Tidings of comfort and joy

This year, I came to the no-brainer revelation that the inevitable "What do you want for Christmas?" doesn't have to be answered complicatedly, nor bashful and ostensibly hesitant: "Um, yeah, well, I can always use..." Thanks to that thing called email, I got a head start by simply copy-and-pasting my Save for Later purchase items from Amazon, then hiring the Mom as my familial shopping-ideas agent. In addition to the usual yuletide necessities (shoes, socks, cashews, wine), my procurement of the true meaning of the Season (i.e. material goods) occurred without any painful awkwardness. Let's just say, I'm pretty stoked:

-The (new, unexpurgated) Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1
-An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (bilingual), ed. Elizabeth Bishop
-Planisphere: New Poems, by John Ashbery
-Mean Free Path, by Ben Lerner
-The Alphabet, by Ron Silliman
-Brecht and Method, by Frederic Jameson
-Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, by David Rakoff
-Language and Mind, by Noam Chomsky

The iconography of iconoclasts

Sans the self-diagnostic, ego coddling apology, let me share without apparent jealousy the pellucid [goddamnit] work of those [bastards] more avidly concerned than my[childishly neurotic!]self about this matter. I haven't located the last article cited (Wheeler's "Poetry, Mattering?"), but reading Golding's terrifically balanced exposition feels like showing up to your fifth grade science fair only to find another project strikingly familiar in content but surpassing in rhetorical execution, and a more expensive posterboard. Of course, that never did happen because, as the comic reality exists, even today, "80 percent of success is showing up." The problem in question involves a lot of upset people doing a lot of things to upset the complicitly normative way of writing by deriding the "easy" way and fostering new ways to mean, inevitably causing an upset for those used to art-as-usual, used for commodity and complicitly absorptive audiences, then those new ways getting understood, getting trendy, upsetting those who expected the anti-authoritarian, anti-academic icon-clasters not to seize the moment of institutional sponsorship and affluence, because it's upsetting to think of once radical figures and works assimilating into the unpreventable canon, inadvertently setting (authoritatively) preferred standards of taste and teaching objectives, ultimately requiring a new tide of upset detractors to upsettedly upset the upsetting consecration of purposely desecratively upset upsetters and their upsetting works. Is it wrong for intentionally obscure poets to explain? to be made accessible? Should we write them off as fraudulent anti -capitalists and begin the counter-revolutionary revolution? or haven't we learned that opposites are imaginary, and no serious "should" belongs in any radical invective.. wait, is this absolute? what do I mean? Do you see my reason for tentativeness? Am I being clear? you understand? Oh, I sure hope not.

"Charles Bernstein and Professional Avant-Gardism" by Alan Golding

[snatched from Bernstein's Web Log]