"hell is other people's music."

3/31/07

EVEN IF WE'RE JUST DANCING IN THE PARK

as a warmup for concrete discussion group's "event" in rochester's abandoned subway tunnels next friday, a few of us took advantage of the change in weather and set up turntables and big speakers on an isolated patch of grass by the genessee river. having just seen lightning bolt on wednesday, i was in full annoy everyone mode. the second song i played was the locust. people backed away from the speakers. then i played a few other noisy things. feeling kind of bad and noticing that people were starting to leave, i played some channels 3x4 and "mind your own business."

i played a lot of noisy short songs, but the whole point was to build to slayer's "raining blood" and time it to coincide with the sun going down. the few who were left at that point (the locust = mass exodus, which was too bad because i really wanted to see people's faces when marilyn manson came on) were wholly into the fast, noisy music. the second locust song i played went over well. playing "raining blood" really fucking loud in the park with no one around to tell us to turn it down was a thing of beauty. reactions to the line "do you want to die?" were especially awesome.

thee headcoats "punk rock ist nicht tod"
the locust "some song"*
k.i.t. "buddy series #2, track one"
lightning bolt "wee ones parade"
channels 3x4 "nite out"
delta 5 "mind your own business"
channels 3x4 "boys"
li'l pocketknife "ADD"
li'l pocketknife "disco dancer"
daniel johnston "museum of love"
joy division "24 hours"
rites of spring "for want of"
circle jerks "don't care"
circle jerks "live fast, die young"
the necros "i.q. 32"
sonic youth "youth against fascism"
marilyn manson "the horrible people"
lightning bolt "forcefield"
swell maps "let's build a car"
the germs "what we do is secret"
blatz "fuk shit up"
the mekons "never been in a riot"
x ray spex "i am a poseur"
thee headcoats "i suppose i'm a poseur"
finally punk "ein zwei polizei"
le shok "we are electrocution"
fugazi "the waiting room"
big black "jordan, minnesota"
f.y.p "smarter than the average bear"
m.d.c. "john wayne was a nazi"
bikini kill "carnival"
the sick lipstick "sermon from between his legs"
the locust "some song"*
slayer "raining blood"

* because all locust songs are pretty much the same, i just put the needle on a random track from the locust's self-titled album.

3/25/07

THE NECESSITY OF THE ARCHIVE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

i hadn't slept in a week. almost literally. i did, however, catch a few minutes here and there during a rare screening of jeanne dielman. if you've seen it, you'd understand. at the conference friday, i was asked a question and was so completely out of it, i had no idea what she meant. so i asked her to explain herself. then, in lieu of answering her question, i told a couple of random anecdotes about waiting for a holograph edition of dickinson's poems and about how, had she published during her lifetime, the poems would now be in the public domain and we'd have a holograph edition, as opposed to the books being locked up in the harvard vault, inaccessible to most, including susan howe. this afternoon, i wrote her a lengthy and thoughtful response. here's how it should have gone down two days earlier:

Q: with digital archive and variorum projects, do we see something approaching the ethical presentation of dickinson's poems that you call for?

A: there is a sense in which digital archiving can limit the degree of violence that certain kinds of book publication do to dickinson's texts, e.g. "normalizing" the idiosyncracies of her poems and, in the extreme case, transposing prose from her letters into "new poems." but i suspect that to leave the ethical task of presentation at this point is to assume that the surface of the page is the only site of ethical contestation. if we suspend my apocryphal reading of dickinson's poems as requesting not to be read (for how literally should we be taking a poem's expressed intention?), there is still the problem of the material conditions of producing and disseminating her poems. that is, we have to ask whether these poems are site-specific within her fascicles and, so, perhaps any reproduction would violate the larger material objects of the fascicles. furthermore, are the fascicles intended as (or do they intend to be) singular objects? and are the poems inextricable from these objects? any dissemination, then, might also be a violation.

it's a tricky question, locating the intention of a poem or an object, particularly without falling into intentional fallacies or personifying or anthropomorphizing texts. the point of my paper, in the absence of a definitive answer to your question or associated questions about discursive violence or violations, is the necessity of good-faith reading and publication practices (the rest of my larger study of which this paper is the introduction moves away from dickinson to engage with this point vis-à-vis the discursive violence of publication and museumification). that is, what i'm calling for might be a necessary historicism, in which we must locate the tradition and discussion that the work engages with in order to identify its demands (miwon kwon calls this the work's "discursive site"); i located this in my paper in the pope/finch/woolf trajectory. for me, this moves beyond an objective "truth" of the text and becomes a self-reflexive exercise for the reader, publisher, or critic. i'm not sure how useful this would be for literary criticism or poetics, but i suspect that it speaks to the ontology of the poem as an imagined, rather than material, object. unlike contemporary art (even dematerialized conceptual art), in which we have a physical object in a physical, often institutional, site, the poem may not physically exist anywhere —if we take the words on the page to be deictic of what exists in the imagination. therefore, the ethical demand of poetry may also take place in the imagination.

3/21/07

HALF LINE AESTHETICALLY LEFT/SLASHED IF A HARE CROSSES

on friday morning,

i'm presenting this paper called "me tangere/noli me legere: my hysterical emily dickinson." in it, i write:

Marjorie Perloff writes of Susan Howe’s landmark study My Emily Dickinson that “Howe’s aim is not so much to ‘explain’ Dickinson’s meanings as to relive them.” Howe herself writes, in response to Gilbert and Gubar’s characterization of Dickinson’s “stitching” of multiple selves as “spider art,” “Who is this Spider-Artist? Not my Emily Dickinson. This is poetry not life, and certainly not sewing.” Here we can return to Blanchot’s analysis of reading as liberatory, that reading “lets be what is,” but whose being is constitutive of being read. Though Perloff’s wording is imprecise, Howe’s opposition of poetry and life does not contradict Perloff’s reading of My Emily Dickinson. Rather, the salient point for Howe is not that she performs Dickinson’s poems but that she allows them to perform. Howe’s criticism of Gilbert and Gubar lies in the latter’s reduction of Dickinson’s poetry through a reading overdetermined by the (Howe argues essentialized) role of the woman author that they construct, a role that she claims Dickinson disavows in her poems. What Dickinson sought to do in life by enclosing herself, Howe contends, she successfully accomplishes in her poems.

[...]

We can see in Dickinson’s poem “In a Library” an elucidation of her relationship to the published work. In the poem, Dickinson writes of her experience of reading that it is
A privilege — I think

His venerable Hand to take —
And warming in our own[.]
While Dickinson, unlike Keats [specifically, his late fragment "this living hand..."], is loathe to extend her hand to the reader, she is perfectly content to delight in receiving the hands of other poets. Through Howe’s reading in My Emily Dickinson, we can perhaps say that Dickinson does extend her hand, just not to the reader. Dickinson’s poems, then, are apostrophes to the poets she has read, effecting an imaginary conversation with them. Howe’s theorization of this poetic project and her analysis of the idiosyncrasies of Dickinson’s poetry yield an attention to both the framing acts through which we have received Dickinson’s poems and the social role of the woman author (a frame itself). In “a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living,” disavowing the social roles that would have determined her status as a woman author, Dickinson, precisely in transcending the material conditions of writing as a woman, performs what, for Howe, is true women’s writing, writing that confronts the societal pressures placed upon it, not one defined by its conditions.

my argument doesn't depend on the first quotation from my emily dickinson, for my argument doesn't depend on the persuasiveness of any reading of dickinson but, rather, on the ethics of performing a reading of her poems. however, the sentiment "this is poetry not life" is key to my study on an allegorical level. reading is not life and, furthermore, while i will grant eliot that "criticism is as inevitable as breathing," literary criticism and breathing are most certainly not the same thing. that is, reading is a practice of the imagination. we know from levinas that ethics is as well. whatever the face-to-face might yield, it is not life but, rather, an imaginary staging of life in the deferred absence of actual life. susan howe's emily dickinson stages an imaginary face-to-face. my emily dickinson confronts the reader with one.

it is, i think, an ontological condition of poetry that it exists in the imagination. i have a completely different relationship to art, even dematerialised conceptual art, because i firmly agree with douglas' claim that art is "productive of social relations." this is one major reason why i am no longer a literary critic. while my education in poetics has proved invaluable to my understanding of aesth/ethics, the study of poetry, as evidenced by my award winning but navel gazing undergraduate thesis on the most emo of poets, yeats, seems to be me to be no more than a really fun, pointless game. if poetics is valuable as a discourse on ethics, the study of poetry qua textual exegesis is a highly ideological form of escapism.

the so-called relational aesthetics that foregrounds much of the recent art criticism presents one attempt to work towards a poetics of art, a utopian (re-)integration of art into the praxis of life. i wonder, however, about the recent critiques of relational aesthetics, that these practices "do not engage the real conditions of late capitalism but, rather, pose alternatives and offer escapes. Many of the practices not only shy away from direct critical engagement, but verge on mystification” (elizabeth ferrell), and that they present “a highly ideological form of escapism” (andrea fraser). i would like to theorise a conciliation of the utopian claims of relational aesthetics and the commitment to the real material conditions of life advanced by institutional critique artists such as fraser and critics indebted to the institutional critique tradition like douglas and ferrell. there is, i think, a great value in the concept of relational aesthetics, but in the aesthetic practices of some of its major proponents, among them thomas hirschhorn and jeremy deller, we might see an art that verges on the navel gazing of poetry. the work of hirschhorn and deller seems to rely on the wrongheaded assumption that the practice of art is itself somehow emancipatory as life-praxis, an assumption that also subtends almost all literary criticism that attempts to recoup the discipline from aestheticsm and for the political. in hirschhorn and deller, and in the recuperative literary criticism, we have merely replaced one kind of idealism (beauty, truth, meaning) with another (practice as praxis, a priori). this is art, not life.

art is not sewing. against the idealists, i will also contend that sewing should not be art. here, we see in the revisionist museology, the one that "opens" the field of art to include such things as sewing, a reversion to the old idealism. art, as a category, doesn't have any immanent value. sewing, i think, does. it is, then, not elevated by entering the canons of art and the walls of the museum but, instead, liquidated of its value. this is not to say that sewing possesses an immanent value; rather, in keeping with relational aesthetics, it is in the sewer's relationship to the practice of sewing that we find value.

so imagine my surprise when, tonight, susan howe said she had changed her mind about sewing. two days before i give my conference paper, she comes to rochester and drops this bomb; what are the odds? she spoke of the difference between embroidery, in which the marks that reveal the act of sewing are hidden on the verso, and lace, which reveals these marks for all to see. to be sure, this does nothing to my argument. the criticism of gilbert and gubar's essentialising reading of dickinson stands, as does my use of the quotation from my emily dickinson to illustrate a poetics of reading. however, it may have broader implications. there is, in the former's marks, a relationship between lace and practice. but what does turning this index of practice, this metonymic severing of practice, into a trope do? i haven't fully digested or thought through all of this yet, but might we see in this metonymy the same liquidation of actual practice from object as the museumification of sewing. which is to say that howe was all about the poetics back in 1985, when she wrote my emily dickinson. today? aestheticism.

3/18/07

ELEVENTH HOUR ANXIETY, TANTAMOUNT TO GABRIEL BYRNE BARFING WHILE WALKING TO MILLER'S CROSSING

"Once a commitment to publish is made, the commitment is forever. There is no erasing a book. Trees, on the other hand, take a much longer time to produce, and we kill quite a few of them every time we put words and images on paper. Keeping in mind that publishing entails an environmental responsibility encourages a certain editorial economy."

—Roger Conover, MIT Press
from: Art Journal 65:4 (Winter, 2006), p. 49.

3/17/07

ANOTHER OCCIDENTALIST INTERVENTION

félix gonzález-torres; there's no good way to talk about him, at least not without either tiptoeing around what you really mean or coming off at least a little bit insensitive. that said, i'll jump right into it.

i wrote:

> > writing my art journal article, just came across
> > something on that félix gonzález-torres piece we
> saw
> > at MoMA back in january 2001, which i'd forgotten
> all
> > about... remember the gallery with candy wrapped
> in
> > foil piled up in the corner?
> >
> > "the weight of the candy in the gallery was equal
> to
> > the ideal weight of his recently deceased lover
> ross,
> > and every piece taken corresponded to the wasting
> of
> > his flesh from illness" (272-274).
> >
> > heartbreakingly sad and poignant; but i'm also
> more
> > than a little disgusted that i ate ross'
> > transubstantiated flesh.

he replied:

> it is a beautiful thought, and about the other
> thing, i love
> transubstantiated flesh... in fact, i sneak wafers
> at the local catholic
> church EVERY chance i get. its also the only
> legitimate way to drink wine
> that i've managed to find (its not REALLY wine, its
> jesus's blood!)

i should provide some background information. félix gonzález-torres was a new york-based cuban artist from puerto-rico. he died of complications resulting from AIDS in 1996. his partner, ross, died under similar circumstances in 1991. the piece in question is portrait of ross in l.a. (1991), in which the corner of a gallery was filled with candy in foil wrappers. museum-goers were welcome to pick up the candy and consume it; they were encouraged to leave the empty wrappers in the opposite corner. every morning, the candy was replaced, reproducing ross' ideal weight of 185 lbs., and the empty wrappers were disposed of. we saw a reinstallation of the piece at the museum of modern art in new york in january of 2001.

my interlocutor here is a dear old friend of mine who will remain nameless (he has objected to my publication of his name in the past — and for good reasons, all of which will remain undisclosed here). i will say, for the sake of elucidation, that it is against his religion to consume alcohol and that the religion in question is most certainly not catholicism, nor any other kind of christianity. he is also not white. i will also allude to the "the brazilian trope of anthropophagia: the polemical metaphor of cultural 'cannibalism' that sought to appropriate existing cultural practices in order to marshal their force in the interests of an anti-colonialist praxis" (302-303). that's all i'll say; i'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about why i've quoted the above conversation and what it might mean.

** all cited text from institutional critique and after, ed. john c. welchman (zürich: jrp/ringier, 2007). the art historian and amateur cartographer alexandra alisauskas would like me to note that i am indebted to her for the link between portrait of ross in l.a. and anthropophagia.

3/16/07

FOUR HANGINGS AND A FUNERAL

two pictures illustrating this art historical point: