E-lite elites

Two recent articles take on this question of 'What is elitism?' or 'Who are the elites?', stemming from an unmistakable swell of anti-intellectualism in political, social, and aesthetic discourse. Is there a real disconnect? What happened to the "power elite?" Who is actually dictating and public taste and defining social/commercial attitudes? Scholars? critics? or big budget marketers?

NY Times: Defy the Elite! Wait, Which Elite? -by A.O. Scott

n+1: Revolt of the Elites -from the editors of n+1

The times they are a-changin'

A talk by Charles Bernstein given at Simon Fraser University, Jan. 8, 2010: "Sound Tools for Sound Listening" (mp3): contains three essays: "Making Audio Visible," "Hearing Voices," and "The Bound Listener," as well as some Q&A.
©PennSound

The thinging of things

"Read what Heidegger has to say about the thinging of things, that is, the gathering and uniting—or as the German says so directly and strongly, das Verweilen, the letting-while or letting-dwell—by which the world is stayed, in virtually every sense of 'stay,' and you will begin to re-collect in your own thinking a basic human grasp of the meaning of things, which will open up afresh a basic human relationship to them... As over against the modern concept of the thing which sees it primarily in its relation to human understanding as an object of representation and in its relation to human will as matter or product of a process or production or self-imposition—a concept, then, not of the thing in its own thingness, but of the thing in its subservience to human preoccupations—Heidegger finds in language the thought of the thing as thing, that is, as gathering and staying a world in its own special way. Hence he is able to use 'thing' as a verb and, by this new coining and recoining of the ancient word and its meaning, to think recallingly and responsively the being of the thing as man has authentically lived with things from the beginning.
Call this primitivism, if you will; it can also be called a recalling to origins, a reversion to the primeval... It represents a movement away from the thin abstractions of representational thinking and the stratospheric constructions of scientific theorizing, and toward the full concreteness, the onefoldness of the manifold, of actual life-experience." -Albert Hofstadter, Introduction to Martin Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought

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."

Mixed media messages

The Introvert by Jill Moser, poems by Charles Bernstein

paint & words

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

'Da Bomb'

Flipped through the latest issue of BOMB Magazine today at B.A.M. Great interviews with Adam Pendleton and Rae Armantrout. Excellent literary supplement as well. Jotted the following notes:

"I couldn't say whether the Situationists failed or not. My feeling is that when you contribute, there is no failure. It's like an unspoken law. I like your use of 'provoke.' When you provoke you have contributed. When you become a part of what happens next you have contributed." -Adam Pendleton, in conversation with Thom Donovan

"Of course, there are so many hallmark readings of a person like [Rosa Parks], because it is more convenient to deradicalize her than to radicalize her. She becomes a hero. And to be labeled a hero is one of culture's ways of depoliticizing you. You become part of what culture has dealt with. In this sense, one should always strive to be the opposite of a hero." -again, Pendleton (emphases mine)

'Come you masters of war'

Yesterday, Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers whistleblower) and 131 U.S. Veterans were arrested in front of the White House during a nonviolent protest of the Afghanistan war. Watch the highlights below:



"You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks"

-Bob Dylan

Dreams, wakes

THE WIND LIKE AN OCEAN

"the wind like an ocean
but sometimes the sun stills it
and the surface is solid

why shouldn't life pass as in a dream
or a dream itself, there are different degrees
or different dreams reality
at one with a dream

the naked sea
stinking
is fresh
in time,

(o shut your eyes against the wind"

-Larry Eigner

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"All experience is conditioned by expectation... [Debussy] arousing different levels of dreaminess and wakefulness. We wake from a dream to enter, clearly, a daydream." -Nick Piombino

(I think he means: consciousness is but a daydream, since it is clouded by our ingrained expectations of what is and should be)

Liu Xiaobo

PEN American Center protest of Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment on Christmas, 2009. DeLillo, Albee, and others read:

1960

Recordings of the U of Penn 'Poetry in 1960' symposium, held on Dec. 6, 2010
©PennSound

Discourse and Truth

The Problematization of Parrhesia

An online version of Foucault's lectures on the historical problem of truth-telling. Published as "Fearless Speech" by Semiotext(e), 2001. An audio version is also available.

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Samuel Beckett's silent, quotidian-titled Film (1965), starring Buster Keaton

Julian Assange = the Language Poets?

I love when (self-assuredly) clever conservatives highlight similarities between vastly different political philosophies (in vastly different political contexts) in order to expand the net of blame. Anarcho-Libertarianism can take many different forms, and in response to many different sources of social inoculation/coercion. My own dissenting feelings take aim at the corporate bodies that manipulate government institutions and orchestrate fruitless wars. And while I count LangPo as a major reference point, or historical nexus, between the present and the radical Left of the 60s/70s, I don't consider them my sole ideologic influences. You'd think conservative (pretend-) pundits would want to spend this much critical energy on demanding explanations from the U.S. government. Is it really enough just to conclude that our leaders are corrupt? Is that all it takes to rally the (merely) anti-establishment?

Essay: What is Julian Assange up to?

Poets going on, even while they can't go on

Whoever finds a horseshoe

"We look at a forest and say:
Here is a forest for ships and masts,
Red pines,
Free to their tops of their shaggy burden,
To creak in the storm
In the furious forestless air;
The plumbline fastened to the dancing deck
Will hold out under the wind's salt heel.
And the sea-wanderer,
In his unbridled thirst for space,
Dragging through damp ruts a geometer's needle,
Collates the rough surface of the seas
With the attraction of the earth's lap.

But breathing the smell
Of resinous tears oozing through planks,
Admiring the boards of bulkheads riveted
Not by the peaceful Bethlehem carpenter but by that other-
Father of journeys, friend of seafarers-
We say:
These too stood the earth,
Awkward as a donkey's backbone,
Their crests forgetful of their roots,
On a celebrated mountain ridge;
And howled under the sweet cloud-burst,
Fruitlessly offering the sky their precious freight
For a pinch of salt.

Where shall we begin?
Everything pitches and splits,
The air quivers with comparisions,
No one word is better than another,
The earth hums with metaphors.
And light two-wheeled chariots,
Harnessed brightly to flocks of strenuous birds,
Explode,
Vying with the snorting favourites of the race-track.

Three times blest he who puts a name into song;
A song adorned with a name
Survives longer among the others,
Marked by a fillet
That frees it from forgetfulness and stupefying smells,
Whether proximity of man or the smell of a beast's pelt
Or simply a whiff of thyme rubbed between the palms.

The air dark like water, everything alive swims like fish,
Fins pushing aside the sphere
That's compact, resilient, hardly heated-
The crystal in which wheels move and horses shy,
The moist black-earth every night flung open anew
By pitchforks, tridents, hoes and ploughs.
The air is mixed as densely as the earth-
You can't get out, to get inside is arduous.

Rustling runs through the trees like a green ball-game;
Children play knucklebones with the vertebrae of dead animals.
The fragile calculation of the years of our era ends.
Let us be grateful for what we had:
I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.
The era rang like a golden sphere,
Cast, hollow, supported by no one.
Touched, it answered yes and no,
As a child will say:
I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one;
Its face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words.

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased.
The horse foams in the dust.
But the acute curve of his neck
Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs
When there were not four
But as many as the stones on the road,
Renewed in four shifts
As blazing hooves pushed off from the ground.

So,
Whoever finds a horseshoe
Blows away the dust,
Rubs it with wool till it shines,
Then
Hangs it over the treshold
To test,
So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint.
Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said.
And the arm retains the sense of weight
Though the jug

splashes half-empty

on the way home.

What I am saying at this moment is not being said by me
But is dug from the ground like grains of petrified wheat.
Some

on their coins depict a lion,

Others

a head;

Various tablets of brass, of gold and bronze
Lie with equal honour in the earth.
The century, trying to bite through them, left its teeth-marks

there.

Time pares me down like a coin,
And there is no longer enough of me for myself."



My time

"My time, my brute, who will be able
To look you in the eyes
And glue together with his blood
The backbones of two centuries?
Blood, the builder, gushes
From the earth's throat.
Only parasites tremble
On the edge of the future . . .

To wrench our age out of prison
A flute is needed
To connect the sections
Of disarticulated days . . .

And buds shall swell again,
Shoots splash out greenly.
But your backbone is broken,
My beautiful, pitiful century.
With an idiot's harsh and feeble grin
You look behind:
A beast, once supple,
Ponders its paw-marks in the sand."

-Osip Mandelshtam, 1923