Diabolical Anthems

 I probably wouldn't think anything of it, were I not lesson-planning for tomorrow's #Milton class, and this song just happen to come shuffling across my iTunes, but how seriously wicked it is, and how typical. I don't know anything about Greg Holden, apart from the fact that he made this song and Insound (where I buy my records) is giving it away for free. It's a beautiful tune, and a heartfelt, bold delivery, even if it's full of annoying non-sequesters, but when the chorus comes, it is perfectly diabolical. The lyric goes

I will not be commanded

I will not be controlled

I will not let my future go on

without the help of my soul

I can't really make heads or tails of the closing couplet: probably he's pledging to be a more spiritually in-tune person forthwith, and probably that spirituality has more to do with hiking than with established religious traditions, or with a community of believers, but those first lines: geesh.

On the one hand, its obviously just more of the "we don't need no thought-control" aimless rebellion sold by the thought police that are our modern media heroes: the recording "artists" of America (NB this guy's British though). But this declaration is so broad it might as well have come from Satan himself, who says in Paradise Lost,

...Is there no place

Left for repentance, none for pardon left?

None left but by submission; and that word

Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame 

among spirits beneath (iv.79-83)

Even as he considers reconciliation with God, and fleeing finally the Hell he himself has become, Satan trips not on the act, but on the concept of submission, which he cannot abide, just like, apparently, this Greg Holden fellow. Spirituality aside, I can't help but think what a terrible employee he would make. Or soldier. Or student. "Write your name on your paper, Greg." "I WILL NOT BE COMMANDED!" Or a dancer: "Okay you cross to center and..." "I WILL NOT BE CONTROLLED!"

And I'm worried not just for him--Mr. Holden's attitude and humility problems are no especial concern of mine--but for the legions his song compels to throw their fists in the air chanting that slogan over and over. Control is for the weak! Aiming is for cowards! Cooperation be damned! Rise up with me! We may yet challenge the Omnipotent in arms!"

Follow-up: turns out, he's a good-natured and generous sort of chap who wrote this song for a charity, and based it on a literary character: not Milton's, but Dave Eggers'. Still. 

My Brief Affair with the Criticism of Michael Robbins

Well, that was quick. On Wednesday, I received my copy of this month's Poetry Magazine, and read the criticism first, as is my custom. There, I found a blistering--not for its spirit, but for its force--critique of a new anthology called Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, edited by Paul Hoover. It was authored by one Michael Robbins, whose poem book, "Aliens vs. Predator," I ordered immediately. It hasn't yet arrived, so I don't know if it's any good, but the essay is so smart, so broadly associative, so powerful in its judgement, that I tweeted this, right away. 

And with that article in @poetrymagazine, @alienvsrobbins became not only my favorite critic, but my favorite PERSON. (Sorry Wife)

— Mischa Willett (@PoemsforPeople) July 5, 2013

You can read the essay here. I was convinced that we had another Randall Jarrell in the making, combining sound judgement with elegant prose, and the kind of energy and good humor you might expect from someone who would name his book after Arnold Schwarzenegger franchises. I shoved the essay into anyone's hands who had ever expressed a passing interest in verse-making. "Excited" doesn't begin to cover it; for whatever reason, well-written criticism lights me right up. 

Alien vs. Predator (Poets, Penguin)

By Michael Robbins

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Our affair was beautiful and passionate, and has now burned itself out. A few days following the Poetry Magazine piece, Robbins published another article in the Chicago Tribune (read here)  which is defensive and under-theorized, and frankly, juvenile.  In it, Robbins defends song-lyrics as poetry, which people who know nothing about either song-writing or poetry, do all the time. That's one of the problems: that there isn't anything original about the claim; people (usually rappers and their vociferous following) are always claiming that there is no difference between what Kanye West does and what Anne Carson does, as though to deny the rich, famous, aggressive and universally-admired TOTAL control over every provenance their enterprise touches amounted to a kind of snobbery. The other problem with the article is that Robbins' argument comes down basically to a) song lyrics=poetry because Bob Dylan is super awesome, and b) because why not? Quote: 'What would be the point of denying these lyricists the honorific of "poet"?'

For one, "poet" isn't an honorific; it's a job title. It's a job title for people who make real the inherent music in words, and not one for people who make music, and then add words to it. If that seems like a small difference to you, consider the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle. Two wheels, seats, vehicles of transport. But, if the motorcycle is "cooler" somehow, it relies on an external source of power to get where it's going. The same is true of song lyrics: without the music, they're just a bunch of metal sitting in a garage. Stay with the metaphor for a moment. A bicycle is powered by whoever happens to be riding it. Some will be better than others, some can do tricks on it, but bikes work (or don't) in large part based on the training, practice, talent of the rider. So too the poems on the readers'. 

There are far more arguments against this tired position than I feel like trotting out here; a well-written version of them can be read in this essay by William Logan, which came out in this month's New Criterion. Logan isn't really arguing the point, he just takes the distinction as a given that educated (or grown-up) people maintain. Here's some of it though: 

Song lyrics can be entirely artless or devilishly contrived, composed by some magician of the word or just some putz; but whatever they are they need music to make them art, and without music they’re just love without money. “Sha-na-na-na, sha-na-na-na-na” and “Do-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-do” and “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da” make perfectly wonderful lyrics, but on the page they look like gibberish. Cut out the tune, and lyrics are just words that look annoyed.

Logan is right en pointe here. One of my favorite differences is that poems are in their truest, most authentic possible performance in every individual reading. If Yeats came back to read "Adam's Curse," there would be no reason to take his choices of inflection as more correct than mine; if Tennyson read "Ulysses" like he were on helium, he wouldn't--he couldn't--damage the poem, because a poem re-incarnates in between every set of lips that shape it. Obviously, the same is not true of lyrics. Dylan has to be there for a Dylan song to work. When he's dead, there can be no more authentic Dylan performances, while Keats performances will continue, in all possible originary power, as long as we have breath and books (or memory).

...which is all to say that I should have listened when Robbins tweeted me:  

.@PoemsforPeople @poetrymagazine I'll just disappoint you

— Michael Robbins (@alienvsrobbins) July 5, 2013

DHSI UVic

Thanks to the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, I was able to attend this year's Digital Humanities Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Victoria in B.C., just up the proverbial street from Seattle. While I learned a lot (and was bewildered often), perhaps the most helpful aspect of the DHSI was incidental to it. 

Though the sessions themselves were compelling, and will feature in future research of mine, most immediately rewarding was that the conference coincided, whether intentionally or not I can't say, with another academic gathering: the Academic Congress 2013, which drew scholars from all over the continent in every area of artistic and humanitarian concern. Seven thousand participants were gathered at the UVic at the same time, outgoing as we were incoming, but in that crossover, I made several connections with scholars from Mexico to Montreal at the opening night buffet, where I also caught up with my old colleague and DH wunderkind, Dr. Jentry Sayers.

Furthermore, as is often that case with academic conferences, but which I've never seen on such a scale before, publishing houses had sent representatives to the book tent, so I was able to talk editions with editors from Broadview Press, McGill-Queen's University Press, University of Toronto Press, and others I admire. Invaluable.

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There also, as grace would have it, I met Joel Heng Hartse, who was there giving a paper at the commons, and which I wouldn't have known had I not seen #uvic on a Twitter post. Hartse's book Sects, Love, and Rock and Roll, was one of my favorite reads last year: empathetic and wise, and dead-on in taste. He writes for magazines like Paste and Geez, and teaches Applied Linguistics classes at the University of British Columbia over in Vancouver. We'd met briefly at a reading he gave with Dr. Jeff Keuss at Seattle Pacific, but meeting an author at a book signing is never a terribly intimate affair. 

While we were talking in the courtyard of the MacLaurin Building, Digital Humanists buzzing around us, we had (okay, he had) an idea for a media project that we began working on right on the spot: he downloaded the appropriate software, and we recorded the first episode/incarnation of P.E.P.I. (more information forthcoming post processing).

Who knows if it will amount to anything, but this is what I love about conferences. They are more than sessions, more even than the exchange of business cards in between. We not only talked about, but began--actually put words on tape and paper--a DH project on the first night of the conference that is we think useful and interesting and that will include other participants in culture and academia as the series progresses.  

I'm not sure if it would have happened had we not been at the same conference. Probably not, and it certainly wouldn't have happened that way, coming off the kinetics of meetings, exchanges, and the sense of possibility that attend these gatherings. 

Scottish Literature Course

Among the many assignments for the course on Scottish Literature I taught in Winter term for the University of Washington, my favorite was the creation of a Complete Works of Alexander Smith.  mith (1830-1867) is a marvelously gifted poet of the Scottish working class who exploded onto the worldwide literary scene in the 1850's and was hardly ever heard from again, despite pleas every 30 years or so, by someone who actually read his work, for people to appreciate his genius. (For more on this phenomenon from a scholarly angle, see LaPorte and Rudy eds. Special Edition of Victorian Poetry vol. 42.4 2004)  The pleas are ignored of course, and nothing of Smith's has been in print for 100 years. As a class, we took it upon ourselves to make a scholarly edition, (of James Thomson B.V., in another section) complete with introductions and footnotes, transcribing from scanned manuscripts where necessary. 

My second favorite assignment though, were these reading videos. Students selected, from any of the Scottish poets we confronted, a piece that they then read to their laptops and the broad world, in an act at once distanced from the public (less embarrassing than reciting in front of class) and of course, much more public in that some of these videos have been viewed on several continents by this point.  The interpretation, visualization, and editorial impulse are entirely their own.  I'll link to a sampling here, in order to keep things neat, but should you like to see more, many are posted on this YouTube channel. 

Responses to the prompt ranged as widely as the students themselves: ome sang, some drew, some montaged, and others pointed the camera at their faces and just read the poems with understanding and pace, but they were all illuminating readings, showcasing personality and verve. 

You can read a bit more about the class here, or as above, see the rest of the videos here, or learn a bit more about Smith and the Spasmodic School of poets here. Thanks to my Scottish Literature students for a memorable quarter. 

Slàinte!

What is a Chapbook?

ext month, the good people over at Finishing Line Press are putting out a chapbook of my poems, called Lunatic, about which you can read more here. I thought it a natural moment to say a few things about the form thereof. 

Chapbooks have a long history in English literature, and have nearly always been associated with poetry.  "Broadside Ballads" used to circulate for a penny, (also called "penny-ballads," and thereafter "penny-dreadfuls," when the form was taken over by throw-away adventure stories, the equivalent of airport reading like John Grisham or 50 Shades now). 

Anymore, chapbooks are mainly the purview of poets. Since presses are reluctant to put significant investment into an unknown author, they'll often put out a chapbook first, which is a (usually saddle-stapled) short-form of a book, no more than 45 pages, with which to test the likelihood of a poet's success in a full-legnth. Some poets put out several chapbooks: they're cheaper to buy, and can be more coherent as works since they're shorter. I have a friend, the terrific poet Matthew Nienow, who has three chapbooks out so far; the form works for him, and works well. 

As major publishers move away from publishing poetry in an economic era that rewards risk less than it might, small presses are stepping in and publishing smart, tight, little books in editions of 500-1000; they trade a smaller print run for a few more authors on the roster and make up the difference that way, or they focus on the book as a thing, which I had occasion to discuss in this review, and count on discerning customers' appreciation of the object as much as its contents to create a following.  Floating Bridge Press, Ugly Duckling Press, and Codhill Press are the best-known publishers of this smaller type, and probably make the prettiest books. 

Think about it like a band's putting out an e.p. before a full-length album. Sometimes it's because these are songs that don't fit in with the tone of the full-length somehow; sometimes they haven't written enough material to make a record, and sometimes the label isn't springing for the contract yet. Sometimes, these e.p.'s are extraordinary artworks in themselves: think of the great musical acheivements on e.p.'s proper or split 7" records: Pedro the Lion's Whole, Bloomsday e.p., The Gloria Record e.p., or the entire set of mailings from Postmarked Stamps.  

My little book is coming out soon on Finishing Line, for reasons you can read more about here. I designed the cover myself, but that is as far as my hand in the production reaches, so I'm waiting with baited breath to see how it turns out.  The poems were written over the last ten years or so, mostly following the completion of the M.F.A. at the University of Washington, and are part of a larger work from which I thought this sample representative, but which I think works on its own as well.

You can pre-order it here, should you find yourself possessed of a soul, $12.00, curiosity, sympathy for struggling artists, or any of the above. 

Year in Poetry 2012

Most best-of lists come out in December, I know, but since my birthday happens in January, I’ve always done the requisite reflecting on l'anee passe a few weeks late. Here then is what mattered most in the poetic year, offered for those of you who don’t live near a superlative reading series, or great bookstores.  

Personal

On a personal level, this year was important as I was living in Germany at last birthday  and gave my first European poetry reading in the Zimmer Theater in Tuebingen.  Moreover, I finished at long last a series of poems I’ve been working on for a couple of years called The Elegy Beta, a series of responses to Rilke which I hope you will hear much more about the future and conceived as a collaboration with the Argentine photographer David Wittig.  I also began a partnership with musician Jake Armerding trying out new ways of distributing poetry to the people. You really should check this last link out; big things are happening.

Runners-up

In the broader world though, first: B.K. Fisher’s Mutiny Gallery was published: a book about the poet’s travelling with her daughter which reads more like a novel than a book of poems since their are consistent characters to whom things happen, but which tries several formal devices to convey those happenings, making it an engaging read start to finish which, needless to say, not all poetry books are.

The second runner-up for most important happening in poetry this year is pages 8-11 in the December issue of Poetry Magazine (reprinted in full here). Richard Kenny’s three new poems in that volume are acute pieces of thinking, and beautiful besides, but the interview printed afterward–his attempts to explain those poems–condense a monograph’s worth of poetic theory into a few humble but muscular pages. Required reading.

To this entry I should also append the news, announced only a few days afterward, of Christian Wiman’s leaving the editorship of Poetry Magazine. Wiman took the magazine into the stratosphere, changing the design, the headquarters, and the structure of the magazine, while tripling its readership. Surely, his is one of the most productive editorships that have ever been, and his acumen made itself felt across all quarters of the establishment, such as it is. 

Big News

Matthew Dickman’s new book Mayakovsky’s Revolver came out and he has switched presses: he is now on Norton who produced a beautiful black book for him rather than the paperbacks he had been stuck with for his previous. Dickman also produced a book called 50 American Plays with his brother Michael Dickman which I’ll be teaching from in the spring, and which is terrifically smart.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s new book Our Andromeda also came out this year, which I was looking very forward to as her last two were just exceptional. This new book is too long by half, which is to say that some poems are just outstanding and the other half probably could have used a stronger editorial hand, but is still important because Brenda Shaughnessy is a star, and those poems that do work work marvelously.

But the single most important thing to happen in poetry this year (as it might be measured in 20 years’ time) is the death of Jack Gilbert and the publication of his Collected Poems. This volume is significant because most people don’t know any books from Gilbert apart from Refusing Heaven, and because it’s a gorgeous copy absolutely essential reading of a poet that seems more important every time I return to him.

New Poems published in Boneshaker

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The people over at Wolverine Farms Publishing put together a spectacular little magazine in Boneshaker, full of narratives, diagrams, a very beautiful full-color poster, and two poems of mine: "Surface Tension" and "Counter-argument." You can order a copy here, or, if you're in Seattle, stop by Hub & Bespoke, which you should probably do anyway, because it's a lovely shop. When the follow-up issue comes out, (that is to say, when re-print rights have reverted to me) I'll post the full text of the poems over in the Publications section, where you can download, print, share, and otherwise participate in the poetic economy. Thanks to the editors, stockists, readers, and designers for making this object prettier than it needed to be.

ICR: Shelley Among the Ruins of Language

So should we save an absence? Should we save the void and this nothingness at the heart of the image? -Jean Baudrilliard

Last month, I flew down to Phoenix to give a paper at ASU staged by the International Conference on Romanticism, on the broad topic of "Catastrophes." I've attended the ICR once before, when it was held at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, and had a collegial and intellectually-rewarding time, and was eager to find myself in such company again.   

Conferences get short shrift in these hyper-connected times--why fly across the country to read a paper out loud that you could just as easily email to all the members, who could then read it on their own time? Are the ten pages of notes I took worth the price of the flight?--but I find them immensely useful.  One meets the few true colleagues we have in an era of specialization and those meetings often turn into real research: I ended up in Germany for a year because of a conversation I had while balancing plastic cup of champagne on my hors d'oeuvres plate at NASSR Vancouver. What's more, one gets a sense of the field--its upcoming directions, its major players, a ranking of the relative esteem in which specialists hold various journals and publishing houses, and a hundred other corrections, spurs, that are unavailable, or indecipherable anyway across digital media, or even a row of spines. 

Here is the abstract for my presentation:

Recent collections like Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory (2010) edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig, and Literary and Poetic Representations of Work and Labor in the Romantic Era, edited by Christopher Clason (2011), have shown renewed interest in the formal properties of poetic difficulty, even poetic disaster. This paper means to introduce to that discussion a poetic economy wherein nothing is lost. Even the weakest lines and most faltering spans of attention contribute, in this economy, to the launch of a larger conceptual framework unachievable without the original defeat, which suggests a new and recuperative way of reading weakness and displacement by contextualizing their discussion under the heading of performative aesthetic loss.

In Shelley Among the Ruins of Language, I argue, (adopting Levinson’s terms in The Romantic Fragment Poem) that an “authorized fragment” (one wherein the poet has an opportunity to finish the work, but doesn’t, as opposed to an “accidental fragment” wherein he drowns, loses the mss., etc) constitutes a thing a la Bill Brown and Jean Baudrilliard’s “thing theory,” and that it thereby deserves unique consideration. When poets promise something, and fail to deliver, often--if these are to become active failures or redeemed catastrophes, they are suggesting something about the greatness of their original conception. With their argument, I mean to highlight not only the difference between “authorized” and “accidental” fragments in Romantic poetry, which distinction Levinson maintains too, but to differentiate between fragments that should be read as remnants-- pieces meant to be read as parts oferstwhile wholes, and those that should be read as ciphers, pieces of truncated production meant to imply a never-present but imagined wholeness.

The whole thing was handled beautifully by Mark Lussier and Ron Broglio, and I felt especially lucky to hear presentations by Marilyn Gaull and Angela Esterhammer; most exciting though, was a chance to see my friend and former colleague Jeffrey C. Johnson, and Frederick Burwick, who I seem to run into around every corner.  

I was also glad to hear papers by my co-panelists in the "Theorizing Disaster" session:

• Kimberly DeFazio: “Material Events: de Man, Badiou, and Romantic Disaster”
• Caroline Heller: “‘What manner of man art thou?’: The Catastrophic and Autobiographical ‘Life-in-Death’ in S.T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”

Great thanks to ICR for arranging this banquet, to ASU for hosting us, and to my own Department of English at the University of Washington for making my trip possible.  

C. M-H R.I.P.

This week, I resumed my reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, from a new copy I picked up at Elliot Bay Book Company, having left behind the Tübingen Library's copy in Germany, at...the...Tübingen Library.  For a bookmark, I am using a postcard from the Linda Hodges Gallery here in Seattle that was an advert for a painting show by Christopher Martin Hoff.  

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Every day this week, when I picked up the book to start reading, I glanced at the reproduction and said to my wife, "we really have to buy this painting; this guy is amazing." Yesterday, I found out that the artist died this year, quite young, but apparently of natural causes.  It was sad to hear not only because he'd been, weirdly, on my mind all week, but because his work was so good, and because he was apparently a thoroughly decent human being. The city was better for his being here. 

Teaching Digital Humanities

This is my tenth year of teaching at the university level, and while I usually have students make some kind of project in addition to writing essays, the projects for the class I've just finished were exceptional, for the clarity of thought that went into them, and the sheer import of the undertakings. 

The class was called Texting: Writing about Digital Humanities, and the idea was to introduce students at an early stage in their academic careers (this was my first time teaching Freshmen in quite a while) to the plethora of tools available to them during this explosion of all things digital, but also to the problems surrounding the humanities generally, and the digital ones specifically. Not least: what are they?

If nothing else, I wanted to gain, over the course of the class, an answer to that question, and so we set out, week by week, confronting the memes and websites, databases, archives, and articles that make up the debates surrounding

• Digital Music
• Digital Scholarship
• Digital Poetics
• The New Aesthetic
• News Aggregators
• Centers, Symposia, Initiatives
• DH Resources particular to UW

One student, in a farewell blog post, summed up our project particularly well:

After taking English classes for more than 7 years, I expected to re-learn about things I have already been taught. How wrong I was. My English 111 class's focus was digital humanities; something I've never even heard of. We learned to navigate our way of information, data, history, poems, research, and so much more through the future of the digital age. We live in this digital age and it only grows from here, so I thought that learning about it now will only allow us to strive for greater success later. It doesn't end here. We would take digital works of course, such as articles, blogs, poems and really learn to dig deep into them and read. Read for context, read for analytical purpose, but we also read for style. Like what apprentices do, we learned from people who were better than us, who had mastered what we desired.

The class explicitly aimed at education's not being theoretical. I didn't just want them to know what I could tell them during our ten weeks together, but how to learn/make/do whatever it is they are individually in to better ever afterward. Again, a student summed it up better than I can:

I remember in our first day of class, our teacher told us something that stuck with me. He said, "You can do, what you can do." He put great emphasis on how much impact one person can make if they really wanted to. Throughout the whole quarter, we learned about many great organizations and devices that became successful just because one person had a crazy idea.  Due to English 111, I have learned "One person is all it takes", is overused for a reason; because it's true.

You can read more of the students' weekly responses here.

Projects

This is the really exciting part.  The students completed two large projects for the class in groups; one of them, called "The New Aesthetic Project," I'll have to tell you about later; the other was a Free Project of their own choice and devise. The prompt said simply find something that could be better and make it that way using the tools we've discussed. Here's a sample of what they outlined and built:

• A Facebook page--The Husky Food Project--featuring photos and reviews of every restaurant, eatery, or coffee stand on campus
• A book (pdf preview here), yes, that you can buy in hardback, softcover, or pdf from here, which is a guide to all the public art on University of Washington's campus, featuring pictures, history, and a short description of each.
• A Comprehensive Digital Map of UW building interiors (for finding your class on the first day of school, bathrooms, etc) whose pitch is just a model of professionalism and urgency.
• An e-book about 100 Changes Due to Tech.
• A website listing all the free products available to students at UW

The point is, I was impressed. These students, for many of whom this was their first college class ever, conceived of, argued for the importance of, and executed significant projects they designed, while writing papers, doing readings, and keeping up with the other, rather large project we were working on as a class.  Hats off!

PAMLA: Coleridge and the Prison Bower of Meaning

This year's Annual Conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association was hosted by Seattle University and held October 19-21 - 110th.  I contributed a paper on Coleridge to the session "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream."

Abstract: 

 In Coleridge’s Dream Theory and the Dual Imagination, Kathryn Kimball puts forward the poet’s outline of sense impressions that “arrive constantly,” “whether asleep or awake,” which “the night-working imagination transmutes into dream images,” arguing that, while the poet can be said to have a purposeful theory of dreams, the main reason he was so concerned was that “dreams are an escape from a difficult life.”  

Using Kimball’s assemblage, and a section of the Biographia Literaria called "Nihil Negativuum Irrepresentabile," I argue that the arrest of such “transmutations” becomes for Coleridge an aesthetic technique wherein the Imagination is staged as a mediator who is intentionally exhausted by the difficult (or impossible) task it is set.  He explains the difficulty of his project: to produce “a body at one and the same time in motion and not in motion,” and his method: to erect “...a motory force of a body in one direction and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction,” which he argues “is not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable.” The interjection of the man from Porlock, for example, during the composition of Kubla Kahn,  like the overvaluation of albatross-hunting, is that second “motory force” which demands that the imagination mediate between the two opposites in an effort to achieve a place of retirement. 

This paper reads Coleridge’s failures of thought and willful obfuscations in the Biographia Literaria as Deluzean attempts to construct a kind of black hole in which meaning is itself imprisoned, with the intention of defining the imagination’s mediative role between states:real and unreal, sleep and waking. 

It was a lively conference in which to participate, and much larger than the usula discipline-specific conferences I attend.  The best part was connecting with people outside my particular area of specialization and hearing the fine papers by my co-panelists (see full program here):

• Patrick Randolph: "

  Who Are You?" Queerly Destabilizing Identity in Wonderland

• Rebecca McCann: 

  “The Scientific Possibilities of Mesmerism”: Dreaming of Utopia in The Diothas

• Kristine Miller: 

  The 'Fever Dream' of the Post-9/11 Cop: Trauma, Personal Testimony, and Jess Walter's The Zero

Special thanks to our panel chair, Lauren Bond (La Sierra University), to the conference organizers from Seattle University, and to the Renaissance Hotel for having us.  

Punk Prayer

Pussy Riot are unbelievably articulate and intentional about their work.  This defense should be posted in lieu of an Artist Statement in any galleries that can’t better explain their raison d’être. Churches too.

Small Cameras pt.2-Leica x1

When I finally won an eBay bid for my long-coveted Leica x1, when it arrived, after I finished marvelling at the packaging (what care, what consideration these people have) the first thing I did was to climb online and see if it was fake.  Search: "Leica x1 counterfeit scam." Hmm. Nothing.  But this camera is so light, surely it's a plastic knock-off of the dignified Leica of which I've dreamt.  I snapped a picture of the desk in front of me.  Hmm.  Best picture I've ever seen. Not fake then. Or at least, a very, very good fake, featuring luxury optics that outperform any camera I've ever held.  

It took me about two hours to love everything about this camera.  The leather strap (!) the camera comes with isn't adjustable, but it's the perfect length.  I never wanted to mess with those silly plastic toggles on another camera again.  I never wanted to be responsible for choosing a proper camera-hanging-from-the-shoulder-length. Above all, I never wanted to be weighed down with another clunky piece of kit again. Compared with this light little beauty, all other cameras seemed like carrying a laptop around one's neck.  People walking aroudn with thier d5100's or whatever started to look awfully silly.  

No viewfinder? A little ghetto, but that's okay, I thought, I'll just compose right here in this--wait, completely horrible LCD screen. Hmm. Back to the counterfeit theory. Leica is a terrific, and a terrifically arrogant company. They make dictatorial choices, which are admirable in thier audacity sometimes, and sometimes infuriating. They've decided, see, that people don't really look at images on the camera's LCD screen, or, they shouldn't be looking at images that way, so they've put a perfectly-functional, but woefully basic screen on a screamingly sharp piece of design; having maxed out the sensor quality (within reason) and lens quality, they've cut things that don't matter (in their estimation) so much. For more thoughts on the company's approach: its glories and attendant frustrations, check out my favorite camera review ever, or find this beautiful essay by Anthony Lane about the history of Leica Cameras, recollected later in Best American Essays 2008. 

I had a great time making pictures with this device.  I carried it everywhere, some days not clicking a single frame, and still not feeling bad about having toted it around due to its size, weight, and ergonomic reward. I was often frustrated with not being able to focus (the camera does a great job of focusing on its own, but I like to decide what's clear and what's not; plus, I'm faster) but all frustrations melted with the easy intuitive menu, the simple button placement (everything I need in a click, or turn of the smart metal wheel atop the camera), and big, bright files (if occassionally over-saturated colors).

Self. Photo by Amber Willett. Taken with Leica x1.

I had to sell it in the end, because I had to feed my family, and because it can't make videos.  I don't know anything about these things, whether video would be hard to impliment, or whether it's a simple software add that Leica doesn't deign to grant because they're being purists.  Either way, I'm often called upon to make little videos of dance performances, or poetry readings, and I can't very well have a house full of tech equiptment to accomplish tasks that an iPhone can handle. I miss it though.  I sympathize with camera critic Steve Huff, who loved his Leica x1, then sold it, then bought it back after a year because its magic--and that's really what it seems like--called back to him even over the twenty cameras he'd had in between. I may just re-buy one myself when I'm in the position to, unless I find an unbeatable deal on the nearly-identical-but-for-the-added-possiblitiy-of-an-EVF Leica x2. 

Roman Hours vol. 2.1

Tiburtina Station RedesignAfter a layover in Rome's newly re-imagined Tiburtina--and what times these Romans have ahead of them! Finally, a station worthy of its approach!--my wife and I boarded the new train line, Italo Treno, for Naples.  Since the service just launched this Summer, they're offering 20 euro fares to all the major cities they visit (adding Venice and Turin soon). Though my seat faced backwards, which meant I was curled up in the aisle facing front (motion sickness, see?), how nice it was to find oneself on a clean and modern train, to have waited for it in an air-conditioned lounge with free wi-fi before boarding, to have booked tickets from a beautiful, simple website, and to have been aided by an army of young, smartly-dressed attendants.  

It's only a little disconcerting how much I look like the people here.  Features which one took to be his own turn out all along to have been regional markers: the slightly recessed mouth, downturned eyes, Roman nose (obviously), hairstyle (such as it is), and even particular shade of eye-color were apparently motivated by--the food from this earth? These winds?--this stock and ground.

After finding our hotel (scary from the outside, plesant within) we headed we headed into the last golden splash of daylight for a semblance of a stroll, but really we were so hungry it was more of a hunt.  Good thing then that I accidentally took us to the best strip of pizzerias around.  Amber read a sign out loud "dal 1923" which I remembered from some local blog I'd seen as the identifier of her favorite pizzeria.  We rolled and won on a Pizza Lasagna which was terrific, and afterward had the best gelato really, probably of my whole life. 

Naples feels dangerous at every turn, like the end of the world, or the beginning, or a ruin mid-definition.  It throbs with life and excitment though, and I wonder if sometimes the locals don't prefer to keep the trash in the street just to stay the tourist horde from overtaking, as they surely would, in this Rome-on-the-Sea-but-20 Degrees-Cooler-and-with-Better-Food.

I can't help but love it here, even while I can't help but think that someone with a power-washer and a pot of flowers could be Mayor, raising the city to it's quattrocento glory simply by tidying up. 

Small Cameras pt.1-Fuji x100

I haven't had a proper camera since the digital revolution made my years as film photography student seem quaint, like minoring in tannery, or taxidermy.  Granted, there is still great work being done in film, and I'm not sure that even the best digital cameras match it yet--though they're close--but it still feels a little funny having been in likely the last class to learn hand-processing not as some retro-choice, but as the only option for aspiring professionals, just as it must've felt when the French perfected a county-wide canal system just in time for the automobile to render that method of goods transport adorable and less cutting-edge than they imagined and budgeted for. 

Since I'm travelling around Europe a good bit this year, I thought it was time to step up.  Thing is, I'm sort of particular about what I carry on my person.  I choose my wallet based on whether it will disturb the line of my trousers, and carry my keys in a side-bag for the same reason.  I'm not a diva exactly, but cheap or badly designed things not only disturb me ethically, and obviously, aesthetically, but sensually: the touch of most plastics turns my stomach.  I know enough about myself to realize that if I was actually going to carry a camera with me, rather than have one on my shelf at home, it would have to be small, and pretty cute.  

So DSLR for me then.  At the same time, I didn't want to settle for the quality that comes from most compacts.  Anybody that pays attention to such things will know that we're in the middle of a small-camera revolution, with the advent of the (really strangely beautiful) iPhone camera, and the Micro 4/3, and other mirrorless systems making quality files available from much smaller packages than were concievable a few years ago.  

I spend entirely too much of my time reading reviews of these cameras, and by this point I've owned most of them, and been really satisfied by none, and thought I ought to say why.  

Fuji x100

The first one I bought was the legendary--really this camera and the hype surrounding it will define this decade of camera manufacture in any history thereof--Fuji x100.  I don't want to provide a full review here, since they exist really by the thousands all over the internet; I just want to say a little more loudly some things that all those reviews say in the footnotes.  That is: though this camera makes amazing images, better than anything in its class, including narrowly, the Leica x1 (more on that in a minute), and though it is beautifully-designed as an object (I notice whenever anyone walks by with one around h/ir neck), its menu-design and sluggishness take nearly all the joy out of shooting with such a pretty thing.  

Amber Willett in Dresden, Germany. Shot with Fuji x100.

Again, every reviewer notes this camera's focus-problems and slow start-up speed, but they don't say with sufficient strength (or didn't anyway to stop me from buying it) that what this means is that you'll often miss shots while it "boots up," that if you see some great moment--your wife smiling, kids playing, and bird overhead--you'll likely get to save that only as a memory, while you look at the little rotating wheel on your x100's screen.  If somehow, by the time you're ready, something else great happens, you'll likley get an out-of-focus picture of it, since it's another 10 seconds (more like 3, but that's an eternity to a smile) while the thing focuses.  

I look back at the few good images I made with it from time to time and think: these are gorgeous, but not since the Sega Genesis have I so badly wanted to physically damage a piece of equiptment for dis-obeying me.  If you have a world of patience, or a studio, or if you take pictures mainly of food or other things that hold still, this is the camera for you.  Otherwise, let's all be thankful for Fuji's having moved the proverbial ball so far down the field in terms of style, but lament their accompanying ham-fisted approach to the engine that drives it.  A great camera to look at then, just not much of one to look with.

Travel Tip: Getting to Rome

The train ride from Roma Fuimincino Airport has been bad for decades, but it's gotten worse recently, and now ranks among the worst things to be experienced by the sensual animal. Everything grates: it's filthy as a port-a-john, there's plastic everywhere and graffiti on that; all alert systems are red since it feels both crowded and dangerous. What's more, the A/C is broken, and has been on all five of my trips to Rome, and, somehow, psychotically, they've bolted all the windows shut. The temperature inside hovers around 100 and one thinks she can imagine the smell, but is still surprised experiencing it. And it's slow. And takes you through the worst part of town. And it's expensive: between 8 and 25 euro depending on which line you get in and whether the man working the desk thinks you look like prey. And th ensigns directing you to the "station" are held up with tape. You get the idea. Half of the visitors' Roman dreams are dashed in sweaty Satanic reality before one even crosses the Flaminian gate.

Hence, this tip. When you arrive at FCO, don't follow the signs that say "In Centro," or "Rome," or "Metro" or "All Trains," or anything else that suggests "You Should Come this Way." That is the broad way that leads to death (Matt 7:13). Instead, go out to the curb where the cabs come, then get to Terminal 1. It's an easy walk from 2 or 3, and a free tram ride from anywhere else (also picking up on the curb). Once there, stand on said curb, enjoying the fresh air, and go to the small sign that says airport shuttle. There are many that operate--one by AiItalia and another that just says 7 Euro" on the side. They're all 7 euro, and clean, modern buses, that stow your luggage, are air-conditioned, and drive straight to Termini (no stops between) via what looks like a tour bus route: you'll see EUR, Colosseum, Forum, St. Giovanni in Laterno, and many other landmarks, just on your way into the city, where you arrive refreshed, relaxed, dry, and excited to begin your pilgrimage.

"The Breaking Towers" at Monarch Review

My new essay--"The Breaking Towers: on Hart Crane's Crumbling Muses"--is up now at Monarch Review.  Essentially, it's a meditation on the way critics treat artists, especially as seen in the new film Broken Tower (dir. James Franco) and in Paul Mariani's biography of the poet, by the same name.  

Monarch is the new kid on the block in the (tough neighborhood?) of literary magazines, and it's based in Seattle, which is why I wanted to publish there.  That, and the fact that they've got an epithet from Richard Kenney on their masthead, whose book One-Strand River is, apart from Shelley, the poetry I've re-read more than any other.  I'm seriously in the middle of my 16th or so straight read-through and it still chokes me up.  

Anyhow, the folks at Monarch are generous and give this content away for free.  You can read the whole essay here. 

Behind-the-Curtain Reading

photo by David Wittig Photography

I'm giving a reading next week at the historic Zimmer Theater in Tuebingen, Germany (named for the Zimmer family, the poet Holderlin's caretakers during his madness).  I'll be reading with Marcus Hammerschmidt, a local poet with whom I've been working to translate some of my poems into German (we'll debut some translations at the reading).  

The Behind-the-Curtain is a fun structure for a Reading Series.  The audience doesn't get to meet or see the writers, who read from onstage with the curtain drawn.  It focuses the attention more on the verse than on the poor nervous poet; in the second half though, the curtain is pulled back and there are more readings and discussion. 

If you're in Southern Germany, come check it out; for those of you who will miss it, I'll post some images to this space and check back in after the fact. 

Tuesday, 5 June 8:00 pm

Charles Bukowski "The Laughing Heart"

Dresden + Berlin

If Dresden had an unreal quality to it, it wasn't because one felt like he was (the troll or the prince?) walking around in a fairy tale, though once it would have felt just that way, awash in Baroque exuberance.  Rather, despite its small beauty and typically European good sense, its unreality, its sense of foreignness came from the open space and new construction that made the whole city into an open-air shopping mall.  So many perfect surfaces disinvite the imperfect creature from resting, even visually, in the townscape, the way insects feel out-of-place in a clean room.

The vacation began, for me at least, in the Berlin Hauptbanhoff, a new technological and civic splendor, set in the middle of what might be a war zone in some forgotten Eastern European kleptocracy, rather than in the economic engine of the West.  Every building was scaffolded outside--even Rome, in the run-up to the Jubilee was less under-construction--and the street itself plowed through like a furrow.  It was like landing on Mars.

We walked too far and I carried the bags, and then we found our cool hotel, the Tryp Mitte, along another depressed street and went out into the city to find it full of style and charm of the big-city sort that shuns the Belle Epoque. Everything looked done by the Soviets (much of it was) or the Americans, the two worst guardians of town-planning imaginable, beating their hammers of industry in alternating blows on poor blasted Berlin. 

For all that though, there are artists here, and where there are artists, there is flourishing: coffee shops, bookstores, good ethnic food. I could easily see us living here, and in a sense, I'm glad we weren't stationed in such a vital place, because it would make our homecoming less likely, or less satisfying.  

We saw mostly the exteriors of buildings, its being Monday and nearly everything major closed, but had a good time of it anyway, thanks in large part to the excellent food and cute shops for pottering about in. 

Back home it's been work and reading, which is nice, as Spring--the shyest girl at the party!--blinks her eyes in the corner, hoping to be noticed.