Month: August 2009

Thanks, everyone, for your input. Who said you couldn’t put new lenses in old frames?

I am a little over 45.5 years old and my eyes aren’t working properly. I need progressives. I hate wearing glasses because I am vain, but now it is time, I’m afraid, to bite the bullet. I spent at least an hour trying on every frame at my optometrist’s office, after having had a very interesting conversation with him about early punk rock. I narrowed my choices down to these three, and I would really appreciate your input. Which should I get?

This pair resembles a pair of reading glasses I bought for 99 cents and on which I have received compliments. I think that with my hair side-parted and held with a barette and these frames I would look like someone about to be put on a train to Dachau. I mean that in the best possible way; they have that 30s in Berlin kind of vibe.

Choice A:

This is the pair I’m afraid I like the best, but are they just too outrageously dorky? Devo glasses. The woman who worked the front desk at the eye doctor’s said, “They’re too big for your face, but you might be able to get away with them.” To me, they say “well below 14th St.”

Choice B:

And then there’s these, which seem to me like a kind of compromise between the two:

Choice C:

What do you think? A, B, or C? Or none of the above? I would really appreciate your comments.
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Addendum

OK, wait, there are two other possibilities: glasses I already own.

I think these are cool: REAL vintage. But Gary says I look like an old lady in them (isn’t that sort of the point?):

Choice D:

and then these, which I like, but I’m not sure they are big enough for progressive lenses:

Choice E:

I know I’m awfully flushed and sweaty here, but it’s like 90 degrees in my room at the moment

left to right: David Wolach’s brother, Julian Brolaski’s back, David Wolach, Brenda Iijima, friend of Tracy & Julian, Erica Kaufman, E. Tracy Grinnell

Last Sunday, I gave a reading out in Bushwick with Julian Brolaski, Adam Fieled, Scott Hightower, Chris Stackhouse, and David Wolach. Adam and I had a brief, and somewhat heated conversation about Flarf and its import or lack thereof. Adam blogged today that at the reading he had his “first chance to talk in depth to a member of the Flarf Collective”; well, first of all, that was ME, Adam, you can say my name!, and secondly, I mean, depth is relative, I suppose, but it didn’t seem to me that our conversation went beyond a skimming of the topic. He says that the conversation (which lasted at most, I would say, seven to ten minutes) didn’t change his mind, but honestly, that wasn’t my intent. I don’t fancy getting rhetorical about things that people have already made up their minds about without a prolonged investigation. It’s not really worth my energy, and besides, it isn’t up to me to make people try to like things that they are not inclined to like.

As he mentions in his post, his position on Flarf is that he doesn’t see how it can possibly be of lasting value. I told him that was not my concern at all, and that I wasn’t in poetry to get a toehold on eternity: “I do it for kicks,” I said. I also told him that I thought the term “post-avant” is ridiculous by definition; he countered by making the cogent point that “flarf “ is a ridiculous term, too, and I came back with this even more cogent point: “yes, but it’s supposed to be.” I remember saying that what gets passed on through the ages doesn’t necessarily do so because of any innate superior quality, but because of the machines or systems that move it along; otherwise, William Snodgrass wouldn’t be a name we recognize. Adam thinks that poetry is “left to later generations to determine what’s what and who matters,” but this strikes me as awfully naïve. It isn’t entire generations that do that, but a struggle between the forces of canonization (and these are complex, with factors like mentors and peer groups and lowest-common-denominators to consider) and individuals who continuously ferret out what has been wrongfully ignored. It pains me, really pains me, to think that I was able to go through college studying poetry without ever learning who MINA LOY was, or BARONESS ELSA. I had to write my thesis on Bernadette Mayer because no one seemed to really be talking about her.

Adam’s primary point of objection to Flarf is that, in his view, he does “not think [it] makes for the creation of very memorable poems.” To that I can only wonder, firstly, well, which of the high modernist poems are terribly memorable, beyond the first line or so? We can all call up a wheelbarrow, some sawhorses, some tender buttons, but beyond that, is memorability really a criterion for the continued influence of modernist poetry? Isn’t it more the GESTURE of the texts that we remember? I certainly remember many key texts of the language poets, but that could be more because I read them over and over again (“fellaheen” “Tashkent” “Relax/ Stand at Attention” “people are walrus, fuck ‘em”) than because of any inherent “memorability” of the texts themselves.

Even so, and even as an insider, my sense is that Flarf poems actually are memorable, although more perhaps because they are “bad” (In the sense of Eartha Kitt’s “I Want to be Evil”) or obnoxious or funny than because they are “good”: once you have heard titles like “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” “Chicks Dig War,” or “Mm-Hmm” you will have a difficult time forgetting them even if you want to. They are mindworms.

Adam also made the point that he doesn’t have the sense that Flarf is doing anything new, and that he “fail[s] to see how it adds to the Duchamp paradigm (of the “ready-made”) that was put into place one-hundred years ago.” I couldn’t agree with him more. I don’t think any of us is claiming to be doing anything new, at least not with form or with conceptual gesture. We aren’t motivated by the desire to be at the cutting edge, even though we may be there by default, because everyone else is repeating the same art moves, too; we just have more fun doing it. We write this stuff because it entertains us to write it and to read it, and because it channels, releases, and reshapes energies – notably those of despair and of hilarity.

Adam writes that, “nothing is going to turn me into a novelty freak, because this kind of trend-hopping is anathema to the very slow development of real poetry history.” It strikes me that actually, despite all the media hoopla we Flarfists are enjoying recently, it is not in fact a “trend.” It’s been going on healthily for eight years now. Nor can we even speak, I think, anymore, of “real history” without betraying a very deep conservatism (to which Adam owns up in his post) and willful blindness to the necessity of allowing multiple perspectives and contexts. Maybe Adam is nostalgic for some organized world of poetry he learned about in his Norton Anthology, but it just isn’t like that anymore. In fact, it was never like that. It was all an illusion.

Strange desperate feeling today, and overworked (reading student papers). I don’t feel like taking my goddamn picture. Does that compromise the project? And if it does, so what?

I actually wore three different outfits today. One I didn’t photograph, but here are two of them:

Grayish-purple babydoll dress (Victoria’s Secret catalog ,ugh), accessorized with “newsprint” scarf, rosy mauve daypack, and new sunglasses. The seller on Canal St. wanted $25 for them, I said, “what are you crazy? I’ll give you $10.” He said no way so I started walking out, and finally we agreed on $12, which is not too bad given that it’s less than 50% of his initial quote. I like to think I drive a hard bargain, but I can’t imagine that his wholesale price was more than two or three dollars. Right? Oh, gee, excuse me, is my heritage showing?

To the Stain of Poetry Reading tonight (where I read with Julian Brolaski, Adam Fieled, Scott Hightower, Chris Stackhouse & David Wolach, thanks to organizer Amy King) I wore (you can’t quite see the skirt here; the completists among you will be disappointed, sorry):

Not sure why I so often fall into that “frame face with bird-shaped hands” pose: perhaps it’s a bellydance affectation. Photo by Brenda Iijima. I read LYRIC poems at the reading to psych out everyone who thinks of me as a mere Flarfist. Ha! A wonderful evening, with a rare sighting of Jeni Olin, here shown with Erica Kaufman: (Aren’t they gorgeous?)

Other gorgeous people I saw today:

I love her silver hair, the autumn tones, the shoulder ruffle, and the creative use of fabric direction here. She had an “I love Jesus” lanyard on as well.

I also think Gary looked gorgeous against this dramatically striped and graffiti’d pillar underneath the overpass in his Brahma (?) t-shirt and olive shorts:

Lots of sun today: sleepy. Analysis will have to wait.