January 29, 2009

Red Rosset, Red Rosset / Goldsmith / Cioran


From Louis Proyect’s appreciation of the new Barney Rosset documentary:

Available on home video on February 10th, “Obscene” helps prove a point that I have made repeatedly, namely that the old left of the 1930s was midwife to both the beat generation and the political radicalization and counter-culture of the 1960s.

Focused on the career of Barney Rosset, who founded Grove Press and published Evergreen Review, this superb documentary reveals how it was completely natural for a member of the Young Communists in 1937 to eventually end up publishing not only “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and “Tropic of Cancer” in defiance of the Calvinist censorship laws of the 1950s, but to also print the “Autobiography of Malcolm X” in defiance of the racist attitudes that prevailed in American publishing.

Read it at Louis’s blog, The Unrepentant Marxist.  

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On the other hand, over at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, Kenneth Goldsmith has recently argued that the Depression era – glory days of the Popular Front – resulted in “the exile of adventurous art.”  While acknowledging Brecht’s maxim that “it’s always a bad time for poetry,” Goldsmith sees some times as worse than others for the avant-garde, with the 30s in particular representing a period when

intelligibility wiped innovation off the map: when Aaron Copland's populism trumped the ultramodernism of Edgard Varèse and Henry Cowell; when the avant-European aesthetic of Alfred Steiglitz was pushed aside in favor of American regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton; or when the radical typographical investigations of E.E. Cummings were decimated by Archibald MacLeish who, according to Al Filreis (author of the indispensable Counter-Revolution of the Word), was the poet people turned to when they wanted verse to explain democracy to them. It pretty much derailed the avant-garde in the United States for two-and-a-half decades, until the mid-1950s, when the likes of Cage, Greenberg, The Beats and The Objectivists began to pick up where the avant-gardists of the 1920s left off. A lot of good was tossed out. One example that comes to mind was the multicultural -- yet ultramodern -- efforts of the Pan-American Association of Composers (which included Latino composers such as Carlos Chavez and Amadeo Roldán as well as their American counterparts) was dismantled and effectually blacklisted. It killed the career of someone like Nicolas Slonimsky, whose advocacy of challenging music created such controversy in early 30s, that he was banished entirely from conducting.

A new economic downtown, Goldsmith suggests, may bode equally ill for adventurous art.  In his usual (and quite welcome) spirit of provocation, he concludes with a reference to Charles Bernstein’s recent parodic confession of surrender to the poetry establishment, Recantorium, which in the short term of its existence has, Goldsmith projects, gone from possibly hyperbolic jeu d’esprit to “eerily prescient” foreshadowing of hard times to come. 

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Speaking of Evergreen Review, I found an old copy (March-April 1961) in a used bookstore the other day and bought it, mostly for a Samuel Beckett translation of Robert Pinget's The Old Tune. But it also contained this:

So far as we know, poetry cannot be made out of just anything:  it does not always lend itself.  It has its scruples and a certain . . . standing.  To steal its substance involves certain risks:  nothing could be flimsier transplanted into narrative.  We are familiar with the bastard character of the novel drawing its inspiration from the romantic, symbolist, or surrealist schools.  As a matter of fact, the novel, a usurper by vocation, has not hesitated to appropriate methods belonging to essentially poetic movements.  Impure by its very adaptability, it has lived, it lives by fraud and pillage, has sold itself to every cause:  it is the streetwalker of literature.  What shame could embarrass it, what intimacy would it hesitate to betray?  It forages in ashcans and consciences with equal ease.  The novelist, whose art consists of auscultation and apocrypha, transforms our reticence into gossip columns.  Even as a misanthrope he has a passion for what is human:  he wallows in it.  What a pathetic figure he cuts beside the mystics with their madness, their “inhumanity”!  And then, after all, God is of a different class.  We can conceive of bothering about Him.  But I cannot comprehend our attachment to beings.  I dream of the depths of the Ungrund, the matter anterior to the corruptions of time, and whose solitude, superior to God, will forever separate me from myself and from my kind, from the language of love, from the prolixity that results from our curiosity about other people.  If I attack the novelist, it is because, working on whatever material comes to hand, on us all, he is and must be more talkative than we.  On one point, let us do him justice:  he has the courage of dilution.  His productivity, his power are won at that price.  There is no epic talent without a science of banality, without the instinct for the inessential, for the accessory and the minute.  Page after page, for pages and pages:  the accumulation of inconsequence.  If the catalog poem is an aberration, the catalog novel, the roman-fleuve, was inscribed in the very laws of the genre.  Words, words, words . . . Hamlet must have been reading a novel.

While Goldsmith has surely proved that poetry can be made out of "just anything," as a summation of the novel these words still ring true.  “The accumulation of inconsequence” – that about says it all, doesn’t it?  And it rhymes with incontinence.

It's from E.M. Cioran’s “Beyond the Novel.” 

Are we there yet?  

January 19, 2009

Found Poem for Teddy Wiesengrund


a

atlas shrugged

ann coulter

anne rice

anatomy and physiology

audiobooks

abraham lincoln

art

american girl

accounting

 

ad

adolescence

advertising

adobe cs4

adoption

adhd

addiction

adventure

adobe photoshop cs3

advanced accounting

address book

 

ado

adolescence

adobe cs4

adoption

adobe photoshop cs3

adobe photoshop elements 7

adobe photoshop cs4

adobe

adobe photoshop

adobe illustrator

adolf hitler

 

ador

adorno

adoration of jenna fox

adored

adorno theodor

adorable knits for tots

adora

adorno aesthetic theory

adorno music

adorable crochet for babies and toddlers

adored it girl

 

adorn

adorno

adorno theodor

adorno aesthetic theory

adorno music

adorn new jewelry

adorno reader

adorno negative dialectics

adorno mahler

adorno minima moralia

adorno prisms

 

adorno

adorno theodor

adorno aesthetic theory

adorno music

adorno reader

adorno negative dialectics

adorno mahler

adorno minima moralia

adorno prisms

adorno the culture industry

adorno beethoven


_____________

Search suggestions displayed while typing a-d-o-r-n-o into the amazon.com search box 

January 15, 2009

New Story at Word Riot



I have the great good fortune to have a story of mine, "Uncle Homunculus," included in the January issue of Word Riot.  Read it here, or go to their homepage and scroll down to sample the works of the illustrious company of fiction writers and poets with whom my piece gets to rub shoulders.  Or margins.  You get the idea.  Thanks to the whole Word Riot crew.  


January 5, 2009

Spectres of Anti-Humanism



An excerpt from Gary Lain's "Ho Chi Minh at Spiral Jetty": 

Despite his poor health, Ho strides easily along the rough length of the stone-piled jetty. He’s spent a life time on the march. “It occurs to me, Mr. Smithson, that so much of the work of your Western avant-garde, in its fascination with deep, geological, ahistorical time, constitutes an attempt to operate outside the conceptual boundaries of Humanism, from the Renaissance though the Enlightenment.” 

“For the avant-garde,” Smithson replies, “the crisis of capitalism will not be mediated through intellectual discourse, but will be solved in the streets.” 

“Mr. Smithson, I appreciate your bravado, but history ends rather differently for me.” 

Yulia knows more about Smithson than she has any reason to reveal. He once wrote: The circles of power become more and more intangible as they move to the edge of nowhere. Crimes are committed for the ultimate goal of the state. Fictitious social structures uphold stupid hierarchies and protect the legal criminals. Unreality becomes a hard-nosed fact. In this fugitive ‘city’ of the crumbling world-mind, all solids tremble and seem about to disintegrate...The Establishment is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. 

Pointed social critique from this theoretically elusive figure whose art criticism often reads like an elaborate put-on. Yulia also finds Smithson’s spontaneous and unaffected deep regard for the President touching, if not uncommon. 

“Spiral Jetty is 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide and is composed of 6,550 tons of rock and earth. Construction costs totaled 8,000 dollars; the site was leased for 20 years at a cost of 100 dollars,” Smithson says as they reach the spiral’s tip. “Tell me, please, what you think?” 

Ho gazes over the red salt water, across the concentric bands of the jetty’s length as it crosses his line of sight. “I think it should be bigger,” Ho says.

 Smithson laughs, “You know, I get that a lot.”

*******

Read the full text in the Fall 2008 issue of Fiction International. 

Also check out Gary Lain's video-and-text piece, "A Plague of Cities," at Locus Novus.

More on Robert Smithson here and here.