John Edwards’ sensuous lower lip. Almost . . . French. . .
In the brand new Poetry Project Newsletter, Steve Evans expounds upon his notion of “The Disobedient Poetics of Determinate Negation,” whose method he outlines (in his words, “stooping to assonance” [STOOPING??? from what heights of rhetorical refinement?]) as follows:
NAMING
FRAMING
EVALUATING
POSITION-TAKING
NEGATING
ANTICIPATING
Whoa!
Am I the only one to have seen mafia tactics at work in this series of actions? Think about it:
NAMING (the stool pigeon)
FRAMING
EVALUATING (type of punishment)
POSITION-TAKING (of snipers at the banquet)
NEGATING (blowing their heads off)
ANTICIPATING (retaliation)
Am I…. overreading????
I’m totally down with his argument — especially with its whammo conclusion: “By their [works of determinate negation] swiftness and acuity, their precise articulation, their cathartic humor, and their unswaying hostility to dominance and the agents of its reproduction, they serve to negate the distractions, delusions, and complicities of everyday life. Fucking with the structures of conformist thought, negating them on their own ground, these acts of ‘negative testimony to the possibility of the possible’ belong more to a poetics than to a politics, but they are not not political.”
But I can’t stop seeing that banquet massacre scene (‘”on their own ground” if you will) from The Godfather in my head.
Introduction for Carolee Schneemann
Bowery Poetry Club
October 2, 2004
What is this thing, this body?
What are we doing here, as bodies, and as a social body?
Whence this crazy sensorium, these pleasures, this pain, this ever-bewildering mortality?
What’s sex? What’s love? What’s aggression? What’s war?
More than any artist I can think of, with the possible exception of Leonardo da Vinci, CS (whom I have elsewhere referred to as a “renaissance being”) has always explored these most fundamental questions.
There is a unique sortilege in her art’s expanding dimensionality. It goes far beyond, say, the charming instance of Max Fleischer animating Koko the Clown right out of his inkwell, or the misogynist Pygmalion kissing his sexy statue into life.
She has, with her sorcery, taken even the brilliantly meta Courbet one step further. In his immense painting of 1855, “The Artist’s Studio,” a nude model stands behind the painter at work. Half-draped by a sheet, but still revealing most of her luscious form, she cocks her head, seeming to admire the grand landscape he is rendering. Or is she? Perhaps she is trying to see the painting from a different perspective, and meditating on how she might do it better.
In my version, that model is Carolee Schneemann. (who in fact did work as a model when she first came to NYC). In a neat “Purple Rose of Cairo” maneuver, she steps right out of that painting, and proceeds to turn art UPSIDE DOWN. In one of the myriad ways that she examines the relationship between, and sometimes separates, figure and ground, she practically invents performance art. She works in most media: painting, film, installation, video, and text. She becomes world renowned. It’s not that she has her finger on the pulse of the moment, but rather, she is the pulse of the moment. Touché, Courbet!
Among her great achievements is having set into motion the reproduction of a socially galvanizing meme of gylanic energy that may be our greatest hope in beginning to topple the bellicose androcentrics who now dominate the planet. My co-Americans, it is with unbridled jubilation that I welcome to this stage a luminous revolutionary, Carolee Schneemann…
Kerry was polite, informed, clear, and articulate.
His presentation was properly secular.
He sees the world complexly.
There is no doubt that he crushed, really demolished, “the evildoer.”
How even the most partisan spin doctor (such as Giuliani!) could see it otherwise is beyond me.
Saw on my walk…
Dark nannies with expressions of bored resignation pushing pale children in strollers.
Lovely interactions today with
— a little dog named Cookie who reminded me of Grover on Sesame Street
— a piebald pony at the stables down the street who had glaucoma in one eye
— Dante and Nemo, as per usual, thinking how like bunnies they are…
[Nemo has pica — the desire to eat nonfood items — in his case, plastic. If he is anywhere near a plastic bag or a bit of plastic wrapping he rushes to it and starts gnawing and drooling all over it. It’s an inconvenient habit. Cat Fancy magazine informs me that he does this out of sheer neurosis.]
We ought to maximize our interactions with animals. Or… I shouldn’t generalize. I ought to. They are so very much themselves, without any tiresome confusions or insistences or statements of “identity.”
But everyone *is* a victim of something.
Can anyone explain to me why the voter divide is so neatly split down the middle?
Is there a simple explanation?
“we who love to be manipulated”
but not politically.
i never saw that equivalence:
manipulation of reader =
manipulation of citizen
that’s too simple.
*opting* to be emotionally manipulated by forms of culture
is different from *allowing* oneself to be manipulated by forms of power.
it IS different. it IS.
but i don’t know if my “argument” would hold up in a court of literature.
Viewed and loved every minute of:
Vanity Fair.
There’s something about the pace and sumptuousness of Mira Nair’s movies that keeps me at the edge of tears at every moment, watching them.
I cried at the end because the ending was JUST RIGHT. But I won’t reveal it here.
