Now Morally Obligated to Post a Retaliation After Every Post Justin Makes Dissing Flarf
Here is the first paragraph of Dan Hoy’s essay, which Justin links in the below post and I won’t bother linking again, since it is, obviously, the only thing you need to read about Flarf, which is that thing, full of poems, poem things, but you only need to read an essay, about them, the poems, about making them, uh huh, yeah.
Google is not a spontaneous manifestation of the zeitgeist in the virtual realm. That it is often misconstrued as such is due to a passive acceptance of its process and mythos, from its humble beginnings and benign-sounding name to the embedded cultural belief that the Internet is the great democratic frontier in which all information is equalized — the user, instead of the disseminator, is the arbiter of what is useful and not useful — and the residual PR advantage this gives to in utero virtual corporations like Google and Yahoo! over preexisting technocapitalist transplants like Microsoft. Google is considered an organic entity only marginally different from a construct like Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopedia in which users define the content by continually creating, altering, contesting, and amalgamating entries.
Now here is most of Drew Gardner’s “Why Do I Hate Flarf So Much” from the July/August 2009 issue of Poetry:
She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried “but that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” What have you gotten yourself to do? Did it ever occur to you that you may in fact hate yourself? I know I do . . . I’m not nearly high enough yet—and you’re not helping. My group got invited to join the Flarfist Collective, set up some hibachis and do what we do best, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this writing if it were a library and I checked out the entire world as if it were a single book. Strike “helpful” off your list. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it’s speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything. Why do I need an enemy to feel okay about what I’m doing? Observe yourself as you browse with sophistication through the topic of Authorship & Credibility. Why do I hate the surface of the world so much that I want to poison it? Why do I hate this so much? Well . . . you Hate Your Fucking Dad! Why is the screen so damn small? And why does the car turn so sharply? And why is the only sound I hear the sound of a raft of marmosets? BECAUSE I’m fucking ANXIOUS AS HELL about EVERYTHING. AAAAAAAAARGH. It’s even worse: “I’ll tell you later.” The medium is literally made of thousands of beautiful, living, breathing wolves. Why do I hate the moon so much? Unpublish your ideas in reverse. People hate any new way of writing. My girlfriend really hates it. There is not so much daytime left. Life is like spring snow tossing off mercurial Creeley-like escapes from life-threatening health problems. In summer we love winter in winter we love summer—all poetry is written in social mercurochrome. Since I hate the abridgement of life, a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents is more what this is about. Hate and love—if those are the options I just want to love and hate lobsters.
“You have to develop a feel for it, in your body, as you’re feeling the letters. ‘Everything you’re doing is behind you.'”
Dreaming of writing a breezy pocketbook bestseller called HOW TO HAVE FUN WITH CONTEMPORARY NONSENSE, I had my dream thankfully interrupted by the discovery of the mighty Ron Padgett’s Creative Reading (1997), which is sort of a better, richer, funnier, and broader version of my idea, involving a lot less instances of the phrase “Derridian play as model for invisible friendship” (yeah, I know, sorry in advance, hypothetical sorry, snow sorry, slur saw reed) and a lot more about how strange and terrific all reading can be. And how meeting up with that fact makes you a better reader and enables you to have fun with all kinds of reading, even the nonsense. Best of all, Padgett’s book is available for free by clicking the link above. It includes lots of great, clear and easy-gaited strategies for messing around with the stuff you read, which makes it an ideal text for teaching and/or quoting in the presence of family members who have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, ever. It’s full of poems, tidbits, cut-ups, cool stuff. It’s basically about letting your mind be playful and less scared. Less scared of nonsense and of the nonsense at the root of language’s conceit, the ticklish arbitrariness of all abstract communication. Here is a blurb:
After a brief discussion of common reading errors that can be used creatively, the central chapter of the book, “Creative Reading Techniques,” suggests exercises that make reading an adventure, highly interactive, and imaginative, using both classic and modern literature in ways that blend reading and writing. Along the way, among other things, the book talks about the influence of typography, movies, and television on reading, the joys of misunderstanding, the music of Spike Jones, skywriting, Dada poetry, reading in dreams, the way words sound in the reader’s head, and the setting in which text is read.
There’s also an awesome appendix about skywriting. Tell me if this doesn’t remind you of anything:
Hot Dog
How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment, causing a slight feeling of discomfort which not even the most decorous public functions could eliminate; more, that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair.
first few lines of “Investigations of a Dog” by Franz Kafka (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)
X-Mas Present: Everything You Always Wanted to Ask David Gates About Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories…
…and there were a lot of things you wanted to ask, because Gates’s intro is one of if not the best single essays ever written about DB’s work, so you figured he’d probably have done a pretty sweet job on the notes, too, but for some reason it wasn’t in the Gates-prefaced Penguin Classics Edition of Sixty Stories where it should have been, and you knew it was supposed to be posted somewhere on the Penguin website (it says so in the book) but then when you went to the website you couldn’t find it.
If this is you, friend, your troubles end today. Here. Now. I went to the Penguin site, and found the thing–years ago. It’s amazing and enlightening and it’s over 30 pages long. And I had forgotten about it until just now. Everyone should have access to these notes. Rather than try and re-figure out how I found them, I’m just going to post the .pdf myself: The David Gates footnotes to Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. Merry Christmas, all.
Reading Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale, I came across this reference to a Roman Empress named Valeria Messalina who once won a contest for copulating with 25 men in one night
"Messalina Returning" by Aubrey Beardsley
from Juvenal’s Satire VI
(circa late 1st or early 2nd century A.D.)
Then consider the God’s rivals, hear what Claudius
had to put up with. The minute she heard him snoring
his wife – that whore-empress – who dared to prefer the mattress
of a stews to her couch in the Palace, called for her hooded
night-cloak and hastened forth, with a single attendant.
Then, her black hair hidden under an ash-blonde wig,
she’d make straight for her brothel, with its stale, warm coverlets,
and her empty reserved cell. Here, naked, with gilded
nipples, she plied her trade, under the name of ‘The Wolf-Girl’,
parading the belly that once housed a prince of the blood.
She would greet each client sweetly, demand cash payment,
and absorb all their battering – without ever getting up.
Too soon the brothel-keeper dismissed his girls:
she stayed right till the end, always last to go,
then trailed away sadly, still with burning, rigid vulva,
exhausted by men, yet a long way from satisfied,
cheeks grimed with lamp-smoke, filthy, carrying home
to her Imperial couch the stink of the whorehouse.— translated by Peter Green
I ESTABLISH THE CLARITY THEREFORE ALL THIS GOES WITH ME: Ariana Reines Week, Part 5
Today we close out Ariana Reines week with a shift from the present to the imminent future, with sneak previews of two forthcoming works by Ariana Reines. The first, Miss St.’s Hieroglyphic Suffering, is based on act two of Reines’s highly regarded play, Telephone, and will be performed at a Works+Process show at the Guggenheim this weekend. (I’m going on Sunday. Maybe see you there?) The second is from a book of poems (or is it one long poem?) called Save the World, that seems to be forthcoming from FENCE Books. Pretty not bad, yeah? Fun starts below.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 2: The Hot Tub / Glory Hole Part 1
Did you follow that headline? New from Mal-o-Mar Editions is a poetry split– Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub and Dan Hoy’s Glory Hole, together in one spine. You might remember Jon from Hit Wave, the wonderful chapbook he did for Kitchen Press, and Dan Hoy is of course the co-editor of Soft Targets, the journal that did one (two?) legendary issue(s) before apparently winking out of existence, though it, like Jesus, may yet one day return. Anyway, to celebrate the Leon-Hoy Pact (it’s like the Glass-Steagall act, kind of) I thought it would be nice to pair some of their poems together, in little flights. We were doing this the other night at my house–me and some friends, getting slowly loaded on asscheap bourbon and reading these proudly defiant poems of obscene opulence and opulent obscenity aloud to one another. Fun starts after you click the button.
Can books be in love?
I was reading Joanna Howard’s lovely book of stories, On the Winding Stair, and thinking about the setting. And thinking about setting in general. And—for pretty obvious reasons, I suppose—was thinking about Brian Evenson’s book Dark Property. And thinking about his settings. And I was wondering if books could have soul-mates, if they could be made for each other.
My favorite work by Evenson is the stuff placed in a minimally rendered, hot, choked with dust, empty of all but the most barren of trees, flat desertscapes. His Beckett-ian Utah. His Old Surrealist West. READ MORE >
If poetics does not ask the reader to re-negotiate how one reads, if it does not attempt to cast new light on all that came before it, then why bother? Outmoded “schools” of poetry must be transcended so that we might effectively evaluate what does and what does not alter reality and why and how.
“LIFE IS NOT A MISTAKE, MORE LIKE A MILLION CAR PILE-UP”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDPo5xFLwXw
The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey is a book of sonnets in all caps, written drunk and edited sober. Death sentences by broccoli and merciful rivers and toys donated to the fire department. Plus lots of bodies and “rank 80-proof emotion” (sayeth K. Silem Mohammad). There are a few ways to get this book. First you can order it. Or, if you’re ambitious, you can film a drunk friend in a drunk situation reading one of the drunk sonnets drunkenly (you can find some here), and if you upload this video to a video-sharing site (you don’t have to be drunk when you do this) and email me about it (magichelicopter_at_gmail.com) I will send you a free one. Like Teddy here, right? Drunk videos, drunk sonnets, drunk <3.
Also, there are Daniel Bailey interviews all over and Daniel Bailey’s bathtub.