March 1st, 2011 / 12:54 pm
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What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Bhanu Kapil}

Bhanu Kapil teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and at God(d)ard College.  She has a blog with a loyal following in Croatia, Mongolia, and Pakistan: “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor].”  She has written four books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat.)

Question #1

Experimental writing, as a category or concept, seems fraught with widespread confusion and misunderstanding.  How exactly would you describe “experimental writing”?  Or, to borrow a question from Kate Sutherland, “What’s Experimental about Experimental Writing?”

Or: What are the somatics of an emigrant line? I am thinking of an exchange last year, in the comments section of the Harriet blog, with Pam Lu, in which she talked about a prose writing that represented not only trajectory, feral trajectory, but also: “the blocked flows of a global crossing.” Experimental prose, as a category, has allowed me to work out the texture notes of a sentence in a way that fiction, or even the essay, has not. Is this true? Perhaps the more useful question is: What is a sentence for? Could a sentence, as it’s written in English, function as a possible record of boundary “awards,” and of the carnage that follows such decisions? I think of semi-colons, for example, as a kind of scar tissue. Their reversed curvature as formal: the way they are moving in the opposite direction to the content or subject matter of the sentence. Towards what? What comes before, as registered, as marked, in the present, but delayed, so that memory, too, is held in another place. Which memory? The event of a prose work as its attractant. What precedes the category. In a shamanic or trauma theory model, the body streams towards the place where a scrap of it is held. In the butcher’s shop. On a hook. And so on. A recursion.

As I work out what an “embodied historiography” (Thom Donovan) might look like, I’m also trying to work on the experimental as an immigrant.

I’m an Indian writer writing in English, and yet, of course, after all this time, I am not, nor was I ever, either of those things: and so I want a form that lets me die. Be dead. Or lets me be a very black thing. That lets me let out an unearthly sound. That lets the sentence be the place where the dirt, or fractal matter, of the diasporic body: might adhere. This is the experiment: to build a chrysallis, or glass net, on every page. Not just the page. The garden. For: “Ban.”

Question #2

A few years ago,  Marjorie Welish wrote an article for Boston Review about Raymond Queneau, which she concluded by claiming, “Experimental writing is by definition its own adventure, a way characterized most definitely with error yet also with discovery and potential conceptual originality, which in time may well prove significant.”  If we accept Welish’s suggestion that experimental writing is inherently connected to error and discovery, how are readers to determine the success or failure of a particular work of experimental writing?  Without established criteria for evaluation, how can we differentiate between gold and copper?

I visited the Berkeley National Lab a couple of years ago, to interview John Dueber, a physicist-biologist working in the field of metagenomics. I loved it. I loved it so much I tried to lick a fridge when no-one was looking. In the lab, I asked questions about failure and experimentation, and wrote my findings up for the journal XCP. In short, when I asked Dr. Dueber to describe the lab process around an error, he replied: “We work in a duration, on multiple projects in parallel, and we push each one very hard. It takes a lot of time to develop a transparent approach to a problem, and in a way, we’re not interested in that. Everything takes so much longer than in other fields, so what we’re trying to do is get a look at something. Once we can see what it will be…once I can see what it will look like, I move on. It doesn’t have to be perfect. In a way, it’s radically different to the handicraft approach…we’re trying to gather information as swiftly as we can, in these intermediate steps, so that we can store it for something else, for the work we really want to do. Which is design.” Me: “Design?” J.D: “Versioning. Like a tracking effort, so that we can be, like, okay, we want to build that, and we need this, this, this.” Me: “So, you’re more interested in selection than in production.” J.D: “Exactly. There’s a lot to do. This is the golden age of the experiment. There’s a huge amount of failure in everything we do.” Me: “Is that why the counters are so messy?” J.D: “[Laughing] No.” Me: “Hmm.”

This idea of versioning or sketching something, getting a glimpse of something then moving on, rapidly, is something I worked on for a recent Belladonna chaplet, produced for a prose event with Eileen Myles and Vanessa Place in DC, and curated by ZAMBRENO herself. The title of the chaplet: (a poem-essay: notes: for a NOVEL: Ban en Banlieues). “Poem-essay”: from Jena Osman. Her own The Network. Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard. The novel as always not yet written. And once again, the question of fragments and scraps — the dispersed text — and a model that moves forward on the “glimpse” rather than an informatics of lived time. Here, too, the intersections of trauma therapy (soft tissue/cranio-sacral bodywork, in particular) and narrative have been useful to me in working out an art that is built on sensation, or the absence of sensation, rather than the production of images. I think I always felt that the image was what would let the fragments recombine. All that color and saturation. But now I am more interested in the strange, overlapping arcs of a possible content: this quality of refraction, and speed, that Dr. Dueber describes above. The book that never arrives. The book that arrives as it is written. The intermediate book. The notebook-book. The scraps.

Question #3

In his book About Writing, Samuel Delany suggests that many writers (himself included) “no longer see experimental writing as a way to deal with [crisis] aesthetically” (226).  Does this sentiment ring true for you as well?

A healing crisis? A crisis in immigration policy? The crisis of the state? The crisis of social services and mental health care for immigrants? Those are the first crises that come to mind. In this sense, as I’ve tracked cross-cultural psychiatric research, I’ve encountered the research of Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui around/towards: “subtle factors.” A schizophrenic breakdown in an Asian woman or Caribbean “youth” is more likely to be triggered by consistent low-level race factors, like eye-rolling exchanged between the cashier and another customer, when the person walks into the shop, than it is by major stressors like race riots, organized race violence, or even migration itself. And here, I return to the iterations of syntax as the place where I can work with that. Have that. In a work. Is this poetry? No. It’s what abrades the body as it’s being written, or lived, in a chronic way. Chronic rather than acute. And how can I, at the same time, attend to “chronicity” (Eleni Stecopolous): (to write): a “healing narrative?” From a new book by Peter Levine, the language of somatic experiencing, I’ve been thinking of how I might engage pendulation — the movement between different kinds of sentences (theory, autobiography and poetry, for example): as between: different parts of the nervous system. An experimental prose form lets me do this. It lets me write about the body in this way. It lets me touch something lightly many times.

Question #4

Given Amy King’s recent VIDA article on the under-representation of women in major literary publications, it seems extremely important to acknowledge the fact that gender issues continue to problematize the field of literature.  How would you characterize the relationship between women and experimental literature?

For me, everything about being an experimental writer in the U.S. is an improbable and extraordinary gift. The feminine monstrous is how I would describe what that is: a woman writing an experimental text, or reading one. I don’t want to fuck, I want to bifurcate! (I don’t normally talk like this. Plus: it might not be true.) As to the outer world, the commercial and community issues your question raises, I — how can I say this? — as for myself — and with the proviso that answering the question just for my own conditions and experience doesn’t approach what you are asking in this question — I don’t care. I live in a farmer’s cottage in the middle of nowhere. I cannot go home to my people in some fundamental way. In this sense, I don’t register the presence of my works in a larger context. I am an obscure Asian-American experimental prose writer, and unless I can pull it together, Jhumpa Lahiri-style, probably always will be. To put it another way, I am more aware of the larger obliterations. Girls and women culled before they are born, and, obviously, afterwards. If I have to think of what it means to be a woman writing in an experimental form in this country, then I think, more, of what it means to be in the company of other writers, writing. The vibration I feel when I am with other experimental women writers is very strong, and I want to live by this vibration, this joy, even if it’s completely imperceptible to others. Or doesn’t persist beyond the encounter. Even if it’s meeting Ariana Reines for the first time and letting her sniff me, and me sniffing her back; or meditating with Melissa Buzzeo in a botanical garden, so that the gold light between us is filled, too, with the writing to come. Afterwards, we bury our manuscripts for Schizophrene and The Devastation in the rose garden. Those are two recent examples. Magazines decay. Affinity does not. Juliana Spahr in her back garden in Berkeley, teaching me the word: “inflorescence.” And so on.

Question #5

Which are your favorite works of experimental literature, and why?

The blogs of Kate Zambreno, Jackie Wang, Dodie Bellamy and Ariana Reines. They are re-wiring projects. They are excessive. They are about the body and for it. They are brave.

Melissa Buzzeo’s works: Face, What Began Us, For Want and Sound, and an unpublished work, The Devastation. Because they are written at the intersection of social justice, somatics and the question of aftermath. Because she sometimes wrote them at the same table as me, in a cafe. And because, with Melissa, there is an on-going conversation about flatness, in long, slow descriptions — of the jungle, of architecture — as a kind of particulate matter, a precursor to abrupt change.

Renee Gladman’s work has been so important to me. She was the first person who published my writing: a chapbook on her Leroy imprint. I don’t know. It’s obvious. The sentence is for writing and thinking.

Your question also prompts the faces of writers in-folding and bursting at readings of their own work. I grew to love these faces. My favorite works of experimental literature are the bodies themselves. My new idea is to lavish love on these writers whenever I meet them again, in the world. The same goes for the writers – – bloggers, poets — I mentioned above. And in this way: to open. Open to the archive of sense.

61 Comments

  1. stephen

      What is Academic Literature?

  2. Bhanu

      That’s Laird Hunt’s head in the bottom right hand corner of the frame, I realize, seeing this picture: up. Those are his glasses. Experimental writing by women as seen through the eyes of Laird Hunt. The other day, at a samosa party for Lyn Hejinian, at which they served Punjabi tofu (something that does not exist in Punjab itself), I asked him (awkwardly, but I wanted to know) what he had read lately what experimental book he had read lately that was cool. He said: “Volume 1: Collected Novellas
      Arno Schmidt.” Dalkey. [He didn’t say it like that. I just looked it up because I could not remember the title.] In other news, I did not submit this as my author photo. It is fine. I look like a radiant, fuschia sausage. One of those experimental meats infused with unexpected herbs and flowers. Thank you, Christopher Higgs. I feel as if I didn’t answer some of your questions properly. Like the one about error. I didn’t say anything about the copper/gold thing you actually asked. And the Amy King question. I feel perhaps I missed the point or have said something wrong. It’s okay.

  3. stephen

      i’m an asshole… i would be silent… sorry for being rude, higgs

  4. Kate

      Bhanu – You’re hilarious. “A radiant, fuschia sausage.” I loved this interview. I thought you were saying something really wonderful about writing on the margins and the generativity of that, and the freedom in a way of that.

  5. Bhanu

      Zambreno, you are an exemplar of that. What is really funny about communicating with you in the comment box of someone else’s blog — not even our own blogs — is that right now you should be writing Monkey and I should be editing Schizophrene to send back to you. Instead, here we are, lifting our skirts above our knees.

  6. Bhanu

      I mean, if indeed you are KATE Zambreno. It just occured to me there are many radical Kates. I apologize. I am going to stop writing consecutive, rapid fire, overly long comments now. I have seen this sort of the thing in the past and thought, what is wrong with this person?

  7. Kate

      Bhanu – There is something wonderful about lifting one’s skirts above one’s knees. Are we lifting each other’s skirts though? Better to lift one’s own than to have it lifted for you. That is what the boys used to do to be cruel at St. Emily’s Middle School. Lifted our plaid tartans.

      I should actually be writing something else other than Monkey. You should definitely be editing Schizophrene and sending it back to me. Instead we are squatting.

  8. NEW YORK (?) | Amelia Gray

      […] Higgs continues his exploration of experimental literature with a Q&A with Bhanu Kapil. She writes, “The vibration I feel when I am with other experimental women writers is very […]

  9. roxi

      “The book that never arrives. The book that arrives as it is written. The intermediate book. The notebook-book. The scraps.”

      yes. i love a mess made out of scraps. a multicursal labyrinth, full of dead ends, rubble. somehow scraps can be terrible, if i think about scrapbooking and aisles of die cut ducks & flip flops. but allowing things to be terrible is kind of a thrill. & how the blog enters into that space, and exits. before there were blogs there were online journals & diaries; the blog wasn’t yet. now i see a lot of articles about monetizing yr blog or being a blogger, what that means. struggles to define an open space, so that space can be standardized. it good to still blogs that resist that. i think the form resists that… it wants to be messy, sprawling. like yr comments (bhanu & kate) bounding off the interview above. anyhow.

  10. roxi

      “The book that never arrives. The book that arrives as it is written. The intermediate book. The notebook-book. The scraps.”

      yes. i love a mess made out of scraps. a multicursal labyrinth, full of dead ends, rubble. somehow scraps can be terrible, if i think about scrapbooking and aisles of die cut ducks & flip flops. but allowing things to be terrible is kind of a thrill. & how the blog enters into that space, and exits. before there were blogs there were online journals & diaries; the blog wasn’t yet. now i see a lot of articles about monetizing yr blog or being a blogger, what that means. struggles to define an open space, so that space can be standardized. it good to still blogs that resist that. i think the form resists that… it wants to be messy, sprawling. like yr comments (bhanu & kate) bounding off the interview above. anyhow.

  11. roxi

      “The book that never arrives. The book that arrives as it is written. The intermediate book. The notebook-book. The scraps.”

      yes. i love a mess made out of scraps. a multicursal labyrinth, full of dead ends, rubble. somehow scraps can be terrible, if i think about scrapbooking and aisles of die cut ducks & flip flops. but allowing things to be terrible is kind of a thrill. & how the blog enters into that space, and exits. before there were blogs there were online journals & diaries; the blog wasn’t yet. now i see a lot of articles about monetizing yr blog or being a blogger, what that means. struggles to define an open space, so that space can be standardized. it good to still blogs that resist that. i think the form resists that… it wants to be messy, sprawling. like yr comments (bhanu & kate) bounding off the interview above. anyhow.

  12. Christopher Higgs

      Your answers are awesome, Bhanu!

      re: the picture…I’m curious about the presence of Cixous’s Book of Promethea propped up next to your water bottle.

  13. Bhanu

      That I was reading it as I wrote what I was reading that night at Naropa. Last year’s Summer Writing Program. From: SCHIZOPHRENE. That I learned a becoming-book from Cixous. Also, many synchronicities — dreams, real red horses in fields, and so on. To place it on the table was shrine-building. But also deflection. Courage. The animal and the woman mix for Cixous, as they do for me. Experimental writing, feral trajectory — but also love. Something about the book is love. The inversion of the body that always comes, at some point in the night. Not the real night.

  14. Bhanu

      Roxi: villainy, encounter, re-melted materials (below) seem useful as a model for the blogger as scrappy: getting into scraps: making things out of them — and so on…

      scrap (1): “small piece,” late 14c., from O.N. skrap “scraps, trifles,” from skrapa “to scrape” (see scrape). Meaning “remains of metal produced after rolling or casting” is from 1790. The verb meaning “to make into scrap” is recorded from 1891. Scrap iron first recorded 1823. scrappy
      “consisting of scraps, 1837, from scrap (1). Meaning “inclined to fight” (1895) is from scrap (2).
      scrap (2) “fight,” 1846, possibly a variant of scrape (q.v.) on the notion of “an abrasive encounter.” But Weekley suggests obsolete colloquial scrap “scheme, villainy, vile intention” (1670s). The verb is recorded from 1874. Related: Scrapped; scrapping.

  15. liz

      thank you bhanu for taking the question of VIDA in another direction than it’s mostly being discussed. pointing towards race, class, other “obliterations.”

      i mean to say, with everyone talking about the VIDA numbers, pie chart, whatever as if this is fucking revelation is anyone ever going to get around to class and race analysis in the experimental community? all these dudes talking about VIDA like it’s new/old news and then no one saying, wow most of us are really white – what about that?
      Bhabha and his “commitment to theory,” as something other than the “elite language of the socially and culturally privileged.” but doesn’t it mostly look like that? and well experimental lit has always been really theory driven, and white male, though often gay, dominated. but then i think with alot of female-identified and queer writers i like, the experimental derails from or touches theory and then follows sense, the body, emotion even (gasp). and well also theory, but whose?

      and then my writer friend/colleague and I are talking last night about the lack of race and class analysis by experimental writers about their own work and community and she says “well ‘experimental’ is code for white dudes and girls fucking with the language they live in.” and so what of that?

      i don’t think i have the most cohesive thoughts here, but Claudia Rankine’s open letter is awesome.

  16. Guest

      There should be room for writers of all backgrounds, with no genders or ethnicities excluded. But sometimes in these discussions, “white male” is used as a slur, and if anyone likes the work of any white male writers, something must be wrong with them. I don’t think that is any more right than if it happens the other way around. If it is a wrong use of power to lash out at the powerless, then it is also a wrong use of power for the formerly powerless to use newfound power to lash out at the formerly powerful. There is a place at the table for everyone, even those who were already at the table. If that is not true, then any rhetoric of equality is rendered empty.

  17. lily hoang

      Thank you, Bhanu. You made my week!

  18. Kate

      The other Kate likes this.

  19. Bhanu

      Tried to post below Liz Comment but it said SYSTEM ERROR. So: [here]: Thank you, Liz. And – – to complicate – – which returns, I think, to the question of the innovative — the writing community — who I read, who I meditate with, etc — most often turns out to be — the queer, white experimental writing community, rather than South-east Asian novelists-to-be. Not that I do not want to befriend: the latter. But in this country, at least, the migration influx for Indian-origin immigrants came mostly through white-collar professions; their children, the writers, came from that. To generalize. Queens/Bronx resembles the part of London I am from. Waiting for those kids to start writing. Or painting. Probably they already have. (But they are not immigrants — and so may not identify with me as much as I want to feel close to them.) Read a really good interview in Innovative Canadian Poetry and Poetics — Kate Eichorn interviews Gail Scott, who says it’s hard to work on “complex subjectivity” and questions of national identity at the same time. This might underlie some of the stuff around race, at least, in terms of community. So — who is working on race/class/gender — plus experimental? And the name that floods my body is Akilah Oliver’s. It’s pretty much the only name I can come up with. Claudia Rankine, of course. I tried to write a response — I think she’s posting everything soon on her Open Letter site. There’s also the somewhat wild Sean Labrador Manzano in the Bay — and m.g roberts — these younger writers who I’ve met when they came through Naropa, in the summer, to take a class or something. The Asian diagonal is less likely to be Indian-vibed than: something else. Chris Chen organizing a panel for Small Press Traffic a couple of years ago: I was on his panel. “What is an ethnic avant-garde?” And then, what I arrived at — was — it’s hard to write about the body explicitly and then still be able to re-enter a home community, let’s say. Although: what’s going on in India? Vivek Narayan told me about the working-class SARAI collective in Delhi. I think I got that name right. And obviously: London. But I am writing here as someone who left London 12 years ago now. And as for the class/gender/white stuff — Dodie Bellamy is my go-to girl. Also, a couple of times, we meditated, briefly, at the Sutro Baths. On a crumbling edge or partial cliff. That feels important too. Not just literary/cultural affinity or intersection – but how we spend our time with each other when we finally meet. And that’s where I want to be less fearful/recalcitrant/shy as a community person — I want to have more encounters with writers of all kinds, that contain the kind of experiment, desire and adventure we are all working on in our texts. Text-text. Well, there it is, and — okay, now I will attempt to respond to GUEST below. What’s going on with the GUEST?

  20. Bhanu

      Dear Guest, then we leave a place for you at the table. Of course! This is the basis of Judeo-Christian culture and/or a badly translated poem of Rumi’s I once read. Whether or not you show up for dinneris a separate question. Also, the saag tofu might be a bit rich. Indigestible. Hope you like Punjabi food. Goodbye forever! Or until we meet in Punjabi version of an afterlife. Clue: there’s no heaven. There’s no lemon cream pie. BK

  21. deadgod

      scrap on arrival

      We never arrive intellectually. But emotionally we arrive constantly[.]

      –Stevens

  22. Christopher Higgs

      Hi, liz,

      Thank you for your comments.

      I appreciate you drawing attention to the dearth of race and class analysis vis a vis experimental literature. I will make sure to include a question aimed in that direction for the next round of questions, to appear in April.

      For what it’s worth, my intention w/r/t to the VIDA question was to continue the conversation surrounding gender issues, not because I think it’s a revelation, but because I think it’s important to contribute to the intensification of the issue. Given the recent attention the VIDA numbers have engendered, now is a good time to push the issue, fuel the conversation, keep the fire burning. It would be a mistake to let the current momentum dissipate. This is not to say that other causes are not worth talking about, it is just to say that we mustn’t let the gender conversation fade from the forefront of our concerns at this particular juncture.

      But, again, you are right. There needs to be a conversation about race and class. I want to also help intensify that conversation, too. As I said before, I now plan to make that a priority for the next round of questions. I intend to read Claudia Rankine’s open letter, which you mention, but if you have any other sources you could recommend that speak directly to this topic of race and class and experimental lit, I would greatly appreciate it.

      Thank you!

  23. Bhanu

      It’s what you write on an imported Indonesian swing set outside the Allen Ginsberg Library. It’s Pearl Ubungen doing a trans-human progression on the lawn. It’s Petra Kuppers organizing the Somatics, Movement, and Writing conference at the University of Michigan for the first time. Staying up all night from excitement and finally, pre-dawn, reading Eleni Stecopolous’s essay on “chronicity.” The one I gesture to above. To generalize. To make it happen, even in the institution. And not get confused.

  24. Bhanu

      And your Les Figues book was a massive hit with my experimental prose class at Naropa. We asked: “What is a page for?” We applied a Grosz/Haraway treatment to your book. A biology to your text: a language of planetary life, negation, and appearance. How what we thought had been: obliterated; re-appeared. A speck. A spot. Pink wings. A beak. A flare. So, you pretty much made my month. (February.)

  25. deadgod

      is anyone ever going to get around to class and race analysis in the experimental community?

      atacampa sarcasm

      rendered empty

      lloro sanctimony

  26. deadgod

      It is both form and forum for asking these questions: 1) what does “experimental literature” mean or disclose to you? 2) how do you evaluate experimental writing? 3) when and how does experimental writing become ineffective? 4) what are the identity politics of experimental writing? 5) what is your ‘canon’ of experimental writing?

  27. stephen

      damn… Hi, Bhanu

  28. lily hoang

      Wow, seriously? I’m humbled: 1. for yr kind words; 2. that you read my book at all; 3. that you taught my book; and 4. that your students did not revolt. xoxo

  29. Kate

      there are only two of us

  30. Liz Latty

      Christopher (my brother and my cat’s name, a favorite),

      Thanks for yr comments! I’d love to see the question(s) posed in the next round and I’ve been really enjoying this series of posts to be sure.

      I think with the VIDA question well, it can’t really be accurately discussed without a race/class analysis. Separating them out from gender neglects facets of what’s really going on in those fancy pie charts. This of course is/has been one of the most troubling and inherent problems with the feminist movement and gender theory as a whole. So in total agreement that to let the current momentum dissipate would be a mistake, however, how can we reframe the discussions around the issue to include a race and class analysis not only within the industry, but in our own circles?

      as for other resources, i was looking into it last night and found very little. i mean, i think it’s just something that’s not really happening much. gotta start somewhere…

  31. Tantra Bensko

      i LOVE the secret refrigerator licking. the sniffing and gold light. and the fuchsia sausage.

  32. Anonymous

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      madeshopping.net

  36. miette

      Right? I like this so much I’ve run all over town looking for a refrigerator to lick.

  37. Kent Johnson

      >if you have any other sources you could recommend that speak directly to this topic of race and class and experimental lit, I would greatly appreciate it.

      Christopher, others,

      One of the most prominent discussions in this regard, perhaps you know, has unfolded around the Araki Yasusada writings, in particular the book Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof, 1997), which the Nation magazine once termed “the most controversial book of poetry since Allen Ginsberg’s Howl,” actually– maybe yes, maybe no… A second book, Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords was published in 2006 by Combo Books. So there’s a lot of stuff out there pertaining to ethnicity/authorship/axiology matters in regards this work, much of it quite fascinating, with essays by numerous well-known people in the “experimental” poetry arena, like Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Bob Perelman, John Yau, Hosea Hirata, Eliot Weinberger, Forrest Gander, Carolyn Forche, Brian McHale, and others. Some of the reactions have been hostile, others positive. There’s an anthology collecting some of these essays coming out this year. A film script based on Doubled Flowering, amazingly enough, is in production, too!

  38. Jack M

      Aside from the licking and sniffing and punctuation as scar tissue nonsense, very thought provoking and challenging. It would also help if, in future, you included a sample of the writers’ works along with their interviews.

  39. Amy
  40. mimi

      i licked my refrigerator this morning and it was disgusting
      i really should clean more often (and i would) but things just keep getting dirty again

  41. Bhanu

      What makes you think it is even remotely okay to use derogatory language of this nature? You don’t get to use this word — “nonsense.” On me. On a person — a woman, a non-white woman — describing what it means — has meant to her — to have a BODY. To write that. To write the body’s tissue. I’m sorry — but so upsetting. It felt vulnerable to write in this way (above) — and is PRECISELY the problem about taking on race/poetics in this country. The shut-down. Comes fast. So, equally fast: I’d like to call you, whoever you are, on the way you are using the smaller parts of your language — the words, themselves — as eye-rolls of SOME KIND.

  42. Bhanu

      What makes you think it is even remotely okay to use derogatory language of this nature? You don’t get to use this word — “nonsense.” On me. On a person — a woman, a non-white woman — describing what it means — has meant to her — to have a BODY. To write that. To write the body’s tissue. I’m sorry — but so upsetting. It felt vulnerable to write in this way (above) — and is PRECISELY the problem about taking on race/poetics in this country. The shut-down. Comes fast. So, equally fast: I’d like to call you, whoever you are, on the way you are using the smaller parts of your language — the words, themselves — as eye-rolls of SOME KIND.

  43. deadgod

      Bhanu, “nonsense” is derogatory, but only mildly so, compared to some nastiness that’s permissible even here (where there is “moderation” from above (or laterally?)).

      More to the point of your ‘vulnerability’, the aspersion has precisely NOTHING to do with your being a “non-white woman” or “race poetics in this country”. You doubt this counter-claim? – consider what European-American male poets and academics – many of them heterosexual – have to say to other (straight,) white, male peers about their work, ideas, and persons. – and have done for centuries: vitriol and even hate have been a currency in the sometimes-straight, overwhelmingly white and male academy and literary circles/worlds in the West for centuries (for ever?).

      You might feel insulted – which Jack can hardly deny wanting to have provoked! – , but, from my point of view, there’s nothing ‘personal’ – nothing related to your identity and not your ideas – that Jack is calling “nonsense”.

      What does Jack mean by “nonsense”? It’s definitely his responsibility to be specific, and not to rely on an argument from self-evidence. But what ‘makes it okay’ to call an idea “nonsense”? – why, the same privilege you (or I, or anybody) might exercise in saying that Jack’s toddlingly swaggering hauteur is [scoff scoff] “Balderdash!”

      I mean, Bhanu, that your ‘calling’ Jack ‘out’ stands as a (potentially) “scar”-making slash alongside his “eye-roll” – and why not? You hadn’t (and haven’t) said anything to encourage malice.

      But to say “[y]ou don’t get to use this word [o]n me” – well, I hope no one ‘gets’ to rule nonsense out – or in.

  44. Ytyt

      vipstores.net

  45. mimi

      deadgod – mimi likes this comment

  46. Kate

      Bhanu is writing about and writing the body – so it makes complete sense that she would feel vulnerable when this is mocked (as he specifically called “scar tissue” – nonsense – complete dismissal of her ideas), and also makes sense that she would name this body, her body, as being non-white and woman as she spoke of how it felt to be disregarded in this way.

  47. deadgod

      Ha ha – it’s kind of you to say so publicly, mimi.

      Lookit – I think Kapil’s responses to the survey questions are clever and – to the point of her anger – deserving of thoughtful reaction (even in disagreement). – but: Jack’s dismissal consists of saying that an idea or constellation of ideas is “nonsense [period]” – abrupt and nowhere disclosive of even an effort to engage the ideas except superficially — but I think that one, in grasping the superficiality of Jack’s comment in its offensiveness, would have to impose, rather than to discover, an agenda of misogynistic racism.

  48. deadgod

      It’s a complicated perspective (at least: to me) to speak out, Kate:

      The corporeality of language and the linguisticality and even literacy of the body. What do these phrases mean figuratively, and is there a reasonable way to understand them literally? More immediately: when the body is empassioned – when the receptivity in it is enacted – by an operation, or a car accident, or torture, then one mark is “scar tissue”; but a semi-colon (like that one), conceived in the language of the trace of torture? – that’s not transparently axiomatic to me.

      – so at least there’s room for calm explication, real question-and-answer, not marred on either side by hostile incredulity. – which courtesy Bhanu was not shown by Jack (whom I don’t know).

      I don’t say a person ‘shouldn’t feel’ “vulnerable” when she or he puts forward an unconventional thought in unusual locutions — and I’d never defend calling something one doesn’t understand or shows no effort to understand “nonsense”. Fuck that lazy crap etc.

      But because Bhanu identifies herself as “an Indian writer” and a woman, therefore her discussion of “body” can’t be scorned except by way of ‘racist patriarchy’? ‘My body is X, so if one criticizes my ideas about “body”, one insults X.’?? I don’t think that’s a rational way ‘to see’ either rude dismissiveness or racism and hatred for women.

  49. Tantra Bensko

      ok, i am in crutches, in a housefull of people. but, literally, i’m going to right this moment go lick the fridge. tentatively. i’m a little scared. wish me luck.

  50. Tantra Bensko

      that’s an excellent idea. links are good, too, but maybe a small something that exemplifies the topic.

  51. Tantra Bensko

      for a writer, of any race or gender, to answer these questions from the heart, be open, creates a vulnerability that i really hope people will be kind to when writing these replies. it’s a great place for discussion of ideas. as long as that kindness is there deeply.

  52. home » turns out, no.

      […] from today a really great article/interview with Bhanu on htmlgiant re: What Is Experimental Literature? her answers are really wonderful and very much worth a read/comment. bhanu also an inspiration in […]

  53. Amy

      That comment was supposed to be in reply to Liz yesterday, but it went into spam. Thanks for fishing it out, Christopher.

  54. Christopher Higgs

      Hi, Kent,

      Thank you for your comments.

      Yes, I am familiar with your Yasusada project. My wife & I both studied with Brian McHale at Ohio State, and in fact under his direction she wrote an as yet unpublished scholarly paper on Doubled Flowering.

      I will look in this direction to see what I can see. Thank you.

  55. Christopher Higgs

      Thank you for sharing the information about this panel, Amy. I’m excited to check out these videos!

  56. miette

      Thank you so much for posting this panel: there are few things more voyeuristically thrilling than watching people work it all out together. Very good work here…

      (And you’re lucky to have known Akilah, who will be much much missed).

  57. Kent Johnson

      Christopher, could you write me at kent.johnson@highland.edu ? Maybe I can run this paper by the editor of the book I mentioned. It may be too late, but would be willing to try, if your wife would be interested. McHale has an essay in the book, actually.

  58. Jack M

      So sorry, Bhanu, I did not mean to offend by my post. It’s just that I was so intent on absorbing what you were saying that those particular portions of the interview broke the flow of what I was reading and kicked me back to my own awareness of myself. Of course the word “nonsense” was inappropriate.

  59. Bhanu

      Thank you, Jack. I apologize, too, for my own strong language.

  60. What is Experimental Literature? {Recap: Five Questions Vol. 1} | HTMLGIANT

      […] Bhanu Kapil […]

  61. What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Brian Evenson} | HTMLGIANT

      […] asked to describe experimental writing, Bhanu Kapil redirected my question to the body: “Or: What are the somatics of an emigrant line?” She then […]