Everyone here already knows well enough to keep her/his distance from Mitch Albom's cheap, pocket-sized nuggets of sentimentality, but every so often it's nice to be reminded.
September 29, 2006
Pynchon's porn star niece
According to Page Six of The New York Post (which I swear I don't read; I got this from Maud Newton's blog), Thomas Pynchon's niece is a porn actress.
"I think it would be fascinating for him do commentary on the next one," Taormino told Page Six. She said Pynchon would get a bang out of what she does if he only took a closer look at her films and books, which include an anthology, "Best Lesbian Erotica."
"We're more alike than different. We're both writers and I think he's intrigued in general by pop culture," she said, adding she doesn't know if Pynchon has watched her movies.
Did she really say "a bang"?
September 27, 2006
BASS 06
Yet another anthology hits the shelves: Best American Short Stories 2006, edited by Ann Patchett. It includes the usual suspects-- Munro, Wolff, Beattie--plus a handful of emerging writers, which is always exciting to see. And Ann Patchett has a great introduction championing the short story form. Anyone taken a look at this issue of BASS yet?
Google videos of poets
Berkeley is putting class lectures up on Google Videos, and in conjunction, they've posted videos of poets reading on campus, introduced by Bob Hass. So far, there's Mary Ruefle, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Li-Young Lee, Mary Karr, several others. Pretty neat.
September 26, 2006
September 25, 2006
Tom Lux on teaching poetry to engineers
Tom Lux is making poetry safe for engineers at Georgia Tech these days: "We're trying to diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration," says Lux.
September 23, 2006
I want Hugo Chavez to recommend my book.
Because then it could be a best-seller, just like Noam Chomsky's.
Hugo, if you're out there, leave a comment?
September 21, 2006
The Tao of Publishing
Following up on Elisa’s post...
So, the thing about having a strategy that requires ignorance by the intended targets is sort of mutually exclusive with posting said strategy on the internet, which as we all know, allows for the kind of surveillance that would give John Poindexter ecstatic epileptic fits.
Tao Lin’s plan to submit everything to everyone has hit a snag. Or maybe that was the plan all along. Hard to tell. The internet makes deadpan pretty damn elusive. As Oliver North and cohorts would say, it provides plausible deniability. It’s certainly possible for fame in the blogosphere to bring an audience that exceeds print readership, if readership is all one desires.
To whom it may concern
Jonathan Mayhew has some remarks on the possibility of meritocracy in poetry. He also says, "Billy Collins is evil."
Bill Knott disappoves: "Mayhew is such an interesting writer, intelligent and erudite. But I disagree with almost everything he writes about USA poetry, and I wonder why he bothers to write such commentary. [...] Why doesn't he channel his considerable verbal skills to translating contemporary Spanish poetry, and leave the Collins-sniping to hacks like X and Y? It's all they have, whereas he, Mayhew, has so much more to offer!"
Why do people get pissy about what other people blog about? It's my blog, etc.!
September 20, 2006
400 Packets Later
I realized the other day that it has been 11 years since I started submitting to magazines, and things have only gotten slightly less surreal. Though, like a runner’s high, it has never felt as strange as the responses I got from the very first batch of poems.
9 months after I sent to one journal, I received a copy of the next issue in the mail. The artwork consisted of a series of Xeroxed hands. My poem was in the journal, which I found surprising, since as far I knew, it could have been intercepted en route and was currently lining the nest of some auks in Mexico. When I turned to the contributor’s page, I was somewhat startled to find my bio stated that “She is currently a student…” I thought to myself, “I see that we haven’t encountered a lot of Jewish people in our travels, have we?” That was the last time I spoke in the first person in my contributor’s note.
One of my other poems was accepted by a journal, but the acceptance letter was soon followed by another one from the editor, detailing how he had just been fired from his job due to what his boss considered to be explicit content in one of the poems he published in the magazine (which was printed using the facilities of the newspaper where he worked). Accordingly, the magazine was now dead. While it was sort of neat to get a poem placed on the deck chair of the Titanic, it certainly made me feel like I was engaging in a very marginal activity that would cause disquieting silences when disclosed at parties, like a penchant for driving around in those miniature Shriner’s cars, or obsessively curating ferris wheels.
September 19, 2006
More BAP, AKA, Just. Can't. Resist.
Hot damn but you can't throw a spitball these days without hitting a (potential?) lit scandal. Some voices in the blogosphere are trying to pull David Lehman's card...
September 18, 2006
Booker analysis
The Booker shortlist always gets a lot of scrunity. Wouldn't it be wonderful if a book prize were discussed so much in the U.S.?
The Independent is saying that this year's shortlist is indicative of a major change. John Sutherland, last year's chairman, says it's a "bizarre" list. "If you compare it with last year, the average age is five or 10 years younger. What we may be seeing is a turning of the tide, the older generation giving way to the new."
September 15, 2006
The Adventures of James Frey
The Guardian just published Frey's first interview since the talking-to he got from Oprah on national TV. Who's read "A Million Little Pieces"? It's one of those books, like "The Da Vinci Code," that I have a seemingly informed opinion on without ever having read it simply because I've read so much about it. (This phenomenon should have a name: Well-Read by Proxy?) In the interview, Frey says, "I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years." In a hundred years, will our great-grandkids be reading "A Million Little Pieces," or will they simply see the title as a footnote in the sixty-second edition of "Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America"?
September 14, 2006
Yet more literary fakery?
Miss Snark has published a blog entry on the Sobol Awards, a fiction contest for unpublished, unrepresented novelists. The grand prize is $100,000 and a representation deal with Sobol. If that's a good thing.
Let's count the red flags, yes?
1. The fee is $85. 2. The Sobol Awards caps the number of entries at 50,000, so that comes to a $4.25 million haul if that many unpubbed, unrepped novelists apply--and that's assuming that the good folks at Sobol actually do keep their word and cap the entries at 50,000, and don't just keep accepting Mss. until the bovines turn their collective walleyed gaze ever homeward. 3. There's no list of judges on the Web site that I could find. 4. If you're picked as one of the 10 finalists, you must give the Sobol Literary Agency the exclusive right to rep your novel, and any other books they may include in a multi-book deal with a publisher, pretty much until they say you can leave. 5. You can withdraw your Ms. for whatever reason, but the $85 is theirs regardless, which I suppose is common, but it's not nice. 6. Preditors and Editors gives the agency a "not recommended" label. So there's that.
Reread #4, then read (somehow) the Sobol Writer Agreement to get the full flavor of what it means. From what I can decipher, even if you do sign up and plunk down your $85 and send in your Ms., and even if the contest ends up being 100% cool, meaning they don't just up and cancel the contest for whatever reason and abscond to Belize with your money (they can do that, legally--it's in the rules), and even if you're picked as one of the 10 finalists, but you do not win the $100,000, you're still bound to the agency. Pretty much forever, like I said. I didn't see any language in the agreement to allow you to dissolve the relationship if it's not working out for you.
There are many contests available to fiction writers, both legit and dubious. But instead of going into that, I'll cut it short: Don't fiction writers get screwed over enough as it is? Cut it out, already! We're very sensitive people, for Chrissakes!
To comment below on agents and/or the merits of writing contests, please remit a nonrefundable $85 reading fee.
The luv affair w/ fakery cont.
Holy crap I like Tao Lin. Excerpts from a story called "Go to the Beach":
"How's Dana?" my mother says.
"Good," I say.
"Can you be more specific?"
"Pretty good."
*
At a stoplight a man in the adjacent car uses both hands to eat from a large bag of chips. "I really, really approve of that," I think.
Is this the kind of fiction only a poet would love? It's deadpan and plotless. But also tragical and absurd. It feels like a grand joke is being played on someone. This interviewer suggests (to Tao Lin) that Tao Lin is not a real person. "Can we really prove any writer's existence?" he says.
I'm terrified.
I have the hardbound ennui
While I totally understand the need for anthologies, I find that I have such a hard time reading them anymore (Best American Poetry aside, which is its own animal). It's like watching polar bears at the zoo. You keep thinking, “Aren't they really hot in there? Don't they want to sleep on something other than molded concrete?” Even poems that I really like in their home books seem a little bit like Jehovah's Witnesses once they’re anthologized, knocking at my door in ill-fitting suits, asking for just a moment of my time. (For the record, I haven’t read Legitimate Dangers yet, though I intend to.)
Back when I was starting out, I gobbled up anthologies: The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets , Poulin’s Contemporary American Poetry, and the piece de resistance, Naked Poetry (and its New Naked Poetry edition), a 70’s era anthology of poets writing in “open forms.” Logan, Bly, Patchen, Wright, Koch. All the black and white author photos of them outside in fleeces or in tool sheds. Each entry was followed by a manifesto of sorts, which in many cases were more entertaining and more moving than the poems.
Now I find it even hard to read Collected Poems, as the poems and the moods of each book seem to talk over one another like characters in a Woody Allen movie. I still experience some difficulty when I read Mary Ruefle’s wonderfully delirious Cold Pluto, as the typesetting is so tiny and miserly. Does this make me a bad person?
Henry Timrod in Modern Times
Bob Dylan: master of the folk process or "thieving little swine"?
You be the judge.
September 12, 2006
Callback to Plato
Found this in Tom Stoppard's English version of Das weite Land (Undiscovered Country), by Arthur Schnitzler:
Gustal: Madam, get a divorce. How can anyone marry a poet? They’re a subspecies. It was much better in the olden days, when one kept a poet like a slave or a barber – a tradition, incidentally, which survives in Isfahasn – but to let a poet run round loose is plain silly.
We used to be bad boys, with Dylan Thomas sleeping with students in the bushes and Oscar Wilde flirting with customs agents. Now it's the fiction writers who have the scandals, while poets ask themselves, "If I get tenure and implode, will I make a sound?" Didn't Robert Lowell or Ted Berrigan make Nixon's enemies list? Can you imagine any U.S. poet today making an enemies list?
September 11, 2006
September 8, 2006
Chapbooks are hot
... according to Nate Pritts of H_NGM_N: "These compressed bursts deserve our attention because they are, in action, a form of thought, scattered or unified, lax or rigorous; chapbooks are about as close as we can come to inhabiting a boiled-down consciousness different from our own."
I like chapbooks. I also like miniature food.
September 7, 2006
Don't Look Back
Thinking about persona made me remember the first time I read Norman Mailer. Someone had trumpeted his Armies of Night as one of the most significant memoirs of latter half of the 20th century, so I picked it up. I was impressed by how pitiless the book was toward himself and thought the strange associative reveries were excessively cool, even if speaking about himself in this weird informal way made the tone wobble occasionally. But then again, Nixon spoke about himself in the third person awkwardly too, so maybe the zeitgeist was broadcasting a comeuppance. But it was definitely one those moments (like when I read Girl, Interrupted or The White Album) when you realize that you can get away with anything on the page if you’re clever enough.
Then I randomly picked up his collection of essays, Cannibals and Christians, and the self-interview portion stopped me cold. Definitely felt like a case of trying to make sure he only got forehand serves and not backhand ones (and also some weirdly heightened Freudian inquiries). I had to do a self interview in grad school, and I felt so skeezy doing it, and kept thinking about Donald Hall’s invective against McPoems: verse with jumpcuts designed to flatter the star.
[That started the worm turning. Ancient Evenings finished me off. I don’t think I even made it through a chapter. I have rarely felt so strongly like I was reading a bunch of data slathered into fictional form. The man never had any problems filling up a page, that’s for sure.]
What I found so disappointing in the essays was this constant jockeying to supplant other writers and control how their novels were compared to his. I got a lot of this in Bukowski as well: a constant undercurrent of “This is so hard, so don’t even try it, you young writers.” Kind of sad how much energy writers waste either resisting or giving into anxiety about their contemporaries.
Frey settlement
So James Frey and Random House have come to an agreement, according to the Associated Press, to settle reader lawsuits over the fabrications in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces.
Erstwhile readers will apparently get their money back, provided that they can show a receipt or “some other proof of purchase: for the hardcover, page 163; for the paperback, the book’s front cover.”
Page 163?
Defrauded book owners will also have to “sign a sworn statement that they bought the book because they believed it was a memoir.”
I don’t condone what Frey did, but I’m not sure I agree with this as a precedent. Where does it end? I mean, haven’t we all bought a book we thought was one thing but turned out to be another? (I know I’ve bought a ton of books I thought would be, well, good, and they were not. Can I get my money back for those, too?) What about books that have been labeled or shelved a certain way for marketing purposes — are we to feel duped and ask for our money back on those when we find out they are another genre entirely? (John Hersey’s journalistic account Hiroshima, for example, is shelved in the “fiction and literature” section at Barnes and Noble, but labeled “history” on the jacket.) What about books that defy genre? And what about the other fabrications? As we know, Frey is not the only one. Publishers could end up returning a lot of cash, no?
Also, I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a book and bought it purely on the basis of its genre.
Doesn’t it take a complicated set of responses to a book (maybe you’ve heard of it, or liked the cover, or a friend’s boyfriend’s roommate or whoever recommended it, or you liked the author’s previous work, or…) to get people to buy it?
Thoughts?
Question of the Week
Anonymous said...
Do any book publishers look at the slush anymore, or don't bother sending directly? Do you need an agent to have any chance at all?
Jay Baron Nicorvo responded...
Dear Anonymous,
If you want your book (stories, novel, memoir) to come out under an imprint at one of the major New York publishing houses, an agent is a must. I spent time at one such house, and once a month the assistants had a "slush lunch" where they ate pizza and wiped their mouths and went through the bins of unsolicited manuscripts. A chosen few would get honest consideration, followed, invariable, by a kind rejection. From what I understand, this house was the only one in New York that didn't reject slush outright.
There are exceptions to the rule of agents: Steve Almond has no representation, and poetry collections at the major houses (the ones that still see fit to publish poetry) are, in part, pulled from the slush. There might be four poets in the country with agents. The rest send collections to contests or university presses, often overlooking the major houses. But those houses can be a good place for poets to get feedback on their manuscripts--if they know which editors to query. Not so with unrepresented prose writers.
You must also keep in mind that just about every submission that comes in to a NY editor goes first to the editor's assistant. If NY editors are gatekeepers, their assistants are the gatekeepers' gatekeepers, which makes agents thrice removed. One way to sidestep this system is to query independent publishers. There are many out there with solid reputations: Graywolf, Soft Skull, Akashic, McSweeny's, Coffee House, Open City, etc. The books that come out under these imprints have a hard time getting reviews in the major print venues, and the advances tend to be next to nil, but the books are often beautiful and worthwhile nonetheless. Query the editors at these places, and see how they respond. There are resources--namely the books and their acknowledgments pages--where you can find out who you should send to.
That said, I'd add that if you can't find an agent to represent your novel, story collection, memoir, or nonfiction proposal, chances are your book isn't ready to see print. I'm sure there are unheralded avant-garde writes out there who can't find agents, but, for the most part, good work will get out. Agents don't like representing dreck anymore than editors like publishing it; they do so to bankroll quality books they know won't sell. There are literally thousands of agents out there, and if a number of them doesn't see your manuscript as moneymaking junk, and nor do they see it as moneylosing art, then it's a safe bet that it needs work.
Simeon Berry adds...
This isn't a direct answer, but there's an entertaining blog by the name of
Miss Snark (an anonymous literary agent) who answers nuts and bolts stuff
about agents and slush and such.
Here is the index to her archives:
http://snarkives.blogspot.com/
Here are some tips about how to rise out of a slush pile:
http://misssnark.blogspot.com/2005/08/tipping-point.html
Thanks, anonymous. Keep sending your questions in, and we'll select one to feature as a post next week!
September 6, 2006
Book vs. collection
An interesting discussion on the rise of the concept book of poetry vs. a straight collection of not-necessarily-connected poems. This is something Chris and I have mused about, how just throwing all the poems you've written together isn't considered sexy these-a-days.
What books have you read lately that you've loved?
There's been nothing that's really killed me lately. I keep starting things and abandoning them halfway through. What have other people been reading that you'd recommend?
September 4, 2006
More Yasusada: A response from Kent Johnson
Kent Johnson sent Chris, Simeon, and me a great response to our discussion last week of the Yasusada "hoax." I've pasted it in full below. Let's keep the dialogue going.
*
Dear Simeon, Elisa, and Chris:
Thanks for inviting me to post some thoughts in response to your
commentary on the Araki Yasusada controversy [Pshares Blog, August 23,
'06].
To make things easier to follow, I'm commenting within your remarks. (I
haven't copied all of your commentary, just that which seemed to me most
relevant.) You'll see that I find much of what you say very apropos and
thought-provoking; at the same time, there are other things that strike
me as requiring some argument or qualification. Strong qualification, in
a couple places. But of difference is dialogue often made... I'll be
fairly brief for now, though I'd be happy to pursue the conversation if
there is interest in doing so. Well, to proceed, and with thanks again
for the opportunity...
Simeon Berry opened by saying:
>With this internet and all, it seems like we're way overdue for
something utterly ridiculous in the poetry world again, like the Araki
Yasusada hoax, where someone (Wikipedia says probably Kent Johnson)
fabricated a book of poems by a fictional (can one say that about a
character in poetry?) Hiroshima survivor.
Here I'd want to say, and I'm sure it won't surprise you, Simeon, that
I don't at all regard the Yasusada writings as "ridiculous." The
adjective, actually, seems to contradict some of the thoughtful things
you later suggest concerning the work's divergence from certain standard
practices and expectations within the current field. The controversy
around Yasusada has elicited a considerable amount of serious criticism,
here and abroad, pertaining to various issues, and an anthology of
essays gathering some of this, in fact, is nearing completion. So, in
that the work has provoked much discussion across a range of aesthetic
and ethical questions, I'd quarrel with the choice of term!
And I'd argue, too, with the use of the term "hoax." As I've proposed
in different places, this is a word that's often tossed about rather
carelessly and is too general (and too laden with certain connotations)
to be of much heuristic use when considering some of the "generic"
complications involved in both Doubled Flowering and Also, with My
Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords (the most recent Yasusada
book). I don't know if you're familiar with it, but Brian McHale's
essay, "A Poet May Not Exist," in the book Faces of Anonymity, is one of
the best essays on Yasusada and key reading on how works of its kind
might be given more subtle, constructive classification (classification
being not separate, of course, from larger issues of evaluation).
Simeon continues:
>What I find fascinating about the whole thing was that the subsequent
rejection of accepted poems and the retraction of the book. Wouldn't
it just be just as easy to put in a preface or appendix or cautionary
note? In poetry, 99% of the time, there's not really a significant
financial reward (read "ill-gotten gain") if any, so the question
becomes about how to handle phantom authorship. There is no designation
of "non-fictional" poetry, and even if there was, would anyone trust
it? To make a lyric world is to make it false, and no one speaks with
the ambiguity and allusiveness of line breaks. Hell, the white space
alone is suspect. (Plus, what does it say about an editorial decision if
the question of authorship of a poem somehow is construed to negate or
make irrelevant the quality of the language?)
This is interesting and I think you put it really well. Poetry, more
and more, seems regarded not as a mode of rhetoric (which in deepest
nature it's always been), wherein issues of "empirical veracity" are of
secondary relevance--if of relevance at all--but as a species of
truth-claim, one whose purchase on the "authentic" is assured by the
Authorial stamp and guarantee. And this places increasing constraints on
the possible range of poetic practice, I believe, making it more and
more beholden to parameters and relations that are ideological through
and through.
But this is the way it now clearly is both for the "mainstream" and for
the "avant-garde," even though they may refract the situation
differently. Authorship stands, patently, as a function beyond the
purview of the poetic. And it seems comfortably "natural" to all of us,
most of the time, that Poetry is a space over there, and the Author is a
space over here... Although the function fluctuates, historically
speaking--it can sometimes be very strong (as in our current culture),
or sometimes relatively weak (as in various other eras and cultures)--it
is likely to remain the default, normative mode. So it's not a matter of
trying to abolish conventional forms of literary title and property!
But poets, I'd suggest, have the option of coupling the poles of that
divide, of vanishing into their poems and seeing if unsuspected things
might happen from that, both inside the poetry and outside it. There is,
it's my suspicion, a vast and barely explored poetic topology waiting
there. Who knows, maybe somehow this space, if collectively entered,
might prove to have a subversive atmosphere of sorts, even lead to new
political efficacies for the art--though that's just a hunch.
Well, I suspect from your comments, Simeon, that you wouldn't
completely disagree... And by the way, I think the phrase "phantom
authorship" is excellent! I'm going to be stealing that for use in the
future.
Elisa Gabbert said:
>I guess it's something about feeling fooled and recognizing the intent
to fool that pisses people off. If the hoaxer didn't want to P people O
he could have written a book of poems in the voice of a fictional
Hiroshima survivor (I mean, and been forthright about what he was
doing). Trying to pull if off as ALL TRUE is just whoring yourself to
the demand for "nonfiction."
This is something that many people have said, in one form or another,
Elisa-- i.e., that the Yasusada writings are designed to "fool" people,
that the work is driven by a desire to "show up editors," or to make an
agonistic statement about political correctness, etc. I've spoken to
this misapprehension many times and so have other critics, more
recently. In fact, from the very beginning, the Yasusada work exposed
itself as a fiction. There are very few poems or letters in the work,
really, that don't contain some kind of minor or major clue to its
status as an imaginary collection of documents. But we've corresponded a
bit since you wrote this, and you've apparently read some of what I've
said about this elsewhere, so perhaps your view is different now...
The guiding impetus behind Yasusada is an empathic one. It is an
attempt to imagine another life, proffered by an author who engaged the
matter of Hiroshima in his own idiosyncratic way. And his hiddenness is
of a piece with the ethics and aesthetics of the work. Is the mode
transgressive of protocols that channel "proper" literary behavior? No
question. But what event is more improper and transgressive than the
American omnicide of Hiroshima? And why assume that poetry should only
engage Hiroshima and Nagasaki's troubling nature through untroubled
forms and attributions? Here, because it deals with this very question
of representation, I'd point you to what I consider one of the best
reviews written about Doubled Flowering. It's by Forrest Gander,
originally published in The Nation and reprinted here at Jacket
Magazine.
Chris Tonelli said...
>Two great Kent Johnson interviews:
Here.
And here.
Thanks, Chris, and if you don't mind, there are also my comments here,
which I think may be of interest to Ploughshare readers--not directly on
Yasusada, but on issues of suggestive relation: part of a really
interesting roundtable at Web del Sol titled "Avant, Post-Avant, and
Beyond."
All the participants are men, which is a bit embarrassing, but I know
the editors asked a number of women to participate as well, albeit with
no luck, for some reason.
Elisa said:
>Seriously though, I think even in the poetry world authorship matters.
Maybe it SHOULDN'T, but it does. Where did I read recently that no one
wanted to review a book of poems by an anonymous author...
I agree, Elisa. Actually, I think one could make a case that Authorship
currently "matters" just as much--perhaps even more--in U.S. po-biz than
it does in the world of Fiction. The whole sub-cultural apparatus
revolves around it with a vengeance. And some of the consequences aren't
pretty.
Simeon said...
>I think authorship matters too, though I am very hesitant to quantify
exactly where it begins and ends in relationship to the work. Yet it
seems to me that just because we're inevitably and irrevocably
conditioned to read a certain way based on our identify and how it plays
off the author's identity doesn't seem to totally relieve us (or the
author) of the obligation to negate/complicate/subvert this tendency.
Though I do not think that such a burden is a call for deception, or sly
demurrals after the fact. Furthermore, I don't think the only way you
can conduct such an inquiry is by stealth and deniability.
I agree with all of this, including the last two sentences. In regards
to Yasusada, there really are, as I see it, no sly demurrals after the
fact. The work has stood as a fiction for over a decade now, and it's
been clearly explained that the writer of Doubled Flowering is someone
who opted to not take public credit for the work (nor any material gain,
however small--all royalties from both books are donated to Hiroshima
causes). And no credit will ever be taken. Regardless of this or that
assumption about the work's origins, regardless of how "convinced" some
are of its authorship, or how insistently some attempt to domesticate
its ambiguous nature through ascription, there will always be a spirit
of undecidability that surrounds the work.
Then Simeon says:
>Mr. Johnson's defense/explanation of Yasusada is pitched at such a
stratospherically pretentious and recursive level as to be the
rhetorical equivalent of tank armor. The one place in the interviews
where I think he reveals himself is here:
"And of course, for some of the reasons I touch on above, Yasusada
can't help but turn a radical avant-gardist Charles Gray Professor of
Poetry into an angry white male who gets so hopping mad that he can't
see how poignant and funny the situation really is. And it's a very
interesting situation, that of the politically proper post-modernists:
When it comes to multi-culturalism they want to have their cooked
non-white poet and eat her too. And, of course, they want to do it with
everyone's name cards on the banquet table in the English Department
dining hall. No heteronyms allowed!"
Well, I can smile at this... I am the executor and caretaker of the
Yasusada work, and I defend it within my limitations and with all of my
quirks, including my sometimes hyperbolic prose, which I know would have
embarrassed Motokiyu. I'd say, if I can offer just a bit of
self-defense, that the particular interview you quote from is far and
away the most utopian and vatic-sounding of the interviews I've done.
There is the quality of the manifesto to it, I am aware of that. But I
do hope there are some points made therein worth considering.
Simeon continues:
Accordingly, I find myself on the other side of the river from Mr.
Johnson. While I don't necessarily disagree with the general sentiments
he deploys, I disagree with them in support of the Yasusada hoax (and
with the hoax itself, for that matter, for ethical reasons, and for what
I think is ultimately a lack of confidence in the editors, the readers,
and his own writing).
Here I'm a bit at a loss, Simeon. Not sure what you mean, really. Would
like to hear more on this, if you'd care to recast the point.
Chris said:
>I'm inclined to be lazy (surprise, surprise) and be like, "hey, good
poems are hard enough to come by, who cares who they're by." Plus I sort
like when people play pranks on gatekeepers...I'm too wussy to do it;
I'm glad someone isn't. Sim, can you talk more about why you chose the
quote you did. I sort of like that quote.
Chris, I agree with you completely that there are "gatekeepers," and I
believe that strategies of heteronymity/fictional authorship, individual
and collective, will in the future give these gatekeepers healthy fits,
as new modes of authorship evolve and expand. But I'd repeat, because
it's a key point, that Yasusada is not a "prank," and to read it
primarily as such is to mistake largely unforseen "sociological" effects
for its original nature, if I may use such a phrase.
Simeon said, referring to the quote about Charles Bernstein above:
>I think what I find most telling about the quote is the implication
that he finds the whole affair funny. That he savors the spectacle of
relativists (i.e. Language poets) being reduced to a good old fashioned
relationship to the text, with every stodgy prejudice that us Morlock
readers have, instead of languid, disinterested "I am floating in a
field of text. Look, there goes a signifier! Make a wish!"
Hm, here I want to clarify, Simeon, that I am in no way saying I think
the Yasusada affair is "funny." When I say "funny" at that particular
point, I am speaking about the humor, the frankly stunning irony put
into play when Charles Bernstein so angrily, so emotionally delivered
his paper at a Yasusada panel at the MLA.
I say stunningly ironic, for who was Charles Bernstein back in the late
1970's? A leading, brilliant spokesperson of an "avant-garde" predicated
on an insistent critique of the "Self" and the "I" as basis for poetic
composition... And who is Charles Bernstein today? An exemplary instance
of the Avant-Garde Author, the former radical turned Distinguished
Professor of Poetry, an "experimenter" on the page, to some extent, and
still brilliant, certainly, but no different in cultural/institutional
function, fundamentally, from, say, Robert Pinsky. He knows this, I'd
wager, and that is the deeper reason a gesture like Yasusada gets him
all nettled. It highlights, in its own modest, unintended way, the rapid
implosion and surrender of the Language project, the extent to which the
principles of its poetic politics never truly went from word into deed.
Now, I suppose that might sound a bit harsh... But it was Charles
Bernstein who pounded the podium those few years ago and accused
Yasusada of being little more than an instance of "white male rage." So
let's put the cards on the table, I say.
Simeon continues:
>But I don't think the Yasusada poems were intended as a mousetrap,
because the errors introduced into the text seem too minor and don't
have a special sting embedded in them (as they would, for instance, if
one of the anachronisms was a literary critic, or a forged book or
signature). Also, Mr. Johnson has not celebrated or openly revealed his
gimmick, choosing instead to tap-dance around interrogations using the
vocabulary drawn from the vast and windy library of textual
instabilities. The poems themselves read seriously, so the project does
not devolve into parody, nor was intended to, I think. His responses
imply that the whole thing is parodic, which seems to speak to a
fundamental nervousness. I suspect that he grabbed the closest rhetoric
at hand and found that it made his predicament defensible. The one
moment where he chooses to speak plainly (and intelligibly) is the one
where he is personally slamming a writer whose work actually enacts (for
better or worse) all the conclusions of the very rhetoric he has
hijacked. Notice that his main point is that the reactions of the
literary community are funny and ridiculous (and therefore not
indicative of a criminal act). If he really thought it was funny, he
would see nothing wrong in openly admitting it and pushing it further,
making more fantastic and ridiculous claims, rather than retreating into
rhetoric. Hiding out in relativism and disavowing the project smacks of
guilt rather than glee.
I've tried to interject some levity from time to time, but I honestly
don't believe that what I've said over the years about Yasusada can be
classified as "parodic." At least that hasn't been my intent! You are
correct below, Simeon, when you suggest that the controversial
"sociological" effects are largely incidental to more fundamental
purposes behind the Yasusada texts. I've talked about those effects in
various venues, trying to better understand them... But frankly, I
really don't feel "nervous" about my role at all! Nor do I have reason,
in my association with this project, to feel "guilt" --though I suppose
in other areas of my life I have my share of that...
Chris said:
>I do wish he owned it more...that it was funnier to him and that it
was more of a prank and therefore a litmus test or referendum on certain
aspects of the current milieu.
OK, maybe I've said enough above to answer Chris's regret here.
Simeon, in closing, said...
>Rhetoric aside, I think it was actually a case of wanting to make good
poems. The retrenching and trickster stuff seems like it came after the
fact.
Yes, this is accurate. Though I know it was more than merely a matter
of wanting to make good poems.
My thanks, then, to all three of you. I appreciate the opportunity.
yours,
Kent
September 1, 2006
The Makings of a Movie
For its new book "The Mystery Guest," FSG has mounted a guerilla publicity campaign that includes a faux-trailer, viewable on YouTube, directed and edited by David Teague, who has worked on music films for David Bowie, kd lang, and Laurie Anderson. "The Mystery Guest" is French writer Gregoire Bouillier's second book. Lorin Stein, acquiring editor and translator of "The Mystery Guest," came up with the concept for the trailer. The memoir is brilliant, heartbreaking and brutal, and, given the seamless translation, the thing reads more like a novel. Now, thanks to the trailer (and the uses of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous YouTube) the memoir that reads like a novel is being billed as a movie.
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