Tournament of Bookshit Final Matchup: ‘everybody has a story’ vs Sewage Treatment Technologies
[matchup #63 in Tournament of Bookshit]
If I just reword the debate, you will see there is no question here:
The story of the homeless man who recently got his face eaten off vs. Humanure
As you can see, even the most banal, average human story easily trumps a sewage treatment technology. But as language is a game in which I play really good, I will expand my argument with a memory thus bludgeoning you with my sweet opinion. Picture a small child, gazing up at her grandmother, her eyes wide with anticipation and respect for the matriarch, her attention clinging to her grandmother’s every word. Now picture a child listening to her grandma go on and on about growing up next to a PF Chang’s as grandma sat on the toilet and every once in a while demanded 8 squares of 2-ply—I could have listened to those stories for hours. The smell of crab wontons and northern style spare ribs still issuing from her soft, old-ass lady skin. Listening to those stories of a shared past, I felt a great sense of familial warmth like a curly hair in massage oil. It wasn’t just the historical facts of my grandmother’s stories that kept my attention for hours—that as a baby she escaped some horrible genocidal type thing in Europe or the mid-west or the time she rode on this big, huge boat that crashed into a glacier and sunk or actually, that was a blimp, I think—what kept me at attention was the amazing power of language to build vivid, infinite worlds in my mind, that and her fists were the size of hams. She wasn’t the most eloquent of story tellers, in fact she suffered from swollen tongue so often that most of the time it sounded like she was rolling a golf ball around in her mouth, but I could feel the urgency and emotion in her every word. Her life was the accumulation of her stories, and this defines our human condition. In comparison, sewage, treated or otherwise, ain’t shit. Septic tanks? Fine bubble diffusers? Froth flotation? Expanded granular sludge bed digestion? I’ll take my grandmother’s story about meeting my grandfather during the Great Sensation or watching the first Jewish president get knifed on cable any day.
ToBS Final Four: Calling anything you write a manuscript vs Sewage Treatment Technologies
[matchup #62 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Calling anything you write a manuscript, known as the Billy Collins approach or the Ron Silliman method in contemporary poetry circles, is not only popular with poets (David Foster Wallace immediately springs to mind, too), but nobody does it better than a poet. No one else has the narcissistic tendencies, nor the free time. But these very same tendencies led to one of the most beloved pieces of literature of all time: The Bible. Can you think of another book with words and sentences arranged less arbitrarily? Can you think of another book that’s inspired as much killing in its name? Yet it was conceived during a flight of whimsy and written on the back of a cloud as a half joke.
TOM CLANCY: POETRY OF DAD’S DEATHSTATE
>> INTERVIEW <<
Clancy predicts a totally unfunded secret intelligence agency that publishes eBooks that go on to predict the state of war and peace. He is the cultural side of the police state – the non-state state. He predates Jack Bauer by decades. He invents a protomasculine character haunted by the cold war, in seamless transition into the near-warless future. The 90s never died, they just killed. Every dad read this shit and every dad wondered what would need to be done in a worse-case scenario. Wife, kids, house, Xbox, netbook, and cruise missile. Tom Clancy’s next book will be about the war that hasn’t happened yet. The big war. The quiet war that lasts forever. Drone strikes like cymbal crashes. Cyber attacks by children in China. An Etsy dirty bomb. The the hyperpoliticical bedroom radicalism of London’s East End Tumblr scene. He only wants to tell us that we are never safe from stories of violence and instability. There is always the threat that our lives might need to mean something: quickly, violently, profitably.
Looking At and Working Through Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by CA Conrad
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon – New (Soma)tics
by CA Conrad
Wave Books, April 2012
240 pages / $18 Buy from Wave Books or SPD
From The Right To Manifest Manifesto:
“The most idle-looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.”
Suddenly is a speed – in as much as it awakens us to see a constancy we’ve stepped out from. This is in large part what I suppose we all look for in literature or art of any sort. Conrad’s book is something sudden – however not in the sense of a sudden rush of fear or panic or power or adrenaline or lust. It’s more of the suddenness we feel in finding wind – or sensing even ourselves as sudden, to a tree or some thing. The subtlety of this sort of suddenness is residual and it goes along with you and for things. I like to think the book gives a newness to that which one has assumed to be known, or figured.
Conrad’s book is sinuous too. Each Somatic exercise is on a black page with white font, each poem, having been written in response to an exercise, is on a white page in black font. The modality is soothing, but keeps you thinking for polarities – in negations/negatives, as that of a photograph.
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June 18th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
June 18th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Repetition as rule, repetition as defamiliarization,and repetition as deceleration
As promised, back to Shklovsky! In Part 1, we examined his fundamental concepts of device and defamiliarization. In Part 2, we saw how context and history deepen what defamiliarization means. (That’s what led us to take our New Sincerist detour.) Now, in this third part, let’s return to Chapter 2 of Theory of Prose, where Viktor Shklovsky discusses “special rules of plot formation.”
Here it’ll be useful to remember that one of the meanings of rule’s root, regula, is “pattern.” Because Shklovsky is talking less about “rule of law” than he is about the patterns that devices combine to make.
Whenever you write—and it doesn’t matter whether you’re me or Chris Higgs or Mike Kitchell or Kathy Acker or Georges Bataille or whomever—you’re working with conventions. None of us invented these words, nor words, nor their spellings, nor syntax, nor sentences, nor punctuation. We didn’t invent writing. Nor did we invent literary criticism, or essaying, or blogging, or the HTTP protocol that transmitted this post to your computer. We’re all working within overlapping systems that, by virtue of the accident of birth, we find ourselves in. This should cause us no distress because rather than stifle our creativity or inhibit our originality, these systems and their rules provide the very basis for originality and creativity. Without any patterns or conventions we would be left with only noise, in which no innovation whatsoever is perceptible or even possible. It is in fact patterns and conventions that provide the opportunities for disruption and deviation.
In Chapter 2, Shklovsky is trying to understand patterns that authors use when stringing devices together. He isn’t interested in defining every pattern; nor is he interested in critically evaluating them (e.g., “this pattern’s better than that one”). Rather, he wants to examine commonly used ones and demonstrate (the following point is crucial) how even though the patterns are simple and common and predictable, they provide practically infinite opportunity for defamiliarization—and therefore artistry.
In the rest of this post I’ll focus on the simplest of those rules, repetition, with examples taken from Nirvana, Weezer, and Tao Lin.
ToBS Final 4: Alcoholism vs ‘everybody has a story’
[matchup #61 in Tournament of Bookshit]
If this were the S.A.T., I’d go with my gut and say, alcoholism. Sure, everyone has a story, but most of those stories are as boring as policy debates on CSPAN. In service of our egos, we subconsciously construct our identities so that everything we say, wear, eat and do reinforces the illusion that we know everything, and totally have our shit together. “Let me tell you about the time I was right—again—because I know important people at the Wall Street Journal.” Snoresville.
Give me epic tales of humiliation, shame and ignorance. For example: “My fat camp counselor discovered my cache of hidden candy bars and let everyone in the cabin give me titty twisters for a week, and now I can’t come unless candy bars are hidden under my mattress and I’m on the top bunk.” William Burroughs said, “Pity the young lawyer who’s never lost a case, the doctor who’s never killed a patient. He doesn’t know the score. I trust him little in the commerce of the soul.” Ditto. READ MORE >
Just FYI
I was sorting my mail and was about to throw this out when the phrase, “You… A Bestselling Author?” caught my eye. The training is free so… act now. If you partake of the training and learn how to get on the New York Times bestseller list, do let us know!
Prose Poetry etc
‘All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.’ (Molliere)
‘The prose poem has the unusual distinction of being regarded with suspicion not only by the usual haters of poetry, but also by many poets themselves.’ (Charles Simic)
‘From the reader’s view, a poem is more demanding than prose.’ (Mark Strand)
‘My own formal literary education has not accorded much regard to what in English are referred to as ‘prose poems,’ and I am not at all sure what the genre is supposed to entail.’ (W.S. Merwin)
‘However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.’ (James Schuyler)
‘There is a shorter distance from the unconscious to the Prose Poem than from the unconscious to most poems in verse.’ (Michael Benedikt)
‘I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose=words in their best order; poetry=the best words in the best order.’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
‘A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction.’ (Russell Edson)
‘The prose poem is a useless whore.’ (Aoody Wallen)
‘I had long since given up, however, on the notion of reading a long and complex prose poem.’ (Mark Roberts)
‘But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.’ (Story Musgrave)
‘The prose poem as a lantern, an illuminated container, casting images and phrases needed but barely understood.’ (Martha Kinney)
‘Marriage – a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.’ (Beverly Nichols)
‘I’ve been writing a lot of prose poems. And I probably have a dozen I can live with. Many of them are comic; there are several that are serious. The first one I ever wrote was in Amsterdam. It was a long time ago, I would say thirty years ago. My wife had gone off with a friend, and my kids had gone off to get stoned, and I had time. There was a park named Vondelpark, named after a poet, and I went there. I’m a guy who writes a lot. I enjoy writing; I feel I should be writing, keep my hand in it. So I started writing something, and I wrote a little piece about a Dutch doctor that I knew and loved. And it was the first good prose poem I ever wrote. And then I wrote a couple more, and they weren’t any good (I published them, but they stunk).’ (Philip Levine)
‘It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.’ (Eugenio Montale)
‘When prose gets too stylized and out of control–and Stein is sometimes a good example–when you don’t know what the hell is going on, then it’s kind of boring.’ (Rick Moody)
‘The last few months I’ve been obsessed with taking photographs of miniatures inside of ice cubes.’ (Matthea Harvey)
Someday Everything Will Matter: Shit Fancy Writers Say
When I read interviews with fancy, famous writers, I am somewhat bewildered. These writers discuss craft and process and influence in near-spiritual terms as if they exist on an alternate plane where they are perpetually able to articulate profundity. There’s writing and there’s being a writer and the more success you achieve, the more you have to spend your time being a writer—being interviewed, writing op eds and essays, getting your picture taken, coming up with pithy lists of what you are reading or cooking or how you are spending each hour of the day and maybe, just maybe, writing new books. All this business of being a writer must have some purpose. There must be an audience with an insatiable desire for the marginalia and minutiae of famous writers or it might be that this is part of the game—write book, sell book, sell book, sell book.
There is writing and there is being a writer and you can’t have one without the other. Helen Dewitt, author of Lightning Rods, alludes to this in a comment on the Paris Review blog when she notes that, “the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years,” and that after he wrote Freedom, “Franzen then had to do a roadshow to shift copies of the artifact. The fact that his editor saw him as the most important writer of his generation did not mean that his editor thought his time would better be spent (gasp) writing.”
It must be exhausting being a writer, all that blah blah blah. I read interviews with fancy, famous writers and wonder, “Do they ever watch television or are they spending that valuable time thinking up intelligent answers to interview questions?”
The Scraped Tongue, the Skin Drum: Reading Pith & Amber by Carah A. Naseem
Pith & Amber
by Carah A. Naseem
Fugue State Press, 2011
102 pages / $12 Buy from Fugue State Press
Pith & Amber by Carah A. Naseem is full of texture and material, is performative, reaches language into the body of the reader. In response to the book, to the text, I will perform a reading in parts. First the outside of the book, its initial presence, its porous threshold. Next the first novella inside, scrape bark of the sycamore with your teeth; scrape the moon. Finally the second, longer novella, Cathay Umay. In all three movements: an attempt to meet with the book, to inhabit with the book the space of text, together to form a textbody, to allow the language of our textbody to scrape against my language and the language of Pith & Amber.
I. The Outside, the Initial Presence, the Porous Threshold
Handmade paper wrapped around the book. The skin of the book. The rough cut skin worn over the cover. The thick grain of its texture. Splinters in the skin, suspended in the skin. And the red obi around the skin. The paper and obi wrap, but do not contain, do not bind. When I look at the book, its skin is a thicket in which my eye is caught, my eye stuck full of the skin as it moves through to the image. The front image seen through the skin: blurred, dark shapes, symbols, writing, gathered around what almost looks like a face, two faces stitched together, the two faces of theater, and red blotches, blood drops, a mark left by a finger dipped in red. The back image seen through the skin: a dark landscape, an empty landscape, the smoke, the fog, the sky, the blurring of earth and sky.
I peel away the skin, hold just the skin in my hands, one side smooth, the other rough. I rub my hand over the rough side and one of the splinters in the grain sticks, clings to me for a moment, raises out of the book’s skin into mine. I smooth it back down. I wrap the skin around my face, look through it at my room, look through the thicket of grain at my room, blurred. Small holes in the skin. Gaps in the grain. I leave the skin on the desk, it moves when the wind blows through my windows.
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June 15th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
June 15th, 2012 / 12:00 pm