http://horsesandhorsesandhorses.blogspot.com/
Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
Today’s lovely Lyalin post is by the talented and dedicated Seth Landman, poet, editor of Invisible Ear, and basketball enthusiast.
Before Landman takes it away, remember that you can buy Natalie’s book, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat, here. Giveaway possibilities are described here.
So, here Seth excerpts a poem and comments on it.
When Mr. O watered his plants in a light blue shirt with a breast pocket,
His hair slicked back, he boarded a plane to Africa, where the lion still
walked in bursts of grass.
In his light blue rental car, Mr. O took photos, very close photos, of lions resting.
There was nothing to report back.
The world lay silent. The giant squid was silent.
The continents were silent. It was quiet as he boarded the plane for home.
It was quiet in the diamond mines, it was quiet in the coal mines,
And the Loch Ness monster sighed and waited for sonar.
This week, there are all these ways you can win a copy of Pink & Hot Pink Habitat by Natalie Lyalin and more things along with it.
In two ways you might win the whole Coconut books catalog:
1. By commenting at fellow Coconut poet Gina Meyer’s blog.
2. By commenting at fellow Coconut poet Reb Livingston’s blog.
And in one way you can win a copy of P&HPH plus a badass t-shirt.
1. By commenting at A Mystery in Common
This week, I along with other contributors will throw down with Natalie Lyalin, editor of GlitterPony and author of the next book of poems that you should buy: Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books). Buy it here. There will be opportunities to WIN Natalie’s book along with other books from the tremendous Coconut catalog, so stayed tuned for that. This will be like a party on the internet. A party that starts with a poem and follows that with an interview to which the poem is relevant. So, to begin.
GREAT SOPHIAS
There were two great Sophias
and a few good Dorothys. We enacted
inside the outside world of the mausoleum.
The mausoleum is by my house,
and I thought it was ordinary. I thought
it was all ordinary. I was Sophia,
but not so good at it. I loved Dorothy.
On the lake, the small swans stood on water.
I stood under a tree. Someone occupied the
peace pagoda. It is not always certain,
a safe exit from the forest.
I believe their show was the first
to address homosexuality. Dorothy
loved the way she dressed.
They were dressed impeccably.
Because Natalie’s book gave me lots to think about concerning gender and place, these were the starting points of the interview, after the jump. READ MORE >
Yoko Ono answers questions posed by her twitter followers. Some are funny, like
p_oem: If I were a wave would you surf me? Ono: If I saw a big wavelike you, I will flee
Others are dumb, like
sugarspeak: Who is your favorite female, contemporary poet? Ono: I don’t read poetry. I imagine.
When reading the work of prodigiously–okay wildly–talented contemporaries–people like Natalie Lyalin, Heather Christle, Sabrina Orah Mark, Chelsey Minnis, Claire Becker–I tend to think first:
I love this. This is essential and beautiful.
And then at some point, my thoughts turn to my own work, and a voice says,
I can’t do anything like this.
It is all too easy to stop at that point, and stew, and–to drown out the voice–spend the next part of the day doing something that isn’t writing.
But the voice isn’t done talking.
That is going to have to be okay. There are other things I can do.
Listen to that, and return to your writing. This is the next step.
It’s not as if Chelsey Minnis can do what Sabrina Orah Mark does. It’s not as if Sabrina Orah Mark can do what Chelsey Minnis does. This is the whole point.
As Justin pointed out, the New York Times reports today that the Mississippi plantation diary of a wealthy slave-owning Mississippian has been found that Faulkner consulted often to find names and incidents to use in his work. The son of Faulkner’s friend recalls that when reading the diary, “Faulkner became very angry. He would curse the man and take notes and curse the man and take more notes.”
I can relate.
For about three years, I worked on a never-finished manuscript about my mother’s family. While I went back and forth, for part of the time I wrote it as a fictionalization, so I made up new names for all my relatives. To help, I consulted a family genealogy book called The Descendants of Robert Kay. Robert Kay was my great-(x7 or 8)-grandfather on the side of my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, one Miss Viola Verona Kay King (pictured: one of her sons). Robert Kay was himself a wealthy, slave-owning cotton farmer in the 18th century. The first few pages of the book tell about how he came to Anderson County, South Carolina (where my mother grew up) from Virginia.
All sides of my family have lived in the South as far back as anyone can trace. But it’s one thing to figure that my ancestors probably owned slaves, and quite another to see a list like the one unceremoniously provided on page 9 of The Descendants of Robert Kay. Here’s an excerpt from the inventory of his property up for sale:
One Girl Silvia seven years of age $250.00
One Girl Winifred five years of age 150.00
One Girl Delilah 80.00
One Large Iron Pot 5.00
One ditto 3.00
One Pot and Skillet 3.00
One kittle, frying pan, and three pairs of pot hooks 2.75
Since Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual is in effect a piece of Deleuzian theory and by nature indulges in micro-theses embedded in paragraphs, I feel it’s worth making a veritable castle gate out of the primary thesis put forward by ‘The Bleed’ to help us all start on the right foot with this week’s chapter. So here it is:
Rethink body, subjectivity, and social change in terms of movement, affect, force, and violence – before code, text, and signification.
As we know from Chapter One, this book’s primary task is to re-introduce theories of affect into the cultural theory landscape. By nature, as definitionally a term used to describe non-cerebral, non-rational, and emotional influence and intensity – intensity being Massumi’s privileged noun – affect was the victim of disregard under postmodern theory due to its seemingly impossible assimilability within methodologies of cultural analysis and deconstruction. As lit theory students, we know well one of our first-year edicts: the affective fallacy. Affect qualified is emotion, but Massumi nips this in the bud early on in Chapter One when he says that, “Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state and that state is static…” This leads us to ‘The Bleed’, and an important distinction: affect, also known as intensity, bleeds over our receptivity to it. What would otherwise be approached as the language of subjectivity, or the language of human feeling, here is recovered as a site that must be investigated as a “resonating chamber”. Receiving affective energy, the body then responds to the stimulus by making sense of it, first bodily (and this has vicissitudes that I will later explain) and then in language. What we have in this chapter is the concerted attempt to construct an incorporeal materialism – a Massumian appellation for Deleuze’s transcendental materialism – that accounts for the real, material influence of virtuality on the actual, and the actual’s communication through virtuality. So, the task is to include sensation that is either too small or too amorphous or opaque as a part of our critical programmes, and in the process perhaps succeed in following Nietszche’s admonishment of being human-all-too-human and move towards ontological analysis that accounts for becomings via means that are not necessarily entirely explicable as purely sociological or psychological phenomena. Massumi explains that cultural theory as it stands is not all wrong, it’s just that we need to be articulating a language and a philosophy that better deals affect and intensity. READ MORE >
There is something in classical music called the deceptive cadence, in which the chord progression seems to build toward one thing–to resolve itself in a way that is naturally pleasing/tension-releasing to us–but instead does something different and a little bit wrong. (Technically, it is a five chord that doesn’t go down to a one chord like it ought.)
In a wonderful TED talk called “Feeling Chopin,” Benjamin Zander talks about the deceptive cadence in Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor (Op. 28 No. 4). I’m performing the prelude tomorrow, so it is all I can think about today, which is why I’m writing about it now. Zander suggests raising one’s eyebrows at the audience when playing the deceptive cadence, so they get it, but I’m not really close to the level of being able to do two things for my audience at one time.
It’s really worth a watch, even if you aren’t performing the piece tomorrow. Zander compares what Chopin is doing to what Shakespeare does in Hamlet–Hamlet finding out in Act I that his uncle killed his father but dithering around until Act V to do something about it, because otherwise it would end too soon. And thus a series of deceptive cadences. In the prelude, we know what we want from the beginning, right from the first B–we want the E. But we don’t get it till the very last, after a series of heart-wrenching (truly–it is the saddest) fake-outs.
Can you think of any poems or stories with a deceptive cadence, where you feel entirely set up for something and then don’t get it until much later? How is it done? I mean, I would think there are lots of them, but I’m curious about just how purely formal they could be in writing, rather than plot-based. Or, what other formal devices do you find useful from other art forms?
Today is the day to make it your business to submit to the print journal of your dreams. To that end, the great Seth Parker, editor of SKEIN, has this to say to you today:
Queries, comments or submissions (.doc or .rtf) can be sent to the editor at skeinmagazine@gmail.com.
This is the first part of the discussion group for Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, and Sensation. I am very late doing this. I am sorry. I was having whiplash and making phone calls because I got in a car wreck on the freeway. Nobody was seriously hurt, and more importantly, it was not my fault. But it happened and I am too easily derailed. There is a very wonderful Chapter Two post waiting for us; it is by Corey Wakeling. So I just want to do this so we can get to that. I am liking Massumi. I drank Rioja instead of Malbec because I had some.
Are you reading Massumi? What is the affect–equated by him with effect and intensity–of reading Massumi? Not the emotion. What is the sensation? For reasons I shouldn’t like to understand, reading really good academic prose turns me on as I read it, literally, but I haven’t read much of anything like this since college, so getting into Parables for the Virtual lent a tender, nostalgic, aroused sensation. Like the children in Ch. 1 I equate arousal with pleasure.
Here are some things I would love to talk more about if you would like to talk more about them:
Intro pp. 12-13. False modesty, wrongthinkingness of critics who think it is not their job to create. At times Massumi is writing about how to write, which was a nice surprise.
Ch. 1 pp. 24-25. The way Massumi writes “form/content” blows my mind. I know we can’t totally divide form and content, but to conflate/equate them thus is, for me, hard to do. Please help.
28. “[Emotion] is intensity owned and recognized.” Crucial distinction/delineation.
[I’m relieved that Massumi compared his own prose to a black hole]
39. Kinds of aphasia and their inverses. How they could help us hear.