Ok... I'll bite

Well, Gary's come out swinging on his weblog, and it's not like I have nothing better to do today but I frankly think he was swinging low... here's my riposte. (None of us have time for more headaches, so hopefully this will fade quick.)

Hey Gary,

Well, this gets MY goat -- I'd be happy to see this go away, but you really go pretty low here -- I'll apologize in advance for taking you up on all your points, and hope this doesn't hurt your feelings. Maybe you could post my response on your weblog?

> DWH's comments above, unlike Swift's brilliant, exhaustive
> excoriation, lack any measurable sense of experience with the medium
> he's dismissing.

Darren's written over 4 books on the subject, and is the creator of both alienated.net (which you should know) and Free as in Speech and Beer, which is a spin-off of his book of that title -- so, if that's a way of "measuring" a "sense of experience," then let's use it.

If by "medium" you mean "personal weblog," then you do not medium as he clearly means it in his paragraph, which is the medium of the internet. Consequently, if you are comparing Darren's blog prose-style to Swifts, you might as well compare Silliman's to Coleridge's, or your own to Mark Twain's -- and then you are right in there with Darren, chanting "anemia," since neither you, nor Silliman (nor I) write so well. Nice tautology.

> I've already argued here for the value of personal weblogs--has Sei
> Shonagon's unedited, "formless" Pillow Book grown "thin" over time?

"Thin over time" -- I think we are talking about two different times here, that of history and that of, say, the daily news. I'm sure there is a blog out there that, collected in its entirety, might be worth reading several years from now, but that's not quite what we are talking about, is it? And because one person succeeds in a "genre" does not free the genre itself for all criticisms. Certainly the historical and romance novel has had its many brilliant successes, but for the most part they are not done well for reasons endemic to the culture that often produces them, that of the cheap paperback novel. So does that mean we don't try to imagine what a good historical novel might be like?

> mostly gender-centric assumptions

This is truly playing to the crowd? Darren's a man, eghad! (Wow, it really gets worse below... Gary, this is disappointing.)

> Let's look at two key words: "over time." Note that, for instance,
> Circulars (which DWH, as well as BKS, had a significant hand in), has
> slowed down significantly in since the invasion in Iraq--it's still
> being updated, but not at all with the collective excitement the site
> enjoyed in the first three or four months of its existence. "Over
> time," the content (literally the content) of Circulars has, in fact,
> thinned--to a proportionally greater degree than, say, that of
> personal weblogs such as Nick Piombino's Fait Accompli or Eileen
> Tabios's CorpsePoetics (formerly WinePoetics). This need not be the
> fate of a politically oriented, multi-authored web publication: take a
> look, for instance, at counterpunch.org.

Counterpunch is a muckraking newsletter that has a paid staff. Circulars was a short-term effort (or as short-term as the war) that was a response to what I sensed was, or would be (or hoped to be) a moment of crisis in terms of American self-identification. But like sports, crises has its seasons, and as you know having seen Circulars, it was a site with a mandate to collect the "disparate activity of poets" out there -- if there is no such activity, then certainly I can't collect it. Nor can I write it -- Coburn and St. Clair are professional journalists who make it there business to churn out prose -- it's what they've trained themselves to do, whereas I've trained myself in something quite different in terms of writing. They have a network of journalists (there is, after all, much more writing on political issues than there is about off-the-cuff journalism about poetry). Anyway, the comparison is specious: Counterpunch is not a weblog, it has a budget, a press office, etc. You know that. And as you know, I announced the death of Circulars weeks ago -- it didn't mysteriously trail away -- the point being that, next time, it could be done better, starting afresh. The paragraph that Nada is commenting on is in fact from an "exchange on Circulars" -- we're thinking of how to do it better. Anything wrong with that?

> DWH uses the modifier "anemic" to describe what he sees as an
> inevitability: the diminishing returns of personal weblogs. Without
> getting into Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor,"

(Why not? I can't imagine anything in it would be as low as what you write below...)

> there's something gender-specific about that particular word and the
> images it may conjur up: It is, after all, women who most often suffer
> from anemia--Nada, for instance, whose strong reaction to DWH's post
> you can read in the "comments" section following DHS's original
> post--has had at least two life-threatening instances of the
> affliction. Would, I wonder, DWH use "diabetic" in a similar way?
> Doubtful.

This is absurd. Plenty of men have anemia (from hemorrhoids, as it turns out, but also just plain old disease). And so did my mother (not from hemorrhoids), for years, and I'm not offended. And she's Korean, could have been a lack of iron in her Korean diet -- did Darren know that? This is low and ridiculous, frankly.

> Why not? Let's be frank: unconsciously, DWH probably would *not* use
> an illness as metaphor that he associated with someone he knows and
> respects. Anemia is a "safe" illness to use as metaphor--unlike AIDS, it's not un-PC to use it this way; unlike diabetes, it's probably not something any of his male writer friends actually has. It is, in fact, something *women* (and old people) have.

You mean, because Steve McCaffery and I are diabetic, he held back from calling webblogs "hypoglycemic"? This is a unique bit of reasoning. And what do you, or anyone else, know about Darren's "unconscious"? What are *you* unconsciously writing about then?

Andrea Brady recently told me that she was "hemmoraging money" in New York -- did I take offense because old people hemmorage more than young? Because hemmoraging leads to anemia? Would you?

> The public journal has, since the Heian period when Sei Shonagon
> authored hers, been associated with "women's writing." Blogger's
> precursor, Diaryland, was decidedly gendered (in look and attitude)
> *female*--assumption no doubt being that the personal journal is
> something chix do.

Most of the bloggers on my blogroll are male because most of them *are* male -- one of them has a blog called "The Jism" -- and I cringe every time I see that name there. Do you? And this business about the public journal going back to the Heian period -- well, what are the great public journals of the last 500 years? Just because it's from a different culture (an "Oriental" culture, I might add), and a different time, does this exotic "otherness" give it authority? Of course, I won't press this point.

> What, one wonders, does DWH consider to be "content"? Anyone who has
> read his wonderful book, Tapeworm Foundry, is probably going to be in
> the dark. (The work decidedly comes down on the Form side of the
> Form/Content divide. It's a oulipoianesque formal game--a good
> one--but a game, nonetheless.)

Sorry Gary, but I have to point out that there's nothing Oulipian about Darren's book -- it's just a string of ideas for poems and performance art projects, hardly formal -- it's a mess, it's more like Cage, loose but all "written," and full of "content" -- you make it sound like Barrett Watten's early work here. Just because it's not confessional content does not mean it's not content. Darren's book can be seen at www.ubu.com/ubu.

> Certainly, if we are to take what DWH says in the Circulars exchange
> at face value, he does not consider one's personal thoughts, opinions
> and emotions to be content--or they are, anyway, *thin* content.

Utterly beside the point. First of all, Nada is responding to an expression of Darren's "personal thoughts," and certainly to his "opinion" -- her complaint, in fact, was that it was "opinionated" (ironic for her of course; she, as do you, as do I, obviously believe that having "opinions" and knowing what they are is important in terms of self-identity). And just because someone splashes on a page "I feel like shit today" does not mean that they are expressing emotions in a way that makes for worthwhile reading -- otherwise, writing would be very easy, and we'd all have best sellers.

Why is it so crazy to think that one has to spend time in writing, and that writing "emotions" is practically the hardest thing to do? I'm amazed at how easy everyone thinks writing is!

(And frankly, if you thought that blogs were at their best when they were in the process of writing "emotions", then why was your St. Mark's blog issue entirely concerned with literary criticism -- didn't have any space for emotions there?)

> Dig the tone of the language he uses: Very Professor Tweed Condescends
> in order to Set the Freshman Girl Straight: "There's nothing *wrong*
> with personal weblogs ..."

You make it sound like he is responding to Nada when in fact Nada is responding to a semi-private correspondence that Darren and I are having and that I'm posting to my blog. Nice camera trick -- "fixed in the edit" -- but it's wrong.

> which have seen Everything! Everything!

Maybe you should read one of the many books he's written on the subject (none released in the US, unfortunately, but in the "elsewhere" of Canada, which I guess isn't far away enough). Why go over the top when you lack basic facts (and, of course, Nada thought Darren wrote "Eunoia").

> before suggesting that one way of addressing anemia is to do "more
> collective writing"--in other words, girls, you really *are*
> incomplete without your (male) Other. Oh, and, in Perfect Professor
> fashion,

Darren's a professor? I've seen you wear more tweed. (You are really beating a rather dead-non-horse here with the gender thing. This is, I dare say, a great example of how an argument can go "anemic" over time.)

> he reminds Freshman & Lapsed Freshman Chix Everywhere: "The problem is
> partly a need for education."

Yes, the education word kind of bothered me here, too, but I think he meant "self-education" -- as in what I did, teach myself a few things. But so he's suggesting that, well, now that we're in the web world, why not take it the next step instead of being bystanders? The internet is there for the taking, why trivialize its great potentialities.

> Uh huh. Of course it is. That's *always* the problem. Because, you
> see, without it, that grand and beautufully Male Thing: Ed(it) YOU
> Cation -- you see, without THAT, people can fall into a dangerous
> space where they begin to think their own thoughts, imagine their own
> futures, and create their own works of art.

Yes, male = edit. Or, male = education. Or whatever, not sure what the point is -- that the women in Afghanistan are not happy about going to school because it's a male thing to do? I'm sure I could list a thousand female poets who edit more than, say, Ron Silliman. Who, by the way, is the most prolific blogger out there. If one really cared for one's own thoughts, one would take the time to write them out very carefully. Original thoughts are, after all, hard to come by.

> DWH's message: Join the Boy's Club. Become Part of the New Old Boy's
> Network. (Note that these multi-authored blogs tend to be male-run,
> and largely male populated.)

Dude, as I said, drop the "multi-authored" from the above and you are talking about blog culture in general. And what multi-authored blogs are you talking about -- you sound like a professor here! You must know something I don't, because you seem to have the entire culture under your thumb! Was there not about a %75 to %25 male to female ratio at the commix convention the other day? Feel guilty? Not me (title of an Eileen Myles book concerned with independent thinking).

(I think it's useful to believe that some people know more about something than I do, like I know that you know more about commix than I do -- doesn't mean I'm a sycophant. I think that equation is harmful.)

> So, where does this language and attitude of DWH come from, and where
> will it lead? Simple: If one *really* wants others to join them, to
> work with them, on some possibly politically relevant or even
> potentially utopic site--it's *crucial* to be arrogant andor
> dismissive andor sexist andor ...

right. Either way, the men win again.

Posted by Brian Stefans at June 24, 2003 11:27 AM | TrackBack