The Shame of Aesthetic Disconnect

A non-lit or literati related moment to express some utter, utter aesthetic bafflement, namely:

How in hell does Shame not get an Oscar nomination while Midnight in Paris does? 

Midnight in Paris?
Yes Michael, that was the look on my face too... 

Yes yes meaningless arbitrary institutional back-pattings with no sense which don't mean anything motivated by economic extraneous ends plus American film institution trying to promote "solid family values" sceptical of anything sex-related or otherwise disturbing or going into deeper layers of what it means to be a human being etcetera etcetera but still: Meine Damen und Herren, still, HOW - with no hyperbole whatsoever - may the literally worst film of the last decade (at least), which for its DVD release could be most appropriately retitled Pretentious drawn-out maudlin saccharine vanilla navel-gazing (by a ridiculously out-of-touch film-maker who made three great films about thirty years ago) into a non-existent industrially processed tepid nostalgia about a "Paris" nobody has ever seen, visited, dreamt about, fantasised about, or would ever, ever want to, how does that film, yes, good God, that film with Carla "Quelqu'un m'a dit" Bruni playing a tour guide in the Rodin museum (just read that sentence back slowly to yourself trying not to black out from your brain going into neurological arrest in the face of the sheer incomprehension of its surrounding world...), how does that film, with the most slobberingly mind-numbingly characterless performance from Owen "one-dopey-facial-expression" Wilson, get the nod, while the just beautiful, layered and generally moving performance from Michael Fassbender, well, does not... Bested by a film able to make Marion Cottilard look like a hollywood automaton of adolescent pouting à la française...

(This post has far more italics than usual, but italics are the font of aesthetic disconnect...)

Anyway what was I saying? Oh yeah: on a lit-related note, my take on Chris Vitiello's gorgeous Irresponsibilites is in the new Galatea, and I forgot to link.

Just don't go telling me it doesn't match up to Ted Kooser... Please don't... 

       

Literature Blogs and Videos: An End to Excess

Can we make a collective literature slash poetics blog new rule? Namely: only twenty percent (and I think this is being pretty generous) of your blog's content may consist of embedded videos on or about or of writers and poets.

This video content on lit blogs phenomenon is just reaching a ridiculous saturation point. And this is coming from someone who edits a journal and archive of video poetics...

But most of this indescriminate embedding is not of true hybrid works, or collaborative video/poetic praxis.

What I'd like to see is video content used well, and sparingly, and with reflection...

This is mainly because a fair number of well-known literature blogs, which I used to find stimulating places for conversation and analysis, have now apparently become places to simply embed content of recent readings (I won't bother naming names, it's obvious enough).


I find two sentences more interesting in the context of a blog than videos of poets reading. In a recent trend, these vids are increasingly filmed readings of poets and writers who have recently passed away. Especially in this context of a homage or obituary, isn't it far more moving and personal to actually say something? One line, one word even, anything. At least say something about the video!  

I understand that people don't have all that much time, or even any time at all. Especially when a blog has been running for so many years. At times, for various reasons, I've left this space silent for 6 months or more.

But silence (or spatial absence) is surely better than "[person you've vaguely heard of] reading last night at the [place you've vaguely heard of]" embed.

This is not meant to be snarky... I just miss those places. I miss those lit blogs I used to love.

Linh Dinh's Letters to a Young Poet on the MFAs

Linh Dinh's current headbutt of the American MFA system is necessary reading, tackling exceedingly pressing questions, both economic and aesthetic. You should read it, and the ensuing discussion, even if it hurts you. Comment box extract from Linh:

The MFA writing racket was in full swing when I was in college, but one does not need expensive degrees to become a poet, only to teach. In fact, many poetry professors are lousy poets, or no poets at all, though their students don't know that. Students make lots of money for these programs, so the primary job of these so called professors is to flatter the students, keep them paying that tuition with loan money. Some students do go to school for free, so they're not being hustled out of cash, but they're still swimming in that smarmy and dishonest atmosphere. As I said in a lecture at Penn, many poets praise everybody, people above and below them, because that's how you gain allies. Again, there is no correlation between an expensive degree and becoming a poet. In many cases, it's the exact opposite. MFA programs are theme parks at best, and factory farms at worst. If you want to be a writer, then study the works of the best writers. Learn from Vallejo, not some unctuous and insecure poser at some college. You'll learn by reading and rereading, by writing, and by living and mixing with ordinary people. Get out of the theme park and, short of getting killed or raped, go to the wrong neighborhood and enter the wrong bar. Listen carefully to how people talk. If you can't get a poem out of that, then maybe you're not a poet after all.

It says it straight. There are, however, aspects of which I'm sceptical. I'm worried for instance about opposing to the MFA model a romantic ideational praxis, one that values itinerancy, disconnection, bar-talk etc., when I've often found such periods of itineracy and disconnection in my life to be precisely those moments when poetry becomes impossible (because of immediate needs or simple psychic-metaphysical desperation...) Now, when all is better again, words shine and the world opens... And the "ordinary talk" of people? Does this exist as a concept? The risk of wordsworthian wish-fulfillment is present here too, and we need to be en garde...

I'm also sceptical of the idea of "being" a poet or not... The subjective identification seems wrongheaded to me, and crazy pressure for kids... What are we supposed to do to be poets?

These are my quibbling thoughts, but my thanks and belief with Linh that this critical revision is the right road, remain...

Perhaps the urban wanderlust experiences gave necessary perspective? Contributed to poetic and other realities? Certes. But only as much as reading comfortably in an armchair or a conversation at a friend's party or an amphitheatre lecture or a long train journey or reading so long your eyes hurt... It all swirls and mixes in the bubble bubble and toil, and attributing an axiological priority to the moments of disposession can also, perhaps, skew perspective towards a false quest for excess? This is my suggestion. I've known this, at least...

I've never taught poetry "workshops" - yes, awful term, pick up your hammers and clag kids - I teach literature and rhetoric and languages in public institutions - I'm aware of inevitable hypocrisies in my position as well, just to pre-empt the "thanks for pointing this out" - though in the current academic job climate I've been tempted to try. In France, such ateliers are at least economically different (though my scepticism, or even outright rejection, regarding the effectiveness or utility of their praxis remains). France has more or less free public universities ("more or less free" means still expensive for many, maybe 600 American dollars a year for an undergrad degree, which is only cheap when compared to the anglosaxon fee debacle of the US, UK and Australia: £9,000 pounds a year Cameron? To be paid late? Oh sorry my bad, that's fine then. What? For the rest of my life? Arsehole).

So France is a different matter, though it is disturbingly moving towards a broken and revoltingly unjust Anglo model (though note that the French seem more willing to fight this to the death, ah les grévistes !). Let's pray we can fight it, or slow it, or destroy the fire-spitting Gamera of Sarko's "La Princesse de Clèves ne vaut rien!".

This said, students' social access to these universities, but especially the Grandes Ecoles, is obviously determined by myriad socioeconomic factors (it's exceedingly hard to get into the ENS or Sciences Po without having been to an exceedingly good Prepa, and thus having the cash or contacts or connections or geographical Parisian location to go to Henri IV or Louis le Grand...). Not many comp lit students from the cités...

But back to the workshop model, this weird new 20th century invention so at odds with the entire history of poetics... I just worry about my American friends beginning or completing MFAs.

Really, have you thought it through?

Do you really want to do this?

The Pitcairn Islands... and Rhetorical Metonymy Measurements

According to this bizarre and more or less utterly useless web thing J-P.M referred me to - though of course, dear poetics readers, you naturally incline towards all that which is teleologically null, thus defined by "intrinsic and not extrinsic" value (cough irony cough) - the most appropriate real-world geographical analogy for The Newer Metaphysicals is the Pitcairn Islands.

Pretty...

(But weirdly like a bad Star Trek set, for that fight scene for instance... Anyway.)

Of course this thing was bound to please, as I'm generally fond of rhetorical metonymy which is supposed to clarify measurements and ends up obscuring them immensely ("Richard Serra's most recent sculpture is the size of fourteen elephants or 234,000 dragonflies" etc.).

Pleasure then in the images abounding now from google images of Pitcairn, this weirdly idyllic utopia I didn't know existed. Bathe in the warm seas of ridiculousness, in all its weird grammatical glory:

If thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com were a country it will (future? no) be bigger than the Pitcairn Islands with 50 people. Daily: 51 visitors.  Let's put that in a perspective (okay, which perspective should we put it in?) : 51 of the 1,966,514,816 internet users daily visit thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com (encouraging? depressing? ambivalent) There are at least 26 Bugatti Veyron's required to transport all visitors of thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com. (I presume this is for inane publicity and I am simply blindly adding to the ravenous machine). If all 51 daily visitors take (preterit) each other by hand (definite article) you will (what's with the future!) get a straight line with a length of 0 kilometer. (Plural. This line of no length though is almost a sphinx-worthy [or  heraclitus-worthy] enigma...) We (who?) estimate that this website use (third-person present -s conjugation) 1 server(s). The average use of electricity of a internet server is about 2.400 kWh a year. This means that the server(s) of thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com will consume 1,728 kWh every year. Looking at the average cost each kWh with a price of 0,23 cent per kWh, the cost using electricity will be $397,- a year. 

Or in other words, about the cost of a one-way boat ticket to Pitcairn...

Vivaldi in the Villa Medici - Il Favorito e l'inganno

One of the ripened fruits of our time at the Villa Medici...
Moving to see once again these places where, so strangely, we lived...
For those who know those involved, enjoy the game of recognition.

Ticking

The patience required to write, to continue struggling on, to let time tick on - this is often under emphasised. I am presently impatient. I need to find or refind this patience. This is said without pathos or pity. In an economy where less and less books are published, where less and less are bought... Only, the simple fact that one cannot think of effect, of product, far less "outcome", that this is liberty, and that such terrible utilitarianism is damaging... And yet a certain pragmatism is required in order to continue, to join another page to the previous, to dream of readers, of an eventual reception, which may or may not occur. Which means that all this feels sometimes, rightly or wrongly, like a dark night. And yet what sacrifices are we prepared to make? I am not prepared to sacrifice all, or even much. I would like my writing to be an organic component and proponent of experience, of event, and not the sacrifice that needs to be made. Sacrifice becomes then an unmeaning precept. And patience replaces it: though it is so much harder, slower, glimmering...

Apollinaire

My brief study of Apollinaire's Alcools in the collective volume of Atlande's concours series is now available. 

Pinoappli

Orlando

Before the veiled and scattered lights of Saint Brieuc and the sea farther off - bad Woolf syntax parody sic and  intended - I began reading Orlando this evening, the only book by Woolf I've never read.

This is due to an adolescent obsession. This omission was, at least consciously, unplanned.

But it is revelatory. I realise I had relegated Woolf to the status of an early-age engouement, to a precious if ridiculously overly researched  undergraduate paper on Walter Pater's influence on a Decadent axiology of taste (or something...)

I have intense memories of that paper - of the emotion accompanying its composition, not its content - as well as of all my initial adolescent forays into novel-writing, which read like 300 page long Woolf pastiches, full of islands and salt winds, men gazing out to sea in the brunt of salt winds, attics, empty rooms in old vaguely patrician manors (which I had never seen, and still have not), and the sea...

(To those reading this now who hate Woolf with a passion, who find her convoluted, pretentious, vague, excessively and heroically bourgeoise, half-baked, at once sentimental and weirdly cold... I understand. There are few novelists for me more divisive, more taste-reliant, than her, and though I half admit each and every one of these aspects, I love her books with an undying passion).

And so reading Orlando now, after 8 or so years without having touched a book by Woolf, well, the boy comes surging back... How beautiful it is! And how bizarre! Have just traced the pages of the mythical Great Frost, where country boys are weirdly frozen in mid-action throwing stones at frozen and still crows... In its aspect of repressed fantastique, there is a certain magic realism here so much lighter, less winking and irritatingly self-conscious than Marquez...

And its infinitely complex sexuality! Sensuality rather. Both. With the morphing and reshapings of gender, such terms as homosexuality become extraordinarily reductive, unable to describe the synesthaesic interplay of these polyvalent bodies: when Orlando first glimpses Sasha skating so gracefully on the ice, for instance, and is distressed at falling in love with a boy, as only a boy could skate with such gracefulness (we are told), and then the revelation of her femininity, which allows Orlando (socially speaking) to desire her, to fall in love, but which seems  also almost a let-down to him, as if Sasha's initial apparent masculinity had been the pinion of a machinic desire which, though lessened by her female reality, required this reality as its cultural cachet, as the thing allowing the kisses to occur... Thus her femininity required the initial "incorrect" impression of masculinity for her femininity to emerge as an infinitely powerful sexual construct...)

And I haven't even got to the point of the "true" gender change (or so I remember from some half-forgotten articles and the book's back cover which I glimpsed).

Orlando seems at once deeply woolfian and utterly unwoolfian.

I did not know Woolf could do this. All of this. The fantastique and the morphing corporal realities and  the sex! The goddamn sexiness of the whole thing: all violet ice and blue lace, and the tree roots hard against a shoulder like "the spine of the earth", and a sexiness overcoming hetero and homo divides, into a sex of the earth almost, of infused life living through its own, constantly transformative, desire ...  

I am only 40 pages in.

I will be leaving Orlando in Saint Brieuc, by the sea, taking different books on the train back to Paris. It will be right to read it here on a small and often desolate coast, in a smallish town, in an attempt later to find windy attics and men struggling fiercely against cold Atlantic gales towards an almost invisible island, far off...

De Retour

And so to Saint Brieuc... And away from the muddy Thames... And the return to Paris after what often felt like exile. Don't get me wrong, the year was fine and all. But back home now among the boulevards. This presence even of the word "home", this little lighthouse, calling for a decade of more, revolving its steady beacon, cooing sirenesque...
Note The Newer Metaphysicals has changed. Change is a fine thing
I'll try to end the silence then... After so many months.