After 15 years . . .

Musilean

There's no doubt for me personally that Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is as fine a book as Joyce’s Ulysses, and that, moreover, both are, for me, “better” – in the sense of richer, if not in the sense of more occasionally and sporadically beautiful – than Proust’s Recherche. Proust is extraordinary, only some don't seem to want to admit that he is also a deeply idiosyncratic writer, obsessed with concerns which are at once so specific and so raffiné – the history of French aristocratic lineage, simultaneous covering and exposure of homosexuality and jewishness, jealousy as 600 page autopsy – that they seem to dominate to the detriment of stunning insight and atmospheric rendering.

(In fact, the unusual thing for me is that, for all the critical pages spent on Bergsonian objective/subjective time-states, identity and memory, these foci, if merely judged by the no-brain method of the page-count, are not Proust’s most dear. They are usually, it’s true, the novels’ primary points and axes of development; yet they are also given short-shrift in terms of ink and narratological ardor, which is perhaps not something to be entirely overlooked).

Similarly, critics are interested in Robert Musil’s renovation and re-implication of positivism, science and scientific language into the modern novel, a result whose lineage is distinct and major, even in our own contemporary literature, from DeLillo to Pynchon. Or, a great and justifiable interest is made to bear on Musil’s own transformation of the novel as genre – not quite on the level of Joyce but surely a little above that of Proust – providing the genre with a new formality and a new field of references and influences by making chapters resemble essays, each with their own dialogic and centre of intellectual engagement. This harks back of course to the novel’s 18th century origins, and the essay-like genre return is not the only aspect resembling Sterne, but also the entire ironic tonality which, though at once more serious and more dark than Sterne’s Tristram, serves to render any dialectic engagement infinitely more complex by its gradation according to irony’s vague and shifting colour-scale.

(And yet, for all this, one of the most surprising things in the novel is simply its mis en scène of a scientist - essentially an extraordinary positivist, ex-mathematician, ex-engineer - to replace the Wertherian or Byronian heroic model, and without whom Max Frisch and Hannah Arendt’s Homo Faber would not be possible).

This has the surprising effect of making The Man Without Qualities resemble, simultaneously, philosophy in its most originary state – Platonic dialogue – and also the novel in its most originary state – namely, that of the serialized, chapterized narrative, bearing no distinct or utter demarcation with the journalism published next to it.

For all this, there exist the overused critical epithets of Joycean and Proustean to describe novelistic procedures and fictional effects, and yet Musilean is, at least from English, absent. Interestingly, though Joycean and Proustean may have been largely stripped of their meanings, Musilean seems to me to suggest the possibility of a rather coherent term, at least to a reader familiar with The Man Without Qualities, Torless and the Novellas. So, what might Musilean mean:

Musilean. adj. (more rarely: adv.) Denoting a literature of ideas which tempers its ideas, be they positivist or not, by a tone of intelligent and sophisticated irony which, though never belligerent, produces a marked flattening effect which makes emerge relevant absurdities or paradoxes in such “knowledge”, without for all that depriving this knowledge of all epistemological, or even merely psychological, value.”

So, that’s my definition of Musilean. (And yes, that's also why I don't write dictionaries). In any case, I expect it to be used frequently and profitably to describe everything from sitcoms to the Vice President’s most recent public address.

Rendez-vous - Claude Lelouche

I've never been able to decide if I find it beautiful or hideous . . . Context:

"C'était un rendez-vous" by Claude Lelouche. A Ferrari at 250kmh through Paris... The driver was an F1 Pilot. Lelouche was arrested when he presented the movie. He never admitted who the driver was.

For those who know Paris, the itinerary is quite typical. And after a while, even before he starts climbing that hill, you know exactly where he's going. So, like Jordan Stempleman's reading (see below), watch it till the end.


(Update: Mr. C. Adams from the French department of my old haunt, the proud sandstone edifice of The University of Queensland, corrects me by way of the pesky IMDB: "The route taken in the film is 10.42 km long (6.48 mi). It takes the driver 7:57 to cover that distance, giving him an average speed of 78.64 km/h (48.86 mph)." (I note for Mr. A that this is an average: he could have gone close to 250 on the Champs, non? Je passe.) "Until recently, there was no confirmation of who was driving or what car he was driving. Over the years, various sources claimed an F1 driver was at the wheel of a Le Mans Matra 675, Ferrari 275 GTB, or an Alpine A110. However, Claude Lelouch confirmed on his official website in March 2006 that he was driving, and it was a 6.9 litre Mercedes". "You should do yr research better", opines Mr. A. Thanks Mr A. Now get back to yr goddamn Phd on Deleuze and all those plateaux or whatever).

I Think I Can Tell the Difference: A Poem

"Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference" – Billy Collins in an interview with Guernica

Some sex is warranted and other sex I think is gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.
Some overpasses are warranted and other overpasses I think are gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.
Some homosexuality is warranted and other homosexuality I think is gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.
Some rhymes are warranted and other homosexuality I think is gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.
As Man Ray says, “It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms."
And I think I can tell the difference.
Some tourists are warranted and other tourists I think are gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.
Some sestinas are warranted and other sestinas I think are gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.
Some killings are warranted and other killings I think are gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.
Some wars are warranted and other wars I think are gratuitous.
And I think I can tell the difference.

NEW! Jordan Stempleman at The Continental Review

The latest update to The Continental Review is Jordan Stempleman reading from "The Travels".

I must admit, this is one of my favourite pieces we have done so far for the Review, and for several reasons. (Though of course, they're all my favourites!) Firstly, everything went so smoothly: Jordan sent me through everything in the space of a few hours, I filmed some footage, we got to editing and everything was wrapped up in time for Parisian afternoon coffee. Secondly, I think these are beautiful poems, and moreover Jordan has a deeply rhythmic, though strangely humble, reading voice. And lastly, you simply must watch the video until the very end, as there is a little surprise that no-one, I think, was expecting.

The reading, visuals and music: it all seemed very organic and coherent. Sometimes things just work.

Thankyou Jordan for letting us put this most intimate reading out there.

Monitoring the Videowaves

Tracking today the viewing figures for the various poetic performances already featured at The Continental Review has revealed some interesting trends.

The views for many of the vids clocks in between 250 and 300: better, one has to admit, than your average poetry reading. (Of course, some of these views may last 12 seconds, and still be counted as a 1 by the counter: but the same perhaps occurs, if not so radically, in some real-life readings!) These pieces do then, I think, represent some degree of exposure for the artists in question, which I'm pleased about, as there's no real point having a supposedly innovative journal with zero innovative viewers.

The site has so far recorded, in its ensemble, some 1500 hits, which is a lot more than 250 views for each vid, (meaning that, just like any other journal, everyone in no way watches every vid, but rather the poets they would like to see, or simply those who catch their eye). Of course, a journal can't expect as many visits as a frequently updated blog, but still this number is a touch on the low-side, one reason no doubt being my choice to let people freely embed videos on blogs and websites, a function I could turn off, but I felt, and still do, that it only lends greater exposure to it if bloggers can simply put things all in one place, and rather than linking, just say: "Hey, check this out . . ."

What I'm quite sure of is that interest is still fairly restricted, and a little more than I'd like, to known avant poetics circles: put in the word POETRY at YouTube as a search term, for example, and you still come up with Slam events, the Muppets, animated Billy Collins poems, but none of our vids.

Che sera . . . It might be changeable. As for those videos leading the way: Allyssa Wolf is still out in front with 402 views (go Allyssa!). Collaborations are also of primary interest apparently, as the great Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson are coming in at a proud second with 387.

As for the ratings: no comments yet (shame), or even better, no video replies! (A personalised video reply to your favourite poet: now wouldn't that be fun!)

Moreover, some tasteless member of the rozza multitudine has inexplicably given ONE STAR to Tom's glorious vid: a situation which must be rectified! Vote vote vote. This is a democracy, people.

So, apologies for the no doubt retentive statistics. It is perhaps, however, an editor's job to make sure that work which has been given a home is seen, circulated and responded to. Thus justifying any inherently amusing number-crunching.

Reception and Capitalism: Imagining the Reader

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Who will read it? Not many. Those who do will be most interested in how it relates to their own production. In this way the whole individual effort amounts to the work of a group, each member of which hopes for their own advancement, but also the general prosperity of the group as a whole, for this prosperity will, in theory, allow the individual to partake of it. The group dynamic is thus simultaneously self-interested and altruistic, these two terms being not polar opposites, but rather in a symbiotic, dialectic, and self-defining relationship. Any attempted discussion to situate the group as being “more” or “less” self-interested, or “more” or “less” altruistic, falls into an initial rhetorical trap, for it fails to recognise that both terms exist as beads upon the same string, so that when one end is jigged the other responds similarly. In the ideal arrangement of this, the altruistic act adds to the community, which gives back to the individuals within the community by its mere common advancement: a type of meliorism. Thus, no act is truly “altruistic” in the sense of being sacrificial, for it will always have a product, which then needs to be properly distributed. “Altruism is in your own interest” is the paradoxical motto of this paradigm, and it addresses certain manifestations of the receptive community fairly well. The problem is obviously when an individual contributes to the community in a way which the community does not repay: this is the point where problems occur, at the distributive level. But the source of the problem is not the demonic self-interest on the part of individuals, which though it absolutely occurs, is less widespread than a merely systemic injustic, which is often out of individual's control. It is the effect of the system as system, on the system, which is largely haphazard and untraceable, in the sense that it does not trace itself, and is thus prone to injustice.

This is where contemporary reception resembles capitalism: the idea that, by valorising certain productions, the total production will be made better, and one may participate in this new totality as an individual. Canonization is in this sense a rationalisation, which aims to concentrate attention, and thus effort, on “successful” or “effective” elements of the group dynamic as it moves through time. The canon, moreover, is a synchronic freeze-frame of this movement, which attempts to make sense of the intersections of various group dynamics. QED, the canon never moves. Rather, the canon is like a flip-book with many stationary freeze-frames side by side, giving thus the impression of movement. We may be tricked into believing in its flux, in its diachronicity, but the canon is in truth many variant visions of stasis stacked end on end. The canon is negative in the sense that all rationalisation, aiming for productivity, is an exclusion and reduction justified by the optic of growth.

The Reader, being a Writer, is thus more or as interested in your work for his or her own work, though this is not necessarily a negative aspect if seen in the context of a group dynamic where self-interest and altruism are necessarily co-dependant and co-defining. It is also true however – and this is at once the irony and the key point– that often one writes, in no real sense, for this set of readers, that is, for the other members of the community, but rather for an undefined ideal, a dream individualized and materialized in an O’Harian abstraction: “Poetry is part of your self.” There is a space then where one attempts to abstract oneself from the purely “exchange-based" relationship of the dynamic – which Mallarmé truly abhorred, and this is the reason why Mallarmé, in spite of all his bourgeoiserie and snobbery, was in fact also an anti-capitalist – into a space where altruism and self-interest push and pull upon one another less strongly.

This space does not hope to gain something by its passivity. In fact, it is the only space where one may gain nothing. In some ways, it resembles death, and may be strongly contrasted to the life and violence of the living receptive community. This space is not an aesthetic, Longinian sublime, existing untouched from dialectic and discourse: rather, it is a place of synchronicity over diachronicity, the One Room which Woolf talks of where all are writing together, at once. Mostly, we do not inhabit this room, but rather a landscape where a very many individuals are unequally spaced, with different means and different ways of living, some massively neglected and others vastly over-praised. (But, do the readers we have, or those we dream of, exist in this extended landscape, or in the small, One Room? This is the question).

This also means that the work of one’s peers may never maintain a spiritual place quite so profound or meaningful within oneself as the work of non-contemporaries. Not merely, of course, because of a sense of jealousy or pressure to meet contemporary standards, but simply because being involved in the active, communal process of contemporary reception removes one from the passive state which often produces strong aesthetic feelings and allegiances. (The allegiances built in the active landscape may be strong, but they will be different, and still involved to a greater degree in the false dialectic of altruism and self-interest).

This stress on “passivity” seems unpopular, even dangerous. But it must be taken as it’s said. For no-one may pretend to an “active”, in the sense of contemporary, engagement with Shakespeare: though we may criticize it or praise it, the work has entered a space where declaring oneself a “Shakespearian” is neither self-interested nor altruistic, but simply meaningless. It is not only great works which obtain this type of passivity, but really all works over time. It is a sort of calm which comes to them, which much like the calm of death, signals a sort of beauty which sadly couples together an absence of violence with an absence of life.

How2 - New Media

An excellent, very interesting New Media segment in the new issue of How2. (And a great review of Laura Mullen by local Paris poet Jennifer Dick). Check it out.

Sexism: A Look Back

Those of you in the States probably don't know of Harry Enfield, a satirist whose pieces, such as the one below, often attain for me a sort of conceptual and dare one say aesthetic perfection.




What's interesting for me in these types of retroactive making-fun of idiotic social mores is that there is simply nothing one wouldn't expect - everything is laid out in a cogent and almost unimaginative order to present a fairly accurate, in the end, vision of male chauvinism - and yet, in spite of its predictability, the piece has for me what amounts to a sort of formal perfection, which extends from its spot-on use of the genre of the 50's information film - where the finest segment is no doubt the diagram of "female information uptake" - right through to an atmosphere of artificiliaty mixed with satire which is damn near poetic.

New! Spencer Selby in The Continental Review

Delighted to be featuring, as the next update for The Continental Review, the very first online video appearance of Spencer Selby's magnificent poetry with his sumptuous visuals. And as Spencer tells me, this is also his very first appearance on YouTube. Do check it out.

You can read more about Spencer in Ron Silliman's post a short time ago regarding the most recent collection, Twist of Address. And for those not in the know:

Poet and visual artist Spencer Selby was born in 1947 in Iowa City, Iowa, and studied political science and psychology at The University of Iowa. In the mid-1980s he started SINK Press in San Francisco, and coordinated The Canessa Park Reading Series in North Beach from 1987-93. His poetry collections include Instar, Barricade, House of Before, Sound Off, No Island, The Big R and Task. He also has three books of visual work: Stigma, Malleable Cast and Problem Pictures. His art has appeared in group shows and he was co-editor of the visual poetry magazine Score. His most recent collection, Twist of Address, is his first in some years. It is out from Shearsman Books.

Claire Potter at The Sydney Writers Festival

Australian poet Claire Potter, at the Sydney Writers' festival, writes her poem Bird-Card for Lingis as part of the intriguing Occasional Poetry Project:




Fascinating to see the term of occasional poetry taken, and reflected upon, so seriously. Mallarmé would be rightly proud. Claire reads her poem, and is interviewed by Andrea Featherstone, in an engaging exchange about what constitutes "occasionality" in poetry, here.

I wish I could have been there.

Our Michael Magee

An important discussion is going on in the comments field of Craig Perez's blog regarding the voluntary removal, thanks to threatened legal action, of Craig's truly exceptional essay "My Michael Magee and the Frontier of Democratic Symbolic Action" from the current issue of John Tranter's Jacket.

How darkly telling this controversy is in light of the now inacessible Emerson quote, which was (to be) the essay's byline: "We must realize our rhetoric and rituals."

Indeed we must. What's at stake? Questions of what a critic may say. Why dialogue is so often seconded to the non-exchange of confrontation. What a critic's responsibilities are: to formulate provocatively and tentatively the content, borders and methodology of a discourse - formulation marked often by a concurrent ambiguity of critical tone and positioning - or to fall back on the orthodox and engagementless position.

We know the dream of Aristotle was not that of Horace: those who need shape our rhetorics are not our lawyers, but our poets.

My dear, dear Louis

A case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a : both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. - Zukofsky

The stunning understanding in simplicity of Zukofsky helps me. Calming in beauty. You realize, as Hugh Kenner says, “how little his banalities are banal, how exact, under scrutiny, are his impenetrabilities."

Z to A. Z – A. Z around A.

“All words are abstract.”