my wife, so that she knows how to get a hold of me when she can’t visit. In the note, I included a url to the live cam feed from the book’s interior, in case she wants to monitor my progress as I work for literacy advocacy. I included a privacy button on my end, for when I’m, you know, going to the bathroom or pleasuring myself. Those intimate moments are best kept to one’s self.

I also have left information about a trust fund with enough money to handle my final expenses. I plan to have a conservator preserve me. I have found an expert who can completely synthesize my body with the book using a mixture of mylar and the saliva of honey bees combined with extreme heat, or something to that effect (I have to admit that although I am a book lover, I have never been one to know the ins and outs of the technical side of book preservation).

The money in trust can be used to ship my book-body hybrid to a rare book collector in Finland, where the book and my remains (I could just say the book, at this point, but I don’t want to confuse you, dear reader) will be showcased in a temperature-controlled display within this expansive private collection. I have had to do quite a bit of legal research and maneuvering to make sure the collector is not arrested for mutilating a corpse or necrophilia or some other dubious crime in possessing the giant book.

I cannot tell you how great it feels to finally have found my life’s purpose and to have that purpose be affiliated with worthwhile activism, rather than just idling away my days in service of some faceless corporate master. Well, the space within the book is too small and so resembles a monk’s cell that it’s impossible for me to bring a computer, and typing is not feasible within the book’s claustrophobic confines, so I bid you adieu. My last wish for you in this my last act of writing is that you can find a purpose as singularly fulfilling as merging with a giant book in the service of literacy advocacy and literacy education.

Allegory in Kate Bernheimer's "Whitework"

Certainly, it could be said to be a story about the anxiety of influence, or, perhaps more aptly, the influence of anxiety—it contains the code to my work with fairy tales as a writer, I think. But the code is submerged, just as secrets should be.

—Kate Bernheimer, Notes to "Whitework" (p. 533)

***
Allegory, or The Fairy Tale of Ideas

I get apprehensive teaching works that specifically say they've been coded. "Oh, great," I think to myself, "another writer contributing to the myth that literature is all about coding and decoding, and if you are unable to decode, you are not a good reader." To me, this myth is one part of the waning popularity of reading, especially the waning popularity of reading works that attempt to push against or destroy limits in a well-informed, meaningful way.

And yet I took Bernheimer's cagey comments in her notes to the story "Whitework" in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me as a challenge to wrestle with the allegory I believe her story contains. For those of you who don't know, an allegory is an extended metaphor (comparison) between two unlike things. In this case, her retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" deals with the same theme as Poe's short story, an obsession with art at the expense of what is perceived as the real (this is the part where we can have a tangent about the nature of art's reality, but I'll stick with deciphering the allegory for now and collapse that binary later).

The allegory begins with the fairy-tale cottage in the woods to which the speaker is taken for convalescence. The fairy-tale cottage is at once both a comfortable refuge and the object of  derision because it is so cliche (abandoned, forlorn, diminutive). The allegory is cemented by Bernheimer's clever double entendre: "This is where I found myself: in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the woods." On the literal level, the first phrase announces the setting, a physical location in the imaginary time and space of the text. Allegorically, the idea of finding one's self means understanding one's own nature or purpose. In this way (and in knowing what we know about the nature of the story from her notes), Bernheimer decreases the distance between the first-person speaker of her tale and herself as auteur.

In the description of the setting, two object of symbolic import are revealed: a locket and key. Lockets contain keepsakes and keys open things up, although the speaker her is confused and uncertain about the import of the key (wait until later...) among other things like how she even arrived at the cottage.

The cottage, as a metaphor for the fairy-tale genre, is a strange place. From the outside, it appears convetional and cliche, but on the inside, it is surprisingly different than what one might anticipate, full of odd shapes that do not match the boxy, "Christmas package" of its exterior.

Then, of course, the room where the speaker convalesces is decorated with whitework, the story's namesake, which the dictionary tells us is an embroidery technique in which the stitching is the same color as the fabric:



A similar concept can be found in the "White Paintings" of Robert Rauschenberg, which the artist described as having an ambient quality to them where the paintings were hypersensitive to and affected by the setting in which they were experienced.



And so it is with fairy tales. As you might expect with the risk Rauschenberg took, the paintings often enraged critics and audiences for being blank or not being art at all ("Anyone could do that" is a chestnut oft quoted in light of these experiments.). Bernheimer recounts a similar response to fairy tales among creative writers and scholars alike.

The whitework metaphor works so well (as does the complementary white on white painting). The fairy tale can be seen as the base fabric of the white work and its retelling(s) then are the stitching of the emboidery, the artistry of which is often indistinguishable from the base material if done well. And yet, like Rauschenberg's white paintings, fairy tales prove to be ambient, changing with the atmosphere in which they are displayed (Read this tale as a way of revealing fairy tales intertextuality; read LaBute's "With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold" as retelling the Rumpelstiltskin tale through the screen of the digital age.). And all this richness without too great a distance from the source material.

The candle in the story illuminates the art of the whitework after a change in atmosphere. The leather-bound onionskin book that magically appears represents the speaker's discovery of scholarship about the whitework/fairy tales.

Then, of course, the portrait appears in the corner of the circular room. The portrait might be the most complicated part of the allegory, representing simultaneously the speaker's memory, self, the suspension of disbelief, and the postmodern subject. The crucial description of the portrait reveals that "The girl was depicted from top to bottom, smudged here and there, fading into the background, reminiscent somehow of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children's and Household Tales, the German name for the Grimm Brothers' book of fairy tales, look it up yourself, lazy!] yes, you could describe her portrait as an illustration. She was a plain girl, not unlike me" (530).

The speaker's description of the girl in the portait, the portrait resembles "a young girl ripening into womanhood," sounds odd and makes the girl in the portrait seem distant, although "not unlike" the speaker: a memory and also the self that one inserts into a story when reading it (suspension of disbelief). Bernheimer's tale, since the gap between the speaking "I" and the story's speaker is so small, also reveals the postmodern possibility of the fairy tale, where, in the tradition of the New Novel, the author might be inserted into the tale, leading to a meta-tale about the construction of fairy tales.

This adds a conceptual next level to this fairy tale that surpasses, like Rauschenberg's paintings, the dualism of the whitework as an apt allegory for fairy tales. Now fairy tales can include authors that critique the fairy tale's very fairy-tale-ness even as the author is retelling a conventional tale.

This is not only the speaker's postmodern awakening but also the connection to the surprise ending of Poe's "The Oval Portrait." The speaker has a kind of epiphany that her involvement with, in, and on-behalf of fairy tales is so all-consuming and life-replicating that it has no boundary. In other words, she can experience a kind of disembodied death within the story and perhaps also the symbolic "death" that submission to the obsession with the whitework (fairy tales) can be. The limitless possibilities of art and her existential ponderings lead her to realize "in my wonder I possessed complete satisfaction" (531).

The story ends with the speaker waking up to a less-fabulous reality, where it seems she has been more mentally debilitated than physically, as her cottage reverie indicates. The dualism between the fantasy world and this realism is where the companion comes into play. This shadowy companion is like a caregiver, someone who keeps her physically alive by providing sustenance, like a nurse, while she is mentally off in the "prison or home" that is the mind, the seat of ideas and artistic endeavors. Of course, in the last line, the unresolved key is reintroduced, as the doctor urges the speaker to manage her obsession with the art of fairy tales, which has made her suspicious of reality.

Series A Sound Archive

Sad news: William Allegrezza's tenure as curator of the Series A readings at Hyde Park Art Center has come to an end. Good news: find a great selection of contemporary experimental poetry mp3s here.

Your humble blogger reads with the inimitable Kathleen Rooney (see January 7, 2009).

Micro Review: The American

The American starring George Clooney and directed by Anton Corbijn is a visually stunning film, and I wouldn't be surprised if it wins Oscars for its look. The dialogue between the main characters is spare, and their interactions, believable. Clooney may be nominated for this role, but he won't win. Again.

Thematically, the film addresses the possibility of redemption and change, using traditional symbols. Clooney's character Jack (Edward) has a tattoo of a butterfly, reads a book about butterflies during the film, marvels over an endangered butterfly during a picnic with client Mathilde, and is called "Mr. Butterfly" (or the Italian "farfalla" by two characters, Mathilde and Clara.

It is precisely things like this heavy-handed use of symbols that should cause the movie to be retitled For Americans rather than The American, because it uses symbols so clumsily in order to have a wider appeal to a generalized American blockbuster audience that might miss things (the kinds of people who complain about "Inception" being too complicated).

The audience this film was made for needs to be told by a bartender that a Sergio Leone spaghetti western is playing in the bar. They wouldn't get it and thus couldn't make the connection between The Man With No Name and The Man Whose Real Name We Don't Know in The American, both of whom are loners competing for a prize, a prize that, for Jack/Edward changes, as he does, during the film's climax.

Despite the film's ability to keep Jack/Edward's life secretive and ambiguous (all we know of him happens in the film's narrative itself), it ultimately falls flat for an informed viewer because it gets to giddy about revealing its contingencies. It doesn't trust the audience enough.

Books 2011

1. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit--Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity
2. CAConrad--The Book of Frank
3. Kate Bernheimer, ed.--My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
4. Nick Demske--Nick Demske
5. Thomas Sayers Ellis--Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems
6. Leo Bersani--The Culture of Redemption
7. Daniel Borzutzky--The Book of Interfering Bodies
8. Anne Sexton--Transformations
9. Aaron Kunin--Folding Ruler Star
10. Aaron Kunin--The Sore Throat and Other Poems
11. Claudia Rankine--The End of the Alphabet
12. Susan Howe--That This
13. Rebecca Wolff--Manderley
14. Rebecca Wolff--The King
15. Danielle Pafunda--Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies
16. Debra di Blasi--The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions
17. Johannes Göransson--A New Quarantine Will Take My Place
18. Lynda Barry--Cruddy
19. Catherine Wagner--My New Job
20. Dorothea Lasky--Awe
21. John Wieners--Book of Prophecies
22. Marguerite Duras--Writing
23. Kass Fleisher--Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman
24. Adonis--An Introduction to Arab Poetics
25. Pierre Bayard--How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
26. Chris DeVito, ed.--Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews
27. Franco Moretti--Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
28. Leo Bersani--Homos
29. Mirabai (translated by Andrew Schelling)--For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai
30. Joyelle McSweeney--The Necropastoral
31. Dodie Bellamy--Fat Chance
32. Claudia Rankine--Don't Let Me Be Lonely
33. Kim Hyesoon Trans. Don Mee Choi--Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers
34. Adonis Trans. Samuel Hazo--Transformations of the Lover
35. Charles Bukowski--Septuagenarian Stew
36. Charles Baudelaire Trans. Ariana Reines--My Heart Laid Bare
37. Dean MacCannell--The Ethics of Sightseeing
38. CAConrad--Deviant Propulsion
39. Arthur Rimbaud Trans. Martin Sorrell--Collected Poems
40. Pierre Michon Trans. Wyatt Mason--The Origin of the World
41. Brenda Shaughnessy--Interior with Sudden Joy
42. DICHTEN=[number ten] 16 new [to American readers] German Poets
43. Viktor Shklovsky Trans. Irina Masinovsky--Literature and Cinematography
44. Kate Bernheimer--The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum
45. Carol Fisher Saller--The Subversive Copy Editor
46. Joanna Ruocco--Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2 manuscript forthcoming 2012)
47. Curtis White--The Barbaric Heart
48. Raymond Federman--My Body in Nine Parts
49. Roland Barthes trans. Richard Miller--The Pleasure of the Text
50. Alan Singer--The Inquisitor's Tongue (FC2 manuscript forthcoming 2012)
51. Ellen Lupton, ed.--Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book
52. Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodriguez, and Robert M. Wharton--The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century
53. Ellen Lupton--Thinking with Type
54. Melanie Otto--A Creole Experiment
55. Kamau Brathwaite--ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey
56. Kamau Brathwaite--Mother Poem
57. Kamau Brathwaite--Sun Poem
58. Kamau Brathwaite--X/Self
59. Kamau Brathwaite--History of the Voice
60. Johanna Drucker--Figuring the Word
61. Johannes Göransson--Dear Ra
62. xTx-Normally Special
63. Roxane Gay--Ayiti
64. Brandi Wells--Please Don't Be Upset
65. Brian Oliu--So You Know It's Me
66. Susan Howe--My Emily Dickinson
67. Jean Genet--Treasures of the Night: The Collected Poems of Jean Genet
68. Dennis Cooper--Idols
69. Dennis Cooper--Dream Police: Selected Poems
70. Paul Celan trans. Pierre Joris--Breathturn
71. Paul Celan trans. Pierre Joris--Threadsuns
72. Paul Celan trans. Pierre Joris--Lightduress
73. J.G. Ballard--The Atrocity Exhibition
74. Lea Graham--Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You

Films 2011

1. The American
2. Talk to Her
3. The Thin Red Line
4. Antichrist
5. The Social Network
6. Winter's Bone
7. Casino
8. Selena
9. The Color Purple
10. Jackass 3
11. Hot Tub Time Machine
12. The Next Three Days
13. The Fighter
14. Black Swan
15. The Lover
16. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
17. The King's Speech
18. Blue Valentine
19. 88 Minutes
20. Due Date
21. Kissing on the Mouth
22. My Own Private Idaho
23. Romance and Cigarettes
24. Apocalypse Now Redux
25. White Men Can't Jump
26. Somewhere
27. The Hangover
28. All Good Things
29. Badlands
30. I'm Still Here
31. Strange Days
32. True Grit
33. The Rite
34. Exit Through the Gift Shop
35. The Big Sleep (1946)
36. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
37. 25th Hour
38. The Believer
39. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
40. Waiting for "Superman"
41. Takers
42. Easy A
43. Hereafter
44. The Tree of Life
45. The Adjustment Bureau
46. The Possession of David O'Reilly
47. The Brown Bunny
48. Murder by Numbers
49. Helvetica
50. Stone
51. Bound
52. Kids
53. Natural Born Killers
54. Insomnia
55. Objectified
56. Insidious
57. The Machinist
58. Casualties of War
59. Dark City (Director's Cut)
60. All About My Mother
61. Buffalo '66
62. Control
63. Fair Game
64. Last Tango in Paris
65. The Conversation
66. Children of a Lesser God
67. Kenneth Anger Vol. 1
68. Kenneth Anger Vol. 2
69. Boys Don't Cry
70. Basquiat
71. The Fall
72. The Conspirator
73. Julien Donkey-Boy
74. Trainspotting
75. Source Code
76. Bridesmaids
77. The United States of Leland
78. Chloe
79. Trucker
80. Stay
81. The Ghost Writer
82. Jimi Hendrix (1973)
83. Horrible Bosses
84. Crazy, Stupid, Love
85. Bonnie and Clyde
86. Exotica
87. The Hangover II
88. Straw Dogs
89. Midnight in Paris
90. The Hustler
91. Straw Dogs (Remake)

beginning with a Haitian proverb

the constitution is paper, but bayonets are steel. the laws are indelible, but they are written in sand as the sandstorm begins. a mandate caramelizes the polis, but legislators are teflon. human rights are shadows hidden in burrows, but the screams of the tortured echo and echo. the enemy's civilians are as fleshy as us, but our missiles fire.

Emptiness and Fullness in America

This is the old American emptiness: the frontier. Hetch Hetchy Valley before the construction of O'Shaughnessy dam. John Muir fought hard to protect the valley, but only some nature can be fenced off and left empty of use.

And the flooded valley. The new new world. Land of fullness, the Land of Many Uses. Use me, use me, fill me with your life-giving liquid. If that I may be bountiful and not so spare, not so devoid.

If the clouds or the color blue are insufficient to fill the sky, then fill it with clouds so numerous they defy the imagination, defy the sun.

Abandoned construction projects are the new beautiful emptiness. Spare, economical and lapsed from their intended purpose, they become the perfect metaphor for our time in America.

These are the pristine ruins under the billowing garment of failure, ruined before they get old enough to be ruins. Ideologically, these images are at war with the American Dream, the house picture each of us drew as a child, sun in upper corner, smoke coming out of the chimney, perfect and perfectly devoid of complexity.

from ISU International Collection of child art

Of course, real American ruins present a grimmer metaphor for American emptiness, as the country has ceased to be a power in manufacturing. Rust belt photographs depicting empty industrial sites or ghost towns are eerily compelling, devoid of the human touch, embattled, overcome by the elements.

American emptiness and fullness is brought into stunning relief in the homes of hoarders, who fill the American Dream with things meant to be interlocutors for real emotions. Usually hoarders are hyper-sensitive perfectionists whose minds can make more plans than they can execute.

This is perfect excess, with all the busyness of a collage. The dream of consumerism behind the facade of the happy house, the American Dream. Hypocrisy.

Stuff piled ceiling high. Excess, fullness. Isn't this what a house should be filled with? Isn't this how a room should look? The monsters hiding in plain sight. They are never under the bed. This monstrosity must be confronted and worked out before it overwhelms the imagination, returned to a state of blissful emptiness like the facade of the child's painting, the idea of interior matching the exterior.

Kele - Everything You Wanted (DJ Mujava Remix)

Reposting "A Fire in My Belly"

I'm reposting David Wojnarowicz and Diamanda Galas's "A Fire in My Belly." This is art worth fighting for, and if the Smithsonian no longer will exhibit it because they are weak, then I will. I stand with the LGBTQ community and remember those who suffer: taken, further marginalized, or demonized by AIDS.

For Weeping

"Naima," John Coltrane
"Nothing Compares 2 U," Sinéad O'Connor
"Bridge Over Troubled Water," Simon and Garfunkel
"Something in the Way," Nirvana
"Lean On Me," Bill Withers
"In My Life," The Beatles
"Imagine," John Lennon
"Kathleen's Theme," Les McCann
Praying with Eric, or "Meditations for a Pair of Wire Cutters," Charles Mingus/Eric Dolphy
"Would?", Alice in Chains

There are others...

The Diet Plan

If you minimize your breathing, you will appear skinnier overall as you will be better able to hold in your abdominal region, and when you manage to completely stop breathing, it will be just another small thing you can do to show your commitment to weight loss and healthy living, which will make you a source of inspiration for family, friends, and strangers alike.

The Decree

If the reserve rolls of bath tissue be placed too far from the throne so as to be unreachable whilst still sitting and upon completion of the dirty act, then this is a most grievous offense and shall be punishable by an eternity of tickle attacks enacted by hands bearing feathers and other objects like severed limbs or the hair of the dead emerging from the myriad dark openings of the gulag cell so that the world may be simultaneously cleansed of those who are ruthlessly inconsiderate shits and filled with the desperate ongoing laughter that surrounds well-intentioned torture like a warm afghan blanket or cloud of smoke that leaves a pesky lingering odor not even modern products like Febreze or Lysol can mitigate.

A Fragment on the Assigning of Days

The fact that we have a day (or month) for anything like human rights just gives certain hypocritical people an excuse to ignore or willfully encroach upon the idea of basic human rights the other 364 days and then talk about their undeniable importance during the designated day (or month). So for me, human rights day has lost all possible importance and meaning by being relegated to a specific day, kind of like the Christian elements of Christmas have been evacuated by turning the possibility of Christ's presence in the world via practice of kindhearted and altruistic behavior into a season of the year, a season now more celebratory of Capitalism. And yet, many believe the imaginary man (sic) in the sky will grant them access if they buy stuff for all their family and closest friends and toss a few coins into the cups of Salvation Army bell ringers during the holiday season. It's so convoluted, when you really think about it.

An Odd Occurrence of Two Books Switched at Birth

I am working on an interdisciplinary project that involves the work of Kamau Brathwaite. I checked out his book The Development of a Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820. I just opened the book to peruse it when I discovered that a different book had been put inside when the text was bound by the library's preservationist way back when. Inside is Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago published by The Free Press in 1955. I'm baffled about how two seemingly unrelated texts have been switched and wondering about where ISU's copy of the Brathwaite book might be.

Review of cessation covers by Bill Allegrezza

Bill Allegrezza has been working on a series of micro reviews called The Daily Glance for a few months now over on his blog p-ramblings. I have really enjoyed it when his reviews match up with things I've already read, but I like it even more that these micro-reviews expand my horizons. Now all I need is an unlimited small-press poetry budget! A couple weeks back he reviewed my chapbook cessation covers, which I published back in late 2007 with Adam Fieled's Funtime Press.

Here's what Bill had to say:

Steve Halle's cessation covers seemed related to music right from the beginning. Oddly, they made me remember being in a punk rock band trying to come up with lyrics as we played. Steve is, of course, a poet, not high school want-to-be star, and he tells us in an apology that these pieces are a response of sorts to the lyrics of Kurt Cobain. Steve's pieces are short eight line lyrics (except for the last one) with disrupted syntax, occasional rhymes, and references from Bogart to Oedipus to NyQuil. They are best read as a series instead of as individual poems, though some of them stand quite well on their own.

off white is off-

white on

the swatches, which were

novelties, how about now?

That's a pretty dead-eye, sharpshooter review for one paragraph.

New Maps & Atlases Album Perch Patchwork!

What you really should do, if you have a brain in that head of yours, is rush out to your finer independent music purveyor and buy a copy of the album Perch Patchwork by Maps & Atlases (pictured above). I'm heading to Monticello, Illinois for a concert and record release at Any Frequency (220 W. Washington St.) tomorrow, June 30 5-6:30 pm.

Failing that, you can also purchase the album here, listen to it on myspace, or download it from your favorite site.

Few things in this earthly realm make me happier than new music from Maps & Atlases.

End transmission.

Micro Review: The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing

The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing
by David Morley
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing is intended to be a textbook of sorts for beginning creative writing students at the university level, and it offers a primer on the field of creative writing for these students (as opposed to Myers' The Elephants Teach or Dawson's Creative Writing and the New Humanities, which are institutional histories of the field intended for scholars).

Morley offers fair coverage of the three genres generally taught in creative writing programs: prose fiction, prose nonfiction/creative nonfiction, and poetry. He does not seem to favor one aesthetic practice over another (i.e. official verse culture or experimental, etc.), moving from Mary Kinzie to Oulipo, often in the same chapter. Morley also does a good job of covering different modalities by including writing that is performed or writing as performance, either oral or digital, although these modalities are given considerably less weight than practical concerns.

The book is divided into ten chapters:

1. Introducing creative writing: This chapter merges the history and purpose of the field of creative writing, articulating why it belongs in the academy and theorizing its development since the start of history. Morley advocates for writers to also be voracious readers, mainly within their genres, eschewing how-to books and literary criticism.
2. Creative writing in the world: Morley uses a conflicts approach to show literary criticism and creative writing to be two sides of the same coin and advocates for writers to practice reflective criticism of their own work. He covers how to use experience as well as language play to make creative writing and briefly describes the field of publishing and editing.
3. Challenges of creative writing: In this chapter, various writing blocks are described, both imposed by the world and self-imposed, including indifference, rival media, procrastination, etc. Morley then examines challenges for translation, as well as experiment, design, and quality
4. Composition and creative writing: This chapter outlines different practical matters necessary for the writing practice, everything from establishing discipline to dealing with how-tos and rules to finding the right notebook. The chapter then covers ways to vary or change one's practice productively.
5. Processes of creative writing: Morley describes seven process for creative writing here, all of which are heuristic: preparing, planning, incubation, beginning, flowing, the silence reservoir, and breakthroughs and finish lines. He then extends out into post-writing practice and some non-traditional practices like appropriation.
6. The practice of fiction: Genre-specific introduction to writing prose fiction.
7. Creative nonfiction: same as above
8. Writing poetry: same as above
9. Performing writing: In this chapter, Morley describes ways that writing goes from the page to the stage, arguing that since writing began as a speech genre, that the true measure for a work is to hold up when delivered as a speech act. Again, practical advice is offered first and then Morley branches out into lesser considered spheres of performed delivery.
10. Writing in the community and academy: This chapter talks about connections between creative writing practice and the larger community, arguing that many writers need to be active in the community by necessity, as the academy or self-sustaining practice is for the few. He also argues for multidisciplinary creative writing practice within the academy, sort of a CWAC approach, if you catch my drift.

One thing I did not like about the book is Morley is dismissive of criticism/theory/philosophy, going so far as to say these things will detract from writers' practices. I am fond, however, of using theory or introducing theory to creative writers as a way to allow for the development of complexity, which Morley doesn't allow for. I guess he has to be polemical to fight off the literary factions within the English department.

Overall, I'd recommend adopting this book for classroom use. The book is conceptually similar to Wendy Bishop and David Starkey's Keywords in Creative Writing, but this book's structure makes it more appealing to teach with (Keywords is organized alphabetically and it could be useful to assign readings from it as topics come up and need explication). In addition to the chapters that introduce the field fairly well, Morley peppers his pages with gray boxes that include writing exercises, each one with an aim (rationale) for doing them. I suspect this book would work well in a multigenre introductory workshop course, where class time might be devoted to generating new writing and examining student writing in workshops. The book will allow students to get a feel for whether the field of creative writing is for them, while allowing the teacher to develop a class that focuses on students' writing practice.

MAKE Magazine review

One of the spoils of this year's AWP was MAKE Magazine, a Chicago-based publication that publishes new nonfiction, fiction, poetry, interviews, reviews, visual art, and a section called "On the Make," a nod to Nelson Algen and a link between the print version of MAKE with its online counterpart. MAKE's title also reflects poetics, the theory of making, and the literature, art, and hybird work found in the issue I examined are aware of artifice.

I noticed two things before I read a word: MAKE looks good. MAKE even smells good. The cover features a quote from Jenny Boully's nonfiction piece "If you point to heaven, it begins." integrated into multicolored brushstrokes. Since the magazine is as much about the integration of art and literature with design, the cover works to prepare readers for that. The journal's title and information is relegated to the far right-hand corner of the cover.

The theme for the Spring/Summer 2010 MAKE is Myth, Magic, and Ritual. I like literary magazines that posit a theme for each issue, as it usually provides either a point of coherence or dissonance as I work my way through (It also make me rethink my own work as I prepare to submit).

As for the issue's content, I was drawn immediately to Kate Zambreno's nonfiction piece "Slapping Clark Gable." I'd been following Kate's blog Frances Farmer is My Sister for a while (especially interested in her theory of anorexic and bulimic writing) and connected with her at the AWP (the Les Figues/Chiasmus/Fairy Tale Review readings at Thin Man in Denver was worth the trip alone and Zambreno's reading mesmerized me: raw and invested in themes my work returns to like religion and sexuality).

"Slapping Clark Gable" is nonfiction in the lineage of confessional writing (see especially Plath) and excess, informed by Zambreno's fave theorists like Artaud, Bataille, etc. It is bald, sexual, shockingly honest:

Although I would be a virgin until twenty, I began masturbating furiously at a young age. I would lie on my belly and rub my fingers against my underwear. I needed friction to get off (still do). I know what you're doing, my mother once said from the foot of the stairs as I pretended to watch TV. This best sums up the exchanges I had with my mother about sex. The implication of surveillance, the undertones of guilt.

After the aforementioned reading at AWP, I told Kate in passing that she was my unofficial autobiographer, based on the excerpt she read from her Chiasmus novel O Fallen Angel. Devouring passages like the above on the plane home from Denver just reiterated that compliment. Although my parents were not quite as panopticonic as Zambreno's mother described above, I felt the pressure to behave (whatever that means) and succeed (whatever that means), which are as much about my Catholic upbringing as a dissonant counterpoint to my own oxymoronic flaw of perfectionism. Zambreno captures these notes perfectly here, hinting at the roots of her attraction to the taboo, to stoically brutal lovers. I think of my own attractions to junk, ruin(s), tabloids, and garbage. A great read.

MAKE also makes an investment in visual poetry, publishing the collage work of Brandon Downing, whose Lake Antiquity, just out from Fence Books looks beautiful and kitschy (in a good way!). I was more taken, however, with the excavatory poetry of Nate Zoba. "Recrement" is the example of Zoba's work here, and it coincides with the idea of MAKE being about poetics and especially with the ritual act that excavating a book must be. Zoba's work forces me to reckon with it as a visual artifact before getting at it as a poem. It looks like no other poem I've seen (although Tom Phillips A HUMUMENT comes to mind for both Downing Zoba's poetry) with its webbed projective verse. The pages become webs that link the word selected by Zoba, given depth by the object of the book itself. MAKE is one of only a handful of journals (Poets & Artists (O&S) being another) that could pull off publishing visual work like this with its full-color matte pages and large size.

MAKE features plenty of other writers I'm interested in, including Nick Demske, Cathy Park Hong, Dara Wier, Lily Hoang, and Kathleen Rooney, mixed with writers whose work I'm seeing for the first time. MAKE is a sexy journal that seems committed to publishing challenging work.