I like these lines from Carina Finn:

where I stole grapes from wooden crates
and cracked the skins between my milk teeth.

I think there used to be 8 people who are listed as BAG readers; now apparently there are seven; if I offended someone, please let me know.

On a very different note: I would lllllllllllllovvvvvvvvvvvvvvve to go to Kimbe Bay, PNG; and I'd love to visit Port Moresby for like two days.

Kimbe Bay has orcas, and I think it'd be a million times niftier to see one there as opposed to the Pacific Northwest.  I'm obsessed with mammals living in places they're not widely connected--the aforementioned KB orcas, Jaguars in Arizona, Pumas in the eastern United States.

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.