Disruptive distinctions

Sometimes (well, oftentimes, and with the semester beginning, oftener-times) I need diversions, stark as a good Onion headline ("Nation's Weirdest Teenager Buys Season One DVD Of 'Murphy Brown'"), but nuanced enough to colonize my interest for several accidental minutes. At once permanent—or for the moment, permanently accessible, as in, wherever there's a WiFi hotspot—and ephemeral—no "object" in the sense of tangibly differentiated space; always remote from "I"—the projections/projectables/projective virtual "things" so far incapable of being possessed, bought (copyrighted?), except through Lindley's temporal act of installation (in this sense, of course, it is owned), or if I permit the temptation to fetishistically stick it to my desktop background; what do I want to say about them? Something simple. Something like, "She does it best." Isn't this the point, by varying degrees of totalizing statement, which art critics arrive at in their praise of a person, or his/her craft? I don't know. I'm happy it isn't my business to be an expert on such questions (for now, at least), but if I could just give a more intelligent, less inherited, sense of what I mean by "transfix," when I say I am trans-fixed (I stand or sit, and I am moved) by these pieces. If I could only inhabit these virtual works besides just within my own mind—but that thinking is illusory. The material, the tempo-real cannot (shouldn't?) be transmuted by the mind (only within its conceptual parameters). Nor can the virtual object coagulate, calcify, inhabit space in a solid, intransigent way; and this is the axiomatic takeaway of the medium itself: nothing, essentially, exists in this way. All is finally subject to corrosion, structural decomposition, liquification, elemental reconstitution.

I'm not nailing this aesthetic definition-thing down. It would be a mistake to think I could even attempt a potent critical investigation of Lindley's craft. And I don't mean for this reverence to lend more autonomy to the work than is due; it is just one of those pieces I would rather (for better/worse) let speak for itself.

"D.2" by Kasey Lou Lindley

In the mail

Just out this past January, the first volume of The H.D. Book: The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan, UC Press, 2011, 696 pgs.

Publisher's description:
"This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan’s wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work—at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan’s quest toward a new poetics—is at last complete and available to a wide audience."


I recently found a .pdf of the Frontier Press 1984 version, for free, which does not include the new introduction and appendices.

Criticism matters (but all of it?)

Today the NY Times Book Review featured a forum on "Why Criticism Matters," which is nevertheless worth the read if you want to hear where (some of) the general concerns lie for/about the genre of literary criticism. I recommend the contributions by Pankaj Mishra, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman. However, Tim Yu provides a more complete scope about the gimmicks and (often paradoxical) concerns of professional, as opposed to academic and to amateur, criticism in his post: "Does (Paid) Criticism Matter?" He notes that it is a classic example of one-upmanship by the self-marketing, quasi-insular, honorific (bourgeois?) literary scene that wishes to appear as the specialized-though-not-too-specialized arbiters between the potentially misunderstood artist and the ignorant public. As if to appose specialized "esoteric" prose and a terrestrial, "commonsense" content (or, if you like, a time-consuming, tediously prepared meal and the quick, packaged, healthy supplement meal in a candy bar), and ask: Which would you prefer? Yu notes: "Fading into irrelevance themselves, paid critics shore up their position by pointing to the even greater irrelevance of the academic writer." This does seem to be the editors' point, but it is also to advertise, to re-romanticize the life of the paid writer; the very sort of aphoristic tragedy that works to dignify MFA programs (which they discourage ostensibly) as a dying breed. The point is, isn't it rather insulting to lament the wavering interest of the "common reader" (a construct) with a hopeful tone that concessions can be made. 'You may resemble dumb, ungrateful animals, but we can win you back!' Although Anderson's piece makes the case that Criticism plays a vital role in the intertextual production (and play) of meaning, the feature's title "Why Criticism Matters" is pure genre-pandering. The question begged, 'Does it matter?' suggests an unconscious opinion poll. Yu makes it clear: this is an ad campaign for the major reviewing venues. Paid-criticism presents a more palatable alternative for the reader. To me, this seems a greater sin than (arguably, over-)specialized criticism, which doesn't take the reader for an impossibly limited beast. The question is: do paid-critics feel threatened? Does the web's increased access to free content pose a danger to the print/subscription-limited reading industry? Have they failed to build an insurmountable hedge around their commercial production of homogeneous Taste?

Also, we mustn't forget, as Yu reminds the NYT: "The range of books reviewed has become narrower; readers of poetry in particular know that the major book reviews abandoned us long ago."

"Reduced-fat" reading

Paul Kozlowski's satirical rant on the ceaseless trials of an aged critic, with apparent malaise at having reached a position of influence and no more passion (or time) for the intricate: "I want easy answers coming out of fast books. That's all I have time for."

You can never get away from yourself

Marjorie Perloff

A talk from Unoriginal Genius delivered at The University of Richmond, Feb. 2010:

"Asocial" authors involve audience

The latest advances in e-literature include:

Blurring the Line Between Apps and Books
the smashed writer/programmer distinction, by making the author literally approachable through the book which is installed as an app (with communicative capacities)

The Medium: E-Readers Collective
the marketing of a work/passage by the populist (and, yes) compositional practice of readerly highlighting, here called "crowd-sourced literary criticism"