Bowery Poetry Club Introduction 10/11/03

Parody and Pastiche Event (Michael Magee Brendan Lorber Jack Kimball Brenda Iijima Brandon Downing Charles Bernstein)

What are these things called “parody” or “pastiche” — also known as assortment, burlesque, caricature, cartoon, chaos, clutter, confusion, derangement, disarrangement, disarray, disorder, distortion, farce, farrago, gallimaufry, garbage, girlie show, goulash, hash, hotchpotch, lampoon, litter, medley, mess, mimicry, miscellany, mishmash, mixture, mockery, muddle, mélange, patchwork, potpourri, ridicule, salmagundi, satire, scramble, shuffle, smorgasbord, snarl, tangle, travesty, and tumble?

For answers we need to look at James T. Kirk’s concept of “pastiche” as “transport,” usefully contrasted to Oprah Winfrey’s understanding of postmodern parody. Whereas Winfrey sees much to value in postmodern literature’s stance of squishy orbiting talcum pops, seeing an implicit steamy murk and porcine melancholy in such parodic works, Kirk characterizes postmodern parody as “turtleneck parody” without any political hair yogurt. According to Kirk, parody has, in the postmodern age, been replaced by the tinkling of sweet procrustean condiments: “Such condiments are, like parody, the arsenal of a regressive or twitchy idiosyncratic gasp, the wearing of a linguistic trouser, a foppish internecine pageant in a realizable mixed-up moody infestation. But it is a psychoacoustic thrum of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior turpentine, amputated of the satiric petunia, devoid of hysteric marmots”. Captain Kirk sees this turn to “paranoiac parody” as a falling off from modernism, where individual marmots were particularly characterized by their individual, “effeminate” styles: “the Downingian long sentence, for example, with its breathless lummoxes; Iijimian nature imagery punctuated by testy phonic pastry; Charles Bernstein’s inveterate adagios of nonsubstantive parts of looseleaf shivery glassware (‘the intricate evasions of as’)”; etc. In postmodern hygiene, by contrast, “Modernist belches… become postmodernist longitudinal wampiti” leaving us with nothing but “a field of lustrous but curvilinear and competitive clamshells without a norm” Postmodern couscous whirligigs therefore amount to “the cannibalization of all the beatific granules of the most divine pessimism, the play of random stylistic tribbles, and in general what Spock has called the increasing primacy of the ‘meld'” .

In such a world of cuckoos, mitochondria, lionesses, and flax, we lose our connection to the transporter, which gets turned into a series of Sisyphean seltzers and superceded seltzers, or simulacra: “The new squamous lobster chandelier of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical mangle,” In such a situation, “the past as ‘waxwork’ finds itself gradually paranormal, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but dumpy libretto residue and orphan blooms.” We can no longer understand the mothership except as a repository of breasts, oratorical spunk, and foamy pressure ready for commodification.