Faulknerian Psychedelia

"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting," observes Benjy at the opening of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1951) -- and indeed for another 69 pages of his inventively structured novel.

Yet as much as I love this sentence, it does't make sense. What is "between the curling flowered spaces" are but wooden boards, which we can't see through (to see the golfers "hitting").

Is this more like it: "Through the fence, between the boards, I could see them hitting and the curling flowered spaces"? 

Autobiographies By Those Other Than Their Subject

Paul Radin's Autobiography of a Winnebego Indian (1926) is the story of Sam Blowsnake (aka Big Winnebago, aka Crashing Thunder), as solicited, transcribed and edited by the anthropologist Paul Radin.

I admired this book as an anthropology major at UVic in the early- to mid-1980s (Radin insists that the narrative is "authentic" because Blowsnake's words were "translated literally,"), but because I was taking electives in English and Political Science, where I was reading French post-structural theory (Derrida, Foucault, et al.), I came to question the authenticity of all narratives.

It was years later that I saw Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and zeroed-in on the fact that it, too, was written by someone other than its titular subject. How vain of Stein, I thought, as I stared at the 1961 Vintage cover of Stein's impatient face, looking off or in profile. Years after that, How accurate, because the book is not about Toklas but the conversation that is Stein and Toklas -- as written by Stein on behalf of someone who, she determined, would never get around to being her Boswell.

A couple summers ago I read Toklas from cover to cover after pecking at it in my bathroom for a year or so prior. A great history of Toklas's life prior to 1933 (she was born in 1877; Stein died in 1946), but also of a Paris scene where artists and writers didn't have children but ideas. In addition to that, political details about the First World War -- an account by two women who were, as they say, in the midst of it. Stuff like this:

"Then came the days of the invasion of Belgium and I can still hear Doctor Whitehead's gentle voice reading the papers out loud and then all of them talking about the destruction of Louvain and how they must help the brave little belgians. Gertrude Stein desparately unhappy said to me, where is Louvain. Don't you know, I said. No, she said, nor do I care, but where is it." (147)

Sex Positivity

U.S. American artist Marilyn Minter (b. 1948) is having a moment. Her current LGDR exhibition, Elder Sex, is a sex positive look at sex after seventy. Most of the pictures feature a steamy window between camera and subject(s)-- a "filter" that both blurs and drips with sweat, tears and Bartholin lubrication. In keeping with tradition, subjects come in multiple colours, genders and sexual persuasions. 

For those wanting more, check out this 2016 Time Out interview on the occasion of Minter's Brooklyn Museum retrospective, where the artist speaks on a range of topics, from buying TV ad time during the early days of Letterman ("it was only $1,800 for a 30-second spot on Letterman, while Artforum charged $5,000 for a full-page ad") to the ongoing fascination with laser hair removal:

"Many men under forty have never seen female pubic hair, so I want to make it beautiful enough to put in your living room. I also think young girls should stop lasering. You can trim your pubic hair into a question mark if you want. Just don't laser, because it won't grow back, and you'll be sorry!"

Image: Ginger (2016) 

April is Puppetry Month

JUST A BUNCH OF FUCKING DICKS

The system is capitalized. The System is

as it does, and because

we live like this, we have ideas

as we call them, but sadly

they're just opinions, informed

by the platforms

hot spots where Life gets talked about

The System. And. Who.

It. Serves. Has. Got. To. Go! Its critique 

is not limited to clap-shouted attitude

it includes actions. So it's okay to invade its halls

steal from its coffers, beat its police

because those upholding it are Just.

A. Bunch. Of. Fuck. -ing. Dicks!

Ludic Types

At Tim and Stephanie's for Game Four of the EDM/LA series, Tim presents me with a belated birthday gift: Al Neil's copy of Robin Blaser's Syntax (Talonbooks, 1983), with the author's inscription inside. Below Blaser's inscription is Tim's note to me.

I confess to never having seen a copy of Syntax before, though I am familiar with one of its poems, a short narrow piece Allan Safarik anthologized in Vancouver Poetry (Polestar, 1986) -- one of many provincial attempts to sum up Vancouver for visitors of Expo '86. The poem appears in the opening "Truth is Laughter" section and is untitled. For Safarik's anth, the poem is titled "Sparrows".

Blaser's book is comprised of "things seen"... "things heard or overheard" ... "things read" ... "all things that run interference on a poet's life," which is more than enough for me, particularly at a time when poetry books are becoming more and more singular in their focus, more and more "about" the confessing self.

Like Blaser, Michael Ondaatje is another ludic type, and an admirer of Blaser's poems. You can see why in a concrete poem like this one (the second piece in Syntax):

The janitor at the St. Roch National Historic
Site said: "When I was in Los Angeles, the O
from Hollywood rolled down the hill and cut
a station wagon in half."        "It would've been
better," he said, "if it'd been a Honda Civic.
Front wheel drive would let you go on driving." (13)

Last night, while caught in a loop that had me clicking on Carol Burnett's appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's show two weeks ago, Burnett (who turns 90 tomorrow) talks about growing up in Los Angeles and attending Hollywood High, across from the studio where Kimmel's show is taped. "As kids we used to climb the Hollywood sign," she says, then adds (to immediate laughter), "The Os were my favourite."

Time's Spaceship

I didn't know Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Contemporary British Poetry (1982) was a follow up to A. Alvarez's The New Poetry (1962), but the former mentioned it in their "Introduction," so there you go.

I purchased The New Poetry (substantially revised in 1966) in 1982, and have kept it with me ever since, wondering if this was the last British poetry anthology of its kind, only to find out forty years later that it wasn't; that the year I purchased The New Poetry was the year it was succeeded.

Always behind, in a history most of us step over to get to what's freshest, to what doesn't stick to our shoes.

Alvarez's anth notes the influence of Americans (it was Alvarez who first championed the poetry of Sylvia Plath), while in Morrison and Motion's anth, Northern Ireland is the hotspot (Seamus Heaney, et al.). Another noteworthy revelation is M & M's declaration of a "'Martian' school," after a poem I'd never heard of -- Craig Raine's "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (1979). (For a less lyrical version of what this poem is and isn't, see Horace Miner's 1956 report "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema".)

This school and its exemplary poem allow the editors to speak of a postmodern turn in British Poetry. Our current turn has books left on shelves for what can be had quicker online. Here's a taste of "A Martian", the poem's last third:

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Member?

To believe too much in anything is to fail in places. To believe in nothing (but yourself) is no safer. 

Western Liberalism is not the bomb we feared in the 1950s through the 1980s, but a new kind of bomb, one whose force is implosive, not explosive. Conditions are created to encase us in this new bomb's ever-liberating structure, one loosened not by ideology, but by identity; not by consensus, but by relativism.

The U.S. has told Canada to increase its NATO contribution to a minimum 2% of our GDP. If we do that, it will come at the expense of our welfare state. If we don't, NATO will take it in real estate (the Arctic) or tariff increases (on soft woods).

The question arises: Would you rather live securely in a dictatorship, or under threat in a liberal democracy? A false dichotomy, because there is nothing secure or unthreatening about life in a dictatorship, even a benevolent one, like Cuba's. 

Neoliberalism's greatest achievement is having us think we are living in a liberal democracy when in fact we are bound by its contradictions -- birds who have made our nests not with organic fibres, like those linked to the foods we eat, but with polymers made from fossil fuels.

"Nostalgia," according to Mad Men's Don Draper, "is delicate and potent." More recently, nostalgia gave us Brexit, and for America's whitest and blithest: Donald Trump. Before that, South Park's Memberberries, and before that, Robert Mugabe, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini ... 

"It's not called the Wheel," adds Draper in the middle of his pitch to Kodak, nor the Wheel of Fortune, but something closer to an axle; something like the Rack.