"Old men write books about cataclysms," therefore heroism and mortality

Philip Roth discusses his new Nemesis and what he intuits is the decline of the novel in the wake of the lit-digerati. This is undoubtedly an old codger's take on "those darn things," though few would deny that questions of concentration (both the attentive and process of pure cognitive consumption sort) linger in most everybody's mind at the merest mention of e-texts and alternative reading (or should it go by another name) practice. Is the tradition of holistic mental engrossment via alphabetic print justified? What are the benefits/disadvantages of our tuning-out capacities? Isn't reading an archaic and wasteful distraction? Is a return to primarily oral/aural/visual transmission desirable? Hasn't television and new media already supplanted that musty literary medium? Is there a use for history/values-based cultural conditioning? The ultra-capitalist answer is simple. My own, however, is not. But, half-ironically, I don't have time to divulge that now. This blogging business leaves too many openings for hyperlink-sensitive absorption and confusion/obfuscation of sources and their legitimacy. And anyway, that grad. school personal statement isn't going to finish writing itself.

Rather than an acute sense of the responsibilities of the reader, there's always room for that on those of the writer; which Philip Roth succeeds:

"'Writing a book is solving problems,' he said. 'You don't think about your place in this or that, or prizes, or reviews, or anything. It's the last thing that's on your mind, it's the work that is on your mind.'"

Wish list/ Name drop

While it's common for bloggers to share what books, films, articles of clothing, means of transportation, etc. they have consumed, utilized, or mail-ordered, I'm caught between want and wealth, having not yet achieved my school-season cushion capital. So I share with you a list of to-acquire items, to remind myself that while I haven't read half the titles on my procreant shelves, and while it is nice to eat every now and then, my consumerist lust for MORE perdures:

(titles by no means rarified or novel)

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat

The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History by Jill Lepore

The Coming Insurrection (Semiotext[e]/ Intervention) by The Invisible Committee

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

Half Empty by David Rakoff (the first chapter did it for me)

Political Writings 1953-1993 by Maurice Blanchot

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff

James Baldwin: Collected Essays (Library of America) by James Baldwin

Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook ed. by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins by Bob Blumenthal

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds

Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire by Louis Zukofsky

Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word ed. by Charles Bernstein

The Alphabet by Ron Silliman

Tea-Party as "Beat"en?

Lee Siegel's essay in this Sunday's NY Times Book review, The Beat Generation and the Tea Party (if that isn't a stretch...), seems to me to, above the surface counterculturalism, suggest that this anachronistic anti-political, politico-populist movement is, likewise, a momentous (but momentary) breeze.

Of being numerous

An ever-important voice in American poetry, George Oppen continues to resonate for me personally and politically, having so delicately scanned the social landscape of his contingent world with a ready admission of his constituent and consequent place in it. No poet in his time (that I can presently recall) so drove home the point of our existence's singular/plural condition, and with such meaning-ridden economy (even the hesitancy speaks through). We need a poetry today that is descendant with/from his compassionate(ly blunt) panorama of "presentness."

Charles Bernstein insists that for Oppen, the "loss of the 'transcendental signified' does not necessitate the abandonment, or absence, of knowledge but its location in history, in 'people'. This view entails both a rejection of the crude materialism of things without history and the crude idealism of history without things... an ideal communication situation... The autonomy of the root, of the individual, allowing for the music of the social, the numerous." -from the essay Hinge, picture, published in Ironwood 26 (1985)

Another short list

-Hyperlink digital collection of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine

-The late Pinter stars in a film adaptation of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape

-DeGeneres confronts bullying

Writing as revelation

INTERVIEWER: "So [writing]’s quite unlike preaching?"
BALDWIN: "Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
BALDWIN: "I don’t know, I doubt whether anyone—myself at least—knows how to talk about writing. Perhaps I’m afraid to."
INTERVIEWER: "Do you see it as conception, gestation, accouchement?"
BALDWIN: "I don’t think about it that way, no. The whole process of conception—one talks about it after the fact, if one discusses it at all. But you really don’t understand it."

Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 78 (Interview with James Baldwin)

Wiretapping extends to internet communications

Not that this administration hasn't already expanded the abuse of power wrought by Bush's "state-secrets" privilege (ruled illegal by Judge Walker in 2009), but it's about to get MUCH worse, with no visible political opposition on the horizon—as if the "lesser of the evils" characterization of national elections needed reminding.

U.S. Wants to Make it Easier to Wiretap the Internet

A couple links

+ubuweb's Anthology of Conceptual Writing
+Paris Review has made all interviews available for free!

Redactful

I anticipate that my preemptive judgment of the Howl film in an earlier post will need repealing once I actually see it (what I get for spouting off undeveloped commentary rather than involved critique; I had it coming). I gather as much after nearly every review by poets and film critics alike who insist that a better adaptation/biopic/tribute of Ginsberg's text (in the original context) is not possible. But a short scene posted by Vulture was enough to fill me with shame, since Franco exhibits a reading voice, inflection, cadence almost identical to the Ginsberg recordings I used to take with me on walks and bike rides.

Post-avants: refocusing, repositing or regressive?

"I’ve long felt the rejection of representation crucial to any investigation into styles of poetic thinking. What constitutes such a discretion? Not entirely the abandonment of logic but certainly the freedom to a certain capriciousness in its application, arrived at through a tactical linking of words into propositional units... Bold innovation is immediately co-optated into a patinated rhetoric of supercession which gets one nowhere beyond the ephemeral titillations of fashion. I prefer to that other narrative of Midas that re-visions the avant-garde as a storehouse of available and cumulative techniques deemed viable and adaptable to the urgencies of the present. Poetry won’t change the world but might render the world rethinkable. This is not a Utopian inclination but a tactical strategy within a multiplicity of dreams, agendas, mistakes and arrogances. It is a poetics of promiscuity envisioned as a tactic. I adopt a chiasmic view of history: that’s partly Eliotian and partly Benjaminian: the present contemporarizes the past as much as the contemporary is historicized by the past. Any worthwhile poetic must be historically rigorous and admit the capricious power of the anachronism."

-Steve McCaffery, from his afterword to Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery, 1989-2009

The shape of [what] to come

"For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action. Since it hasn't been done, there's no use talking about it."

-The Other's Language: Jacques Derrida interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997

Dream deferred

Students used messages to protest in favor of the Dream Act, which was denied in a procedural vote Tuesday.

Syrian salon

Poets allowed gathering in Damascus, more out of "freedom" than "insubordination."

Lexical 'chunking'

A brief bit by Ben Zimmer on the habit of using idiomatic "chunks" of speech in relation to fundamental language learning. Actually, this Sunday's issue of NY Times Magazine is devoted entirely to topics of education and learning technologies, and worth reading.

Politics of fiction

Turkish, female (but more importantly:) writer Elif Shafak talks about "The [identity] politics of fiction"

(found courtesy of Ron Silliman's blog)