fool me once

First of all, let me say that I did enjoy reading Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I was bored enough with the first two chapters that I almost put it down, but the book got better after that. Or at least better enough that I kept reading. The narrator and main character, who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome and tries to solve and avenge the murder of his boss, was interesting enough, and the way Lethem drew a link between associations in language and discovering the hidden motivations in people’s lives was done well. The book even had some truly funny stupid jokes.

None of this was material of startling brilliance though. The elements of detection in the novel were handled half-heartedly, being perhaps not quite the point in a book that is only making use of the notion of detective novels in order supposedly to tell us something more significant, or at least to entertain us differently. The characters involved with organized crime weren’t particularly original either, although making some of them simultaneously involved with a Zen Buddhist organization was a clever if ultimately overly obvious twist: men of a world of violent action posing as men of inner peace. So I thank the friend who recommended Lethem to me (half-heartedly enough himself, as it turned out) for leading me to look at the work of this novelist whose book reviews are regularly featured in the NY Times Book Review.

What does bug me though is that Motherless Brooklyn was winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and was named by Esquire as novel of the year. Why would that be exactly? For its mugging references to Raymond Chandler (whose books I kept wishing I was reading instead every time Lethem’s main character mentioned them) while it simultaneously distanced itself from being considered mere genre fiction by the human truths it supposedly offered? And what were those? Would they include the insight offered by the character Julia that the narrator’s boss “said the reasons you were useful to him was because you were crazy everyone thought you were stupid’? In other words, that because of prejudice towards the disabled, their abilities are often overlooked? Is this what prompted Esquire’s statement that the book is “utterly original and deeply moving”? There were some original moments, but I was moved just about zero percent of the time.

I’ll stop carping though. I’m hoping I’ve learned by now that books win literary prizes because they appeal to the values of the judges of literary prizes. Sometimes those values are even good values, and sometimes books that win awards really are extraordinary books. Not this one, but sometimes. And of course all criticisms of this kind always contain that nasty subtext: why aren’t my values the ones being consulted in the awarding of literary prizes? Still, I’m hard pressed to imagine that anyone really does think Motherless Brooklyn is a great book, although it seems that some do. It was a decent summer read, no more.

But here’s my problem. The book was just decent enough that I can imagine someone saying of Lethem, “Well, that one was okay, but you really should have read his book so-and-so.” And I can imagine myself being persuaded enough to buy one more book by Lethem. And if that one was similarly okay? Would I then be led to a third by somebody else, and so on?

In other words, how many times am I willing to let the apparatus of praise keep me reading the work of a writer who, on a first take, I found only marginally satisfying?

I’m wondering if anybody else has similarly been led down the garden path of praise to read repeated books by a writer they don’t like that much. For the moment I’m holding my ground and reading no more Lethem. But I’ve been led down this path a few too many times to think I’ll never be led down it again.

Advice for Writers

Isak Dinesen: “A few lines every day, without hope or despair.”

Notes on Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art

These notes are part of an ongoing, under construction project. Responses are welcome.

“Is it true that scientific analysis is doomed to destroy that which makes for the specificity of the literary work and of reading, beginning with aesthetic pleasure? And that the sociologist is wedded to relativism, to the leveling of values, the lowering of greatness... And all because the sociologist is thought to stand on the side of the greatest number, the average, the mean, and thus of the mediocre...” (Preface, xvi)

Intriguing to read Bordieu’s critique of these typical assumptions that the defender of art is the (usually elitist) defender of the exceptional case of the literary object and author, whereas the scientist sociologist is seen as a crude, knee-jerk democratic relativist. His comments are clearly marked by their French context. What to make of them here in the U.S., where in the cultural imagination literature is considered irrelevant unless it reaches a broad audience and therefore “stands on the side of the greatest number”? Similarly, the scientist is often imaged as the pale weirdo of genius (usually male but not inevitably) pursuing a valuable esoterica that might someday “save the world” while being incomprehensible to the masses. The artist irrelevant, the scientist an artist.

confessions of a young flarf: Rodney Koeneke

Hello Rodney:

I had fun reading both of your books, Rouge State and Musee Mechanique. Reading them together made me consider the issue of pre-flarf influences on what became flarf. Unlike some other people (and I say this neither for better or worse in comparison to them) your pre-flarf book Rouge State, with its whimsical, consciously exaggerated and often satirical lyricism, suggests that you were already moving in flarf directions before you became involved with the methodology. What that fact implies for me is that flarf didn’t come out of nowhere but to some extent involved a coalescing of ideas that were already floating around before the methodology became more definite.

Mark

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your note about my books, and for noting the connections between them. It's funny, when I joined the flarf listserv in Jan '03, I didn't have much of a sense of what flarf was supposed to be. It was still in the "giggle word" category, a kind of crepuscular rumor ... I don't remember anyone, for instance, calling Deer Head Nation a "Flarf" book at the time. I mean some may have, but it didn't seem to occlude or determine the reception of the book the way I think the term would now. What attracted me to the list then was the sense that things were still being explored, and all was permitted (esp. attractive during the lingering moral hangover of 9/11). I didn't feel like I was taking on any extraordinary aesthetico-political baggage by pushing the language and sensibility of Rouge State through the cyclotron of Google and this group of twelve-plus friends.



The attempts to define, critique, and/or defend flarf are so widespread and public now that I think it's hard to recapture that original sense of play, except as a kind of nostalgic re-enactment of the phase when it was play. (It doesn't help either that there are, like,10 flarf books in print now, though they don't seem much consulted as a rule in the, ahem, growing literature on the subject.) I have the sense that most readers who approach the work now labor under a notion of what flarf's already supposed to be; meanwhile, the participants themselves (though there's not much explicit discussion of this, on or off the list) seem to be reaching toward something like 'post-flarf'; a writing that keeps the core sensibility and collaborative bonhomie that brought us all together in the first place, but plays down the Google and the flashier cut 'n' paste disjunctions of an earlier era.

I'm not sure what this will look like yet. Gary's Elsewhere series seems like one instance; Nada's Folly reads as rather 'post-flarf' to me in its seriously playful suggestion that everything's Google. I'd thought to make Musee Mechanique an instance of "lyrical" flarf, to see how, or even if, the aesthetic could accommodate gestures toward the sincere, "finished," and feelingful. I've kind of amped up that exploration in the work I've done since, in way that I don't think would be recognized as what's currently thought of as flarfy. Personally, when Bush is out of office I think flarf will have lost its raison d'etre, and what's left of the practice formerly known as flarf will move in a different, if cognate, vein.

Send a nice short email, get punished with a long response! Please take it as a mark of how much I appreciated your note.

Sincerely,
Rodney

this is where I'll be this weekend, but where will you be?

Please join us for

THE SMELL LAST SUNDAY READING SERIES

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Featuring:

Susanne Dyckman
K. Lorraine Graham
Dana Ward

THE SMELL
247 S. Main Street, between 2nd and 3rd St, downtown Los Angeles
(enter in the alley in the back)

Doors open at 6:30 pm
$5

Susanne Dyckman received her MFA in Writing in 2003 from the University of San Francisco, where she is now one of the program's graduate thesis advisors. After being named co-winner of the Five Fingers Review 2003 Poetry Award, she was invited to join the journal's editorial staff. She has been a panel moderator at the 2005, 2006 and 2007 AWP conferences, and in 2006 presented a Creative Writing Pedagogy paper at the RMMLA annual conference in Tucson. For the past three years she has hosted the Evelyn Avenue Reading Series, which features experimental poetry, prose, and, on occasion, fine art.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of three chapbooks, Terminal Humming (Slack Buddha), See it Everywhere (Big Game Books), and Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Outside Voices' Take Home Project. Dear [Blank] I Believe in Other Worlds was originally a pamphlet from Phylum Press. Narrowhouse Recordings recently released Moving Walkways, a limited-edition chapdisk of her work. Lorraine has just completed the extended manuscript of
Terminal Humming.

Dana Ward is the author of New Couriers, The Wrong Tree, and other chapbooks. He has new work available or forthcoming in The Recluse, string of small machines, the DC Poetry Anthology and seconds. He lives in Cincinnati, where he edits and publishes Cy Press.

The SMELL LAST SUNDAY READING SERIES is co-curated by Teresa Carmody (Les
Figues), Ara Shirinyan (Make Now Press), and Stan Apps (Insert Press).


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The energy, talent, and range of activities that I've found among the poets of Los Angeles has been one of the most attractive features of living in southern California. At least on the east coast, Los Angeles didn't have a reputation for having an active alternative poetry community, so to find out about everything that was going on there, and to be part of it at times, has been great. I've been getting up there about 5 or 6 times a year and wish I could go more. But, you know, I'm working for a living, and etc.

Part of this liveliness has to be attributed to the Cal Arts program, and the Otis College program also, which help expose young writers to non-mainstream poetries. These programs help Los Angeles continue to have a variety of young, well-informed writers who can contribute to the city's literary community.

In Washington, DC, where I used to live, we had a great poetry scene too. But I always felt we struggled with the fact that there were very few MFA programs in the area which took much interest in non-mainstream poetries. George Mason University played this important role for a time, while Carolyn Forche taught there, and helped introduce to the DC poetry community any number of fantastic young writers who have had significant success since: Heather Fuller, Jean Donnelly, Leslie Bumstead, Graham Foust, Carol Mirakove, Susan Landers, Mel Nichols, Ethan Fugate, Chris Putnam, Allison Cobb, Jen Coleman, and Kaia Sand, to name only a few. That's quite a track record, but with Carolyn now gone from George Mason, it's not clear that the connection between Mason and DC has remained. These kinds of connections really are fragile, and one person can make all the difference.

Even when new people were flowing in, though, I always remember being concerned that the audience (which is also to say, the participants) for what we were doing could dry up at any moment. I could imagine us very easily having the same 10-15 people at readings for decades, all of us staring at each other and saying, "Oh, it's you again." But I've been hearing that the DC non-mainstream poetry community continues to do well, and that's really great news.

Still, if I have a point here, it would be not a very original point, but still an important one: having a place to go where people share your literary interests is a fantastic thing, and not everybody has it. It requires that people make an effort, and even a few people making an effort can help fun and interesting things happen. If you know somebody that's doing this kind of work in your area, how about thanking them? And then helping them out?

a poet to look out for

An up-and-coming poet whose work has remained on my mind since I read it for the first time this year is Elisa Gabbert, whose 2007 chapbook Thanks for Sending the Engine was published by Kitchen Press. Her work resonates for me with a number of other outstanding women poets who have been around a little longer: K. Lorraine Graham (towards whose work I’m understandably partial), Stephanie Young, and precursors by only a few more years like Nada Gordon and Catherine Wagner. All of their writing shares a few things in common; restless energy, a willingness to turn the expected upside down, and an ability to bluntly startle with things usually supposed to remain unsaid. There’s a relationship between sexual desire, anger, and an exploration of the dynamics of power in specific human interactions that appears in the writing of these women and that strikes me as different from what came before it. But I’m not sure I can define that difference just yet. Maybe it’s a kind of aggressive femininity, an active contradiction that challenges the common definition of femininity in cultural studies contexts as a passivity born of powerlessness.

Thanks For Sending The Engine has a number of really memorable poems, funny, insightful and daring. Gabbert is eager to put the more intense aspects of human behavior on display, even and especially those things that we all know we’re supposed to keep to ourselves: contradictions, blindspots, neediness, annoyance, the desire to act badly just so we don’t have to listen to somebody drone on about everything that’s safe to say. An exhilarating chaos runs through her poems, one that’s aware of itself as performance at the same that the performance collapses distinctions between what’s playful and what’s serious. The metaphor/image game poems like "What The World Was Like" or "Blogpoem W/Epigraph" show a flexible, wide-ranging, but also relaxed ability with language. But as fun as they are at moments, they’re a little less down and dirty than my favorite poems here: "Blogpoem w/Ellipses,", "Lousy Day Blogpoem," "Blogpoem @Sea," to name just some.

Here’s the opening of "Blogpoem W/DTHWSH”:

Take me to the library: I’m in the mood
to get murdered. Mm, murder in the stacks:
shove the LING shelving over and let those
uncracked grammars in teal and burnt umber
make papery work of the burying. Chris,
this is me courting depression, or it courting
me. I’m not seduced by death, just death’s
techniques—the way it lets me let it buy me
a drink. Then drives me home with the lights
off, in stealth mode. I want that void IN me.

If the casual line breaks seem obviously New York School, the frenetic and fierce perversity feels unique. The lines attack and reveal at the same time. The narrator may care what Chris thinks but that’s not going to stop her from requiring Chris, and herself, to understand exactly what’s on her mind. But the desire for self-destruction expressed here isn’t the same as giving way to that desire. Instead, the bluntness of the sexual metaphor at the end of the passage suggests not so much a giving in to the death drive as a willingness to welcome it and acknowledge its presence, then to go on from there.

In her poems, Gabbert relentlessly turns inside out the daily foibles of personal relationships and people's fucked up feelings, including the narrator's own. And she does it frequently with a frame of reference that understands the larger contexts of social institutions and art. I wonder whether as Gabbert’s writing continues she’ll be able to stretch to more areas outside the interpersonal, or find new ways of exploring it. This isn’t a criticism so much as a way of asking whether her poems can continue to be in the eye of the maelstrom, or whether as time goes on that focus will become a restraint that she’ll feel the need to step outside of. But maybe that’s just a question from right out of the boring drone that Gabbert, and so many of the rest of us if we can be honest, have gotten tired of hearing. If as Frank O’Hara said, “You just go on your nerve,” Gabbert’s got as much nerve as anybody. For a first chapbook, Thanks For Sending the Engine is all that it needs to be to make all sorts of things happen. Although I’ve never met her or heard her read, if she’s giving a reading anywhere near you, go see it.

And to see where she’s started to go next, check out even the details have details, a workshop blog of one-a-day poems for poetry month written by Elisa and her collaborator Kathleen Rooney.

the worst major urban newspaper in the U.S.? Sunday July 22

For examples regarding my last post, here are some of this Sunday's main articles:

Frustrated Supporters Rush to Help Accused U.S. Troops: "Conservative Christians and military veterans are part of an emerging group of Americans who say they are upset by the recent prosecutions of soldiers and Marines on war crime chargers, and they are coming to their defense with words, Web sites and money."

Refineries' woes push price of gas ever upward: 'These mechanical breakdowns, which one analyst likened to 'an invisible hurricane,' have created a bottleneck in domestic energy supplies, helping to push up gasoline prices 50 cents this year to well above $3 a gallon."

Los Republicanos: The author of a new book argues that Hispanics and Republicans need each other, and are a good fit.