Otohime

The simultaneity of the prophetic and the satiric distinguishes the greatest of Romantic art, and the failure of the classically oriented taste and criticism of our times has been not to credit the Romantics with a sense of humor and to ridicule their achievements with the same ridicule they practiced on themselves. The crucial difference, of course, is that Romantic satire measures the limitations of its heroes in their quest for absolute freedom while classical taste calls even the limited movement toward those ends grotesque.

(P. Adama Sitney, writing in Visionary Film on Kenneth Anger)

We’ll all be Yayoi Kusama soon.

Today was so variously interesting I have to make some quick notes about it before Duration swallows my memory:

at lunchtime went to a screening of three films by a Pratt colleague, Ethan Spigland,

the first called, I think “Luminosity/Porosity” with an old-fashioned (to me) Teiji Ito-ish soundtrack exploring the interactions of porous materials like stone and brick and cement with light;

the second actually a set of short films (I LOVED these) created in collaboration with Malcolm McClaren (!) to interact with McClaren’s mashup songs (for example, Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” + the Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together”(!)). The images were very s-l-o-w, sometimes looped images from 60s & 70s porno films… but not the sex scenes; rather, what came before and after the sex scenes: a woman eating grapes, three women sitting on a sectional sofa, a cocktail party… Discussion afterwards focused on the expressiveness of these isolated moments, how they (in Ethan’s words) “revealed the unconscious” of the film.

Thinking as I listened to the discussion of what I mentioned to G. yesterday, that to get inside any art form you have to actually do it, never mind whether you do it well, and now that I have a little experience with moving images I knew precisely what Ethan meant. There is a moment in my newest opus where a very plump little girl dances in a monster costume at a carnival, and there is so much revealed in those few seconds… about little girls, about monsters, about plumpness, about carnivals, and how we feel beholding those things, and how SLOWED down the poignancy of her movement is even more penetrating.

But back to Ethan’s films… the third one he showed was of Miru Kim, whose project is to photograph herself nude in abandoned urban spaces. He said he was interested in how she moved through those spaces, and that the photos didn’t reveal that, so his film showed her padding about in factories full of rusty equipment, actually sitting on the giant gears (I thought of Chaplin, but naked), touching surfaces, peeling off paint, gingerly putting her bare foot down on piles of scrap material. I worried about whether she had had a tetanus shot, and whether she was warm enough, and I felt a little nervous for her as exposed Asian female, but not so much, I mostly thought she was brave and beautiful.

Ran from there to take my students to PS 1 where with another teacher they were asked to look at an installation by Florian Slotawa: “Most of the contents from his Berlin apartment, including his washing machine, dining table, wardrobe and kitchen sink, have been transported into the gallery, leaving the apartment absent of key appliances and furniture.” (from the PS 1 site) and while they were being guided by the teacher in thinking about this sort of stark and imposing structure (none of the objects were in any kind of usable position, and were balanced on top of each other), I went across the hall to watch Kenneth Anger movies, one of which I adored:

Eaux d’Artifice, in which a human (a dwarf, it turns out) clad in a Marie Antoinette-era gown, perruque, and mask, glides across what seems like palace grounds; it reminded me of the set of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete,… ah, Wikipedia tells me it is the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. (and why am I not going THERE this summer?) Gorgeous arcs of spewing (ejaculating?) water, a fan that suddenly turns golden amongst the monochrome, all set to Vivaldi.

Browsed the bookshop there, noted many books by K. Goldsmith, C. Bok, and even Lisa Jarnot, made mental note that we must get Flarf anthology in such museums because of all the trendy elements: collectives, appropriation, etc.

And then, and then, as if that weren’t enough, got on the 7 train to meet G. because, as Rodney’s poem testifies, “there’s Szechuan in Flushing,” and we ate dan-dan noodles, basil chicken, etc., then got on the 7 again to Jackson Heights so I could re-buy a copy of the old Ramayana DV so that I can cop the scene where Ravenna unwraps Sita from endless colorful saris, and where in the DVD shop I had lovely interactions with two cherubs whose Muslim mother saw me with the DVD and told me to enjoy it with my head and not my heart because it is wrong to worship idols of wood and stone (forgot to mention here how earlier in the day I kicked off Passover by having a BLT for lunch: sorry, ancestors, it was delicious, so crunchy and bacony). And then finally before coming home bought a little triangle of a paan leaf; if you have not tried one before know that it tastes like a cross between brown sugar syrup, bath salts, and a lawn, and it is delightful. It is probably on the trajectory of the stimulus of that weird treat that I have been able to write these notes about my terrific (but exhausting!) day.

whoa, good writing here

If it were up to me every man who wasn’t already a dandy would be
forced to be a transvestite.

Had a moment of intense happiness today although tired and cold, sitting on the corner of Cortelyou and Coney Island Avenue waiting for the B68 bus, eating two absolutely perfect Medjool dates.

Thinking that I am neither beautiful enough to relax into beauty in order to hypnotize people nor homely enough to relax into homeliness and just be pure consciousness. It is a tense middle space.

I would like to learn to speak the language of men. I mean, not to capitulate to them, but for the sake of dramatic breadth, and also for attention.

I do notice that when I post on certain “Aspergerian” topics, like “poetics,” below, I get a flurry of comments from men. Hi fellas! Come here often?

If I post instead on the fact that Conway now has the most amazing selection of t-shirts for no more than 3.99 apiece, plus these great prim cardigans (I bought three! Teal and black and grape!) for only 10.99, will anyone care? Will anyone actually go to Conway? Will anyone comment? Ladies?

Conway, like many of the places that poor people shop, has the most insidious smell. At first, one thinks it is cat or rodent pee. I think instead it’s just the offgassing from all the toxic cheap materials of the no doubt unethically produced items for sale there. But still: $3.99. Just sayin’.

The magnolias are decidedly Out, and early cherry blossoms, too. This afternoon though there were a few freakish puffs of snow flying around, and I thought, ooooh, poetic… magnolias in the snow! And then I remembered the name of the lipstick I used to wear as a punk teen, and its horrible taste: “Cherries in the snow.” Blecch, but the most vivid vermillion, really.

Because I don’t watch TV, I find out about a lot of pop-cultural phenomena through the backdoor, by google-searching for flarf purposes. I didn’t know, for example, what “The Watchmen” was, or who “Amy Smart” was, until I inadvertently found them in a search for poetry. I find out other things, too. I knew, of course, that Krafft-Ebbing was the author of Psychopathia Sexualis, but I had never actually looked at the book. What beautiful writing! It gets horrible and violent in parts, but there are gems among the cruelty and offal, and the latin terms for sex acts are great fun: “Maxime delectata fuit lambendo anum feminarum amatarum, lambendo san- guinem menstrualem amicae.”. Because Google Books is so wonderfully obliging to provide a plain-text version, here are some quotes:

Veronica Juliani, beatified by Pope Pius II., in memory of the divine lamb, took a real lamb to bed with her, kissed it and suckled it on her breasts.

St. Catharine of Genoa often burned with such intense inward fire that in order to cool herself she would throw herself upon the ground crying, ” Love, love, I can endure it no longer “. At the same time she felt a peculiar inclination to her confessor. One day lifting his hand to her nose she noticed a peculiar odour which penetrated to her heart ” a heavenly perfume that would awaken the dead “.

“A Russian prince, who was very decrepit, was accustomed to have his mistress turn her back to him and defecate on his breast; this being the only way in which he could excite the remnant of libido.” [EWWWW!]

Another supported a mistress in unusually brilliant style, with the condition that she ate marchpane exclusively.

I am sure that must have made her very sick, unusually brilliant lifestyle notwithstanding.

Trust me, you will not want to miss this.

On Friday and Saturday, May 1st & 2nd, 2009, join us as some of New York’s most accomplished writers and performers take the movies to task. Featuring a mix of realtime commentary, collaged and re-edited fragments, Neo-Benshi (live film narration) and other perversions, this two-evening program should prove that all poets really want to do is create chaos and watch movies. Curated by Brandon Downing. Presented by the Flarf Collective and Dixon Place. A benefit for the Dixon Place, a 501 (c) 3 organization.

It was beautiful to be way up north for a few days, even in the chilly spring rain, and to stay in a little motel with a taxidermied bear in the lobby, and to read for an attentive and amused audience, and to eat sea creatures at a lobster pound, and to take a picture of a Paul Bunyan statue, and most of all to have the chance to hang out with Ben and Carla. I believe I met Ben when I was sixteen, although I may only have met his bookshelf. I remember going to a party with my ex (who once worked at the same skateboard shop in Berkeley where Ben’s best friend Jimmy also worked) in Oakland and seeing a shelf full of interesting books I identified with and finding out they were Ben’s. I guess we started hanging out when I was maybe nineteen or so, as he (along with his girlfriend at the time, Pat) was one of the only other young people around at Language Poetry readings at places like Intersection (the old one, when it was in North Beach) and 80 Langton St. One of the great joys of hanging out with Ben is the intensity of conversation, for he is so well informed and thoughtful and enthusiastic; it turns out Carla is, too, and I was so happy to have a chance to get to know her on this trip.

Now, one of the conversations I had with Ben has me a little puzzled. It was a conversation had towards the end of the evening, when I was tired out from a hectic day with Q and A with students in the morning and the lobster pound in the afternoon and lots of heavy rain, so I may have been a little crankier or argumentative than normal. We were talking about blogging, and what blogs are good for, and I said that one of the things I like about doing Ululations is that it gives me a place to “articulate my poetics” in a space that is occasional and in a form that accrues. At least, I think that was what I said (I was tired). Ben said then that, I think, “poetics” was not really the right term for me to use: “just thinking and writing about poetry,” or one’s own poetic methodology, was not, he said, a poetics. Poetics, he clarified, implies a set of general statements about all poetry, about how poetry works, and is not the same thing as one poet’s “working notes” or even one’s personal aesthetic (which is what the word seems to synonymize with in our community). [And it makes me wonder, too, does the same distinction apply to “aesthetics”?]

I argued that this was just a difference of semantics. His may be the official definition, but I’m using the vernacular. Could the difference also be signaled by the possessive pronoun, i.e. “my” or “his” or “their” poetics as opposed to Poetics, a la Aristotle? It’s very unlikely, at any rate, that I am going to enunciate a highly worked-out Aristotelian system of the structure and function of poetry, so if that is the sort of thing that poetics is, really, I guess I’m fucked. Because a) highly worked-out systems are not my thing, and 2) look, just take a look at my tag cloud just to the right of you. What word is biggest? You guessed it: poetics. And it’s possible I’ve been using the word wrongly all this time.

I’m lazy about tagging posts, but it occurs to me that if I were to go back and tag everything, there would be far more to which I would give this same tag, which just goes to show you either how a) expansive and casual my use of the term is, or b) how exact and rigorous and maybe pedantic Ben’s is. I don’t know. What do you think? It seems to me that all statements are partial; that is, they create “states” that isolate even when they masquerade as statements of totality. Or maybe I’m just stubborn?

It’s true that poetics is an overused and underdefined word, though. In this day and age we can have a “poetics” of all sorts of things, a poetics of doughnuts, a poetics of carburetors, a poetics of poetics, a poetics of peepee, I don’t know, why do we not use the word “theory” instead? Or is theory different? A theory involves a hypothesis to be proven; a poetics seems to pretend to be descriptive, maybe? Or perhaps there is something about “poetics” that implies appreciativeness, what I think Kristen Prevallet once called (in reference to how poets write about other poets’ works) a kind of “fondling.”

We looked, for example, at the artist statements on the 21 Grand web site, and Ben contended that they were not really poetics statements. I think he’s right, although to be fair I don’t think that’s what they were asked to do, and I do think that there is a kind of implied poetics in each of them that can be deduced from the choices they made in writing them.

Ben’s more erudite than me, and better educated, so I want to take his distinctions into account, even though I am certainly not going to go through my archives and retag everything! But I wonder, what would be a better term for the tag? If musing dilettantishly on the how and what and whoa of poetry doesn’t count as doing poetics in the strict sense, what is it, exactly?

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Me as Janus +. Photo by Ben Friedlander!