Movie: Frankenstein (1931)

Trailer to Frankenstein

Our lazy afternoon viewing was James Whale's 1931 "horror classic." What makes a movie a "classic?" Innovative camera work, mainly. Frankenstein has some truly incredible visual offerings: burying a man out in a creepy graveyard, complete with angel of death. A windmill out on a precipice. Arcs of electricity in a mad scientist's lab. The appearance of the monster. A scene in which the monster kills a little girl.

But perhaps the deepest lesson to get from watching Frankenstein, or any "classic" movie, is about maintaining your love of craft in a world that best appreciates convention. There are horrible character actors here: the guy playing Dr. Frankenstein's dad is just terrible, and even Boris Karloff's own performance is, for me, overrated. The story has been mangled twice over since "Mrs. Percy Shelley" (yes, that's what it says in the opening credits!), leaving us with a version in which Frankenstein's murderous nature can be explained by installation of the wrong brain, and both Dr. Frankenstein and his fiancée Elizabeth live to the end, presumably happily ever after. The evidence is clear: Hollywood made a blockbuster out of the Frankenstein story, and they very likely distorted Whale's directorial vision as well. But Whale is a professional, which means here that he fills the picture with just the conventions the audience wants, with just a touch here and there of features that might possibly challenge the viewer (Frankenstein says he knows what it means "to be God," little girl murder, Swiss wedding dances). He didn't abandon his project because he had to compromise on his vision. That's certainly a lesson for the young person.

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Theory Live

"And now he's here once again to capitalize on people's emotions."

Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History, 20:4 (Winter 2008): 845-60

I call this "live theory" because I'm responding even before I finish the essay. I think Berlant's writing lends itself to that -- much as with reading in Chinese, some translation and paraphrase is necessary along the way.

This essay begins by giving me the idea that Yang Jiang’s essays, both as collections and as fragmented vignettes living their own lives all over the internet, act analogously to The Intuitionist or Pattern Recognition in that, like historical novels, they attempt to capture the affective response to the historical crises. If you can capture exactly what it was that we felt, then you can bring together the two opposing views that history determines us (structure) and that we determine history (agency). I pictured this at first as a closed door and person approaching. The person reaches out, opens the door, and walks through. The door shuts. Which determined what just happened, the person or the door? Clearly it was a process of the person’s immediate response to the circumstance of the door. The door didn’t make the person go through it. Similarly the person did not choose to open the door rather than simply pass through without opening it. Structure and agency affect each other.

Of course, most of the time the circumstances are far more complicated than one person and one door. Berlant asks, “...how does the aesthetic rendition of emotionally complex sensual experience articulate with what what is already codified as “knowledge” of a contemporary historical moment? How is it possible for the affects to sense that people have lived a moment collectively and translocally in a way that is not just a record of ideology?” Imagine if the only way to tell the story of 9/11 was with CNN news clips. Now imagine how much we add by writing novels that tell the intimate experience of the disaster. What does making the novel add? As for the second question of Berlant, I think immediately to the South Park parody of Alan Jackson’s song about 9/11: sometimes it is just a record of ideology.

Berlant proposes the to answer the questions by analyzing how people respond to such historical novels with intuition -- in this, she seems to be doing the same work as the makers of the South Park episode, exposing how intuition overrides critical judgment -- but I’m sure in a nicer way. For one thing, the plot of a historical novel is experienced in two ways at once -- it happens in your mind as an immediate experience, with the same perspectives as the characters. But it is also known to have occurred in the past. “[D]espite the singularities of affect, the historical novel points to a unity of experience in an ongoing moment that historians can later call epochal, but that at the time was evidenced as a shared nervous system.” (847) Translation: Even though “feelings” can only be had by one person, and even then they can’t have exactly the same “feeling” twice, with the historical novel we can make it seem like a whole group of people was having “feelings” together. Again, when we tell the story of 9/11, we do something -- like say where we were at the time -- that implies we were feeling something similar (a break in the daily routine, say. A shock.)

We have to check out what genre our novel is, because genres each manipulate the feelings of the reader in a different way: the ghost story makes you scared, for example. In Berlantese, genres are “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take.” Marxists like Lukacs first mapped out the conventions of the historical novel, and even realized that these conventions were linked to feelings, but they did not work out how different conventions activate different feelings. They did not have a science of “affect,” which is another way of saying that they didn’t care much for each other’s feelings.

A historical novel takes as its theme the past, but the feelings the story makes us feel are feelings that have to do with the historical present of the author. “Affect works in the present.” (848) This helps me solve the problem of what is so important about old people’s writings. Old people begin to see all of their experiences as “emergently historic,” especially if they have lived through multiple crises.

More to come.
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Note: Pu Songling's "Twenty Years a Dream"

“Twenty Years a Dream" adapted for Chinese television

As I was cleaning up a messy file in my desk, yesterday, I came across a copy of the story “Twenty Years a Dream” as translated by John Minford in his recent version of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. This morning, in no hurry to get started on the difficult writing of my dissertation, I took the time to read the story again, and now I just have to put down a few comments, which I will try to do quickly.

The story begins

Yang Yuwei went to live on the banks of the Si River, in a studio out in the wilds. There were numerous old graves just beyond the wall of his property. At night he could hear the wind soughing in the poplars, like the sound of surging waves.

He sat up l ate one evening beside his lamp and was beginning to feel very lonely and forlorn when he heard a voice outside chanting some lines of verse:

In the dark night the cool wind blows where it will;
Fireflies alight on the grass, they settle on my gown...”

Over and over again he heard the same plaintive, melancholy lines chanted by a delicate woman’s voice. The sound intrigued him greatly.

The boy meets the girl; I’m always fascinated to find that the basic desire for the most basic of attachments indeed appears over and over in all cultures, in all times! But already we have here some very important conventions at work that make this story distinctively Chinese. Yang Yuwei is man who has come to live “in the wilds.” What he finds attractive about the lady is that she seems so cultivated, so delicate. Her poem is full of symbols, as is the entire story -- symbols stand-in for whole stories, stories within stories. It is important to realize that this is a real erotic feature for him; “intrigued” is a very physical response. Even after Yang realizes that this girl must be a ghost, “He felt himself strangely drawn to it.”

He listens to her “melancholy dirge,” aroused (er, “intrigued”) and thinks of a great way to establish communication: to reply to her couplet with “Who, alas, can know your heart’s secret sorrow, As you stand at moonrise in your cold torquoise sleeves?” I love that the girl’s image is one of the wilderness, one to remind us perhaps that fireflies mate by flashing their lights at each other, males flying in search of a female to alight on. Yang takes up this role, but gives his girl a new image of herself as a fancy lady, alive and standing?” It was just the right thing to say to her.

Thus begins the relationship. “You are indeed a gentleman of such refinement and cultivation, sir!” She tells him her story, that she is from Gansu province and died on a trip at age 17. “Yang wished to make love to her without further ado, but she would not.” But he can’t, because she’s a ghost and sex with her would kill him. “So Yang held back, merely toying with her breasts, which were as virginal and soft to the touch as freshly peeled lotus kernels.” This last is an image from Chinese poetry that elaborates on the idea that what is so erotic about the girl is the great “refinement” and “delicacy” of her body and her persona -- nothing more delicate than a ghost, I guess you could say.

The two continue to cultivate an attachment that is figured by literature. She notices he is in to Yuan Zhen’s “The Lianchang Palace” and is all, “Oh my god, that is my favorite Yuan Zhen poem too! We have so much in common!” (not a real quote, obviously) Unable to have sex, Yang and Locket are able to become good friends with common interests. She does creates her own poetry compilations with great calligraphy, teaches Yang to play ‘Go,’ and plays him songs on the piba. And he loves to listen, especially to her happy songs.

Their relationship is nearly ruined when Yang’s “boorish,” “nasty” friends learn of his girl and want to become audiences to his attachment, but the most boorish of them all, Wang manages to perform the service of ridding the girl of a bullying demon. She responds by acknowledging her debt to him and recognizing him as a friend also (though of course he must respect her closer position to Yang than his now). The story ends as in dreams come true: the girl can become a real girl with just a little sex, blood and nourishing broth. , helps make poetry collections, That the story is essentially boy meets girl, boy faces major challenges to get girl.

Minford seems quite right to compare the “platonic relationship” here (though I won’t agree to that term) to Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu. I think even that it would be a good idea to assign the story along with the book at the end of the semester, the better to talk about the role “elegance” and “delicacy” play in Chinese life writing.

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At Least I'm Un-Making Progress

Palmer's Lodge, Hampstead, London, (June 2010)

Daruvala, Susan. Zhou Zuoren and An Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

I revisited the first chapter of Susan Daruvala’s book about Zhou Zuoren to get a sense of how she writes the “theoretical frameworks” that I have been told more than once is my greatest weakness.

“Nationalism and Modernity,” the central section of the chapter, elaborates on the antagonistic forces that Zhou Zuoren’s philosophy opposes. A careful reading of this 11,000-word piece was more than a little xingku, and ultimately left me unsatisfied because it does not give any role to literature. But I’ll bracket that criticism for the next few paragraphs to summarize what this work actually offers: a passionate response to a set of readings that shows one student’s effort to understand why and how nationalism dominates modern societies.

* * *


Daruvala first sets out to set as the object of her concern the emergence of the nation-state, which occurs after the growth of long-distance trade and big cities. The word “modernity” describes this emergence, but is applies equally well to a new self-consciousness and capacity for reflection: how do we connect the two?

For one thing, the emergence of the nation-state is the emergence of people who see themselves as parts of a greater whole. They become willing to live and die for their country. This sentiment spreads out of England in the 18th century into other European nations, and their colonies.

But if some are willing to die for their country, inevitably others came to question whether this was the best practice. Perhaps there are times when one should ask not what one can do for one’s country, but what one’s country can do for one? And perhaps if the answer the country gives is “I shall make you into a productive tool,” then the contract between citizen and state may begin to look unfair. The Holocaust of course constitutes the extreme example of how unfair this may become.

For Liah Greenfeld, it is particularly important to understand that German elites were driven to create a nation-state out of a ressentiment, a sense of inferiority, against the more successful English. One wonders if they ever considered that the English were helped along themselves by their fear of Napoleon! In any case, we must remember that in addition to ressentiment, pure greed is a major factor driving the formation of nation-states; if we picture capital as a thing, we can look back on history to see the English, Germans, etc. carefully structuring the state and the nation to better serve it.

Books and print media have the key role of disseminating the discourse of nationalism: only with the help of books and newspapers could the English amplify their sense of Englishness; that they also became racists along the way is an inevitable feature of the rhetoric used in this discourse. Daruvala does not spell out this rhetoric, but I am reminded of the concept so popular at the moment (2010), that it is easy and efficient to build group identity by identifying the outsiders.

I lament this rhetorical pattern, which is so completely common even on the news reports I’ve heard just today, but I am also fascinated by its power and versatility. To see this, one only has to consider the emergence of nationalist discourse in the colonies: elite colonial subjects always want to become their masters: from the English, we have India.

Looking at the colonies is useful because it allows us to see that in the discourse of nationalism, “nation” and “modern” mean much the same thing. Nation-builders hoped that they would become modern, and hence more rational, and hence more fully free and rational; they did not see that they actually were making themselves into tools for the service of capital. Gradually a “stance of disengaged reason” makes a person begin to see herself as merely a part of the whole unable to change the whole. (Scientific discourse encourages this “stance of disengaged reason.”)

Eventually, the understanding that the parts ought to leave the whole alone becomes a moral claim. This, Daruvala will go on to claim, is what happened in China during and after the May Fourth Movement.

Meanwhile, nation-builders continue to think that having a modern nation will make them rational. As Paul Ricoeur argues, the drive to be ever more rational is a feature of humans, but goes awry when they build structures that serve capital, instead of attending to “what is most living and creative in them.” Another Frenchman, Patrick Tort, points again to the rhetorical pattern of evolution and progress which is a crucial part a larger “para-scientific ideology.” Just as we serve capital, we have come to serve science and rationalism. The unfortunate consequence of this service is amnesia, as Renan has said: “Forgetting...is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” (I suppose the way this works is as follows: I can play video games, what use have I of chess? I must form a nation-state, what use have I of Catholicism or Confucianism? Renan’s point was apparently directed at the French, who say “We have France, what use have we now of Spanish-speakers?”)

“Progress,” tied as it is to rationalism, pictures civilization as a warring party with nature. To identifying “civilization” with nations is to picture yourself fighting with other nations. Alternatively, civilization could be “open structures” separate from nations, which might allow more room civilizatons to co-exist.

Perhaps, since the nation has evolved as the organization best-suited to grow capital, that opposing the nation would help oppose capital? Tagore certainly thought so.

***

Despite the eloquence of Tagore’s anti-national vision (apparently he told a crowd of Japanese in 1916, “The people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with the cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power called the Nation.”), my objection to Daruvala’s account is that neither she nor Tagore have given any hint that “the Nation” is the source of the greed that drives civilization to care for the needs of capital rather than the needs of people. I think I see what she is driving at, however: if we can awaken ourselves to the fact of our slavery, we can begin to fix the problem. If we can remember the older habits, like filial piety, that make us serve people, that can help displace the service of capital. This is somehow a larger umbrella into which I can place the lessons of the “queer art of failure” and “against recovery” from recent readings. But all lack a real vision -- so far. I’ll be patient as I continue to study Daruvala with great care.


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Story: "I Bought a Little City"

A young Barthelme. Thanks to the Guardian books blog - this entry is part of a long series surveying the short story.

I have listened to all of the New Yorker fiction podcasts, and I am now filled with complex feelings about the short story. It seems to me the form that privileges the craft of story first, entertainment value second, and lastly social and political commentary. For comparison's sake, most television and genre fiction seems to go for entertainment value first, followed closely with social commentary; craft recedes into the background, even in the most highly-crafted works. In poetry, craft is probably everything, and poems with social content or entertainment value per se are now an endangered species.

That is preliminary bullshit, but it matters to the young critical thinker still too afraid or too plagued by petty anxieties and self-inflicted handicaps to write. I don't write, precisely, but I do comment. To comment seems the biggest procrastination of all.

Enough. Now I procrastinate even comment.

"I Bought a Little City" by Donald Barthelme is "absurdist" in the sense that a man cannot, in fact, purchase Galveston, Texas, to rule over as absolute monarch. Perhaps even more absurd is just how much the protagonist debates with himself before selfishly inflicting injustice (he shoots another man's dog -- not quite a beating offense). But the story's truth is that if we were to give high office to any of the whining social commentators of the land, from our finest poets to the most unimaginative dolts, they would very likely fail to uphold fairness and decency in the realm. The best they would be able to do is hand the land back, and move away from the center.

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Minor Memoir: Rao Yuwei

NTU back when it was Taihoku Imperial University. From this great page of old posters, postcards and such.

I made a small study of the wikipedia entry for Rao Yuwei this morning, and I’m left with the feeling that it might be a part of my Vancouver talk in December, one of the places where Yang Jiang’s essays have an afterlife. Either that or possibly a footnote in my dissertation somewhere.

You see, the article begins by saying that Rao was a professor and chairman at the Taiwan National University. But in the second sentence it says that he was a graduate of Tsing-hua University in the same class as Qian Zhongshu. Under the final section of his entry, “Influence,” there is only one paragraph to the effect that his 1986 memoir of his days at Tsing-hua contain one section of note that records his impression of Qian Zhongshu, citing Yang Jiang for the use of the excerpt.

Did Yang Jiang’s mention of Rao Yuwei lead to his wikipedia biography? It’s very possible. The section in question reads:

Of our classmates, Qian Zhongshu left the greatest impression. He was profoundly accomplished in both Chinese and English, and quite knowledgeable in philosophy and psychology. He spent all day studying widely old and new texts from China and the West. But the strangest thing was that when he came to class, he never wrote in his notebook. He would just bring some book that had nothing to do with the class to read as he listened. But when exam time came, he was always number one. He loved to read himself, and always encouraged others to read.

I find it a little that the author describes this passage as “important materials about Qian Zhongshu’s life at university.”

There are other reasons for having a Wikipedia entry for Rao, I suppose. He helped found the Foreign Languages and Literatures department at National Taiwan University in 1947, along with other KMT adherents who had come over from mainland China, and a few Japanese scholars who stayed on through April of 1947 before going back home one after the other. An uncredited line in this entry says that Rao asked Qian Zhongshu to join the department at NTU, but Qian Zhongshu refused.

In a memoir serialized in the Liberty Times Literary Supplement, Qi Shiying’s daughter Qi Bangyuan remembered that Rao Yuwei used to drive an American military jeep up and down Roosevelt and Heping roads, sometimes to give her a ride. He did not offer any advice on being a young professor, however.

Rao was only a professor a few months himself, before taking a job in the American news industry in Singapore. The author of the entry speculates that top talent like Rao, Qian or Yang Jiang would not have liked working at NTU in the early days, when the salary and prestige of the university was very low.

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The Public Sphere in China

Hanjiang Road, Hankou (Thanks, wikicommons)

Rowe, William T. "The Public Sphere in Modern China." Modern China, 16:3 (July 1990): 309-329

What makes modern society so different from ancient societies? Is it just that we have new ways of working in groups on larger, more complex projects than before? Does having ways of working in groups make us any better at communicating with each other, or at fighting for the rights of the weak and injured in the world?

Writing just after the translation into English of Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, historian William Rowe reviews 1970s and 1980s work to analyze Chinese social structures in terms of the growth and decline of a “public sphere.” Most scholars answer the first question above with an affirmative to the second question: modernity is about the growth of long-distance trade, which necessitates new social structures such as newspapers, coffee houses, popular literature, trade guilds, neighborhood elites, and street repair teams. Habermas’ work specifically laments the transformation of the public sphere of the European bourgeoisie into a place where mass opinion is manipulated by large corporations, mass media, advertising, the ideology of social rights, an enormous bureaucracy, mass political parties, and highly-organized interest-group politics.



The work of China scholars, however, does not always lament. Research on 18th- and 19th-century Chinese social structures often celebrates attention to the “public” (gong) as a class of citizens, in contradistinction to “private” (si) concerns that were negatively encoded in the tradition for their exclusion of anyone outside the family; gong was also most often distinguished from “official” guan, which according to ancient ideals was a support to the larger community, but which was notorious for serving its own needs as a larger, more malevolent version of “private” actors. “Public” social structures included gongjian, special offices “authorized for use on local community projects such as road and irrigation work repairs.” These kinds of local elite structures continued to evolve through the early 20th century, when they began to realize that they were more effective at management than the imperial system.

Rowe admits frankly that the accounts available by 1990 had not developed the history of how this locally-based “public sphere” was “foreclosed” by the expansion of the “official” (guan) sphere under the late Qing, then Yuan Shikai, and then the KMT. The question, “Did an autonomous public sphere disappear in twentieth-century China, and, if so, at what moment?” remains intriguing and incompletely answered. Now that the Chinese government has scaled back from the peak of its intrusion into the intimate sphere, the question of both the intimate sphere and the non-governmental public sphere have become active topics for discussion again.

Rowe suggests that Habermas has “much to say” for students who would write the histories of “domesticity, friendship, and intimacy in China,” but leaves this aspect of history mostly outside the scope of his article. I take away a number of points, however, which I believe are applicable to my work so far (against my better judgment, I first put these down as a list, because they are still so fragmented in my mind):

“Why” attempt to find an analogue to “the public sphere” in Chinese history? Because we are looking for the opportunities that life offers for criticism. In doing this we follow the tradition of the Frankfurt School. between “public” and “gong” in Chinese history?

We are interested in the historical changes to people, and their values. Where Habermas studies the creation of the bourgeois (burgerlich) class which at first imposed its will on what was to become the notion of the “public sphere,” in China we must follow along the local elites who so often took responsibility for mass communication, education, and even repairing the roads.

For Yang Yinhang, a crucial component to popular sovereignty was the rule of law and an independent judiciary. I wonder how contemporary readers, intellectual or otherwise, understand Yang’s values, and his disappoinments?


My own focus on a woman who seeks only to remember her most personal and intimate relationships at first seems to put the economic origins of the local elite class out of my scope. But this is not quite the case; Yang Jiang remembers the centers of wealth in her own clan, in the Qian clan, and in the people she knew as a child in Shanghai. Uncomfortable feelings about one extremely wealthy family in Shanghai helps us to understand how Yang Yinhang and his family distinguished its own modesty and concern for social justice. The contrast of Yang’s more open and progressive home from the Qians also highlights the diversity of approaches to the tradition and such matters of public taste as “elegance” (ya).

Wuxi, with its dialect, its customs of teasing, it’s strong local community, makes it an ideal place for Yang Jiang. The influence of Qian’s Bofu, and the Wuxi teahouse culture, on him is directly connected to his production of a novel in Yang Jiang’s formulation.

Yang Jiang’s own practice is characterized as an appeal to public opinion. There is a basic faith that public opinion has not degenerated wholly into mass opinion. Yang Yinhang’s older and undeveloped view that an informed reading public could help in the creation of an informed and influential public opinion lives on in Yang Jiang.

There is a centuries-old war of the word “gong” in China -- does the responsibility of the public interest lie in the central government, or in the hands of its private citizenry? If self-interest (si) could be understood as crucial components of public interest (gong), then gong and si need not be opposed. This tradition is what Yang Jiang is trying to describe in her own family.

We can see this idea at work in Yang Yinhang’s dedication of his home to an elite activist from the late Ming. Yang Yinhang at the time had hope that an elite-led local public sphere might still be a force for political good using tools like the newspaper and the legal office.

The form of the essay lends itself to combining social comment with the deeply personal and subjective, with making symbolic the details of everyday living. In doing so, it shows itself a proper form to inherit the old tradition that would make gong out of si. No wonder it remains the major form for so many Chinese readers.
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Berlant and Intimacy, Again

An example of the many interactions intimacy can have with institutions

Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 281-288.

On the third reading of this small, dense essay, I am just beginning to realize how difficult it is to use any of what Professor Berlant is saying, because I have not only to translate her often disconnected terms and propositions, I have to sift through carefully staged generalities and ambiguities to create statements that might apply directly to what I am thinking about. I thought once before that at the very least, writing under the influence of theory was less difficult than translating Chinese scholarship. How wrong that was!


Therefore, to help prepare the theoretical portions of my dissertation, I will begin going through American theory very, very carefully, tasting my thoughts along the way. I have time.


Berlant opens with a vision of intimacy as an element of stories that call us to look inward at intimate relationships between people, but also calls us to look outward towards "institutions of intimacy" that we hope will help us lead the lives we wish to lead. I find mysteriously intriguing Berlant's comment that intimacy as an element of stories is suited to simple elegance:

"I didn't think it would turn out this way" is the secret epitaph of intimacy.To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity.

Certainly, I do not at the moment see the connection between this form that intimacy takes and its dual inward/outward nature. All I have is an inkling.


The next three paragraphs are very unclear, but involve the ideas of therapy and jurisdiction (which I suppose we can understand as the law as an institution). Berlant's point seems to be simply that the stories we tell about intimacy have an influence on such institutions ("intimacy builds worlds")


Next, Berlant states the scope of the essays in that number of Critical Inquiry: the essays investigate the complex relationship between intimate life on public life and vice versa. For example, a billboard may suggest strongly that abortion is wrong: the public sphere has a message about the intimate sphere. But the intimate sphere may have something to say back to that. And so on and so forth. There are huge philosophical battles here: we Americans tend to consider private life more real than private life. How does all this happen? asks Berlant. "How can we think about the ways attachments make people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities, when those attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises?" (283)


In the USA, we perpetuate a divide between public and private that does not accurately describe many of our institutions, which in fact "can be read as institutions of intimacy." Habermas understood that if the public were to take up a role as critic, then "collective intimacy" must the ideal of the public in cafes, newspapers, and at home. "Persons were to be prepared for their critical social function in what Habermas calls the intimate spheres of domesticity, where they would learn (say, from novels and newspapers) to experience their internal lives theatrically, as though oriented toward an audience." (284) But it didn't work because people were driven to read and watch stories that are pleasurable, not merely instructive. It becomes hard to tell the difference between pleasure and critical function. Special interest groups begin to realize that many stories demean them, which calls into question whether we should ever have striven for a collective intimacy -- isn't it always a dream of omnipotence by some privileged class?


But intimacy is actually a very diverse, "wild thing:" we can find stories of people who walk dogs, or fetishists and their objects. Berlant reveals her interest in the marginalized people whose stories often go untold, and ask us to question, why are there so few plots? Single people, queer people, can become "unimaginable" even to themselves, thus wasting "world-building energy." Therefore there is a major need to "rethink" the narratives, presumably to increase to total diversity of narratives, of ways of being. "To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living."


When we consider intimacy, we always see tacit "fantasies" in the stories that people fight to show us and make us believe. When a certain kind of intimacy becomes an issue, we see people argue for it eloquently. When a population loses its sovereignty, the stories they produce can be expected to be bitter. Many, many kinds of trauma affect contemporary societies everywhere, but these traumas are now mass-mediated events, including testimony from those who suffer that offers a "shocking" message about intimacy (I'm not sure what Berlant means here: is she saying that the Haiti earthquake survivor shocks with her appeal via intimacy, or is she saying that we learn of our true intimates when they are sheared away, and this is shocking?)


To recap, Berlant's vision is of a set of essays that will further conversations about "the modes of attachment that make persons public and collective and that make collective scenes intimate spaces." My project would seem to engage only the first of these two rough divisions to the project -- I present stories by a single author that show intimate attachments becoming public. For me, the form of the Chinese essay is an intimation, in that it communicates with readers using spare signs and gestures. The essay shows us the personal details, sometimes of attachments and sometimes not, but always to form a multiplex attachment with many readers -- this is the power of the symbol. I take it as well from Berlant that it is crucial to attempt to understand how such stories affect and are affected by institutions such as the law. Certainly there are reciprocal relationships between stories and institutions that deserve consideration, though this aspect of the work remains most mysterious to me. Some clues that Berlant leaves include: check out the hidden divide between stories that instruct and those only meant to entertain, check for the most marginalized populations and their strategies, and think about to what extent the entire society is experiencing trauma through mass-mediation.

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Review Snippet

A peasant of China's northeast (cribbing this article)

Hershatter, Gail. Review of Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949 to 1999, by Yunxiang Yun. Contemporary Sociology, vol. 33, no. 4 (July 2004): 433-4
Gail Hershatter’s review of Yan Yunxiang’s 2003 Private Life Under Socialism admires a sociologist and insider who writes an exposed, personal account not just of the social attachments in Xiajia village, but of the emotional lives of its inhabitants. Yan treats the subjects of his ethnography very much as individuals but also charges people’s attachments and obligations with representative symbolism: they have “begun to fray.”

Yan’s portrait constitutes a large-scale comment about the contemporary situation -- “an accelerating breakdown in community and civility” that accompanied the withdrawal of the state. The biggest worry here is of an “uncivil individual” whose self-interest gives him a focus on romance, intimacy, and pleasure but dispenses with public life, as is especially apparent in the emergence of elder neglect in these villages. Even through the book review, this figure of the “uncivil individual” is shockingly, tragically familiar.

What Yan seems to be doing is somewhat similar to what Yang Jiang does in her essays: make our most intimate attachments to each other, in order that public opinion be influenced in favor of certain values and against others. The artistry that Hershatter identifies here is in painting emotional lives with a candid exposure of the speaker's own emotional investment in living with the subjects. The main difference seems to be a simple fact of the geophysical situation: Yang Jiang lives closer to the center amidst a rich literary cultural apparatus, and trained to use it.
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Monsieur Ennui

Click for Costumes

Monsieur N. is a textbook example of costume drama with nothing to say, much as in many history textbooks. This is perhaps a film about Napoleon during his last days, on the prison at St. Helena. But more accurately it should be called a film about the very dull ship of fools, English and French, that accompanied him in exile. None of these poor fools makes enough of an impression to mention by name. It suffices to say that there is a handsome soldier, an unconvincing blonde, and many rather repellant officers and aristocrats. The main lesson to learn here is not political or social in theme, but rather economic: some people made money off of Napoleon, and some didn't. It is not surprising at all who did and who didn't.

One can't help but use this sort of film as evidence against the European film industry, against state-support for the arts, against the dullness and pedantry that comes from producing the story out of institutions. Hollywood, for all its mediocrity, offers some minimum standards for entertainment value, and those alone should have seen to it that this uninteresting script never see the light of day.

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The Ecological Exorcist

Late 1970's fun

With music by Ennio Morricone, 1970s girlish beauty by Linda Blair, Richard Burton in a surprising turn as the exorcist with the tortured soul, and James Earl Jones in locust headgear, you know that at minimum this sequel is going to provide camp fun. And it does.

But what is such a surprise is what a thoughtful and spacey little film this is. The exorcism plot is re-invented as a flirtatious debate between the fields of religion and psychology. Which is better equipped to heal the ailing mind's of today's children? Which can better explain evil? Can the Prince of Flies be prayed away, or are his wings controllable with revolutionary new biofeedback technology? The shlock horror conventions remain, but are enriched by well-cut trips to Africa, Rome and fancy Manhattan therapy labs, where we meet two characters, Richard Burton's darkly passionate priest, hanging on to hope but just beginning a great fall, and Louise Fletcher's psychiatric experimentalist, all positivist with doses of rapid advancement in science and women's liberation. James Earl Jones turns in a memorable cameo as both locust-themed wiseman of the mudcity and white-coated George Washington Carver for a savannah that just wants to control its locust populations. The inevitable conclusion here is that the ecological metaphor for life, post-Rachel Carson, did become conventional, but that doesn't mean that a stylish handling of it via convention wasn't worth the try. Theater-goers in 1977 probably thought the film preachy and not scary enough, but this true accusation does credit to the filmmakers in 2010.

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Heavy Cloud, No Rain

The Rainmaker proves mostly superstition

I can't believe this movie comes from Francis Ford Coppola, who I remember best for The Godfather. It's a totally clichéd story of a handsome young Gallant who brings together a colorful set of friends, including a nice old rich lady, a poor battered wife, a feisty little DeVito-sidekick device, and special guest start Mickey Rourke as the walking LA sleeze-symbol he must really be, for all I know. Oh, what does Gallant do, you ask, in between yawns? He wins a lawsuit for some poor devil who suffers from a severe case of coughing and acting sick and/or retarded on screen. You know it was either gonna be that or a black man mistakenly thought of as an inhuman beast. Either way, this is a John Grisham, so you better believe a couple of squishy-faced southern power attorneys had their asses handed to them! Whew!

Sarcasm is all I can offer this lazy Sunday afternoon waste of time. I'm just astounded that it's the work of a veteran director. Worse still, The New York Times' Elvis Mitchell called it Coppola's "best and sharpest film in years." Does watching the film in 2010 reveal how fast the tropes of courtroom drama become stilted, predictable conventions? Even viewed as purely a genre picture, I find the script utterly ridiculous. Mickey Rourke's smarm-made-flesh doesn't get enough screen time or any remotely cool lines. The old lady has no color to her at all -- in one scene she has only one line asking Matt Damon if he wants his sandwich (no, he's in a hurry). No, I think convention's progress is only part of the story here; perhaps another factor is the rotten star system in Hollywood that still wants to believe in Coppola and cute blond guys with winning smiles.

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What are Poets For? : On John Haines

Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays by John Meade Haines

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This collection of essays is a long-term consideration of the writing life and all its aesthetic and critical potential. John Haines will stand out from now on to me as a voice from the wilderness, speaking of the need to consider all that has been lost as human beings cover the globe in an endless cycle of production and consumption, construction and destruction. The wisdom of the aging Haines of the 1980s and 1990s lies in his realization that this perspective on humanity at first seems to pit it against nature, but actually it is only ever a part of nature. Something in this idea may have helped Haines attain the acceptance, or at least resignation, for the onslaught of human progress, though at the same time he would never stop speaking for the wilderness, for an ancient world where poetry had mystic power, for “a certain attention” that is born only in such states of quietude, detachment, and thoughtfulness as were once common elements of our life, but increasingly less so.

I love that the collection includes both longer, deeply-considered arguments (“What are Poets For?” and “On a Certain Attention to the World” stand out) as well as occasional pieces as seemingly insignificant as a letter to the New York Times Book Review addressing a young girl who wanted to become a “success” in poetry. What the juxtaposition reveals is that a single voice may present a largely consistent message in a great variety of venues. This message concerns the role reading and writing ought to play in modern life: a greater one. And not just any reading and writing, but reading and writing that aids us in cultivating the attention we need, that gives us the power to consider, and perhaps revise, our social and cultural values. For a true poet, the problems of a rapidly globalizing, industrializing and domesticating society can be summed up as a kind of loss of attention, a lowering of awareness. The wilderness, our attachments to the earth, our attachments to each other, our sense of spirit, and our very minds, especially the feelings and judgments of the mind, are in great peril. They always have been, but it always gets worse.

Poetry has always been a way to speak that gets the attention, that increases awareness. Poetry in the age of the declining wilderness must take up this decline and this wilderness as its theme. Poetry in an age when our attachments to the earth have grown brittle and feeble must present the problem along with a vision of something healthier. Poetry must restore our spirit and our very minds by the sheer application of the faculty to read, to write, and to imagine. If more people imagined a better world, or even a worse one, then the world would change.

Poetry is the main subject of most of these thirty-plus writings, though poems themselves do not always appear. Thus I have come to believe that an implicit point in this collection is that poetic language can be found in prose. To the degree that a poem is any text that is read in such a way as to re-direct the attention back at the form of the work, to suggest a sense that lies in the music and craft behind the words and statements, and not only in the sense of the words and statements themselves, well then to that degree prose may be poetic.

The autobiographical essay is thus in a sense an prose-lyric-poem. “Within the Words: An Apprenticeship,” (1991) for example as both a prosaic and a poetic sense. The prosaic sense is to account for the young poet’s progress towards answering life’s call to read and write. There are moving elements distinct to this prosaic sense, which we may also call “the story.” The turning point, for example, when Haines decided to “abandon” drawing and painting to devote more of his day to poetry, is the central decision, and thus the climax, of the story. But the story contains more that is of a more poetic than prosaic sense, as we can see in the portrait of the poet Charles Olson:

He read two of the poems in a ponderous and pontifical manner, staring out over the small audience from behind his eyeglasses, looking rather like a stranded walrus. It was my first poetry reading, and I found the poems for the most part impenetrable.

This portrait certainly adds to the driving force of the story, but it also makes the reader change the direction of his attention. Our gaze is focused on an image, which is colored lovingly with metaphor. The moment soon passes, for the story must go on, but it was indeed a moment, a kind of pause in the story, though “pause” is misleading in that it detracts from the real motion of the lines (“staring” strikes me as the eye of the poetic moment here).

The truth is, there is no firm boundary between prose and poetry, story and image, motion and stillness. When a statement needs expressing with emphasis, then it needs modification so that the reader’s attention will zoom in on the statement and then be redirected to consider the statement again. This modification is what may be labeled “form,” and the statement itself is the “content.” So clearly form and content are inseparable. Haines’ consistent point throughout his prose is that form and content must be continually developed anew. Sometimes form and content develop simultaneously, as in many lyric poems where the speaker and his attachment to language emerge together. But content can also come first, leaving the artist with the project of fashioning the correct form to put out the content in the most effective way. Haines thinks this is how poets probably worked most often in the past, but can no longer do so.

Here are some statements that seem to me both prosaic and poetic, statements with basic sense and tailored to a form that is self-referential, even musical:

“Literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”

--Thomas Hardy, quoted in “What are Poets For?”

“Political indifference is ethical indifference.”

--Hermann Broch, quoted at least twice

“How beastly the bourgeois is!”

--D.H. Lawrence

“When did we stop taking our words seriously, and cease to believe that what we had to say really mattered?” -- “What are Poets For?”

“In order to write such poems you must have a certain conviction, and be willing to submit that conviction to scrutiny, to questioning, and, if justified, to doubt.”

“Turn the page, and it continues with a new title. And into this hectic, driven journey with no destination are blown up from moment to moment scraps of newsprint, discarded announcements and ripped posters, to accompany, to illustrate and emphasize, the pop culture of our time, with its neon-lit totems that crowd the highways and litter the malls: BUNS, TACOS, VIDEO RENTALS, USED CARS, CINEMA, TRAVEL, BANKING, NINTENDO, etc...And all of it with no visible center, no perceptible order, and nearly without end.” -- “In and Out of the Loop: Review of John Ashberry’s Hotel Lautréamont”

“It is a strategy that in this case, and despite an initial and lingering sense of a false note, can be said to work.” -- “Less than Holy: Review of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography”

“I recommend The Estate of Poetry for its wisdom, its clarity and generosity, for its quiet and embracing passion that offers a balanced and effective reply to all current and perennial wars among poets. What it has to tell us can never grow old, for it is the very ground of poetry.” --from Haines’ introduction to the volume.

“Among the things I was shown was a photograph of the first small house he had built on that shore, with nothing but space and ocean around it. Standing at the top of the tower with Donnan Jeffers, I compared that photograph with the densely settled scene before me, and I felt acutely how discouraging and embittering that intrusion on his solitude might have been to him, taking from him finally all but a piece of land not much larger than a normal city lot. It was a lesson in how relentless and cynical in its regard for the intrinsic nature of a place our society has always been. In the face of that encroachment, fulfilling his own prophecies, Jeffers’s patience (or resignation) seems exemplary.” -- “On Robinson Jeffers”

“A poem is anything said in such a way, set down on the page in such a way, as to invite a certain kind of attention.” -- William Stafford, quoted in “Formal Objections: Review of Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism”

“I would feel much better about the intentions of these formalist poets if they simply wrote their poems and let us dispense with the programming and the self-advertising. Whatever there may be of a reforming character in their poems would sooner or later speak for itself and far more persuasively than all the dubious rehearsals of the lapses and failures of modernism.” -- “Formal Objections”

“Wyatt Prunty’s academically corrective discussion of minor poems by Creeley and Ammons trails off into absurdity, and his essay otherwise is mainly contemptible.” -- “Formal Objections”

...Poetic form in its proper sense is a question of what appears within the poem itself. It seems worth while to isolate this because it is always form in its inimical senses that destroys poetry. By inimical senses one means the trivialities. By appearance within the poem one means the things created and existing there. The trivialities matter little today, and most people concede that poetic form is not a matter of literary modes.” -- Wallace Stevens, quoted in “Formal Objections,” and in other places as well

“I am not in favor of an art that is too subjective.” -- Milosz, quoted in “Something for Our Poetry.”

“...the potential subject, Nature, is so vast an inclusive that it is not easy to imagine it being exhausted by any amount of study and writing. Nonetheless, the capacity of this society to seize upon, promote, and trivialize any and every enthusiasm should not be discounted. Few people really know Nature in any depth or detail, whereas many would write about it, if for no other reason than that they have read some of the books and because it is now the thing to do.” -- “Reflections on the Nature of Writing.”

“...I learn more of contemporary life from reading a story by Ray Carver or Richard Ford, more about society and its political arrangements from an interview with Noam Chomsky, than I do from reading any poet I can name at the moment. The reasons for this are probably complex, but may owe something to the perceived position of the poet within society, and which might be stated: ‘Society behaves as if I did not exist. Therefore I will write as if society did not exist.’”

“The essence of modernism, in poetry, as in literature and art generally, has been identified with a clearing away of historical debris and cultural baggage, that the spirit of the age -- mutilated, skeptical of inherited values, but determined in any event to seize from the wreckage something it can hold up as truth -- might find adequate expression and at least a partial fulfillment. And this expression must have at its command a means an potential effect not dispersed or deflected by traditional consolations, whether in terms of an agreeable music or of familiar structures, at least where these would seem to support the illusion of a harmony that no longer exists.” Letter to Hudson Review

“The modernist revolution may be over and, typical of revolutions, has left in its wake mainly confusion and the petty tyranny of factions. But what remains most important is the astonishing variety and richness of American poetry in the first half of the century; an achievement that includes Eliot and Williams, includes Pound, Jeffers, Stevens, Crane, Moore, Cummings, and a number of other people, none of whom resemble each other in either manner or substance.” -- Letter to New Criterion, November 1988

“Learn first to be an intelligent and passionate reader. If you must be ‘successful,’ then find an occupation that will allow you that; and write, if you must, when you can and what you can.” Letter to a girl, July 1988

“To look at the world: and when we have learned once more to look, we see the possibility of renewal, of an implied order, in every aspect of the life around us. In the stillness of leaves floating in a forest pool; in the flight pattern of a flock of birds obedient to an invisible current of air; in the twilight folding of a particular hillside...Sometimes I think that is all we are really here for: to look at the world, and to see as much as we can.”

“When we observe cattle or sheep grazing in a pasture, we are looking at a fallen species. Compared to the alertness of the wild creature, a steer or a sheep is changed, into something less, even while we sense in the dulled gaze of the domestic beast a wildness that is merely slumbering and is never completely converted. And it seems all too likely that as we have tamed and reduced these creatures according to their utility, we have at the same time deformed something in ourselves.”

“What we see depends on an inner, psychic disposition, so that there can be no final and objective view of anything. The world changes before our eyes, and mind, to call it something, is an endless unfolding of many complex relations.”

“It is not so much Christ himself, as personality, as historical reality, that is figured in so many representations in the art of the time, and who looks out from countless nativities, but a new soul in a new man. This new soul may never, except in a few individuals, have come to completeness, but it was there, as promise and potential, and of which we have the lasting evidence in the art that survives.”

And there are so many more, which explains to some degree why I took such time and care in reading this book. I should name the beginnings of disagreements, too: when Haines decries the lack of love poetry, why doesn’t American popular song count for him? Why does he seem to read no women or black poets at all, ever? But these are but quibbles against the very real moral and ethical grounding to reading and writing that Haines offers; I can do much worse than to offer in return my thanks.

The final entry in this book, “Early Sorrow,” offers the deeply personal and exposing story of an early childhood romantic attachment. This is a great surprise after reading so many passages against writing that is entirely subjective or personal or autobiographic. The solution seems to be that Haines presents his memories as something other than entirely subjective. Certainly one passage makes this explicit:

What is missing now is that increasingly rare mysteriousness of departure, and the sense of a whole new adventure beginning, and which I suspect lies near the heart of the human experience of life on earth.

Haines is describing a ferry ride here, but beauty of the idea is that it applies to his first feelings of romantic, sexual attachment to girls just as well. Also, Haines’ keen sense of “what is missing now” refers more often to his own perception than to any universal statement of fact; this idea occurs to Haines himself in the end:

Would we have found anything to say to each other? When I thought of that -- of facing each other and finding the necessary words -- the suppressed memory of my own folly and embarrassment returend with a rush, and with it a stumbling inability to speak. There remained that slim blue question mark in the cold stands, and scattered like dust or pollen over the wrinkled vastness of a continent the improbably elements of a story that no one would ever write. Though, as I say this, it occurs to me that it has already been written many times.

View all my reviews >>


I love that the collection includes both longer, deeply-considered arguments (“What are Poets For?” and “On a Certain Attention to the World” stand out) as well as occasional pieces as seemingly insignificant as a letter to the New York Times Book Review addressing a young girl who wanted to become a “success” in poetry. What the juxtaposition reveals is that a single voice may present a largely consistent message in a great variety of venues. This message concerns the role reading and writing ought to play in modern life: a greater one. And not just any reading and writing, but reading and writing that aids us in cultivating the attention we need, that gives us the power to consider, and perhaps revise, our social and cultural values. For a true poet, the problems of a rapidly globalizing, industrializing and domesticating society can be summed up as a kind of loss of attention, a lowering of awareness. The wilderness, our attachments to the earth, our attachments to each other, our sense of spirit, and our very minds, especially the feelings and judgments of the mind, are in great peril. They always have been, but it always gets worse.

Poetry has always been a way to speak that gets the attention, that increases awareness. Poetry in the age of the declining wilderness must take up this decline and this wilderness as its theme. Poetry in an age when our attachments to the earth have grown brittle and feeble must present the problem along with a vision of something healthier. Poetry must restore our spirit and our very minds by the sheer application of the faculty to read, to write, and to imagine. If more people imagined a better world, or even a worse one, then the world would change.

Poetry is the main subject of most of these thirty-plus writings, though poems themselves do not always appear. Thus I have come to believe that an implicit point in this collection is that poetic language can be found in prose. To the degree that a poem is any text that is read in such a way as to re-direct the attention back at the form of the work, to suggest a sense that lies in the music and craft behind the words and statements, and not only in the sense of the words and statements themselves, well then to that degree prose may be poetic.

The autobiographical essay is thus in a sense an prose-lyric-poem. “Within the Words: An Apprenticeship,” (1991) for example as both a prosaic and a poetic sense. The prosaic sense is to account for the young poet’s progress towards answering life’s call to read and write. There are moving elements distinct to this prosaic sense, which we may also call “the story.” The turning point, for example, when Haines decided to “abandon” drawing and painting to devote more of his day to poetry, is the central decision, and thus the climax, of the story. But the story contains more that is of a more poetic than prosaic sense, as we can see in the portrait of the poet Charles Olson:

He read two of the poems in a ponderous and pontifical manner, staring out over the small audience from behind his eyeglasses, looking rather like a stranded walrus. It was my first poetry reading, and I found the poems for the most part impenetrable.

This portrait certainly adds to the driving force of the story, but it also makes the reader change the direction of his attention. Our gaze is focused on an image, which is colored lovingly with metaphor. The moment soon passes, for the story must go on, but it was indeed a moment, a kind of pause in the story, though “pause” is misleading in that it detracts from the real motion of the lines (“staring” strikes me as the eye of the poetic moment here).

The truth is, there is no firm boundary between prose and poetry, story and image, motion and stillness. When a statement needs expressing with emphasis, then it needs modification so that the reader’s attention will zoom in on the statement and then be redirected to consider the statement again. This modification is what may be labeled “form,” and the statement itself is the “content.” So clearly form and content are inseparable. Haines’ consistent point throughout his prose is that form and content must be continually developed anew. Sometimes form and content develop simultaneously, as in many lyric poems where the speaker and his attachment to language emerge together. But content can also come first, leaving the artist with the project of fashioning the correct form to put out the content in the most effective way. Haines thinks this is how poets probably worked most often in the past, but can no longer do so.

Here are some statements that seem to me both prosaic and poetic, statements with basic sense and tailored to a form that is self-referential, even musical:

“Literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”

--Thomas Hardy, quoted in “What are Poets For?”

“Political indifference is ethical indifference.”

--Hermann Broch, quoted at least twice

“How beastly the bourgeois is!”

--D.H. Lawrence

“When did we stop taking our words seriously, and cease to believe that what we had to say really mattered?” -- “What are Poets For?”

“In order to write such poems you must have a certain conviction, and be willing to submit that conviction to scrutiny, to questioning, and, if justified, to doubt.”

“Turn the page, and it continues with a new title. And into this hectic, driven journey with no destination are blown up from moment to moment scraps of newsprint, discarded announcements and ripped posters, to accompany, to illustrate and emphasize, the pop culture of our time, with its neon-lit totems that crowd the highways and litter the malls: BUNS, TACOS, VIDEO RENTALS, USED CARS, CINEMA, TRAVEL, BANKING, NINTENDO, etc...And all of it with no visible center, no perceptible order, and nearly without end.” -- “In and Out of the Loop: Review of John Ashberry’s Hotel Lautréamont”

“It is a strategy that in this case, and despite an initial and lingering sense of a false note, can be said to work.” -- “Less than Holy: Review of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography”

“I recommend The Estate of Poetry for its wisdom, its clarity and generosity, for its quiet and embracing passion that offers a balanced and effective reply to all current and perennial wars among poets. What it has to tell us can never grow old, for it is the very ground of poetry.” --from Haines’ introduction to the volume.

“Among the things I was shown was a photograph of the first small house he had built on that shore, with nothing but space and ocean around it. Standing at the top of the tower with Donnan Jeffers, I compared that photograph with the densely settled scene before me, and I felt acutely how discouraging and embittering that intrusion on his solitude might have been to him, taking from him finally all but a piece of land not much larger than a normal city lot. It was a lesson in how relentless and cynical in its regard for the intrinsic nature of a place our society has always been. In the face of that encroachment, fulfilling his own prophecies, Jeffers’s patience (or resignation) seems exemplary.” -- “On Robinson Jeffers”

“A poem is anything said in such a way, set down on the page in such a way, as to invite a certain kind of attention.” -- William Stafford, quoted in “Formal Objections: Review of Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism”

“I would feel much better about the intentions of these formalist poets if they simply wrote their poems and let us dispense with the programming and the self-advertising. Whatever there may be of a reforming character in their poems would sooner or later speak for itself and far more persuasively than all the dubious rehearsals of the lapses and failures of modernism.” -- “Formal Objections”

“Wyatt Prunty’s academically corrective discussion of minor poems by Creeley and Ammons trails off into absurdity, and his essay otherwise is mainly contemptible.” -- “Formal Objections”

...Poetic form in its proper sense is a question of what appears within the poem itself. It seems worth while to isolate this because it is always form in its inimical senses that destroys poetry. By inimical senses one means the trivialities. By appearance within the poem one means the things created and existing there. The trivialities matter little today, and most people concede that poetic form is not a matter of literary modes.” -- Wallace Stevens, quoted in “Formal Objections,” and in other places as well

“I am not in favor of an art that is too subjective.” -- Milosz, quoted in “Something for Our Poetry.”

“...the potential subject, Nature, is so vast an inclusive that it is not easy to imagine it being exhausted by any amount of study and writing. Nonetheless, the capacity of this society to seize upon, promote, and trivialize any and every enthusiasm should not be discounted. Few people really know Nature in any depth or detail, whereas many would write about it, if for no other reason than that they have read some of the books and because it is now the thing to do.” -- “Reflections on the Nature of Writing.”

“...I learn more of contemporary life from reading a story by Ray Carver or Richard Ford, more about society and its political arrangements from an interview with Noam Chomsky, than I do from reading any poet I can name at the moment. The reasons for this are probably complex, but may owe something to the perceived position of the poet within society, and which might be stated: ‘Society behaves as if I did not exist. Therefore I will write as if society did not exist.’”

“The essence of modernism, in poetry, as in literature and art generally, has been identified with a clearing away of historical debris and cultural baggage, that the spirit of the age -- mutilated, skeptical of inherited values, but determined in any event to seize from the wreckage something it can hold up as truth -- might find adequate expression and at least a partial fulfillment. And this expression must have at its command a means an potential effect not dispersed or deflected by traditional consolations, whether in terms of an agreeable music or of familiar structures, at least where these would seem to support the illusion of a harmony that no longer exists.” Letter to Hudson Review

“The modernist revolution may be over and, typical of revolutions, has left in its wake mainly confusion and the petty tyranny of factions. But what remains most important is the astonishing variety and richness of American poetry in the first half of the century; an achievement that includes Eliot and Williams, includes Pound, Jeffers, Stevens, Crane, Moore, Cummings, and a number of other people, none of whom resemble each other in either manner or substance.” -- Letter to New Criterion, November 1988

“Learn first to be an intelligent and passionate reader. If you must be ‘successful,’ then find an occupation that will allow you that; and write, if you must, when you can and what you can.” Letter to a girl, July 1988

“To look at the world: and when we have learned once more to look, we see the possibility of renewal, of an implied order, in every aspect of the life around us. In the stillness of leaves floating in a forest pool; in the flight pattern of a flock of birds obedient to an invisible current of air; in the twilight folding of a particular hillside...Sometimes I think that is all we are really here for: to look at the world, and to see as much as we can.”

“When we observe cattle or sheep grazing in a pasture, we are looking at a fallen species. Compared to the alertness of the wild creature, a steer or a sheep is changed, into something less, even while we sense in the dulled gaze of the domestic beast a wildness that is merely slumbering and is never completely converted. And it seems all too likely that as we have tamed and reduced these creatures according to their utility, we have at the same time deformed something in ourselves.”

“What we see depends on an inner, psychic disposition, so that there can be no final and objective view of anything. The world changes before our eyes, and mind, to call it something, is an endless unfolding of many complex relations.”

“It is not so much Christ himself, as personality, as historical reality, that is figured in so many representations in the art of the time, and who looks out from countless nativities, but a new soul in a new man. This new soul may never, except in a few individuals, have come to completeness, but it was there, as promise and potential, and of which we have the lasting evidence in the art that survives.”

And there are so many more, which explains to some degree why I took such time and care in reading this book. I should name the beginnings of disagreements, too: when Haines decries the lack of love poetry, why doesn’t American popular song count for him? Why does he seem to read no women or black poets at all, ever? But these are but quibbles against the very real moral and ethical grounding to reading and writing that Haines offers; I can do much worse than to offer in return my thanks.

The final entry in this book, “Early Sorrow,” offers the deeply personal and exposing story of an early childhood romantic attachment. This is a great surprise after reading so many passages against writing that is entirely subjective or personal or autobiographic. The solution seems to be that Haines presents his memories as something other than entirely subjective. Certainly one passage makes this explicit:

What is missing now is that increasingly rare mysteriousness of departure, and the sense of a whole new adventure beginning, and which I suspect lies near the heart of the human experience of life on earth.

Haines is describing a ferry ride here, but beauty of the idea is that it applies to his first feelings of romantic, sexual attachment to girls just as well. Also, Haines’ keen sense of “what is missing now” refers more often to his own perception than to any universal statement of fact; this idea occurs to Haines himself in the end:

Would we have found anything to say to each other? When I thought of that -- of facing each other and finding the necessary words -- the suppressed memory of my own folly and embarrassment returend with a rush, and with it a stumbling inability to speak. There remained that slim blue question mark in the cold stands, and scattered like dust or pollen over the wrinkled vastness of a continent the improbably elements of a story that no one would ever write. Though, as I say this, it occurs to me that it has already been written many times.

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Read more...

Make me my loom then

Wiki commons illustration of a distaff

Procrastinating my work, I came across an old poem that I remember reading as a child:

Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleat;
     Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.
Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate,
     And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
     My Conversation make to be thy Reele,
     And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:
     And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:
Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
     Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.
     Then dy the same in Heavenly Colours Choice,
     All pinkt with Varnish't Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
     Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory;
My Words and Actions, that their shine may fill
     My wayes with glory and thee glorify.
     Then mine apparell shall display before yee
     That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

("Huswifery," by Edward Taylor)

I see my grandmother in here. Of course she didn't use a "distaff," but she was a master of all things domestic, and she was also my only close family member who really attempted to tell me how to pray to God.

As a child, the idea that my life be like a machine dedicated to the glory of God had great appeal, at least in theory. At first glance this poem really brings to life the simple elegance of that thought: God is great, and I am his loom, his distaff.

But "Understanding," "Conscience," "Memory" and all those other bits of the human are in fact greatly reduced in this metaphor, even if the poet took steps in the last stanza to name them. Naming isn't enough; one wants to know how Affections can be at once "mine" and also at once "thy Swift flyers neate." The last-ditch effort to call the affections "mine" can't turn back the general sense from the beginning that all of the Self belongs to God, is in fact his tool.

So the poem now seems to me a preservation of a profound mistake, or at least a profound tension inherent in one's relationship to God. I love God, I serve God, may all of myself be only a tool to God; this is what I think and feel. But what right do I have, in this former scheme, to think and feel? I suppose I am treading the same old road that Satan faced in ages past, leading in the end to the decision that I cannot serve God, that not all of myself be a tool to God. Perhaps rather God is a tool for me! As far as that goes, I do at this moment have great sympathy for the Devil.

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Demetri Martin: An Annoying Person

Demetri Martin - Person • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control
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Demetri Martin, if you dare

I thought it would be nice to hear from a younger-generation comic. I heard he was very bright, very talented. He plays music! He does mindmaps! He dreams up whole costumed scenarios! He's appeared on the Daily Show, so maybe he knows satire too! Maybe, ooh...just maybe, he could be the nerdy, graph-sketching George Carlin for our times!

Boy, was I in for a disappointment. Martin applies all of his very real talents to jokes like this:

I like "Rock, Paper, Scissors Two-Thirds." You know. "Rock breaks scissors." "These scissors are bent. They're destroyed. I can't cut stuff. So I lose." "Scissors cuts paper." "These are strips. This is not even paper. It's gonna take me forever to put this back together." "Paper covers rock." "Rock is fine. No structural damage to rock. Rock can break through paper at any point. Just say the word. Paper sucks." There should be "Rock, Dynamite with a Cutable Wick, Scissors."

And this: (showing us a graph drawn on a pad of paper)

This is very autobiographical. This is the cuteness of a girl versus how interested I am in hearing about how intuitive her cat is. You see, the cuter the girl is, the more I'm willing to hear about the cat. "Oh really?" "Yeah, he's very intuitive." But you'll notice, at a certain point, I don't care how cute you are. I don't wanna hear about your fucking cat anymore. I hate your cat. When you leave the room, I try to get it.

Sigh. I know I am kicking a horse that won't die. And yet, I must, for my own edification, make a statement about this terrible, stultifying form of comedy.
I know I'm channeling my current reading at the moment, but I do feel that comedy gets better when it takes up the responsibility to show us our assumptions and prejudices in a vivid, challenging way. Chris Rock at his best. John Stewart, especially jokes about Fox News. George Fucking Carlin. Carlin really cared about the problem of us getting along with each other; this alone explains why he had a very cynical attitude.

Comedy must have a strong critical spirit to satisfy us as art; otherwise, it may be a simple exploration of the world we live in. Analyses of silly games that we hardly notice. Observations of completely typical sexual desire; confirmation of heteronormative gender frameworks. What about this one:

Those that say their glasses are half-full are considered optimists. Yeah, but shouldn't we be more specific about the contents of the glass? If it's a glass of shit, I'm going half-empty. I don't like shit as an optimist. "Yeah, we gotta half-empty shit glass right here."

The main purpose here is to direct our attention to an idiomatic expression, and then show that a slight change in the expression can deplete its meaning utterly. See, folks? With Martin's incredible talents, even set idiomatic expressions can be totally depleted of meaning.

Is there a word for the opposite of satire? A comedy that comforts, that says the world is doing just fine, so we might take a little time to indulge in childish questioning carefully subtracted of any social or political content? It seems strange that there not be a word for this anti-satire, this "antire" since Martin (and Carrot Top, and Gallagher, and I'm sure it goes back even further...) proves easily enough that it exists, and many find it worthwhile for its cleverness. For the safe, comfortable giggles it delivers. We see this kind of comedy in the Sunday comics, and in Reader's Digest as well. It has a democratic quality, to be sure, but more importantly a domesticating quality, a force on us to observe our lives in the smallest details, find a way to make a small transformation to our perspective on those details, and then to be satisfied that we really are thinking and living.

Well, we're not. It's piffle, childishness. It's the self-satisfied contentment of a shrinking class of ugly Americans. It answers not to what the audience needs, but what they think they want, poor devils. At this moment in my life, at least, Demetri Martin's whole persona, and the whole form of "antire" both just make me really sad.
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To Tell, To Perplex: Shutter Island

Trailer to Shutter Island

Shutter Island is the story of a man nursing the wounds of war and his lost wife, working to change his deep guilt into a pursuit of justice against the insidious creep of legal and medical institutions into our lives and over the values he fought so hard in the War to preserve.

Until the climax, that is. Then we discover that Shutter Island is the story of a man nursing the wounds of war and wife who murdered their three children by creating an alternative reality that this institution is working hard to correct, using an experimental role-playing treatment that we happened to jump in on in its opening scenes.

Ugh. This film was maddening, which I suppose I must earn it some credit. It tries to do something special by applying and then breaking movie conventions. The trouble is that the use of a massive reveal (“I’m a cop. I’m a cop. Oh wait, I’m a patient here?”) makes it very difficult for us to continue sympathizing with the protagonist, if we ever did. Now, when I was watching, I tried to keep to a vision which saw the protagonist as correct – there is a conspiracy. So when I reached the reveal, I felt foolish, and cheated. The scene with the Rachel the Psychologist-turned-Patient hiding in the cave, for example, was only a delusion of the protagonist, and shame on me for not seeing that.

But more sophisticated viewers might well have doubted that whole scene the first time they saw it, in which case they would have been frustrated by the attempt to make them have some emotions that they could tell Scorsese was preparing to undermine later in the movie.

Either way, all of the pre-reveal scenes are made ambiguous or even paradoxical by the reveal. For example, is Dr. Cawley a good man or a bad man? Certainly he’s not quite as anti-lobotomy in the end as he implied in his expository entrance scene.

The story architects would probably say, “Exactly, dude. The scenes and the message of the movie turn out to be ambiguous because life is ambiguous. Mental institutions are creepy, but ultimately necessary. The kind of guilt and confusion that poor Teddy suffers from is real.”

Grrr… But, but…shouldn’t the movie give Teddy the power to overcome his guilt and confusion, to find meaning in his life again?

“It does! Teddy gets a glimpse of the real truth, but he just can’t deal with it, so he chooses to embrace his fantasy again, but this time with the knowledge that he will undergo a lobotomy. Hence his final line, ‘Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or die as a good man?’ He is taking charge of his life again by dying a good man.”

Hm. Okay. But I still think that the film suffered from slow pacing and overly forceful tone. To me this is more than a formal weakness, but an indication that the storytellers are more interested in the scenes as a clever intellectual game than they are about any serious comment on how the human mind actually makes and breaks its connections to the world.

“Oh really,” I can hear Scorsese say. “Well, pray tell, my young friend, what is your story, and what forms does it apply to make a ‘serious’ comment. Hm?”

Uhhhh….dammit, I don’t have one. I’ll write one then!

“Well, okay then. I look forward to it.”

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Getting ecocritical

A quick mindmap to try to understand the interaction model.

Foote, Bonnie. “The Narrative Interactions of Silent Spring: Bridging Literary Criticism and Ecocriticism.” New Literary History 38.4 (2007) 739-753.

This article updates my sense of literary value: literature is language that exhibits dense internal interactions, as well as a great variety of interactions with its readers. “The sheer quantity and density of interactions are, in fact, exactly what make literature literature.” I like this formulation for now because it jives well with an ecological metaphor for human life: life is about expanding sociability through biodiversity, while good literature is about expanding communication through diversity of language, of artistry, of experience and imagination. Although I haven’t thought it through just yet, it seems to me that thinking of literature in this way gives us room to accept strong messages of advocacy as well as simply complex or realistic or otherwise sophisticated works of art.


Take Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as an example, says Foote. This is a good book to choose because it illustrates how a book and its critics can affect the social and natural worlds: Silent Spring started a very large national conversation about the effects of trace poisons that involved a large and expensive effort by the chemical industry to destroy Carson’s legitimacy. Eventually Carson’s work triumphed, Carson became a heroine, and certain steps were taken to open a national conversation on the environment. More importantly, Carson left a major mark on the narrative tradition in coming up with a form that suited the new problems of her day. As John Haines would say, Carson followed the example of the great modernists of the early twentieth century in tailoring artistic form to the needs of the moment with a consciousness that art, history, the environment, and our humanity are all interrelated pieces of some whole.

Foote’s nice reading of the epigraphs to this book and to its opening lead her to an application of network theory as the metaphor for this model: “In the parlance of network theory, Carson wove together an extraordinary array of influences to create a compelling communicative ‘hub,’ an O'Hare or LAX for ideas and emotions to move through, launch from, and reference. Her creation has never since lacked for emotional and intellectual traffic.” Foote calls for New Historicism, New Criticism, New Media studies, Reader-response criticism and other aspects of modern theory to work together to explain exactly how Carson was able to create persuasive, contentious rhetoric that opened so many eyes to the perils of the environment, and that continues to do so. Implicitly, Foote also can be said to be asking us to study why Silent Spring also stirred strong opposition, how the story of Silent Spring has been transformed throughout its afterlife. We are also meant to ask what exactly made Silent Spring a success when similar texts like the 1960s environmental essays of John Haines, say, are ignored.

This last bit would trouble Haines, I think. I think many artists find something repugnant in trying to crack open the secrets to fame and influence. As artists, they are afraid what might happen to art if the passion to create is understood as a function of the desire for influence. And rightly so, I think; art that plans to have a big effect can’t, as a rule. Art must begin with a certain attention to the world, to the reality of life in the world, and not be distracted by any vision of the unpredictable effects that the art may have in the future. John Haines is uncomfortable with the term “vision,” and now I can see why. But for the critic and teacher, vision is absolutely necessary, because we must choose what is good, often quite before any other readers have done so. Can a good teacher become a good artist? Certainly a good artist might also possess what it takes to teach -- I’ve seen this myself. But I’m not nearly so sure whether Foote’s interaction model, and my feelings of thrall over it, might be the death knell for any attempt I could ever make at creating art. I thus reach a dilemma that must be as old as the idea of teaching literature: should I continue to develop critical ability and give up on art, give up on criticism and pursue art, or continue to try for a composite form of expression that answers specifically to what I need to say?

One clue to the solution of my own dilemma is Foote’s assertion that literary criticism take an accounting of itself in light of the grandest vision it may have of art and society in interaction:

The next step would be to map literary criticism not just onto, but into, this interactive model. Literary critics constitute, after all, one of the most influential audiences for literature, the key group shaping the presentation of literature as an institutionalized narrative tradition, primarily through scholarly publication and university teaching. What territory, what potential, what influence does literary criticism have already, and what will it choose to claim in coming years? As Robert Scholes, Gerald Graff, and John Guillory have most memorably shown, these boundaries are hardly stable, and literary criticism could sharply interrogate and substantially expand them without exceeding its legitimate grasp.

As an institution of literature experts, we should be ashamed that we didn’t treat Silent Spring as a work of literature before. We didn’t teach any literature that worked seriously to change the world, because we have slowly but steadily relinquished any potential for literary criticism to change the world.

Here we come to another aporia in my current thinking. Should a smart person such as myself work to join an institution such as a university? If Silent Spring were not already considered literature, I could imagine one of my projects to have been to make students and teachers take Silent Spring seriously. But perhaps Silent Spring’s true power as a persuasive text is damaged by bringing it into the institution. Foote knows this is possible; certainly John Haines would see it as more than likely. We return to then to the idea that we must take a full accounting of why, how and what it is we are doing, and try to develop a vision (yes, Haines, a vision!) of where we need to go next. Foote has an elegant idea for an opening question:

Working further with the narrative interaction model, critics looking for appropriate lines of inquiry might ask: where in current and past societies are the interactions of narrative most dense, potentially or actually? Which narrative works provide linguistic hubs, hearthfires, for those interactions, and how do they do it? ... Where, though, are the constellations that literary criticism has missed?

The interactive model allows us to spot the dense areas, and we must attend to those. But we also need to fill in the gaps, or at least understand why the gaps are there: Haines tells us that it is a tragedy more people haven’t heard of Edwin Muir or Hermann Broch. Is it? Why?
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