Good Americans Hate Cities

There has been a lot of furor lately over the comments of Horace Engdahl, the lead judge of the group who decides the Nobel Prize, made several weeks ago about American literature, calling it too parochial, isolated, and ignorant in contrast to the greater cosmopolitanism of various European literatures. He later backpedaled a bit, saying that he was speaking of no particular author but just American literature in general. But aggressive debate has continued, with many Americans defending American literature and saying Engdahl knows nothing about it, while other critics (see for instance the ongoing discussion on Johannes Goransson’s blog) see in that defense a continuation of an American bullying refusal to engage with literature of other cultures and languages.

I’m not interested in taking a stand on American literature in some general way as much as I am in noting that American parochial anti-cosmopolitanism does indeed exist. In fact it has a long and particular history, one that in the literary furor nobody seems to be talking about in much detail.

For reasons that might seem obvious, early European settlers of America were themselves often anti-European. There’s nothing like desiring or needing to run from a place to turn somebody against it, and early Euro-American culture is full of Europeans who despise Europe, even while a whole range of other attitudes also remain possible.

In fact the rhetoric of colonial America often claims to be in absolute opposition to the principles of Europe. One of these basic principles has to do with cities. European cosmopolitanism was often seen by early Americans as the source of European moral and political corruption. In contrast, colonial Americans often defined themselves in terms of rural virtue. The good, independent farmer whose virtue comes from the land is a stock figure in American culture. Maybe no text defines this figure better than the 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer by John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, a French aristocrat who came to America, changed his name from Michel Guillaume to John Hector St. John, and worked for a few years as a farmer before eventually returning to France and living out his days there, to some extent against his will.

What’s important to note about Crevecoeur is that Europeans can have pro-rural, pro-American, anti-cosmopolitan ideas about Europe too. The idea of rural virtue as an antidote to the decadent city is one developed by Europeans and their Euro-American descendants.

Nonetheless, much of American culture is based in the distrust of cities and remains that way to this day. For instance, one of the things that was so radical about the work of Walt Whitman that we might now forget is not simply that he celebrates American urban immigrant culture, but that he writes about the city at all. In the 1850s the city wasn’t considered by American poets to be a suitable subject for poetry, since the city lacked morally elevating principles. In fact cities are notably absent from most of early American literature, occasionally making an appearance in a book like Charles Brockdon Brown’s 1799 novel Arthur Mervyn, which discusses Philadelphia mainly as a vast gothic breeding ground of contagious illness, not to mention criminality and promiscuity.

Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 book The Life and Death of American Cities, details how the history of urban planning in America is founded in and determined by anti-urban attitudes. That is, the people involved in planning American cities up even into the 1960s did so from the perspective that the city was immoral and that good city planners should make cities feel more rural. Instead of building cities on the idea that urban spaces prosper when neighbors interact on the streets, American cities are often full of anti-urban spaces that try to foster an illusion of privacy but instead mainly destroy street life and turn streets into often dangerous, isolated places.

Another important element contributing to American isolationism is the literal geography of the United States, especially as that geography interacts with the history of the belief that U.S. rural democratic goodness is opposed to European cosmopolitan authoritarian corruption. Both the size of the United States and its distance from other countries that speak other languages mean that it’s more possible for people in the U.S. to grow up without interacting at all, or more than barely, with people who speak languages other than English. Certainly I grew up never hearing any language other than English spoken by anybody I knew well or even casually. I heard Spanish on several trips to Mexico and French once on a trip to Quebec. Although I took six years of French and two of German, I can barely speak a word of either of those languages. In the kinds of schools I grew up in, taking language classes was considered by other teenagers something for sissies, of course. But it also went hand in hand with comments about “When am I ever going to use any of this actually?” I had no opportunities to go to Europe as a boy (in fact I first went when I was 33) , and spending a few days in Mexico or Canada as a boy with my father hardly constituted any kind of major immersion in another culture. I’m not always sure whether people understand the degree of linguistic isolation that exists in many parts of the United States even now. Europeans, of course, other than the most isolated rural ones, are in general much more used to the idea of being around multiple languages. At their worst they tend to see American ineptness with other languages as a kind of moral failing, which in some ways it may be. But it’s also a result of a real linguistic isolation that Europeans don’t have in as significant a degree.

Add all these things together, and one has a country that to this day is often very resistant to the idea of influence from the outside world. Admittedly I find it odd to consider that American isolationist rhetoric hasn’t changed all that hugely in over 300 years, and that it hasn’t significantly changed as the United States has developed from a small country to the world’s predominant military power. But it hasn’t. Rhetoric about good country people is essential to ideas of American exceptionalism—the idea that the past and destiny of the United States make it uniquely the best nation in the history of the world. It’s really both astounding and not surprising, actually, to see some of our current candidates for president and vice-president use the same rhetoric about America and the outside world that they might have used several hundred years ago.

One last point. U.S. isolationism is not only subject to political manipulation, it’s also volatile. While the Republican party is generally more likely to call up this rhetoric and make use of it, isolationism now and then swerves to embrace a more democratic, populist perspective that has sometimes put liberals in office. Consider this: of the 70 to 80 percent of Americans who now feel that the war against Iraq has been a mistake, it’s still only the same 35 to 40 percent of us who feel it is a mistake because of what it's doing to Iraq. Another group of a similar size is more likely to believe that the war is a mistake because it’s a waste of U.S. money and U.S. lives in a country far away that we shouldn’t have cared about in the first place. In other words, if the war against Iraq does finally end, the fact that many U.S. citizens would prefer not to even know that a place like Iraq exists may play a significant role in ending it.

Doomsday Is At Hand

Among the many remarkable and ridiculous things about the last two weeks in American politics, I noticed an absolute explosion of Doomsday Rhetoric, beginning with George Bush’s Chicken Little “The Sky Is Falling” speech and the chorus of rhetorical doomsaying that followed.

While a significant portion of what remains of your money is being handed over to the same people that took the rest of it, I thought I’d say a little bit about Doomsday Rhetoric and why Americans love it so much.

I haven’t done any research into the historical origins of Doomsday Rhetoric, but its history is undoubtedly quite ancient. Indeed I can imagine the opening sentence of a typical student paper reading something like the following and not being too far off the mark:

“Since the beginning of time, humans have prophesied about the end of time.”

Certainly the origins of the United States are thoroughly soused with Doomsday Rhetoric. One of the first works written in America that might have been called, by the standards of the day, a best seller, with over 1800 copies delivered in its first year of publication (1662) alone, the Puritan poem “The Day of Doom,” by Michael Wigglesworth, through 224 grinding stanzas described in pleasingly dark and repetitive detail the destruction of human life because of its sinfulness and the tortures of hell that followed. Over the next several decades “The Day of Doom” became a standard work found in many New England homes. It's important to recognize how much fun this poem must have been to read at the time in order to understand how Doomsday Rhetoric works.

Hundreds of years later, Americans continue to be very excited at the thought of Total Destruction, or some especially thrilling degree of it, and flock to movies such as Independence Day and countless others that show destruction at the hands of meteors or monsters from outer space or nuclear war or climate change, anything really, as long as it brings us to the verge of Total Destruction and in some cases takes us over the edge.

Of course, the biggest difference between watching the world end in a movie and watching the world actually end is that if you watch it in a movie, you can come out again next week and watch it again.

For awhile, after September 11, there was a temporary moratorium on films featuring end of the world thrills, since such films seemed, for a little while anyway, to be in bad taste. But there was nothing like Bush’s mantra of “weapons of mass destruction” to get Doomsday Rhetoric on the road again, and in recent years it has been going strong. The absolute flood of it we’ve seen in the last week or two has reminded me once more how much so many Americans love the idea of Doomsday.

Some points though. The Doomsday Tale is always, at its base, a religious tale. Doomsday comes because Human Sinfulness has brought it. We need to understand that a religious thrill underpins almost all Doomsday Scenarios: the great pleasure we take in seeing the sinful (however we define their sin) getting what they deserve.

This fact is important because the use of Doomsday Rhetoric by conservative politicians always taps into the American religious desire to punish the guilty, even as it also taps into the desire to save the righteous. Of course, George Bush’s recent speech had more of the latter than the former, since he hardly wanted to punish the Wall Street players who his policies have been enriching for years. But you can’t evoke Doomsday without the specter of punishing the guilty rising very quickly, and the outpouring of rhetoric that followed tried instantly to find the sinful, an easy enough task in this case: the “Wall Street Fucking Fuck Fucks,” as someone I know likes to say.

But I want to be fair, at least a bit, and acknowledge that the left also has its own versions of Doomsday Rhetoric, coming out of issues like globalism and climate change and many others, each of which similarly, although in various degrees perhaps, looks to uncover and punish the sinful. Remember, “Soylent Green is People.”

Part of the reason that this rhetoric becomes attractive even on the left is that conditions in the world really are frequently as awful as can be imagined and in fact worse. War, starvation, massive capitalist piracy: these aren’t conspiracy theories but social realities, even as none of them really indicate with certainty that after centuries of being prophesied, the Day of Doom is finally at hand. Or as I once put it in one of my books, the problem with Total Destruction is that it happens to someone somewhere in the world every day. Apocalypse is ordinary.

Still, I think we need to be cautious about Doomsday Rhetoric because of the way it plays so easily into a conservative, fear-mongering view of the universe, one in which each of us gets to play the hero by punishing the guilty and saving the righteous. I think it plays into that world view too much even when it comes from the left.

There may be moments, I suppose, when Doomsday Rhetoric might be useful from a leftist perspective, although I tend to be skeptical of it whenever I hear it. On the whole Doomsday Rhetoric remains an obfuscation, one that lends itself not to an understanding of political realities so much as to a titillating religious mythology, one that no doubt even has exciting sexual undertones. Face it: somewhere in the desire for Doomsday is the desire for The Final Orgasm.

What Is Tasteless?

Let me be clear that I’m not recommending that you watch Takashi Miike's Visitor Q. In fact I’m recommending that you don’t watch it unless you have some idea of what you’re getting yourself into. Let me say also, in my own defense, that I only watched it at the request of a graduate student with whom I’m working who may be including a reading of Visitor Q in his thesis. And let me say, in his defense, that I think he has interesting things to say about this film and its relationship to the taboo. Besides, do I really need a justification for watching a film that many people claim is an important work of art? Even if I don’t though, in this instance it feels like I do.

All disclaimers aside, I think it’s not going too far to suggest that Visitor Q sets the contemporary standard for what’s tasteless. If there’s any more tasteless contemporary film around, I’m not aware of it and I’m not sure I want to be. Well, okay, I want to be aware of it. But watch it? I don’t know.

The only other film that I can think of that covers similar territory to Visitor Q is Pink Flamingos, a movie which is better than Visitor Q in almost every way. In fact one main problem with Visitor Q is that it’s just not very enjoyable to watch, or at least wasn’t to me. Its opening soft core porn incest scene, for instance, which turns out to be one of the gentlest in the film, is not only dull and interminable but also ridiculous. It’s perfectly transparent that the actors involved aren’t really a father and daughter, so the pretense that they are comes off as laughable. Similarly, the film’s rote attempt to shatter one taboo after another almost proceeds like a checklist: let’s shatter this one, and this one, and don’t forget this one. None of the characters or situations is ever believable for more than a few moments, which is part of the point perhaps but nonetheless not very interesting.

The idea of the tasteless obviously depends on the idea of taste. Both concepts are part of what we used to call back in the olden days of theory a binary opposition, like the concepts of good and bad art, the masculine and the feminine and many others. And taste of course is culture and class bound. One goal therefore of consciously tasteless art is to critique the social limitations of taste, showing it to be the property of the repressed, the controlling, and the power hungry. And certainly that’s part of what Miike wants Visitor Q to do.

But I’ve been wondering about an aesthetic of the tasteless and what value there is in it. Once the tasteless makes clear that it’s a critique of the limits of taste, isn’t it in some perverse sense making a bid for itself to be recuperated as somehow tasteful, at least in the sense that in showing problems in the idea of taste, it puts itself in the position of having a superior understanding of taste when compared to art that simply tries to reproduce cultural standards of the tasteful? Or to push this idea further, by showing that taste is no more than a set of biases, hasn’t it undermined both the idea of taste and therefore the idea of the tasteless by showing them both to be shaped by conditions of social power, in which case it’s not tasteless but something else? To remain tasteless, a work of art would have to accept normative standards of taste and therefore accept its own tastelessness. Many lowbrow American comedies, like the American Pie series, do something like this. Or else it would have to fail in its attempt to critique standards of taste and therefore remain tasteless.

The second of these possibilities is how Visitor Q achieves its own unique tastelessness. Its message, at the end, is that all we have watched has been part of the struggle of these characters to understand and accept themselves, and now that they have, they’ll be more capable of loving themselves and each other. Since it’s nearly impossible to believe that any of the characters could be actual people, the standard happy ending family message seems falsely tacked on, or else one more final tasteless joke in a series of such tasteless jokes. Believe me though, the ambiguity here is less interesting than it sounds.

Which is to say, Visitor Q remains genuinely tasteless because its critique of the oppression of social taboos is almost never convincing. Visitor Q remains tasteless because it doesn’t work.

Finally, I’m not sure how much interest I have in simply reversing the binary and celebrating the tasteless. Pink Flamingos, for instance, is gross, but because it succeeds as art it creates its own alternative standard of taste, that of the John Waters vision of the universe. Visitor Q remains tasteless mainly because it’s just not really that interesting. I can certainly acknowledge that someone might like this film because it’s both boring and tasteless. They might like it because it explores taboos and attacks middle class squeamishness even though I don’t think it does that very well. But what I can’t seem to acknowledge is that boring and tasteless art is automatically interesting simply because the idea of taste is a problem.

I'm reading at San Diego State this Tuesday

The Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series

Presents an Evening with

Mark Wallace

on Tuesday, September 23rd, at 7pm

SDSU's Love Library, Room 430

This event is free and open to the public.
Pay lots are conveniently located around the perimeter of the campus. A trolley stop for San Diego residents is also conveniently located near Aztec Center.

For more information, please contact Victoria Featherstone at livingwriters@gmail.com

SDSU’s location:
Just off Interstate 8, at College Avenue.

The address is:
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182

The reading is at SDSU's Malcolm A. Love Library, Room 430, at 7pm. Once you enter the library under the dome, go downstairs, walk west through the passageway to the elevators, and take one to the 4th floor. Room 430 is in the center of the stacks near the stairway.

People who live in San Diego who want to attend the reading might take the trolley to campus. It is very convenient.

Here are some driving directions:

If you are coming from coastal north: Take I-5 South to I-805 South to I-8 East to College Ave. Go south on College, and campus is on the right.

If you are coming from inland north: Take I-15 South; merge onto I-8 East to College Ave. Go south on College.

Paid visitor parking is available in designated campus lots. Please refer to the Campus Map for specific visitor locations.

Here is a link to the Campus Map: https://sunspot.sdsu.edu/map/SDSU_MAP.pdf

(additional parking information)
Parking Structure 2 has yellow permit dispenser machines, and this lot allows for the most convenient walk to the library.

Visitors may park in Parking Structure 5 on the west side of the university, located on 55th Street and Montezuma Road. They may also park in Parking Structure 6 on the east side of the university, located off Montezuma Road and East Campus Drive. The cost to park is $1 per hour. Parking Structure 5 has permit dispenser machines on levels 1 and 2. The pay machine on the second floor, north side of PS 5, accepts VISA and MasterCard payments. Parking Structure 6 has permit dispenser machines on levels 1, 2, and 3.

Is poetry work?

Do you think of poetry as work?

If so, do you think of it as a particular kind of work?

If not, do you think of it as another kind of activity (that is, other than just poetry)?

I’m influenced enough by Wittgenstein that I don’t think of poetry inherently as work. Instead I’m interested in what happens to poetry if we define it as work, and what happens to it if we don’t. Thinking of it as work or not might change, and probably does, how we write poetry and how we feel about its importance.

There’s a long history, both in what became the United States and elsewhere, of distrusting poetry. That distrust has often been based in thinking of poetry as something that is not work, or as work that may not be all that valuable. Puritan culture, for instance, often looked skeptically at poetry. As one Puritan divine of the time put it, “It is as if words should elect to dance and caper, instead of to speak plainly.” In this view, poetry is playful and wasteful and an inappropriate manner of celebrating. The Puritans were no simpler than we are though, and one of them, Edward Taylor, wrote poems full of ornate artifice and linguistic playfulness, dancing and capering with quite marvelous results.

If we consider poetry to be work, is it possible that we’re looking to justify it by giving it the dignity of labor, dignity that perhaps we feel that poetry simply as poetry doesn’t have? When we use the phrase “work of art,” have we, in a subtle fashion and perhaps even unknown to ourselves, sought to justify art through the productive aspects of it as labor?

If we consider poetry to be work, what role does humor, feeling, playfulness, ornamentation, and artifice have in the poem as work?

If we do not consider poetry to be work, what role does effort, thoughtfulness, difficulty and developed skill have in whatever kind of activity we imagine poetry to be?

Which is to say, I wonder what aspects of poetry become more emphasized or more forgotten when we consider poetry as work or as something that is not work. And when we consider poetry as work or not, I think that probably changes the relation of poetry to the kinds of work we’re doing, work we may have to do or may want to do. Does poetry become less important or more important to us as we imagine it as more work or as something other than work?

And by the way, I’ve been working a lot these past few weeks. If you haven’t heard from me recently, that’s why.

Colin Smith's 8x8x7

At the Vancouver Positions Colloquium, it was great to see some old friends and acquaintances and to hear new work by writers whom I have known a long time. And it was nice to meet people whose work I have long known but whom I have never met, like Fred Wah, who continues to have a broad influence on the poetry of the Vancouver area and beyond. In a few cases though, not only was I hearing new work or meeting a writer I had never met before, I was meeting writers I had never even heard of before. One of those writers, Colin Smith, gave one of the most powerful readings of the colloquium, and I immediately picked up a copy of his book published by Krupskaya, 8x8x7. The book is every bit as powerful as his reading and I hope more people will find out about it and read it and buy it.

Smith’s book, and his reading, certainly shared in the tenor of the conference, and in the traditions of Vancouver avant poetries, in a focus both on global power structures and the most immediate details of the here and now and how connections between the two might be traced. He shares a Vancouver poetics also in the biting, ironic wit and rapid fire politicized quips that mark so many (thought not all) of the male poets I admire from that region (the female poets share it too, although they’re more likely to risk sincerity or aestheticism without sacrificing a keen politicized edge). But Smith’s work is marked by personal and painful immediacy, one that can sometimes be difficult to include in a poetics interested in understanding and critiquing large scale economic realities. Which is to say that his work often details, very affectingly, the fact of how these economic realities really do hurt individuals, and how it feels to be hurt.

Smith had perhaps the single best quip of a quip-filled colloquium. “Ready!——Fire!——Aim!” from 8x8x7's opening poem, “Just,” left the audience with one of those groaning laughs of recognition that continue to reverberate long afterwards. I’m still teasing out all the contexts to which such a phrase is too perfectly applicable. At the same time, the fact of his own obvious pain was apparent in his reading and can be found throughout the poems. This pain is both physical (chronic problems with his spine, he told me if I’m remembering correctly, can make it difficult for him to walk or stand for too long a period of time) and a function of being poor in the center of an economic boom which is making a few people rich and disenfranchising many others. “How can you say I’m committing a crime?/ I’m/ just/ sitting here,” he concludes at the end of “Just,” exposing readers to the ongoing history (one that in Vancouver lately has been amped up as the 2010 Olympics approaches) of making it a criminal act for people to have nowhere to go. Although he was a Vancouver resident for many years, he now lives in Winnipeg, a city where for the moment he seems to have found it more possible to survive.

8x8x7 consists of a number of poetic sequences of various lengths, many about 8-10 pages of accumulated reflections, critiques, one-liners, outbursts, and howls of recognition. From “Leper Hockey Punchline”:

The soup that thinks outside the can.

SPECIAL
HD/HBGER
FF&ldr
3.99

Eat crap, die, and leave
a luminescent biohazard of a corpse.

He lifts his spirits by reading Madame Bovary
while listening to Joy Division.

Would I think thrice
before donating Charles Dickens books
to people in prison?

War and unemployment
are the energies
of our economy. Cold and Hungry Please
Spare Anything

“Symptoms of vomiting and nausea”
“Alleged photos of torture”
Ask about our ‘hit the ceiling’ guarantee!

You are automatically entered.


The development of each poem isn’t so much narrative as associational, yet the overall affect paints a thorough picture of an individual subject to economic and social forces vastly beyond his control, forces that claim to be impersonal even as they wrench from those subject to them the most personal confessions, doubts and failings. Smith doesn’t reveal any of this through a conventional telling of his own tale, but through the way the snippets converge and diverge in a sort of globalist pointillism. His poems don’t so much map an overarching schema of social and economic landscapes, as for instance Jeff Derksen’s work (itself also very impressive but in a much different way) does, but bring us right to the points of contention, the sore spots, the sites of emotional anguish. Even as Smith’s poems remain really very funny, there’s the same sense of unbearable pain that one gets from Jack Spicer poems, a feeling of being overwhelmed, just from listening, by the suffering in the poem. But the irony and humor of many lines is not a distancing or muffling of anger, or even a way of making it more palatable, so much as it is an act of momentary relief from a tension that just keeps building. These are poems that can do things that political theory, for all its value, usually can’t: tell us what it feels like, all over one’s body, to be losing out in the midst of an economy that claims to be booming.

Oddly enough perhaps, there’s something intensely energizing about 8x8x7, just as there is about Smith himself, with his humor, generosity, and really just friendliness and willingness to converse. The poems in the book never completely give in or give up even as they acknowledge the many moments when giving up seems the only sensible reaction. There’s a sense of fight in these poems that I can’t help but admire—a fact which the cover art of the book, a montage by Frank Mueller of some of the boxing scenes in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, both points to and ironizes. A fight which shows the ridiculousness and often hopelessness of fighting, yet continues to strike back with whatever power it has, and does so with insight, hilarity, and a willingness to open its own most vulnerable conditions. From the book’s final poem, "Goodbye (Riddance)":

Because the closest to a safe home
I’ve ever known
was a psychiatric hospital I lived in
for 6 months when I was 14.

Chronic pain abstracts you
from yourself while making it impossible
to abstract chronic pain.

Sanction, endure, render.

Truth... grace... beauty... I dunno,
what do you think you get for them?

Smith’s book is hardly a self-congratulatory attempt at fighting the good fight. But it shows very well the degree to which the desire for self-determination and self-respect is perhaps the most essential power to tap into when struggling against forces and individuals who would take those things away from people.

Vancouver Positions Colloquium: Tom Orange photo sets

That's Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, being as usual casually remarkable, and the rest of Tom's very thorough photo set on the Vancouver Positions Colloquium can be found on his blog or by going directly to the complete photo set.