Joan Retallack and Me

Recent reading in the form of email:

SB: Hey, did you once tell me about Joan Retallack? I could swear you did. If not, read this: The Poethical Wager, by Joan. I am in love and fear. Her mind and mine are soooooooo very alike. I'm going to pay homage in my chapter on Stein and in my introduction. I read bits of the eponymous essay years ago, right after I had "coined" the word poethic myself, and avoided using it. That similar. Spooky. Not totally convincing me that my book is already written, not by a long shot, but spooky nonetheless.

LH: And as for the spooky similarity between her and yourself: it's spooky, but also great. Still, wherever similarities occur, the divergence has already taken place. The mutual reinforcement shows you to be on the right track, and the track is about the swerve. Of course, this is a reference to this perfect term of hers, 'poetics of the swerve',which I gleaned from the Amazon page on The Poethical Wager;-).

SB: I was just thinking, "Look at the quick research he's doing." ;-) There's a big difference between us -- I kept reading last night. First, her reasons for the 'h' are like mine, but unlike. The emphasis is on the risk, the wager (a la Pascal) in art (she's a pal of Cage's, too, and also one of the Language folk, in a way, which I didn't know, which is weird since I read most of them back in the day, and should re-read again, actually), it's the swerve itself that's important because the world is such a chaotic place (in the strong sense) that you can't really know what the outcomes will be. She accepts contingency, but not arbitrarity and irony (pfft to Rorty there), which makes me like her all the more. Well, there's no news there, as gorgeously as she puts it. Her insistence on the Possible Good in that total situation is what's lovely. What's different is that, and this may be a romantic naivete on my part, I think these arts really Can Be Models For Being, and that the role of the critic (possibly more than the artist) is to explain That. In terms of the arts, I think what's happening is that I'm asking critics to become more artistic, and philosophical, and much less interested in judgement, but more intereseted in looking at the implications of the work for art and for the world, rather than the other (more conservative, less swervy) way around. Which also needs saying in my introduction. I'm not defending artists so much as challenging critics. Professors and professional book review types alike. It's one of the points I started to make in my paper on Murdoch and Irigaray: the Humanities are far more than a repository of what humanity has done. Of course, it's risky, it's dangerous to gesture into the future like that, but we have so little choice. As she said from Pascal, you are embarked. You must wager. The art that could make us new has been here for a long time, and it's still just labeled "experimental" instead of "life changing." Soooo. I think my God/desses would be happy with that.