Dear readers,
If you have been watching this blog recently, then you have been watching nothing. I am temporarily therefore declaring this tumblr suspended. I will be blogging about food at http://xianonfood.tumblr.com/ and later I will be starting another tumblr about global events.
—Brown
First of all, if you had chronic pain, I really do not think you would want a hug.
The comments have been exploding here with news from the inside that Titlepage is not dead, merely in hibernation. Well, thank the ether for that! In the meantime I have been dosing on bookchat archivally, tying a rope around my arm and gleefully sticking every half hour a needle called Linebreak—an all-audio program from the 1990s about poetry, mostly avant and post-avant—into the back of my elbow.
—Brown
To kick off a series of posts on the subject of Narcissism, we will begin by pointing to an essay by the poet Gabriel Gudding, “From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in Mainstream American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing.” Here are two relevant quotations:
To this day the personal experience of the writer has been so foregrounded that the writer William Gass prefers not to teach courses in creative writing because, as he puts it, “I hate dealing with people’s souls.”
The influence of the Mearnsian doctrine that poetry reflect a writer’s experience has so permeated contemporary American poetics that readers will often brook no violation of its tenets. A July 1996 article in the APR tried the limits of these tenets by announcing to the world the arrival of Japanese-born (albeit deceased) poet, Araki Yasusada, an alleged survivor of Hiroshima, whose “fourteen spiral bound notebooks” were found by his son. When the subject of the coverage in the recent APR “special supplement” “Introducing Araki Yasusada” was shown to be a “hoax,” a healthy degree of outrage was levelled at the perpetrator. The accused prankster, some have argued, apparently created this fictional poet while writing his doctoral dissertation at Bowling Green State University. Kent Johnson, the man to whom many point as the author, quite rightly insists the word “hoax” does no justice to the work itself, insofar as the term limits the cultural, aesthetic, and political scope of the Yasusada manuscripts. The interesting thing about the most vituperative of the criticisms levelled against whoever wrote the work isn’t so much that bad poetry had been traded against an exotic biography (a biography which in turn proved to be false) — the poetry, it is generally agreed, is good — nor was it so much that Yasusada’s nonexistence proved to be in bad taste (having been billed as a survivor of Hiroshima). The outrage, I think, arose in large measure because Yasusada’s creator had broken the primary tenet of our mainstream Mearnsian milieu: that a poet’s work portray his experience. In an era of isolation, we cannot afford counterfeiters.
I will be drawing further material from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.
—Brown
1. An erratic fountain that makes
I bet that fountain is actually a metaphor. What could it be a metaphor for? Perhaps poetry itself? Correct!
2. Your hands are indispensible. Without
This poem is actually pretty good. It proceeds to list off a few things that we do with our hands—including hand jobs! And then it contrasts them favorably with the legs and ends with a call for all legs to be amputated at birth so that people won’t run around so much doing silly, wasteful things and “man … will be intimate with all that’s closest to him.” Somewhat sentimental there, but mostly perverse. Nice job, poet.
3. Afternoon. A box of light cornflower blue you are the sand
This is from a sentimental poem about parenting. Parenthood has brought about the realization in the poet that not only are crayons a worthy poetic subject but the names of crayon colors are poetic language. It would make good evidence in an essay called something like “Poetics of American Capitalism.”
4. Lie down beside me I signalled to my wolf
The poet has cunningly decided to complicate a poem that might be summarized “dog is man’s best friend” by calling his dog a wolf.
5. i looked away from the computer with a slight feeling
A computer in a poem! Very bold. This poet is going places!
6. Once upon a time in America,
All the lines in this poem are titles of movies. Not badly executed I suppose, except the last line is fairly predictable: Apocalypse now.
7. From one lemur to a city of many other lemurs
Which is worse, sentimentality or sentimental surrealism?
8. Everybody knows the lice are lonely.
Anthropomorphism as a strategy of banality.
9. God is in the waxy substances and the meet of God is sweet.
The poetics of American capitalism are not without a spiritual component.
10. Can birds be a religion?
The eagle-god smiles on this poet.
11. Be careful of the moonbeams
This poem is about how romantic emotions can be hazardous to your health. But it’s irony: romance and moonbeams and the sex on various furniture and carpets mentioned later in this poem are all desirable.
12. You were in bed, but you weren’t there.
What could have done in this relationship? The rest of the poem indicates prostate cancer.
13. Tuesday. Space is changed. Space is changed by every bird in it.
Avian enthusiasm embraces both religion and metaphysics.
14. From a gray string, the orange
This poem, which takes as its title the name of a major league baseball team and is about how “you” miss “the girl you once loved” who “lives there” actually made me sad. Even I, it turns out, am vulnerable to sentiments.
—Brown
Amid growing, entirely justified hysteria about toxic climate change in the literary ecosystem, as book review sections across the United States are shuttered, when the nation’s rivers of lyricism taste of the piss of critics addled by their own bile, while scheming illiterate frauds of criminal descent turn their pseudo-literary exercises in vacancy into high-stakes con games, what may have been the last, best, revolutionary hope to save New York corporate publishing and to promote or even innovate American literature in general seems to have been snuffed out in the cradle.
I speak, of course, of the web-based book chat show that for six weeks this spring touched the hearts and enlightened the minds of hundreds around the world, convening every seven days four authors of new books seeming to have very little to do with each other except that they were novels that took place somewhere or they were books about something or something naughty or the authors weren’t American or hadn’t written books before, filming said scribes in a style that recalled the best of the nouvelle vague: titlepage.tv.
After episode 6 (“National Obsessions”), featuring Ben Nugent of the all-powerful Brooklyn Literary 100, which went live in June, no further episodes have emerged, and the square on the homepage that previously featured enthralling thirty-second previews of future issues now shows a quite humorous rendition of “Who’s on First” animated with topography.
We can only assume that a giant whole has been poked in the fabric of American literary publicity. Here are some theories as to what went wrong:
1. The host feared that the quality of the first six episodes could no longer be matched and shut down production when he felt the program had reached an unsurpassable peak.
2. Word got out that the writers appearing on the show instantly attained fame commensurate with that of Hollywood’s blockbuster actors and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and started to refuse to appear on the show in the hopes of retaining the privacy necessary to craft their prose or poetry.
3. They ran out of money because they used too many cameras.
Whatever the truth is, we’ve lost something that could have saved something else that definitely seems to be in grave danger!
—Brown
Was briefly transfixed yesterday (and sadly, I can’t now remember how I stumbled across it) by a preposterously amateurish September 11-conspiracy theory video purporting to explain that THE JEWS did it.
The Vimeo server seems to be slow as hell, so I didn’t get very far into this sub-Loose Change nonsense, though I did see some top-notch material — references in the titles to “EQYPT” and a ludicrously ill-informed account of the Lavon Affair.
But the whole thing is summed up in the unwitting praise from this Vimeo commenter:
Despite some very good research presented by this film, it contains a serious flaw, that I hope will be corrected in the final version: It states baldly that (former US president) Harry Truman was a Jew.
Sure — but everything else is correct, right?
—Smith
Despite pleasant weather and a nice free lunch, a mostly foul mood prevailed today after a largely sleepless night. I will emit some aggression by listing a series of first lines from immediately mediocre and sentimental poems I’ve read over the past few hours:
1. There is safety around the smell of coffee and laughter.
Right away you can tell that this poet is going to elaborate for about twenty lines on how everything is nothing, it’s all a lie but all also true, meaning is elusive, yet that’s somehow okay, and that is exactly what he does.
2. It’s grief that tears the paper lanterns
Sounds like someone took a trip to Japan and was momentarily sad.
3. Ruin is a promise
Is this poem about a break-up or geopolitics? The latter.
4. A girl of freezing ice in my stomach; a papoose
This poem will operate in a mode of precious juxtapositions ignited by enjambment.
5. I’d thought my life was too unfocused and without cause compared to Kubota’s,
An adulthood spent teaching at MFA programs will do that to you; thus unmediated autobiographical reflection is to be avoided.
6. I keep wanting to go back, across an ocean, blue-grey and uncaring,
Buy a ticket then, and the ocean cares, it really does, it just wishes you didn’t use that ugly hyphen.
7. You won’t believe it now,
No, I don’t. This poem turns out to be about disbelieving that now an old man you were once young. It’s slightly redeemed by name-checking Dr. Who.
8. It will be the past
This poem fulfills the promise of unadulterated unspecified nostalgia lust promised at the top.
9. Gobi (not your real name), where were you
Which is more objectionable—the superfluous self-consciousness of the parenthetical or the cuddly exoticism of the invented name?
10. In the city spring burns its way out
This poem isn’t so bad until its third line, where the word “lovely” drops in to confirm that this elegy will be more gum drop than fireball, but that initial prepositional phrase feels unnecessary and turns out to be just that, and the present tense verb signals disposability.
11. Dear Sufficiency, perhaps you’ll lose your best friend, partner, apartment
Listacular! As the penultimate word of this line indicates, the poem will be energetically politically correct.
12. This dream of a bird strange, tangled up. A hybrid: a bunting
Some nice lines in this poem, but an effective strategy for writing a poem about a dream of a strange bird should include leaving the words “dream” and “strange” out of the first line, maybe “bird” too.
13. I couldn’t tell one song from another, which bird said what or to whom or for what reason
Poet 12, it seems, is not the only American poet with a fowl oneiric life.
14. America, let the leaves that brush your blacktop
The primary modes of poetry in the United States today are lazy, nostalgic, liberal anxiety; anxious, lazy, nostalgic liberalism; liberal, anxious, lazy nostalgia; and nostalgic, liberal, anxious laziness.
—Brown
I was reminded by Delmore, who learned of it here, that back in 2006 I became fascinated with the phony psychological character study of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili put out by Russia, which sold it as the work of Scandinavian, German, and Dutch doctor’s. Below is an edited version of the full paper.
ANEMNESIS AND FAMILY HISTORY
Raised in a single-parent family environment, the Subject grew much attached to his mother and due to a deep emotional trauma early in his life he became very aggressive toward his biological father. He had difficulties in establishing relations with other people of his age and was often treated as an outcast and a “loner.” This situation was corrected when in high school he joined a school theater group and took part in some of its theatrical productions. At the same time, though, together with some other classmates, he became actively involved in an amateur film production, including porno films. When this became public and a scandal broke at school, he fled to Kiev. There he immersed himself in a lifestyle of destructive behavior, parties, and sex. His apartment at that time was often offered to his fellow students and friends as a place for intimate encounters and he used this as a way to gain popularity and establish his place in the “in crowd.” By the end of his freshman year, he was expelled from Komosol, the Communist youth organization. In order to calm things down, he volunteered in the Army and spent two years in service.
BEHAVIORAL PATTERN
While often exaggerating his sincerity, Subject presents all the signs of nervousness, suspicion, and emotional vulnerability. The nonverbal component is especially informative in this respect: while his facial expression is usually lively and matches the behavioral context, his gesticulation is spastic and his posture rigid, even in favorable situations. Subject’s pride prevails over the altruistic tendencies he pretends to demonstrate in public. He is only able to express signs of genuine interest when his persona, his exceptionality, and significance become the central topics of discussion. He has never appeared more excited and radiant—if not happy—as when he posed in front of his car, pointing out the bullet holes in the windshield. To him, the fact that he was the target of an assassination attempt put him in line with other world leaders and dignitaries. This sort of showmanship is typical among hysteroid types.
INTELLECTUAL COMPONENT
Subject’s IQ level is above average. His ideation activity combines impulsiveness, rigidity, and a tendency to conceptualize emotionally saturated ideas asserting the importance and exclusivity of his own personality. Taken to the extreme, this tendency may become transformed into megalomania, even a maniacal syndrome characterized by a personal conviction that he is destined to be “the chosen one.” Primary motivational factors include ambition, vanity, superiority, and extreme competitiveness. We may assume that his low self-esteem and inferiority complex—both formed early in the childhood but presently suppressed—have determined his strong urge for power. He may easily lose the natural human fear of consequences and become capable of provoking serious conflicts, including military ones. The instrument of his quest to gain the social recognition that he has been denied for so long is, in the end, his political career.
—Brown
Who is it that can tell me why my bed seems so hard and why the bedclothes will not stay upon it?
Good question, Ovid.
But what if Corinna came by? In that case, Cetera quid nescit?
Better to live in Rome or in exile in Tomis than in the Third Reich.
I have made an elegy for myself it is true.
But what’s up with Fergus Allen? Apparently, he’s started a blog, posting with admirable restraint.
This is a dog of Fo.
—Brown
