Trays of live worms for consumption, a nightly stroll with the shells of dead animals, and an arm covered in yogurt and soy sauce that smelled like strawberry grease for a whole afternoon; these are the ingredients for this new video book review of Gabriel Blackwell’s book by Gabriel Blackwell and meta-Gabriel Blackwell from CCM. I don’t know which of them is real. I think I’ve been hypnotized by Joseph Michael Owens’ music tracks. But I didn’t make this video. My wife did. She says she’s never seen any of the footage included and doesn’t understand why I’m crediting her. I don’t like strawberry soy sauce covering my arm so that my hands are unctuously melting into my chest. I’ve never eaten living worms before. I need to go back to America and have cheeseburgers made of artificial cheese and meat so I can have a culinary epiphany and shit out truths inspired by film cuts of scatological epics. You should read The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men from CCM by Gabriel Blackwell reviewed by Peter Tieryas Liu and Angela Xu with music from Joseph Michael Owens and edited by Janice Lee.

(Read the previous review on HTMLGIANT here)

Can It!
by Edmund Berrigan
Letter Machine Editions, 2013
169 pages/ $15  Buy from Letter Machine Editions or SPD

The first time that I read the title of Edmund Berrigan’s bold book Can It!, I misread the words as a syntactical anomaly. The words seemed to combine a common inquiry (“can it . . .?”) with aggressive, declarative punctuation. This removed the deferential, cautious quality from Can It!, while adding an insistence that did not negate the underlying doubt; Can It! was a juxtaposition of the curious and the angry and a coexistence of blunt assertion and self-reflexive wonder.

Far from being an error, my misreading of Berrigan’s title served as an avenue into the text, which embodies many of the same concerns as the near-paradoxical titular wording. Can It! is at once an intimate and touching memoir of Edmund as a child and a young man as he experiences the death of his father Ted Berrigan, the later death of his stepfather Doug, and lives as a growing artist in New York City. Can It! is also a fully realized post-Language-School work, sections of which strive to tear apart Berrigan’s established personae and voices, and a playful tribute to the avant-garde surrealist aesthetic that was ushered into America nearly a century ago (and which seems to be experiencing a contemporary renaissance). These styles and traditions jumble together from section to section and form a whole that is rife with Whitman-esque contradictions and pleasantly revels in its inability to be pinned down in genre or intent.

Berrigan’s ability to create pathos while deftly narrating personal development is displayed in a diary entry dated “8/6” (the year is not specified) within the “San Francisco Diary” section:

Compare the ostensible sincerity of that entry with one of Berrigan’s more Language-influenced passages:

Throughout the recurrent instances of sections such as these, Berrigan weaves the notion of language’s flexible mutability—just as a book can trade one influence or style for another, so can swaps and surprises take place within language. Within many of the later poems of Can It!, the playful aspects of language are emphasized—predictable nouns are replaced with other nouns, whether childish or profound. Using a technique that pushes these sections towards the previously mentioned surrealism, Berrigan repeats bits of language (whether lines or phrases) throughout a prose section/poem, or even between two different poems. Such effects maintain the shifting affects of Berrigan’s work. In part 3 of the section “The Ball-Hallelujah Connection,” he writes:

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Imperial Nostalgias
by Joshua Edwards
Ugly Duckling Presse, April 2013
96 pages / $15  Buy from UDP or SPD

Joshua Edwards begins Imperial Nostalgias with two short parables. One tells the story of a Traveler, another of an Outsider. The poems are immediately evocative and irresistible in the tradition of Italo Calvino and his Invisible Cities, or more recently Srikanth Reddy’s take on Dante. From there, Edwards wades into cinematic territory in a series of photos. These describe a journey through a “Valley of Unease.”  We see ruins, a stray dog, and a bonfire at night.

The third section, a prose poem called “Departures,” is the strongest in the collection. The travelogue model works as a compelling framework to satirize and embrace American anxieties in “slightly foreign” lands. The poet approaches Imperial Nostalgias with clear eyes. In an interview earlier this year with the Studio One Reading Series he admitted, “Imperialism is in the cereal I eat and the culture I consume, and the ghost of Manifest Destiny looms large in the histories of the states I’ve spent most of my life in.” Like Ben Lerner’s terrific Leaving the Atocha Station, the work engages the aesthetics and the ambivalence of young Americans abroad.

Edwards works through anxieties, but he still perpetuates the myth that there is such a place as “abroad.” So while there is little talk of the cringey Tinker, Tailor, “These boys were born to empire,” type nostalgia in the collection, there is still a very clearly articulated imperialist nostalgia.  This comes out in snatches,

Edwards chooses a very particular aesthetic (He evokes French minimalists like Toussaint, art galleries, (Like Lerner, Imperial Nostalgias repeatedly returns to art museums as if too say this too is a high concept endeavor), washed out desert scenes, vague Orientalism, Paris, Texas, etc) that effectively conveys a certain moment in American (therefore world) history: 80’s independent film and Conceptual Art.

In the translation of this aesthetic, Edwards shows a drive towards the mysterious and apophatic. When Bell Hooks wrote about Imperialist Nostalgia, she focused on celebrities like Madonna, performing blackness. She employed the now well-worn “eating the Other” type analysis. But really, it’s important to remember there’s a lot of Other there (too much to eat), and in terms of nostalgia this comes out in the apophatic or the unknowable. For 80’s Conceptual Art or even Paris, Texas, the mystery deepens as it ages. And difficult to decipher social orders become conflated with truly the truly unknowable. The work of Cindy Sherman, or Vancouver School Photographers, lately much celebrated and mimicked, have taken on a sheen of romance. And this says something about conceptual photography in the 80’s and a whole lot more about the way we live now. It’s common for artists to romanticize and re-imagine the past, but this has everything to do the artist’s personal contemporary.

For artists of a certain generation Paris, Texas becomes a type of nostalgic touchstone; it represents not a time before there was American empire, but perhaps before the artist knew about American empire. The unknown swirling around Harry Dean Stanton would be a lot less unknown for an older generation of filmgoers that had seen him act in movies beginning in the 1950’s. In a recent HMTLGIANT post, Felix Bernstein imagines art “that may or may not know (symbolic order) networks exist.” Paris, Texas is a beautiful film, certainly nostalgic for great Cowboy and Noir films of an earlier era, but the complex social networks it explores (poverty in the panhandle, cold war malaise) might be different for an older artist living in Houston, for example.  Recognizing the precarious position of a would be counter-cultural American artist abroad, Edwards compulsively recreates an aesthetic of the Imaginary or in-between, when the startling symbolic order networks do not exist for him, but not an aesthetic from when they did not exist. And by translating this aesthetic again and again, Edwards is free to play Cowboys and Indians.

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Joseph Houlihan lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.