September 30th, 2010 / 4:56 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Matthew Simmons—
Joyelle McSweeney on Loser Occult. Also, if you ever get really sick of HTML Giant, blow us the fuck up. (Thanks, Johannes. Thanks, Paul.)
i’m going to blow up htmlgiant.com
thanks for showing me that. I’m gonna waste so much time with that ship now.
I like this. Will more people get locked into one core value of poetry: It is outside commerce. The joke about poets not making $$ is not a joke, it is the point.
Writing outside capitalism can be a statement.
Poetry as an act NOT trying to make money. As the essence of the act.
wouldn’t not writing poetry make even less money
blaow
i just blew up your spot
fuck ya life, son (no homo)
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
No, not writing poetry, as a use of time, would make more money.
Anything more you said I’m lost. I don’t speak fuzzy or dice.
(yes hetero–whatever that means)
Werd
s
like, eating salads doesn’t make more money than writing poetry
doing sit ups doesn’t make more money than writing poetry
sitting quietly and thinking about the national debt doesn’t make more money than writing poetry
buying things doesn’t make more money than writing poetry
like, many things that are “not writing poetry” make less money than “writing poetry”
you know, man
like, isn’t the opposite of making money buying things or giving money away or something
I am saying shaving away a space for yourself that in no way makes you money, in no way the actual act is to make you money, the intent and time and purpose is to make you money can feel OK.
I read and fish rivers for the very, very same reason. I wade rivers for hours to know I am NOT getting ahead.
I bet poetry feels the same way, pretty good.
To be in the act not the Thing.
This is what I am saying.
I like commerce, in and out of my writing. Avoid purity at all costs.
Well… why exactly can’t poets make money? Is it because the ‘Industry’ doesn’t like poets? Or because all the poets out there don’t like poets?Disclosure: I’ve never known any dedicated poets, so I can’t ask them. I’ve known private poets, and fiction writers… a bunch of painters and musicians . . . no active/publishing poets.
Well . . . apart from email, I guess, which doesn’t count.
(Note: I’m not asking this to be annoying. I’m looking to flesh out my understanding of the problem, and this relates to something else which a few of you already know about.)
At any rate: surely the answer is not working for free. Even if you do, and your work is popular: somebody is going to find a way to make money off your blood, sweat and tears.
Johannes and Joyelle work for the Catholic church. They make mucho money teaching poetry at Notre Dame. So, all their whinging and ACTIONING and angry art, is a grand fake.
I agree.
I graduated from ND, actually, academic/athlete scholarship. Coulda shoulda…… couldn’t turn it down (mom & dad had no money, three more kids to school and I had no idea…..)
I never wanted to get away from a place so badly.
Were it not for the insane stories I could tell about priests, football players, rugby players, hockey players, hockey cheerleaders and cornfields in the fall (not all in the same story ha ha)…………. the lasting advantage of having gone there………. these memories.
Well… why exactly can’t poets make money? Is it because the ‘Industry’ doesn’t like poets? Or because all the poets out there don’t like poets?
Disclosure: I’ve never known any dedicated poets, so I can’t ask them. I’ve known private poets, and fiction writers… a bunch of painters and musicians . . . no active/publishing poets.
Well . . . apart from email, I guess, which doesn’t count.
(Note: I’m not asking this to be annoying. I’m looking to flesh out my understanding of the problem, and this relates to something else which a few of you already know about.)
At any rate: surely the answer is not working for free. Even if you do, and your work is popular: somebody is going to find a way to make money off your blood, sweat and tears.
So is your problem with J&J working for a Catholic university or that they’re academics? Would yr impression be different if they were still at Alabama? I went to ND, not because it’s Catholic but because they offered me decent fellowship. Does the Catholic funding make what I learned there fake or the mss I wrote there fake? Does it make my criticality towards the experience inauthentic?
Following your logic, anyone working for any university funded by the state (and private schools with private endowments) should neither whine nor ACT because this makes them hypocrites. Anyone working at any university should either remain quietly complacent or not work for said university. Am I understanding you correctly?
OK, I’m gonna reply to myself here……. To elaborate, I have nothing against J&J/Action Books, however I was somewhat surprised when I first saw the address (ND) for the Action Books imprint in ‘I’m a Little Bit Happier Than You Are’ by Tao Lin.
Having since read stuff on the internets by J&J, I am further …….hmmm……. confused/conflicted/intrigued. I squirm more at the ND connection and the ‘hidden, unspoken’ of that fine institution than at anything J&J produce. It’s a weird juxtaposition to be sure. I squirm when I tell people I went there. And I’m not even Catholic.
there’s no such thing as clean money. that the $$ is then used to make fantastic objects right under the nose of the institution is a victory, not a snub.
i also doubt that ‘mucho money’ is really the case. teaching is teaching.
ugh, Denise, your comment is sad.
The “I, Miss Ronald Reagan” bumper-sticker clownage that Joyelle McSweeney’s Loser Occult plays with sure sounds opposed to hegemonic institutions etc.: “I, Miss Ronald Reagan: This is ‘success’ in ‘life.'” I can’t discern what’s “grand[ly] fake[d]” about McSweeney’s blogicle.
But perhaps Denise is (clumsily) making a useful point: the material sources of political-economic and cultural resistance to resource misallocation, “liberty” misdefinition, and so on are surely germane to the effectiveness of those interventive acts of resistance.
The equation ‘works for Catholic Church/API/insurance co./bank/etc.’ = ‘running dog lackey’ is vulgarly and misleadingly simplistic. Why shouldn’t Notre Dame students have profs/grad students/other students talking to them about, say, Genet or Hans Kung or whoever opposes RC dogma and ideology? I’ll bet Notre Dame grads who follow their ways to the ‘left’ generally have better actual arguments for being, for example, ‘anti-imperialistic’ than do students who go four years without ever hearing the pro-imperialistic rap from anywhere but FoxGoebbels or the Wall Street Pravda.
But, again, Denise’s point – cast in less rigid terms – obtains: anybody who thinks Reagan was a terrible president and Rove even worse can take a look at where their income comes from and goes to (as a worker and consumer, respectively). If the ‘left’ ever wants to persuade those tens of millions of people who live left and vote right to vote for themselves instead of being prompted so binarily by reptilian stimulation, that ‘left’ has to work with – as well as against – the reality of bourgeois compromise.
damn