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Gabriel Gudding wrote in a comment box recently:

i know the flar-fist blogs are v masculinist.

To which I responded

Um is my blog masculinist?

Gabe’s reply follows in blockquotes with my responses interleaved:

i don’t read many blogs, nada.

OK, and clearly you don’t read mine with anything like attentiveness, or you would not say something so absurd about it.

but i mean, aside from the fact that entire notion and action of ritualized transgression, esp as it manifests in art, has lots of homologies with masculinized behavior (self-aggrandizement, anger as means of appropriating needs, fetishizing of technique),

Well, if I own up to the first two, but feministically, as a way to aggrandize what has been belittled & oppressed and as righteous anger to, yes, appropriate needs, can I say what I have said a billion times in this space here before, if you had thought to pay attention to it, that I do not fetishize technique. I do not think really that what the flarf collective does can be reduced to “technique.”

if the motto of your blog is any indicator, then yeah yr blog is totally masculinist:

Really, Gabe, how glib can you get? Totally masculinist? I really do not think so. The fact that you would attempt to summarize everything I have written on the seven years I have kept this blog as masculinist because of your willful, twisty misreading of its epigraph (no, not its “motto.”) is in itself a kind of warlike, aggressive, unmindful gesture!

tristan tzara: “”Beauty and Truth in art don’t exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality, transposed directly and clearly into its work, man [sic] and his [sic] vitality, the angle under which he [sic] looks at the elements and the way he [sic] is able to pick these ornamental words, feelings and emotions, out of the basket of death.” (Tristan Tzara, from “lecture on dada” p. 107)”

the focus on intensity, directness, clarity, man, vitality, looking-at, manipulator-of words/feelings/emotions, and the whole heroic stealer-from / fighter-with “death” — is totally very all about eurocentric conceptions of manly manliness.

I like the quotation because it stresses the ornamental, a key concept I have been meditating on here in writing since the beginning of this blog, and also because it imparts a Spinozan sense of the infinite horizon against which we seize the day, intensely, to make our works. I don’t read it as you do, at all, and in any case, I correct the pronoun throughout, in case you didn’t note that.

then there’s the whole 20thC-europe refusal of beauty thing — edmund burke was right to suggest an ideational substrate in european culture that yokes beauty with smallness, femininity, pleasure, roundness, light and the sublime with hugeness, masculinity, terror, dark.

I don’t refuse beauty; rather, I insist on it (perhaps because I am so small, feminine, pleasure-focused, round, and radiant myself, prrroww, oh and sublime, too, did I mention that?) – but I insist on a hugely expanded definition of it. What I refuse is “beauty,” and I think that’s what Tzara was getting at, too; that is, the notion of beauty as confined to accepted limits of what beauty might be, beauty in constraints, beauty that is only symmetrical or harmonic or non-grotesque. To me, that isn’t beauty, and I don’t think it was to Tzara, either. Have you looked into Tzara recently? Because to me his best writings sound a lot like koans, not like Eurotrash.

plus there’s the whole performative defiance, verbal club/gang thing. a show of one’s supposed autonomy in an energetic fantasy of defiance against other poetry. i mean there’s a reason why a-g movements are almost completely guy-based, more even than mainstream circles.

I do enjoy performative defiance (don’t you? isn’t your own “outside” posturing a kind of performative defiance, too?), it’s true, in part because there’s energy to be found there (as you point out), and that does help to fuel production. A narrative with no conflict is not really interesting, is it? The thing is, what we do in the flarf collective is simply not guy-based. It’s just not. The women involved are strong and hilarious and brilliant, and power is diffused throughout. A little fact-checking might have served you here.

so yeah i guess kinda.

No, Gabe, not even kinda. And now that you mention it, I can’t think of any flarf blogs that are “masculinist,” not in the way Dale’s aggressive thrown gauntlets are, in any case. Look at Stan’s recent post on “boundary issues,” and the ensuing comments. Gary’s blog is a mass of gushing, almost girlish,enthusiasms about the world and its cultures. Drew’s is about attentive listenings. Kasey’s is rhetorically masterful, it’s true, but not in a “masculinist” way; he’s just good at what he does, and thoughtful, and smart. So is Anne, and a lot of her posts are about what it’s like to be a mother. Is that “masculinist?” Sharon doesn’t post frequently, but if you look at her blog right now you will see a long post about her reminiscences of her early time in NYC, all described in heartfelt, luscious, emotional detail. What is masculinist about that?

Gabe, what are you talking about? Like so much of what gets leveled at my cohorts, this is really inaccurate and honestly kind of dehumanizing. I really do expect better thinking from you, and from everyone else, too.

I need your prurient lantern

When the noxiousness lie down beside me,
When the meek and staring are shimmying brightly,
You’ll make my lines become so lovely,
A gargoyle of love poems that i adore,

Don’t you know that i am a ‘pataphysicist?
Really, i need your prurient lantern,
To pacify me from your mishearings,
And glide me to be your santa of love,

Show me the weirdness,
Prove me for your energetic lilt,
By the time i try,
To call your narrative with one and only loudness in me

Love Me With The Photics of Marginalia

I walk through the template of love, where your name still frightens my mind, and the sulky marmots tell a story about falsetto . . .

Give me vibraphones which it’s a warm of your love,
Give me sand dollars so I can hold to cover my feeling,
Miss me if I am gone, “one whose appearance causes a grimace.”
Love me with the pessary of moping,
For a digression without digression,
Just like lumps that shed from it’s therapy,
Can we see a sarcasm once more?
Wherever ducks and nightwalkers sing?
O. . . Mumbled brute, give me a love,
Until my eyes can’t speak hymen anymore.

Why Don’t You Love Me Blankness?

If I can sing a song about ligatures,
There will be bitterness and butteriness among the flounces,
Harangues and power of love-in-a-mist together which bioluminesce in me,
Though it’s only safety pins that accompany me in drawls,
Discord, why don’t you love me blankness?
Did the bemazement of love had deceived you?
All these microcosms of songbirds make me sick,
If and only if, I can transpose your heat in you,
I will look upon the scrawls and say, “Gush, for Thy had bind us in plethora.”
Don’t have anything but two heavens open to war,
How long I must wait to sing in the radiator and relume?
Only sheen gives ardor to a croon in this twinkly holomorph.

I would like to remind would-be commenters on this blog that I do not accept anonymous comments.

Thinking about, reading, feeling, experiencing several things at once, always, but noticing it especially today.

Reading about Baroness Elsa, noticing how she is so often described olfactorily, as pungent and repellent but also animal and intensely desirable. How WCW “loved” her so much he punched her in the face. Thinking how when I learned about dada in my teens she was never included. Like how I never learned about Mina Loy in college, even though at SFSU.

Noticing that on the very well-edited new remix of the Studio 360 radio show on the flarf phenomenon, my name doesn’t get mentioned, although there are a couple of my lines in the mix. I’m not huffy about that, but just sayin’. That’s OK, after I die someone will do a big university press book about me like I’m some kind of avant-garde “rediscovery.”

In fact, of the women of flarf, only Sharon’s name is mentioned on the show. Just sayin’.

The Baroness painted her nails at a time when only I guess underclass women painted their nails, if anyone did. In maybe subconscious mimicry of that, I painted my nails this morning, roughly the color of the background of this blog, and realized after the first coat that I was thinking of the Baroness. Now thinking consciously that I should endeavor also to make my outfits a little less boring, at least as a tribute to her, although the winter in this city does a lot to deflate sartorial inventiveness. Tomato can bra, anyone? Bald head tinted with iodine?

(Gary comes in to say, “I’m helping you out, sweetie, I put away the book about Baroness Elsa and put a book by William Carlos Williams on the table instead.” Laughs, “Just kidding.”)

Lately I am more interested in technology than clothes, and that worries me a bit. New camera, new netbook, new hard disk, and even coming soon an analog2digital converter. I am morphing, in middle age, from odalisque to dork. A dork with hot flashes! I did try on a beautiful faux-50s rose print dress at H & M yesterday, thinking in terms of spring, but the fit wasn’t right. That means, of course, that my sewing instinct is kicking in again, and there will be custom-made rose-print items for Nada in spring 2009.

Reading bits from Song of the Dodo and Keats and Embarrassment. Yesterday watched Abby Child’s On The Downlow (loved it!) and part of the Shaw Bros. Hong Kong Rhapsody, which I’d seen before. A-go-go contest, anyone?

Quotidian life so much about weathering irritation: with oneself, with other people. Not letting me get off the train. The horrible ugly fucking grim damp dark cold subway train. And this restless feeling of why aren’t parties better? Why are there no leaves on the trees? Annoyed, in general, by shallowness: I want vertiginous resonance. And of course I want time, I want to possess, squeeze, envelop, exude, and caress time.

Shall I wear my trousers rolled? Get botox? (I’m only half-kidding.) I am the goddamn mermaids singing to my selves, a whole goddamn mermaid musicale, but a fat lotta good it does me!

Last week Nick asked,

I know you returned to Japan not long ago for a visit. Since you lived there for 11 years, do you feel like commenting on how Japan has changed- and maybe on how it has stayed the same?

I noticed on my last two visits there that Japan, already techno-sleek, was getting even techno-sleeker. On the train, it seemed that everyone was writing a cellphone novel. More trains are equipped with screens showing commercials, news flashes, weather reports, etiquette reminders (a lot of these in Japan!), etc.

I heard from friends that Tokyo in particular had gotten much druggier. Drugs were not widely available at the time I lived there, although everyone worshipped alcohol, of course. It seemed that drugs had become a problem among students, as well.

Sociologically, it seems that there are fewer women foreigners working as teachers, as jobs are harder to find and/or not so remunerative, and the men who have stayed are married to Japanese women and have been there a long time.

What else? It’s easier now for non-Japanese speakers to navigate the train system, as train announcements and signage are now in English as well.

There has been a kind of gentrification in the old neighborhood I used to work in, Kanda, which was once mostly for salarymen and now has a profusion of new restaurants among the gritty workaday downtown atmosphere. You can sit at one of the modern pubs (nomiya) and place your order on a little tabletop computer. The food is divinely inventive, and puts ours to shame, but then, even the worst Japanese food does that, pretty much.

“Convenience stores” there have gotten even more convenient, and their food offerings are also exciting. One can go into a 7-11 or its equivalent and buy a perfectly lovely little salad with a wafu dressing, a variety of onigiri, and so forth. Again, there is absolutely no comparison with the things we call convenience stores here.

I noticed also that almost no women have long black hair. Layers, dyed brown. Most of the women remain extremely skinny, and some look as if you pushed their foreheads lightly with an index finger, they would topple backwards. But that’s not really a change. Certainly there was a lot less of the Namie-Amuro look (fake tans, orange or white fingernails, bleached hair, anorexic body perching on high boots) but still a lot of the same weird quirky fashion tropes I remember even back from the late 80s, often involving various types of socks and legwear.

All this is to say, from my tourist’s perspective, things in Japan seem to be even better than they were when I lived there, but that could very well be because I (sadly) do not live there. What’s truly wonderful, though, is the ways that Japan does not change, and how one can feel the ancientness even inside all that sleekness.

I’m a pedantic usage maven particularly regarding the transfer of Japanese words into English.

I have remarked in this space before on the correct pronunciation of karaoke (kah rah oh kay), but I’m not going to harp on that now, as I really am thinking about usage and grammar at the moment, not phonetics.

The first and most important point is that there is no –s plural in Japanese. Most educated people sense this and do not say, for example, samuraiS or sushiS. (I have often heard kimonos, though.) Following this logic, benshi should never be followed by an –s. Ever.

It is important to note (I mean, I guess it’s important) that we have come to refer to our doctored film projects as benshi when in fact benshi means narrator. That means we are the benshi (no –s!), not our projects.

A similar issue came up recently when I was collaborating recently with Adeena Karasick and Sharon Mesmer on a conference proposal entitled “Towards a Testicular Feminist Poetics.” We wanted to describe our poetics in terms of the practice of bukkake, which Wikipedia defines as “mass ejaculation on any part of the body.” One of my collaborators had written that our poems “spew bukkake,” but that unnerved me a little. Bukkake is not semen; it is the act of mass ejaculation. Thus it was very hard to translate. In Japanese it’s bukkake suru which literally means, “to do bukkake” (which sounds a little awkward, but not unpleasingly so, in English). I was hard-pressed (as it were) to figure out how to better express (as it were) it, and I think I left the phrase as it was.

OK, one more little niggling annoyance, and it has to do with transcription and pronunciation. The stuff you buy in health food stores that is a combination of sesame seeds and sea salt is goma-shio (sesame salt), but the macrobiotic food companies render it as “gomasio,” which is truly unfortunate. First of all, Americans do this weird thing of accenting the second syllable, so it sounds like some kind of weird Spanish word: goMAseeoh. No! No! No! My ears hurt! Every syllable gets just about the same stress, and it sounds like this: go mah shee oh.

Am I just insufferable?

p.s. My mom wonders why Obama says Pahkistahn but not Ahfghanistahn….

Spielberg’s comment that he couldn’t “afford to do a shot like this.” False modesty. Of course he could.

Michelle in those olive green gloves: the fashion punctum of the whole event. Loved the brocade and Jackie O reference of her outfit (she likes necklines with “interest!” Fancy trim!). Maize is not her color, though, I think; I prefer her in strong jewel tones.

Cheney positively craven & Dickensian in his wheelchair. I watched from the packed auditorium in Pratt’s Memorial Hall. Everyone hissed with great drama.

Barack comes out with his “meditative” face. I think I want to be a fly on the wall of his brain.

All those alarums. Shouldn’t they update the music? Aren’t trumpets kind of pre-colonial? Like… feudal???

The Pratt auditorium fills with applause. “I love that man,” someone behind me says.

Feinstein’s lacquered 60s hair, her fine, robust voice. No one liked her in the 80s I remember. I like her now. That fine voice.

Rick Warren [why do we need an invocation? all these invocations & blessings. jeez]. He rhymed a lot: “History is your story.” I know he’s a hopeless homophobe but found myself moved. Sorry to be switching tenses.

How can they still talk about “the lord.” The lord?

BO looking golden – praying – cut to a woman in Memphis receiving divine grace

cut to a mixed couple in LA in designer shades

“hollow be thy name”

Aretha appears in gray felt cloche hat with giant bow, rhinestones and beads around the bow’s edge, her dove-gray eyeshadow coordinated with the hat. She sings, pauses after the first syllable of country, did anyone notice that? “Father” becomes singular, she’s interpreting. BO may be president but she’s the goddamn queen. NO one, no one does a grace note like Aretha.

Jill holds the bible, she’s the “helpmate,” Biden also speaks in a fine fine voice, sounds like he means it, but after the line “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion,” which he says with conviction, a moment of spacing out, which I would do too after saying such a line of an oath… His oath followed by kisses,
then that awful piece “Air and simple gifts.” Personally I would be happy never to hear that damn Shaker song again, but I suppose I like that it’s appropriated….

Aren’t YoYo Ma’s hands cold? BO torquing his body to look at the musicians. My favorite thing is watching the girls, Malia with her little camera, such a modern child! And so beautiful! Sasha’s the family darling and clown, I can tell, but Malia already has gravity and grace.

An amazing thing to see the auditorium audience rise here at Pratt and then onscreen in Memphis, too.

The oath: his sweet fallibility.

The dynamics of his speech: a plunging arrow that then moved back up….

“worn-out dogmas that have strangled our politics”

“the makers of things…men and women obscure in their labors” (poets, did you not think of yourselves here?)

Cut to Pasadena, where a woman sees herself on CNN and jumps, startled. A frightening moment: “Did something happen to him?””

“harness the sun and the winds and the soil” this is like Steinbeck language, lovely parallelism, repetition of articles

“imagination…joined to common purpose” I hope he’s right.

Again there’s Malia with her camera, taking pictures of poppa

“the lines of tribes shall soon dissolve”: postmodern utopia

His message to leaders: “we will extend a hand, if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

key moment: “a man whose father might not have been served at a local restaurant can stand before you to take this most sacred oath”

then the speech finishes and everyone starts to leave not wanting to hear the poet

she was not worth staying for, “all about us is noise,” so how to use that noise more interestingly in the poem?

“say it plain,” she says, with much annoying rustling of paper, and I think NOOOOOOO, don’t say it PLAIN. More TORQUE pleeeze.

And I look down the row of auditorium seats to where Julian Brolaski and E. Tracy Grinnell are sitting and we grimace…

OK, New Era… bring it on.

Today, helped Gary purge books. What a lovely feeling. Bye, books.

We went to get quarters to do the laundry. The bank clerk was so radiant. I wonder if she’s always radiant or if she was thinking of the imminent historical moment.

It’s a winter wonderland outside, not so horribly cold and every delicate branch is topped with powdery snow. G. and I said, whoa, the snowflakes look like 3-d graphics! They’re coming right at us! And they look so realistic!

Purging books is fun because you remember what you have. I kept poking my nose into The Arcades Project and Stendhal’s diaries.

I did not accomplish anything that I wanted to accomplish this long weekend, but that’s OK: my belly is full of brown rice and stew and broccoli and san pellegrino, and tomorrow is a new day.