I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order--pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature."--

The above quotation is, supposedly, from Kate Zambreno.  I am a fan of Kate Z, and very much think of us as electronic friends.  I don't like the above statement(s) though; well, ok, revision, I don't like conflating selfhood to an I or the directly experiential: I believe selfness can manifest itself in a fascination with cubes and rhomboids, or the color blue.  Rallying against the "objective" strikes me as problematic: if the world is reduced to the subjective, then how is it supposed to be legible; legtibility, I'd argue, depends on some relatively stable foundations (the key here is relatively stable, not to push the notion that foundations don't crack, morph, etc); if everyone is their own universe, then how can communication occur, how can connection occur?  Furthermore, it seems to me that the use of language is in some ways very at odds with selfhood: no one person owns language, has their own (unless they start from scratch and make a new one) so to write is already to enter a space that is massively beyond the self.  Well, this assumes one buys the position that language precedes self, that language is bigger than self, that one does not own language--even that which is supposedly their own. 

I will be the first to state that what I just wrote is by no means complete: I havn't really addressed the term "repression," and I am not at-all anti I.  Probably my key qualm is the use of the declarative mode; I am so sick of declaration serving as substitute for argument; please, please, give me generous, expansive qualifications not, oh no, I don't mean this nor that, a tactic which emphasizes language as personal possession of an I.  I love writing which highlights all the problems with its statements, which constantly decapitates its authority, constantly posits that one may be wrong, or incomplete, that tries to let in as many positions as possible, so that one gets, for a brief time, a kind of whole (a whole whose halflife, admitedly, will likely be brief).

 

At my mom-two's sister's house, I had a Manhattan for the first time.  I didn't love it, but I didn't dislike it either; and I get why people could like them.

In my prior blogpost it may look like I'm stating many blogs fit cozily with M Nussbaum's line, but I really mean those and this blog don't often do clarity in the august manner of her sentence.  Blogs are awesome odd spaces.

So I went to Kate Z's blog FFIMS and she's going on vacation from her blog, which is perfectly valid, and probably healthy, but I'm not thrilled.  I'm not in the habit of emailing her--and I love how she states in her bon-voyage from blogging blogpost (bon voyage is kinda a funny term to use as her departure note longs for burrowing, not the open seas or vast continents or somesuch) that she'll, possibly, be up for email exchanges--so no-more literary community I've gotten really used to, and am glad for; and FFIMS was, hopefully shall be again, its site!  Or location!  Or venue or square where, electronically, people meet!  And ugh I'm hopeless at the straightshot trajectory: this point (point is the wrong word but oh well) should have come earlier--true-true, I guess a single person can't be a community (ok, this is no longer feeling prior); and by comunity at FFIMS I mean the blogcomment streams; but Kate Z talks to and within those streams so she, surely this makes some plausible sense, becomes both singular and plural or, in other words, a community.  I have had brief email xchanges with Kate Z, but they havn't seemed to catch and hence, logos-wise oddly, stream; but woww have we had some lively exchanges at FFIMS. 

I love--and of course by love I mean do not love--how, with the prior paragraph, I had no intention of writing a labrynthine (and that adjective is generous) sentence but was initially aiming for conventionally chatty or rather, foremost, for conventional transparent prose.  I want to write prose like a novel by James Patterson: it's practically an algorhythm if that's the word for when a set of movements, a movement complex, goes reeling, gets replicated; it reads like no individual author at-all.  

Suspicious Of My/Mine

Although I don't think Nussbaum is anything like correct in her criticism of Butller in her essay "The Professor Of parody"--she seems to majorly underestimate how intimately linked JB's work is to "lived," off the page experience--I do like this point quite a lot, and it seems to me to be a good take on a dynamic one can get at some literary blogs (probably, eek, this one among others!):

"When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority."

Citation is interesting: it so often seems to be a matter of calling attention to persons not only ideas, to ideas as property of persons rather than ideas as dynamics which cannot be owned.  This may or may not relate to my wondering whether one can ever be true enough responding that someone has misread their point, has not gotten a meaning; how can a person own a meaning?  Not all readings are as strong, but to state someone has not gotten what they're doing freaks me because it privileges the author, and suggests that they are in control of their meaning, that they have done a great job at articulation and that any flaw in thought lies with the reader not the writer.  Another formulation could go like this: is this phenomena (overblown word choice, true-true) more accurately one of occluding egotism rather than generous engangement?  Note: ego is not an energy I wish to perma-diss; my point, instead, is that not all forms of egotism are exciting.  And can an idea be mine?  Can I possess one, or only--gorgeously--live in constellation with one or ones.

Although getting poems rejected is not as much fun as having them accepted, it was lovely to recieve a really kind rejection from G C Waldrep of West Branch.

Prose No Muse

For me, the crucial issue is not what can be done to change the status quo but, rather, to look intensely, meditate majorly, on what is so appealing about it. I don’t think the status quo is sufficiently understood by some whom critique it or, perhaps more accurately, imagine they do. I’d prefer one explores, sees emergent, how interred one is, and to think with ridiculous distance about whether one would like to embark on exploration yields new pleasures, new comforts so primary they’re almost natural, and in not quite being so are the more powerful. This stance, too true, may not afford hope adequate to sustaining any endeavor the status quo doesn’t sanction, and surely replacing its pleasures would raise maximal ire. It is so difficult to depart from status and be correct enough; nor is it sufficient to declare incorrect far more valid than previously established: flipping does not, necessarily, alter the stuff of very sentience; instead, it highlights the same old material a little differently. A little difference is not a bad aim. Most authority is insufficient. I’d be surprised if, were this state altered, satisfaction would soar. Kindness and dumbness have a relation to each other but I’m not, currently, sure what it is; no, I insufficiently am!

Prose, to me, connotes authority to such a degree that it becomes denotative. As someone who is massively suspicious of my own authority, prose thus becomes a somewhat absurd endeavor. I cannot end an argument, or even necessarily adequately support one. I am likely to start with one stance, and end with belief in its opposition. In my hands, argument is wrecked, made amorphous, no, jelly, jiggly stagnancy whose slops and winks, wee shocks and shiftings, make hallucinating going anywhere possible.

Yes, my interest in prose is at odds with my philosophy of power so, astride a deliciously cynical logic as topos, that renders mine dumb. This, almost comically, makes revelatory sense: I am keenly invested in faith that theoretically unsavory demographics are often no more possessed ponk than any other community once one adjusts for magnified visibility due to comparatively small size or, conversely, darn near invisibility due to hugeness; and of course, and of course that phrase is wildly frustrating, everyplace in between is crucial. Poles ably morph into polarities; I’d rather live in cosmopolitan country. Is it just me or does diaspora make more sense as a concept than community. I’m craving closeness.

Poetry, for me, is a matter of riding a language stream, an energy, a tidal rivulet; prose requires me to think more than perceive. I am not markedly good at thinking. Mostly I’m so focused on why my ideas are inadequate that this unconfident stance thickly scrims getting to any point I imagine could hit a chord with many others. I’m not cut out for self-defense and it’s precisely there that I imagine making significant points. Why I’d jeopardize what I imagine could be a strength is not even a question I entertain. Moreover, strength is nothing if not indefinite when it comes to its article. And underneath all this hoobla there’s undoubtedly self, matrix, defense, blank point whose chiasmus does not demonstrate equivalence nor support the thesis that equivocation is an outmoded model for what’s assumed to be happening. How I can even dare the word happening is ripe for wonder. I insistently don’t supply concrete examples. I do not bolster my prosy chunks with quotations. This manner could be determined to be egregiously egotistical. My fantasy is that this method (grandiose term!) investigates so much knowledge or, rather, the frequent condition of knowledge: devoid proof, citation.

This post was submitted as a blog-comment-box response to Kate Zambreno writing on her blog that genius is a fucked up, status-quo interred concept; it may end up at FFIMS, but very recently responses havn't ended up posted--this cld be because Kate is too busy, or because the computer cogs have decided to revolt and stuff has gone to an abyss etc; anyways, here is my ditty:

I'd argue that genius comes to inflect future status quos, but that almost by definition it cannot be the status quo at the time of its inception: Stein, Cezanne, Dickinson. Interestingly, it seems like Woolf was rightfully recognized in a quite short span of time. I do not mind the term genius because, for me, it basically just denotes work which displays insane ambition and manages, in the execution, to make that ambition something others can richly engage with. I do though think that calling a con temporary American grant a Genius grant is dumb: what that really says is those in the Macarthur committee matrix are super astute observers of culture--the most astute, and this is wonky; single individuals likely aren't the sole or even most crucial way genius gets recognized, but rather through a much broader swath of humanity. I do think Genius may not at-all be a generative paradigm for contemporary practitioners in a given field: 99.999 percent of those who practice are not/will not be geniuses; several decades can go by before the spore takes fire; and this doesn't mean wonderful stuff ain't happening in the interim!


adam s

ps: I've been loving H Bloom's latest, and it recently dawned on me that you and him have a ton in common as far as approach goes, that you all may be kindred! One moment in particular cld almost be you! I don't think either one of you, though, would be pleased by this connection, yes, so true!

much love!