Dear New Yorker,

I’m writing to you concerning the racism of the 6,000-word profile of Kenny Goldsmith titled “Something Borrowed.”

The racism expresses itself structurally: understanding that some readers will already be aware of the controversy around Kenny’s work, and that those unaware might be turned off when it’s revealed that Kenny is “beleaguered” due to the uproar around his reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report – revised to end, consequently, with a note on the “unremarkable” nature of Brown’s genitals – as a piece of “avant-garde” art at an Ivy League arts conference, the author sets the stage for a sympathetic reading of this obscenity by demonizing those who would critique it. The author seeds the text with subtle denigrations, largely through negative characterizations, of non-“conceptual” writers, targeting particularly Asian Americans.

The first seed: in paragraph three, the poet Cathy Park Hong is noted as speaking “resentfully” about Kenny’s career. The quote from Hong is neutral (“He’s received more attention lately than any other living poet”) and is not characteristic of Hong’s thinking as expressed in several recent articles – that is, anyone could have said it. The only reason this sentence exists is for the final adjective: resentfully. The author could have quoted any of the established older white (male) poets who are brought in later in the essay like C. K. Williams, Charles Simic or Dan Chiasson, familiar to readers of the New Yorker, to serve as a hook for, or easing into, the article. Instead, he chose the relatively obscure female poet with the Asian name to set up the big reveal. Hong is depicted, if slyly, as barbarian No. 1.

About 3,748 words into the essay (a little over halfway), no mention yet being made of the Michael Brown piece (“beleaguered” floats as an indeterminate tease), this remarkable sequence appears:

Goldsmith’s hegemony as a conceptual poet… has led a number of other conceptual poets to feel that he monopolizes a territory that excludes them. Many of these writers identify themselves as poets of color. A poet named Tan Lin wrote me, “The conceptual program, as it has been developed and codified by critics in the past ten years or so, and I am really talking about the institutionalization of conceptual poetry in academia, has focused mainly on the work of white authors.” Dorothy Wang, a professor at Williams, said that poets of color have grown “pissed off by the stranglehold white people have on avant-garde poetry.”

This is a classic non-sequitur; what prompts the entry, after the first sentence, of “poets of color”? Why have the white conceptual poets been excluded form this set of “other conceptual poets” of whom the huge majority, lets say 99%, are white? Tan Lin is, indeed, a poet of color – he’s Maya Lin’s brother – but one could hardly identify him as an identity writer, nor does anyone consider him a “conceptual poet” in any of the ways described in the article. The quote from Lin, consequently, doesn’t even mention Kenny or hegemony – Lin even qualifies his statement by noting that he is speaking of “critics” and “academia.” Dorothy Wang, on the other hand, is not a poet at all – she’s a scholar.

The adjective “many” is used to describe a mere two, and “of color” simply to describe Asian Americans. How did this get past the editor (presuming the editor wasn’t Donald Trump)? The writer suggests that black, brown and yellow hordes are storming the barricades in a thrust against “hegemony” but in fact, in this article, the hordes, like Trump’s murderous Mexican rapists, never appear. (Tellingly, the author, like Trump, merely pivots to scapegoat Asians.)

If Wang is being brought in to vouch for the poets of color making this argument about the “avant-garde” – which is also not synonymous with Kenny or conceptual writing – Hong’s own words could have been employed here since she inaugurated this argument in her controversial polemic, “The Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” which appeared in the journal Lana Turner nearly a year ago and is readily available on the web. Any journalist with integrity would have tried to trace at least one more of these “many” writers down. Lin and Wang are barbarians No. 2 and 3.

But the sheer ill will – I have to call it racism – doesn’t stop there. Your author continues:

Some poets of color feel that Goldsmith is subtly denying selves that they wish to assert and explore. Only a white person, these writers say, has the ability to shed his or her identity or to wear it casually. Their experience is that to be a person of color in America is to be constantly reminded of who you are. Dorothy Wang feels that identity in conceptual poetry “is a code word for racial or ethnic identity.” She says, “Often, the assumption is that good experimental avant-garde work is bereft of identity markers, and that lead-footed, autobiographical, woe-is-me, victim poetry is minority poetry.”

We still don’t know who the hell are “these writers” are? Of the two mentioned, Tan Lin could hardly be said to be wishing “to assert and explore” his “self.” Lin writes in Seven Controlled Vocabularies, an exploration of “ambient” poetics: “A poem or painting or landscape is beautiful at the moment it is forgotten, when it subtly accentuates a style or mood without drawing attention to itself, like drapes or a shade of paint.” This is hardly the battle cry of an ethnic essentialist; Lin has read his Kant, and is well aware that the “self” is a tricky thing. Once again, Dorothy Wang – not a poet – is brought in as somehow representative, this time not of the “many” but of the “some.”

At this point, not a single black or Latino author has yet been mentioned (which is to say, employed like pawns in this sophistic circle jerk). African American poet Tracie Morris (brought in at around word 5,468) is situated as one of the “few” to defend him, while Mónica de la Torre is permitted to offer something like a distinctive, nuanced comment – “The problem is that both positions are equally flawed” – that spares her, like Morris and unlike the resentful Hong, from being a barbarian. Morris and de la Torre are brought in after the big reveal, in fact, to somehow help mollify (if unwittingly) the obscenity of Kenny’s reading at Brown University.

A general argument is proposed: Kenny’s Michael Brown piece illustrates that there is only a narrow, worthless discourse – or perhaps a compelling ethical dilemma – concerning who is able to “speak for people who have been harmed or who have suffered.” The trick is that entering into this debate will always result in the conclusion that Kenny’s piece worked, even if in Mephistophelean ways, for the cause of “good.” Art, unlike, say, a train bombing, can always in retrospect be considered a goad to greater understanding even if it “hurt” the people who first witnessed it. A rabbit hole opens leading not to nowhere, but to the canonization of Kenny’s piece in the inevitable tomes devoted to the major events of 21^st century “poetry.” (The travails of this journey are alleviated because, in this article, the barbarians have already been depicted as classic philistines, “politically correct” Jihadists with no understanding of this Faustian gamble.)

Fine.

The real issue with Kenny’s Michael Brown piece, to my mind, is the general awfulness of Kenny’s artistic production, including the lameness of his public persona, over the period of time since that Buffalo conference. It’s this very awfulness that he took into the auditorium at Brown University in his attempt to perform (he claims) an elegy – he was really just trying to revive the Kenny G brand – for the person about whom several thousand people had just rioted and rebelled.

Take one example: Kenny’s book Head Citations from 2002, an “irreverent and amusing collection [that] consists of over 800 ‘misheard’ song lyrics” according to the press release, was merely a recycling of the method of ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: And Other Misheard Lyrics by Gavin Edwards, a novelty book published 1995 by Touchstone Books. It would take quite a mental acrobat to link the monastic integrity of Sol Lewitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to this juvenile bauble. I’ve heard Kenny read from this several times and it always struck me as incredibly dumb, not to mention cloying. Nonetheless, like Seven Deaths and Disasters (which I thought Colbert had lethally exposed as a mere stunt) and potentially the Michael Brown piece were it to have been published (“the eighth American disaster”), it makes for a perfect MoMA stocking stuffer.

Another example: anyone who’s heard the Kenny reading at the White House (available on YouTube) can hear that he really doesn’t know how to read poetry. He massacres the bits by Walt Whitman and Hart Crane (used to set up Traffic) with that smarmy, shit-eating Adam-Sandler-meets-William-F.-Buckley voice that was so potent and fun on his radio show for WFMU but couldn’t be banished enough for occasions requiring some gravity (which no doubt contributed to the awfulness of the Michael Brown reading, the audio and video of which, as your author mentions but with different verbiage, Kenny suppressed.)

Kenny never read even his best work (such as No. 111) very well; now that he’s added salmon-colored shirts, mismatched socks and a Tolstoyan beard to his product, the impression is that artistic integrity has long since departed, any note of “critique” being replaced by simple market logic. (For what it’s worth, I’m not alone in this opinion: many of my poet friends – and, yes, white friends, not only your enfeebled “poets of color” – have been embarrassed for Kenny by this turn of his toward outright charlantry.)

A final example: it’s noted around word 5,567 that “Goldsmith makes a substantial part of his living from readings, and over the summer he was concerned that fewer places would hire him.” This occurs after the unusually long note on his familial heritage. Kenny’s lived, for as long as I’ve known him, in a huge, at least 6,000-square-foot apartment (I don’t know anything about real estate and my eyes are bad – this is a wild guess) in Manhattan in the 20’s between 5^th and 6^th Avenues (I think his parents bought it for him after graduating RISD). His only other income, from what I know, is from his lecturer position at U Penn. But even if Kenny lived in a broom closet or fish bowl in Chattanooga, how much cash could Kenny possibly draw from the poetry reading circuit – a not particularly flush segment of the civic population – to make a “substantial part of his living”? Does he subsist on water, oats and Chef-Boyardee?

“Before Goldsmith became a poet, he was a text artist,” your author writes. Though he might play one on TV, Kenny is not a poet. Kenny doesn’t even like poetry (bravo that he’s read Ulysses several times; and Chris Christie has never missed a Bruce Springsteen concert) and has always been disdainful of poets. (It’s a weird irony that the Language poets wished to be known as “Language writers” and yet are not, while conceptual writers are being called “conceptual poets” despite, on the part of some, their overt hostility to the art – marketing is certainly everything.) I can accept that some of Kenny’s work itself is poetry, but Kenny is a poet in the way that a person who has fallen down the stairs – in the meantime exploring, if unwittingly, some unique, compelling human configurations, the cell phone video having received a million hits on YouTube – can be called a dancer or choreographer. (Insert Chevy Chase reference here.)

But my concern isn’t with Kenny, to whom I wish the best. I’ve known him personally for some time, even contributing material to ubu.com back in the day, though I withdrew from any communication with him years ago (largely because of his insufferable ego and terrible ideas about art). I’d like to say that the author of “Something Borrowed,” Alec Wilkinson, was well intentioned – but I can’t. Wilkinson, better known (I believe) as a music critic, has no doubt been an admirer of Kenny since Kenny’s days as a music critic for the New York Press back in the 90s – “bromance” is written all over this article.

No Seymour Hirsch, Wilkinson seems willing to publish whatever garbage Kenny fed him, including inventing a new origin myth, necessary for any proper hagiography, revolving around some clandestine meeting in a bar in Buffalo, which is pure horseshit (I was there, and know all the actors well). I’m also sure that it was Wilkinson who, clever man, threaded his article with such subtle, but clearly potent, racism to frame Kenny’s catastrophe in the best light. Wilkinson’s list of barbarians eventually grows to include CA Conrad (who if anyone could expose Kenny’s claims to be an “outlaw” as pure narcissism), Ken Chen (Asian American!) and the self-styled Mongrel Coalition (no fans of mine, by the way), quoting from one of their scattershot tracts. These poets are depicted as unfortunate victims of their own misunderstanding of the purity of Kenny’s desire to “provoke” in the name of the “avant-garde,” of the obsolescence of the discourse on ethnic identity, and of a narrow conception of poetic form, human creativity and the ubiquity of algorithmic culture (lyricists “allergic” to procedural poetics).

As much as Kenny would like to figure himself as the extension of tradition of Mallarmé, Beckett, Cage, Warhol and others, one would have to ask: when did the “avant-garde” tradition make it their business to target minorities? (Granted, in this tradition, anti-semitism and the exploitation of African art was commonplace, but this, I presume, is not the tradition Kenny or his supporters are identifying with; pictures of Pound, Eliot or Celine do not appear on ubu.com.) When did it become the job of the enlightened “avant-garde” artist to fuck with the minds of people of color (and not their classic targets, the bourgeoisie)?

André Breton, one of the greatest provocateurs in the history of art, went to Haiti and endorsed the first publications of the Négritude in a sincere effort to encourage political change, to foment revolution, to transform the social order – now it’s the job of white artists to play vicious pranks on minorities for the mere sake of continuing a tradition, or just as something to do? Kenny G states: “I’m an avant-gardist. I want to cause trouble, but I don’t want to cause too much trouble. I want it to be playful.” That’s the artistic platform one takes into “appropriating” Michael Brown’s autopsy report?

(As a side note: no negative comments by black authors are recorded in Wilkinson’s article, even as they proliferated on the internet in the wake of the reading. John Keene is particularly notable in this regard in his writing on “the limit point of certain conceptual aesthetics.” This is mere cowardice: Wilkinson was quite aware that any screw-up by the New Yorker concerning African Americans would lead to a backlash from several quarters and puncture any possibility of redemption in the profile, whereas a backlash by Asian American writers has been traditionally easy to brush off as an extreme form of “identity politics.” The solution – to simply exclude black writers from a discussion of Michael Brown – is telling of how much he hoped to get away with.)

I’m far from a moralist when it comes to art, and I’ve tried as much as anyone to create an “expanded” notion of poetry, but the perversion of values in this article is nauseating. Who was this article written for? Are we actually back in the 80s? Is this Pee-wee’s Playhouse?

Wilkinson notes that Kenny “was paid five hundred dollars for his reading, and he gave the money to Hands Up United, an organization that called, among other things, for an investigation of Michael Brown’s death.” It’s the definition of corporate shilling when a journalist uncritically repeats Kenny’s attempt at damage control – think of the Vatican giving money to victims of sexual abuse for the sake of the press – to massage away the reality of his utter nihilism. Did Wilkinson ever humor the idea that Kenny, who has never exhibited any concern with social issues in his work or person, might have been insincere? (And is Kenny really making a living giving $500 readings?)

Wilkinson seems quite happy to have shoveled whatever pabulum Kenny sent his way and cut-and-pasted it into his article. “My books are so boring that even the copy editors can’t read them,” he claims that Kenny “said recently” – this has been a pretty common line of Kenny’s for years in interviews. As for common sense: does Wilkinson really believe that any of Kenny’s works had copy editors? Absurd formulations that have long moldered – “The modernist project… had always been to deconstruct language to its smallest shard… [L]anguage got so atomized that there was nothing left to do” – are given new life in Wilkinson’s blinkered attempt to write a compelling art hero into existence for the New Yorker, one who is, as if to order, both transgressor and victim.

But Kenny is not the victim. The proof is right there in the article. Perhaps the most revealing passage occurs around word 3,972, just before the big reveal, when Wilkinson writes:

Flogging this conceit [of being an uncreative writer], however, had led to conceptual poetry’s being regarded as unfeeling and as interested only in formal problems. The perception that the field had discovered its boundary had led to its being less well attended. “We held the stage for fifteen years as the most challenging movement in poetics, with a form of expression that many people hated,” he said. He wanted to hold the stage a bit longer.

What would help, he thought, was to find “a hot text.”

This would almost have been a redemptive passage – laying bare the machinations of Kenny’s carpet bagging, imperialist mentality – but one misses the saucy, editorializing adverbs Wilkinson favored in his quote from Hong. How about:

After “Sports” he “got bored with being boring,” Goldsmith said banally. His work had traced “a trajectory that starts with the driest copying, where I trumpet being the most uncreative writer on the planet,” he said megalomaniacally. “We held the stage for fifteen years as the most challenging movement in poetics,” he said blindly. What would help, he thought delusionally, was to find “a hot text.”

Wilkinson also decided not to mention what every follower of this controversy has long known, that the notion of the conceptual “hot text” had already been broached by Vanessa Place, a writer (and self-styled Mephistophelean) who had used, for example, the “statements of fact” that she wrote defending sexual offenders in her day job as a lawyer (published as a book in 2010). Place has also been also recently been embroiled in accusations of racism for a project in which she republished the text of Margeret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind in 140-character tweets, using for her profile photograph a picture of black “nanny” and a “coon” drawing of the period, a project she claims is overtly anti-racist but which others have understood as akin to the exploitation in Kenny’s Michael Brown piece.

Kenny was, no doubt, emboldened by Place’s Statement of Facts. But Kenny’s (or Wilkinson’s) claim that conceptual writing was moving beyond merely “formal problems” with Seven Deaths and Disasters is completely wrong: that book, and the Michael Brown piece, was a testing of the properties of conceptual writing on intractable material that would inevitably create a stir but in which the artist had no investment. To that extent, the Michael Brown piece was paradigmatically a formal experiment: how to take the act of plagiarism and “give it legs,” in journalistic parlance, in a time in which the conceptual writing brand (or Kenny’s career) was growing thin. Wilkinson’s note about the hubris of “wanting to hold the stage a bit longer” doesn’t approach the monstrosity of the means of doing so: invading a territory to extend or expand the life of an artistic prospect or career regardless of who actually occupied that territory (or who else made art concerning Michael Brown), a sort of Lebensraum philosophy of maintaining and expanding an individual’s cultural capital.

There is no reason a white artist can’t make compelling, disturbing art concerning Michael Brown’s death. There are many reasons why this shouldn’t be done merely to test a product, illustrate the robustness of the “avant-garde” tradition or revive interest in a flagging (white) artist’s career, especially with the legacy of sheer buffoonery that had characterized Kenny’s career to that point. Imagine “Weird Al” Yankovic publishing a funny song about Whitney Houston’s death, claiming (after suppressing the song and donating his earnings to charity) that he had been simply tired of the “Weird Al” formula and wanted to test it:

His phone rang, and it was Marjorie Perloff, telling him to ignore a spiteful post that had appeared that morning. Weird Al paced as he talked to her. When he sat down again, his face looked drawn. “Sometimes I think I might be headed back to the world of novelty recordings and Dr. Demento,” Weird Al said ruefully. “I don’t deny that possibility. They still seem to like me there.”

Poor baby.

The kind of people who think it’s cool to take the SAT’s on acid because they’d “already deconstructed and critiqued the culture” are not the same people who protested the shooting of Michael Brown. If Brown (whose high school graduation photo was projected as the backdrop to Kenny’s piece) had taken the SAT’s on acid (yuck yuck yuck), he would have been caught, then safely ensconced in a prison somewhere on August 9, 2014, and would not have been shot on the streets of Ferguson for shoplifting cigarillos. Nothing of his life would have been available for recycling or exploitation by an “avant-garde” artist, even a good one. After release, Brown would have been burdened for the rest of his life with a prison record limiting his job prospects, no higher education at 25, most likely a despairing attitude and the poverty from which he and his family had already suffered. The thought of making a career change by turning to republishing “boring” or controversial texts for the tourists and art groupies who shop in the MoMA gift shop couldn’t have crossed his mind.

I’m sure the pages of the New Yorker have gushed on occasion with some remorse for the persistence of racism in the United States and for the “tragedy” of Michael Brown. In that case, the presence of this article points to a raging hypocrisy among your editors and readers. But I am a barbarian; I am most likely missing something. Perhaps remorse for Michael Brown’s death, a condescending and scapegoating attitude toward Asian Americans and all writers of color, and the need to bolster an individual’s flagging artistic career regardless of the value of his work (so long as it sells copies and confirms the elitist tradition depicted on the famous 1925 cover reproduced above) are all non-contradictory in some elevated – and eternally elusive to the hoi polloi – world of ideal forms, in which case 2+2=5.

Brian Kim Stefans is a poet and Associate Professor of English at UCLA.

Here is something a little strange: a scan of a series of essays by poet Ronald Tanaka (1944-2007) about Sansei (second generation Japanese American) identity — or even the possibility of identity — published in the Journal of Ethnic Studies in, I think, the late 1970s. I haven’t been able to locate bibliographical information.

It starts as something like first person sociology, moves through a logic section, incorporates bits of poetry, drama and calligraphy, and ends with a series of Wittgensteinian mediations, parts resembling the Philosophical Investigations, but finally descending into a series of numbered single sentences resembling the Tractatus.

18.6. Yuck! (As Shino would say.)

I wrote about Tanaka a bit in “Remote Parsee” a long time ago but really didn’t know what to make of him. Thanks as ever to Walter Lew for bringing this to my attention. I think I have more tools with which to get a grip on this now.

Ronald Tanaka (Wikipedia)

The Circle of Ethnicity

I, and I imagine many Korean Americans, were offended when first hearing about the movie The Interview. A “buddy movie” that merely takes advantage of the average American’s lack of interest in Korea — by which I mean North and South — didn’t seem like a great idea. Given that we lost over 36,000 soldiers in the Korean War, and that there has never been a the sort of public soul-searching that we’ve had many times in films over the Vietnam War — think of Platoon, Born of the 4th of July, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam, etc. — I always thought we should move the other way: learn more about what created the present conditions, not turn what is a truly awful, desperate situation in the North into caricature.

What was especially offensive, to me, was the poster for the movie in which the Korean written language, Hangul — something all Koreans take immense pride in, a symbol of their resistance to the Japanese attempt at genocide — was merely deployed in an uninspired Shepard Fairey-esque pastiche to signify the “other” with what are, when you read them, not particularly comical texts. Add to this the film’s money shot, its fist-bumping selling point, is when the two hapless, apolitical (read: “relatable”) heroes get their wish and kill of the acting leader of a state. This movie isn’t The Great Dictator, The Mouse that Roared, Dr. Strangelove or Wag the Dog but a pretty dopey attempt to take advantage of the fact that all anyone knows about North Korea’s dictator concerns his haircut and that he is overweight.

Of course, none of us have seen the film, but from the likes of it, it seems to fit more into the Fu Manchu / Charlie Chan tradition of depicting quirky, inscrutable, all-powerful (if wily) Asians with funny accents — our version of the African American tradition of minstrelsy in white American cinema that Spike Lee (and before him Marlon Riggs) did so much to critique. From what I’ve seen in the trailers, Randall Park’s depiction of Kim Jong Un is quite charming, and I probably would have enjoyed the film on many levels. But I do wonder about the turn of events after the Sony hack.

First off, why are no Korean or Asian Americans being asked their opinions on these occurrences? After all, we have huge Koreatowns — in which Hangul is ubiquitous — in many major cities. We have immigrants (and sons of immigrants, like myself) who have been paying attention — with our hearts in our throats — to events on the peninsula for our entire adult lives. Why are the only people who seem to be cited as somehow offended by this (Obama an obvious exception, though he’s fallen quickly in line) white men of privilege? George Clooney, Judd Apatow, Sean Penn, Steve Carrell, Bill Maher — all seem to be speaking up about how “un-American” it is this act of “expression” is being “censored.”

As far as I can tell living in Hollywood (or just reading the news), self-censorship is par for the course — no one in the major studios wants to make a movie that won’t make lots of money, and very good ideas are always being sidelined for the bottom line. So this hack will install a new regime of “self-censorship”?

Hollywood bends over backwards not to make movies that insult African Americans, Christians, Jews, gun-owners, straight people (when they make “gay” films), gay people (when they make “bromance” films), etc. — as well as Asian Americans (and the Chinese, if there’s a market). I’m not complaining, it’s great folks are sensitive if only for filthy lucre, though I miss the days when visionaries like Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce were censored because they were offering new principles to society, not merely taking advantage of someone else’s hard fought battles. Even Chris Rock has recently lamented (“Chris Rock Talks to Frank Rich About Ferguson, Cosby, and What ‘Racial Progress’ Really Means,” Vulture, November 30, 2014) that comedians can’t be as challenging as they once were due to social media.

The real story here, finally, is not about censorship — no one’s seen the film, so we don’t know if it’s Birth of a Nation (unlikely) or Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (in which GWB is allowed to be a quirky, goofy, approachable guy but is not, indeed, killed at the end). The chest-beating by these macho “creatives” about freedom of expression — that it is “un-American” to “censor” works of “art” — misses the point that these types of attacks will happen between several types of countries with very different relationships to the notion of “freedom of expression.”

There are two major historical parallels here. The first is the outbreak of Islamic riots — a version of “censorship” from abroad, but through action on the street — following the publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006 of degrading images of Mohammed, which was just a dumb idea and could have easily been avoided. The long-gestating, expensive ad campaign for The Interview (not the movie itself — no one’s seen it!), was coyly playing with such incitements, especially with the use of Hangul.

The second concerns cyber-warfare, namely that the United States’ insertion of the Stuxnet virus into a Iranian nuclear plant in 2010 to literally destroy their reactors (see “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran” in the New York Times, June 1, 2012) set a precedent for non-retaliation that the North Koreans (or whoever) must have misread. There was no retaliation by Iran for the latter act nor international condemnation (James Franco certainly didn’t voice an opinion), even as NATO determined that the Stuxnet virus — which was developed over three years under close White House supervision, and which escaped to infect computers worldwide — was considered an “act of force.” (“U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran was ‘act of force,’ NATO study found,” Washington Times, March 24, 2013).

This attack on Sony sets a new precedent, but it’s not the one of a foreign state “censoring” America — otherwise, not caring about repercussions, we’d have legions of films in which two lovable goofballs knock off acting world leaders of a variety of races and creeds. Rather, it is that an act of cyber-terrorism attributed to a nation-state might find its way into something like a “real” war, one folks on both the left and right (“North Korea brokers peace between Republicans and Democrats,” MarketWatch, Dec 19, 2014) are beginning to see as a “just” war.

I’m not convinced North Korea is behind the attacks. As the media seems to have forgotten, the first emails to Sony from the hackers asked for money, and the hackers stole something like six films. It was only after the media speculated — due to the standard sabre-rattling response of the North Koreans to the imminent release of the film months earlier— that the “Guardians of Peace” decided to use that as the main motif of their complaints (see “The Evidence That North Korea Hacked Sony Is Flimsy,” Wired, December 17, 2014). The image at the head of this post does not look like the work of North Korea but a bunch of bored teenagers passing the bong (“Today’s Tom Soyah…”) in a basement in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

The chest beating about “trampling on our first amendment rights” (as if any other country signed on to that), the demonization of a foreign leader (not hard to do in this case, but still), and the history of American intervention in Asia (the first armed merchant ship from the U.S. landed in Korea in 1871 and was promptly destroyed) with no clear dissenting voice in the media is alarming. Add to that the singular lack of knowledge most Americans have concerning the Korean War (1950-53) along with the money, talent, influence and occasional good looks of the macho men pulling for retribution in Hollywood — where McCarthyism claimed its greatest victims — to the point of transforming a “resurgent” President Obama into a mere parrot of their views (isn’t it cool he spanked Sony?), both nauseates and frightens me.

Brian Kim Stefans
Associate Professor of English
Poetry and New Media
University of California, Los Angeles

In lieu of the fact that there are no substantial Asian American film actors or politicians or athletes (outside of Tiger Woods), or at least ones whose political opinions might matter to the average filmgoer — or if there are, no one seems to have bothered to ask them — I’ve gone ahead and written my own reasons why The Interview is already a stupid movie. I’ve had these ideas ever since I saw the poster several months ago, but thought to finally write them given the Sony hacks.

1. They use Hangul, the Korean written language, in the poster. But it isn’t there because they think Koreans will actually read it — in the mind of these guys, there aren’t any Koreans in the United States. Either that, or Koreans are genetically humorless and would never understand why it’s funny to have the words “We Will Start a War” painted on bombs. The Hangul characters are merely a stand-in for a generic Asianess, or North Korean-ness, regardless of the fact that South Korea does, indeed, use Hangul. As one commentator (link below) points out, several film projects in the past started with China as the baddies, but switched to North Korea at the last second because, well, there simply isn’t a market there. But splashing Hangul on a poster, with the assumption no one can read it, is like making a movie about Hitler and littering with quotes in French and Spanish simply because of the similarity of their alphabets. Granted, it’s hard to make a movie poster that will be funny in two languages, but this Shepard Fairey pastiche, using Hangul merely as a decorative device that is encoded to read “Bad North Koreans” (just as the hammer and sickle signified bad communists in the past) just states what Koreans (not to mention Asians) already feel about the mainstream media: we have been deleted, we don’t exist. (Koreans are, by the way, fiercely proud of their written language, invented in the 15th century under the guidance of King Sejong. That, and kimchi.)

2. North Korea is a live situation. North Korea isn’t a country blanketed by the mists of time, nor is it an Orientalist fabrication or (as in past, much funnier political comedies, like The Mouse that Roared) an amalgam of several countries, but a complex, frighteningly opaque political entity that — most especially to Koreans — feels something like a wound that won’t heal. Half the population of the Korean peninsula is starving; North Koreans are incurring genetic changes due to the near-constant state of famine, and many of these North Koreans have close relatives in the South. The movie is a cheap shot about killing the leader of a country that most Americans only know about through other media (films, video games, occasionally the news). Most Americans can’t even name the years of the Korean War, nor even know that 36,000 Americans died there (and something like 2.5 million Korean civilians). There still hasn’t been a substantial movie, soul-searching on the level of say Apocalypse Now or Platoon, about the Korean War (unless MASH, which I really liked, counts). (There are a lot of conventional war movies that take place in Korea up to about the early 60s, then MASH, then nothing.) I don’t mind harsh satires about evil people; I just don’t see the joke in one about two bumbling Americans killing him because he can’t speak English without an accent (guaranteed, though I haven’t seen the film, Kim Jong-Un speaks with a terrible accent).

3. It stars James Franco. This might not seem like a big deal, but I can’t help that that smug grin he wears (or which he wore during most of the terrible Academy Awards) when he thinks he is engaging in some great meta-artistic project — some high concept video, for example, where his insider status as a star somehow provides us plebs with insight into Three’s Company or, even more perversely, some pseudo-intellectual take on someone a bit highbrow who he claims has impacted his work, such as the poet Hart Crane — infects this project as well. While I doubt he will be performing fellatio in this film (that, actually, would be genius), I can’t help but sense his utter tone-deafness to the nuances of pop art in the film poster. But there is a more obvious point to be made, which is that he’s a terrible actor — usually pretty good, if overdetermined, in technique, but no good at working with scene partners. He sucks the air out of nearly every scene he’s in with people (for instance, for my money, while he was great eye candy in Milk, he was way out of league on the same screen as Sean Penn, who was simply generous and helped Franco look good). Maybe that’s why people liked him in that movie where he is entirely alone and cuts off his forearm. But he has never really been truly funny as far as I know (he was just very handsome and likable in Freaks N Geeks, kind of a Fonz for the Dawson’s Creek age, but let the others get the laughs). He’s no Robert De Niro. If I thought there were a chance for humor in this movie as there was (though not tons of it) in Team America, I’d be far more lenient.

Well, just thoughts that have been circulating in my head for a while. I’m surprised no one’s mentioned any of this in the press.

Here are some related pages:

“Why Do Filmmakers Keep Trolling North Korea?”

The Poster For Seth Rogen And James Franco’s New Comedy Is Filled With Anti-American Propaganda

Hangul (Wikipedia)

So, in the end, I’m totally in favor of the Sony hacks — it’s like a Christmas gift for me. And the fact that their executives are being revealed as racist and misogynistic — all great. I’m hoping that it’s some spin-off of Anonymous or LulzSec rather than North Korea doing the hacks. I just don’t understand why, in a time of inspired political comedy (like on the Daily Show, etc.) this is taken as interesting. I wasn’t much of a Borat fan, either, maybe I’m too sensitive to ethnic stereotyping of that nature much as I love to speak in funny accents.

I found these poems (or lines of poems) in my papers, typed on index cards. I don’t know what I was planning to do with them or when I wrote them. Probably at least ten years ago. I recycled a few lines for “Provincial Hack” which appeared in What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (2006). So it has to be earlier than that, Sherlock.

One set has something to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The others are little Raworth-style Language -centered ditties. None of this is genius but kind of fun to look at these years later. Surprisingly, no typos!

Below are all the links to the various texts that were written by poets and writers giving close(ish) readings of Kristen Stewart’s poem published last month in Marie Claire. If there are others out there, let me know!

Kismetly I Rear and Wonder
Kazim Ali
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/02/kismetly-i-rear-and-wonder/ 

UCLA Prof Blames “Beatniks” for Kristen Stewart’s Poetry
Stephanie Nikolopoulos
http://stephanienikolopoulos.com/2014/02/12/ucla-prof-blames-beatniks-for-kristen-stewarts-poetry/

“My Heart is a Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole” (annotations)
RapGenius
http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Kristen-stewart-my-heart-is-a-wiffle-ball-freedom-pole-annotated#note-2781083

25 Points: Kristen Stewart’s “My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole”
JD Scott
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/25-points-kristen-stewarts-my-heart-is-a-wiffle-ballfreedom-pole/

Kristen Stewart’s heart is a wiffle ball/freedom pole, according to ’embarrassing’ poem she wrote
Hilary Busis
http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/02/10/kristen-stewart-poem/

Kristen Stewart, Secret Poet, Shares Her Art With ‘Marie Claire’
Tess Lynch
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/kristen-stewart-secret-poet-shares-her-art-with-marie-claire/

The The Kristen Stewart Debates: Poetry, Taste and Mass Culture!
Johannes Göransson
http://www.montevidayo.com/the-the-kristen-stewart-debates-poetry-taste-and-mass-culture/

Open Letter to Kristen Stewart
Brian Kim Stefans
http://www.arras.net/fscIII/?p=2258

Here’s a paper I wrote at Bard in 1990 or so for no reason at all concerning artificial intelligence. Surprisingly, it’s not entirely wrong, just not very scientific. Lots of spelling errors, too, but as you can see, it was written on a primitive, by our standards, computer.

How many people out there have the special, limited “Broken Glass Edition” of the iPhone?

Celebrating the ephemerality of the material and the translucency of the medium, this limited edition — a literal “delay in space” — is being specially authorized by the late Marcel Duchamp, an important French artist, while supplies last. Each phone is individually smashed by one of Duchamp’s spectral henchman doubles and is unique of its kind; no pattern repeats, and each is guaranteed to change through time with or without use of device. The BGE iPhone (the result of a timely recent collaboration between Apple visionary Steve Jobs and U2) remarkably accrues greater value when it ceases to operate and is left in a corner to “breed” dust. Fifty percent of profits are immediately donated to Amnesty International.

If you don’t have one yet, I know where you can get one, cheap.

Joseph Beuys, “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974)

Dear Shia LaBeouf,

I and several other poets in my circle have been following with great interest the recent controversy concerning the accusations of plagiarism that have been leveled against you. We find it all very interesting, and believe there’s really no reason to feel ashamed. I thought to offer you some advice.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

But most importantly, keep doing whatever it is you are doing. It’s great!

Sincerely,
Brian Kim Stefans

(Poet and actor Antonin Artaud.)

Dear Kristen Stewart,

I’m a poet and professor at UCLA, and thought you might be interested in what some of my poet friends (most of whom also teach and are otherwise very accomplished) and I have been writing on Facebook about your recent poem published in Marie Claire. This is partly to address the apparently universal opinion by journalists – most of whom seem to not know anything about literature – that this is a terrible poem.

My own initial post went like this: “The second stanza isn’t horrible. Worst part of the poem are those awful adjectives! Stupid Beats.” What I meant by this was that the words “digital” (applied to moonlight), “scrawled” when linked to “neon” (neon is a much overused word by poets who want to sound like Beatniks) and “abrasive” (applied to organ pumps) weren’t working for me. I also didn’t like the word “ubiquitously” especially since everything up until that point was in the singular – ubiquitously seems to suggest some sort common element among many parts. Not a big fan of “Whilst” either.

But I thought the second stanza was very delicate with sound play – “parked” and “Marfa” are good off-rhymes (I heard the word “barf” in there somehow) and there is some nice alliteration in “Devils not done digging / He’s speaking in tongues all along the pan handle / and this pining erosion…” etc. And I like the broken syntax and quick movements in perspective – there’s little to no punctuation and most people can’t pull that off. And the line “He’s speaking in tongues all along the pan handle” is very evocative to me – and seems to explain some of the eccentricities of syntax and vocabulary in the first verse!

Anyway, so some of the other comments that came in here quite interesting. I’m not going to give the poets’ names since I haven’t asked their permission for this (I’m writing this quite quickly), but a female poet in New York wrote: “I don’t think it’s bad at all. It’s better than 90 percent of the poems in the first batch of my intro to creative writing class. I just read three different poems about a football game. Three different young men.”

Another poet here in Los Angeles – he studied linguistics and works at Google – wrote “For someone who never went to high school, I think ‘Your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps’ shows a pretty promising imagination.” I think what he means is that there is genuinely Surrealist element in the first stanza – “abrasive organ pumps” could have been written by Antonin Artaud – and has some real shock value. This same poet wrote (in response to some negative commentary on the FB feed):

Not sure why folks are hating on this poem. It’s young, but the more I read it, the more I like it. For someone just starting out, it isn’t overly freighted with expectations of what a poem should do or be. If it’s ‘beat’, it’s more Bolinas or young Bernadette than hortatory elder beat. That first line is weird and inspired. And moonlight strafing the foothills, nicely observational.

[“Bernadette” is Bernadette Mayer, a prominent New York poet associated with the Lower East Side.]

Another poet wrote: “I like the title!” That’s pretty cool since I’m not sure if I can get behind the title (unless I read it as extremely pop/campy in that Jeff Koons way). He actually wrote earlier on his own FB feed that he liked the title (that’s where I learned about your poem).

The defenses continued to roll in, even for the unusual adverbs. One poet, a teacher at a prominent college and co-editor of a major publisher of poetry, wrote: “Hm. I actually like the weirdness and energy and if you’re going to have an adverb at all why not go with ‘kismetly.’ I say go for it Ms. Stewart.”

This same poet later wrote – in response to a post that compared you to James Franco (Franco’s writing took a lot of digs on our feed, with no defenders): “No, honey, this is yards better than the few Franco pieces I’ve seen. But there’s lots of different types of poets and poems in the world.”

You found your strongest defender in a poet, editor and teacher at a major university in the Midwest. She wrote:

I actually think this poem is TERRIFIC. I guess there’s something wrong with me. It has a great punchy energy, it’s strange, and I never know where it’s going next. I would put stars all over this poem if it were turned in in my class… Also the language isn’t boring – kismetly and ubiquitously have a nice feel to them. I think this is pretty great.

So you see, there are a lot of qualities to your poem that really come out when you think about them. I’ve come around to liking your strange adverbs, and love it when people invent words. (The great Russian poet Mayakovsky once wrote that the creation of a neologism is a revolutionary act.)

My advice would be – if you really want to do something with poetry – is stay away from that terrible tendency in Hollywood (not just among actors writing, but mostly) to litter your poems with decadent sex and booze stories – Charles Bukowski is not the only one to have ever written a poem, and happily, much as I like him, your poem has none of his qualities. It seems that a lot of male actors in L.A. when they get down to publishing – and they usually publish way too much – seem to think they have to prove they know what a bad hangover or an abusive relationship is.

I would also suggest that you read a lot of crazy shit – i.e. look at the Surrealists and even earlier French poets, some of the more “experimental” work in the U.S. (I could help you with that), read philosophy if you have the time, books about insects and ancient cultures and Japanese horror movies and roofed bridges and, well, anything – it can all go into a poem provided you really care about what you are reading. Conversely, don’t be afraid to be small – William Carlos Williams wrote a major poem about a cat that was only 27 words long.

And lastly, don’t be hung up with trying to make your poems make too much sense. Yes, you don’t want to sound deranged (necessarily, though Arthur Rimbaud argued for just that – but he wasn’t being trailed by paparazzi) or like you have no control over the language. Actually, it’s good to have language have some control over you – I think that’s what we all liked about this poem, you were really going with it.

With enough revision, you can make a poem that has a clear emotional intent without necessarily telling a story or having a clear “message.” An American example would be Hart Crane – many of his poems would (to a journalist) appear completely impenetrable and gibberish, but those of us that love him know exactly what he means. But you can find a lot of examples of this in the movies – David Lynch, obviously, was never kept up at night wondering if everyone understood what his movies were trying to “say.”

I think you were really brave to publish this poem, especially in a magazine in which you can’t merely hide behind their literary credentials to help it pass. Keep going!

Kismetly yours,
Brian Kim Stefans (and a bunch of other poets)

I was asked by Marissa Lopez, my colleague at UCLA, to write the introduction to a symposium (really just a public chat session with music critic Nikki Darling and Jose Maldonado of the Sweet and Tender Hooligans, a Smiths tribute band) concerning Latinos and Emo, probably because of my love of all things Morrissey. This is it, pretty light stuff and written rather quickly but I hope you like:

Introduction to Lat/emo

May 31, 2013

Over the past three or so years I’ve been researching the LA post punk scene, collecting whatever free music is or was available online, going through the used record bins at Amoeba and Counterpoint and various other places in LA, and making a ton of online purchases at sites like Discogs and Musicstack.

My interest in post punk as a genre of music was spurred by Simon Reynolds Rip It up and Start Again which charted the histories of such bands as Joy Division, Devo, The Associates, Scritti Politti, Pete Ubu and others that formed on the cusp of, or in some cases prior to, the punk music explosion of ’77.

My knowledge of LA music, outside of the mainstream either of the early 70s (Fleetwood Mac, Tom Waits, Jackson Brown, etc.) and of the later hair metal era (Mötley Cru, Guns n Roses, etc.), was mostly confined to some punk and hardcore, and even at that it was quite limited — Black Flag and X might have been the only LA punk bands I could have named when I got here.

Soon I discovered such lost gems as the Screamers, Suburban Lawns, the very obscure Null and Void and the even more obscure Wild Kingdom — whose only recording was published as a flexi disk insert for a music fanzine (Brad Laner has a rip of it on the website for his radio show).

From Pasadena, most of Wild Kingdom was made up of Latinos — you can see them on YouTube from their appearance on Peter Ivers new wave theater (the sound is awful) — but that is only worth noting for the rather elaborate pompadour, leather jacket and suede shoes of their lead guitarist. Wildly experimental, I don’t hear too much Chicano influence in their music; the track, “Roma/Destiny,” starts as ebullient space music with one of the most unusual drum beats I’ve ever heard, to something like carny music, then back to space music again.

[The video below is from their appearance on New Wave Theater with horrible sound. The track “Roma/Destiny,” their only studio recording, is a thousand times more interesting but you get a sense of their appearance and instrumentation here.]

I focused on post punk also because that’s kind of the music of my youth — and not punk, which predates me a bit and besides was a little too aggressive for my sensitive poetic soul in my teen years (I was also an MTV kid, and punk never really broke there). So my goal, really, was to uncover whatever music in LA that matched up with that post punk aesthetic — experimental, sophisticated but still DIY, at once political and concerned with emotions and solitude, and wildly imaginative (costumes, make-up, synths and videos shot in exotic locations — and which didn’t make it across the country to New Jersey.

I was surprised at how many musicians of color — Latino but also a fair amount of Asians (Dianne Chai of the Alley Cats, Susan Rhee of Susan Rhee and the Orientals, a woman who goes by the name of Cyrnai) and even black presence (notably Pat Smear but also a ska band called the Untouchables and, of course, Fish Bone) — were on the scene, if not at the start, then later.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was really in the Latino music (with the exception of Fish Bone) that one heard a real cross cultural mix — not in every song, perhaps, but overtly at moments and maybe as a subtle undercurrent of pining after, or critique of, the American Dream that is buried deep in the mix and the lyrics but which decidedly reflects the attitudes of generations of Latino US culture. Not nihilism but an allusive poetry, not just critique from the outside but politics from within the margins.

East LA had its own club, The Vex (started by Willie Herron of Los Illegals) partly to address the fact that most east LA bands outside of the Plugz and, later, Los Lobos couldn’t get gigs on the Strip. The Vex clubs became a meeting place for the punk bands and the more traditional Mexican music that had a young audience (a good compilation of this music is Los Angelenos – the Eastside Rennaissance, which includes the Plugz, the Brat among other obscure acts).

Probably the Chicana musician most associated with the LA punk scene is Alice Bag, born Alicia Armendariz, front woman of the band the Bags. I haven’t read her autobiography, Violence Girl : East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story, but reviews show her story to have been, indeed, quite violent and not a little inspirational.

Bag might better remembered as a great charismatic figure in the early days of punk — she did in fact wear bags — though the recordings of the music I’ve heard (mostly live tracks) seem to fit the punk, and not post punk mode I was looking for. She’s featured in Penelope Spheeris documentary about the LA punk scene The Decline of Western Civilization though after the band had broken up — she left music to become an educator.

But I think the most important bands for the purposes of a conference on Latino emo would be the Plugz and the Brat. The Plugz were far more accomplished — their first LP, Electrify Me, which features their punk version of La Bamba (which figured in the Repo Man soundtrack) was full on electric guitar-bass-drum punk. I’ve lost my copy of this LP so couldn’t review it (neither the Plugz nor the Brat feature — surprise! — on Spotify).

Their second, Better Luck, features better production and more accomplished songwriting — Tito Larriva, their lead singer and songwriter, could fit easily among the “angry young man” post punk generation of the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello — as well as the inclusion of horn sections, entire songs in Spanish, complex harmonies, and pastiches of various styles of music such as reggae, a kind of jerky Devo-ish beats, jangly pop and traditional Mexican.

Larriva’s lyrics are poetic, including humorous reflections on So-Cal life in the 70s such as waiting on a gas line — the outro to that tune pleads “Don’t light a match! Don’t light a match! Don’t light a match!” etc. — watching unattainable, if slightly sketchy, girls on a hot day on the street (which he recorded for an important album of spoken word poetry in LA), the tale of an American who “took the bait” (I think a critique of mindless capitalism), and somewhat gruesome evocations of having a brother involved in violent street crime, slot throats and all.

This sort of mix seems not inimical to Morrissey himself, who could often mix politics, ethics, infatuations with the life of crime and erotic longing in a single song. Larriva — who also had a great voice, not the most versatile tool but distinctive, an urban existentialist singing through the clenched teeth of a gangster — went in to form Cruzados, Tito and Tarantula and others and he is also known as an actor in Roberto Rodriguez films and elsewhere. He’s also scored films.

Lesser known is Teresa Covarrubias, lead singer of the Brat (other members included brothers Rudy and Sidney Medina), which only managed to record an EP for Larriva’s own label, Fatima records. Covarrubias is described as being introverted and yet dynamic on stage – one website states: “Covarrubias remembers that sometimes audiences were surprised by her off-beat yet alluring stage presence and didn’t expect much from someone so petite, brown and seemingly timid.”

Covarrubias’ lyrics (I’m assuming she wrote them, I don’t have credits for the LP) could also vear from the political to the personal quite quickly — one song called “The Wolf” has as its refrain “The wolf and the lambs… we are the lambs” and sings of “democracy laced with hypocrisy” while “Attitude” could be a high school anthem — it seems entirely about declarations of personal identity, an emo theme if there ever was one — and “Starry Night” is a love song.

The structures aren’t quite as sophisticated as the Plugz — very much four part punk (one track clocks in at 54 seconds) with some X influence — but are terribly effective, especially due to Covarrubias’s clear but expressive voice rising over the hard electric din (it resembles Belinda Carlyle’s in this way, a little flavorless but, in juxtaposition to the intense lyrics and clanging music, just right), some nice rhythm guitar work and background vocals. It would be truly a loss if they were able to work past this early sound in later years and yet never found a contract.

Los Illegals are also a hugely important East LA band but maybe I don’t see their connection to emo as clearly. Formed as a wing to the art/political collective ASCO, they seem a little less personal, less vulnerable than the Plugz or the Brat. No less imaginative – some of their songs have a sci-fi apocalyptic or noirish intensity — they are never personally introspective, though of course I think introspection of a sort — social introspection based on communal fear and rage? — lies at the heart of their most satiric songs, like The Mall and Guinea Pigs.

Besides, I’ve spoken long enough! I’m eager to learn more about the infamous Latino fanbase for the music of the Smiths and Morrissey — it all makes sense to me now but I confess it was surprising when I first learned of it back in new York!

I’m writing in response to Juliana Spahr’s and Joshua Clover’s self-nomination to the presidency of Poetry Chicago. I was especially struck by how they noted that the outgoing president was critical of MFA programs and the fact that poets often got jobs in universities these days. The letter got me thinking of ways to spend their money to provide some at least temporary support for poets who are otherwise working in non-academic fields, how to decentralize poetry in the U.S. and move it away from the major cities on the coasts, and, how to get poets from other, less-visited countries over here and vice-versa. Most these are, I think, pretty original ideas with the exception of the last. I’m serious about all of this, by the way (no snark today, sorry)!

1. Travel grants for poets to non-European countries
What are the poets in Ghana doing these days? I’m a little surprised at how American poets gravitate to Paris for their big cultural sojourn, as if it were still 1917 and the frontiers of Europe lay along the Swiss Alps. I think it would be far more interesting if poets, especially those interested in politics, travelled to Africa, Asia and South America – many of the countries there are in what one might call “transition” periods, and if anything provide a more dynamic view of globalization (not to mention capital) in the present times. England, France, Germany and Italy (though this last, being a semi-permanent basket case, still has something to offer) don’t provide much of a contrast to how things work in the States, and we have access to their literary histories through tons of translations and visitors from abroad. The Clash might have been bored with the U.S.A., but I’m bored with the E.U. I just think it would be more interesting for poets to travel to the frontiers of their cultures, where things are broken or breaking down and something of the world  system lies exposed, than travel the paths they are expected to travel, being sophisticated beings, and which are often already gloating over their recognized achievements. For what it’s worth, I don’t particularly care for poetry that is inspired by beautiful places, it’s often quite self-involved, since what is there to think about in beautiful places than one’s self? Consequently, tickets to places like Senegal, Peru and Thailand are super expensive compared to the tickets to Europe, and there is not much coming back from the other end in terms of invitations or grants, so a poet would especially need help there. I also wonder why political radicals from the left travel to Paris, as if May ’68 were still flowering in the boulevards, rather than places that have had revolutions much more recently. Is it really that much more interesting to read Badiou in a Parisian café than at home?

2. Seed Grants for semi-commercial poetry/arts organizations in non-major U.S. cities
One of the success stories in New York has been Bob Holman’s Bowery Poetry Club, which combines a heavy list of readings, music concerts, and other events with the commercial income of a bar and coffee shop. I think that could be a model for similar organizations in cities that don’t have a lot of funding for their native literature and art scenes and which are in need of places where poets and artists can socialize, kick back, get to know each other’s work and love or loathe it, etc. This organization – perhaps housed in some small building on some weird, forgotten edge of town that is sketchy but safe, but still inexpensive – could also serve to help bring poets in from out of town, or maybe act as a link in the chain of places that poets travel to when they do book tours. I have no idea who I would call if I were to do a cross country tour, or whether it would be worth it at all – driving to Austin for 12 hours to have 3 people show up? This organization could keep a few rooms on the second floor as crash pads for travelling poets, or even have residencies like they do here at Machine Project, having a poet come to stay for a month or so to give workshops or just be part of the scene. It would be great if New York were not the only place poets gravitate toward (or are encouraged to gravitate toward) after graduating from college (or high school, or whatever). Why couldn’t it be Pittsburgh, Lawrence or New Orleans? I imagine that the proposals for these grants would spell out a 5 year plan, including costs and income. There would not be any requirement to describe how the organization could last in perpetuity – I just don’t imagine any poet really wanting to run a business for the rest of his/her life – just how it would last for 5 years, to get something in going in said small city.

3. Upgrade internet knowledge and distribution of books
The Small Press Distribution site is really incredibly useful, and certainly an improvement over the days when you ordered books from them by telephone or mail. But what I’d really like to see on the site are some new features that allow those of us who never get to see these books browse with some knowledge of what’s inside them. I think it would be great if SPD made available at least 5 pages of all of their books on their site, thus facilitating browsing, and also creating something of an unedited, ever-expansive online anthology of contemporary poetry. Presses would just get in the habit of including a short sample PDF when sending their information in. SPD’s bestseller lists, for example, often contain poets I’ve never heard of or worse, the same poets that I’ve heard of who have appeared on every SPD bestseller list. The blurbs and press information often are completely non-informative, and having staff picks is nice, but still, I often don’t know the staff. I often buy tons of SPD books when I see them at book fairs, but almost never, unless for classes, from their site. And poets don’t always write the same way they did in previous books — imagine the disappointment fans of the “Waste Land” felt when they opened their copies of “Burnt Norton.” I just assume that every time I publish a book, people just think it’s another Free Space Comix and say, nah. I also think it would be great to have a part of the site (or maybe just a separate site) that is entirely automatic for presses that are so small that they can’t even afford to pay the nominal fee it requires to be distributed by SPD. For example, if I were doing a press run of say 50 copies of such and such a chapbook, I could go to the site, fill out a form, upload a cover image and sample pages and a link to the website where I could purchase the book. All SPD would have to do would be to somehow make sure that no one just uploads pure garbage, pornography, links to sites selling bogus hair growth tonics, or even just links back to blogs for those self-promoters, etc. and also that old entries that link to dead sites are deleted.

4. Grants for poets from other countries to travel to the U.S.
Once again, I’m interested in having poets from non-European (or at least the more or less affluent European countries) come to the United States to study, get involved with a poetry scene, publish or translate their work, share the work from their own respective country, etc. Even poets in Mexico find it incredibly expensive to spend even a few weeks in New York city, so you can imagine what my imaginary poet from Libya, Georgia or, the Philippines might feel. One of the great things about living in New York was being able to meet so many great artists from other countries – one of my favorites was an Israeli butoh dancer named Boaz Barkan, whom I met through the remarkable and terribly missed Stacy Doris – and though I occasionally have the opportunity to meet artists (but mostly students) from other countries in Los Angeles, it’s obviously with far less frequency. I suspect that there are forms of this sort of grant, but my guess is that they involve some sort of research aspect, whereas I think these poets should be able to come to the States based purely on their creative achievements. Another thing I would like to see which is somewhat related are grants for non-English speaking or writing residents of the United States. There is a whole network of South American poets here that might be receiving support from their respective home countries, but are often (I sense) not feeling terribly integrated into the U.S. scene. This grant wouldn’t operate as a way to make a living, but more as a fund to get work translated into English, to travel, to create community, much like what is outlined above. It would be great to foster non-English U.S. poetry if only to provide a more realistic, less homogeneous, image of what this country is. I would imagine that in the Korean American community, for example there are some pretty good poets over here writing in Korean who wouldn’t be able to published in Korea but who should be read, somewhere.

5. A permanent “poets in need” fund
This is certainly my least original suggestion, but I’ll describe it (at length) anyway. As it is, those of us in the poetry community periodically receive requests from the group Poets in Need for donations to be given over to a usually older poet who has fallen on hard times. In some cases, there are direct appeals to the community on behalf of someone who is pretty well-known and beloved. This is all really great, though I know that, in the past, when second parties have made appeals on behalf of a poet, said poet was not always so happy to see their misfortunes advertised, and/or were too proud to accept donations from their friends. I think it’s great that the network of poets could help each other out, but quite often the poets being appealed to are not themselves all that rich. Consequently, I imagine there are many poets that simply don’t have that sort of network, or who might be are not necessarily “beloved” – I just mean poets who are anti-social and don’t get out much, or poets who are simply to young to have published much but who have, say, become desperately ill and have no insurance – or who simply do not like to make public their personal problems or finances. There are poets who are also pretty much in a terminal state of poverty due to illness and age, but who cannot foresee themselves appealing to the community every time the gas bill needs to be paid. I think a grant or some sort of social security for poets who have significant publishing histories or have otherwise proved their commitment to poetry (through translation, editing, rabble rousing, etc.) should be able to have a place to receive some funding should they hit upon hard times. A corollary to this could be an education or training grant for poets who either don’t have any skills in anything more than, say, word processing or copy-editing and want to get themselves out of a hole.

Well, that’s my fifteen cents. I’m sure I’ll think of more just after publishing or posting this, but hopefully there is something to chew over here and Poetry Chicago will respond. I really want them to, since they really are in a position to do something really radical and interesting, but I’m afraid they’re just going to throw their money at the usual places, like fostering more small presses, or get poetry into the schools type programs, all of which is good but in the end doesn’t make poetry more interesting (and Pound, who you see above, was all about making poetry more interesting, not simply getting people to read it).

Notice that none of the above has anything to do with affiliations with poetry schools, movements or well-established poetry “wars.” If anything, I’d like to see a situation where more poets unconcerned with, however much informed of, the familiar partisan battles are engaged in writing, editing and publishing. I don’t think it’s a required element in the education of a poet to suddenly become aware of the largely inane bickering about the mainstream or “school of quietude” and some sort of avant-garde. Let these “political” ideas, some of which are useful, come after the exposure and engagement with the work, not before. I mean, having an opinionated poetry clique is a nice way to make friends and foster one’s self-education, but  can sometimes set irrational boundaries on what one is expected or not expected to read.

Also, none of this has to do with selling or making poetry more popular with the “masses.” I hate those campaigns to somehow save poetry from obscurity and showing the public that poetry is something that can be a part of their lives. The poetry that I generally like will most likely never be very useful to your average American, just as I’ll never see a Gang of Four song covered on American Idol. Just let the poetry get written, get out, and if it finds its readers, great, if not, then let it rest for a few decades to be rediscovered by someone with taste! Poetry’s not dying, it doesn’t need resuscitating, it doesn’t need help by well-intended people involved in more lucrative industries who often simply don’t know what they’re talking about. And please, let’s get rid of the position of Poet Laureate!

I’ve spent my off-hours this past couple of weeks finalizing a project I began a few years ago to create a “freeware” compilation of post-punk and otherwise experimental pop music from the Los Angeles area up to roughly the mid-eighties. I haven’t figured out how to host this yet, but thought I’d post the rough draft of the table of contents to see if any of these bands ring a bell to any of you out in the blogosphere (and to give myself some closure since I’ve become a little obsessed).

I still have tracks from my own records I’d like to rip and include, and I keep finding new acts from roughly this period with a few good tracks. I kind of think of this as a portrait of the city at the time more than a collection of tracks that will change the world (though more than a handful I think are unfairly neglected). I’m wondering if someone like Rhino Records would want to do a Nuggets-type collection from the period? They already have one of Los Angeles from 1965-1968 called Where The Action Is which looks really great (I don’t have a copy yet).

I plan on writing some liner notes to explain the rational behind some of my choices and to throw whatever weight I have behind those bands I particularly enjoy who have been entirely forgotten. Any opinions you might have are welcome, I’m eager to learn more about several of these acts. Ideas for a better title for the collection are also very welcome.

Southern California Post-Punk and Indie-Wave (1977-1987)

Disk 1
1 Wild Kingdom — Roma / Destiny (1981) 5:51
2 17 Pygmies — Words Never Said (1984) 2:28
3 Bad Religion — Chasing the Wild Goose (1983) 2:50
4 Null And Void — All The Old Humans (1980) 3:36
5 Outer Circle — My Mona Lisa (1984) 3:53
6 The Fibonaccis — Somnambulist (1982) 3:4
7 Bone Cabal — I O Betulah (1983) 4:34
8 Zolar X — Science (1982) 1:25
9 Trotsky Icepick — Mar Vista Bus Stop (1988) 3:3
10 Green on Red — A Tragedy (1981) 4:20
11 Iron Curtain — First Punk Wars (1983) 6:38
12 Abecedarians — Benway’s carnival (1985) 5:9
13 Earwigs — A Martyr Is Made (1981) 2:31
14 Shadow Minstrels — Great Expectations (1983) 4:3
15 Martyr Complex — Monsters (1981) 3:30
16 Motor Totemist Guild — Crayons (1985) 2:39
17 Steaming Coils — Harry Languid (1987) 1:9
18 Afterimage — Surf Generator / Part of the Threat (1981) 4:27

Disk 2
1 Peter Ivers — In Heaven (1977) 1:46
2 Suburban Lawns — Janitor (1981) 2:31
3 Human Hands — Trains Vs. Planes (1981) 3:59
4 Gleaming Spires — How To Get Girls Thru Hypnotism (1982) 3:56
5 B People — Can Can’t (1981) 2:27
6 The Squad — Scene Of The Crime (1981) 2:36
7 Primal Danse — Insomnia (1982) 5:0
8 Life After Death — In Living Color (1985) 1:54
9 Choir Invisible — Hands of Another (1981) 3:49
10 Kommunity FK — Something Inside Me Has Died (1985) 3:45
11 Null And Void — A Party Filled With Thieves (1982) 3:33
12 Boxboys — Seperate Rooms (1980) 3:12
13 The Child Molesters — Violent Crimes (1990) 2:27
14 Beat-E-O’s — China Sleeping (1981) 2:12
15 Weirdos, The — Weird World (1981) 3:2
16 Wet Picnic — He Believes (1982) 5:33
17 Christian Death — When I Was Bed (1985) 7:57

Disk 3
1 Dogma Probe — Thirteen (1982) 4:30
2 45 Grave — Riboflavin-Flavored, Non-Carbonated, Polyunsaturated Blood (1980) 2:38
3 Pompeii 99 — Ignorance is the Control (1982) 4:35
4 Opus — Get Procedures (1979) 3:1
5 Subjects — I’m Mechanical (1982) 3:18
6 The Plugz — Gas Line (1981) 2:45
7 Null And Void — The Motorcycle Song (1982) 2:27
8 Monitor — Mokele-Mbembe (1981) 3:23
9 Outer Circle — Broken Children (1982) 7:2
10 Berlin — Matter of Time (1979) 3:56
11 Fibonaccis — Crickets (1987) 4:32
12 Wog — I Had A Notion (1986) 5:54
13 Suburban Lawns — Hug You (1983) 4:49
14 The Nerves — Hanging On The Telephone (1976) 2:3
15 Blissed Out Fatalists — Spiral (1987) 2:42
16 Phranc — My Favorite Women Newscasters (1987) 2:13

Disk 4
1 Null And Void — I Can See What’s Happening (1980) 2:43
2 Pompeii 99 — Android Police (1982) 3:0
3 Outer Circle — Blind Venetians (1982) 1:39
4 Oingo Boingo — Only A Lad (1979) 4:16
5 Steven Fields — Legalize Heroin (1988) 5:7
6 Knife Lust — Shrivel Up (1979) 3:10
7 The Screamers — 122 Hours Of Fear (Part 1) (1978) 2:20
8 The Screamers — 122 Hours Of Fear (Part 2) (1978) 1:12
9 Rikk Agnew — 10 (1982) 2:58
10 Savage Republic — Next To Nothing (1982) 3:24
11 Life After Death — Isn’t It Time (1985) 2:57
12 Human Hands — Blue Eel (1981) 2:51
13 Gleaming Spires — While We Can (1982) 4:19
14 Christian Death — Cervix Couch (1984) 3:10
15 Nu Beams — One Step For What? (1981) 3:9
16 Kommunity FK — Unknown to You (1983) 4:15
17 Plebs — Redhead (1982) 1:44
18 Abecedarians — I Glide (1986) 7:31

Disk 5
1 Android — Luminary (1982) 6:12
2 Nocturnal Education — Alone Tonight (1986) 5:23
3 Standard Of Living — So Hard (1982) 1:53
4 Wall Of Voodoo — The Passanger (1980) 4:9
5 17 Pygmies — Lawrence of Arabia (1983) 6:59
6 Shadow Minstrels — Popular Song Of The Hour (1983) 4:23
7 Iron Curtain — Tarantula Scream (1984) 4:18
8 Grey Pavilion — Tell Me The Story (1983) 3:43
9 Information — I Know (1985) 3:35
10 Green on Red — Two Bibles (1981) 3:29
11 if-then-else — Sidewalker (1981) 5:23
12 Monitor — BEAK (1979) 1:50
13 Fibonaccis — Some Men (1987) 2:42
14 Wet Picnic — Tension (1982) 3:36
15 Rikk Agnew — Everyday (1982) 4:30

Disk 6
1 Freshly Wrapped Candies — Judas (1987) 3:41
2 Pop Art — In My Hands (1987) 2:56
3 Shadow Minstrels — The Guest (1983) 2:30
4 Slow Children/Pal Shazar — Spring in Fialta (1981) 3:24
5 The Squad — Virgins (1981) 3:36
6 Cipher — Body Chemistry (1981) 2:9
7 Earwigs — Freedom (1981) 2:47
8 Transport — Body Buildings (1982) 3:49
9 League of Nations — Thin Ice (1984) 3:42
10 The Child Molesters — Don’t Worry Kyoko (1990) 4:7
11 Nu Beams — Sterile Swab (1981) 2:53
12 B-People — I Said Everybody (1979) 1:37
13 Perfect Imperfect Circular — A Mighty Feeling (1986) 2:33
14 Standard Of Living — Dancing In The Street (1982) 5:15
15 Cathedral of Tears — A Situation Of… (1984) 3:29
16 The Spell — Moonlight Shadows (1984) 3:40
17 Puppies — Mechanical Beat (1981) 2:45
18 Atila — Mr. Kritik (1981) 1:12
19 Sparks — Angst In My Pants (1982) 3:28

Disk 7
1 Suburban Lawns — Gidget Goes to Hell (1979) 2:1
2 Outer Circle — Another Moon (1982) 3:25
3 100 Flowers — Without Limbs (1983) 1:56
4 Subjects — Laugh (1982) 2:9
5 Mnemonic Devices — Marriage Of Convenience (1982) 3:42
6 Screaming for Emily — The Love (1987) 4:43
7 Freshly Wrapped Candies — Fa Fa Fa (1987) 3:11
8 Dream 6 — Rain (1985) 3:16
9 Afterimage — Relapse (1981) 3:8
10 Wall Of Voodoo — Ring Of Fire (1980) 6:11
11 Abecedarians — Smiling Monarchs (1985) 6:47
12 Passionnel — Make Like You Like It (1984) 3:37
13 Rand Kennedy — Enorma Jones (1983) 1:3
14 Drowning Pool — The Italian Pop Song (1987) 5:37
15 The Fontanelles — Passion Kills (1987) 2:57
16 The Motels — Total Control (1979) 5:54

Disk 8
1 Animal Dance — Under Pulse (1984) 3:21
2 Null And Void — Un Sedatif Ce Soir (1980) 4:34
3 Suburban Lawns — Flavor Crystals (1983) 3:47
4 Newsbreak — Hidden Eyes (1983) 3:14
5 Three O’Clock, The — With Cantaloupe Girlfriend (1982) 2:54
6 Christian Death — Romeo’s Distress (1982) 3:15
7 Johanna Went — Consumed (1982) 2:40
8 Iron Curtain — The Condos (1984) 4:44
9 Infantry — The Call (1987) 3:50
10 IQ Zero — Zero Gravity (1981) 3:9
11 Savage Republic — Mobilization (1982) 3:21
12 Choir Invisible — Quiet Place (1981) 3:14
13 Kommunity FK — Incompatible Disposition (1983) 2:48
14 Cyrnai — Noct (Mourning Glare) (1985) 5:9
15 17 Pygmies — Chameleon (1985) 3:54
16 Danny & the Doorknobs — In Exile (1985) 2:40
17 Cindy Lee Berryhill — Headin’ For The Border Line (1987) 3:56

America has known a lot of great vocal stylists: Patti Smith with her girlish, demure speaking voice erupting into volcanic fusillades from hell when she starts to sing; George Carlin’s loopy, hippie lilt, eventually crackling into the idiosyncratic, linguistically obsessed crank of his later years; Marilyn Monroe’s whispered “Happy Birthday” to JFK in Madison Square Garden, her only hit single, but a wonderful translation of the decidedly constructed ditzy-sage demeanor of her films; Johnny Carson’s nasally, Midwestern twang, crisp as freshly ironed slacks, punctuating jokes, good or bad, soft-balled from the guest couch; Allen Ginsberg’s mischievous Jersey Jewish channeling of Blake and Whitman in “Howl” and UCLA Alum James Franco’s equally mischievous Jersey Jewish channeling of Gisnberg in Howl; Axl Rose’s noxious screech, Kurt Cobain’s gargly drones, Bob Dylan’s messianic yawps, and Al Jolson’s Jolsonesque “Mammy” in blackface in the first talkie; Ronald Reagan’s authoritarian jocular basso profundo pouring forth casually from a throat swathed in white cravats, while William F. Buckley lisps complaints from a couch in WWOR-TV Studios in Secaucus, NJ, and Jimmy Carter retreats into the 90s; Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Paul Robeson and James Earl Jones, Montgomery Clift and James Dean, Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey, all pairs all connected by osmotic DNA over the reach of years (and telephones); Eddie Murphy doing Eddie Murphy receiving a phone call from Bill Cosby chastising Murphy for using dirty words on stage, Murphy then doing Murphy calling Richard Pryor and Pryor saying to Murphy: “Tell Bill next time to have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up!”

Charles Bernstein—who, by the way, is the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania; the publisher of something like 12 full-length books of poems, most recently All the Whiskey in Heaven, his selected poems published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; the author of several collections of essays such as Content’s Dream (published right here in Los Angeles in 1986), A Poetics, which contains his oft-cited, seminal essay “Artifice of Absorption,” My Way, which contains one of my favorite essays of his, “Poetics of the Americas,” and most recently Attack of the Difficult Poems, of which no doubt today’s performance will be a substantial new salvo; editor or co-editor of countless volumes, journals, and digital archives such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine in the 70s with Bruce Andrews, the PennSound archive at the University of Pennsylvania, and a recent edition of the poems of Louis Zukofsky for the Library of America with its distinctive light cerise/puce cover; television and movie actor in such film as Finding Forrester where he played Dr. Simon and a series of hilarious Yellow Pages commercials with Jon Lovitz (where he school Lovitz on the art of improvised comedy), or as himself articulating the literary virtues of the latest postmodern post-author literary fad, the telephone book (R.I.P.); a prolific librettist, having composed three operas with Ben Yarmolinsky and most recently an opera based on the life of Walter Benjamin called Shadowtime with British composer Brian Ferneyhough; Director and Co-founder of the Poetics Program at the SUNY Buffalo, where he taught from 1990 to 2003; father, husband and Jew, this latter apparently contested category according to a fantastic long essay in Attack; and lastly, perhaps leastly, but not insignificantly the creator of several audio works that he recorded spontaneously over the years (all of which are collected on ubu.com) such as a now infamous one in which he reads the numbers 1 to 100 in order and quite dramatically, which I invite you to check out—is a different matter entirely. But I’d rather not tell you what he sounds like, you’ll learn momentarily.

As for Charles’ importance as a poet and theorist, I can only say that writings of his have had immense importance to me as I was “growing up” to be a poet. For instance, when in high school and college, Ezra Pound was really my guide, my “master” if you will—creator of crystalline poems, writer of daring, timely and certainly confident essays that I could use to chart out Modernism and basically all that came before (I was just some kid in the Jersey suburbs, my mother raised during the Korean War, quasi-working class, certainly no one around me was going to help). Pound’s anti-semitism, the radio broadcasts, or his generally complex conservative / libertarian politics never registered as anything I had to deal with—it was all aesthetics—and when they did I was quite troubled for a time. Pound became this big roadblock historically—you had to have an answer about Pound to make sense of all that came after: his generosity to younger poets, the profound flood of new forms that proliferated in the wake of the Cantos, etc.. Anyway, it was actually an essay of Charles, “Pounding Fascism,” that appeared in Artifice of Absorption that kind of did the trick for me; if anything, the essay permitted me—poets are all about the “grand permissions”—to assimilate Pound’s contradictions (the overdetermination of his political views with what seemed like an indeterminate poetics), his unfortunate crossing over into “history” proper—poets won’t try that anytime soon!—and the fecundity of his artistic ideas.

I think many of us poets in the academy have something of Charles’ “program,” if you will, within us. There’s tremendous anxiety among poets in the academy that they’ve sold out, are living in some other universe that can have no bearing on the “world,” partly because so many of our friends—some of whom we consider better poets than ourselves!—are working day jobs, are largely unrecognized by the literary world, are working only very slowly due to insecurities and lack of critical attention, etc. I think this is another problem that Charles has helped me solve, which is that he’s turned the academy itself into a subject—he works within it, critiques it, activates it, acknowledges its place in the world and hence is able to articulate its potentialities. To quote from one Charles’ essays, the job of the teacher is to work in the “vertical of the social not the horizontal of tradition.”* I think he does that all the time—which is why he, and his poetry, are so damn difficult.

* I actually couldn’t find this quote in Attack, where I thought I had read it. Someone might have written it about him, and this might not be the exact phrasing; nonetheless, Charles approved the quote before I read the introduction, so we’ll just consider this a collaboration.

[I was recently asked to be a respondent at a small panel — two papers, one by a student and one by a professor — at UCLA. This what I wrote. It ends as a sort of polemic about the “artist” and “society” today (the language almost sounds quaint, but I was trying to write in a “public” way, which I haven’t figured out how to do) but it gets at a few points I’d like to try to elaborate on later.]

These papers both seem to strike right at the heart of certain issues of aesthetics and ethics, and a discussion of either could easily spill over into an entire meditation on the role of the artist in society, particularly as it concerns society when it has failed us: in the former case, during the AIDS crisis, a relatively unprecedented failure of US leadership to even acknowledge a decimating epidemic (though we can look at instances such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments as antecedents of government sponsored or endorsed disease inflicted on a minority population, or even before that, the ignorance or exploitation of smallpox and other diseases in the Native American population in the colonial years), and in the latter, a very specific instance of war – the Israel war in Lebanon in 1982 – but also war and “violence” (the former cannot entirely be reduced to the latter) in general.

The both share issues concerning witness – how to observe, record, convey, and memorialize incidences that most of us in our “everyday” lives never experience (one must assume that there is a “normalcy” that runs in counter to the extraordinary events of AIDS and war). They also ask how to create action, or “change,” from this witnessing – how does the elegy interact with an “ethics of activism,” how does a “war film” become an “anti-war” film and then an “anti war war film” (acknowledging, as we should, that there is a such thing as a “war film” just as there such things as “war poems,” such as the Anglo-Saxon “Battle of Brunaburh,” the epics of Homer and Virgil, and our own national anthem).

A running (not unexamined) assumption in both essays is that the artist is a participant in these events – even a “victim,” as they are not ever depicted as being in control of fate or the forces governing them – and that the artist wants to do good: the artist is aware of what a normal, full human life is – filled with love, compassion, responsibility to others, etc. – and uses this general sense of humanness as a foil for the aberrant conditions of the fatal, swift-acting processes of disease and of war. The trick or game is how to preserve the “human,” synonymous with the “good” in this relatively un-ideological formulation, as well as how to “keep alive” the events that prompted these works of art, rather than merely offer them for simple consumption.

In both papers, this leads into questions of technique. In the former instance, the question centers on how maintain the dynamic nature of very particular gay relationship – between the poet, Paul, and his late lover, Rog – and not let it fade into the “general” genre of elegy, not surrender “Rog to the past” (Aaron states it much more eloquently, but I can’t find the quote). In general, the poems become political by their very resistance of their particulars to submit to the “public mores” and their “utilitarian” nature, which (though it’s not quite stated, I think) quite obviously has failed them. There is some variation on the Galatea myth here: a poet, who knows his lover has died, nonetheless will continue to animate this body on the stage of the poem, which he is aware is entering a contested, politicized forum.

In the Israeli war films, an excellent case is made that both Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon made clean breaks with naturalistic filmmaking to such a degree that they in fact become meditations on war and cinema themselves. In the former, the spectacle of war – which is to say, the violence of battle (and not the spectacle of speeches and conferences), are kind of auto-critiqued by the very dream-like, vivid and beautiful nature of the animation, as if beauty and violence, or maybe dream and witness, were engaged in some intellectual counterpoint. In the latter, all hints of the spectacle are dropped (including non-diegetic music) in favor of the colorless boredom of life in a small tank – it’s always interesting when films refuse certain absorptive techniques, like in the films of Dogme 95 – though meditation on the mediation of cinema itself still makes its presence in the form of the cross-hairs in the gun sight (if anything, more poignant now considering our nation’s recent addiction to Predator drones).

I’m taking the long way to making my basic point, which is that in none of these cases do these artists present their works as assays – as tries, as intellectual workings-out. In the art works themselves (as opposed to the paratextual materials of interviews, postscripts, the author’s other work, or history as its been recorded, etc.) there is no thesis or grounds for argument presented, nor do there seem to be the operations of clear dialectics that would seem to actively request intellectual – as opposed to emotional, or even ethical via vicarious participation – engagement by the viewer. The artist him or herself is generally supposed to remain more or less invisible in the work, or if visible, only in nuances of style, editing choices, word choices, punctuation (or lack thereof) – the marks of the auteur – or as, importantly, character in this act of memory. Outside of that, the artist (in these cases, self-consciously responsible artists) does not, or more or less refuses to, interject what one might call editorial or intellectual content into their pieces concerning the aesthetics of depiction – the artist, as presumably the viewer or reader, are simply subject to events, just like you and I.

(I am reminded of a piece by British artist Fiona Banner, a huge book called The Nam for which she viewed six major American films about the Vietnam War – Platoon, Apocalypse Now, etc. – and conveyed what she saw as if she were there, almost thereby insisting on the centrality of an editorial vision in the apparently transparent, absorptive depiction of war.)

Maybe this is an obvious point. But it strikes me that a lot of the theory that we rely on with which to discuss the ethical implications of contemporary works of art – Benjamin, Adorno, Debord, Jameson, etc. – in fact relied on the work of certain artists who made this issue of artifice and “reality” – specifically the absorptive nature of filmic spectacle – central to their work. I am of course thinking of Bertolt Brecht, who, despite what appears to be a revival of a “pure” form of Marxism in the academy, does not seem to be suffering a revival himself – nobody calls themselves a Brechtian today. But it seems to me, for instance, that had Brecht made a movie like Waltz With Bashir, there would have been no mistaking the element of media critique in the movie itself (which I haven’t seen, I’m just assuming this critique wasn’t foregrounded enough, since so many failed to see it). Lebanon sounds like it possesses some anti-absorptive properties, though it sounds like the “sentimental” dialogue was expressly conceived to nullify any sort of cognizance on this level.

I do think some “anti-war” films, especially those of Stanley Kubrick, take into account this Brechtian possibility; though Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket often lapse into mere absurdity or outright nihilism, they are mated enough with some analysis of the machinations behind the scenes, and leave so many issues open, as to suggest this “assayistic” quality. (Bertolucci’s films about the war share some of these qualities, and I think the first minutes of Saving Private Ryan are pretty unique in being relatively free of narrative, given over entirely to conveying the physics of battle, to nearly traumatizing effect, as if a short avant-garde film were tacked on to in the first twenty-minutes of an otherwise standard Hollywood feature.)

I couldn’t help but think of Frank O’Hara’s amazing elegy for Billie Holiday when reading Aaron’s paper. It seems to me to address a lot of the issues that Monette was concerned with – how to maintain the dynamics particularity of a relationship in a monument offered up to time. I think O’Hara’s poem suggests a middle-ground between the lyric (which he seems to posit as some sincere effort at communication) and the monologue (which is implicated by its very details into an historical situation). O’Hara was always adopting voices to tell you something of himself and his time; there is an entire suite in the voice of Mayakovsky, for instance, one of which is called “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island.” Rather than Brechtian scheme here, I see a sort of elevation of the activities of a single human to status of high artifice; there is a relative lack of a case being made for the poet as “good,” as “natural,” even as “human” – the first stanza of “The Day Lady Died” is replete with numbers and schedules, and “Having a Coke With You” is largely a catalogue of things. O’Hara simply doesn’t fit in with “public mores” as much as the latest issue of the New World Writing didn’t fit in.

I guess I’m making an argument for unnaturalism in art – not “acting,” but also no pretending to merely “be.” Or maybe if the artist is to “be,” that the artist not be human – our trusted friend, “authentic” – but powerful, in full awareness of its seduction – to stand against, or perhaps in place of, those awful forces (of fate, of politics) to which we are all supposed to be unified in being victims of. If we’re going to subject artists to such readings as involve the politicized uses of emotional valences – “protest mourning” as Aaron terms it, or the staging of trauma as a public catharsis in Gil’s description of Waltz with Bashir – the artist might as well get in on the game! I guess I wonder why (and here I’m really getting polemical), for all the hundreds of poets and film directors we have in this country and elsewhere, in what is arguably one of the most liberal periods of expression, and with film production getting cheaper and cheaper, and with film and pop cultural criticism getting more and more sophisticated (though that, indeed, might be at the heart of the problem, too) and the academy willing to engage with pop culture, there are fewer assayists – Voltaire types, people that offer their works specifically as contributions, even discursive contributions, to the public sphere, rather than merely as fodder for other people’s works – than ever. (Lars von Trier, Oliver Stone, Peter Handke and Claire Denis might be filmmakers who clearly critique the artifice of film in their feature-length fictions.)

I might summarize my point here by suggesting that artists who offer their works to a critique involving the judgments of human behavior – who offer their works with a sense of a transcendent justice – that placing the artist central to the vision presented, not as invisible auteur but persuasive author, is merely the honest thing to do, since the artist him or herself, who would co-opt history and transform the realities of others, is nearly always doing the work of politics, and is never simply “innocent.” The scales of justice are only truly activated (one assumes these artists wanted these “scales” regarded) when the artist is frank in offering him or herself to be judged.

I’d like to quote from a song by Morrissey – never one to avert trouble, he recently attacked the Queen again – which is not a comment on these works themselves so much as the problems facing the artist in society today:

No it’s just more lock jawed pop stars
Thicker than pig shit, nothing to convey
They’re so scared to show intelligence
It might smear their lovely career

What keeps them from doing so? I can’t speculate – perhaps it’s our culture of high surveillance, perhaps it’s just money – but it’s a bad time when “intelligence” and careers seem to run completely counter to each other, in entertainment as elsewhere.

Description

This course will examine punk/post-punk bands in the Los Angeles area, ranging from the years 1977-1983. We’ll start by looking briefly at the UK and NYC versions of punk/D.I.Y. culture, both in music and politics, then move to SoCal’s unique contribution. Bands include likely candidates such as The Germs, X, The Adolescents, The Screamers, The Weirdos and The Plugz, then move on to relatively obscure acts such as Suburban Lawns, The Fibonaccis, The Urinals, Monitor, Savage Republic, Outer Circle and Christian Death. We’ll brush on famous New Wave (Oingo Boingo, The Go-Go’s) and hardcore (Black Flag, Agent Orange) acts, but the focus will be on bands that seem to have disappeared from the narrative of post-punk U.S. culture. We’ll also consider the relationship of punk to the poetry scene in LA, specifically as centered on Dennis Cooper’s short-lived magazine Little Caesar. Finally, in the last sessions of the class, students will work on their own D.I.Y. compositions (no musical ability required!) and record them with “lo-tech” equipment, i.e. laptops and phones.

Reading List
Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
Simon Reynolds: Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984
Mark Spitz & Brenda Mullen: We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk

Brian Kim Stefans teaches new media and poetry in the English department. His research focuses on new media poetics (in terms of graphic design, programming, the history of the book, theories of narrative, politics/society, etc.). His secondary research project focuses on the “experimental” arts in Los Angeles, specifically poetry, music and theater.

I made this over the summer at a sign making event at LACE. Note the creepy background hands in both, but particularly the second, photo.

Just watched a ton of these on YouTube. These are some of the classics. Couldn’t embed It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Psycho, and Casino (which I can’t find online but part of which is in the short doc below), but those are all great.

Walk on the Wild Side is recommended for cat lovers. Seconds is probably my favorite, but I can’t imagine half the audience not walking out of the theater during the titles.

Vertigo is somewhere between Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema and the time warp sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Are those computer generated swirlies? I wonder if he was hanging out with John Whitney?

The Man With the Golden Arm (1955)

Vertigo (1958)

North by Northwest (1959)

West Side Story (1961)

Walk on the Wild Side (1962)

Seconds (1966)

Cape Fear (1991)

Saul Bass: Title Champ (short documentary)

Dear Melts, Digital Humanists, and others,

So, in preparation for my presentation on Friday — for which I had planned on assembling an annotated bibliography of books that fell within my understanding of the field of “digital humanities” (and/or “digital literature”), I decided to assemble the books as Amazon “lists” via the site’s “listmania” feature — seductive capitalist trap that it is! I got a little manic.

What appears below are five lists of 40 books each (that’s the max per list) that more or less circumscribe, for the moment, my understanding of the field of new media studies as it relates to literature. The titles of each of the lists are provisional — certainly any number of the books could end up on another of the lists — but in general I think it gives a pretty good idea of how I approach things, and I hope, if you have several hundred dollars to spare, that you decide to pick a few of these up. I’m going to petition the library to purchase copies of these if they don’t have them already.

If you have additional books to recommend to me for a more formal list for English graduate students, then send them my way! Most likely they won’t end up on the Amazon lists unless I can swap them out easily, given the limitations, but I’d like to have some lists on hand for future part 1s.

The good news is that I won’t blab on for hours on Friday about 100 books from my library, but I will describe my reasoning behind each of these lists and point out a few of the more unusual inclusions. It’s a very idiosyncratic assemblage (Lipstick Traces anyone?).

Best,
Brian

PS. BTW, several of the more adventurous publishers are offering their books online as downloadable PDFs. I’ve found a few of the titles below (such as Harman’s book on Latour, Prince of Networks, and Marcus Boon’s book In Praise of Copying), for free. This is kind of the companion post to my earlier Freeware Guide, Introduction to Electronic Literature.

1. Foundations and Surveys

2. Graphic Design and Visuality

3. Ludology and Narrative Theory

4. Poetry and Poetics

5. Politics and Philosophy

Digital Humanities “Jam”: A Workshop Seminar

Friday, April 15th, 10-2
CDH “Laptop Room,” Room B01
LuValle Café (enter down stairs from south side)

Light refreshments will be provided; please RSVP.

Introduction

The goal of this seminar is to consider ways in which graduate students in English and other departments of the humanities can integrate Digital Humanities into their research and scholarship. The structure of the seminar is as follows: early in the semester we will meet for a “jam session” on the digital humanities, during which students will be introduced to the concepts, technologies, and projects that are associated with the field. Students will be given an overview of work specific to UCLA, both by faculty and students, as well as in other universities when they speak of “digital humanities.” Students will then begin to consider how they can create projects that are integrated into their present research while taking advantage of digital technology, or at least the insight provided by theorists in the field.

Some Useful Links

UCLA Center for Digital Humanities
Where you can find all information about related faculty, the Graduate Certificate, research projects, etc.
http://www.cdh.ucla.edu

UCLA Digital Humanities Reading Group (sign up)
Listserv for DH lectures, workshops, job opportunities, etc.
http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/digitalhumanities

United States Digital Humanities Academic Programs
Set of links to other major DH programs
http://www.cdh.ucla.edu/resources/us-dh-academic-programs.html

UCLA HyperCities
One of the several major UCLA DH projects, especially valuable to literary studies
http://hypercities.com

UCLA The Institute for Digital Research and Education (research projects)
Overview of IDRE-HASIS research projects at UCLA
http://idre.ucla.edu/hasis/research

UCLA Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts
Mathew Fisher’s huge online links archive of medieval manuscripts from around the world
http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu

UCLA Game Lab
Exciting new research and design/programming lab at Design/Media Arts with fab website
http://games.ucla.edu

Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
Collections of Electronic Literature, the first co-edited by N. Katherine Hayles, the co-edited second by myself
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/
http://collection.eliterature.org/2/