A Short History Of Myronisme: 1919 - 2009
In the turbulent wake of the Great War, Myronisme was conceived, in the bars and cafés of its two vital centres, namely urban Milan and rural Rockhampton, as an explicit revolt against the floral, false, artificial, decorative, ornate, and as one critic put it, frankly "gay" rhetoric of previous avant-gardes. Here was a new, sobre, darker, more materialist, more concrete, more analytic vision of subjective and intersubjective disintegrations, far from the sensualist abandon of a Walter Pater (whom Harold Bloom once famously designated as a "poncy naa-naa") or Gabriele D'Annunzio :
After its initial explosive debuts - and the trashing, in 1922, of a Rockhampton café by three of Myronisme's most prominent members - the group progressively jettisoned its influences garnered from the pre-war Italian Hermeticists ("Myron m'illumina d'immenso", as Giuseppe Ungaretti evocatively put it) in order to adopt a new, and astoundingly new, style, one more floral, false, artificial, "beautiful", decorative, ornate, and frankly "gay", as evidenced in what is generally considered to be the movement's dark, curlicued, arabesqaed masterpiece, coming just before the outbreak of the European war: Cinderella, of 1938 . . .
The unrivalled Gesamtkunstwerk which was Cinderella cemented Myronisme's place in the common poetic heritage, and the pantheon of European avant-gardisme more generally, as a post-symbolist, anti-idealist Brechtian satire of bourgeois heteroglossia. Here was a new, strictly poetic, hard hermeneutics, one critical of its own registers and positions of discursive, lyrical and sexual address.
In the wake of Marxism, the war in Vietnam, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Bob Dylan and the birth of Slavoj Zizek, Myronisme re-emerged some time in the mid-eighties in a new and divergent form, one reliant this time on the rejection of "easy" subject positions, the unveiling of dynamic syntactic disjunction, non-allusive alliteration, parataxis, vox-pop realpolitik and the undermining of traditional narratological assumptions. This culminated in the shockingly dark, frank sexuality of the masterpieces of what later came to be known as the M=A=N=G=L=I=N=G movement:
At its height, M=A=N=G=L=I=N=G, a direct product of the work of the Mew Mamericans and such precursors as Marles Molson and Mouis Mukofsky, was composed of such prominent figures as Marrett Matten, Myn Mejinian, Muce Mandrews, Mon Milliman, and Mae Marmantrout. Its prominence continued to grow and exert itself upon almost all production of the contemporary poetic humanities, until it stopped doing this.
Problems began to arise for M=A=N=G=L=I=N=G when other people began talking about it. No avant-garde being capable of surviving such receptive pressure, the first signs of stylistic buckling soon began to appear. In the wake of M=A=N=G=L=I=N=G - soon widely known as a mere institutionalized corruption of earlier, purer Myronismes, in the plural sense - the movement culminated in the late 90s in its post-pre-notreally-dontcallme-dadaist phase, known as MARF (or the Myronic Armed Republican Faction).
MARF, the emergence of which most critics attribute to the terrorist attacks of September 11 combined with the increasingly poor production qualities of MC Hammer's later videos, soon created furor, whooping cough and cases of genital rabies among critics from Manhattan to New Jersey over its outrageous (outrageous) jizzed Raymond Williams anal bunny crotchslide :
(One famously infamous MARF debate, for instance, between Northrop Frye, Katy Perry, Roman Jakobson and 10,000 YouTube viewers in the Stade de France resulted in an infamously famous closing exchange between Frye and the MARFISTS: "Fuck you!" "Chill dude.")
Following conflict between the various incarnations of Myronisme - the Hermetic/Minimalist, Decadent, M=A=N=G=L=I=N=G, and MARF factions, respectively - Myronisme as a movement petered out and died at approximately 7:33PM on the 10th of February 2009, Paris time.
In spite of this decline, many exegetes still believe that the trajectory of Myronisme could be more generally described as the trajectory of all art over the whole course of all of the entire 20th century.
Thank you.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
On The Nile With K. Lorraine Graham
Easily one of the most beautiful dreams I've ever had the pleasure to be vicariously part of.
"Nicholas said, with great drama, 'Ah, it is the Nile! Let us bathe!'"
"Nicholas said, with great drama, 'Ah, it is the Nile! Let us bathe!'"
Monday, February 9, 2009
Seven Petals
Love poems from my new manuscript Homo Sentimentalis : A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy are featured all throughout this week at Reb Livingston's divinely scented No Tell Motel. A new petal will appear each day.
Breathe.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Fénéon!
Ah, what pleasure to be made fun of by the darting, irreverent minds of The Fénéon Collective!
To see that my dear friend M. Katko is being made fun of too!
If only I truly was at page 481.
Stay tuned for further divinations...
Overheard Or Said In The Streets And Bars And Parks Of Paris (No. 2)
The second installment . . .
1.
– No!
– Come on baby, it's snowing.
– No!
– Time to come inside. You can come play with the white children again in the morning.
2.
– Listen, you look like a nice man. I really need some money. I locked my key in my hotel room at Place de la Concorde like 4 hours ago and my wallet's in there too and my little dog's inside and I desperately need to buy dog food for my little dog or he's going to starve inside that horrible hotel room.
– How are you going to get the food to your dog if you're locked out of the room?
– What?
– How are you going to get back in to feed him the food after you buy it? If you could get back into the room you could just get your wallet and then go buy your little dog some food.
– Ah come on man I just really need some money!
3.
– For passengers in first class, our Eurostar staff will come to you and put food directly onto your seat.
4.
– I'm sorry my English, he is not so well.
– No don't worry man, it sounds fine to me.
– No really, she is not so well.
– You're doing gre . . .
– Ah shit, I mean he is not so well. Sorry.
– . . .
– Sorry.
5.
– Here's my card. You should give me a call some time.
– Um, sure. {Long pause}. You mean for business, right?
– Business, not business, who knows!
– Um, okay. I suppose we could talk about some business stuff.
– Who know's what we'll talk about!
– Ummm . . . I just don't want this to be . . .
– Who know's what could happen!
6.
– Haven't seen snow like this since the war.
– You weren't in the war.
– That's how co . . .
– Yeah that's how cold it is. Funny stuff Marc.
– Ha ha ha ha!
7.
– Hey, I read your book!
– Oh thanks.
– You're reading tonight aren't you?
– Not tonight, no.
– Ah, then I didn't read it.
8.
{12 or 13 year-old French girl singing softly to herself in accented English}
– My ‘89 grind make my old nine shine like we been movin' bricks 'round this bitch for years I say I get it in it's because I get it in, now shorty there a eight but her friend near a ten I finna spend my G she fuck with me I'm into win, I'm cooler than her ma then we do this shit again.
9.
– Excuse me, do those stairs go up out of the metro?
– Eventually yes. It's a touch complex though. You have to turn a few times. I'm going up though if you want to follow.
– Oh no that's fine. I was just wondering.
10.
– Are you the one who does the asterisks?
– What asterisks?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
(As you may have noted, The Newer Metaphysicals these days is morphing somewhat. It is becoming a space less exclusively devoted to poetics, and more and more a weekly journal of the final year of a humble PhD candidate, in all its erratic panic and turmoiling emotional thrill. Apparently blogs are organic structures. But please feel free to tell me if you don't care for this new orientation. If there's backlash, I'll try to begin talking again about poetics, that is, making fun of Ted Kooser).
Sunday, February 1, 2009
I have precisely 210 days to finish my PhD. If I seem absent, or neglectful of correspondence, it is for this. It is the culmination, or is meant to be, of some 4 years work, though the roots of these reflections go back much further.
The task sometimes seems very daunting. French PhDs, moreso than their English or American counterparts, are exceedingly long. The minimum is perhaps 450 pages, and the good, "solid" ones tend to be over 500, extending sometimes to 700. My PhD will be, it seems, approximately 550 pages, excluding the various annexes and appendices.
I hope I can do this. Scratch that. I will do this. It is by far the most difficult thing I've ever tried to do. But rather a lot depends on it: my future here in Europe, my life in France, my desire to teach literature, which I've had, to the best of my memory, since the age of perhaps 12.
(Also - and this thought is calming me recently in the midst of uncertainties - I will soon be attempting to become French, and to go through the process of naturalisation. I am, of course, as much French as I am Australian or Irish or Scottish. But I've never thought of myself as a citizen of any country. I simply want to be able to move through borders freely, and to meet no administrative discrimination thanks to my perpetual foreigner status. I'm rather tired of answering the question: "Where do you come from?" Now, depending on the situation, I sometimes make up a variety of answers. Please, if you do it, don't ask people with slight accents where they come from until you know them well. Think of something else to talk about.)
It is 6 years that I have been gone. How can it be so long? This amazes me.
Whatever happens though, at least I know that nobody has so tried, whatever the success, to utterly destroy and then partially rebuild, on the ruins of a failed idealist culture, the terribly damaging notion of poetic sincerity from 1900 on.
At least, if nothing else, I know this.
If it is, one day, published, will anyone be able to say again "the poet is not being sincere here"? This is what I hope that no-one will be able to do.
The mood I am in at the moment, daily, could be described as anything save "poetic". In any sense. It is not even a poetic of irony or detachment or self-consciousness. It is rather a soul-state composed of such questions as: "Do I need to pre-apply through the CIES to be eligible for ATER positions?" or more generally "How precisely will I feed myself after September?" It is thus, in short, the most extraordinary pragmatism. A 9 o'clock (or 10 or 11 if I lay in bed looking at the ceiling for a while as the sun filters through the curtains, thinking about the coming day) I arrive at the beautiful circular-vaulted room of the old National Library (the one near the stock-exchange, not the wondrous modern glass-coated Death Star).
I go to the new BNF, the real BNF, when I need to do real research, that is, consult books. I go to the old BNF, now the INHA (National Institute of Art History I believe) when I simply need to be alone, to write and rewrite chapters. I know nobody there. There are people writing on Rubens and Man Ray. I am not distracted by any books relevant to my subject. On the vault above there are the names of the major cities of the world inscribed in enormous lettering, and they rim the overhead, arching glass. It is good to look at the names of these cities. They must have been written there hundreds of years ago, though I know nothing of the library's history. All I know is that the one which pleases me most is the one which almost smilingly reads "Byzantium".
I go out for coffee every two hours or so and walk around the crumbling statues in the courtyard. The sparrows always cluster about my feet, apparently used to old researchers taking pity upon them with crushed sandwiches flaking down onto ice.
I go back inside. Every so often, when I can no longer look at language or think by using its specific means, I will go through some new variation or novelty in the Nimzo-Indian or Caro-Kann for a half-hour, thus clearing my head with this rather variant formality.
So it is very strange living in the heart of this daily pragmatism, when many other things fade from view. It is in these times, for instance, that you entirely stop asking yourself such questions as "Does this or that person feel for me/desire me/love me?" or "Am I having enough powerful and valuable experiences in my life?"
It really does makes one think, in short, that these are almost entirely "leisure questions": in no way unimportant, of course, simply the things we wonder over when there is not 8 hours solid labour, albeit intellectual, to be done, in order to make something of ourselves (or have food to eat and a nice place to live).
These days, of late winter and with much change apparently about to occur, I keep returning in my mind to a recurrent dream. I'm no longer sure if it was once a dream or simply a fantasy which I invested with this new wakeful status.
In any case, I am on the threshold of the small lounge room of a rather beautiful apartment. Sun is slanting in through a window on one side. It is obviously in France - though it's difficult for me to define why I am so sure of this, perhaps simply the specific type of polished floors and light fittings which I have never seen anywhere else - though not necessarily in Paris. Perhaps Strasbourg, Bordeaux or Lyon. The avatar of this semi-mythical place is an apartment I looked at some years ago, with my partner at the time. It was a time when I had some savings, and could afford it. The place was in Paris's north, and it looked out over the extending railway tracks. It was quite beautiful, and belonged to a friend of mine who subsequently went to teach literature in Bordeaux. In any case, for a number of reasons which I won't get into, we didn't take that place. I regret it, but it wasn't possible. Perhaps it wasn't, in the end, for the best.
But the place in this dream is like that, only different. Notably, there are my belongings in the lounge room, though I don't have many. Simply books and a few other assorted objects. The room has those shelves cut into the wall, so common in French apartments: as if everybody has simply many, many books, and will need all this pre-built shelf space. So my books line these walls: the many poetry collections, some forty or so signed by the poets, friends, mentors and idols. My chess books are on one of the lower shelves, classified, as they are not now - strewn as they are across my messy PhD demeure, on the covers of which are set the odd candlestick or bills and various other assorted ephemera - into opening repertoires and strategical classics (the spine of Nimzowich's My System winking in the sun). They are guarded by blackwood bookends. There is a plant nestled in the white hollow among the books.
In one corner of the room, the sunlit one below the window - which perhaps looks out onto perspectivally receding railway tracks or some central courtyard deserted by all save the requisite two or three French cats - is a round table, upon which sits my chess set. The pieces are well-lit in this obviously matinal luminosity, and their formality smiles in a sort of tranquil, reposed beauty.
There is a sofa, the colour of which I'm not sure, with a coffee cup below a lamp, and my two bonsai plants are also in the room, trimmed better than they are now, their location apparently shifting each time I mentally re-enter this imagined space.
This is all I know about this space. It represents, for the moment, everything I want and perhaps could ever want to be.
The task sometimes seems very daunting. French PhDs, moreso than their English or American counterparts, are exceedingly long. The minimum is perhaps 450 pages, and the good, "solid" ones tend to be over 500, extending sometimes to 700. My PhD will be, it seems, approximately 550 pages, excluding the various annexes and appendices.
I hope I can do this. Scratch that. I will do this. It is by far the most difficult thing I've ever tried to do. But rather a lot depends on it: my future here in Europe, my life in France, my desire to teach literature, which I've had, to the best of my memory, since the age of perhaps 12.
(Also - and this thought is calming me recently in the midst of uncertainties - I will soon be attempting to become French, and to go through the process of naturalisation. I am, of course, as much French as I am Australian or Irish or Scottish. But I've never thought of myself as a citizen of any country. I simply want to be able to move through borders freely, and to meet no administrative discrimination thanks to my perpetual foreigner status. I'm rather tired of answering the question: "Where do you come from?" Now, depending on the situation, I sometimes make up a variety of answers. Please, if you do it, don't ask people with slight accents where they come from until you know them well. Think of something else to talk about.)
It is 6 years that I have been gone. How can it be so long? This amazes me.
Whatever happens though, at least I know that nobody has so tried, whatever the success, to utterly destroy and then partially rebuild, on the ruins of a failed idealist culture, the terribly damaging notion of poetic sincerity from 1900 on.
At least, if nothing else, I know this.
If it is, one day, published, will anyone be able to say again "the poet is not being sincere here"? This is what I hope that no-one will be able to do.
The mood I am in at the moment, daily, could be described as anything save "poetic". In any sense. It is not even a poetic of irony or detachment or self-consciousness. It is rather a soul-state composed of such questions as: "Do I need to pre-apply through the CIES to be eligible for ATER positions?" or more generally "How precisely will I feed myself after September?" It is thus, in short, the most extraordinary pragmatism. A 9 o'clock (or 10 or 11 if I lay in bed looking at the ceiling for a while as the sun filters through the curtains, thinking about the coming day) I arrive at the beautiful circular-vaulted room of the old National Library (the one near the stock-exchange, not the wondrous modern glass-coated Death Star).
I go to the new BNF, the real BNF, when I need to do real research, that is, consult books. I go to the old BNF, now the INHA (National Institute of Art History I believe) when I simply need to be alone, to write and rewrite chapters. I know nobody there. There are people writing on Rubens and Man Ray. I am not distracted by any books relevant to my subject. On the vault above there are the names of the major cities of the world inscribed in enormous lettering, and they rim the overhead, arching glass. It is good to look at the names of these cities. They must have been written there hundreds of years ago, though I know nothing of the library's history. All I know is that the one which pleases me most is the one which almost smilingly reads "Byzantium".
I go out for coffee every two hours or so and walk around the crumbling statues in the courtyard. The sparrows always cluster about my feet, apparently used to old researchers taking pity upon them with crushed sandwiches flaking down onto ice.
I go back inside. Every so often, when I can no longer look at language or think by using its specific means, I will go through some new variation or novelty in the Nimzo-Indian or Caro-Kann for a half-hour, thus clearing my head with this rather variant formality.
So it is very strange living in the heart of this daily pragmatism, when many other things fade from view. It is in these times, for instance, that you entirely stop asking yourself such questions as "Does this or that person feel for me/desire me/love me?" or "Am I having enough powerful and valuable experiences in my life?"
It really does makes one think, in short, that these are almost entirely "leisure questions": in no way unimportant, of course, simply the things we wonder over when there is not 8 hours solid labour, albeit intellectual, to be done, in order to make something of ourselves (or have food to eat and a nice place to live).
These days, of late winter and with much change apparently about to occur, I keep returning in my mind to a recurrent dream. I'm no longer sure if it was once a dream or simply a fantasy which I invested with this new wakeful status.
In any case, I am on the threshold of the small lounge room of a rather beautiful apartment. Sun is slanting in through a window on one side. It is obviously in France - though it's difficult for me to define why I am so sure of this, perhaps simply the specific type of polished floors and light fittings which I have never seen anywhere else - though not necessarily in Paris. Perhaps Strasbourg, Bordeaux or Lyon. The avatar of this semi-mythical place is an apartment I looked at some years ago, with my partner at the time. It was a time when I had some savings, and could afford it. The place was in Paris's north, and it looked out over the extending railway tracks. It was quite beautiful, and belonged to a friend of mine who subsequently went to teach literature in Bordeaux. In any case, for a number of reasons which I won't get into, we didn't take that place. I regret it, but it wasn't possible. Perhaps it wasn't, in the end, for the best.
But the place in this dream is like that, only different. Notably, there are my belongings in the lounge room, though I don't have many. Simply books and a few other assorted objects. The room has those shelves cut into the wall, so common in French apartments: as if everybody has simply many, many books, and will need all this pre-built shelf space. So my books line these walls: the many poetry collections, some forty or so signed by the poets, friends, mentors and idols. My chess books are on one of the lower shelves, classified, as they are not now - strewn as they are across my messy PhD demeure, on the covers of which are set the odd candlestick or bills and various other assorted ephemera - into opening repertoires and strategical classics (the spine of Nimzowich's My System winking in the sun). They are guarded by blackwood bookends. There is a plant nestled in the white hollow among the books.
In one corner of the room, the sunlit one below the window - which perhaps looks out onto perspectivally receding railway tracks or some central courtyard deserted by all save the requisite two or three French cats - is a round table, upon which sits my chess set. The pieces are well-lit in this obviously matinal luminosity, and their formality smiles in a sort of tranquil, reposed beauty.
There is a sofa, the colour of which I'm not sure, with a coffee cup below a lamp, and my two bonsai plants are also in the room, trimmed better than they are now, their location apparently shifting each time I mentally re-enter this imagined space.
This is all I know about this space. It represents, for the moment, everything I want and perhaps could ever want to be.
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