tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85423871397509206412024-02-06T19:57:25.354-08:00ASK/TELLTom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-74507699875516561182014-05-15T14:05:00.003-07:002014-05-15T14:05:43.457-07:00TABLE OF CONTENTS<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2011/09/interview-with-sawako-nakayasu-about.html">INTERVIEW WITH SAWAKO NAKAYASU by Thomas Fink (Sept. 2011)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2011/10/interview-with-graham-harman.html">INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAM HARMAN by Tom Beckett (October 2011)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2011/11/exchange-on-film-and-poetry-by-thomas.html">EXCHANGE ON FILM AND POETRY by Thomas Fink and Eric Monder (Nov. 2011)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2011/11/interview-with-bill-bissett-by-ryan-j.html">INTERVIEW WITH bill bissett by Ryan J. Cox (Nov.2011)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2012/02/interview-with-timothy-morton.html">INTERVIEW WITH TIMOTHY MORTON by Tom Beckett (Feb. 2012)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2012/05/basil-king-and-thomas-fink-exchange-on.html">BASIL KING AND THOMAS FINK</a> (May 2012)<br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2012/07/exchange-about-lakshmi-bandlamudis.html">EXCHANGE ABOUT LAKSHMI BANDALUMUDI'S DIALOGICS OF SELF, <i>THE MAHABHARATA AND CULTURE:THE HISTORY OF UNDERSTANDING AND UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY</i> by Thomas Fink</a>(July 2012)<br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2012/11/questions-for-sonny-rae-tempest-by.html">Questions for Sonny Rae Tempest by Maria Damon (November 2012)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2013/03/interview-with-branton-shearer.html">INTERVIEW WITH BRANTON SHEARER by Tom Beckett (March 2013)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2013/12/i-do-have-lot-of-friends-who-are.html">JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN INTERVIEWS NINA POWER (December 2013)</a><br />
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<a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2014/05/interview-with-angela-simione.html">INTERVIEW WITH ANGELA SIMIONE by Tom Beckett (May 2014)</a>Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-76451215101914488812014-05-15T14:02:00.000-07:002014-05-15T14:43:14.884-07:00INTERVIEW WITH ANGELA SIMIONE<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> Tom Beckett: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;">Where did/does art begin for you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;">Angela Simione:</span></b><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"><br />I suppose that, for me, it comes down to a certain way of seeing. Everything has an inherent art potential and somehow I have to see it. I have to find a way to have those kind of eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The easy answer is that my work begins in my diary. Every morning when I wake up, I make a cup of coffee and get back in bed with my diary. I write for as long as I want. That flood of slang and swear words and totally ineloquent run-on sentences somehow rinses my eyes out. It cleans out my filters. I’m more able to see the art potential that surrounds every facet of my day. So maybe WORDS is the answer? For me, Art begins in the desire for language.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">TB: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I’m going to want to circle back in a little while to the response you just made, but what I need to ask you now is: if that’s the easy answer to my question, what’s the knottier one?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Haha! I knew I shouldn’t have said that!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Honestly, the question sorta stumps me. I’m not exactly sure how to answer it. I’m not sure where art begins for me because I can’t see where it ends. It’s such a big, banal part of my life that it’s hard to locate where art isn’t. So much of how I determine what is and is not my “art” happens in retrospect. And I’m pretty lenient when it comes to defining art. My practice itself is such a great big, wide open thing. Taking a walk is as much a part of my practice as actually sitting down to write or make a drawing. When I was really young, I had this masochistic outlook that I couldn’t call myself an artist unless I painted 6 hours a day. I was chalk full of these romantic ideas of what made an Artist and who could claim to be one, largely determined by cinematic representations and my own teenage longing for a romantic life. </span><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 14pt;">J</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> Now, I can see how simply taking a walk down the street is as valuable as flinging paint around. Maybe even more valuable. I can see how going out and getting drunk with my friends is part of the process. I scribble about the experiences I have and sometimes they wind up becoming part of poem. And then later, that poem spews out a single line of text which snags my heart and won’t let go and haunts me as I walk to work, as I walk to get a burrito, as I walk home from the bar. It haunts me until I do something with it. Maybe that’s where the art begins: when the haunt of the thing forces a response.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;">TB: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;">Was there a breakthrough thing you made or text you wrote that repurposed or reorganized your thinking about what you were capable of doing (or that really changed your direction as an artist)? If so, please feel free to include it as part of your response</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">AS:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">All the pieces I’ve made that felt really honest and really took a lot of self trust to make, feel like breakthroughs to me but there was a particular piece that really helped me turn a corner in my own practice. I made my first crochet artwork as a result of slipping a disk. I was trapped in bed, flat on my back, for a month. My art practice was at a stand-still. I couldn’t draw. I couldn’t paint. I was in so much pain that really all I could do were things that required next to no movement. I had to crawl slowly down the hallway just to go to the bathroom. It was awful. But I could write and I could read and I could crochet. I decided to let that be enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXZQizDWWQHa7ramPsriLtk9noNKmD2LtkuaW5ITuVDCOewZcE0ol0w-uklo9nngNX57gezMf6QcJdA9-H0_wNXfWmSa9PKAaSSM8AewxCR8JEwn4-ItqccErEK8ExXaubmtOckrW_-SQ/s1600/in_the_name_of_mass_hysteria,_crochet,_angela_simione_2007.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXZQizDWWQHa7ramPsriLtk9noNKmD2LtkuaW5ITuVDCOewZcE0ol0w-uklo9nngNX57gezMf6QcJdA9-H0_wNXfWmSa9PKAaSSM8AewxCR8JEwn4-ItqccErEK8ExXaubmtOckrW_-SQ/s1600/in_the_name_of_mass_hysteria,_crochet,_angela_simione_2007.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">At that point, I had a pretty rudimentary understanding of crochet as a skill. I knew a few basic stitches and, spending days inside the warm patience of a Vicodin haze, I was able to teach myself how to render lettering through tapestry crochet. My first piece was a table-runner that read: IN THE NAME OF MASS HYSTERIA. I was thinking a lot those days about female hysteria and what a horrible joke that diagnosis was… that a woman’s natural state was expected to be one of happy passivity and to be angry or dissatisfied was totally unacceptable. So unacceptable as to be pathologized. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">TB:</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> I had back surgery for two crushed disks when I was 35. So I’m familiar with the kind of pain you’re talking about. Familiar too with the Vicodin haze. I spent a good chunk of time in bed reading Blake and scribbling incoherently. Didn’t achieve, though, anything as elegant as your “IN THE NAME OF MASS HYSTERIA.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">That work, in its impulse and style, reminds me of the agitprop kind of pieces that Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer have made. Which leads to the question: as a writer and visual artist, who do you think of as your forebears? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">AS:</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Goddamn! Sorry to hear about your back! Makes my sciatica burn just hearing about it. Eeesh! I sympathize with that agony entirely. I think it’s hard for people to understand this level and type of pain unless they’ve sustained a back injury as well. It’s simply indescribable. Being born naturally optimistic, I’ve tried to find the silver lining to this particular physical ailment and I am, at times, genuinely grateful for the insights that have resulted; specifically those related to ableism in our culture. Being confined to bed is a unique experience that really turns up the volume on how we treat (and hide) disability. It makes me so grateful for every day that I am able to get up and walk. It makes me value my physical strength (when I have it) and the youth I still enjoy in a much deeper, more poignant way than I would have otherwise. It helps me appreciate my mortality in a more individual, solid, specific way: I can <i>feel </i>my mortality. This, in and of itself, has made me a much more thoughtful human being and a much more thoughtful, serious artist. Being trapped in bed for weeks at a time definitely gave me a lot of time to think. And read. And write. And it’s definitely in the landscape of crochet where my writing practice and visual practice finally found a place to overlap. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Jenny Holzer was an instant favorite and is an artist I routinely turn to simply for pleasure’s sake. I love looking at her work! I love how participatory it is, and how poetic. I love that her work makes room for poetry in places we aren’t used to finding it; poetry that has come off the page and scurries across the walls of museums and billboards. I appreciate this so much and her work just makes me so excited! Barbara Kruger too! Beyond the overlap of writing and visual art, we share an affinity for the black & white aesthetic. I’m not nearly as politically motivated as she is (at least not overtly), but I’ve been so encouraged by her work to continue in the feminist vein and not shy away from my politic. Not for a second. The work of Louise Bourgeois has been one of the biggest influences on my practice so far. I turn to her work constantly. There aren’t many days I don’t find myself looking at and thinking about her work. The details of the Cells… that blanket that reads “j’taime” over and over and over down the length of its’ entirely shook my heart so hard when I saw it… the way it makes art and emotion an actual space one can inhabit physically… like actually being able to curl up into a poem. I would think about that when reading the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and, later, Sharon Olds and Rebecca Loudon. I’d think, “God, I wish these poems were blankets that I could just wrap myself up in and hide under”. Had I not been injured, maybe I wouldn’t have had these thoughts? I wouldn’t have needed them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">David Wojnarowicz is also a major influence on my life and practice. It’s his refrain “smell the flowers while you can” that I scribble on abandoned couches on the street. I stole it from the postscript to his essay ‘The Suicide Of A Guy Who Once Built An Elaborate Shrine Over A Mouse Hole’. He’s just so fucking smart and so passionate and not at all afraid to be romantic… to make a show of his love for the world and for other humans. That’s a trait I admire and find horribly lacking in the world. Especially in the art world. I <i>like</i> romance. I <i>like </i>being and feeling poetic. It’s fun. These shouldn’t be slurs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1pAvsrLfoOEDU2hVNx7pAJG9VZNrXz6KQkmbBJJeluPRONiHZEhjpFu1bZW00B90oBKy2K3Bqu03Qsh4UHj8V60aISMjXZ4CoVBTLYkZdh8QESmkYc0fB0mCkDfkpkZv1hyphenhyphenLHHBHFses/s1600/until_now_001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1pAvsrLfoOEDU2hVNx7pAJG9VZNrXz6KQkmbBJJeluPRONiHZEhjpFu1bZW00B90oBKy2K3Bqu03Qsh4UHj8V60aISMjXZ4CoVBTLYkZdh8QESmkYc0fB0mCkDfkpkZv1hyphenhyphenLHHBHFses/s1600/until_now_001.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Annette Messager, Tracey Emin, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, Terence Koh, and Francesca Woodman are total pillars in my life and bookcase. I’ve slept with my Francesca Woodman book in the bed next to me for weeks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">TB: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">We’ve talked a little bit about where you think your art comes from, a little bit about who you see as your forebears; and you’ve spoken a bit, as well, to how you want to be and feel poetic—the importance of romance in your practice. What I’m wondering is <i>what do you think art can do</i>? And what kinds of things do you want the art <i>you</i> make do? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">AS</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> I mean, honestly, I think art can do anything. It can also do nothing. Art can just as likely save a life as piss off an entire country or command absolutely no attention at all. There really are no limits to what art can do, be, and accomplish; or not accomplish. I think I stopped needing art to be some sort of cultural savior a few years ago when I realized that I personally didn't appreciate being put in the role of savior, nursemaid, or saint in my personal dealings with other people. And casting off those titles and roles, dealing with the painful fallout that can't be avoided from refusing such titles and expectations, taught me a lot about why new art is (at first) sometimes met with such disdain and contempt. Refusing to fulfill expectations is something art has always circled back around to doing. It's something art<i> has</i> to do and something I very much appreciate. But it's something I had to learn how to appreciate and I really struggled with that for a long time. I thought art had to be a certain way- be made with certain materials, deal with certain topics, yadda yadda yadda. It took me awhile to see that that is such a closed way to look at something. Anything, actually. And that the closed way I was viewing art actually belied the way I was thinking about and responding to my own life. Art needs to circle around to ignoring expectations perhaps because humans need to as well, to simply achieve being oneself... which isn't at all a simple thing. The openness of Art testifies to the openness a mind can achieve, and the openness the world can achieve. It makes me feel good when people like my work or experience a sense of kinship with me because of it but, honestly, that's totally out of my control. I can't force that type of response and I don't even think about getting that response when I'm writing or making something. I think primarily of myself and my own need to record and share my experiences; mostly in the hopes of finding out how absolutely non-unique my experiences are. Something happens in the process of writing and making that allows me to feel attached to my own humanity. Even in moments when I felt most alone and most isolated, the process of creation itself gave me hope that maybe that wasn't the case... the creative act itself reassuring me that, even if it feels like it, I'm not screaming into a void. Or even if I am, so what? The scream itself is valuable. The scream itself needs to BE. But I'm not sure I know what I want my art to do beyond satisfy my own need to get the scream out. I like feeling heard. Everyone does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I installed a new yarnbomb a few days ago on a street corner and then went and got dinner. As I headed back home, it was a lot of fun to watch people stop and read the text. it felt good to watch them stop walking, tilt their heads to the side, and consider the sentiment in front of them. In this particular instance, it was a banner that read THE WAY YOU NEED TO BE LOVED and I really got off on seeing this. I didn't need people to know it was my work. it was more than enough to just have it be out in the world, working whatever magic it might work without me standing there next to it to guard it or explain it or influence the experience of others as they encounter it. I <i>hope </i>that people think about the way they need to be loved. If it provokes that type of inner dialogue, that would be fantastic, but what the piece has already accomplished is making me meditate on that idea. My art nurtures and challenges <i>me</i>. it makes me look at myself and then makes me look beyond myself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">TB: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">There’s a risk and an erotics in this. I have often remarked that the reception of a poem—or work of art—is akin to that prompted by an unsolicited kiss. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I like that! There’s certainly the risk of getting slapped, as it were, for stealing a kiss. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Not everyone likes the stuff I do on the street. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Pieces have been slashed and thrown in to the street. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">A few pieces were even set on fire. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It amazed me that the work provoked such a violent response but you raise a good point: if the reception of these pieces is akin to how one might react to a stolen kiss, a violent response is justified. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Especially since this work is taking place in public. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I’m not asking permission to show the work. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I’m not waiting for my turn to speak. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I’m taking my turn and I’m taking up space. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">But back to the topic of erotics for a moment: </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">it was definitely a pleasurable moment of voyeurism to witness other people read my work and know they had no idea that the artist responsible for the piece was watching them. Very pleasurable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">TB: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I want to return to the point where, at the beginning of our exchange, you suggested that “For me, Art </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">begins in the desire for language.” Could you flesh that out a bit? I’m interested in finding out more about your process. Maybe you could take me through how you came to make some particular work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I mean, it’s very much like how children point at objects which are new to them and ask, “What’s that? </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">What’s that?” </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It’s curiosity. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">But that sounds really thin. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It’s a deep love of my own curiosity. And maybe even simply a deep love for the world at large.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> I want to know what things are. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I want to know their names. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">In learning about the outside, I learn about the inside. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">During the last few years especially, I’ve become increasingly concerned with knowing who I</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">actually</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">am. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Not who I thought I was or who I’d been brought up to be, but who I truly was. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The embarrassing shit. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The dark shit. The scary shit… The things that I perhaps once thought would never apply to me. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">One day you wake up and are confronted with the fact that you’re just as capable of being bad, selfish, and fucked up as everyone else. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">That was a reckoning. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Still is. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I appreciate those moments so much because those are the environments in which I’ve learned a greater depth of honesty. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Or the true depth of my bravery… </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">sometimes even the true depth of my cowardice. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">My diary has called me out more than a few times. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">There have been these really strange, horrible mornings when I flipped back through previous volumes of the diary because I playfully wondered, “What was I doing on this day three years ago?” </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I find the correct page and am confronted with the horrifying fact that I’d been making the same complaints about life three years prior that I had just made that very morning when I was scribbling in the current volume. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">SO EMBARRASSING! Amazingly, brutally embarrassing! </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">But it’s moment like those that have given me the strength to pull whatever trigger I’d been afraid of pulling. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It’s moments like that which showcased my own cowardice in such a way as to give rise to a greater strength of will and a more solid self-esteem. Those texts are often the ones that become the basis of a blog post or a piece of art. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">With a few exceptions, pretty much all the sweaters and banners bare a sentiment that came straight from the pages of my diary. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">And usually the sentiments nod at (or straight up disclose) a truth I am uncomfortable with and feel called out by. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">When this project first started, I wanted to walk around with snippets from my diary on my chest as a way to get comfortable with certain facts about my life. I needed to make peace with my Self and my history. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It became a test of courage to see if I could really wear certain statements out of the house. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It didn’t really matter if other people “got it” or not. I knew I was exposing something fragile about myself. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I knew I was turning my body into a billboard. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I wanted to be dry-eyed and stoic, stomping down the street to work, while broadcasting a hard truth about my life. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">For awhile, I nicknamed the project “sweaters of death” because the work largely dealt with the massive trauma of my mother’s death. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It was important to me to be open about a subject that our culture is so closed to. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I wanted to offer up my experiences as common fodder for discourse or attack simply because I was pissed off that there aren’t many spaces in our culture to talk about death and mortality. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The hardest sweater to wear out of the house at that time was the one that reads I WILL NOT DIE IN FRONT OF YOU. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">People would read it as I walked by and then I’d watch their faces crinkle up. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It was a turn off. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">And I was okay with it being a turn off. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I just had to learn to see this work as more than making sweaters. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I had to see it for what it really was: performance. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I needed to find a way to let the sweaters function as an armor as well as a billboard.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYYjPN2WJAA_uhm_5x-EH4L9ED39yYBNvOQKICWFdSRuulOQWqUi2qxfBAXrlWUicJYmKRRdtzKUbdg7w6lBVLftVYbM_BAzLUzDImWnLuevtxgMh0cRdhdgEqSpLN4k2Nsi-qUUmpXFU/s1600/until_now_002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYYjPN2WJAA_uhm_5x-EH4L9ED39yYBNvOQKICWFdSRuulOQWqUi2qxfBAXrlWUicJYmKRRdtzKUbdg7w6lBVLftVYbM_BAzLUzDImWnLuevtxgMh0cRdhdgEqSpLN4k2Nsi-qUUmpXFU/s1600/until_now_002.JPG" height="320" width="238" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">And then they went beyond the subject of my mom’s death into different realms. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Desire, fear, loneliness, horniness. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">In that work, I’ve opened up about so many things that I didn’t foresee speaking about, at least not in such an overt way. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">There’s something about the meditative quality about crocheting though that helped me become comfortable with exploring sides of myself I tend to keep intensely private. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Some of my projects take weeks to resolve. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I’m meditating on the sentiment the piece bares the entire time. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">It’s a catharsis and a reckoning at once. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">TB:</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> Thank you, Angela.</span></div>
Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-67051265766157883382013-12-15T11:25:00.000-08:002013-12-15T11:29:05.969-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large; text-align: start;">John Bloomberg-Rissman interviews Nina Power</b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTd28SCy_fz69X8lG2v20ALs5yL2Wq2uQVcWENVj4LbKf4rzL-YR5_DQmDngfBgvtaW7dWydxnYv8FxAzoA-YFiohAlQI0nQGpnsqHfbRWMHKrLTCr6Lv25AowJN5Da3K6hVCHEsfmu1A/s1600/1477343_10153526150210652_1806686064_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTd28SCy_fz69X8lG2v20ALs5yL2Wq2uQVcWENVj4LbKf4rzL-YR5_DQmDngfBgvtaW7dWydxnYv8FxAzoA-YFiohAlQI0nQGpnsqHfbRWMHKrLTCr6Lv25AowJN5Da3K6hVCHEsfmu1A/s320/1477343_10153526150210652_1806686064_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">“… I do have a lot of friends who are artists
and poets. Most of the poets are obsessed with the way in which capitalism
talks about itself, the language of the markets, the speeds and strangenesses
of financial activity. It’s interesting - as if contemporary experimental
poetry is the nearest thing to the critique of political economy that art has.
…” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">JBR: As best I can tell,
over the last few years, you have morphed a bit from an academic / activist
into an activist / academic. In other words, your main focus these days seems
to be activism, rather than writing, translating, etc. If that is true, can you
tell us a bit about the transition? And about your activism? (this is where you
can talk about the trials, I think) </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">NP: I certainly shifted from being primarily
interested in politics as a theoretical object to it being a pressing daily
concern in 2010, but I would refuse the activist/academic division to some
extent. I mean, I wish more academics were explicitly politically, both in the
media and in political life, and there are many that are - but an awful lot are
content to remain within the often limited scope of their academic research,
and to go along with various management decisions, however detrimental these
might be. So you often end up with a few 'radicals' on campus who, often
alongside their students, are fighting to prevent departments being closed own,
fight against imposed registration (often used to check immigration status of
students), contest Vice Chancellor's pay-rises, fight fees, improve conditions
for non-academic staff and so on. In 2010, with the closure of the
undergraduate Philosophy department at Middlesex, the beginning of this long
round of attacks on Higher Education really kicked in. I had studied and worked
at Middlesex and feel a very strong connection to its aims and ambitions, so I
was part of the campaign to prevent its closure - the occupation was seen as a
kind of test-case for what would happen at universities over the next few
months as fee increases were debated in parliament, the Education Maintenance
Allowance was cut, and so on. The outcome (the graduate centre moved to
Kingston and the undergraduate programme was indeed cut) was ambiguous, but,
alongside the university occupations over Gaza the year before, the tone was
set for a certain kind of student and staff militancy between then and the end
of 2010, when the tripling of tuition fees and the funding cuts were finally
passed. </span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Over the course of the four main student
protests that took place between November and December that year - huge,
thrilling events which broke away from the main route and occupied Tory HQ in
one instance, and escaped police containment (kettling) in another - we saw a
series of arrests, as well as the increasing police violence that occurred on
every protest - horse charges into static crowds, baton use, use of shields as
weapons, and so on. This police desire for retribution culminated in the
extreme police violence witnessed on the day of the fees votes, where many
protesters suffered head injuries and, as is quite well known now because of
the subsequent criminal prosecution brought against him, one protester, Alfie
Meadows was so seriously injured he had to undergo life-saving brain surgery.
The Crown Prosecution Service then saw fit to charge him with Violent Disorder
(a charge used against many of the protesters arrested on the student protests
and others), which has a maximum life sentence of five years. Alfie and his
co-defendant Zak then had to suffer through three trials (the first jury
returned a hung verdict, the second trial collapsed due to multiple delays),
which finally culminated in their unanimous acquittal in March this year. Along
with a number of others, we set up a campaign (Defend the Right to Protest)
which focussed on helping defendants get the best legal advice, supporting them
during their trials, writing articles about the trials in order to raise
awareness about what was happening to the dozens of students who faced court
cases and prison and linking up with other campaigns that work on protest,
police violence and imprisonment. One of the links the campaign has worked on,
and continues to work on, is the broader question of police violence: deaths in
custody, daily police harassment and so on. While many of the people on the
protests did not necessarily have experience of police brutality before they
witnessed it in late 2010 (though many did), we wanted to try to make the link
between protest violence and the violence that many (particularly young black
and Asian men) suffer daily: in other words, to try to get people to think in a
more 360 degree way about the role of the state and the police, and the way in which
violence is meted out unevenly. We continue to attend inquests into deaths in
custody and to support families of those involved in the justice campaigns.
Because the scale and the extent of the cuts have been so brutal since the Tory
government has come to power, alongside the rise of extreme right-wing groups
like the English Defence League and the UK Independence Party, it has been hard
for those who oppose cuts and fascism to keep up with the extent of state
violence: opposition to austerity measures has been fierce but so too has the
state's response. One of the most significant things for me over the past few
years has been to meet up with criminal defence lawyers - these people are
truly extraordinary in their fight for justice for ordinary people: of course,
the legal aid that ensures people can get even the slightest hint of justice is
being dismantled as we speak. </span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Personally, I'm not sure if I write more or less
now than I did before 2010. The main thing I stopped doing was my blog I guess,
which just started to seem a bit frivolous: it was something set up as a
distraction during my PhD but I got tired of having all this word-junk hanging
around - also, I could see from searches to the blog that someone/some people
were looking for dirt on people who had been arrested or were heavily involved
in the protests. Needless to say there wasn't anything on the blog that could
do anyone any damage, but a lot of people were feeling exposed and anxious at
that point. As you know, there have been a few very high profile exposes of
police infiltration into protest movements in recent years, and I think
paranoia is sometimes a normal response: people were going to prison were
insanely minor things and newspapers and right-wing blogs were all-too-happy to
smear protesters when it suited them. </span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I think my writing has perhaps become more
fractured over the past few years, and I really am a terrible academic - if by
that I mean someone who focuses on one thing in a scholarly way and becomes an
expert on that one thing - because I write about so many different things all
the time in different contexts. But I get bored easily I think. Some of my more
recent work on notions of the 'public' tries to bring my interest in protest to
bear on larger philosophical and political questions - definitions of
collective subjectivity, for example, which I wrote about in my PhD. But I try
to mess about with different styles of writing - journalism, academic articles,
reviews, experimental stuff - so as not to get too ossified in one way of
thinking or doing.</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">JBR: "Are any of the
activists with whom you are colleagues, are any of your friends and
non-activist colleagues, artists? If so, do you discuss art with them? Which
arts? Are any of them poets? Do you have a connection to that aspect of their
work?" </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">NP: I’d like to start with a quote from an
interview given by Rachel Kushner (not with me though I did chair an evening
with her recently in London):</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">‘I think it’s unfair to compare the stakes of
art and the stakes of protest. The implication is that art is sillier, that the
stakes are about ego and money and hierarchies ... but we are not choosing
between a world without exploitation and a world without culture. They are not
in direct competition with each other.’ </span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">[</span><a href="http://www.themillions.com/2013/06/transcending-the-political-the-millions-interviews-rachel-kushner.html"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.themillions.com/2013/06/transcending-the-political-the-millions-interviews-rachel-kushner.html</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">]</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I was really struck by this quote as it
articulates something important about the way in which the relationship between
activism and art are often framed, as if they are opposed and mutually
exclusive or excluding. Clearly there is a way in which art sometimes appears
to be self-contained - in its own little world, the “art world” perhaps -
though obviously at the top end the links between this world and the world of
finance are very tight. A lot of what people mourn these days when they talk
about the disconnect between a lot of art and politics (or ask ‘why isn’t art
relevant?’) is based around a fundamental assumption that these two spheres are
somehow distinct. They might even be distinct, often, but it doesn’t mean that
they should be, or always were, or always will be.</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Nor, though, do I think that art has a
‘responsibility’ to be political, to have a particular message etc. Practically
speaking, a lot of my friends who are artists are heavily involved in politics,
particularly since the events of 2010 that I described in my first answer.
Groups like Arts Against Cuts and The Precarious Workers’ Brigade look very
clearly at the material constraints and conditions for artists and for art’s
relation to politics in the UK context, and I have friends who work for both
groups. Here I think there the question is one of specificity: rather than
making generalisations like ‘all money is dirty money’ or ‘we are all
complicit’, these groups think about the context, funding and presentation of
art (and who gets paid, and who doesn’t). A couple of my friends, Dean Kenning
and Margareta Kern, wrote a recent piece for Art Monthly that I think addresses
these questions head-on. They write:</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Knowledge as to how class
power operates through art, and how we are in various ways subject to its
forces, can inform artistic decisions. It may be exactly those points where art
brushes directly against neoliberal power that offer most potential for
effective resistance. In this respect, decisions made in specific art-world
situations, including acts of subversion or refusal, should not be interpreted
as points of individual morality or personal preference but as artistic acts
with the potential to affect the wider field of art.</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Much of the time, when people refuse to work
with galleries etc. or pull out of events because of where the money comes from
the response is often to attack this as a ‘moral’ position, but really the
question has to be asked on a case-by-case basis with as much recognition of
the different positions people are in and are able to take (obviously someone
with a salary from a university job is better-placed to ‘refuse’ than a young
artist without a job or money) </span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">To get back to your question, I do have a lot of
friends who are artists and poets. Most of the poets are obsessed with the way
in which capitalism talks about itself, the language of the markets, the speeds
and strangenesses of financial activity. It’s interesting - as if contemporary
experimental poetry is the nearest thing to the critique of political economy
that art has. Most of the visual artists I know are also engaged in kinds of
mapping, or political critique of one kind or another, and often critique of
the artworld itself.</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">In terms of cultural form, I spend most of my
time listening to music - I’m very, very keen on experimental electronic music
that has an interesting relation to gender - figures like Julia Holter, Laurel
Halo, Berangere Maximin, and I obviously write quite a few music reviews for
The Wire. I also watch quite a lot of films and have been asked to speak on a
few occasions about film-art - this weekend I’m speaking about the work of
Ericka Beckman, for example. I grew up reading a lot of novels and it’s still
the cultural form I probably feel most at home with (hence reading all of the
Booker shortlist this year! The prize is open to accusations of mainstream
conservatism, for sure, but an interesting project to attempt alongside work
and other writing).</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">It is difficult to untangle art in the British
context from its commercial elements, and certainly most of the artists I know
- Laura Oldfield Ford for example is a dear friend - find it difficult to earn
enough from art alone, even though their work is excellent, moving and
incisive. I think it’s interesting that so many discussions of so-called
immaterial labour begin and end with the artworld and the figure of the
contemporary artist as the paradigm examples of this tendency: art has perhaps
become dominant as a mode of existence, which of course makes it no easier for
those who describe themselves as ‘artists’ to make a living. <b> <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">JBR: </span></b><b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’m guessing you know about the Militant
Politics and Poetry Conference held in London this past May. I’m also guessing
that you know a number of the people who presented there. I wasn’t there, but a
number of the talks and a number of responses subsequent to the conference have
been posted to the Militant Poetics forum </span></b><a href="http://militantpoetics.blogspot.com/"><b><span style="background: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://militantpoetics.blogspot.com/</span></b></a><b><u><span style="background: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div>
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<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Among
many other things, there seems to have been a lot of – I don’t know if anxiety
is the right word – desire that poets think about “how to go forward, what we
might do etc.” (Chris Gutkind). I’ll quote a few illustrative comments:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Is
there something we can actually do that might help, make a useful contribution?
But together, since we’ve come together, and what is together anyway, what do
we mean by that in our situation?” Chris Gutkind<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“It's a
good sign that there's a conference on militant poetics raising explicitly
non-rhetorical questions, & a good starting point for poets to at least
think thru the implications of a shared poetic militancy. But what are the forms
this ought to take to make any fucking difference at all, to effect a reversal
in the seemingly endless parade of abhorrences & loss of common rights?”
Michael Tencer<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“How do
we fight the corruption and greed of politics, and is the power of language alone
sufficient?” Selina Vuddamalay<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I used
the word anxiety above, and then withdrew it, but would like to put it back on
the table. Because it seems to me that poets who are sure of what they are
doing don’t ask such questions. I would add that I don’t find the anxiety
unreasonable, in fact I share it; tho I don't find it unreasonable, I'm not
actually sure that it IS reasonable.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Since it
does not appear from your answer to question 2 that you find poets NOT doing
what they ought to do, to be falling short, failing somehow, what would you say
to me, what might you have said at this conference, to the poets (and other
artists) who express these kinds of doubts? (In a certain way your answer
already addresses this, I know, but I’m hoping to push you a little into a more
specific interaction with this “anxiety” …)</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">NP: Anxiety is this omnipresent cloud over
everything anyone does I think! It can and does tip over all the time into
fatalism, or panic, or despair. It’s not surprising that poets would feel this
particularly acutely as poetry as a cultural form seemed to be peculiarly
marginalised in some ways, and thought not to have the strength to make much
impact outside of a few small camps who will be extremely moved by it -
although it’s clear that in Iran, for example, poetry is still highly
privileged as a mode of political, spiritual and literary communication and
whose effects are deemed to be worrisome by the authorities. At the same time,
it won’t do to imagine cultural forms are more subversive or relevant than they
actually are.</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">There are several kinds of anxieties at work
here it seems to me: the anxiety that what one is doing is of any value or
makes any difference, for starters; the anxiety that the entire mode or form of
production has value or is still historically relevant; and an anxiety about
how individual or collective production links up to broader questions of
political struggle, or how to tie being a poet, for example, in with being
someone engaged in political work (anti-police protest, for example, of which
we have seen a lot lately in London). I have many friends for whom the question
of whether they concentrate on their work or whether they spend their time
organising (alongside everyday economic questions) is a daily, practical dilemma.
Of course the ambition is for there to be no gap between the work and the
politics. But these moments are rare and utopian. But they do exist. </span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Another option is to see the negativity all the
way through to the end, to analyse and categorise it, to pin it down and to
work out whether there is anything to be done with hate, revenge, pessimism
etc. I’m also interested in this option, as are many others (see </span><a href="http://radicalnegativity.com/"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://radicalnegativity.com/</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">).</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">JBR: To change topic a
little: How does global warming play into your "communist horizon"?’</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">NP: I think this is a difficult question, though
one as relevant as ever with the news today that 95% of scientists are now
convinced that global warming is the direct result of human influence. I think
one of the problems we have politically is to try to conceive of nature in a
dialectical way: one obvious fantasy (perhaps a primitivist one) would be to
imagine the world in a pre-capitalist state, with sustenance farming, commons,
and so on, where humankind lives harmoniously with the environment. Of course this
is in many ways a wonderful image - and I have nothing but admiration for
people who live in this way, wherever possible. But I think too that
realistically you have to think about the planet as it has been constructed and
changed by capitalism, by pollution, man-made disasters like Fukushima and so
on. Obviously some of these things can be ‘cleaned-up’ and behaviour changed,
but it is clear that there is significant damage done to the planet at this
point: and the mismatch of scale between an individual recycling glass bottles
and companies dumping waste quantities of crap into the oceans is hard to
conceptualise. Futility or a kind of nostalgia for the future of the kind that
Herzog sometimes engages in - wouldn’t the world be better off when all the humans
are gone and nature can return to its true beauty/horror? - seems tempting
sometimes. Most contemporary cultural explorations of this idea of ruin begin
or end in apocalypse (think of <i>Children of Men</i> etc.), and it is a
tempting position, to romanticise the destructive ruins left by a ruinous
species, but again it depends upon a concept of nature that is somehow pure and
doesn’t include humans, as if we are not also a part of the nature that we have
betrayed, and in doing so, have betrayed ourselves.</span><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span><b><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">JBR: L</span></b><b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">et’s talk a little more about global warming
and a communist response to it. I see that you rule out two possible responses:
nostalgia for a golden age, and desire for our species’</span></b><b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> extinction. I am fine with that; neither seem
useful, both dodge the question of how humans are going to go on, and each is
just too romantic for words. I have seen the capitalist response: either
denial, and business as usual, or a reliance on geoengineering projects when
the going gets bad (or a combination of both: for example ExxonMobil funds a
great deal of denialism, AND is investing heavily in geoengineering – heads I
win; tails you lose). And, when I look back on prior attempts at communism,
e.g. the USSR and China, I find that each were dependent on the very same
technologies as capitalism, i.e., those that are killing the planet. So, while
it’s all very well to remember Marx’s “Men make their own history, but they do
not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances,
but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of
the living”, now it’s not just the tradition of the dead generations, it’s also
the CO2, etc. I don’t see that the communist (or any other truly left)
tradition has theorized this kind of thing well [this kind of thing = changing
the modes of production, the energy and other technologies upon which we
depend, at the same time as consolidating the revolution itself] (please tell
me that I’m wrong about this!). How does a communist think this crisis [the
crisis of capitalism AND energy technology] (it feels to me to be a crisis)
now? Or, perhaps better, how do you? </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">NP: I
think there is a very long tradition that relates to ideas of “the commons”
that precisely relates to this problem of capitalism and energy
technology/access to resources/sustainability. The work of the Midnight Notes
Collective (</span><a href="http://www.midnightnotes.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.midnightnotes.org/</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">) points to exactly this
kind of thinking. I don’t have much to add here except to say that every time I
read what they write I can’t help but agree with them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Nina goes on to add, “John:
I realise this isn’t a very satisfactory answer! Feel free to maybe cut this
response or maybe you could incorporate it back into the earlier question about
global warming?” Instead of cutting or incorporating I am going to leave this
as-is, to point to the fact that I believe that what I call just above “</span></b><b><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the crisis of capitalism AND energy technology”
<i>is</i> undertheorized, which is not to
take away from the work of those who are attempting to deal with it in the
least, it’s just to note that this crisis needs to be at the top of the agenda,
or perhaps the rest of the agenda will find itself irrelevant before too much
more time passes … Do I need to add that theorizing this (trying to <i>think it through</i>) is just a first tho<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8542387139750920641" name="_GoBack"></a> necessary step? Again, this is just my opinion …</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-20673656066078849942013-03-27T12:54:00.000-07:002013-03-27T12:54:02.071-07:00 Interview with Branton Shearer <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Tom Beckett: </span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">You’re a psychologist who has built a business on Howard
Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.
You’re also a friend of mine—a go to guy to play bad pool with—but when
I first became acquainted with you, you were an aspiring poet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So, where
did/does poetry begin for you and how does it relate to what you’re doing for a
living now?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Branton Shearer: </span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I suppose it is simplistic to say that words on the page
define a great swath of my reality. I
like writing because it slows down my appreciation for the meaning and impact
of individual and particular clusters of words.<br />
<br />
As I transitioned into the role of psychologist from that of a poet I
unconsciously found myself attracted to psychological theories and activities
that were 'word focused.'<br />
<br />
During therapy one listens to the other person's reality as it is captured in
words and perhaps how the person is likewise 'captured' by those very words.
Can changing our words change our reality -- for the better? I could
probably think of a lot of examples to support this but let me illustrate with
the simple semantic shift that I've shared around the world and that has
sustained me in my work for nearly 30 years.<br />
An IQ-based view of intelligence asks, "How smart are
you?" but a multiple intelligences perspective asks, "<i>How</i> are you smart?"<br />
The first implies one ladder of smartness while the latter assumes that there
are numerous ladders.<br />
This subtle shift can have dramatic consequences for someone who
has always been negatively labeled with “not smart” "low IQ" -
"not college material" - "dull" or - horrors! "merely
average". These labels are gross over simplifications and may completely
neglect, denigrate or demean a person's true "intellectual potential".
I know that this semantic shift can be very good news for anyone for has
been negatively compared to a sibling, i.e., "<i>Ah, she has a nice personality but she's just not as smart as her
brother</i>." This person's keen interpersonal intelligence may go
unrecognized and undeveloped in the shadow of her "smart brother".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">TB:
</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Do you have a
theory of the Self?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">BS:</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> I notice that you capitalized the word Self. Does
that imply that there is higher Self as well as a lower self? Or perhaps many selves….Years ago I was
attracted to the idea that we are each made up of many different voices of
sub-personalities. Like that commonplace experience of hearing your father’s
(or mother’s) voice coming out of your mouth, when you least expect it. I
suspect that I envision that we are composites of all the different voice
influences encoded in our brain neurons. Some voices ring louder in our ears
than others over the years. Each sub-personality serves us – for better or
worse – in different ways. Are we more than the sum of these voice parts woven
into a higher Self? Perhaps. That’s a
bit too abstract for me and my daily purposes. I’m satisfied knowing that there
is some voice that keeps my fingers pecking out words in some sort of meaningful
order on this cold keyboard. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">TB:
</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If I recall
correctly, the trajectory of your career so far has been tripartite in
nature. You began by working with
patients who had suffered brain injuries.
In the next phase you did therapy with individuals. And for the larger part of your career you
have been working on ways to assess how individuals learn. Could you speak to your work experience and
your sense of how you’ve arrived at the point you are at today?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">BS:</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> You've skipped over my earlier stints as roustabout
on oil rigs and three miserable years as an apprentice carpenter where I
learned the basics of building things. I continue to build things today but
instead use materials and tools that I'm more adept with - words, ideas and
people rather than wood, blueprints and sledge hammers. These days I labor mostly with teachers,
principals and students as we strive to redesign how learning takes place in
classrooms and beyond. I use my carpentry knowledge often as a metaphor for
this effort. In my fantasies I am the Frank Lloyd Wright of learning, except
that I want my structures to be more liveable and easier to maintain. Hard to
balance elegance with practicality, eh?
I strive to help teachers (and people-in-general!) to see beyond their
conventional expectations of what it means to be smart and how best to learn. I
have to paint word pictures to get people to move out of their square box homes
and to see the potential in the neglected, ignored or denigrated aspects of
their abilities. For example, I have
found that students who are strong in the Kinesthetic and Naturalist and
Spatial thinking abilities can struggle in the classroom. Academic tasks are
difficult for them so the challenge is to construct learning activities that
embed academic content into their particular thinking strengths. We usually
don't mix these things together. P.E. is only for physical games and math is
for logical thinking. This is wrong headed. Real life is much more of a mixture
of various abilities that allows for multiple entry points. If we force people
to focus on their weaknesses in order to drive the round peg into the square
hole then we inflict harm upon many people. This doesn't apply only to children
in school. We're attempting to make similar shifts in thinking on the job. I
think that too much of work is awful because of a mismatch between person -
position. We choose our careers and jobs for all the wrong reasons. See above
my misguided efforts to become a carpenter! But, I learned stuff from pounding
my head and thumbs one too many times. I stumbled down many blind alleys before
I found the path that promised to make the best use of my own particular
cognitive strengths. Not everyone gets this opportunity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">TB:
</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Did you have
an “aha” moment of epiphany?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">BS</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">: Actually, I did. I can clearly remember it.....I had
watched a TV news report that interviewed a psychologist who started a school
in Massachusetts for kids with learning disabilities. There was something about
hearing him during the interview that really struck me as being important. A
while later, I was drinking a beer on my front porch on my Ram Island home
(where I was charged with remodeling a ramshackle house as an outdoor
environmental education center -- thumb pounding daily) and I had this vision
of completing my BA in education / psychology and then going on for my
doctorate. It is a little hard to believe today because at the time I had only
completed 1 year of my undergraduate degree and I was a poor, married,
carpenter poet living in a house without running water and an outhouse. But there
it was....and it had to be done. The vision was realized about 8 years later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">TB:
</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Talk about those 8 years and what was going on
with you, how you were evolving personally. At what point did you become
exposed to Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences? At Harvard?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">BS:</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Ah, so it is a story you want to hear, eh? Get comfortable, my friend… My life
changed on a rain soaked Saturday in Brattleboro Vermont while visiting with
friends. Bill is a folk musician who had recently graduated with his teaching
degree from the Lesley College Adult Degree Option (ADO) independent study
program. Instead of sight-seeing we spent the whole rainy day talking about his
program and how he worked full time while completing his bachelor's degree. I
immediately knew that's what I wanted / needed to do.<br />
For the next 2 years wife Beth and I lived on Ram Island
commuting by boat (Limping Dog) while I studied independently towards a degree
in education and psychology.<br />
It was there that I wrote poems such as this.....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> <b>With
the Dusk<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I did not come to
Bass Rocks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">on this Gloucester
cape<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">in fog<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">to catch the sun <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">nor bob my head in
the tide <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">cold and recoiling.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I lie on my back on
granite <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">that juts into the
mist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Twin Lighthouses to
the left, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">a loose crew of gulls
– we <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">are the only ones<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> on this cusp<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> to call our names <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> against the constant waves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Silent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">are thumbnail
crabs, sea urchins <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">& barnacles,
the dim<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">lights of fishermen<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">drawing nets <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> through the mist<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">as smoke<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">twists a black
scarf<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> around cold throats. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I did not come<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">to these Atlantic
rocks <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">to carry on<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">with the task<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> of a day’s catch. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I came to coil my
nets, reel in<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">the lines<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">& be content<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">to scan the grey
blue arc<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">between <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">while a distant
seam in my world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> is unraveling in this<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> near silence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><br />
</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br />
During this time living in the salt marsh surrounded by clam flats egrets great
blue herons and biting green head flies and the regular rise and fall of the
tides my BREAKWALL BOOK of poems was edited and published by friend Major
Ragain.<br />
<br />
I found it easy to slip from writing poems and letters into writing in response
to my academic readings. It was a great way to process my new learning.
I'd work half a day on island projects and then settle down for a solid 4 hours
of school work. I used a manual typewriter and had to be finished by dark
because it was difficult to read by kerosene oil lamp light. Our days
started before sun up and ended with the coming of night.<br />
<br />
Speaking of writing, while words flowed naturally for me I found that my
mechanics were flawed. Much work was needed to bring them up to snuff. I was
all set to graduate and get on with my life when I was advised to stay one more
term to work on my prose skills. I balked at this and my committee allowed me
to graduate. This might have been an error. It took me many years of slaving
over my prose to figure out how to write a proper academic paper. Numerous
papers were rejected for publication because of their atrocious writing.
Years of writing poetry did not prepare me to follow the rules of
academic (or even simply standard) prose conventions. Even today after writing
somewhere around 10 books of prose I'm still sometimes baffled by commas and
clauses.....<br />
<br />
I managed to get my B.A. degree in 2 years because the school awarded me one
year of college credit for my "life experience". To get this credit
I spent 6 months creating a thick binder documenting my cross country travels,
exotic work history (on paddle wheel river boats and such) and poetry
involvements. I think they called this "American Studies."<br />
<br />
After graduation I was desperate to move home to Ohio so my 1 year old son,
Dylan, could grow up with his grandparents in his life. I applied to
several graduate schools in Ohio and to Harvard. Well, Kent State rejected me
but Harvard accepted me so I HAD to go to Harvard. This was a good thing
because both of my main advisors at ADO got their Ph.D.s at Harvard so they
brainwashed me with developmental psychology theory. Harvard Grad. School of
Education being the home of world renowned developmental psychologists.<br />
<br />
I LOVED my time at Harvard even though I worked harder than I think I had ever
worked in my life. Even harder than my 12 hour days on the oil rigs stacking
100 pound sacks of chemical mud off barges onto the rig deck. In fact, one time
we worked 24 hours straight after an accident....but, my studies at Harvard
were equally relentless but much more enjoyable. <br />
<br />
Oh, I learned of multiple intelligences theory as an undergraduate and was
happy to be going to Harvard where Howard Gardner was teaching except that the
year I was there he just happened to be on sabbatical, so...no, I never had the
pleasure of taking a course with him. But, to my great good fortune, he has
been a steady correspondent ever since 1986 when I informed him of my efforts
to create a mulitple intelligences assessment. <br />
<br />
Six days after an amazing Harvard graduation Beth and I packed our belongings
into a UHaul truck and hit the road for Ohio. We had borrowed money from her
parents to buy a run down Amish house (sans indoor bath, furnace and with only a
little electricity) and 10 acres. All our neighbors were Amish and deposited
quarters in a coffee can to use the phone in our barn.<br />
((An interesting existential
aside…while driving the loaded UHaul on country road with Dylan in his car seat
beside me, we almost died. A fist-sized rock shot through and shattered the
side window landing on the seat between Dylan and I. A brush hog mowing the
weeds along the roadside lopped off the top of a rock and sent it flying
through the driver’s side window. I thought it was a gunshot until I saw the
rock lying on the seat. We arrived in at our country home in Middlefield with
tear stained faces….))<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br />
During this time, I wrote a few pieces like this....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> <b>First
Cutting<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Hay,
hay, hay. Heave-ho. Heave-ho-hay. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Hot day with the
itch<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Of hay bales hefted
high. Up lifted <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Heave-ho-hay. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Sun hot mow air<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Thick dust and
chaff scratch. Make work <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Some fun, poke
holes <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">With a word that
turns and winks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Blink. Leap up and have-ho. Shove hard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Bare hands as
baling twine burns lines<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In soft palms.
Straw hatted<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Father, brother,
neighbor, friend<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Drive a wagon
creaking on. Hay-yea.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Ho-yea-heave-ho. Hot horses plod and stamp<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Huge hooves on hard
earth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Ho -- back
-- Ho. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Heft up a warm bale
and stack’em high <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">As the wagon tilts
down <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Around the bend and
lurches up<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The short path to
farm barn. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Hay home.
Hay home. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">No hum drum drowsy
days <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But turn and learn
how hay is cut—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Raked, baled and
heave-ho. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Stacked on edge,
cut side up<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In hot air to hay
mow - slow fun - sweet bale<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Work tough as words
fresh sound<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">And turn our face
to catch a breeze<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Through the
hatch. Bearded brother, father neighbor,
friend<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Lend rough hands –
soft punch<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Up the mow – Heave
Ho! - Sun low<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">We turn and go <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">‘til next cutting
comes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Rain willing - sun up
- sky high – HAY! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><br />
</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br />
It was tough to find a job as a master's level counselor in Amish country.
After 3 months of hard job searching, home improvement, fence building (for
Beth's horses) and farm life I landed a position as a psychology assistant at
Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital counseling people recovering from illness and
accidents. I was assigned to the brain trauma unit where I had to devise
a crash course in cognitive remediation because I was completely ignorant.
And overwhelmed.<br />
<br />
I would sit stunned with quadriplegics, young men just emerging from a coma and
stroke victims wondering what I in the hell I could offer them...<br />
I was soon trained to administer a 6 hour battery of neuropsychological tests
so I could describe in great detail what was WRONG with the person's brain
functioning but I really couldn't tell you what was working well. I knew something
was missing, especially when no one paid a bit of attention to my carefully
written reports that I sweated bullets over. It was frustrating. I wanted
my work to contribute something meaningful to the person's rehabilitation
program but no one on the team seemed to pay much attention. Something was
missing from this picture.<br />
<br />
In my reading of the cognitive rehabilitation literature I learned that it was
important to estimate the patient's "premorbid intelligence," e.g,
how smart they were before their injury. This was supposed to help you know how
to conduct therapy and how much cognitive function was lost (and to what status
they might hope to return to). To make a very long story a little bit
shorter, I was showering one morning before work and it dawned on me what I
needed to become a useful member of the treatment team. I needed an
understanding of the person's multiple intelligences profile prior to their
injury. This would tell me their
strengths as well as weaknesses that could be used in the design of strength-based
therapeutic activities (that should be more motivating for the patient). How to
obtain this information was the problem.<br />
Quite suddenly I realized that I needed to devise a structured
interview that could be conducted with a family member who knew the person well
prior to injury. Thus was born the Multiple Intelligences Developmental
Assessment Scales (MIDAS) in 1986.<br />
<br />
TMI yet? We can now connect back to writing poetry....<br />
<br />
Creating the MIDAS has proven to be my life's work that makes deep use of two
of my strengths - words and people. I was once told by a neuropsychologist that
I have a unique way of "feeling into how people think". And on
occasion I'm told that I've written a good poem. Both require close attention
to details. Writing questions for the MIDAS questionnaire (and reports) is easy
for me -- small words in short sentences.<br />
Interesting story..... After writing the first version of the
MIDAS questionnaire in collaboration with 2 psychologists and a speech pathologist,
I was astonished to learn that it was written at the college reading level! Not
good, if it was to be used with adults with a high school education or less.
And many brain trauma patients are dare devil teenage boys who are not
necessarily academic stars.<br />
My solution became a fascinating journey into words and
their meaning. I started interviewing people with less than a high school
education; most from the hospital's substance abuse treatment program.
The person would read the question aloud and I would in turn read aloud
the response choices. I would listen where the person stumbled on the words
then ask, "<i>What does that mean to
you? How else could you ask that? What words would you use to ask about that?</i>"
After a series of these interviews I completely rewrote the 120 questions to
simplify and shorten them. It was a fun challenge to translate abstract ideas
into everyday language while retaining the nuance and subtlety associated with
specific skills and abilities. <br />
THEN I recruited hundreds of people with various education levels
to complete the questionnaire so I could statistically evaluate the questions
in relationship with other questions pertaining to that particular
intelligence. Whew. As I like to say, Fun with numbers! This is where
poetry and psychology come together.....a single word can alter meaning. Go
figure. Poets have known that forever, eh? It still strikes me sometimes
how deaf psychologists are to words and how dead their language is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">TB:</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> To what do you
attribute that deafness on the part of your fellow psychologists?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">BS:
</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> An analogy might be helpful. Words are instruments. Psychologists fancy
themselves as doctors who use words to do things like a doctor uses a stethoscope
or perhaps an X-ray machine that describes a broken bone. I used to have a
supervising psychologist who joked that writing psychological reports was the
“lowest form of literature.” For poets,
words are also <i>instruments</i> but more
like a flute through which blows the music that is their life’s breath. Does that make sense? Another analogy is painting. A house painter
brushes color on the wall. A painter uses color to create a portrait of a house
infused with his spirit / imagination. So, anyway…the psychologist applies the
words to the surface while the poet infuses words with life. Or..something like
that! </span><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">J</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">TB: </span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">You
have the distinction of being the first person I’ve interviewed who has
inserted a smiley face at the end of a sentence. I hope this doesn’t signal the beginning of a
trend.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Final question. What gets you going? What keeps you motivated to do what you do?<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b>BS:</b> What keeps me going? (Besides
being the first to insert emoticons into a “serious interview”? hee, hee….I do like to cross boundaries and
stretch the rules…. )<br />
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Words are like little magic mirrors that
I like to play with bouncing light shards all around the room. They allow
me to reflect on present experience and - if the light is just right - peer through
a keyhole into the future that I hadn’t seen before.<br />
<br />
The small thrill of discovering something new are the fireworks that brighten
grey mornings, dreary afternoons and dark nights for me. The challenge is to
capture these fleeting flashes of light and then share them with others. Or -
even better - show others how to ignite their own fireworks displays. Seeing
the glow in their faces as they realize their own personal spark is the other
source of joy that keeps me trudging forward when the going is thick, murky and
slow.<br />
<br />
Yes, it has been a long march through the proverbial thick and thin - good
times and bad - since I left home at 18. I've tried to keep my wits about
me and learn things during both the good and bad stretches. The highs have
indeed been high and the lows quite low. If I can live through them fully
and keep my head up then it is another good day! I don't always achieve
it but if I keep returning my attention to those little magic mirrors then
something good is bound to come of it. <br />
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">That’s what keeps me going. <br />
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Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-54386239261386877312012-11-01T03:05:00.000-07:002012-11-02T08:50:04.410-07:00 Questions for Sonny Rae Tempest by Maria Damon<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What is your background in terms of artistic or mathematical or any
kind of formal training?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Unfortunately,
I do not have any formal artistic training beyond books that I’ve read. I do,
however, have a long history of mathematical training. The Bachelors degrees
that I have (Meteorology; Nuclear Engineering Technology) as well as the Naval
training that I’ve been through (nuclear reactor chemistry engineer; pilot)
focused strongly on math in all aspects. I don’t find that I use this knowledge
much in my work, if at all really (at least for now). Actually, the training
that has helped most in my work occurred in the computer camps that I attended
as a kid. In the early 80s, I was able to experiment with LOGO on the Commodore
64, which in turn gave me the confidence to learn BASIC and to create games at
home. Sadly, once I entered high school, this type of creation fell by the
wayside, as the guitar became my sole creative outlet. While the chicks dug it,
I was an incredibly mediocre guitar player. I promptly stopped playing after
graduating. It wasn’t until a few years ago when I moved to Louisville that I
began creating works on the computer again. It turns out, those computer camps
helped shaped the way I think (in discrete, logical steps) that made it easy to
pick up modern computer languages that have evolved from BASIC. Don’t get me
wrong; I’m not a strong coder. Aside from Assembly language, which I needed to
thoroughly teach myself in order to make my Atari game poem triptych <i>Monday</i>, I have a very superficial knowledge of the languages
in which I most often work (python, javascript, html). I only know enough to
piece together code from online how-to’s, and shape them to suit my needs.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What is the role of amateurism in your practice?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">None
of the work that I create is intended to make a profit. If I were worried about
perfection and marketability, nothing would get finished, and they certainly
would not see the light of day. There are very few pieces that I’ve spent
considerable time on, enough to call “professional” work, which would <i>Monday</i> (almost 2 solid years of my life devoted to that),
and my larger x-stitch pieces (you know firsthand how long that takes). Most of
what I create is done so through my Moment Art practice, which came about as a
reaction to <i>The Artist’s Way</i> morning pages. I’m sure
you’re already familiar with <i>The Artist’s Way</i>,
but if not, the morning pages are a method of writing to maintain creative
momentum, in the form of stream of consciousness, diary-like writing, to be
accomplished each morning. According to the author, these daily exercises are
to be kept in a notebook and stored away, never again to see the light of day.
I did not like this idea. Instead, I came up with the concept of Moment Art,
where one spends a minimal amount of time during each day making <i>some</i>thing creative, be it art, poetry, or whatever. Once the
Moment is finished, it must be released into the world, freely available to all
to see. For me, this usually means posting it to some social network, but could
very well include sending it as a message in a bottle. The point is to give
birth to these works and then set them free into the world, instead of locking
them in a drawer. I find this method perfect for those like me who spend most
of my waking hours at work, where the time to make elaborate pieces simply does
not exist. As a result, much of the work that I create is left unpolished, so
that it actually will be seen and enjoyed, instead of sitting somewhere waiting
for me to “finish” it properly.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Now
don’t get me wrong; I <i>do</i> spend a
large portion of each day thinking about one or another creative project. I am
fortunate enough to have a job that does not require a lot of brainwork, so
while execution time is limited, each piece is usually in a mostly-finished
form mentally before I even begin creating it physically. For the UnderAcademy
classes, each assignment was conceived and developed over the course of a day-a
week on a forklift at a trade show (just an example), and produced at night
when I found the time. Would I like to spend more time polishing all these
pieces to perfection? Absolutely. Unfortunately, my time is limited and my
ideas are numerous (and I’m totally addicted to a sense of accomplishment), so
only a select few things receive that time and attention that they deserve. At
the moment, this includes a chapbook of poetry, and an upcoming UAC class that
I’m excited to have the opportunity to teach.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">How did you find your way to Underacademy College? You mentioned that
it was through following Chris Funkhouser on Twitter, and that it was his books
that in turn drew you to that. How did
you find his books and what area of your own interest does it most overlap
with? The historical? The merging of visual, digital and literary/poetic?<br />
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">It
is also through Twitter that I discovered <a href="http://cordite.org.au/features/picture-becomes-text-becomes-writing">Chris Funkhouser</a>. Somebody (can’t
remember who) retweeted his new book <i>New Direction in Digital
Poetry</i>, right at the moment when I was delving deeper into the e-lit
community, discovering a host of ways to compose poetry/art that I hadn’t
before considered. I bought a copy of his first book (<i>Prehistoric
Digital Poetry</i>) in order to learn more about what I was doing, and
what had already been done in the field of digital poetics (which is what I’m
most interested in). I am a huge proponent of learning the history of what I’m
doing, so that I not only have a deeper appreciation for what’s being created
today, but also to map out methods that have yet to be addressed/created. I am
very much interested in trailblazing, so it helps to have a map of the known
world at hand.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What is poetry to you?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve
tried and tried over the years to address this question, to no avail. The best
thing I can say is that <i>poetry is any expression
that is made with poetic intent</i>. To me, this can mean a host of
things. If you look through all the work I’ve created under the moniker
“poetry,” you’ll see an array of completely different projects. These run from
traditional text to static paintings to generative code to games, and all exist
in a variety of media. Even though I call myself a poet, very little of my work
consists of text only.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">How do you define your practice(s)? How do you integrate these
practices into your daily life (worklife, family life, affective life,
spiritual life): do you experience this process as disjunctive or harmonious? <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">As
mentioned, most of what I create is done so through the Moment Art process.
This process integrates wonderfully into my work life (keeps my mind occupied
when it would otherwise be drooling on itself), and as a result many of my
processes are expressions of my feeling toward my work.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Family
life can be hectic, especially with five children. We are all a creative tribe,
but since a lot of the work I do is at the computer, it can be anti-social and
not conducive to quality family time. It is usually late at night after
everyone is in bed that I have the chance to truly sit down with my work and
move it forward.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">As
a whole, this process <i>is</i> my spiritual
life.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Tell me by way of a biographical sketch how you got started in the kind
of creative production you do for your Underacademy College work, your x-stitching,
etc., and how you have evolved to the present?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">As
mentioned, the work I do for UAC is the result of my Moment Art practice. Cross
stitching, however, began when I was very young. My mother and grandmother are
incredibly crafty people, and raised me to be in a constant state of creation.
Among many of the things they did was cross stitch. At the time, I was very
much into my Nintendo, and realized that the pixels on the screen translated
perfectly to a cross stitch pattern. Instead of making hand-stitched Marios and
Zeldas and Metroids for me, my mother taught me how to do it myself. I began
with simple sprite stitching, but quickly found that I could make <i>anything</i> that I saw on the computer into a cross stitch
pattern (back then, I was hand-drawing images pixel by pixel on an old Tandy
1000 computer, mostly album covers). I was not very interested in traditional
cross stitch patterns of cats or farms or samplers, but to a young boy, the
idea that I could stitch Mario onto my backpack was the coolest thing ever.
Again, though, once I got into high school, the quest for popularity squashed
my interested in crafts. It wasn’t until many years later (2006, I believe)
that I began spending more and more time with my grandmother and got back into
cross stitching as something to keep the hands occupied while chatting. Most of
what I stitch still revolves around my love of classic video games, though I
have done some portrait work as well, since now, 20-30 years later, modern
computers allow for simple one-click conversion of an image into a pattern. I’m
not sure how many more 200-colour, 200x200 pixel projects I’ll do in the
future; I’ve done a few, and they’ve eaten up months of my life. I have been
considering how to use cross stitch poetically since Eric Snodgrass’ Nō Code
class at UAC, where I experimented with stitch patterns as a way to represent
digital code in a non-digital form. I am very much interested in seeing where
this goes.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Do you ever collaborate? If so,
can you describe the process and practice?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I
have yet to collaborate on a large project. My experience with collaboration on
a creative work has gone no further than 2 painters 1 canvas.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Did
you have a “poetics” or an “aesthetics” for your artworks beforehand? Do you
have one now? Does it matter? or is there a better question for getting at what
satisfies you in a work or how you understand the underlying principles of your
endeavors?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I
don’t usually begin with a certain aesthetic in mind. For my larger projects, I
try to do is to use/create an aesthetic that relevantly matches the theme of my
poetic expression. Everything else is usually just a sketch, where the
aesthetic is far less important than the message. Most of what I do is play. I
enjoy the process of creating my pieces far more than I enjoy the product.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What do you DO with the visual work? where is it kept–the x-stitches,
for example? do you give it away? keep it? Is there any “bibliography” of its
circulation? What would be some ideal ways of circulating it, if you wanted to
do more. Do you document the items in
any way?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Most
of my cross stitch pieces are gifted. Otherwise, they’re rolled up and put in a
drawer. As I mentioned, it’s the creative process that I appreciate most. My
Moments are typically uploaded to whatever social network site I’m currently
using. Any of my larger or more serious works are posted on my <a href="http://www.sonnyrae.com/">blog</a>, freely
available. There is a limited collection of my work on my website, though I am
working on gathering everything for a more “professional” website. If I have
spent considerable time on a project, I will write a blog post or a post-mortem
about the process, which is as extensive as documentation gets. When a work is
finished, I try to make it available as soon as I can, because I will likely
begin another piece immediately, and forget about the one just completed. I’m
running into the problem now where the more I create, the more daunting a
creation of this collective website becomes. I have so many things that need to
be moved from my folders into the world.</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Under what
circumstances do you make your art? (do you even call it “art”? What do you
call it?) Late at night? With music on? At the computer? Spread out on the
floor of a room in your home? What
prompts a piece: an assignment? a conversation? a nagging feeling that something
must be done? a shape, color or word in your mind's eye? A recognition of
relationships (numbers to letters or colors)? All at once in one go or over the
course of a few weeks, months, etc.? Is there "revision"?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">As I said,
the bulk of my work is mentally processed while I’m at work, and completed at
night while everyone in the house is asleep. I could be at the computer or in
my basement studio, generally with either soft music or silence. I find it hard
to remain focused on production if there’s anything going on around me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Anything could
prompt a piece, though most times it relates to my family or work. Chances are,
I will try to get the idea completed as soon as possible, usually within a day
or so. Otherwise, I may sit with an idea for weeks or months before I attempt a
go at it, during which I will mentally revise throughout the day, day after
day, until I drive myself, and everyone around me, absolutely crazy. There are
times where I may go an entire day without speaking, simply because I’m
hyper-focused on a certain piece. These are the times when physical revision is
minimal, since the work is more or less “completed” before it’s even started.
Other times, I may jot down some ideas in my notepad (which I carry everywhere,
and at all times), which I can use to fall back on when I’m creatively fallow.
In this notepad, there can be a single sentence, pages of the same thought, or
lines upon lines of crossed out and rewritten words that later become something
more concrete and meaningful. Once a piece is completed and released into the world,
there is rarely any further revision. But then there are times, especially when
I’m working on longer textual works, that I may go through dozens of printed
drafts before I consider the work finished.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Much of your
work could be described as translation. Do you understand it as such? What does
that mean to you, if anything? </span></span>What’s the thread of continuity,
the “thru-line” in all your work? Is it code and coding?
Transposition/translation from one form of systematicity to another?</i><i><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It’s like a
wave riding onto shore. The beach becomes inundated. Things begin to move. The
water recedes, and there is a moment when a swath of wetted sand teems with
bubbles and mollusks. It is this disturbance of baked beach and brackish water
that I find so fascinating, the ephemeral instability caused by hybridization
in a holistically stable system.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Code is just
a language I use to express a thing that English has no word for.</span></span></div>
Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-18340901270849495022012-07-02T07:19:00.000-07:002012-07-02T07:56:45.669-07:00EXCHANGE ABOUT LAKSHMI BANDLAMUDI’S DIALOGICS OF SELF, THE MAHABHARATA AND CULTURE: THE HISTORY OF UNDERSTANDING AND UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY (New York and London: Anthem Press, 2010) by Thomas Fink<br />
<b>Thomas Fink:</b> One main premise in Dialogics of Self for the investigation of Indian-Americans’ responses to the great Indian epic <i>The Mahabharata</i> and especially to its televised 1989 refashioning by the Indian filmmaker B.R. Chopra is the epic’s openness to so many different ethical, philosophical, and psychological perspectives, and this makes the participants’ interpretive discussions especially amenable to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of Dialogism. You indicate that “while <i>Ramayana</i> . . . clearly stipulates the “ideal” to be achieved, <i>The Mahabharata</i> is . . . an intricate labyrinth of history of ideas that highlights irony at every point” (107). Does <i>The Mahabharata</i> (prior to Chopra’s version, of course) oppose a monologism in ancient Hindu Indian culture(s), perhaps exemplified by <i>Ramayana</i>, or does it bring out the true dialogism that is always already present in the ancient culture?<br />
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<b>Lakshmi Bandlamudi:</b> A very interesting multi-layered question. First, let us talk about the necessary conditions for a dialogue – there must be openness on the part of the individuals, a willingness to engage with competing ethical and philosophical dimensions and even place themselves in the midst of these conflicts, so that they may realize something about themselves in culture and history. Second, the text must be open-ended to invite dialogue and thirdly, cultural conditions must allow for the dialogue to emerge. Self-Consciousness may be very dialogic, but if the text is closed and rigid, the range of possible meanings is limited. Both the self and the text may be open, but if the cultural conditions are unfavorable (as in authoritarian regimes), then, dialogue may not be possible. The title of the book – <i>Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata and Culture</i> reflects this necessary triadic relationship. <br />
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When you are studying Indian-Americans, they are in a unique position (as with any immigrant group) of experiencing the ‘enigma of arrival’ – where all the hidden cultural codes become visible and are forced to question selfhood, their cultural baggage and their histories. This feeling of displacement creates a unique opportunity to enter into a dialogue with different cultures, which could lead to creative understanding of self/culture/history. What was evident in my study was that the vast majority does not respond to this dialogic potential; instead, they either shun what they perceive to be ancient/Indian or romanticize the past and the culture. The expressions ‘back then’ and ‘back there’ are either glorified or vilified making any engagement with a familiar epic monologic.<br />
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Now, let us discuss about the text and its history. In general, the hermeneutic tradition in India was never preoccupied with preserving the authenticity and originality of texts, but instead, celebrated the ever-evolving living traditions of epic texts. Furthermore, when these texts are orally transmitted, the storyteller is always preoccupied with many truths – the psychological, social and the dramatic and hence resorts to all sorts of persuasive tactics to beckon the listener. The transition from oral to textual in numerous languages in India adds more layers to this complex phenomenon. Therefore, there is a built-in atavism to any version of the text. The dialogic potential is already present in the various versions of the text. Therefore, the ‘surplus of meanings’ about the text is always floating around in the cultural atmosphere and it is up to the reader to select a few and construct meanings. In the constructive process the ontological and the epistemic choices made by the reader become visible.<br />
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The epic <i>Ramayana</i> is <i>Kavya</i> – poem, while <i>The Mahabharata</i> is <i>Itihas</i> – history of ideas. The former preaches about the ideal to be achieved, and hence the Godhead Vishnu incarnates as a human being and sets an example for the subjects to emulate, whereas, <i>The Mahabharata</i> exposes the very process of ‘idealization’ and hence nothing is absolute and final. This does not mean that <i>Ramayana</i> cannot be dialogized, but the scope is greater in <i>The Mahabharata</i>, since the reader is faced with bewildering complexities. While <i>The Ramayana</i> commands devotion, <i>The Mahabharata</i> demands dialogue.<br />
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<b>TF:</b> Whereas Draupadi, a major female character in <i>The Mahabharata</i> whom we’ll discuss next, seems to invite dialogue, the male character Karna doesn’t. All of your interviewees—whether their perspective is feminist, patriarchal, or somewhere in between—indicate “unconditional respect, sympathy and admiration” for Karna, the “tragic hero, who has been abandoned by his mother, ostracized by the society, betrayed by teacher and tricked by gods…” (154). Does this result suggest that, even in the very dialogic situation of this epic, consensus is possible? Or, in your view, are all the interpreters missing (or even resisting) the possibility of finding a negative aspect of an otherwise respectable character and blameless victim?<br />
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<b>LB:</b> Any encounter with Draupadi – both within the epic text and in the literary history – has enormous potential for dialogue, but this potential is rarely realized because of the tendency to refract her character through the prism of patriarchy. Therefore, more than dialogue, Draupadi invites strong response and controversy. While passions run high in dealing with Draupadi, Karna invites tender sympathy, only because in every important relationship he faces betrayal for no fault of his. Draupadi is a woman of extraordinary beauty with a fiery temperament and so for men she is both the temptation and the terror. And so, when viewed through the patriarchal lens, Draupadi’s pugnacious nature is seen as the root cause of her woes. Interestingly, both Draupadi and Karna seek the battlefield to avenge the insults hurled on them, but Draupadi’s actions are seen as bloodthirsty and vengeful, while Karna is spared of such characterization. Seeking the battlefield is seen as a natural and justified response when a valorous hero is insulted. Whereas, when Draupadi’s asks pointed questions, all the wise men assembled in the court of Hastinapur not only fail to answer her, but questioned her audacity to question and most of my respondents also joined the patriarchal/masculanist chorus. Therefore, Draupadi is a palimpsest and a contradiction bearing all the marks of gendered history. She is the site for affirming and challenging the ideologies of patriarchy. Although Karna is a noble character and has numerous redeeming qualities, he joins hands with evil forces out of sheer loyalty and even instigates and partakes in their nefarious activities, and yet, he doesn’t receive the same degree of condemnation as the heroine. In a dialogic reading, one recognizes the temperament of a character, their unique role in a plot, their past experiences in the story and their situational trappings to give a multi-dimensional and multi-layered interpretation. The characters are located in a broader episteme to reflect on uneasy issues of caste, class and gender in our chequered history.<br />
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Therefore, to your question on the possibility of consensus even in a very dialogic situation, the answer is of course yes. Remember centripetal and centrifugal forces are inherent in a dialogue and hence voices do adhere. For that matter it wouldn’t be a dialogue if it were a collection of disparate and disconnected opinions. There must be points of convergence and divergence in a healthy dialogue.<br />
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<b>TF:</b> Perhaps you were constrained by your position as researcher/facilitator from entering the dialogue on Draupadi as much more than a questioner. What “multi-dimensional and multi-layered interpretation” of Draupadi would you like to provide that you might not have been able to present in the book?<br />
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<b>LB:</b> In the long literary history of India, Draupadi remains unparalleled in personifying womanhood in its wholesomeness and uniqueness, with all its glory, horror, retaliation and resilience. Her complex and contradictory nature makes her versatile and she has stirred the imagination of many writers. She is an excellent literary device to write commentaries on nation, gender, caste and class. During the freedom struggle, a Tamil nationalist poet, Subramania Bharati wrote a classic piece based on the attempted public disrobing of Draupadi titled <i>Panchali Sabadam</i> – the Vow of Draupadi. In the very public humiliation of Draupadi, the poet saw the tribulations of Mother India, whose body has been invaded and stripped of dignity, while the rulers and enforcers of law and justice were either complicit or silent, and her custodians remained pathetically helpless. Bharati mobilized the nation to wake up and retaliate and gain inspiration from Draupadi who relied on her inner strength and strong convictions. In this piece the poet justifies Draupadi’s anger and the Nation’s rage over colonial rule and even deems it necessary to overcome self-pity and degeneration. In my view, any encounter with Draupadi is like entering a hall of mirrors, where we see ourselves <i>seeing</i> ourselves. Infinity is the reality in the play of mirrors – and in the reflecting reflections we see both the mirror and the subject – Draupadi and womanhood, inseparable in our journey from the immediate present to the remote past. <br />
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In one of the cantos in <i>The Mahabharata</i>, Draupadi herself presents the most persuasive argument on the ethical-philosophical dimensions of anger. She vociferously argues for the ‘ethic of rage and retaliation’ in response to Yudhishtir’s ‘ethic of restraint and forgiveness’ and I read the <i>Feminist Manifesto</i> in this debate/dialogue.<br />
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I am fascinated with Draupadi’s character, because long before women’s liberation philosophies were recorded, she loudly proclaimed that “Personal is Political” and hence challenged the kingdom about the legality of the transaction when she was pawned in the game of dice. In the court of Hastinapur nobody questioned when she was staked and nobody answered when she questioned, For that matter her question – did her husband lose himself before staking her or after – is a brilliant legal maneuver, because if the husband lost himself and if she is considered his possession, then she is lost along with him. But if the wife is an independent entity, how is the transaction valid if she was never consulted? This question remains unanswered to this day. Instead history has been clever, for it has been after all –‘his-story’ and not ‘her-story’ and so it has conveniently masked its inability to answer her question, by questioning her audacity to question and ascribing her character with subterranean and complex evaluations. She is both a victim of patriarchy and an irritant for patriarchy. I think to answer her question we need to go back to her – fight a good fight – and to use my earlier metaphor, when we enter the hall of mirrors, we see our reflection along with hers, and so we come in full circle – <i>from</i> Draupadi <i>to</i> Draupadi and between these two intervals we may discover new terms for gender relations.<br />
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<b>TF:</b> Did Draupadi feel that “rage and retaliation” was a strategic stage that would eventually allow women to gain equality with men in her society or a strategy for ongoing resistance in a never-ending conflict? (Separatism is a third option, but I don’t surmise that she would find this ideology satisfactory.) And which “new terms for gender relations” may we discover between the directional prepositions involving Draupadi?<br />
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<b>LB:</b> The epic <i>The Mahabharata</i> is about conflicts on many levels, and hence gender is not the only issue and therefore we could say that her legal maneuvering was a brilliant form of resistance and retaliation in a never-ending conflict. Now, how her strategy has been interpreted is an interesting issue and it says more about our contemporary conflicts than about the ancient past. As Gayatri Spivak has noted, I see Draupadi as an active ‘shuttle’ between the past and present and in this bi-directional movement we are constantly redefining gender relations. In our cultural life the nature of conflicts in class, caste, gender etc., are never static and the strategies shift and hence the shuttle does not necessarily explain everything about the gendered phenomena, but at best explains <i>how</i> and <i>why</i> the culture has produced some of these phenomena.<br />
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<b>TF: </b> From Bakhtin you derive (and in your assessment of the participants apply) the concept of seven kinds of selves: the Traveler, Biographer, “Clan” self, Seeker, Scriptural Self, Gendered Self, and Dialogic Self (92-3). You notice intriguing dialogic conflicts: “Interestingly, all the seekers are men, who insist on rational, scientific knowledge which they claim to be universal, and the gendered selves, who are all women, vociferously contest these claims,” which they say are held by “men with vested interests” (101). You speak of “the Traveler’s engagement” with the text as a “search for ‘authenticity’” (245) that, like the Seeker’s quest, is dehistoricized. The “rationalist” Seeker is after the replacement of ignorance by “Truth” (93), while the Traveler wants to enjoy and be moved by “fleeting impressions of the world” that s/he regards as “neutral” and “realistic” (92). I wonder, in a dialogic space involving <i>The Mahabharata</i> or not, whether transformations often occur. Might a Traveler ever get weary of the relative superficiality of his/her experience and “convert” to the seeker’s position or encounter an intense sense of gendered power relations and veer in the Gendered Self direction? Might a seeker ever reach such a mighty impasse that s/he experiences the limits of rationality and heads toward the Dialogic Self’s path? And can a Gendered Self, while retaining gender as a crucial category of experience/analysis, become fully dialogic in the sense that she acknowledges not only conceptions of gender change due to historical circumstances, as most influenced by recent feminist theory do, but also other categories that are vital and that, at times, may take precedence over gender?<br />
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<b>LB:</b> A very interesting and an important question. Transformations do occur in the interpretive act, either due to the pull of their reading partner or the plot. The movement towards dialogism was greatest in Plot III, where an attempt is made to disrobe Draupadi in public. The plot pulled the reader in multiple directions and hence it was difficult for them to exert complete authority over the text and determine its meanings. The dissonance was palpable in this plot, whereas the other plots involved more of affirmation and repudiation. Interestingly, the neutral, detached world of traveler was relatively more amenable to making entry into the dialogical world, than the absolute world of the biographer with a clear demarcation between right and wrong. Ideological idealism was far more obstinate than ideological realism. The objective/rational world of the seeker was slightly more malleable than the strict moralist world of the biographer. What was the influence of the reading partner? My study demonstrated that the dialogical readers were able to draw only few wavering subjects into a dialogue, whereas monologic readers were more successful in silencing the multiple voices of dialogic readers. Therefore, what is clear is that the monologic impulses are very strong. It is interesting to note that 50% of my subjects engaged in strict ‘Direct Unmediated Discourse,’ in reading all the plots, and only 8% were dialogic in all the plots and the rest occasionally moved towards multi-voiced reading depending on the plot. While the Scriptural, Gendered and Dialogic selves were interested in spreading layers of meaning, the single-voiced readers were busy scraping layer after layer only to negate other possible meanings or actually run away from the text or affirm their interpretive stance. The dialogic reader happily wanders in the semiosphere of the text and its immediate and remote surroundings only to discover a host of dormant meanings. That is why I am arguing that dialogic consciousness is rare and is a developmental achievement; it requires effort, courage and confidence in self to question our assumptions and transform.<br />
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The seeker is a classic Hegelian/Piagetian subject who is more interested in extracting a unified philosophical truth in the story. To them, the theatrical element of the story is just surface noise. For most part, they engaged in “uni-directional discourse” where extra-textual materials were used only to substantiate their already formed worldview. Remember, the seeker firmly believes that there is a deep down stable rational truth/philosophy in the text and it can be uncovered with objective methods. Hence their entry into the ‘vari-directional multi-voiced discourse’ is rare.<br />
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The gendered self is inherently dialogic to begin with, whether they retain gender as a central category of experience or not. In fact they seem fully capable of de-centering gender and treat it as one of the many stratifying factors in cultural life. For instance, when Draupadi dismisses the candidacy of Karna, the gendered selves are aware of the privileged position that the heroine enjoys at that moment. So you are quite right, at times other categories of class and caste may take precedence over gender.<br />
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<b>TF:</b> Using Giambattista Vico and Hayden White, you indicate how four master tropes are situated in discourse and how “the transition from one rhetorical trope to another… or the stagnation at one trope, signifies human and cultural consciousness” (33). Chez Vico, “the transition from a primal metaphorical world to a metonymic world leads to from a theocratic to an aristocratic world,” whereas “the movement from metonymy to synecdoche… represents the transition from aristocratic to democratic worldview, where wholes are constructed from parts” (255), and then, “as one moves from the world of heroes to the world of humans,… “individuals”—I take it, within democracy—“recognize their power and their limitations and, thus irony” (256) becomes the major trope.<br />
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I agree that irony is a vital trope for the realization of dialogism, especially in its connection with “parodistic discourse” and “hidden polemic” within “double-voiced discourse.” In American literary criticism in the seventies and eighties, one can look at dialogues among Stanley Fish, Wayne Booth, and others who tease out the distinctions between stable and unstable irony. For Booth, the former is readable as an attitude in opposition to a particular literal perspective, whereas the position or attitude of the latter cannot be located. Fish sees the binary stable/unstable as comparable to decidable/undecidable, but he argues that “all ironies are stable, even those that point in multiple directions, in that the shape they have (or don’t have) will follow from in-place interpretive assumptions; and all ironies are unstable, even those that are sharply pointed, in that they are the product of interpretive assumptions, and not the properties of texts” (<i>Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies</i>, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989: 568). Do you agree with Booth that stable and unstable irony can be distinguished or with Fish that it is all up to interpretive communities and conventions? In other words, would it be useful to perceive the irony you’re talking about vis-à-vis Vico and White as unstable or stable? <br />
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You point out the danger of synecdoche lucidly. But I would problematize the implicit devaluation of metonymy. This trope, when its constituent parts are both held in mind and one is not repressed, indicates relationality, interdependence, a non-hierarchical understanding of contiguity, and hence the possibility of a historically situated understanding that could exist in concert with dialogism. What do you think about this? <br />
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<b>LB:</b> Not having studied in any great detail, the works of Booth or Fish and in particular the distinction between stable and unstable ironies that they make, it would be difficult to make any intelligent connection with Vico or White. However, based on the explanation you have given, I would think that unstable irony would be closer to Vico’s explanation of the trope. In Vico’s exposition, ironic speech presupposes awareness that any interpretation could entail some amount of feigning or lying or masking and therefore you need a dint of self-reflection as a cover to establish veridicality of one’s position. It demands meta-interpretation. That is why I have argued that unlike monologic reading that is so keen on self-affirmation, the dialogic approach leads to self-realization – an awareness of the limitation of your interpretations – leaving a loophole for other interpretations to emerge, and thus keeping everything unfinalized and open-ended.<br />
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I think your point about metonymy is well taken. I agree that it could lead to dialogicality and I would stress ‘could,’ because not all readers move from metonymy to other tropes. I am not suggesting that movement of these tropes is necessarily sequential. If anything the discourse moves in zigzags and coils. When the movement stops with metonymy, then there is a danger of making simple-minded causal relations. I think you said it quite well that all the elements of metonymy create the possibility of a historically situated understanding.<br />
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<b>TF:</b> “A dialogic consciousness,” you write, “seems brave enough to explore every nook and corner of the semiosphere, which is the gathering ground for many disparate texts and distant spheres” (253). In this “journey,” “these spaces become ‘tools’ for reactivating the text” (254). Freshman expository writing (Composition) is a large part of what I teach, and you teach psychology, in which, I imagine, students also have to write papers supporting a specific thesis. To what degree would or could a dialogic pedagogy reconfigure expository structure into something that either allows the notion of a thesis to be much more capacious or is not thesis-driven? And how would such a dialogic advance in teaching methodology provide safeguards against the risk of chaotically thrown together, meandering essays?<br />
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<b>LB:</b> Sadly what we see in our classroom, despite creating an atmosphere for dialogue is the chaotic grouping of texts and ideas without achieving any kind of metamorphosis. This trend was evident even in my study, where readers would invoke many texts and draw comparisons, but fail to use the extra-textual materials as tools to return to the original text and open up other dormant meanings. For instance, while discussing the dice game plot where Draupadi is vociferously challenging the kingdom, the readers may invoke Anita Hill’s testimony and this was common. They would engage in a parallel discussion in an unconsummated fashion. Rarely would they get to another level of drawing converging and diverging points between these two characters. If they did that, they might have discovered something about the contemporaneity of the ancient text – in other words, recognize that Draupadi may belong to the mythical past, but the past she belonged to still remains with us. Despite my prodding, many of my respondents, like our students, fail to make the dialogic connection. I think that is what we struggle with in our classrooms, and hence, left with random grouping of references and texts without the central thesis. Even to engage in a good dialogue, there has to be some anchoring, so that there is unity in diversity. Surely, dialogue is murky and meandering, but there is method to this madness! I notice that in my developmental psychology class, students grasp F:Piaget with relative ease – it is a linear theory of development with neat stages, whereas the non-linearity of Vygotsky is a challenge, because it demands connecting disparate elements – that is, enter into a dialogue. <br />
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I wonder if we can directly teach dialogicality; after all it is not a technique or a concept with identifiable features, and the best one can do is to create a condition for a dialogue and make every effort to pull the student into the dialogic space with a hope that they push themselves too. I am curious about your take on this.<br />
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<b>TF:</b> Yes, we can create a space for dialogue, and we can help students organize the contours of their thinking without sacrificing dialogism. I have been very gratified when a student tells me that s/he has strong arguments for two opposing sides and is having trouble formulating a thesis or wonders whether any thesis will do justice to the complexity of the issue. We talk about the possibility of “weighing” the two sides and provisionally coming up with a qualified preference for one side, or else acknowledging a current impasse (undecidability without further data) as the thesis, or else achieving a synthesis that is not a “reconciliation of opposites” or paradox but a compromise formation that takes the best aspects of the two sides, shaves off the weaker aspects, and entails generalization that may go in an unexpected direction. <br />
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In the Platonic dialogues, the gadfly Socrates always wins. (Of course, the reader might engage in an ironic reframing of the philosopher’s bullying mode of questioning.) It would be exciting to allow some essays to take a (literally and non-Socratically) dialogic form, where there are ultimately <i>two theses</i> and not necessarily a winner, even as the two speakers acknowledge each other’s strong points. There’s no referee or judge. <br />
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Is monologism in its most extreme forms a kind of psychopathology? What modes of psychotherapy and/or psychoanalysis are most dialogic? Are the most dialogic most efficacious?<br />
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<b>LB:</b> I agree that non-Socratic dialogue would validate each thinker the ‘truth value’ in their own right – as Bakhtin would say, Dostoevsky created characters who were philosophers in their own right – often taking a diametrically opposite view from the author. It is this kind of dialogic form in <i>The Mahabharata</i> that is appealing to me – there are no phantom ethics, but only ethical validity at a given place at a given moment.<br />
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One of the topics that I am often preoccupied with is the connection between monologism and psychopathology. Long ago I presented my work to a group of very culturally oriented psychiatrists and psychologists and they made a very interesting observation about my various categories of self. Gingerly, they said that very often the dialogic character arrives at their clinic feeling thoroughly exasperated by the rigid world, feeling like misfits. Whereas, the monologic character might drive a reasonably healthy individual into therapy, making them believe that they need to sort out their emotions. The dialogic character operating in an ever-ambiguous world might become susceptible to that kind of labeling, while monologism masquerades itself as firm, decisive and by extension healthy. This kind of struggle was evident in my study; often the traveler would shout, “get to the point” or “don’t be so emotional” at the meandering dialogic reader, whereas for the latter there are too many points and emotions are one of the basis for interpretation. This disturbing trend is something we witness in our cultural and political life in particular, where volume of the voice drowns the nuanced voice. The dialogic self has greater penchant for self-interrogation, thus leaving the door open for attack, while the world of monologic reader is heavily fortified.<br />
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About the modes of psychotherapy that are most dialogic, I think first, we need to re-examine how we define human pathos. Think about the play – <i>One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest</i> – and I think we have gotten worse in attaching pathos where there isn’t one and we offer pills as the remedy, making drug companies rich. Therefore, as J. Krishnamurthy, a philosopher from India said, it is not a mark of great mental health to conform to a sick society.<br />
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<b>TF:</b> Those who say, “Don’t be so emotional” themselves are being emotional, and the dialogic reader as an interpreter, I suspect, tends to be less in the thrall of emotions that are hostile to particular points of view. Openness and irony contribute to skepticism about situations in which emotion and, in fact, bullying overrides thoughtful reflection. And perhaps the dialogic thinker can be sensitive to the “get to the point” attitude—which can be understandable in terms of norms of attention spans—by verbally foregrounding process in advance of and during elaboration.<br />
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What you say about our political life is so true. Kerry was branded as a “flip-flopper” rather than a dialogic thinker, and Bush’s monologism was considered admirable, though by 2004, people were thinking less monologically about Iraq, and so Bush squeaked by. Somehow, in 2008, Obama’s dialogism relative to McCain’s monologism won out, as the former was viewed as more sympathetic and “cool” than the latter, and Bush was blamed for the tanking economy. This year, with respect to monologism/dialogism, I wonder whether the electorate will behave as it did, marginally, in 2004, or in 2008.<br />
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Regarding the Krishnamurthy quote, I would say that there’s a condition of heteroglossia in our society: there is a good deal of conformity to exclusively money- and status-centered striving, and yet many people are pursuing deeper desires in a self-directed and/or communitarian way, and still others are trying to synthesize divergent aims, perhaps with some success. And this diversity is probably reflected in the panorama of psychotherapies.<br />
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As a scholar of Dialogism, what post- <i>Mahabharata</i> project might lie ahead for you?<br />
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<b>LB:</b> I agree with your point that there is equal measure of conformity and creativity in our culture. In the former one marches to the drums of culture, pursuing money and status to enter into a Faustian bargain, while the latter pursues deeper meaningful desires that are in tune with their inner rhythms. Perhaps that is what makes life bearable.<br />
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I am at present working on a manuscript – <i>Difference, Dialogue and Development: A Bakhtinian World</i> – in which I am trying to look for images of developing subject in his collected works, to explore significance of his theory for developmental psychology. The basic argument is the reality of differences in the world necessitates dialogue, which in turn leads to development.<br />
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I will also be convening an All India Bakhtin Conference in August 2013 in India to explore the dialogic potential in the culture. Interestingly, if Mikhail Bakhtin’s works stand under the banner of plurality, open-endedness and diversity of languages and social speech types, the cultural, philosophical and literary histories of India may very well be brought under the same banner. A polyglottic culture with an amazing assortment of dialects, religions and customs would then seem to be an ideal soil for the growth of Bakhtin’s ideas. It may very well be the case that long before the principles of dialogism took shape in the western world, these ideas, although not labeled as such, were an integral part of the intellectual tradition in India. However, like most places the monologic impulses have taken over, and hopefully in the conference we will explore ways of recovering the dialogicality.<br />
It is a rare privilege to respond to someone who asks thoughtful open-ended questions and so THANK YOU for opening up a sustained dialogue…<br />
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<b>TF:</b> Thank YOU, Lakshmi. I have learned a great deal.Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-71507912107711219912012-05-09T13:19:00.000-07:002012-05-11T09:02:35.822-07:00Basil King and Thomas Fink: Exchange on Basil King's Learning to Draw/A History. Ed. Daniel Staniforth. Cheltenham, UK: Skylight Press, 2011.<b>Thomas Fink:</b> I want to begin in a very general area and get to specifics a bit later. Whether in prose or, less often, in verse, <a href="http://www.skylightpress.co.uk"><i>Learning to Draw</i></a> presents numerous stories about historical figures in the arts, about political and social trends, and about you as an artist and individual who left his native London to live in the U.S. The subtitle <i>“A History”</i> is important here: whether or not you consider your book a long poem, this massive accumulation of narratives bears comparison in scope and cultural emphases to the “poem including history” that Ezra Pound was trying to make cohere in <i>The Cantos</i>, and that Charles Olson, your professor at Black Mountain College in the fifties, was working to achieve in <i>The Maximus Poems</i>. The diverse stories keep coming back to a group of particular themes or motifs, but between each story, there’s often a big jump. I cannot envision the whole as either a single large story or a set of tightly interlocking narratives. Yet I am reminded of what Judith Halden-Sullivan in <i>The Topology of Being: The Poetics of Charles Olson</i> writes about her subject: “Olson is less interested in readers identifying the particular facts that fill his poems than in their discovering a pattern of connections in his work that shows something larger than discrete bits of information” (23). I also think about Paul Bove’s assertion in <i>Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry</i>, which depends in part on Olson’s exhortations about perceptual movement and process in “Projective Verse” that “Pound and Olson do not hope to see the whole world laid out spatially on a map seen from above,” but “rather,. . . try to regain the older method of map-making which grows directly out of motion, dis-covery, and encountering the unknown. Pound calls this process of charting a coast line, <i>periplum</i>” (267).<br />
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How then, do you regard your map, <i>periplum</i>, flexible overall procedure or design, or poetics for this project—especially regarding the possible relationships among narrative elements? Am I right to see a connection with Olson’s (major) “push,” as Sherman Paul has it? And how does Daniel Staniforth, your editor, enter into all of this?<br />
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<b>Basil King</b>: I have no map when I start. When I paint I have a figure or a group of figures in mind – or writing I start with one or two people from real life, history usually, not my personal life. As I start other people will come to my mind. But first, whether in painting or writing, I have to place them. Am I going to talk in terms of biography or some insights I have about them? <br />
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As this progresses, I begin to know more. I begin to see a bit more clearly. <br />
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I’m travelling down a road, yes. Very often on the most familiar route, I’ll see something I never saw before. And that prods me on to the next thing. I do like Pound’s idea of a map but it isn’t particularly useful to me. Too many things come into my head, I see too many things all at once. But I have learned over the years to find space for the things I think about. I suppose that’s why there are jumps.<br />
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Often I find a phrase or a few lines of poetry that I repeat because this literally helps me begin again from there. And I’m sure it helps the reader because the repeats give a reader time to take it in, to breathe.<br />
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The sections or pieces are not in a preordained sequence – I didn’t write them that way and I had the feeling that one could start or stop almost anywhere. In fact several readers have told me they read this book that way. <br />
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I like that. It feels democratic. Daniel Staniforth asked me if I wanted to publish Learning To Draw/A History. And it was wonderful to be asked. I was comfortable with Daniel’s sensibility and felt very confident that he would do justice to the manuscript so I decided to ask him to organize the sections into book form. I told him only that “Across and Back” had to be the first piece. <br />
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It could be done another way. And another time it might be.<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> Why did “Across and Back” have to be first?<br />
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<b>King:</b> Because ‘across and back’ is what I do. From Europe to America, from the cave to the present. This section also contains a nice introduction to H.D. who is muse. D.H. Lawrence has always been very important to me, as well – and there it is: America. Europe. I don’t mention my father’s statement to me about Lawrence in <i>Learning to Draw</i>, but I have it in <i>mirage</i>—he said, “Read Lawrence. He’s an anti-Semite but he’s a great writer.” That was a great lesson to me and has helped me to stay open.<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> One motif that often seems to orient you is “Get rich. Be rich. Get rich. Be rich” (15). Why is that one important to you—as psychopolitical critique?<br />
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<b>King:</b> Yes, I often use it instead of “Pause” as a break between sections. I don’t think of it as a political statement. I think of it as a way to declare a central theme of capitalism, a motif that repeats itself in American life…from the outside, from the inside.<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> OK, I understand. For readers who aren’t yet acquainted with this book, however, I would advise them to pay special attention to the representation of the political in two sections near the end of the book, “Twin Towers,” which addresses the tragedy of 9/11 and its aftermath, and “Basil’s Arc,” which includes a sharp critique of militarism in all its forms.<br />
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Would you say that this book is a long poem, a hybrid of several genres, or something else?<br />
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<b>King:</b> This best way I can think of answering this is to cite a note I received from Nathaniel Tarn: he said that he thought I had found a way for an artist to write his autobiography.<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> I might add that it’s an aesthetic/intellectual autobiography by an artist who is also a poet. The “Across and Back” section is challenging because sometimes I think you’re giving an actual account of a historical event—for example, the meeting between H.D. and D.H. (Lawrence)—and then you segue into something like the account of the war hero, and it seems to be fictitious or the narrative gets scrambled to the point where it couldn’t be “a history.” This kind of segue happens repeatedly in that section. For example, Freud appears to proposition H.D. It didn’t happen. What kind of guidance can you give your readers about what you might like them to make of the movement from historical reportage and interpretation to out-and-out fiction?<br />
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<b>King:</b> Your definition of the book is fine by me.<br />
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As for my switches between ‘fact’ ‘invention’ and outright ‘fantasy’ – I don’t want to provide clues. I happen to think that way. Somehow I think about how Pieter Brueghel, Gruenwald, and Bosch treated actual events and fictions and fantasied them, way before the coming of Surrealism. I also take a lot from Rimbaud’s instructions on disarranging our senses.<br />
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I should also add that more than one piece has taken me over a year to complete. I don’t always know the final destination.<br />
The ‘war hero’ came to me because H.D. and D.H. really did meet just as war was declared in 1914. So I was thinking about people who have been in combat. I just know they come out with thoughts that are not always real. That passage has a great deal of reality I believe. Just not the same kind of fact.<br />
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That kind of mix-up is important to me, bringing disparate things together. <br />
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As for Freud propositioning H.D. – wouldn’t H.D. have loved it!<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> After a prose passage on Walt Whitman and the Civil War and the racial situation during early Reconstruction, you break into a highly evocative free-verse strophe on the painting process that seems a statement of poetics:<br />
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We paint from memory<br />
But experience gives<br />
Us our background<br />
Background: the sum of<br />
One’s experience re-invented<br />
And made conspicuous<br />
Brings the disparate together (79)<br />
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Why might that statement be coming after the Whitman/Reconstruction passage? And does the strophe, which, I think, gives “re-invention” some degree of priority over “memory,” help us understand not only your process of painting but your intentions? Also, what tends to motivate the decision to use lines of verse rather than prose, or vice-versa?<br />
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<b>King:</b> The process immediately after the Civil War, Reconstruction, was redoing something. Reinventing a society that would work differently. That would be better for everybody. What came to my mind next was how I begin a painting. I don’t think about reinventing society but I do think about reinventing what I already know. That means working with my memory. Reinvention has to start with memory.<br />
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It’s not a question of priority…memory is the raw material reinvention works with.<br />
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I switch into poetry as a means of letting people follow how my thought has changed. When my thoughts are changing, I don’t think prose. I hope it’s clear that the language itself changes. It becomes a poetic statement.<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> Yes, that does seem clear. <br />
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You are frequently interested in linking artistic achievement with both courage and, I think, angry resistance to a society that lacks an egalitarian sociopolitical ethos: “Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock were kicked out of high school for printing a subversive magazine. Not all but some angry young men become killers and a few grow up to become artists. There are always angry young men that are willing to face death daily” (47). This passage can be found in “Quartet,” the section on Nathaniel Tarn, Jacob Lawrence, J.G. Johnson, and Robert Frank, four figures linked by their ability to use “different instruments to find a way to migrate to something that is not theirs “a resource that documents possibility” (32). Of course, migration and anger against the anti-Semitism that you encountered while growing up (and which is the subject of various narratives in the book) are important to your own autobiography. It appears, then, that artistic production (or “reinvention”) derives from both memory of personal experience—oppressive more often than not—<i>and</i> “resources” or material outside the constraints of the self that permit the “migration” to more satisfactory aesthetic and political possibilities. Anger, then, is a fuel for such migration. What in my conjecture about your views am I getting right, and what am I leaving out or overgeneralizing about or just plain getting wrong? <br />
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<b>King:</b> Most of your statement is fine. I pause when I get to “Anger, then, is a fuel for such migration.” Yes, it is but not all the time. If I were to rely on anger only I would have to leave out too much. I wouldn’t be using my whole self. I’d deny other people, and history, mine and all that is in back of us.<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> Because of its associative leaps, one of the most challenging sections in the book is “Dictation,” in which you move from a consideration of Saul Steinberg to Franz Kafka (briefly) to Diane Arbus and then to another photographer, Jerry Shore. Interspersed are some autobiographical narratives. What impels you to put these figures together? <br />
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<b>King:</b> All four of them are cosmopolitan Jews who had a very personal twist on reality.<br />
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I think I am just about finished with a new piece I’ve been working since last spring. Twelve =<br />
This one has six popular singers, a boxer, a movie star, two writers and two politicians… And the painting continues downstairs; it’s tiring and rewarding all at the same time. <br />
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<b>Fink:</b> Twelve characters are a lot to juggle in one composition: congratulations!<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> Being a student at Black Mountain College was a crucial point of your development as a painter/poet. In “Windows,” you write:<br />
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In class Olson was a marvel holding a little piece of chalk in his large hand he’d turn his eyes. Would Ahab get the better of him and would he never see Gloucester again. . . . Olson wanted information that pertained. Process became a passion a declaration of intent that never wavered. He pursued those of us who were in class for information and by so doing he taught us how to use windows. (129)<br />
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Then, in “The Real Thing Has Four Parts,” you put forth the idea attributed to Willem de Kooning, the professor (in your fantasy) of Holbein the Younger, that “Black Mountain College is a community where everyone learns,” as notions like “the faculty their discipline will humble you,” “Black Mountain welcomed those who were willing to leave home, meet strangers and learn to draw,” and “Black Mountain was a democracy no tests, card markings, lights out” (163). In a subsequent verse section, you add, “Voices never heard before/ Gave themselves/ Permission to speak/ And speak they did” (164). <br />
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I assume that you, Baz, were “in class for information”: how did Olson “pursue” you? How did he teach you “to use windows”? And how did “the faculty’s discipline humble you”? De Kooning’s—especially? Also, did you need Black Mountain’s “permission to speak,” or were you “speaking” already?<br />
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<b>King:</b> The summer he was there was three or four years before my time . I met deKooning in New York--because of the Black Mountain connection. What Olson taught me was that you had to look outside, outside of yourself, outside the window, to find information that you needed. That didn't mean that you shouldn't look inside yourself or use your own intuition but that couldn't be the only source.<br />
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I came to Black Mountain when I was only 16; I had never known mature artists, I'd never seen how hard they work. Olson was writing “Maximus” at the time. Volpe was composing. Merce was working his dances out. I think the same can be said of Cage. At the same time, there was a truly democratic environment there. The differences between the faculty and the students were minimized. Everyone worked and people mined each others work regardless of where they were in terms of age or maturity. Pretty much everyone pursued everyone. It could get pretty combative. If you didn't work, you couldn't stay there. It was famous. People came and sometimes three days later they were gone. <br />
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I didn't need Black Mountain's permission to speak, I needed it to find my own voice. Black Mountain taught me that I needed to find my own voice.<br />
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<b>Fink:</b> <i>Learning to Draw</i> includes generalizations about artists that can be deemed part of an unorthodox art criticism or, sometimes, art history. Here are sentences from “The Trusting Child”: “Matisse wasn’t the first artist to stick his fingers in the paint and like honey he rearranged and made his own colour wheel. Black became a noun a predator an intuitive device that could be placed in any room on anyone’s face an eye a space is asked to take its clothes off” (110). When you say that Matisse created “his own colour wheel,” do you mean that he ignored the usual arrangement of complementaries, analogous harmonies, triadic harmonies, etc. and put colours together in unprecedented ways, or something else? And did he literally paint with his fingers, or are you speaking about a particular development of textures—i.e. scumbling? I have always been struck by Matisse’s powerful use of black outlining and solid black elements; I sense how it can seem “predatory,” according to old associations of the word, but in what way is “black” “a noun”? And how does “a space” have “clothes” that black can induce it to “take. . . off”? <br />
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<b>King: </b> Let me say first, when Matisse was a young man he took his paintings to Renoir, whom he greatly admired. Renoir looked at them for a long time and then said, "I could never use black that way." <br />
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Yes, Matisse exaggerated his colors and very rarely is anything a prime color. As for fingers, artists have been sticking them in the paint since the cave. Titian did it in old age and you can see his prints in the paint. I believe Matisse did it ... certainly a lot of moderns, like Soutine or deKooning let it be obvious. I think earlier, fingers were used but without leaving a trace. <br />
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As for other changes, as elsewhere, I really believe the surreal knocks....Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-25368831391839440972012-02-25T06:53:00.001-08:002012-02-25T12:10:23.082-08:00Interview with Timothy Morton<strong>Tom Beckett:</strong> Where did/does poetry begin for you?<br /><br /><strong>Timothy Morton:</strong> Shelley says something quite beautiful about poetry, which is that it's the root and blossom of human knowing. I’d like to turn that upside down for a moment and wonder whether that image is possible because rooting and blossoming are themselves a kind of poetry. A flower is a plant's poem about sex; a flower is a bee's poem about precious food. I mean this quite literally, which is to say, poetically, though in a greatly expanded sense. Bees and flowers have coevolved over millions and millions of years into what we might call an <em>interobjective</em> system. Causality itself—how a flower attracts a bee in order to have sex—is poetic in this sense, in other words, as I'm arguing these days in various places, <em>the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension. </em><br /><br />When one hears the question, “Where does poetry begin?” one is prone to visualize things chugging along in their way, and poetry somehow arising out of the chugging, or being sprinkled along the surface of the chugging like sparks flying out of a complex grinding mechanism. But contemporary physics—going back now to 1900—tells us that the aesthetic dimension is not some kind of optional fireworks that happen if you're lucky and happen to have (human) ears, eyes and so on. Poetry is the blood of causality. A fruit fly smells not by inhaling some volatile chemical, but by detecting the quantum signature of a molecule: its shape, which is transmitted nonlocally to receptors in the fly's olfactory system. <em>Shape</em>, which Aristotle calls <em>morphē</em>, just is what Aristotle thinks as the essence of a thing. This ice cream, right here, this one in my hand—its essence is its form, not an idea in my head or in some transcendental ice cream parlor of the beyond. Somehow we have forgotten how important form is. Form got flushed out of the modern way of thinking about things as pure extension and nothing else—maybe with some accidental candy sprinkles here and there—machinating away in the void.<br /><br />But this mechanistic view is no longer congruent even with science. Things don't carry on “in” time and space, like cogs in a clock. Time and space emerge from things themselves: planet Earth emits a gigantic spacetime vortex that has now been empirically detected using incredibly accurate gyroscopes, so that my watch runs faster in a plane than on the ground. The region “in front of” things is inhabited by time, space, causality—it <em>is</em> the aesthetic dimension, it just is how things appear, their form, <em>morphē</em>.<br /><br />So we coexist in an all-encompassing bath of poetry. The kind that humans like about red roses and so on is just a tiny region of this colossal space of possibility.<br /><br />Another way to hear the question might be, “How can we account for the beginning of a thing, if causality just is poetry?” What does <em>beginning</em> mean? As poets and students of poetry we have a considerable leg up on this problem. This is the phenomenon of <em>aperture</em>. How does a poem begin? Aristotle argues that plays have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I used to think this was a daft waste of space. I mean, all you have to do is look at the first page, and the last page, then divide the total number of pages by two to get the middle, right? Wrong—what Aristotle means is that things have a <em>feeling</em> of beginning, a <em>feeling</em> of being in the middle (which I call <em>development</em>), and a <em>feeling</em> of ending (<em>closure</em>). Beginning, middle and end are aesthetic—so we can use them to talk about causality, since we have established that causality is aesthetic.<br /><br />A poem begins when, all of a sudden, we have no idea what is happening. Some kind of rift has opened up in the midst of what appeared to be a smooth surface, like the blank of a page. Charles Bernstein's short poem is exemplary in this regard:<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">THIS POEM LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK</span><br /><br /><br />Where is the poem? When has it started? What counts as the poem in this sentence, if anything? All this uncertainty crashes into the blank space. It's like the beginning of a story. Who is the main character? What counts as an action or as a significant action? What is happening? Is this studio the focus of the entire novel, or is it adjacent to the main scene? And so on. Not having any well-defined coordinates is the mark of beginning. Realist narrators do this brilliantly with the use of the definite article. You could spend hours studying the first word of Oscar Wilde's <em>The Picture of Dorian Gray</em>: “The studio ...” Which one? Evidently we are already there—but where is that? <em>Something is already happening</em>. This is the feeling of beginning. Something is underway, but we don't know exactly what. That feeling of a lack of coordinates is because there exists a rift between how things appear and how things are: and since we can't know how things are, especially since we've only just begun to read the story, there is a shifty feeling of paradox. The trouble with lying is, how can you tell whether someone is lying or not? Is there, or is there not, a difference between what is being said and the truth? This feeling, in all its poignancy, is the feeling of aperture.<br /><br />I submit that when a thing begins, a <em>rift</em> is opened in reality, a rift between essence and appearance. I mean these two words precisely but not quite in the received sense. The <em>essence</em> of a thing is its withdrawn darkness, its intrinsic unknowability—I am what is now called an <em>object-oriented ontologist </em>because, like Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant, I hold this darkness to be true of all real things whatsoever: old ladies sitting in a tea room, cups of tea, grains of sugar, stainless steel spoons and the core of the Sun. The <em>appearance</em> of a thing is its aesthetic form (<em>morphē</em>), which is part of a thing whether or not that thing is being experienced or used by something else. For a thing to exist is for there to be a rift between how a thing appears and what it is. A really existing thing, then, is a living paradox, rather like the Cretan who says “All Cretans are liars.” A teaspoon is a liar. The Sun's plasma core is a liar. We can't tell where the rift is. The rift is not “in” a certain part of space or time. It's like looking at a mask: is there something, someone, behind it? It's like looking at someone's eyes: are they windows of the soul, or just opaque blobs of jelly? The rift is real precisely to the extent that it can't be located.<br /><br />Again, as poets and students of poetry we have an advantage, because we deal with shifting, seductive lies all the time. We have a high tolerance for things saying one thing and meaning another. Think about a poem. It's just some words waiting to be read. You don't know what it means—yet. This not-yet quality is what the poem plays with. The definition of a good poem is one whose inner rift has not yet collapsed. It is “timeless” because it has not yet been exhausted. Its essence is its future. We can't locate the essence anywhere: what we have is appearance, just these words, this lineation, this rhyme, these images, that rhythm. We have form: form is the past.<br /><br />Crash! Suddenly my hand is filled with splinters of glass. What happened? My son must have dropped the light bulb he was trying to throw in the trash, onto the smooth concrete floor of the garage. There are at once these new beings in the world, these shards of crushed glass in my hand. There is a new rift, a rift that can only be experienced backwards, with 20–20 hindsight (or less, but never with foresight).<br /><br />So to answer the question more directly, poetry begins for me when there is a fresh ripple of uncertainty in things that marks the inception of a new entity. I can never identify the “moment at which” the beginning lies, because time itself is part of the appearance of things, not the essence, and since time emerges from objects, and there are new objects, these glass splinters, there is a host of fresh temporalities that fail to correspond to the ones with which I've grown accustomed.<br /><br />We find this difficult to accept, but only because of the ubiquity of affiliations we humans have made with quartz crystals and their peculiar oscillations, which force us into the totally calculated Busby Berkeley musical called modern life. So despite what Einstein tells us, and poetry, and now object-oriented ontology, we think that time is still a hard Perspex container in which everything has a defined place, like cogs suspended in a paperweight.<br /><br />One consequence of this way of thinking is that beginnings don't just happen for me, or for humans, or even for sentient beings. They happen for trashcans and garage floors. If all that is required is the opening of a rift between essence and appearance, then the smooth concrete floor of my garage also undergoes a beginning when its surface tinkles with the tiny percussion of glass shards. I'm not strictly saying that my garage floor is alive, but that in most ways, how I experience a breaking light bulb is on par with a concrete slab. I find this to be a very elegant and efficient way of thinking, since I'm not required anymore to draw or police distinctions between human and nonhuman, or between sentient and insentient, or alive and inanimate. If that makes me sound like an Aboriginal Australian, that's not so bad.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> The idea that “nature isn’t natural” didn’t originate with you or Graham Harman. Gertrude Stein said the same thing decades ago in her novel <em>Ida</em>. You, however, have fleshed the idea out to astonishing effects in <em>Ecology Without Nature</em>.<br /><br />What I especially value about <em>EWN</em> are the ways in which you braid literary, philosophical, artistic and ecological thinking. ( The ways in which you upbraid each category of thought, too.)<br /><br />I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about how you have come to understand “the environment.”<br /><br /><strong><br />Timothy Morton</strong>: Your question follows “naturally” (haha) from the first one, I think. This is because when we talk about Nature (I'm going to write it in capitals to make it obvious we're talking about a construct), we are talking about a set of things that evoke it. Implied in this notion of a set of things is the fact that the set has to have an outside, things that are not Natural or unnatural in some sense, or supernatural, preternatural, and so on. Nature is shorthand for a set of things whose boundaries are policed. Nature is a line drawn around a group of affiliated things—a more or less loosely bundled <em>interobjective</em> system, that is, a set of <em>appearances</em>. Appearances, not essences—even when these things are seemingly real and palpable and urgent.<br /><br />That book, <em>Ecology without Nature</em>, got me into some trouble, because it was easy to say “Oh, he's a postmodern nihilist, he doesn't think anything real exists,” or something like that. No: it's precisely because I do think that real things exist that I'm not willing to use the concept Nature. I am for coral and bunny rabbits and polar bears, but against Nature. Why?<br /><br />Well, let's try an experiment. Make up a list of things that are Natural: trees, bunnies, coral, ants, mountains, ocean. Evidently the list is incomplete. Let's try another one: trees, bunnies, coral, ants, mountains, ocean, humans, toxic waste, plutonium. Now we are stretching Nature to breaking point but the list is still incomplete. Something must be left out for this list to be a list.<br /><br />What is the deep reason for this? Nature is Nature-for. It's someone's or something's Nature. Nature is normative, because Nature is based on appearances, which just are appearances-for. You decide on a set of relationships and take those to be more real or more proper than others. Nature is a question of taste. You think that bread and marmalade go together naturally, not bread and peanut butter. Peanut butter is an illegal immigrant into the world of bread and marmalade, which must be policed from invasion by unnatural things such as raspberry jam and Nutella. You have said nothing deep about marmalade or bread by calling them Natural. You have only decided that this relationship is the true religion.<br /><br />Nature is held to be real, but I argue that it's the greatest fiction. We intellectuals constantly love to accuse each other of being too intellectual: we should go outside and smell Nature, stop being so narcissistic and weird and feminine. In part my motivation has been to stick up for this narcissistic, weird, femininity. I think the world right now could do with a lot more human gentleness, weakness, lameness, hypocrisy—these are now quite well worked out categories in my new book project!<br /><br />What ends Nature, once and for all? Quite simply, ecological awareness. What we know is that we live inside a gigantic entity called <em>biosphere</em>, which envelops another gigantic entity called Earth. Weaving in and out of this pair of beings is another being, called climate, which is a high dimensional beast we can only glimpse in patches, like when it rains or snows or when there is a drought. Scientific instruments now make these gigantic beings visible to us humans. Indigenous cultures have had pretty good names for gigantic beings that wrap around us like this: Yggdrasil, the Rainbow Serpent. Nature is not one of these names. Nature is a small island of Western human normativity in a gigantic ocean of strangeness. Now we know the gigantic ocean in which bunny rabbits and clouds have their being, drawing lines around certain appearances of things and fencing them off and policing them becomes impossible.<br /><br />In short: Nature seems huge and valuable and real, but in fact it's a meager human reflection of an appearance of a small selection of beings.<br /><br />Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't struggle against the Keystone XL pipeline or against nuclear missile silos or shrinking icecaps. What it means is that we need a new reason to do so. Using Nature as the reason is like using a slightly broken Christmas ornament to fight a huge well-equipped army: this antique looking, but really quite modern, Western consumerist product. What we need to use instead is the idea of <em>coexistence</em>, which is much easier, because it's based on fact.<br /><br />The term <em>environment</em> is an upgrade of Nature, sort of Nature 2.0. But it suffers from the same bugs. We might admit that nonhumans also have environments, or worlds, or what have you. But do we really want to go around saving things because they have worlds? The Nazis had a world, for sure. There was a world of witch ducking in the Middle Ages. However we broaden the category of <em>world</em> or <em>environment</em> to include nonhumans and perhaps even nonsentient beings, it isn't enough. This is fundamentally because world and environment are appearances. They are worlds-of, environments-for. It's like arguments for preserving the humanities because they are meaningful-for certain beings. “Oh please, preserve these candy sprinkles, they are so delicious and make the boring cupcake of science taste really good, for a moment.”<br /><br />Rather than deciding in advance what counts as meaningful, or genuine, we simply need to notice that we coexist inextricably with other beings. All that Nature speak leaves most of modernity intact.<br /><br />I was speaking with this biologist who works in the Everglades, Joel Trexler. He knows ways to restore the Everglades to certain kinds of appearance: how they looked in the 1950s, how they appeared 500 years ago, and so on. Preserving Nature in this way becomes a form of art restoration. It has nothing to do with coexisting with actual beings. It's just about taste. Of course, Nature-speak advertises itself as anti-taste, which is the ultimate aesthetic sophistication, like eating sushi: “This is pure, raw, realness.”<br /><br />Environment and world are more up to date, 3D, surround-sound versions of Nature. That's even a term that some environmentalism uses: “the surround.” What is being preserved when this kind of world is preserved? Just a virtual experience-for some (human) being. It's virtual reality. The trouble is, this virtual reality is structuring the real. Think about a National Park: you go there to experience “away,” you drive to it in your SUV which is like watching a widescreen movie of Nature, on a comfy traveling sofa. Even when you are two inches away from Nature, you are distant from actual beings with whom you coexist. Nature is like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope.<br /><br />One thing that attracts me very much about object-oriented ontology is that we're arguing that we are not inside a total virtual simulation. There is a reality, but this reality is shifting and weird and elusive. The illusion quality of things is evidence of their reality. It's a very nice philosophical somersault. Nature is one of these ideas that was built up around the time philosophy decided that all it could talk about was human access to things, not things in themselves. It's very hard to convince people about Nature, though, because Nature is taken to be hard and real and wet and aggressively rugged. Gaia is going to punish you if you continue to burn plastic, and so on. But even there, with that idea of the revenge of Gaia, we are trying to watch our own funeral on some virtual TV set in the future after we have become extinct. There is a kind of vicarious thrill in that, which I see in some forms of speculative realism too. It's not really realism, I claim. It's sadistic thrills: watching yourself being wiped out from some impossible outside point of view. It's like watching a cartoon of Tom getting flattened into a pancake by Jerry or whatever.<br /><br />What we have to do, instead of beating ourselves up over and over again with the frying pan of Nature, is disarm this sadism that seems to be tangled up with modernity, including modern aesthetics or ways of seeing and appreciating things. This involves a nonviolent practice of accepting that we already coexist with other beings. This has nothing to do with being in some special game park called Nature or world or environment, or even with abstract concepts such as species. It has to do with this actual polar bear, let's call him Frank. Frank is about to drown because his ice is melting. What are you going to do? Teach him to swim? Have him over to your place? Feed him? It becomes a political problem. Nonhumans are already on “this” side of social, philosophical and psychic space. Our job is to notice that, again and again, and get used to it.<br /><br /><strong>TB</strong>: Politics, ideology need to be explicitly addressed. Don’t you think?<br /><br />Global capitalism operates on the principle of the never ending expansion of markets, coupled with the homogenization of culture(s). Doesn’t this create special problems for ecological thinking?<br /><br /><strong>Timothy Morton:</strong> Perhaps there is a very succinct way to answer this, which follows somewhat from what I've said already. It's this: simply that <em>Nature just is this “homogenization” performed by capitalism</em>. Nature is never this actual bunny rabbit, this actual cloud, this plutonium pellet.<br /><br />I'm not even sure I believe in ideology any more. It seems too easy to condemn people for thinking there is no ideology—to say that this belief is the very quintessence of ideology. I believe in confusion and ignorance and I also believe in unconscious motivations and patterns. And I think that many of these patterns are produced in interactions between humans and non-humans, so that they're not strictly just ideas in (human) heads. My friend Levi Bryant likes to give the example of rice, a labor-intensive crop that necessitated the emergence of strict social hierarchies in China and elsewhere.<br /><br />In another sense, I think our conversation is already addressing politics since politics just is how we coexist together, how we organize our enjoyment together.<br /><br />I just read a very interesting argument about the economy, that is, the human circulation of goods and services and money and debt. We are currently heading towards some kind of productivity ceiling that can't be sustained by this planet. It will happen within the next forty-eight years. What we do about that goes beyond politics as usual. It must be to do with realizing that nonhumans are already on “this” side of social space. Ideology theory is born in an age when nonhumans are relegated to “that” side, “over yonder,” otherwise known as Nature. Ideology theory might be exactly the wrong instrument to get us from A to B. A being the collision course with the finitude of Earth.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> A final question. Near the end of <em>Ecology without Nature</em> you write: “Ecological politics has a <em>noir</em> form. We start by thinking that we can ‘save’ something called ‘the world’ ‘over there,’ but end up realizing that we ourselves are implicated. This is the solution to beautiful soul syndrome: reframing our field of activity as one for which we ourselves are formally responsible, even guilty.” Would you expand on this?<br /><br /><strong>Timothy Morton:</strong> What I love about <em>noir</em> type movies such as Hitchcock's <em>Vertigo</em> or David Lynch's <em>Twin Peaks</em> series is that it turns out that the good guy, the detective, is implicated. Why? It shows that there is no outside, nowhere to jump, nowhere that is sanitized and safe and free of things. Freedom must be sought, struggled for, within the ecological mesh in which we find ourselves implicated—implicated means “folded into.”<br /><br />Environmentalist language takes one of two forms, quite commonly. Sometimes you can find them combined in the same prose, like an emulsion—they are opposites but if you mix them together violently they form a sort of environmentalist vinaigrette.<br /><br />The first form affirms that there is somewhere to stand outside reality—poor pathetic humans are judged from an outside point of view, we salivate over the revenge of Gaia (James Lovelock) and so on. We look on ourselves from the far future, as if we were watching a video of our own funeral. Of course you can do this in narrative but you can't do it in real life. What is particularly galling is that this exquisite artifice is said to be on the side of Nature, speaking for the trees like the Lorax.<br /><br />The second form asserts that yes, we are immersed in ecological reality. But it takes delight in this, it is happy and sunny and beautiful. The immersion language is correct but the affect is wrong. It is not particularly joyful that I am infinitely responsible for the beings that coexist with me, for the simple, formal reason that I can understand this sentence. It isn't particularly good news that mercury is coursing through my blood or that we have created plutonium. It's also not so great that I am a product of evolution whose two outstanding human contributions, from that point of view, are sweating profusely and throwing things. I mean, I'm immersed in nonhumans to the extent that 35% of my genome is also daffodil DNA. Great—am I supposed to be happy about that? My brain is a kluge of sorta kinda functional adaptations to problems for sponges, ichthyosaurs and voles. Great—that makes me feel nice…<br /><br />So I think the primordial ecological awareness affect is the kind of Marlowe the detective, hardboiled melancholia: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge…” (from “Red Wind”).Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-4467702433109558832011-11-14T14:44:00.000-08:002011-11-14T15:01:52.672-08:00Interview with bill bissett by Ryan J. CoxSimply by virtue of the volume of work he has produced over the course of his career, bill bissett is one of the most important and influential Canadian poets of the past fifty years. He has published at least 85 volumes of poetry since 1966, serving as his own publisher through his blewointment press for the first half of his career. Despite this extremely prolific poetic output, bill bissett is also an accomplished painter and was the lyricist and vocalist for the band, Luddites. His importance to Canadian art and culture, however, transcends the mere volume of material he has produced over his career. He has been at the forefront of several important movements that have shaped Canadian literature during, for lack of a better word, the post-modern period. bissett and blewointment, along with House of Anansi, Coach House and others, took part in the first wave of the small press revolution in Canada that helped diversify the kind of poets and poetry Canadian readers has access to. He was early innovator of both concrete and sound poetry in Canada, combining the visual aspects of the word with an intense interest in chant--which bpNichol notes is the important North American mutation of the global concrete movement (46). This combination of the visual and the aural--along with a strong distrust of the hegemonies that standardization enables--anticipates the single most recognizable aspect of bissett's poetics, his idiosyncratic orthography. In choosing to resist standardized spellings and standardized English, bissett creates a space of resistance against the forces of control. This is where the reader finds bissett the social critic that is suspicious of authority, and it opens on to the mystic or shamanistic poet that seeks transcendence through the ordinary and the erotic: the one that seeks the outside of the closed system of language and the repressed self. bill bissett's poetry lies at the junction of authentic and mundane human experience and the ecstatic. As a result of this resistance and his desire for ecstatic, he shares a dubious honour with poets bpNichol and Bernard Lachance: he is one of the few poets in Canada to have the aesthetic value of his poems discussed on the floor of the House of Commons.<br /> In his essay on poetic invention, "Invention Follies," Charles Bernstein posits that "severe forms of oppression rob a people of its right to poetry--and the crisis for poetry, for the aesthetic, is to create a space for poetry again and again" (35). This drive to create a space for poetry, for art, while resisting oppression and repression is at the centre of bissett's poetics. In his poem "Th Emergency Ward," bissett describes a shrink's misdiagnosis of a cerebral hemorage--apparently feigned so that bissett could get out of painting--and when he is subsequently saved from potentially fatal electro-shock by a neurologist, he wakes mid-surgery and conducts a poetry reading. In the face of oppression and possible death, bissett is able to create a space for poetry and celebrates life.<br /> <br /><strong>Ryan J. Cox:</strong> When I've given your poems to students, the first thing they notice and have to confront is your approach to language and spelling. It pushes them outside of their comfort zone and, I think, makes them think about their expectations of what a poem is and what a poem looks like. Could you explain why you use an idiosyncratic orthography or language in your writing and how you arrived at the particular approach you use?<br /><br /><strong>bill bissett:</strong> whn i bgan writing i was in2 sylabuls stronglee n also painting n drawing n prseevd th lettrs in th image n th shapes strokes n image in th lettrs each lettr espeshulee as writing was is originalee<br />piktographik n i alwayze wantid th words n th papr 2 look visualee as much as possibul th wayze 4 me th words sylabuls n nuances uv each word wud sound soundid sew th sort uv phonetic spelling b<br />came natural 2 me n bcame 2 b continualee evolving changing langwage fluid <br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Is there a worry that it might or has become systematized? How do you resist possible systemization and still make the work comprehensible?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> no worreez2 keep going n letting evreething b as indiviual 2 th sylabul 4 its sound n its enerjee as possibul th sound in th image th image in th sound sylabbul lettrs<br /><br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Is it significant that the structural or semiotic difference between the way you present the words on the page and the standardized spellings is apparent visually but not sonically? Is it intended to highlight the difference between notational language and the ephemeral, immediate impact of the spoken word?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> uv kours th diffrens btween standardizaysyunal spelling n individual nuansd sound based spelling is sonick evn whn peopul reed silentlee they heer th words n whn they reed aloud its sew sound n th mor sound based or mor phonetik th spelling is th mor sonic th work reelee is sonic meenings see th lettrs btween qween Elizabeth 1st n sir water raleigh n yu see all th shifts in spelling 2 indikate shifts in meening<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> How should the reader experience these poems?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> i dont kno th word shud its a pressur word i wud hope th reedr xperiences these pomes with xcellens out loud if he or she wants 2 n feels th xcellens mystereez n xplooring gifts uv langwage espeshulee with th sound pomes<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Please describe your writing process <br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> It cums 2 me n i follo go with it whn it th process th writing givn 2 me n me ar in different places as th going with continuez i inklewd that n or both nd th process continues n it i thn whn is thn let go uv it like letting go uv a stroke in a painting th trope fulfills itself n changes changing whethr its a narrativ meditaysyun or say visual or sound pome in in n furthr in n out th work thn is on its<br />own as it alwayze was is xplooring th that jestyur jestr no<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Has it changed over the years? Has technology effected the way you write or create?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> not reelee xsept i dew way less work with typwritr 4 konkreet visual pomes n as in narrativ enigma a lot uv th konkreet visual work ther is dun on th compewtr wher i live reelee sum manee hours a day with email n th writing<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Charles Olson said in his essay on Projective Verse, "It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had." This is a quality of the typewriter I think your work captures, and I believe the way you have been able to use the typewriter to create visual and concrete poetry reveals the way that this rigidity can be exploited. How does the computer compare as a tool for this type of composition?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> th compewtr less eezilee 4 th realiteez a typwritrs can dew espeshulee a smith corona n a compewtr can not reelee type wun word or lettr on top uv anothr ther ar ways around ths agen chek out narrativ enigma wher a lot uv th visual work was dun with a compewtrthers still a lot that can dun yes<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> What is the role of the poet in society? What is the role of poetry?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> th role uv th poet is 2 write n reed poetree th role uv th poet in societee is 2 write n reed poetree <br />th role uv poetree in societee is sirtinlee 2 continu yes <br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> What is the poet's responsibility to society and culture?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> th responsibilitee uv th poet is 2 th pome<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> During the last Canadian federal election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper attacked the arts community saying "when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren't high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people." In the late 1970s, you were targeted by several members of parliament in a similar manner on the floor of the House of Commons, though the rhetoric aimed at you was much more extreme with your work being described as "evil" by Robert Wenman. Why do you think this tactic of demonizing the writers and artists persists?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> i think th taktik uv demonizing th writrs n all artists prsists as a conservativ rite wing stratajee usualee tho not alwayze 2 mussul free speesh n free xpressyuns 2 create n enfors a crowd control that is xcellent 4 th intrests uv th controlling leedrs 4 theyr profits n wepons sales n powr<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> These attacks historically are constructed to be an expression of the thoughts and tastes of the "Canadian people" or the common man or, to use Richard Nixon's label, "the silent majority." Who is the ordinary person and how do they react or relate to the poet?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> lukilee ther is no ordinaree prson th idea uv ordinaree peopul is a ficksyun invented by rulrs leedrs 2 keep peopul down another veree machiavelian ploy by th politikul mastrs manee peopul dew love poetree n its praktishyuners sew lukilee 4 th poets n all artists <br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Should people in authority be afraid of you? <br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> agen th word shud is not reel from th beginning peopul all peopul need 2 inklewding me let go uv theyr feers meditaysyun xercising not wanting 2 control aneewun all these approaches can help<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> looking back, you started writing and publishing during a period of heightened and contentious nationalism in Canada. It was also the period when, arguably, the Canadian literary canon solidified and the New Canadian poetry developed. Is it useful for you as a poet to think of yourself in terms of nation or Canadian-ness? Do you feel that there is anything intrinsically Canadian about your work?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> sure pomes like th Canadian n killer whale both in BYOND EVN FAITHFUl LEGENDS n Canada in my mouths on fire love uv life th 49th parallel in nobody owns th erth th writing work is also abt evreething <br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Your work is consistently described as shamanistic and Blakean, and, without a doubt, there is a strong spiritual component to your work. What I think gets discussed less is the focus on real lived experience. An example would be when you write "th trucks ar/ goin past ium pretty/ stond thrs still a/ lotta light ium/ alone typing/ what i feel for/ yu" in <em>pomes for yoshi</em>. Is it important for you to balance these two aspects of your work?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> thees 2 realms being bcumming oftn inform n modify each othr help each othr speek 2 each othr<br />in my nu book novel ther is a pome specifikalee abt what yu ar saying reelee its calld mariashi mewsik in th chinees restaurant sumthing like that its reelee xaktlee calld ium in th chinees restaurant neer by i dont think these 2 th spiritual n th reel livd xperiences realm ar in anee way mutualee xklusiv or ar in anee binaree opposisyunal relaysyunshp with each each othr they reelee can inform each othr tho they ar different realms ther ar sew manee realms uv consciousness yes <br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Does the transcendent work without the mundane? The magical without the physical?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> 4 sum peopul maybe 4 me they enchance n oftn inhabit each othr<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> You have been incredibly prolific producing approximately 78 books in your career. What drives this need to produce and publish?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> th taktilitee uv lettrs th pickshurs in th lettrs as well uv kours th silk screen deepr thn diamonds n time th thrill uv artikulaysyun however it follos itself r sum names or unnamed goal thats 2 write n 2 paint 2 publish n 2 show is 4 me an offshoot uv thees aktivitees a necessaree n oftn veree fun n xhilerating xperiens 2 say 2 show 2 share 2 b bcumming<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> For the first half of your career, you were primarily your own publisher and editor at blewointmentpress. Since 1981 Talonbooks has served as your publisher. What are benefits and the deficiencies of each publishing model?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> theyr both great benefits self publishing yr choices 4 book size can b mor vareed 4 publishing with talonbooks n all th othr publishrs i workd with b4 talonbooks yu get access 2 a biggr market othr kinds uv presentaysyun choices working with talonbooks has bin an awesum wondrous n wundrful xperiens alwayze <br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Do you miss being your own publisher?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> i lovd being my own publishr tho it wasint xklusivlee sew n it was wrenching 2 give it up i espeshulee lovd n enjoyd sew much printing othr writrs works n dewing theyr books but i fairlee soon didint miss it sew much as nu n othr opportuniteez wer alwayze opning up<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> The internet theoretically makes the ability to publish and proliferate poetry, thoughts and ideas available to anyone with access to the web. What does this do poetry and the community of writers and readers?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> inkreesing access 2 evreething n that is alwayze xcellent yes<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> Where does poetry go next?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> poetree totalee goes next wher it goes in all its multi fasiting infinit wayze approaches n beings<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> You are known primarily as a poet, but you are also a painter and visual artist and you've performed music with a band. What attracts you to these diverse modes and how do they inform each other?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> th lettrs in th image th image in th lettrs strokes shapes strong diffrenses sumtimes in th writing n painting n drawing n also amayzing similariteez<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> How did you come to perform with Luddites?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> they askd me 2 play with them wun nite in theyr rehersal n thn they askd me in n i realizd it had bin an audishyun i had a lot 2 lern n i lovd lerning it writing lyrics 4 th mewsik dewing th vokal<br />work th math all th wundrful gigs we did i was part uv an amayzing xperiens lovd it n lernd a ot n<br />unlernd a lot amayzing time 4 me<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> How would you describe the group's sound? When I've listened to the songs I'm reminded of groups like Public Image, Ltd, early Sonic Youth, and a little of Suicide, but it may just be that these groups all have an avant garde sound.<br /> <br /><strong>bb: </strong> iuv thot uv thos groups yu mensyun as echoes n velvet undrground peopul have mesyund 2 me n us at th time n i wud def describe luddites sound as alternativ rock peopul also sd we wer like th cure but mostlee like ourselvs<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> What music do you listen to these days?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> reelee evreething<br /><br /><strong>RJC:</strong> What have you been reading?<br /><br /><strong>bb:</strong> A perfect waiter by alain claude sulzer<br /><br /><strong></strong>Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-28205267808933705852011-11-05T05:08:00.000-07:002011-11-14T04:20:48.632-08:00EXCHANGE ON FILM AND POETRY by Thomas Fink and Eric Monder<strong>Thomas Fink:</strong> Let’s begin with film aesthetics. In your 1994 book, <em>George Sidney: A Bio-Bibliography</em> (Greenwood Press), you argue that Sidney’s movies from the forties through the sixties “not only challenged the aesthetic principle of classic Hollywood cinema, but also anticipated, and influenced, modern styles of filmmaking” (1). <br /><br />While the classic Hollywood “style was to maintain suspension of disbelief in the storylines by concealing the manufacture of the production” (4), you indicate various strategies that Sidney uses to foreground this “manufacture.” One involves narration. You compare “the structure of many Sidney narratives” to “the unfolding of an origami object—its parts are revealed along the way through digressions (or “set pieces”) that do not, at first, seem to add to the story” (16). Characterizing “Sidney’s cinema” as “one of character, mood and incident,” you nevertheless assert that “the seemingly disembodied vignettes. . . do contribute to the understanding of character development or a general theme.” <br /><br />I want to understand how, in your view, Sidney and later innovative practitioners disrupt narrative via digression or perhaps reinvent narrative as a weaving of digressions and how these formal choices produce thematic consequences. (And I use the adjective “thematic” because you use the noun “theme,” but I’m quite willing to suppose that a movie or poem may have contiguous themes and not one central theme.) In the light of Sidney’s work and what you find most compelling in recent years, I’d also like you to unpack the powerful, evocative statement: “Narrative space (whether a train, a show boat, or a stage) often becomes a character itself, and the pattern of repetition, returning to specific spaces, creates thematic, not narrative, development” (16).<br /><strong><br />Eric Monder:</strong> In <em>Pilot #5</em> (1943), Franchot Tone’s character returns to the location where he had “sold his soul” to a corrupt local government (by helping to evict an indigent couple from their home); his epiphany leads to his voluntary demise during a WWII mission, so it dramatically strengthens the ideological theme (standing up to fascism, whether “foreign” or American home-grown), but does not necessarily strengthen the character’s dimensionality.<br /><br />In <em>Show Boat</em> (1951), Howard Keel’s Gaylord makes a realization about his departure from his marriage when he accidentally meets Ava Gardner’s Julie on a boat (but not the show boat, where both of them had become stars). Julie informs Gaylord that he he has not only left his wife but a child as well. This information prompts Gaylord to return to the original boat, the show boat, and his family, including the daughter he didn’t know he had. Again, there is a circularity of narrative, which offers a neat closure for Gaylord though not for the tragic, mixed-race character of Julie, who is excluded from the traditional family structure and that original space.<br /><br />In <em>The Eddy Duchin Story</em> (1956), Tyrone Power’s Eddy finally meets the son he barely knew (Duchin rejected him because his son was a painful reminder of his late wife). Either by accident or design (I don’t remember), Duchin takes his son to a NYC park, which used to be the location of a nightclub, the very place Duchin met his first wife (Kim Novak), the boy’s mother. It is at this point, Duchin tells his son that he is dying of leukemia. Again, a circularity of the narrative and a return to a space, which is affecting on a level of grand melodrama and minor suspense though does not necessarily develop narrative or character in a significant way (we already knew about the illness and Duchin’s impending demise—it is only a matter of telling his son).<br /><br /><strong>Fink:</strong> These examples help me understand the concept of narrative space as “character” with thematic implications. In the case of <em>Pilot #5</em>, I wonder whether Sidney is simultaneously promoting the ideological theme and indicating how mechanical it is for Hollywood to have to crank it up again and again. In later experimental cinema and even, perhaps, in an occasional contemporary Hollywood “art” film, is there a further use of such space as character in ways that make it more difficult to locate thematic intention?<br /><br /><strong>Monder:</strong> By their nature, art films and experimental films confuse thematic concerns. How would you answer your question vis a vis modernist poetry or your own work?<br /><br /><strong>Fink:</strong> In the 1920s, the first critics of modernist British and American poetry wanted to emphasize the thematic unity of their objects of attention while acknowledging the difficult multiplicity of references, tones, and “events” in the work. For example, between 1922, when it appeared, and around 1970, every critic seemed to stress that Eliot’s <em>The Waste Land</em> was not just a collage of fragments but a text with a coherent center—for example, a critique of the sterility of post-World War I European society through juxtaposition with the great myth and literature of the past. By the seventies, with the influence of continental theory, critics were returning to texts like <em>The Waste Land</em> , Wallace Stevens’ long meditative poems, H.D. myth-inflected work, Pound’s <em>Cantos</em> , Marianne Moore’s collage-poetry, and other texts to show how various themes interrupt and complicate each other without resolution at the end. From such a perspective, yes, <em>The Waste Land</em> includes elements of critique of Eliot’s contemporary culture, but the insufficiencies of ancient cultures are also manifested, traces of the poet’s personal life infiltrate in ways that cannot persist in being read as wholly “universalizing,” seams between collage-elements are not stable, sometimes bursts of language resist any thematic recuperation, and the “whole” is not reducible to a statement or image. <br /><br />As for so-called postmodernist poetry written after World War Two, what we’re calling “thematic confusion” is evident from the beginning. (Of course, to cite only one example, some scholars perceived the William Carlos Williams of the long poem <em>Paterson</em> as a modernist and some as a postmodernist, and others find the binary itself too problematic for use.) Among the Black Mountain poets, Creeley and Levertov in the fifties and sixties were more thematically coherent in a given poem than Charles Olson, who believed in leaping directly from one perception to another. But disjunction is a fundamental technique of New York School poets like Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery. In my own poetry, I am often interested in the collision of various themes, though I would not fetishtically “mess up” a poem that works well yet consistently pursues a specific theme.<br /><br />Regarding another form of disjunction, you observe that “Sidney frequently undercuts the iconic expectations and relationships between star and audience” (10). Do contemporary Hollywood filmmakers use this technique, and if so, is it still able to have a similar impact? Why or why not?<br /><br /><strong>Monder:</strong> I don’t think contemporary Hollywood filmmakers as a lot are trying to undercut generic expectations any more than most Hollywood filmmakers of the past. Those who experiment this way are usually (still) on the margins of the Hollywood scene (whatever that is anymore). For example, I don’t see Spielberg even wanting to achieve something different from the typical bourgeois narrative (rather, he reaffirms it), but a director like Abbas Kiarostami is more apt to make film like <em>Certified Copy</em>, which challenges the very idea of narrative and character development. Since those expectations have changed over the years, a Kiarostami must “up the ante” to have a true impact. In retrospect, Sidney seems like that latter kind of filmmaker, yet he worked within the system, so it is difficult for many to appreciate him the way they would a true pioneering independent (e.g. Oscar Micheaux or Orson Welles). Using Welles as the more celebrated version of Sidney, I would argue Welles’ work would have had greater impact, or at least a different impact, in its day. His techniques and ideas have been appropriated over the years, so an uninformed contemporary viewer would not necessarily notice what is different or special about them. <br /> <br />Does any part of what I am saying resonate with you vis a vis John Ashbery or the other New York School poets or is it too difficult to apply to such a different form with its own unique history?<br /><br /><strong>Fink:</strong> Neither mainstream nor innovative poetry are solid commercial ventures, to say the least, so a Spielberg in poetry is not being rewarded for “conformity” significantly more than a Kiarostami, even if in most cases, though not all, mainstream poets have greater access to the kind of cultural capital afforded by traditionally respected publishers like Norton or Knopf and magazines like <em>The New Yorker</em> and <em>Poetry</em>. However, what you are saying does resonate with the poetry of Ashbery and company. <br /><br />Much as it would be interesting to focus on a good-sized portion of the New York School, Koch, O’Hara, Guest, Schuyler, and Ashbery (to cite the figures generally mentioned as the forefront of the first of several generations of the “School”) have as many telling differences in the ways that they deploy disjunction as they do similarities, and a perusal of “second-generation” poets like David Shapiro, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan would multiply those differences. So I’ll just discuss Ashbery and those outside the New York School who have “upped the ante.” (And in the interests of brevity, I’m going to do a great deal of simplification.) Ashbery’s best known poem is “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1975), which might <em>seem</em> to be a coherent meditation on a Mannerist painting by Parmagianino. However, if one really reads rather than sails through the poem, s/he finds that generally, every few sentences (and within long sentences), the drift of thinking goes somewhere else, a “place” that cannot clearly be predicted from where it had been. Parmagianino’s painting receives a great deal of attention but does not center a narrative with a determinate trajectory. Contexts multiply. And the ringing conclusion does not conclude in a way that can contain what precedes. In fact, it may raise more questions, however dramatically “final” it sounds as a statement about a privileged moment of perception in relation to presence and absence. <br /><br />Even if “Self-Portrait” and many of the poems, long and short, that follow it use conventional syntax, unlike “Europe” and other poems in Ashbery’s <em>The Tennis Court Oath </em>(1962) that dismember all standard models of sentence structure, the poet’s work offers no encouragement for a reader’s retrospective reconstruction of a clearly delineated conflict, complication, climax, etc. And if one somehow discovers “character development” in the text, s/he is making powerful use of her own imaginative (you might say, projective) capacity. In fact, where one character is “speaking” and another has yielded the floor in an Ashbery poem is surely a matter for conjecture, and this New York poet follows Gertrude Stein’s tendency to distribute pronouns throughout a text without tying them to specific human antecedents. For over fifty years, Ashbery has utilized the linguistic tools and signals of narrative—for example, forms of transition like subordinating conjunctions pertaining to space and time—and small bits of plot only to thwart their usual functioning. <br /><br />On the other hand, to those who appreciate (and write about) this kind of work, these texts do not give the impression of 100% randomness or arbitrariness. It is presumed that the disjunctions—leaps from one image to another, from an image to a trope, a trope to an abstraction, an abstraction to an image—possess a “logic” that may or may not be able to be articulated. It could be a dream logic, a metonymic chain that reveals the functioning of words saturated with social significances and their evasion.<br /><br />About the time that Ashbery was writing “Self-Portrait,” what would coalesce—at least according to the narrative of literary historians—as Language Poetry in the late seventies and early eighties on the east and west coasts of this country was beginning to gather its forces by concentrating on advanced continental and other theories of language and political discourse. Language poets constructed texts that “upped the ante” through a disruption of syntax that, in some cases, exceeded those of <em>The Tennis Court Oath</em>, through the placement of intervals of disjunction even smaller, through the resituating of lines on the page, through the use of complex procedures such as those introduced by the French Oulipo as early as the fifties and even through the breaking up of words and introduction of “nonsense”-words. Narrative and character development became even more difficult to fathom, even as, in the eighties, writers who were in sympathetic dialogue with the Language poets were conceiving of a “new narrative” that included disjunction as a strategy. Nowadays, “post-avant” or “post-Language” poets are <em>not</em> “upping the ante” in the sense that they are not necessarily finding ways to be even more disjunctive; what they perceive as innovation is the reintroduction of strategies of coherence alongside the kinds of disjunctive modes that Stein and a handful of other modernists, New York School poets, Language poets, experimental feminists, and others made available.<br /><br />I’d like to hear more about what you consider the most invigorating and influential cinematic techniques used by Orson Welles. And then I’m wondering if you can tell us how Abbas Kiarostami or a similarly representative filmmaker develops strategies that are even more “revolutionary” than those of his precursors.<br /><br /><strong>Monder:</strong> That is interesting about the superficial parallel in the history of poetry. A simple example of a “revolutionary” technique in Welles would be his use of multiple narrative levels and points of view in <em>Citizen Kane </em>(1941), though how much this could be attributed to the screenwriter (Herman Mankiewicz) should be considered, since only a few of Welles’ films really do this. Nevertheless, this “breakthrough” from traditional linear narratives—at least in Hollywood---is often attributed to Welles (in his first film yet). Stylistically, his films also have a consistent use of bold camera angle experiments (particularly with wide angle lenses). Multiple narrative levels and points of view are much more common today in mainstream films. Of greater interest to me, actually, is Welles’ deconstruction/reconstruction of film elements in his marvelous art forgery “documentary,” <em>F for Fake</em> (1974), one of his last films: Welles takes “found footage” and joins it with his own to create a reality that doesn’t exist, or at least is questionable. Thus, Welles questions the very notion of “the documentary” as reality and, at the same time, cleverly comments of the theme of his subject—art forgery! It is a highly self-reflexive, Chinese-box sort of film. Today, anyone can create this effect on YouTube—sometimes crudely, sometimes in a more sophisticated way than <em>F for Fake</em>. But I still marvel at the fact the film was made in 1974, and up until then, there had been only minor experiments of this sort in the avant garde.<br /><br />A note about Kiarostami: he, too, blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction in some of his films (before it became fashionable). I found a quote by Jean-Luc Nancy regarding Kiarostami's 1992 film, <em>Life, and Nothing More</em>...<br /><br />[I]t all looks like reporting, but everything underscores (<em>indique à l'évidence</em>) that it is the fiction of a documentary (in fact, Kiarostami shot the film several months after the earthquake), and that it is rather a document about "fiction": not in the sense of imagining the unreal, but in the very specific and precise sense of the technique, of the <em>art</em> of constructing images. For the image by means of which, each time, each opens a world and precedes himself in it (<em>s'y précède</em>) is not pregiven (<em>donnée toute faite</em>) (as are those of dreams, phantasms or bad films): it is to be invented, cut and edited. Thus it is <em>evidence</em>, insofar as, if one day I happen to <em>look</em> at my street on which I walk up and down ten times a day, I construct for an instant a new <em>evidence</em> of my street (Jean-Luc Nancy, "On Evidence: <em>Life and Nothing More</em>, by Abbas Kiarostami," <em>Discourse</em> 21.1 (1999), p.82).<br /><br />In the more recent <em>Certified Copy</em> (released in the U.S. this year), Kiarostami toys with traditional character development (and undercuts the narrative development simultaneously) by creating fully-rounded characters who seem to become other people as the story progresses (or at least makes you wonder about them) and the ambiguity remains until the final moments. David Lynch has also experimented this way—my favorite of his in this respect is <em>Mulholland Drive</em> (2001). I don’t think you will find anything quite this bold in earlier mainstream films (Welles’ or anyone else’s), though I might be forgetting something. In all these cases, I believe the reception has been mixed. Not everyone loved <em>Citizen Kane</em> in its day, not everyone loves <em>Certified Copy</em>. But <em>Citizen Kane</em> is much more accepted (and cited as influential) today, so it is likely <em>Certified Copy</em> will be considered more mainstream in the future.<br /><br />What future outlook do you see for poetry? Are there trends you could cite? What period (or specific poets) seem to be influencing younger writers? <br /><br /><strong>Fink:</strong> Some recent trends in contemporary American innovative poetry have important thematic components. Poetry connected to environmental movements, Queer Theory (and especially transgender concerns), Web 2.0, the reclamation of history by people of color, or work that combines two of this categories is likely to have increased visibility and number of practitioners for the rest of this decade, and the dialogue among practitioners within each group will likely produce substantial complications. Thus, possibilities of “statement”/demystification of statement and aesthetic modes of delivering such communications will multiply. The poets’ points of solidarity and conflict with one another—often played out in blogs and other social media—may shift and will become increasingly evident, so more and more divergent positions within such areas as ecopoetry, transgender poetry, and new media work will supplant any sense that the practitioners should be lumped together. <br /><br />To recall Robert Creeley’s dictum, “Form is never more than an extension of content,” the struggle to establish a solid relationship between new perspectives and information and poetic forms will engender both new formal constructs and yet, perhaps contrary to Creeley’s point, may influence how the content itself is absorbed. As often is the case, evolving (hard) scientific, social scientific, and computer scientific knowledge will put pressure on poets to expand or transform their linguistic, auditory, visual, and kinesthetic imagination. <br /><br />Ecopoetry has been around a long time, so I should mention that, in the texts of ecopoets like Brenda Iijima and Jessica Grim, the relatively simple, declarative, descriptive modes of eco-forefathers like Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder (both still writing) give way to a discourse that complicates declaration, description, and focus while providing markedly different aesthetic pleasures. <br /><br />Since the cinema and poetry are our foci here, I want to mention the cinematic poetry of Paolo Javier and Peter Nickowitz. Both poets (and there are undoubtedly others I’m not thinking of or am not yet aware of) not only write poems that include the cinema and metacinema as subject matter—I think especially of Javier’s “Ladies and Gentlemen—Mr. Bill Murray” in ways that complicate Frank O’Hara’s homages to the movies, but they “shoot” poems as though they were movies, and Javier also has also produced powerful comic book poetry. These cross-genre innovations can certainly be elaborated in different directions by poets to come.<br /><br />To move to another aspect of film, do films really need music to manipulate the emotional responses of audiences? Or does a relative lack of music make a movie too “naked,” and if so, why?<br /><br /><strong>Monder: </strong>I found your answer a bit startling. I knew that that race, gender, and political issues had become addressed in modern poetry, but I thought (or would have thought) that was the trend (say, 1980s - 2000s) and now something else, less didactic or obvious, would be emerging, as we both acknowledged--in our earlier exchange--has happened in the cinema. Not that cinema and poetry could be considered on the same track, as we also acknowledged, or that generalizing this way is very useful. <br /><br /><strong>Fink:</strong> What I’ve been trying to convey is that contemporary innovative poets have taken up the challenge to address these political issues in ways that are “less didactic or obvious” than mainstream writers tend to do.<br /><br /><strong>Monder:</strong> So I'll move on to music.<br /><br />Music does not need to be present at all to evoke or manipulate emotional responses. The visuals alone could do that. It is noteworthy that several provocative films have no (or at least very little) music--Hitchcock's <em>Rope</em> (1948) and <em>The Birds</em> (1963), Ackerman's <em>Jeanne Dielmann</em> (1975), and many avant garde classics. Originally, in fact, Hitchcock wanted no music in the famous <em>Psycho</em> shower scene. I think music has the potential to greatly influence a viewer's feelings about a scene or an entire movie, particularly in a melodrama (melos = music in Greek) that employs a leitmotif, but music could also have the opposite effect (either by the filmmaker's design or mistake): thus, a score in a Godard film will probably not manipulate a viewer's response in the traditional sense. If anything, it will most likely repel the viewer in the same way Godard's editing style is oft-putting. But if that was the intention, that is also a sort of manipulation.<br /><br />I guess you could call the films without music I referenced "naked," but I don't really think of them that way because each one has very sophisticated uses of sound--just not musical sounds.<br /><br /><strong>Fink: </strong> Yes, it makes excellent sense to speak of “sophisticated uses of sound” without necessarily including music. The lack of music can force viewers to attend more carefully to that sound.Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-44389845955620800422011-10-23T06:11:00.000-07:002011-10-23T14:04:39.950-07:00Interview with Graham Harman<strong>Tom Beckett:</strong> I’m interested in intersections, crossroads, points of connection and departure. Is there a place, for you, where poetry and philosophy meet?<br /><br /><strong>Graham Harman:</strong> At times I wonder if they are different at all. This statement causes outrage for scientistic philosophy, with its insipid model opposing real facts outside the mind to arbitrary, decorative, poetic fictions inside the mind. I reject this scientistic model not for the “postmodernist” reason that everything is a poetic fiction inside the mind, but rather because everything is a poetic reality <em>outside</em> the mind. In other words, I don’t see the real world as the brutal collision of physical chunks monitored by tough-minded researchers in white coats, cheered on by their philosophical sycophants. Instead, I see the physical world as riddled with cracks and fissures of the same sort that is generated by poets, and the great scientists know this as well. There is obviously something quite poetic about the ideas of Einstein and Bohr, for example.<br /><br />We read lots of material during our education, but now and then there are books and essays that have the sound of doors opening onto strange new corridors. This is the special privilege of the young, and they don’t appreciate it enough, not knowing how soon it will be lost. One of those moments for me came as a college freshman, eighteen years old, when I read an essay-length introduction to a book of poems by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset from his collection <em>Phenomenology and Art</em>. The seeds of my philosophy are in that essay, which I read before ever finishing a single book of Heidegger. Its topic is metaphor.<br /><br />Ortega distinguishes between the reality of things as perceived, and their “executant” reality as just being what they are. The direct (“executant”) experience of a toothache cannot be translated into any descriptions of it, no matter how detailed. Reading a 1,000-page Proustian novel about a toothache is not the same thing as experiencing that toothache first-hand. This point is now fairly standard among philosophers of mind who defend first-person “feels” against the hardcore eliminativists who want to reduce everything to objective third-person descriptions. But the important point with Ortega is that he did not limit this to human or animal consciousness. Instead, he says in the essay that <em>everything</em> in the cosmos can be viewed as an “I”– there is an “I box,” an “I candle,” and an “I star.” Ortega was no panpsychist and didn’t think that these things had feelings. He was simply making the point that nothing, not just conscious experience, can be fully translated into outward descriptions. The executant reality of things forever withdraws from access. The greatness of art, in Ortega’s view, is that it gives us a special kind of <em>simulated</em> access to executant reality.<br /><br />The essay is quite atypical of Ortega, and he never developed its themes any further. Most of the time he was a bit too obsessed with the mutual dependence of human and world. But in this one essay he touched upon a radical metaphysics that wasn’t just interesting to my 18-year-old self, but deeply engrossing. For perhaps the first time, I felt myself in contact with a genuinely unexplored philosophical idea, and it seemed obligatory always to keep it in mind. The best essay I wrote as a freshman used Ortega’s essay to interpret Paul Verlaine’s poem “Pierrot.” Only when writing <em>Guerrilla Metaphysics</em> (2005), which contains a whole section on that Ortega essay, did I finally force myself to start putting my thoughts about it into words. That was nearly 20 years of incubation, and I reread the essay countless times along the way.<br /><br />For me, art in general is a special way of breaking the bond between an object and its own qualities, and I believe it is now the central mission of philosophy to theorize the deformations and breakdowns in this bond. As I see it, they come in either four or ten forms, depending on how you count them. In this sense, aesthetics is first philosophy; aesthetics is not lipstick and jewelry worn by sober truths that can otherwise be stated as discursive propositions. Many literary critics already knew this, of course, but they tended to think that this was a special property of literature <em>as opposed</em> to science or philosophy (see Cleanth Brooks, for example). But in fact, not even science or philosophy are doing their jobs properly if they dish out nothing but straight literal propositions. The world is not made of propositions, but of animals, chemicals, sports teams, and bombs. <br /><br />None of these things can be translated into words or perceptions without significant energy loss.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> The world is not made of propositions. Yet any person’s experience can be conceived as being made of language. What is your sense of the limits of language in terms of your practice as a philosopher?<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> The only limits of language in philosophy are the same limits found everywhere else– language cannot make the things directly present. The things cannot be transmuted directly into language. The attempt to set up rules for how to use language logically to refer to the real world rather than referring to mere illusions is hopeless. We need to be as inventive in our language as Picasso in his depiction of solid objects.<br /><br />Different personality types dominate philosophy in different eras, as new needs come to the fore. The dominant personality type of recent decades has been the precise and assertive arguer who speaks clearly and likes to call people out on “nonsense.” It’s a personality that holds itself not to believe in very much, but to undercut the gullibility of other people’s beliefs.<br /><br />My view is that the era of this personality has now run its course, and has become a pestilence of sorts. What we need now is something more like the artist type, given to new ways of staging problems. We need to find the equivalent of “philosophy installations,” whatever that might be.<br /><br />There are too many calls in philosophy for clear writing, but rarely any calls for vivid writing. I agree that writing should be clear, but if this is your first priority, it means that you think the real problem with most philosophy is obfuscation, muddiness, evasiveness, and so forth. But the real problem with much philosophy is that it simply takes a position in some pre-existing trench war without innovating as to the terms of the problem. The result is an increasing supply of rational but boring assertions, not a fresh rethinking of the problem.<br /><br />Philosophical language should be primarily vivid, and only secondarily clear. We should be clear when things are clear, but when we reach the edge of what is known, why pretend to know more than we do? I like a philosopher with a sense of when to use <em>chiaroscuro</em>. There are shadows in the world, and good writing should contain corners of shadow as well.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> I tend to read a difficult long poem—Pound’s <em>Cantos</em>, say, Zukofsky’s <em>“A”</em> , or Stein’s <em>Stanzas in Meditation</em>—in the same way that I read a challenging philosophy text. I suspend any pretence of total understanding and forge ahead. I’m “studiously unprepared” to borrow a phrase from William Carlos Williams. I’m most engaged when I’m at least somewhat textually uncertain. I like having room for improvisational thought. But, you’re right, what sustains me as reader in such situations is vividness. As, for example, your gorgeous invocation of Dante or of a giant ferris wheel in <em>Circus Philosophicus</em>. Among poets, some of us talk about the music of meaning. It seems increasingly that among the new philosophers, yourself and other “Speculative Realists,” it is the chatter of objects that holds sway.<br /><br />What is an object, anyway? And why should philosophy be oriented toward objects rather than language, social change, sexuality or animals?<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> An object is a unified entity that has qualities differentiating it from all other objects. The majority of philosophies we see are attempts to annihilate most objects. This is done by those who want to say that there are no mid-sized horses, tables, and chairs in the world, but only tiny little particles or mathematical structures. But they fail in this effort, because larger-scale objects are not merely an illusory aggregate of the behavior of their tiny little components.<br /><br />The other kind of reductionist works in the opposite direction. They say that there are no objects because objects are merely superstitious fictions posited as lying beneath whatever is presented to the mind, or whatever has real effects in the world. But they fail as well, because if objects were nothing more than their givenness to the mind or their effects in the world here and now, there would be no reason for anything ever to change. There would be no surplus in the present world capable of making things other than they currently are, just as Aristotle saw when critiquing the Megarians for saying that no one is a house builder unless they are building a house at this exact moment. (I simply disagree with Aristotle that “potentiality” is the way to solve the problem.)<br /><br />Objects are paradoxes, because they are more than their subcomponents but less than their effects on other things. Objects live on the mezzanine level of the world. Or rather, there are countless mezzanine levels in the world, because a proton is an object no less than a horse is.<br /><br />This makes some people worry, because they assume that this would lead to a wild proliferation of imaginary entities bloating the cosmos. But there is no problem here, since not all objects are real. If I conceive of some bizarre monster, it is no less an <em>object</em> than genuine trees and horses are. But whereas the trees and horses are deeper than any possible effects they might have (because they are <em>real</em> objects) and can act on each other even if all humans are dead, the same is not true of the monster in my mind (which Husserl called <em>intentional</em> objects, a term long since distorted to mean the same thing as “real,” though it means exactly the opposite).<br /><br />To answer your second question, the reason to focus on objects rather than on “language, social change, sexuality or animals” is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. “Language is the root of everything.” Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and belief-systems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth.<br /><br />All these other disciplines focus on one <em>kind</em> of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space. <br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> I began this interview wanting to pursue your ideas about language and the poetics of experience. Instead I find myself stuck on your idea of “philosophy installations” and imagining a room full of simultaneous translators amidst a giddy “carnival of things.” Have you given any further thought to what form a philosophy installation might take?<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> The closest we ever came to this in the history of philosophy was a strange manuscript by the young Leibniz in 1675, proposing a sort of carnival of knowledge. He mentions magic lanterns, optical exhibits, fireworks, and water fountains, along with gardens of medicinal herbs, laboratories, adding machines, and even including such sideshows as rope dancers, fire eaters, and “perilous leaps.” Plenty of the activities at this circus would also be purely scientific, but always surrounded by the aforementioned carnivalesque entertainments, which Leibniz obviously took great pleasure in imagining.<br /><br />If it were my carnival, I’d probably go about it a bit differently. For me, philosophy has a great deal to do with the tension between objects and their qualities, and with the various forms of breakdown in this tension. I would want exhibits that shed light on these processes somehow. Probably the easiest to envisage at this point would involve the “Heideggerian” sort of breakdown of environmental equipment when we least expect it. <br /><br />My thoughts about this are rough and green, but given the increasing frequency of my contacts with artists of various sorts, it’s probably just a matter of time before someone from the arts world comes and throws down the gauntlet and says: “we have backing for this, so what are your ideas?” And then I’ll have to turn my energies very suddenly in that direction. It feels almost inevitable.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> I can’t wait to see that eventual collaboration.<br /><br />Meanwhile, at the end of <em>Guerrilla Metaphysics</em>, you wrote: “…although we have tried to undercut all claims for the preeminence of language in philosophy, it would still be important to know a thing or two about language even if it is no longer destined to play the starring role it has enjoyed for the past one hundred years.” I took that to mean that you still have some issues that you want to work out regarding the role of language in philosophy. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on these matters at this point in time.<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> Heidegger famously distinguishes between the “ontological” and the “ontic.” The ontological is what pertains to being as such, while the ontic is that which is of relevance to specific beings.<br /><br />What we saw during the very long Broadway run of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy was language elevated to an ontological role, with all philosophical problems reinterpreted as problems of language. Obviously, this is no longer allowed by object-oriented philosophy, which treats all objects as equally objects.<br /><br />Nonetheless, our new ontological principle does not mean that all objects are equally interesting or important. We might say that language and aluminum cans are equally objects, but a philosophical exploration of aluminum cans is unlikely to bring much light into the world. Language, however, is an extremely interesting <em>ontic</em> topic even after being deprived of its ontological monarchy– just as Rome remains one very interesting city among others, even though it is no longer the center of the universe.<br /><br />In this respect, language may still loom large in object-oriented philosophy even though it must be stripped of its transcendental-ontological constitutive power for everything else that exists.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> I understand that you’re working on a study of H.P. Lovecraft. What instigated that?<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> Most readers discover Lovecraft in adolescence, but I never read a word of him until my late thirties. My reaction to reading him was not quite immediate, but when I finally reached “The Call of Cthulhu” and also “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” (perhaps the most underrated Lovecraft tale), the effect was powerful and lasting.<br /><br />As the years passed, I found that I was rereading the best Lovecraft stories almost compulsively. And I found that he had little in common with what is usually called “pulp” literature. I saw Lovecraft not just as very imaginative, but as a literary stylist of the highest caliber.<br /><br />Then, when the original speculative realist group started in 2007, we were astonished to discover that while there were no shared philosophical heroes in the group, we had all read and adored Lovecraft, even Meillassoux in Paris.<br /><br />I wanted to share my enthusiasm for Lovecraft by someday writing a book about him. Thanks to the experimental spirit of <a href="http://www.zero-books.net">Zero Books</a>, the chance arose much earlier than expected.<br /><br />The American University in Cairo has generous research funding available, and thus I was able to spend a large part of the summer of 2011 in Providence, Lovecraft’s very formative home city, a place I had never been before. It’s important to see the hometowns of authors you’re writing about, I’ve found. You might not be able to put in words what you learn about the author from seeing the place where they were molded, but you can get a sense of the atmosphere– a glimpse of what they regarded as normalcy.<br /><br />The atmosphere of Providence? Charming and a bit eerie. It’s more quiet than I expected, and also incredibly hilly, at least in Lovecraft’s part of town near the Brown University Campus.<br /><br />Lovecraft is one of the greats in American literature. I don’t think it’s a stretch to put him in the same league as Poe, and I say that as something of a Poe-worshipper. And both Poe and Lovecraft are given too little credit as <em>stylists</em>. Everyone is in a rush to identify them as co-enthusiasts of “scary content.” But what they really have in common is style, a certain way of hinting and alluding to make things more horrible than if they were directly stated.<br /><br />Poe is the more polished high-literary figure of the two, but if Lovecraft is slightly more awkward at times, he makes up for it with a vaster cosmic vision than Poe ever attempted.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> China Miéville is a writer who emerges as a character in <em>Circus Philosophicus</em>. Does his fiction figure importantly for you too?<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> I met China at a Lovecraft event at Goldsmiths College in London, just one day before the inaugural Speculative Realism event, and we’ve occasionally corresponded since then and I’ve met him a few other times in London. He’s a well-spoken guy who makes a great impression. This may sound silly, but I met him without realizing how famous he was, so I asked him a dumb question: "Where can I find your books?" He answered graciously and humbly, but then I felt like an idiot on the way out of London when I saw his books all over Heathrow Airport.<br /><br />I’ve read a number of China’s books. My overall favorite is probably <em>The City and the City</em>, which uses a superb idea that someone should have come up with a long time ago. It changed my experience of daily walks, as I often try to practice “seeing” and “unseeing” people to imagine what it would feel like. But my favorite individual feature of any of the novels is probably the magnificent descriptions of music in his debut novel, <em>King Rat</em>. You wouldn’t think that techno music could be described in words, but he pulls it off in that book. China has also written a treatise on international law with a strongly Marxist flavor, which is not as well known among his fans. He’s charismatic, smart as hell, and I’m glad he’s around. We’re not close personal friends, but he did enjoy being put on an oil platform in <em>Circus Philosophicus</em>, which was a bit of a prank on my part.<br /> <br /><strong>TB:</strong> In the chapter on Humor in <em>Guerrilla Metaphysics</em>, you wrote: “In this book, we will have to bypass the topic of dreams, despite its obviously promising connection with two of our central topics, simply because a reading of Freud in terms of object-oriented philosophy would require more than a few pages.” I’m wondering if you could at least provide a sketch of your approach to the subject.<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> Allow me to begin with an anecdote. I didn’t read Freud until my senior year of college, largely because he is one of those authors, like Marx, where you feel (wrongly) as though you already know what they’re going to say, simply because they have permeated the culture. So, you grow up hearing that “Freud thinks everything is sex,” and it sounds too robotic, and so you don’t bother to read him. That was my own experience until I was 21 or 22 years old.<br /><br />Then much to my surprise, I <em>loved</em> Freud. It was an immediate passion and a rather strong one. (Among other things, he was one of the best writers of the twentieth century in any genre, fiction included.) Along with the three works we read for class –<em>On the Interpretation of Dreams</em> and a couple of the case studies– I then spent the entire summer before graduate school reading pretty much nothing but Freud for three months.<br /><br />But backing up to senior year, a gruff classmate of mine walked into my workplace on campus one day and asked what I thought of our Freud readings for class. I said I loved them passionately. His reaction was dismissive: “What? I thought you were a Heideggerian. What does it mean to say that a dream ‘is’ a wish-fulfillment?”<br /><br />I didn’t have a good answer to his question, and of course I did agree with the anti-reductionist sentiment behind the question. But I somehow felt there was something different going on in Freud from the reduction part of it. For me it was more the reverse movement that was underway in Freud: a system of translations, not of reductions.<br /><br />An easy object-oriented critique of Freud would go something like this: “Last night I dreamed that I was a harpooner. But this dream cannot be reduced to a wish for mighty phallic prowess. Instead, it might also refer to a desire for adventure on the high seas, or to have a remarkable object of quest in my life analogous to Captain Ahab’s White Whale. In many ways a harpoon is more interesting than genitals in the first place. Aside from that, the harpoon is a symbol resembling the trident, which through Poseidon is linked with horses and earthquakes. Indo-European anthropologists tell us further that earthquakes are connected symbolically with Such-and-Such and So-and-So, and these further symbols are more the meaning of the dream than any phallic connotations. Freud is wrong.” And so forth. And all these critiques have been made many times, yet they somehow fail to make Freud uninteresting.<br /><br />We would have to say not just that the harpoon symbol in the dream is irreducible downward to its libidinal causes and irreducible upward to its systematic anthropological interrelations. This is true enough, but something more is going on as well.<br /><br />First, there is the fact that the “phallic” aspect of the harpoon is already an overly specific translation of a rather amorphous libido, which Freud knew can cathect objects in many different ways.<br /><br />Second, it may very well be the case that the harpoon <em>does</em> serve as a kind of substitute satisfaction for whatever frustrated impulses the dreamer is undergoing. This idea of indirect fulfillment is what made Freud one of the greats, opening up a vast field of psychoanalytic study covering all of human culture.<br /><br />But I would say that they are not just substitute satisfactions. They soon become real ones. If you become an ace harpooner on board the <em>Pequod</em> and begin to take real pleasure in it, perhaps your Freudian analyst in the morning will trace this back to some sort of compensation for organic inadequacy, and perhaps your Jungian analyst in the afternoon will tell you about the harpoon archetype (which I doubt even exists in Jungian circles; this is a made-up example just for fun). But maybe what is really happening is that an erotic wish <em>has</em> been transformed into a self-fulfilling love of the harpooner’s career. And this leads me to a more basic idea that interests me in many different spheres.<br /><br />There is a widespread tendency to think that if anything is moved in any way by ulterior impulses, then it must be entirely corrupted by those impulses. For instance, John Dean of Watergate fame came to lecture in Cairo six years ago. He was presenting himself to some extent as a hero for turning on the Nixon people and testifying against them in Congress. A rather cynical friend of mine said: “So what? He only did it to save his own skin.”<br /><br />To which I should have replied: “So what to you too?” The fact that something is guided initially by self-interest does not reduce it utterly to that aspect. For example, the initial reasons for St. Thomas Aquinas becoming a Catholic may have been something petty like the wish to please his parents and be treated as a good boy. Well, that hardly matters, does it? The origins of a thing do not always contain its truth. Supposing young St. Thomas wanted to please his parents, then enjoyed the praise he received during his studies, who cares if these were his original motives for extreme piety? Over time, it became something much more. We could say that the original incentives lured him into the profession, but then the profession became much more to him than the original lures.<br /><br />To give another example, about twenty years ago I dropped by a co-worker’s house after work. He had a number of ballet books on his coffee table, and in no way was he the ballet-loving type. I asked him about the books, and he candidly admitted that he had met a ballet dancer, found her extremely attractive, and was reading about ballet to impress her, out of purely sexual motives. He even chuckled about it in a way I found unpleasantly cynical.<br /><br />Whether or not he succeeded with the young woman I don’t know, but I’m sure he went nowhere in his knowledge of ballet. But what if he had? Let’s say he had become fascinated by the books, forgotten the woman, and realized his vocation and become the world’s greatest expert on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” It wouldn’t really matter how crude his initial motives were, would it? Aristotle is very clear about this. We become good by imitating good people, meaning that we’re fakes and frauds in stage one, and become genuine only later. This is the main reason that it’s unfortunately difficult to trust young people, because they’re often at a stage of imitation or play-acting as a way of becoming the real thing, and you can never be sure if what you think you see before you is the genuine item, or just an assumed costume that will be reversed the next week under different impulses. Over time, we all become more and more who we are.<br /><br />And so it is with desires, I think. The cynical approach would say something like: “Basically, all people care about is sex and power.” Perhaps at some stage that is more or less true of everyone, but the lust for sex and power can be transformed by a kind of alchemy into a love of harpoons, Catholicism, or ballet. This isn’t quite the same thing as “sublimation,” which still assumes a kind of dualism, with the libido lurking underwater and ballet a pristine Other that provides substitute satisfaction. Instead, I would say that the libido is <em>in</em> the ballet, which isn’t really sublimated at all, but simply a metamorphosis of the libido that has now become autonomous and self-contained.<br /><br />The issue goes beyond dreams, and covers all transformation of one thing into another. I’m against the reduction of anything to its causes or foundations, but also against the idea that anything rises too far above those causes and foundations. A child can never be reduced to its parents, yet the child will always preserve a disturbing number of features and mannerisms from its parents. Do you ever cough and hear the sound of your father coughing, or recognize your mother’s eyes when you look in the mirror? It would be like if you transmute lead to gold, but then the gold is still somehow lead at the same time.<br /><br />To go back to the original anecdote, where my gruff classmate mockingly asked what it means to say that a dream “is” a wish-fulfillment, I would turn this around and ask: how does a wish turn into a dream? That’s what I always loved about Freud: the fact that one thing always had the power to turn into another, especially if blocked or stymied.<br /><br /><strong>TB:</strong> A final semi-articulate question, then. Where do you locate your hope(s) for transformation and change?<br /><br /><strong>GH:</strong> In the avoidance of trench war, and that’s what insight always means. There is a tendency to set oneself in opposition to a certain position and attempt to annihilate it, as if that were the work of thought. “If only there weren’t so many stupid people who keep believing in irrational things like God, then everything would be OK.”; “If only people would stop clinging to the pathetic illusion that a self exists, then we would make real progress.” Look at the political sphere, and you’ll find some examples of this as well.<br /><br />But the key to overcoming trench wars is not to compromise with some watery hybrid of the two. This will always secretly favor one of the two sides. The golden example of such a gesture is correlationism, which claims to “overcome” the idealist/realist opposition, but is really just idealism with some defense mechanisms built in. “We’re not idealists, we believe the self is always already outside itself in pointing at the world” (phenomenology); “We’re not idealists, we believe in the Real as an originary inassimilable trauma” (Fichte, Lacanians).<br /><br />No, the way out of the trench war is usually to adopt openly the “old-fashioned” side that is being critiqued, while finding some way to flip it completely into something strange. I think of Cézanne in painting, who amidst the impressionist revolution found a way to retrieve the solidity of objects without relapsing into academicism, and in doing so he paved the way for cubism. In philosophy I think of Leibniz, who amidst the general assault on substantial forms in the new physics, and the general assault on multiplicity in Spinoza (who has been a bit too much in vogue lately), revived substantial forms and the multiplicity of individuals. Instead of merely extrapolating from the general modern critique and pushing it a step further, Leibniz like Cézanne gave us an unexpected reversal. This is the only way to win a trench war, otherwise you’re simply locked in a war of annihilation with an enemy defined as the evil that must be crushed so that things can turn out happy in the end.<br /><br />Cézanne was really an impressionist, but he also understood what had been lost with the breakdown of three-dimensional pictorial space, and that forced him to discover an innovative way to render solidity simply because he had no other choice. Leibniz was really a modernist, but he had read Suárez like a fiend in his youth and understood how solid the Scholastics really were, and this led him to his strangely gorgeous retrieval of Aristotelo-Scholastic philosophy. These are my heroes: the people who look at first like throwbacks, but are actually more modern than the moderns, because instead of just tweaking daddy’s nose, they also preserve the ways in which daddy was right, and thus go further than the more overt radicals.<br /><br />And that’s how it is with object-oriented philosophy, we hope. There has now been a long assault on objects, objectivity, essence, substance, and so forth. The cutting edge opposes these concepts and the supposedly gullible, oppressive patriarchs who champion them, and seems to think they are superstitions that must be put behind us forever. But history doesn’t work by putting things behind us forever. It puts things behind us for awhile, and then they resurface in some non-archaic form suited to the new conditions. Who really thought that <em>pirates</em> would return as a major threat to the world, for instance? Who in 1965 would have guessed that political Islam would reappear on stage, at a time when the Arab world was in a socialist and secular phase? Who could have thought in 1646 that someone was being born that very year who would write great philosophy by retrieving the substantial forms, which modern thought was supposed to have exterminated? If you want to see the future, look for the supposedly naïve theories that have just been debunked, and try to figure out some futuristic way to modify them so that they would be feasible under the new conditions without being mere relapses.<br /><br />And let me just add that I’m not sure how this would apply to the present political situation, which is one reason I’ve kept a certain distance from it (I’m against Badiou’s conception of philosopher-as-militant, refreshing though it may be after decades of deconstruction). What is the truth here? Was Marx wrongly thought to have been refuted in 1989, and is now returning from the dead in novel and highly pertinent form? Or is it that the protestors, in letting their prefixes do the thinking for them (“neo”-liberalism), are missing the inner truth and greatness of liberalism?<br /><br />There is undeniably a certain banality to the world in our time, a demoralizing commercial hustle. But I’m extremely suspicious of the near-unanimity that prevails in political views in world intellectual circles right now. The price of admission to these circles is a series of expected denunciations that reassure everyone that you’re on their team. This is why I don’t respond immediately to demands to provide a politics of OOO, because I suspect that I’m just being asked to provide the usual, predictable denunciations, just as if I were being ordered to wear a flannel shirt and beard stubble at a grunge music party. That’s not intellectual debate, that’s just group solidarity, and I don’t care how good you think your group is– group solidarity is not a form of thinking.<br /><br />For example, I’m writing this response from Istanbul, where I saw the 2011 Biennale yesterday. The theme was art and politics, and I was disappointed to find that all the political messages were <em>exactly the same</em>! Everything is America’s fault, Israel’s fault, capitalism’s fault. So, is the answer really that easy, and all we need to do is join forces to fight all the stupid and greedy corporate interests that prevent the truth from prevailing? Maybe, but this smells too much like trench war to me. It looks too much like the very “failure of imagination” of which everyone is so quick to accuse the current system.<br /><br />There’s a wise old saying: don’t become worse than what you’re fighting. I would put a twist on that and say: don’t become less imaginative than what you’re fighting. This is the big danger for the political Left right now. I’m not interested in its moralistic self-congratulation, but only in what it can <em>build</em>. This is why I loved Žižek’s speech at the Occupy Wall Street protest; he hit the spot and said exactly what needed to be said. Maybe this Left will be able to build quite a lot. We will soon find out, because they are probably on the verge of seizing the upper hand. What is now called neo-liberalism is a little over thirty years old: the California property tax revolt in 1978, Thatcher in 1979, Reagan in 1980. Like any way of looking at the world, it has turned into a robotic application of clichés and no longer seems to be up to the challenge. We are about to undergo a big Leftward swing. When that happens, let’s see what people can do other than critique and oppose. They’ll have about thirty years of leeway before they start to become completely banal themselves, and then we’ll swing in the other direction again in about 2045, just as my own life is coming to a close.Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-42068074389714362132011-09-17T06:04:00.000-07:002011-09-19T14:14:22.909-07:00INTERVIEW WITH SAWAKO NAKAYASU ABOUT TEXTURE NOTES (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) by Thomas Fink<div align="left"><br /><br /><strong>Thomas Fink</strong>: The noun “Notes” in the title of your book indicates that you are studying something: “Texture.” We’ll get to why you’re doing that a little later. The titles of the prose-poems give a sense that the note-taking took place on particular days, but this mode of titling also evokes the idea of a diary. Of course, as this excerpt from the beginning and end of the table of contents indicates, the dates are not in chronological order; most are from the year 2003 but a few are from 2004:<br /><br />6.2.2003<br />9.2.2003<br />6.3.2003<br />10.4.2003<br />4.6.2004<br />10.6.2003<br />7.8.2003<br />9.8.2003<br />11.8.2003<br />7.9.2003<br />10.9.2003 . . . .<br /><br />5.25.2003<br />10.25.2003<br />5.26.2003<br />10.27.2003<br />5.28.2003<br />5.28.2003<br />8.28.2003<br />7.29.2003<br />10.29.2003<br />3.30.2004<br />5.30.2003<br /><br />What I notice is that the progression isn’t exactly random. For example, in the first part above, the first and third prose-poems are a day apart, as are the fourth and sixth, and the seventh and tenth, whereas in the second part, the first and third are a day apart, the second and fourth two days apart, the fifth and sixth the same day. And in the first eleven, there’s a buildup from the numbers two to nine in the date category, whereas in the last eleven, the buildup in the date category is from 25 to 29. So it’s not merely a matter of disrupting chronology so that the “notes” or “diary” are “flowing” in an “organic” way from poem to poem. Imagine what a diary with such a smashing of chronology would do to the reader’s sense of temporal unfolding! But this is not a set of notes or a diary; it’s poetry.<br /><br />The marking of time is problematic. The prose-poem “6.2.2003” could have been started and finished, merely started, or merely finished on that day, or even none of the above. Something begun in 2003 could have been finished just in time for the book’s production.<br /><br />I don’t want you to give away any mystery or any absent center. Could you just, please, tell us something (anything) about the use of the date titles and the undermining of chronology?<br /><br /><strong>Sawako Nakayasu</strong>: Is it not a set of notes? And not a diary? How do you know that it’s poetry? Of the many interesting topics you bring up, that’s where my attention initially lands: if you remove the book from context and just look at it as an object, the title would (should?) lead you to think that it is a set of “notes.” If you flip through the pages, the dates should stand out as a signifier for “diary,” though, as you note, they are not quite in chronological order. The editors at Letter Machine were kind enough to respect my wishes to not have the label “poetry” on the back cover – and with most of the book written in prose, who’s to say? Of course I love poetry and have little to no objection to being called a poet, but I’ve always found troubling – or rather, I’ve always felt a desire to trouble – any kind of genre segregation: market-based, institution-based, or otherwise.<br /><br />Around 2003, when I wrote this book, blogs were just starting to get embraced by the masses, including masses of poets. Poets had blogs where they talked, opined, argued about poetry, and/or blogs to which they posted their poems. I wanted to try it out, too – and Texture Notes is what came out. That was the name of my blog, initially, though I eventually removed most of those original posts as I started to form a book out of it. So – chronology: the dates do correspond to the dates when the poems were written, which is also the day they were posted (and “published”) to my blog. And by that I mean that most, if not all, of the poem was written on that day. The poems were later revised, at various points between the date of inception and the day I finally gave it over to the editors at Letter Machine, but it was largely surface-level; the core of the poem arrived on the date that serves as its title.<br /><br />There was something interesting, psychologically, about instantaneously publishing a poem – I’m sure many writers had this experience around that time, but the notion of an audience being immediately present (regardless of whether they were actually there or not – the potential was enough, I guess) compelled me to write on a somewhat regular basis – it was fun, sort of – (though if I look back at the contents of what I wrote then, I would question how much fun I was really having in life). (The previous statement would imply that this work also does function as a diary, at least in part.) But I would venture to say that a sense, some sense, of audience, is a part of my writing process. After graduating from college, I was worried about the sudden lack of writing workshops (with its built-in audience system), and began writing texts for performances – and hence writing for real, live audiences. When I finished graduate school, Craig Watson took it upon himself to give me an “assignment” – his way of keeping me writing. And so it turns out that it’s not necessary to have a large audience, but an audience of one is enough too. Writing on a blog was like that – I didn’t need to have a large readership, but any reader would suffice. My current idea (current, as in, from the last month or so) is to give poetry readings for an audience of one – one person at a time, I mean. It’s very intimate.<br /><br />Back to the idea of chronology. The poems are placed in order of the day of the month they were written; hence the pseudo-pattern that you notice. When it came time for me to turn the blog-entries into a book, I considered many many ways of ordering the pieces – and concluded that this worked the best. (Many of my decisions are made intuitively, so I’m afraid I can’t explain any further than this.)<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> Your questioning of genre segregation is very useful. A diary involves autobiographical notes, and notes could be framed as a diary. Chez Derrida and de Man, an autobiographical text is no less a fiction than a poem or prose-poem. The diary and notes as blog poetry also promote intimacy, as you say, between writer and audience. Intimacy, I think, is a major component of an investigation of texture. How did you get interested in doing a blog with (prose-) poems/ notes/ entries with texture as topic?<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> After all that, let’s just call them poems, for simplicity’s sake. As for your question, it’s been so long since I wrote this that I’m having trouble recalling how it all got started – I just went back to the blog and took a look, where I can actually see the pieces in the order I wrote them (though they’re no longer visible to the public). So it looks like the first one I wrote was on 5.25.2003 – though it turns out that looking at the first few poems I wrote doesn’t tell me how all of this got started either, but it’s just as well. I start many writing projects, often, and some of them stick and some of them don’t. After I had exhausted the Texture Notes project, I changed the name of the blog to Insect Tutelage, and started posting Ant poems – those went on for a long time, if a few years can be considered a long time, and then I just stopped writing them. The ants have come to take on another beyond-text life, involving performances and other projects.<br /><br />But regarding texture: I was in a between-cultures state, and texture seemed to be a means of capturing what I found varying between the places where I wrote, or lived, or thought about, the contents of this book – mostly Japan, the US, and France. In Japan, there’s something about the lack (in general greetings) and abundance (unintentional and undesired, as in crowded trains) of physical contact which I found interesting. That somehow you could be in a packed train, where your bodies are literally smashed up against everyone else’s, and yet by sheer intention you could somehow <em>feel</em> that you were not actually touching any of these people. So it’s possible that my interest in texture evolved out of a consideration for bodies in space. Contact improvisation dance was a big part of my life around then, too – which means I was interested in individual textures (“Whenever I meet new people I want to touch them first and find out their texture”) as well as the textures that arise among groups, masses of people and things – hence the field of bicycles, trail of anything, rooms full of things – boots, eyeballs, an airplane filled with diamonds. The population density of Tokyo must have played a part, since many of the poems seem rather heavily populated.<br /><br />I was interested in how far I could take this idea of texture.<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> In the last poem, you joke about “contact improvisation dance”: “Went to a fight. Contact improvisation broke out” (109). And I understand that you’re a hockey player, too; that’s quite a contact sport!<br /><br />“How far [you] could take this idea of texture”—yes, and exceeding customary thresholds is itself an important topos. In such poems as the “Nightmare about Hamburgers” (“9.2.2003,” 3), the direct encounter with the “very very fat woman’s” folds of fat (“6.3.2003,” 5), the “trail of anything—insects, hamburgers, bicycles” (“9/19/2003,” 61), and a man’s quest for a woman in a roomful of boots (“10.25.2003,” 87), I find an extreme immersion in an extreme or, by usual standards, excessive sensual event, sometimes deliberately cultivated and sometimes, (as in the first one above) seemingly imposed, that either borders on or reaches something like sexual experience. There seems to be a battle between attraction and repulsion, and sometimes repulsion is overcome by fascination, which is not exactly attraction. And sometimes it’s the sheer quantity and thickness of catalog elements that make the event both enticing as quasi-masochistic pleasure and overwhelming, hence unpleasant. As a writer bearing intentions or as a reader of your own text, how would you characterize the psychosensual or psychosexual aspects of such unusual and intense textural encounters?<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> I like your idea of extremes – or extremities – of sensual events. On one end might be a whole-body immersion (in hamburger meat, or a room of boots), and on the other, very particular sites of contact: licking an eyeball, poking a finger into an open wound (“9.19.2004,” 63). I’m interested in all that you mention – and in fact I wish you would say more, since I can’t. I can’t, because a) as a “writer bearing intentions,” my intentions are not very clearly known to me at the time of writing; and b) being a reader of my own text would probably lead to some kind of armchair-self-psychoanalysis that we probably should leave alone. These themes are not new to my work, either, but perhaps they are most explicitly manifest in this book in particular.<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> OK, I will say a little more about extremes. In this book, you lay out some intriguing conceptual art projects, and extremity makes the concepts striking. I wonder how a “fried umbrella” would perform in a rainstorm. And a surrealist would need a lot of rendering skill to paint a “fried umbrella” well. The backwards vomit poem (“6.18.2003”) is reminiscent of Vertov’s cinematic experiments. But perhaps there’s a big distinction between the distancing effect of reading about a moving picture of backwards vomit and the dis-ease of seeing it on screen. This form of mediation may be necessary to avoid being overwhelmed and thus unable to get anything meaningful from the experience. The idea of diamonds filling up the airplane, in which the flight attendant has to serve food and drinks (“9.24.2003”), is equally exciting but less threatening, since diamonds have a positive association.<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> I like you describing them as “conceptual art projects” – this also overlaps with my writings for performance, some of which are more performable than others. Often I’ve written pieces that I thought were conceptual (and hence not performable), only to end up staging it somehow – this includes “Ice Event,” a hockey game/performance in which there is only one audience member, who is also the puck. The diamonds in the airplane – are intended to counter the positive associations we have with diamonds – they are obstacles that prevent the flight attendant from making progress in her dreadful task of serving Salisbury steak to the passengers, and “what her face looks like at the end of it” implies that her face has been cut up, damaged by the sharpness of the diamonds. When the diamond drops out from under her skirt, it’s like the maid getting caught stealing jewels from the mistress.<br /><br />I’m not too familiar with Vertov’s work, but if I had to name a filmmaker I feel an affinity for, it’d be Jan Svankmajer – he has such a wacky sensibility that somehow resonates as very honest to me. His films often chew around the intersections between food and flesh, pleasure and revulsion, the abject subject and the boundaries of propriety or social norms… he is definitely a master of the “excessive sensual event,” a lovely phrase you used earlier. We all need more excessive sensual events, I think.<br /><br />On the other hand, you liken that poem (the backwards vomit poem) to “reading about a moving picture of backwards vomit” – which I find interesting, as that was not my intent, and yet I can see that there is something about the way I narrate that makes it seem as such. I think it’s a mode (or a style, voice, what have you) that I often use, which is related to the distancing effect that you mention.<br /><br />Or perhaps there are several kinds of distance and intimacy at work. In part I might attribute it to my bougie upbringing – my mother is so proper that I got scolded when I mentioned I had eaten an apple (whole, unpeeled) on the street while walking to the train station. And so these poems filled with snot, shit, vomit, might sound very different coming from someone else, I think. I don’t want it to seem like some kind of ongoing teenage rebellion, but it seems I’ve taken to mining the discord between the propriety of the young Japanese woman (that I was supposed to become) – and the sort of clear, controlled, removed tone of writing that comes with it, and the vomiting and fucking and whatever other improprieties that may go on, to whatever extent, in my life and work.<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> The representation of abjection (diarrhea, vomit, etc.) and the boundaries of respectable or antisocial behavior (i.e. to eat or not to eat fish eyeballs) are important thematic components of <em>Texture Notes</em>. On the one hand, precision and seemingly objective reportage militate against emotionalism in the treatment of these areas that folks either avoid mentioning or find painful or disgusting, while on the other, in “9.15.2003,” the “addendum” to the first “diarrhea” poem, for example, emotion is cultivated. It’s an emotional solidarity with suffering women:<br /><br />The texture not of motherfucking diarrhea, but texture of the girls, women, all ages and sizes, who have it, diarrhea like a motherfucker.<br /><br />Line them up, all of them, after they have done their business or between rounds, holding hands and lined up all across the hemisphere, or holding one hand out, the other hand clutching belly, and hold them, one at a time, warmly, tenderly, but firmly, these women, such consistencies. (47)<br /><br />You make the textural differences between the waste product and the girls clear, but, for you, what’s the telling difference between the <em>phrases</em> “motherfucking diarrhea” and “diarrhea like a motherfucker”? And do you feel that there’s a feminist component in this and other poems in the book?<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> Tom you ask such interesting questions that even I wonder if I am getting the answer right…the difference between those phrases is performative, I think. So you imagine: a group of women with sweet, young, feminine voices saying “I have motherfucking diarrhea” or “I have diarrhea like a motherfucker.” Wouldn’t you choose the latter too?<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> Yes, the rhythm of utterance is better for those speakers!<br /><br /><strong>SN</strong>: I might also add that all this grossness, the visceral details, might not so much be about being abject or antisocial, but is perhaps about intimacy, after all. Intimacy, in some ways, is forged through a sharing of viscera – so if you’re holding a woman with diarrhea, or one who is vomiting, or orgasming, or giving birth, that’s intimate. I hope he’ll forgive me for telling this story, but when my partner and I got engaged, I opted to receive my engagement ring in the form of a trip to South America. We were traveling lightly, and after paragliding off the coast of Lima, we went to the hotel room sink to wash our clothes, and discovered skid marks on the inside of his boxers. Of course it’s an embarrassing moment for him, but somehow in that moment I really felt like we were about to get married – sharing our dirty laundry, literally.<br /><br />As for feminism, yes. I don’t know what kind of feminism this is (do you?), but just comparing Japanese and American language, I feel like Japanese is oppressive linguistically in that the so-called bad words are a) not that strong, and b) not accessible to me, as a woman. I just wouldn’t say them. If I wanted to say in Japanese that I have “diarrhea like a motherfucker,” it wouldn’t sound right at all…just like, “really bad diarrhea” or something. So I find English quite liberating, and I find writing liberating, as it allows me to say things that I generally would not speak. Or do I have some variation of Tourette’s syndrome? As for the poem you quote, the solidarity is with suffering women, abject women, and in a way, all women: even the most beautiful of women have diarrhea sometimes, don’t they?<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> Diarrhea is neither sexist nor racist nor lookist. “Motherfucker” is such a classically American expression—though it <em>should</em> have its roots in Freud’s study of the Oedipus Complex or maybe Greek tragedy itself—that I can’t imagine a Japanese equivalent. (And I never knew more than 300 Japanese words anyway, but I can’t imagine the word “okasan” or “ha ha” attached to anything vulgar.)<br /><br />In developing short, medium, and long paragraphs, as well as in balancing paragraph-lengths in a given prose-poem, do you have guiding ideas for what might be a rather intuitive process?<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> I don’t think I have “guiding ideas” regarding length, but I have “some idea” whenever I set out to write a piece, and some ideas take more words than others to make themselves heard.<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> The “hamburger” poem (“9.2.2003”), for example, places a paragraph that consumes nearly half a page between two one-fragment paragraphs on top and five very short paragraphs below it. It makes for an artful asymmetrical balance. The poem about a park (“9/13.2004”) expands gradually from short to medium to a long paragraph before ending with two medium ones.<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> So I suppose it isn’t quite as arbitrary as I made it seem – I do think about phrasing, whether at the sentence level or paragraph level – and I often think that the way I shape my writing is connected to some sense of music, or musical development (or anti-development, as sometimes the case may be), that I try to achieve in my writing. In some of my earlier work, like<em> So we have been given time</em> . <em>Or</em>, it’s more apparent that I am trying to write music with words – I would have liked to become a composer, and perhaps I’ll pursue it again one day - but the way rhythms and patterns are shaped in the text, the movement of time within the text, has always been important to me.<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> In “3.21.2004,” you think about ways of describing “the texture of a [musical] conductor’s” body, including not only “the physical memory of every symphony” but every bit of experience that he undergoes and that serves as the “source of that thing called music otherwise known as love,” but then in the next paragraph, “that conductor turns out to be not one of music but of trains,” one attuned to “the pressure of a speeding vehicle or even that of an angry nation” (69). The accidents of language double context, and then there is a reference that does not obviously follow from either context and a closing sentence that seems to stem from that reference: “Two days ago a man and his wife strung themselves from a tree, finding no other way to face down the unbending fact of their negligence.” For you, aside from what you said before about “bad words” in Japanese and English, how does language (or how do languages) impinge on the experience of texture?<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> For starters, the texture of music was a point of departure for me in writing this book. When I studied music as an undergrad, we listened to music while following along to the scores – and one thing I found really interesting was the texture of sounds – and how you could only hear it, but also see it in the score. And then if a non-tactile sense like sound could manifest texture, then it would also apply to much more: so then there was visual texture (“Start from the outside of a peephole…”), auditory texture (sound of the wrong band warming up), and then on to the texture of abstract nouns – memory, need, uncertainty, danger.<br /><br />As for your question, and regarding this poem, I’ve tried to answer this question numerous times and keep failing. By failing, I mean – first of all, I don’t think language impinges on texture, but rather allows for the textures of experience to overlap, or perhaps butt up against each other – creating a meta-texture, if you will.<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> “3.30.2004,” the penultimate prose-poem, presents one of the most lucidly descriptive, dramatic, and touching narratives in <em>Texture Notes</em>. When the speaker, perhaps an attendant at a nursing home, feeds “strawberry short cake to a large, very large indeed man” (105)—reminiscent of the extremely big woman and the sumo wrestlers earlier in the book—but doesn’t succeed in helping him have “the most satisfying eating experience” (107), the two of them are so sincere and determined to make the process work, but it doesn’t happen, as “some third-party observer,” also well-intentioned, takes away the cake so that they don’t have to see “the swarm of ants that are having a ball at their expense.” We encounter human kindness/good will at the same time as we confront (what should only be a temporary) failure of intersubjective understanding, textural negotiation, and circumstance; we might also wonder why the eating area is ant-friendly (bad luck or human negligence) and whether the cake is a low-sugar, low-fat version. Could you supply any context(s) that would help us think further about this simultaneously complex and accessible text? And also, consider the reference to ants at the end, is this a nod to your poetic project involving ants or had that not yet been conceived?<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> The “failure of intersubjective understanding, textural negotiation, and circumstance” – isn’t that just another way (or an academic way) of talking about the messiness of love? I think this is how fiction often works, too – where the actual details of the events (the large man, the strawberry shortcake) are fictional, but all stemming from some real lived experience - this book is dedicated to Eugene, not only of the aforementioned skid marks of intimacy but also the “person for whom I have spent a great deal of time and love,” (53) – not only by default because he is my partner, but also because he figured largely in my life in 2003 and 2004, in which case you might suppose that our relationship has had some struggles along the way. Were the ants because of bad luck or human negligence? Ants are everywhere. And strawberry shortcake is their favorite cake. As for my ant project, I first wrote about ants when I was nineteen. It was an assignment for class, the last line of which was “Can you find your sensibility in a colony of ants?” – a question I’ve been attempting to answer for many years now.<br /><br /><strong>TF:</strong> Since September 2004, when you composed the first version of the last entry that made its way into this book, have you found your daily encounters with texture to be enhanced, deepened, dulled, troubled, intensified, and/or compromised in any way?<br /><br /><strong>SN:</strong> Compromised, forgotten, buried, mistaken, undermined, overexposed. I no longer think about texture.<br /><br /><br /></div>Tom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8542387139750920641.post-86915293550760470222010-12-19T06:17:00.000-08:002010-12-19T07:03:03.048-08:00ASK/TELL: A NEW INTERVIEW BLOG<strong>WHO: </strong>Innovative poets, artists, thinkers, practitioners of the art of living.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>WHAT:</strong> Exchanges about poetics and the poetics of experience -- where we have been, where we want to go, where we are now.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>WHERE:</strong> <a href="http://eeevee2.blogspot.com/">http://eeevee2.blogspot.com</a><br /><br /><strong>WHY:</strong> Because I believe in encouraging revelation through engagement.<br /><br /><strong>HOW:</strong> By whatever means possible.<br /><br />***<br /><br />I'm seeking proposals for projects and am considering taking on a co-editor.<br /><br />ASK/TELL will publish irregularly as energy permits.<br /><br /><br />--Tom BeckettTom Becketthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08956557701199101102noreply@blogger.com9