September 10th, 2011 / 2:27 pm
Snippets
Snippets
A D Jameson—
A follow-up to my last snippet post: What’s the “best” novel or story or poem or comic or song “about” September 11th? (Besides Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits).
Just read this on VICE:
http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2011/09/09/an-excerpt-from-atta-a-novel/
http://www.comicartcollective.com/detail.cfm?page=AE8B160B-3048-77F0-11C960BA2832BBA5
because it makes more sense to say the john adams’ piece _on the transmigration of souls_
i’m going to say in this mess of excess let’s go with “nickel plated pockets” by aesop rock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU-EfwLJAtQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy9i1lXAG7E
Big Pun Feat. Fat Joe – Twinz (Deep Cover ’98)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUJghxU5m2o
Bizzy Bone ft Jim Jones – Twin Tower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUJghxU5m2o
Bizzy Bone ft Jim Jones – Twin Tower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIoy4oAtP_0
THE DIPLOMATS – GROUND ZERO
remember this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV9-xCoPIf0
Mao II, Don Delillo.
r u guys serious
this is 9/11 guys
a poem i wrote for an assignment sometime after 9/11, in fifth grade (i think)
the president says the war will shortly end, but i don’t think sosince that terrible day when the terrorists cameand hit our towers with our planesthey come and they go but they don’t seem to knowwe will catch whatever they throwfor we will stand togetherunited as 1we will always overcome
(was a patriotic lil kid)
damn, no line breaks
fuk 911 right
(sorry the drugs guys)
something ironic or dismissive ehehehehehe
but seriously I liked both extremely loud and incredibly close and terrorist, my bad.
The Suffering Channel
don delillo’s essay after 9/11
This essay?: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo .
Put aside for a moment the portentousness that’s become easy to contradict – like “All this changed on September 11.” – and the hard, clear assertiveness that goes astray – like “Technology is our fate, our truth. It is what we mean when we call ourselves the only super power on the planet.” – .
Plenty of what DeLillo says of “the terrorists” and “the terrorist” are reasonably predicable of our own America-haters–the Teabaggers:
—
Why do you call this essay – if it’s the one to which you refer – the “‘best'” of the material “‘about'” 9/11?
Y’all, what about William Basinski? I just spent an hour listening to the same loop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dQweKIHQP0
Has anyone mentioned “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”? Would you consider that “about” 9/11 though? It definitely plays a big part.
I was teaching an undergraduate fiction/poetry class in September 2001, and one of my students wrote a poem about the attack.
Your poem is much better than his was.
Yeah, sure, I’d consider that an artistic response to 9/11.
I haven’t read it, and my friends all tell me he’s a horrible writer. (I love my friends but I don’t always agree with them, which is hopefully why they love me). I’ve always admired the title; it comes into my mind sometimes when I’m biking, which is one of my definitions for what poetry is (fragments of language that I recall while doing something else).
Thanks for all of these suggestions, sincere or otherwise! I should note that an event as incredible as 9/11 (I mean that in the literal sense—it’s hard to believe that it happened) deserves a huge variety of responses, including snarky ironic ones. That is human nature, and how we humanize things we don’t or can’t understand. And of course so much of the response to that event has been so pompous and wrongheaded, it’s important too for artists to take the mickey out of that, if our memories and depictions of the day are to really mean anything.
So, thanks, again. A
Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms.
can we force the hands of Roland Barthes’ ghost to write it?
I’ve generally felt that the best response was silence. I don’t know, today I feel a little different, like I could even read one of the novels.
It hasn’t been especially long since then–not that there’s a minimum period necessary to incubate excellent art, but I think the lyre of Apollo does thrum aloft later in the day for most people.
It was 24 years after Waterloo when The Charterhouse of Parma was published (written by a veteran of Borodino and the retreat from Russia), and 54 years after Napoleon’s final defeat before War and Peace was first finished.
Or you could look at our Civil War: 30 years before The Red Badge of Courage; 109 years before (my favorite ‘war’ novel) The Killer Angels.
Counterexample: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.
There’s likely to be more – and stronger – response to this prompt in a decade, no?
You’re seen Roger Ebert’s suggestion, right? That the WTC be made into a simple park? I wanted to believe we might live in a world where that was possible.
That’s an excellent point. Gravity’s Rainbow wasn’t published until 1973, 28 years after the close of WWII. (Although of course GR is also a Vietnam novel.)
Still, no harm in asking what’s currently out there, right?
Cinema has seen a lot of responses—Flight 93 (2006), World Trade Center (2006). Remember Me (2010). Woody Allen’s Sounds from a Town I Love (2001):
http://youtu.be/TgAX8CHuhGA
Anyone think well of them? (I like the Allen all right, haven’t seen the rest—though Remember Me intrigues me.)
Oh, yeah, that’s the best I know of. OK, so that’s one great work of art that came out of that whole thing.
I heard there was a performance of it in NYC yesterday? A Philly friend of mine wanted to go, but no way was he fighting the Manhattan crowds to attend.
There’s, of course, a world of thought that posits that silence is the only appropriate response (in art) to the events of the holocaust, paying heed to its inexpressible nature. I, however, would insist that that’s lazy. Of course language can’t articulate terror, but that’s why people make art.
not because it’s inexpressible, but because the responses to this event in particular have, for the most part, been shrill, jingoistic, and have oversold an event that did not need overselling. I think a lot of 9/11-related art, even when made with the best intentions, has contributed to the overinflated myth of 9/11 which has been at the heart of so many terrible decisions.
I agree that The Disintegration Loops is probably the best response I have seen: “silent” in the right way – depoliticized, meditative, inconclusive, free of hyperbole.
My first reaction – I mean, the one I felt ten years ago today – was to build four towers on that spot. ‘Fuck you, whoever did it.’
A noisy irony – one that I haven’t heard expressed more than twice – is that, up to the night of 9/10, hardly anybody in NYC thought the towers should not be demolished. They were architecturally undistinguished at best (except by their height), and – a complaint much exercised – they blocked (rather than constituting or at least enhancing) the view south from downtown and the view of Manhattan from the harbor. They were also hard to fill with paying tenants (or do I have that mistaken?).
–so my initial reaction was as ill-considered as most of the others I’ve heard/seen.
A park dedicated to meeting intercultural rage with, well, parks–that would be fine, but getting Teabag Nation to get the point of a 9/11 park would probably be as successful as explaining such a park to a cat.
I think the cubic divots in the footprints work quite well, but I wonder how many broken classroom windows will go unrepaired to keep the site running.
*Loops is not technically a response but it might as well be.
Sure: no harm.
For me, Flight 93 is taut and exciting–technically, a very adroit thriller. –but, you know, without the knowledge one takes into the movie, it could be a Taking of Pelham 93 thing. Of course, that could easily be me imposing the context that I want, rather than accepting the limited view that, for example, the passengers and crew on 93 can reasonably be imagined to have had.
(Context?: The evil fuck-ups who ignored the warnings then dishonestly and destructively used 9/11 as an excuse to lose a potentially won war in Afghanistan in order to invade and occupy Iraq. An excellent 9/11 movie could be made as a documentary of the Legacy Misunderburnishment Tours the Rove/Cheney miscreants are all conducting now.)
Sure: no harm.
For me, Flight 93 is taut and exciting–technically, a very adroit thriller. –but, you know, without the knowledge one takes into the movie, it could be a Taking of Pelham 93 thing. Of course, that could easily be me imposing the context that I want, rather than accepting the limited view that, for example, the passengers and crew on 93 can reasonably be imagined to have had.
(Context?: The evil fuck-ups who ignored the warnings then dishonestly and destructively used 9/11 as an excuse to lose a potentially won war in Afghanistan in order to invade and occupy Iraq. An excellent 9/11 movie could be made as a documentary of the Legacy Misunderburnishment Tours the Rove/Cheney miscreants are all conducting now.)
Ha! I recently watched Pelham…
deadgod, why don’t you write for this site? You seem a major contributor to it already…
I know they were terrible, those towers, but I always liked seeing them when I took the train into NYC.
Or, rather, I missed seeing them the first time I took the train into NYC and they weren’t there.
God, what a banal thought this is that I’m expressing. (Is this what 9/11 comes down to? My missing the sight of something???)
Did you see where Adorno eventually kinda apologized for that, since of course people have been getting fucked over backwards since time immemorial? And so why should Auschwitz have special purchase on the elimination of poetry? Once you see that error in his claim, it’s impossible (I think) to unsee it.
(I still like Adorno, though.)
Absolute agreement.
In the context of the essay, Adorno was making a more subtle point than he’s credited with having made in the summary clip that’s often referred to. He was saying that barbarism stains civility and the possibility of civility–and that poetry engendered by and through barbarity cannot purge the stain.
Is it so obvious that Celan – or Grossman – would disagree?
No – that was my thought, too (I think). The anger and grief felt about 9/11 doesn’t flow from a loss of what the buildings offered or what transformation they enabled or anything like that. Had they been demolished patiently and with a mind to ‘recycling’ (as it were) the resources that went into them, they’d be “miss[ed]” by almost everybody in a radically different, less corrosive way than they are.
I think it was the means and meanings of their destruction that pierces people in and through the towers having ‘gone missing’. –hardly anything to do with the virtues of the buildings themselves.
ha ha; have you not answered your question
I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard people talk about Spike Lee’s 25th Hour as being a great movie “about” 9/11, or about dealing with the wake of 9/11. I guess I should watch it.
Falling Man