Variousness

Man, I think it's nearly three weeks between posts - the longest so far, at a guess. But moving, and starting postgrad work I think are good excuses.

In case those of you who have not abandoned me (dear readers, dear reader) did not know, I've moved to Auckland, and am now studying at the city's eponymous university. It's great. So far there's five hours of theory a week (three tought, the rest is a discussion group) and there may be more in the works.

I'm working on a trans-tasman semi-aleotory massively excessive (the source-text I've built through processing Home and Away scripts and Abel Tasman's Journals is over 150 pages) work that I'm hoping will be part of the digital bridge being constructed for the Home and Away symposium curated by the NZEPC.

I've also met, for the first time in the real world, Scott Hamilton, Jack Ross, and Tony Green, all of whom are good people (in my estimation at least, for what that's worth).

I've developed an unhealthy infatuation with Antonin Artaud.

Also, Amy King was good enough to send me copies of two of her books (both published by Blazevox), and they're awesome. I highly recomend them to anyone, especially those who like the kind of affect in Lara Glenum, Johannes Göransson, Kate Durbin and Kate Zambreno (And their theoretical work - I'm thinking graphorrhea (there's my Artaud obsession again - he was diognosed with such) , vomit, hysteria, excess of affect, general awesomeness....

Jaques Lacan treated Artuad during his 11 month stay at Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris (one of the five hospitals he was incarcerated in over the 8 year, 8 month period between September 30, 1937 and his release from Rodez in 1945. Artaud described him as a "filthy, vile bastard" (Curtosy of Clayton Eshelman's introduction to Watchfiends and Rackscreams: Works from the Final Period).

Helen Cixious isn't a fan of Lacan either:
"Here we encounter the inevitable man-with-rock, standing erect in his old Freudian realm, in the way that, to take the figure back to the point where linguistics is conceptualizing it "anew," Lacan preserves it in the sanctuary of the phallos (ø) "sheltered" from castration's lack! Their "symbolic" exists, it holds power-we, the sowers of disorder, know it only too well. But we are in no way obliged to deposit our lives in their banks of lack, to consider the constitution of the subject in terms of a drama manglingly restaged, to reinstate again and again the religion of the father. Because we don't want that. We don't fawn around the su- preme hole. We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative. The feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms: ". . . And yes," says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing; "I said yes, I will Yes."" ("The Laugh of the Medusa").

I saw Kate D. has started a Journal of Gaga Studies. I'm very, very impressed, and will contribute as soon as I am able.

Posts soon: Textual Body Politic: Hysteria, Abjection, Expenditure

Review of Myung Mi Kim's Penury

Review of Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound

Swans: Abjection, Misogyny, Capital

Kate Durbin at Delerious Hem

Delerious Hem once again has it's "this is what a feminist [poet] looks like" forum up and running. Kate Durbin's contribution is especially good. "It is kind of this post-femme-something vomit of the medusa" (Kate Zambreno); "[she] brings in Plath and why she has to be dismissed: she is not disinterested enough. This is also related to why kitsch has to be dismissed: it is everywhere" (Johannes Göransson).

"Say melodrama is the gaudy arena in which teenage girls perform their angst—often in the garb of flamboyant (“aggressive”) and/or over-revealing fashions, and histrionic poetry—which is dismissed by society and the church, including, as these girls turn into women, the church of the academy. However, like Plath’s much-maligned insistences that her despair was on par with the Holocaust, melodrama is the teenage girl’s sadness on steroids.

Say nothing is more melodramatic—and pisses off Mom and Dad more—than claiming to be possessed by the Devil himself.

WHISPER: And the Ouija spells: A T T E N T I O N (Is not all feminist writing some form of noisy attention?)

Say, like the demon, the teenage girl’s body is unearned—and therefore claimed by everyone around her. Stigmata, lipstick mark of Cain’s slutty girlfriend, branded by parents, the government, Urban Outfitters and Teen Vogue. Is there any wonder that her body must turn itself inside out, must vomit upon the world in revolt?"

Johannes Göransson: Fasion, poetics, narrative and the politicality of aestheticism

Fantastic piece, as always. Johannes is fast becoming one of my favorite critics/theorists - in the "hip" and "inauthentic" world of the blogosphere. To poetry what Mark Fisher, Dominic Fox and Ben Woodward are to music. Excerpts:

"But I'm more interested - as everyone who reads this blog knows by now - in the use of fashion in this rhetoric, to suggest that there's a superficiality in poetry. This came out - as readers of this blog also knows - when Mark Halliday freaked out over Josh Clover's "lettrist jacket." Halliday was upset that Clover's poetry was not engaged in the real/genuine. Grieving one's father's death I think was Halliday's example. Or maybe that was my own wishful thinking because that's too perfect: "fashion" is the death of the father in some way, the end of patriarchy comes from multiplication, exchangeability, shallowness, flimsiness. That is a funny reading of Halliday. I'm pleased as pancakes."

***

"It seems Aesteticism is threatening. And this should explain why people are wrong when they assume aesteticism is apolitical. Or those who equate it with mere formalism."



Enough of that - read it.

Also: Johannes Göransson on Aase Berg's Forsla Fett as Minor Literature

I'm annoyed I didn't see this post when it went up - Minor Literature is something I'm very interested in - and "Transfer Fat" (as the title reads in English) is (along with "With Deer") one of my favorite of Berg's collections. I can't wait for a complete English translation (there are selections in Remainland, which is available from action books).

Failure, expendeture, Sacrifice - Joyelle McSweeney on Poetics

Johannes just posted this piece By Joyelle - apparently the whole piece is in Fence.

Exerpt, in keeping with the discussion here (in the comment stream), follows:

"3)Bataille says “the term poetry [...] can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore closer to that of sacrifice.’ By sacrifice he means a loss unto extinction; Sacrifice produces sacred objects. Furthermore, “in particular, the success of Christianity must be explained by [...] the Son of God’s ignominious crucifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation.”

"5)Or, put another way, there’s no success like failure."

Johannes: Hipsters, Kitsch and the Specter of Mass Culture

Johannes has a great post here. And there's a Laibach video in the middle of it. Those "Slovenian Retrogardists"....

I especially like the "kitching of the image":

"∑ Adorno argues that the High Modern move towards abstraction is a move away from the kitsch of the image (“mimetic enchantment”).

∑ Steven Shaviro: “Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus, should we not rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”"

Johnson vs. Goldsmith

Johannes has linked to a very interesting post by Robert P Baird on Kent Johnson's plagurism of Kenneth Goldsmith's Day.
Johnson: Here
Goldsmith: Here

several things

Some interesting things going on over on Johannes' blog:
Discussions of Aestheticism and the 'Hipster'. I'm going to post on this stuff (and on what Kent was saying about The Artist) later today, all things being equal.

There's also an interview with Joyelle McSweeney here.

Two things

"....their writing is [...] a space where the Cartesian model of mind and body breaks down"
- An interview with Johannes Göransson over at HTMLGIANT. He mentions me, which feels really weird.

And I'm working on Grant/Residency.Scholarship applications at the moment, and thinking "how are people who generally give stuff to VUP novelists and the like going to react to me essentially saying "I want you to give me money to stick words together, regardless of anything, just based on the fact that it sounds cool, like Jazz" (self-caricature, but probably how they're going to react I fear).

Any pointers? Anyone?

Johannes Göransson on the American Hybrid

This review, originally in Rain Taxi, is excellent.

Excess - Surreal - Pathological

"The word Surreal has gained incredibly currency as a negative in our culture! In our ridiculously hygienic society, "surreal" seems to mean a lot more than Breton &Co, it seems to mean almost exclusively the excessive and pathological.
[...]
After a while one starts to wonder what the deal is. Why is everybody warning against surreal things. It seems to mean nothing much more than excess itself."

-Courtesy of the always-brilliant Johannes Göransson.

Langpo in NZ, kind of.

There's stuff about me here. Yep, I'm stroking my ego. The origins of said stuff are here, then moving to here.

on a only-very-slightly related note, interesting stuff going on here, especially regaring avant-gardism, the grotesque, poetics of excess etc etc.