new blog conversation hosted by Les Figues Press

Vanessa Place and Teresa Carmody, the editors of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles, have re-envisioned the goal of their Les Figues blog. The result is, to quote them, that "Considering our mission of creating aesthetic conversations, we've asked six people to be guest writers in this space for the next six months. Guest writers will be sharing their thoughts about books they're reading, or events they're planning/attending, pieces they're writing, or collaborations they're working on. Our goal is to cultivate a lively discussion about issues, practices and happenings in the world of innovative writing and contemporary aesthetics."

So check it out and become part of the conversation they're creating:

http://lesfigues.blogspot.com/

With the first guest editors including Sawako Nakayasu, Jennifer Calkins and Harold Abramowitz, as well as Teresa and Vanessa themselves, the conversation is bound to be lively, informative, and unexpected.

quick takes

A few books I’ve been thinking about recently in those few minutes I have for thinking.

Kim Hyesoon, Mommy Must Be A Mountain of Feathers
translated by Don Mee Choi
Action Books

This book really deserves a full-length review, and if I’m ever again living a life where that’s possible I may just try it, although Kasey Mohammad has already done a fine one. Combining Surrealist-like distorted images, details of daily life, and concerns with the social and physical condition of being a woman in Korea, the poems in Mommy Must Be A Mountain of Feathers are often powerfully disturbing. What most amazes me about them is the way that unlike most work that picks up traces of Surrealism, they don’t take readers out of the conditions of ordinary experience but instead deeply embroil us in them. Rats, horses, spiders, fish, kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals, prisons: these images help shape a picture of life in a place and time and gender that’s both terrifying and convincing while never being realistic in any conventional sense. “do I go and ask the woman who endures a horse inside her unable to say a single word because the pesticide has destroyed her vocal cords?”


Mel Nichols, Bicycle Day
Slack Buddha Press

A gentle, pained mournfulness has always been key to the fragile lyricism of Mel Nichols’ poems. Bicycle Day shows her work taking new chances with line and page spacing and carries readers along through a series of linguistic surprises and worthwhile insights into people’s relationships both to each other and to the non-human life around them. These are songs of loss, no doubt about it, but there’s also an undercurrent of strength and survival that is all the more remarkable for constantly seeming on the verge of falling apart. There’s a sly, almost imperceptible humor at times too. In the best sense, these are pretty poems, but they’re also not afraid to engage the ugly parts of experience. “what large thieving dogs we don’t know hungering/might break their teeth on our red door/wanting to take your lovely feather [ steal it [ ]/ away [ ] the screaming breaks of the train/balanced over the tales of a dark hollow”


Jen Benka, a box of longing with 50 drawers
Soft Skull Press

I met Jen Benka for the first time on my last trip to NYC and was pleased to receive a copy of this 2005 book. Each poem is titled with a single word from the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution kept in literal order. These are overtly political poems, taking up issues of U.S. history, bourgeois conformity, and the abuses of human life and the natural environment created by the powerful and the wealthy. There’s plenty of anger here, but the precise minimalism of the presentation keeps the poems from becoming partisan rants and always gives readers no more than we need to know. The poems also manage somehow to take a trip across the terrain of the contemporary U.S., dropping us in various locales to show us the social and political connections between past and present. “an unsolved mathematical equation:/land plus people divided by people minus land/times ocean times forest times river.”


Buck Downs, twist riffs and stiff hits

Buck Downs’ poems always have grit, soul, and more than a little dirt-under-the-fingernails sleaze. This little chapbook features another set of poems that aren’t afraid to tell you exactly where they’ve been. If you have the impression, like I do, that what’s wrong with a fair amount of poetry these days is that it’s too scrubbed and proper even when supposedly speaking on taboo subjects, then the work of Buck Downs is a like a splash of cold muddy creek water on the bottled Perrier at that faculty party no one wants to attend. “just for spite: the second time/they hang you it’s only for kicks”


Sandra Simonds, The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, A Teeny Tiny Book of War, Bon Voyage

These three small examples of the art of the book certainly make me look forward to Sandra Simonds' first full-length collection, which with luck will be out shortly. Investigations of history and political consciousness are handled with a genuinely original humor and energetic doses of personality. A Teeny Tiny Book of War comes with its own snap-open purse with poems each titled with the name of an eye shadow or lipstick, while The Humble Travelogues are a half-real/half-farcical photo-poem journalism that explores social and environmental conditions on the emotional and geographical fringes of the world. From Bon Voyage: “so goodbye/bulky red/train-pulse sack of meat,/metal and nail/because my flesh is an artificial/field of feel where each cell/is a different/explanation, each nook/an anxiety to quell”

C.E,. Putnam and Daniel Comisky, Crawlspace
P.I.S.O.R Publications

The text version of Chris Putnam’s and Daniel Comisky’s performance poem Crawlspace is a pleasant diversion, but it’s in the accompanying CD that the conception really comes to life. Obsessions with late night TV, B-movies and other ephemera of American trash culture become essential to a goofy trek across a landscape that’s half circus freak funtime and half metaphor for a life full of shape-shifting alienation. We knew we had to change but none of us were quite prepared for what we found ourselves turning into. “It is difficult to use the claw/to introduce solution sequences/such as this one/because inside the head/are incredibly powerful training tools.” Putnam and Comisky have also done live performances of Crawlspace and if one comes near you, don’t miss it. Putnam has one of the most unique stage presences in contemporary poetry, some unfathomable combination of Sun Ra, “Beaver” Cleaver and a Martian. Or, in this video, a deranged worker just escaped from Colonial Williamsburg.

A Bureaucratic Poetics

Bureaucracy isn’t the opposite of learning any more than a twinkie is the opposite of food. Who cares whether that’s how it seems? Bureaucracy is clearly a kind of learning. What’s at stake is the value of that learning.

The value of learning about bureaucracy is the value of learning disposable information that can be put to processes and ends that affect human beings, sometimes for the good, sometimes severely, but that are themselves as processes and ends also highly disposable. The relevance of bureaucratic detail is startlingly temporary.

Of course, one can study bureaucracy just as easily as one can study art, music, or literature. Studying bureaucracy becomes a way of studying history. One can learn as much about human life, especially daily life, by knowing the history of post offices, state colleges, and banks as by knowing about Cindy Sherman, John Coltrane or Virginia Woolf.

There’s no reason at all to see that as some kind of shocking loss.

Still, there’s a distinction to be made between studying the history of bureaucracy and working in a bureaucracy, in which the goal is not to understand the historical effects of the bureaucracy you are part of but to understand your job just well enough to get those tasks done today that can be done today, then forget about them forever, while calculating what kind of longer range tasks are beneficial and trying to move forward towards them. Knowing about the history of that bureaucracy may help in your job or make it harder.

Of course, the more middle or lower of a middle or lower manager you are, the less you have to do with anything regarding those longer range tasks and the more you struggle, often immensely, with trying to get done today those tasks that can be done today. As all middle managers know, it’s only on rare victorious days that one actually does, today, what can be done today.

Consider for a moment the aesthetics of a budget chart. The simultaneously ordered and fractured rows with their staggered figures that must, when one reaches the bottom line, achieve the beautiful symmetry of unity.

Theories of narrative and theories of budgets tended to synchronize well until about the end of the 1950s, when theorists of narrative began to wonder whether older theories of narrative were really just theories of budgets in disguise. And it quickly became clear that most were.

Just when you thought you were reading literature, it turns out you were studying bureaucracy. In fact bureaucracy is one of literature’s greatest themes. Isn’t Kafka’s almost only point how the human soul has wilted under the endless meaningful meaninglessness of the labyrinth of human bureaucracy? Kafka is one of the world’s great thinkers about bureaucracy and so is Marx, who to his credit perhaps was more optimistic about bureaucracy, if maybe naive about how quickly bureaucracies might improve. Even someone like Jane Austen who isn’t writing directly about bureaucracy might as well be. She tells great stories about how to make the system work for you and retain your integrity at the same time. Very few people know how to do that.

Literature and philosophy, it seems, aren’t that good as escapism from bureaucracy.

Besides, consider how much you’re learning about human life from working in that state office or that bank and maybe you’ll stop wishing you had more time to read and write. Think about forms, committees, personality foibles, individual conflicts, misunderstandings of language, the need to be passive aggressive and the rhetoric of leadership. Think about the differences between censorship, what isn’t possible to say, and what goes unsaid. Think about pressure and meddling. Think about lies, unrealistic ambitions, and resentment. Think about the clash of opposing bureaucratic forces pretending to work together. Now, tell me that you’re not learning almost as much about human life as you can stand.

You’re not going to get more time to read and write anyway, so you might as well consider that your bureaucratic position requires a different kind of reading. Certainly it involves a large number of words on pages. It’s not any more boring and soul killing than you tell yourself it is. All you need to do is stop caring so much about other interests.

Granted, you may have thought you had interests more moving than bureaucracy. You may have thought that bureaucratic structures were actively disdainful of, or at least unconcerned with, a whole series of human possibilities that they push to the side and harm. Bureaucracy doesn’t help you think about why living matters. It doesn’t help when it comes to love, or intellectual or emotional intensity, and it certainly can’t help you think about dying, your dying or anybody’s, although it can help with the funding for those who have been left behind. It uses up land, it uses up resources, it uses up time, it’s very good at giving things to people who already have too many of those things. It’s not so good at revolutionary change or even significant small changes, although it talks about change constantly. It doesn’t help, and indeed often prevents, your ability to create anything, a song or a painting or a poem, that doesn’t have a use in bureaucracy, although maybe, in rare instances, if you’re lucky, your song or your painting or your poem may be counted by the bureaucracy as part of what the bureaucracy likes and promotes about itself.

But don’t forget about the positive things it gives you and others. Think about that salary and those benefits. Think about the lasting friendships you make at the office. Remember how many people would love to be in a situation like yours. Bureaucracy creates structure and opportunity for people who might not have those things otherwise, and sometimes it enables circumstances in which people genuinely help each other live better lives.

And remember, great potential lies in the fact that if the bureaucracy you work for is damaging the environment, or mistreating its workers, or maintaining an old system of hierarchies and prejudices, all things that bureaucracies usually do, that you can by working together with others develop your own alternative bureaucracies, or work with others in the bureaucracy for change from the inside. Those alternative bureaucracies, whether inside or outside the bureaucracy which they challenge, may damage the environment, mistreat workers, or maintain old systems significantly less. They often do important good and, in rare instances, even suggest ways of dealing with groups of others that aren’t bureaucracies at all.

As Althusser would have pointed out though, a question remains regarding how much such moments of genuine good are overwhelmed by bureaucracy’s central goal of supporting state power structures.

When it comes to learning, bureaucracy can give you a good education by teaching you about itself. Some bureaucracies can even give you an education about things that are not bureaucracy, although how well they do that remains debatable. Another debate, of course, is whether bureaucracy is being wasteful in educating you about things that are not bureaucracy. Some visions of bureaucracy imagine a future in which there’s nothing but bureaucracy and nothing to teach about but bureaucracy, and they imagine that future as good. They imagine that future as more full than ever of helpful vaccines.

At this time, there is no escaping the existence of large bureaucracies, the damages they do and the benefits they offer. You can work with the problem or try your best to wander off by yourself, maybe even with a few companions. You might even try to create your own bureaucracy or see how much you can do without one. You might even be able to keep an occasional bureaucracy from knowing your name. I wish you luck on the way.

Go ahead, try to write a poem about that.

The Aesthetics of Cultures and Cultures of Aesthetics

Lately I’ve been noticing, particularly on the Harriet blog but elsewhere also, a number of writers suggesting that aesthetics and cultural studies are opposites. Even more than opposites: enemies.

Given that it’s blogworld we’re considering here, the terms themselves are rarely explored in much depth. Still the implication seems clear that the academic field of cultural studies has no interest in aesthetics, and aesthetics are what makes a poem valuable.

I understand where these concerns come from. Anyone who has spent any time in the world of literature departments has come across people for whom aesthetics don’t matter or matter only minimally. If you care about poems, that lack of interest can be frustrating, although as much as I hate to admit it, there are other things worthwhile to do in English programs besides talk about poetry.

That said, not only do I think the opposition is false, I also think it indicates some things about the culture of contemporary poetry that need further consideration.

First the obvious: all poems have aesthetic elements and all poems say something about the world. How these two elements operate in any poem is certainly not a given. How we discuss form and content or pick apart the binary of form and content, how we discuss the content of the history of form or the form of the history of content, how we differentiate between terms like aesthetics and style and form, or content and meaning and culture, all remain ongoing and at least sometimes intriguing questions. Further, whether we’re considering a sound poem that provides contrasts to existing languages or reading the most introverted poem of personal feeling, the question of culture is always open for reinterpretation but only because it’s always present. A poem always carries traces of its contexts.

So what then would be the point of pitting aesthetics against culture, since they are elements present in all poems? Further, since all cultures have aesthetics, and all aesthetics are developed by the cultures invested in them, we can never talk thoroughly about either culture or aesthetics without talking also about the other. So why separate out the two as implacable opponents?

The answer has to do, I think, with contemporary cultures and how those cultures view aesthetics. Some cultures values aesthetics more openly than others, obviously, although even those others still have aesthetics.

It’s not possible to create a poem that says nothing about the world, but at times I feel that’s almost what I’m hearing people say they want: a poem about the pleasure of language, about an interplay of images and words that can’t be analyzed for political content, for traces of class, race, or gender, or for the social position of the poet who writes it. A poem, that is—and a poet?—freed from the burden of social context and not required to have any significant relation to what is otherwise going on in the world. A poem of play, entertainment, excitement, verbal prowess, a poem which when read has no messy relationship to anything other than itself and creates a moment of pleasure fully reveling in its own energy which then disappears, only to re-emerge when considered by the next person who experiences it.

Are there really people who would like a poem of this kind if it was actually possible to write one? Are people trying to write this poem right now: a poem of linguistic pleasure without social content? A poem that purely is while meaning nothing? What would a poem that wanted to play with language while saying nothing about the world look like, especially given that it would inevitably end up saying something about the world? And why would somebody want that? To be freed from the burden of meaning? To avoid responsibility for things they have said or be safe from the judgements of others? To be protected from an analysis that might say “I’ve read your poem and know who you are and where you come from”? More generously, I think we can see here a desire to counteract the unfair judgements of others: to prevent poems (and people) from being treated as nothing but chunks of information, to stop the complex dimensions of poetic language from being reduced to canned positions in a political debate.

As might not be surprising then, blogworld oppositions between aesthetics and culture are less failed theoretical approaches (since on some level they’re not even trying to be theoretical) than indications of a power struggle between poets and scholars, or even more broadly between poets and anyone who views language as purely instrumental. What makes a poem valuable turns out to be a question of who values it and for what and to what extent, and how the values of those people disagree or even openly conflict with other people and their values. It turns out to be a matter of who says what from what social position, and what kinds of power and resources are associated with that position. Many poets feel that aesthetics is right now simply too neglected even in the few fields that actually discuss poetry. And I agree.

Still, fetishizing aesthetics is not the answer. Nor is claiming that aesthetics is untouched by culture and power. Aesthetics, culture, and their relation to power, in the academic world and beyond, remain issues that poems are always taking up and cannot escape, no matter how badly the writers of them might want either more power or to be outside the game of power entirely. And to try to claim importance by claiming that ones’ poems exist outside conditions of power is hardly a new move. In fact it’s the poetry world equivalent of arguing for the divine right of kings.

Of Pregnant Men and the Definition of Slavery

In the late Octavia Butler’s short story “Blookchild,” a group of humans have left Earth for an unnamed distant planet and entered into a unique social arrangement with one of the species living on that planet. Highly intelligent and evolved insect-like creatures, Tlics are about eight feet or more tall, with multiple legs and body segments and a stinger that puts those who get stung into a pleasantly numb sleep-like state in which they feel no pain. The humans (known as Terrans on this unnamed planet) have agreed to accept protection by the Tlics from elements of the planet never entirely described, although those elements include what seems to be an unpredictable climate, numerous dangerous beasts, and certain Tlics whose intentions towards Terrans are more hostile. The Tlics also offer a health-restoring drink that comes from their own unfertilized eggs. With a fountain-of-youth like effect and mild hallucinatory properties, the egg drink keeps humans looking young and feeling strong and full of a sedating if temporary inner peace.

In return for the never quite clarified protection and as much egg drink as they want, individual Terran families have entered into close, caring, but also sometimes tense relationships with individual Tlics, who become part of the family and help raise Terran children. The essential feature of this relationship is that Tlics now use Terrans to give birth to Tlic young in a startling way. Finding that they get better results than with other animals on their home planet, the Tlics choose individual Terran men to lay their eggs in. They don’t choose women because women have to give birth to babies of their own species. The men are stung to sleep, then their bodies are cut open and eggs (usually six to eight of them) are laid in the open wounds, after which the wounds are sealed up again. At the time that the eggs hatch in their bodies, the men must be stung again, cut open, and the now living Tlic babies have to be removed. The men are quickly restored to good health by the healing properties of the egg drink, which even eliminate the scars from the operation so that the men look like they were never cut. The operation is delicate and, it turns out, dangerous. If the Tlic babies are not removed right when they hatch, they will eat the body that they’ve hatched inside, causing a very painful death for their host. Sometimes a Tlic makes errors in monitoring a man, or grows sick and can’t complete the birth process, and when that happens, sometimes the man involved will die.

While the Terrans have ostensibly agreed to this arrangement, they seem to have done so only under the threat of the loss of the unspecified, vaguely gangster-like protection. Further, they are not allowed to witness the Tlic birth process. Some of them have witessed it though, whether accidentally or out of determined curiosity, and when they do they usually become permanently disgusted and angrily refuse to be part of the Terran-Tlic relationship. They often become proponents of violent revolution against the Tlics, one of the reasons that it is illegal for Terrans to carry guns, although many Terran families keep hidden guns.

Many critics have seen in the social world described in this story an allegory of slavery. Human bodies are used for purposes that humans themselves do not control and in ways that sometimes lead to a violent death, although if the operation is handled properly, they feel no pain. Further, while in theory human men volunteer for this operation, the problem of the ambiguous protection means that the arrangement is actually based in coercion. If the Terrans as a whole refused the relationship, protection would be removed, with the implication perhaps that the birthing process would become one that the Tlics would impose upon unwilling humans, although that possibility is never openly stated. The humans are clearly subject to a degree of control by the Tlics that is not marked by equal authority for both races. Further, this relationship is only maintained through a condition of human ignorance. Drug addiction also plays a role, as most humans have become to various degrees hooked on the miraculous egg drink, even though in this case the drug leads to good health and a youthful appearance. Add to all these details the fact that Butler is African-American, and the idea that this story explores the condition of slavery has become common.

Fascinatingly though, in her afterword to the story that appears in the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, Butler denies that she thinks of the story as an exploration of slavery. Although she never says so directly, the implication seems apparent that people have assumed the story is about slavery partly because Butler, as an African American, is assumed to be writing about that subject. But Butler herself describes “Bloodchild” as the story she always wanted to write about men becoming pregnant, as well as a tale of how human and non-human creatures might be able to live together and cooperate rather than instinctively treating each other as incomprehensible and disgusting enemies. Many individual Tlics and Terrans have loving relationships. They are part of each other’s families and consult each other’s feelings. And again, no individual man is forced to give birth to Tlic babies. Those who do so have volunteered and those who don’t want to don’t have to, although if all of them refused, the agreement between Tlics and Terrans would break down. Tlics and Terrans talk to each other, tell stories and secrets and share emotional support, although the Tlics seem to do most of the nurturing and the nurturing never seems entirely benevolent.

If Butler’s afterword rejects the slavery interpretation though, her own interpretation doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory either. First, the men in the story aren’t exactly pregnant. Humans give birth through organs designed for giving birth. They don’t have embryos surgically implanted all over their bodies, embryos that grow into fetuses that will eat them alive if not removed at the correct moment. Granted, human organs for birth don’t always work perfectly, and cesarean sections, for instance, involve surgical procedures significantly similar to Tlic birth. So there are similarities to real human pregnancy both in terms of some elements of the operation itself and the physical shock it entails. Also, on some level childbirth is indeed imposed upon women, who never asked to be able to give birth, however they feel about it once they learn they have the ability. And there is also the metaphorical suggestion that parents always risk being eaten alive by the needs of their children. Nonetheless, the Tlic birthing process is one that human bodies were not designed for, one which they hate if they ever actually see it.

Second, even if the interpretation that the story is a slavery allegory is one Butler rejects and did not intend, an interpretation that was imposed on her because of her racial identity, the fact is that thinking about slavery in relation to the story raises worthwhile questions. Slavery, for instance, by definition is not accepted voluntarily. It’s the lack of volition that makes it slavery. The social situation described in the story is somewhat closer to sharecropping or servitude, in which the opportunity to choose this particular way of living is more a legal technicality than a real choice, since other options have been effectively, if not absolutely, eliminated. But even that comparison isn’t quite right, since individual humans can opt out of the Tlic birthing system with no more than emotional consequences. It’s just that changing the system as a whole would potentially lead to the destruction of human life as a whole, or at least to potentially widespread violent consequences. The system depends on the fact that some men must volunteer.

Butler’s “Bloodchild” ultimately isn’t a story about slavery, male pregnancy, or a world in which human and non-human actors cooperate with each other for mutual benefit. Instead it’s a story about the complex intertwining of love and servitude, desire and power, enforced by a social system in which one race has more control than another. It’s a story that suggests that nurturing and control, and birth and violence, go hand in hand. It’s a story that shows how people can come to love those who control them and that those who control others can feel that they do so out of love. It’s a story that shows how our most deeply felt emotions can be constructed by conditions of power that are easier to describe in their totality than to understand in specific cases. In this story, power and love are not opposites. Instead, love takes place under conditions of unequal power, and power exists in even the most apparently loving relationships.

The Unexamined British Influences on the Work of Gary Sullivan

Gary Sullivan isn’t afraid to poke a little fun at writers who become too obsessed with their own lineages of influence. Gary's contribution to Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, his cartoon “America, A Lineage,” shows a writer desperately trying to define himself by knowing which writers have influenced his own work.

So Gary is a perfect writer with whom to play “False Lineage: A Game,” one of my favorite literary pastimes.

The game works like this: find writers that you are almost certain did not influence a certain writer, but yet somehow or other, in the unhinged alternative universe that you live in, they really were an influence.

Not every writer likes this game, I’ve seen first hand. Tell someone that his writing reminds you more than a little of Alfred Lord Tennyson and watch what happens. Between you and me, there are maybe a few too many Alfred Lord Tennysons around these days (and I might even be one of them, damnit) but that’s a story for another time.

But Gary is the kind of writer who hopefully won’t mind a few false lineages, so here goes.

In reading Gary Sullivan’s recently published PPL In A Depot, I saw that I’d never realized how deeply Sullivan had been influenced by the work of P.G Wodehouse, Ronald Firbank, and Eveyln Waugh. Sullivan’s thorough reading of these pre- and post-WWI and II British fiction writers, silly, whimsical and satirical in various degrees, has greatly informed the sensibility of his new book. The absurdist plays in PPL In A Depot pick apart the contemporary world of New York City, showing us a society full of lunatic antics and overwrought social maneuvering. Sullivan’s work splits the difference nicely between Wodehouse’s kindly oblivious humor, Firbank’s campy excess, and Waugh’s harsher yet often hilarious skewering of social mores.

Writing this kind of work needs more than an eye for satire though. It also requires a specific kind of social context.

First, it needs a world of nuanced, labyrinthine and finally absurd social networking, in which every moment of conversation has become so burdened by innuendo and implication that it becomes impossible to breathe, leading the satirist to try to blow some fresh air into people’s stuffed shirts (I could be dirtier here, but you see what I mean). How close, it turns out, are the maneuvers of the decaying British aristocracy of the earlier 20th century to the inbred compactness of contemporary New York City life and its desire to escape from itself into miracles:

PPL, page 75:
David Moorehead [Thinking aloud]: OMG, I am totally falling in love with Brooke. How can I tell her that I killed her daughter?

Shirley Wood [Shaking her head at the book in her hands]: You have to be in the mood for some death-defying Orwellian back-flips to read “Poems From Guantanamo.”

Daivd Moorehead: I am such a tard when it comes to Brooke! It’s because I respect her values too much {To Barista} Hey, is my iced frappuccino and my muffin ready yet?

PPL, page 64:
Dewey: Why do educated people believe in demons? I can’t fathom this. I have no idea why you would believe in demons.”

Jenny: Well, I think because it’s fashionable, it’s crazy, and you have to let your hair down sometimes.

Second, it must be the kind of environment that breeds saturation with art, one in which the constant claims for the seriousness of art and literature have become stifling. Not another serious poet looking for fame please. Not another novelist telling the truth for our times. If anyone else at this party gets even a little more self-important, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read again. We have turned the details of art over and over again in our minds until it’s our minds that are turning:

PPL, page 68:

Joel: I always tell the Karaoke Queen that Elton John was the death of rock and roll. His emphasis on Las Vegas style shows with a gay edge effectively ended the great era of rock and roll. Rock was, and should be, a macho phenomenon. The gayification of rock seemed like fun, but it was fatal.

Gina: Donald, your story is somewhat similar to mine. I enjoyed pop music a lot in the early to mid 70s. In 76, the year I graduated from high school, I noticed that there weren’t as many “really great” songs as there had been in the few previous years. I remember my friends and I talking about this.

It’s in this context of social and artistic saturation that the writing of Wodehouse, Firbank, Waugh and Sullivan becomes a necessary antidote. Yet this fact raises an issue that’s relevant to all these writers: the farther removed one is from this kind of world, the less one might feel able to share in laughing at it from the inside. If the foibles of the British aristocracy or the life of contemporary New Yorkers don’t interest you, you may not find this work for you.

Where Sullivan’s work departs from his predecessors, and may also have more staying power as literature, is in its relation to politics. Wodehouse remained throughout his life notoriously naive, never seeming to understand the seriousness of the wars and social conflicts he lived through, even though while living in France in 1940 he became a prisoner of the Germans and was later accused of collaboration with the Nazis for a series of radio satires he made in Germany while still a prisoner. George Orwell famously said of Evelyn Waugh that he was “about as good as a novelist can be while holding untenable opinions.”

Sullivan, however, no matter how absurd many moments in his plays are, keeps bringing his readers back to contemporary political conditions from a leftist perspective:

PPL, page 35:

Brad: Here’s a list of the countries that the U.S. bombed from the end of World War II until the end of the 20th century, compiled by historian William Blum...

And then, despite interruptions, Brad lists them. The result is that, within the flippancy and rejection of the tone of serious art, a serious understanding of the world remains, although it’s handled more than a little bit more lightly.

I have to admit that I wouldn’t want to read the work of any of these satirists every day. Yet at those times when I do read it, it often comes as a relief, not to mention a source of much-needed laughter. It turns out, finally, that it’s in the most complexly developed social environments that a great dumb joke is often most necessary.

You can catch Gary Sullivan and his compatriots in absurdity this week at the 2008 Flarf Festival, the Holistic Expo and Peace Conference version.

&Now Literary Festival at Chapman University

That's where I'll be for the rest of this week. Take a look at the lineup:

http://andnowfestival.com/schedule/

If I don't get back to any of you for a few days, that'll be because I'm having too much fun to check my e-mail. And how often does that happen?